Difference between revisions of "User talk:NonZeroSum"

Latest revision as of 10:30, 26 October 2025

title A Forest of Kings
subtitle The untold story of the ancient Maya
author Linda Schele
date 1990
source <[[1][www.archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche]]>
lang en
pubdate 2025-10-25T12:03:08
topics Mayas, history, kings, rulers, half-finished error-correcting, anthropology, ritual, religion,
cover l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-1.jpg
notes Half the images still need cropping and adding, and there are likely some machine errors that still need fixing.

Also by Linda Schele

Maya Glyphs: The Verbs (1982)

The Blood of Kings:

Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986)

with Mary Ellen Miller

Title Page | ~~

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-37.jpg 70f

A

Forest

of

Kings

The Untold Story of

the Ancient Maya

Linda Schele

and

David Freidel

Color photographs

by Justin Kerr

WILLIAM MORROW

AND COMPANY, INC.

New York

Copyright | ~~

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to
Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and
affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to
print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheie. Linda.

A forest of kings : the untold story of the ancient Maya / Linda Scheie and
David Freidel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliograpical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-688-07456-1

1. Mayas—Kings and rulers. 2. Mayas—History. I. Freidel.
David A. II. Title

F1435.3.K55S34 1990 90–5809

972.01—dc20 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

_{BOOK DESIGN BY RICHARD ORIOLO}

Credits for Illustrations

<biblio> FIGS. 5:12, 5:13, 5:14, 5:15, 5:16, 5:17, 5:18 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Volume 2, Part 1, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1675 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 5:8b-e, 5:11 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 2, Part 2, Naranjo, Chunhuitz, Xunantunich. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 4:5 Eric Von Euw and Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 5, Part 2, Xultún, La Honradez, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 7:1, 7:2, 7:9b-c, 7:10, 7:11, 7:12, 7:13 (map only), 7:14, 7:15, 7:16, 7:20 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 1, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 2:14, 7:5b,d,f, 7:6a,c-d. 7:13a-c, 7:15, 7:17, 7:18 Ian Graham. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 2, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 7:4 (Lintel 23 only), 7:7, 7:9a Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 3, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 10:5 Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 2, Part 3, Ixkún, Ucanal, Ixtutz, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 10:12a Samuel Lothrop, Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itza, Yucatán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Volume 10, Number 2. Copyright © 1952 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 10:5, 10:6b Ian Graham. Archaeological Explorations in El Petén, Guatemala. Middle American Research Institution, Tulane University, Publication 33

FIG. 5:4 (Caracol Altar 21) Courtesy of Arlen and Diane Chase; and Stephen Houston

FIG. 5:21 Courtesy of Peter Harrison

FIGS. 6:3, 6:5. 6:8, 10:7a Courtesy of Merle Greene Robertson

FIG. 7:6 Courtesy of Carolyn Tate

FIGS. 9:2, 9:3 Courtesy of Justin Kerr

FIG. 10:9 Courtesy of Peter Mathews

FIG. 10:11 Courtesy of Ruth Krochock

All drawings in Chapter 8 are published courtesy of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia </biblio>

This Book is Dedicated to

Floyd Lounsbury

and

Gordon Willey

Acknowledgments

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-38.jpg 70f

We wish to acknowledge the many people who helped us with the ideas presented in A Forest of Kings and contributed to its writing and production. First and foremost is Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor and vice-president of William Morrow and Company. When she called Linda Scheie in the spring of 1986 about writing a book on the Maya for Morrow, she opened a world to us we never imagined we would or could know. She saw potential in our ideas and believed we could learn how to write for a larger audience. Throughout the process of writing, she has always been sensitive to our fears and trepidations, enthusiastic about how the work was going, merciless in breaking through the limits in our imagination, and encouraging in all things. In short, she saw something in us we did not know was there, and without her exuberant encouragement and support, we might not have tried a book of this scope or ambition. We wish to thank her also for finding Joy Parker, the third and unseen hand in this book. Much of its eloquence and readability comes from her subtle touch.

The manuscript was written using Nota Bene by Dragonfly Software as the primary word processor. For those interested in how collaborative writing and research worked between us, it varied from chapter to chapter, but it always required goodwill and respect from all the participants. A few of the chapters, in their first draft versions, were written sitting together in front of the computer; but most of the time, one of us structured the first draft alone and then mailed it on disk to the other, who rewrote, adapted, added, or deleted material at will in a process we called “massaging the text.” The text went back and forth between both authors until each chapter became a true fusion of our different viewpoints and specialities.

Joy Parker, a professional writer who knew nothing about the Maya before she began, was commissioned to help us make the thick academese of the first version readable to a nonacademic audience. To begin her task, she flew to Austin to meet us and to tape three days of questions, answers, and just talking about the Maya world. Using these tapes, she tore into our text, learning Note Bene and how to use a computer as she went. She reworked each chapter in turn, clarifying the prose, cutting redundancy, and to our surprise, often asking for more detail to the text.

The idea of including vignettes in the book was inspired by Gordon Willey. At a School of American Research seminar on Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya civilization held in Santa Fe in 1982, Professor Willey entertained the group with a wonderful fictional account of the last days of the royal court at Seibal. The vignette was taken by Jeremy A. Sabloff and David Freidel and prepared as a little in-house publication for distribution at Professor Willey’s retirement celebration. Neither Professor Willey’s career nor the idea of vignettes stopped there. Jeremy Sabloff has pursued the vignette concept in subsequent publications and so have we. The original draft of A Forest of Kings had one vignette in it—and Joy asked for more ... and more ... and more. To our astonishment, they worked and we became as enthusiastic about them as she.

When she was done with her version of the text, she sent it to Freidel, who answered her questions, made his corrections, and then passed it on to Scheie. Having a nonspecialist as a writing partner is a wonderful barometer of clarity: When the text came back to us scrambled, we knew we hadn’t explained things right in the first place. When necessary, a chapter was passed through the loop several times. Nota Bene’s redlining feature proved an invaluable tool in this process.

A special thanks to Joan Amico for her meticulous and informed copy editing. Were it not for Richard Oriolo’s skill and imagination, we would not have been able to incorporate such complex visual material in the book. Additional thanks to Bruce Hattendorf, Maria’s capable and hardworking assistant, for his intelligent help; to Debbie Weiss for her professional care; to Harvey Hoffman for his patience and expertise; to Tom Nau for his commitment and skill; and to Nick Mazzella for his able guidance.

Many of the ideas in this book come from years of interchange with friends, colleagues, collaborators, and our students. We wish to acknowledge in particular the contributions to this process made by Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, William Fash, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Elizabeth Benson, Robert Rands, David Kelley, Christopher Jones, Juan Pedro LaPorte, Juan Antonio Valdes, Gordon Willey, Evon Vogt, Brian Stross, Barbara MacLeod, and the many participants in the Texas Meetings on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In addition, we have sent chapters to various colleagues who have offered suggestions and criticisms that have been invaluable. These people include Patrick Culbert, Robert Sharer, William and Barbara Fash, Ruth Krochock, Kent Reilly, Marisela Ayala, Anthony Andrews, Peter Harrison, Linea Wren, and E. Wyllys Andrews IV. We particularly wish to thank Peter Harrison, who provided photographs of Tikal we could obtain from no other source, and McDuff Everton, who offered us his extraordinary wraparound photographs of Palenque. Finally, Justin and Barbara Kerr gave us access to their photographic archives, including roll-outs of pottery as well as photographs of the art and architecture of the major Maya sites that they have taken during their long love affair with the Maya. As valuable to us was the haven—complete with bed and breakfast—they provided each time we went to New York.

Research by Linda Scheie, as it is presented in various chapters, was supported over the years by the Research Committee of the University of South Alabama, the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Dumbarton Oaks of Washington, D.C. Linda’s research on the inscriptions of Copán has been conducted under the Copán Mosaics Project, which is under the direction of Dr. William Fash and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Part of this research was completed as a Fullbright Research Scholar in Honduras from June to December 1987. Support for the CMP came from National Science Foundation (1986–1988), the National Geographic Society (1986–1989), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986–1987), the Center for Field Research (EARTHWATCH, 1985–1988), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1987; 1989), the H. J. Heinz Charitable Fund (1986), and Council for International Exchange of Scholars (1987).

Research on Cerros presented in Chapter 3 was carried out under the auspices of the office of the Archaeological Commissioner of Belize. Joseph Palacio, Jaime Awe, Elizabeth Graham Pendergast, and Harriot Topsey served in that office and greatly facilitated our research. The Cerros work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BNS-77-07959; BNS-78-2470; BNS-78-15905; BNS-82-17620) and by private donations by citizens of Dallas to the Cerros Maya Foundation. T. Tim Cullum and Richard Sandow served as officers of this foundation and effectively launched the research despite numerous difficulties. Their friendship, enthusiasm, and patience are greatly appreciated. Stanley Marcus, and through Mr. Marcus many other individuals, supported the work throughout its duration. Mr. Marcus has been a special mentor and friend to David Freidel throughout his career in Dallas. The research at Cerros was originally directed by Dr. Ira Abrams; without his energy and initiative, Chapter 3 would never have been written.

Research at Yaxuná presented in Chapter 10 is being carried out under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. The Directors of the INAH in Merida, Ruben Maldonado and Alfredo Barrera, have greatly facilitated our work at Yaxuná. Dr. Fernando Robles, senior investigator of the INAH, and Dr. Anthony Andrews first took David Freidel to Yaxuna and have strongly encouraged the work at the site. The Yaxuna research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-21699-88), the National Geographic Society, the Provost’s Office of Southern Methodist University, and private benefactors in Dallas through Mr. Stanley Marcus.

Prologue: Personal Notes

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-39.jpg 70f

I remember vividly the first time I walked down the gravel path that led into the ruins of Palenque. Surrounded by vine-shrouded bushes filled with the sounds of playing children, barking dogs, and the chest-deep thumps of tom turkeys, I walked down that path past broken buildings shaded under vine-draped trees until I came to the grass-filled plaza in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Inspired by the curiosity of my architect husband, this was the first time I had ever visited México. I had never before seen the rich web of life in a tropical forest nor heard the cicadas sing in twelve-tone harmony. As I walked through the lichen-painted ruins of that magic place, I felt my imagination stirred by the pathos of a lost world. The enchantment of the forest with its emerald green light and towering trees shrouded in a rich world of orchids, bromeliads, and liana vines produced a kind of exotic beauty I had never imagined. The mystery of calcium-heavy water, tumbling down the rocky streams to the plain below Palenque’s escarpment, to encase rock, leaf, branch, and broken temple alike, spoke to my mind in metaphors of creation and destruction.

We were there quite by accident, for we had planned in that December of 1970 to follow the standard tourist pilgrimage to Yucatán to see the famous ruins of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Kabah. Going to Palenque was a last-minute side trip. It looked close to the main highway on the map and the Sanborns Travelguide said it was worth at least a couple of hours of our time. When we left twelve days later, the direction and passion of my life was changed forever.

At the time I was a professional painter teaching art at a small university in Mobile, Alabama. Like most of my contemporaries, I lived in frustration because I knew what I did in my art was irrelevant to the society around me. No matter the rhetoric I threw at the world, I recognized in my deepest heart that the irrelevancy was real and unchangeable. Yet while teaching our “Introduction to Art” course to nonmajors (the token fine-arts class that is supposed to make modern university graduates cultured), I had built an image in my head of what art could be like if it were critical to the society that produced it. When I walked among the tumbled rocks and broken plaster of Palenque’s wonderland, I knew I had found the dream made real. I had to understand how, why, when, and who had made these things.

It took three years to answer the last question: who? and, strangely enough, finding this answer was an accident also. On the last afternoon of the Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque,[1] held in December 1973, Peter Mathews and I pored over the texts in the ruins of Palenque, looking for the names and dates of kings. After three hours’ work, we had managed to identify five rulers, as well as the dates of major events in their lives.[2] That magic of discovery has not diminished during the intervening fifteen years. I have been an enraptured passenger on a wondrous voyage into the past and a participant in the rediscovery of something very special: the history of a people whose story had been lost in the obscurity of the past.

This time of excitement and discovery comes at the end of 150 years of inspired work by hundreds of people who built the foundation that make this time possible. Yet, even acknowledging the debt all of us owe to the scholars who went before us, this is a special time that will never come again. Only once will someone read Pacal’s name for the first time or realize who built the Temple of the Cross at Palenque or Temple 22 at Copan.[3]

And know that this time of discovery is not yet over, for the decipherment of the Maya writing system, the study of their religion and politics, the excavations and analyses of the remains of their lives are not yet finished. In truth, they are barely begun. What we share in this book is but one stage in the journey, and the product of many different people and approaches. No one person is, or ever can be, responsible for the sum of discovery.

The way I have always studied the ancient Maya is to try to understand the patterns intrinsic to their art, writing, architecture, and other cultural remains. The interpretations of events the two of us offer in this book represent the way we understand those patterns now. As more decipherments are made and new data comes out of the ground, as fresh minds bring their insights to bear upon the patterns we have inherited from our predecessors and expanded in our own work, the connections that we see between these patterns will change. Interpretation in our work is an ephemeral thing that continually adapts to the changing nature of these underlying patterns. It is like the reassessment and reinterpretation of history we experience in our own lives, as we look back on events great and small that have shaped the way we see the world. Those of us in our middle years know this kind of reevaluation in how we see and understand the Vietnam War and all that surrounded it. To me, the truly magical thing is that the ancient Maya now have a history that can enter into this process of reevaluation.

<right> —Linda Schele
Austin, Texas
May 1989 </right>

I passed through Palenque for the first time just after Linda, in the summer of 1971 on my way to begin an exploration of Cozumel Island for the Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project.[4] Although I was just starting graduate school, I had been a working “dirt” archaeologist for eight years, gaining experience at projects in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. I looked forward to seeing the ruins on Cozumel, even though they were humble compared to Palenque, because I enjoy the craft of field work; but I dreamed of another kind of study among the Maya.

I wanted to find a way to reveal the nature of Maya shamanism archaeologically. I wanted to know what the relationship was between political power and religious belief among the ancient Maya. My aspirations were fueled by a thorough and intensive training in social anthropology and in Maya ethnography by my mentors in college. I knew that the Maya institutions of power recorded and observed since the coming of the Europeans were imbued with the sacred and enveloped in the cosmic. The challenge was to discover a way to use archaeology to help penetrate the Christian veil and contribute to a discovery of the Precolumbian institutions of central authority.

Because Cozumel island had been a sacred pilgrimage center just before the Conquest, I did get to investigate Maya politics and religion within the context of ruins and artifacts. I found I could bridge across from the relatively rich eyewitness descriptions of Maya buildings and their functions left by the sixteenth-century explorers to the archaeological remains without great problem. Still, even though I had passed through the veil, the penetration was only beyond the historical era of Spanish chronicles. The great span of the Precolumbian past remained beyond my focus.

My next project, at Cerros in Belize, took me from the demise of Maya civilization to its Preclassic beginnings, deep into the archaeological record and far from the historical observations of the Europeans. When I first laid eyes on the great Sun mask of Structure 5C in the summer of 1977,1 knew that I was going to have to train myself in Maya iconography and attempt to interpret this building in terms of its political and religious functions. I had basic training in symbolic analysis from college, but I was pretty ignorant of Maya art and knew virtually nothing of text translation. Linda was among the several specialists in Maya art who kindly responded to my request for feedback on my first substantive article on the Cerros materials. She called me up from Austin and said, “David, you’re right for all the wrong reasons. We have to talk.”

That was in the fall of 1979; we have been talking ever since. Collaboration comes easily to us. The nature of archaeological research requires teamwork; general interpretation is always the product of many people pooling their insight. It is the nature of epigraphic and iconographic research among the Maya as well. Linda and I have different perceptions of the ancient Maya that draw upon different experience and training. We think together in ways that we find occasionally opaque, regularly surprising, usually stimulating, and always worthwhile. I am now an iconographer with a rudimentary command of epigraphy. She is now an advocate of structural analysis and an evolutionist. Most important, we are both something we could not have been in 1971: we are historians of the ancient Maya.

This book is a unique product of our collaboration. It draws heavily upon our personal scholarly experience with the Maya field. Of the six regions and communities anchoring our histories, we have extensively worked at, and published technical studies on, four of them (Cerros, Palenque, Copan, Yaxuna). We wrote the manuscript on personal computers, rewriting over each other’s prose several times so that the initial expertise of each one of us was repeatedly leavened by the ongoing dialogue between us. Ultimately, our partner in this writing effort, Joy Parker, joined in the process. Joy’s clear prose, fresh perspective, and respect for our subject smoothed the flow of our narrative and enhanced the accessibility of our often intricate concepts.

I am changed by this book. I cannot look at a Maya ruin now and think of the people who built it and lived with it as abstractions, an aggregate social force shaping the material world and coping with the process of living. Now I see Maya faces, recall Maya names, look for clues to their intentional acts, their decisions, and the events of their daily existence. History has its many limitations to be sure. Ancient Maya history was the privilege of the elite and powerful; at best it gives an accurate reflection of their views on what happened. It is mute about the lives of the ordinary people. We must look to the archaeological record for knowledge of the humble and numerous commoners whose experiences also shaped the Maya destiny. But I now feel better prepared to continue the collaborative enterprise conjoining the insight of the “dirt” archaeological record with the story left by the kings and their nobles. It will yield, I hope, something of the dialogue between the populace, the source of power, and the elite who wielded that power. The long-term history and evolution of this kind of dialogue is, for me, an important source of insight into the current human condition.

<right> —David Freidel
Dallas, Texas
May 1989 </right>

Foreword

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-40.jpg 70f

Early in this century the word pharaoh burst upon the imagination of the West and transported the modern mind into the ancient and alien world of Egypt’s living gods. Today, in the tropical lowlands of Central America, another anthropological revolution is uncovering a new intellectual and spiritual legacy for the civilized world: an ancient American civilization ruled by living gods who called themselves ahau.[5]

Flourishing for over a thousand years (200 B.C. to A.D. 900), the Classic Maya world was organized at its apogee into fifty or more independent states encompassing more than 100,000 square miles of forest and plain. The divine ahauob ruled millions of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, warriors, and nobility and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples, palaces, and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations numbering in the tens of thousands. Outside of their realm, the Maya engaged in war, trade, and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains of Central México. Theirs was a civilized world: a world of big government, big business, big problems, and big decisions by the people in power. The problems they faced sound familiar to us today: war, drought, famine, trade, food production, the legitimate transition of political power. It was a world which mirrors our own as we wrestle with the present in search of a future.

Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, hieroglyphic texts and scenes carved on buildings, stone monuments, jade, bone, and other materials impervious to decay in the tropics remain as records of their innovative political solutions to the social crises that dominated life in ancient America. These political chronicles speak in the language of a great philosophical, scientific, and religious vision—a charter for power as eternal and as flexible as the American Constitution.

The Maya conception of time, however, was very different from our own. Our old adage “He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it” might have been expressed by the Maya as “He who does not know history cannot predict his own destiny.” The Maya believed in a past which always returned, in historical symmetries—endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space. By understanding and manipulating this eternal, cyclic framework of possibility, divine rulers hoped to create a favorable destiny for their people. But while the Maya ahauob could know only the immediate results of the events they put into motion, we are gradually reclaiming the full scope of their historical accomplishments from the obscurity of the past.

Our challenge then is to interpret this history, recorded in their words, images, and ruins, in a manner comprehensible to the modern mind yet true to the Maya’s perceptions of themselves. What we can offer here is not quite biography, for the Maya ahauob did not intend their history to be a record of personal glory so much as a cosmic affirmation of their actions. Nor can we offer a comprehensive social history, for the vagaries of time have left us with only the story of the great and victorious. Nevertheless, we can offer a history unique in the Precolumbian Americas, populated with real people, replete with the drama of battle, palace intrigue, heroic tragedy, and magnificent personal artistic and intellectual expression. History unlocks the humanity of the Maya in a way not possible by any other means, for it reveals not only what they did, but how they thought and felt about the nature of reality.

It is important that we acknowledge this history, because only then will a true picture of the Americas emerge. The American chronicle does not begin with the landing of Columbus or the arrival of the Pilgrims, but with the lives of Maya kings in the second century B.C. We who live in this part of the world inherit a written history two millennia old and as important to us as the history of the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese, a history equal in longevity to that of Europe or Asia.

Understanding the complexity of the ancient American civilizations does not come easily to us. From childhood on we have been taught in our schools that the Mediterranean is the only “cradle of civilization”; but, in fact, human beings developed the civilized state also in Northern India, China, Middle America, and Peru. The Maya are one of those societies that transformed themselves from villagers and agriculturists into a great civilization. To accomplish this transformation, they developed a high religion and extraordinary statecraft that produced a stable society for over a thousand years. More than a collection of quaint mythology and exotic rituals, their religion was an effective definition of the nature of the world, answering questions about the origin of humanity, the purpose of human life on earth, and the relationship of the individual to his family, his society, and his gods. It is a religion which speaks to central and enduring problems of the civilized human condition: power, justice, equality, individual purpose, and social destiny.

The world of that vision was informed by the power of the supernatural. Our concepts of animate and inanimate matter would not have made sense to the Maya, for to them everything was alive. The Maya cosmos was peopled with exotic creatures of all sorts and the objects and places in their physical world acquired dangerous power as they interacted with the supernatural Otherworld. Order in the cosmos was not accidental or distant from human affairs. Like the great metaphor of Maya life—the life cycle of maize—the continued well-being of the universe required the active participation of the human community through ritual. As maize cannot seed itself without the intervention of human beings, so the cosmos required sacrificial blood to maintain life. Maya life was filled with endless rituals which seem to us bizarre and shocking, but which to them embodied the highest concepts of their spiritual devotion.

With the decipherment of their writing system, the Maya joined the world’s great pristine civilizations—Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China—on the stage of world history. A picture has emerged, not only of a civilization, but of a world view and the individuals who cherished that view. All of the great events in the lives of rulers—their births, accessions, marriages, conquests and defeats, their deaths, and the births of their children—were recorded on public monuments. Not only kings, but their wives and courtiers, sought a place in history through commissioning monuments of their own. Kings and their nobles marked objects of all types with their names, and artists and sculptors signed their works so that future generations could honor them. The architecture and stone monuments, the pottery, jewelry, and ritual implements found buried in the earth, speak to us of the personal histories of the people who made them. This new American history resounds with the names of heroes, kings, princes, warriors, queens, priests, artists, and scribes and the deeds and accomplishments of their lives. Ancient America created its own vision of the world, its own form of civilization, its own high religion: But it also had its Alexanders, its Myrons, its Sargons, its Ramseses.

The story we construct here is one of drama, pathos, humor, and heroics. We approach this story not as if we were examining a long-dead religion and a history of little contemporary relevance but as scholars unearthing the dynamic actions of real people. If human beings find immortality after death by the memories they leave the generations who follow them, then the Maya have been reborn through our growing awareness of the history they memorialized throughout their cities.

Come, then, and join us on a journey into the American past and meet some of the great and victorious people of Maya history.

How to Pronounce Mayan Words

Many of the words in this book will look strange to English-speaking readers because of the way Mayan words are written. Soon after the conquest, the Spanish began to convert Mayan languages from their own written forms into the Roman alphabet. To do so, they used the spelling conventions of the sixteenth century. Since the characters of the alphabet are pronounced differently in Spanish from the way they are in English, and since the Spanish system of pronunciation itself has changed over the intervening centuries, the conventions used for Maya place names and their hieroglyphic writing should be explained. The alphabet we use here, with a few moderations, is identical to that of the colonial Yucatec sources.

Mayan languages use five vowels, or, as in the case of modern Choi, six. Using the Spanish convention, these vowels are pronounced as follows:

<verse> a is like the a in “far” or “father.” e is like the e in “obey” or “prey.” i is like the double e in “see” or “bee.” o is like the o in “hello” or “open.” u is like the double o in “zoo” or “boo.” a is like the final e in “title” or “handle.” </verse>

The letter u becomes a special case when it falls at the end of a word or is combined with another vowel. Then it functions like the consonant w. The word ahau is pronounced “a-haw” and Uolantun is “wo-lan-toon.” Normally, each individual vowel in a word is pronounced separately as an independent syllable, so that the place name El Baul is pronounced “el ba-ool. ”

Since the Mayan languages have several consonants not found in Spanish, the friars who first tried to write the languages had to improvise. They used x to record the consonant that sounds like the English sh. The color term yax is pronounced “yash,, and the place name Uaxactun is pronounced “wa-shak-tun. ” When the x is at the front of a word, it is still sh, even when it precedes other consonants, as in Xphuhil (“sh-poo-hil”) and Xcalumkin (“sh-kal-loom-kin”). In Mayan words, c is always pronounced like k, regardless of what vowel it precedes. The month Ceh is — “keh” and the day Cimi is “kee-mee.”

In Mayan languages, there is also a contrast between the glottalized and nonglottahzed forms of many consonants. Since this contrast is not used in European languages, English speakers find it hard to pronounce or even to hear the difference. Glottalized consonants are pronounced like the regular consonant, but with the glottis or “voice box” closed. You can hear the unvoiced glottal stop in the way New Yorkers and Englishmen pronounce words with a double t, such as “bottle.” Glottalized consonants sound like very hard and explosive forms of the regular consonants. In this book, the unglottalized k sound is written with c while the glottalized k is represented by the letter k. For example, the word for “earth” is written cab, while the word for “hand” is kab. While these words would be pronounced the same way in English, they sound as different to the Maya as volt and bolt sound to us.

There are other pairs of glottalized and plain consonants also, but in all these cases, the glottalized member of the pair is written with an apostrophe after the regular letter, as in b’, ch’, p’, and t’. A glottal stop is written with a simple apostophe, as in ca’an.

Mayan languages do not have some of the consonants that are native to English, such as the d sound. Conversely, Mayan has a pair of consonants unknown in English. Written as tz in its plain form and tz’ in its glottalized form, the consonant is pronounced somewhat like the English z, but with the blade of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth and with a sharp expulsion of breath.

The Spanish letter j also causes problems for English-speaking people. In Spanish, j is pronounced like the hard h in English, while their letter h is essentially silent. Since the Mayan consonant is more like the English h than the silent Spanish h, the letter j is frequently used to represent it. English speakers often make the mistake of pronouncing it like the English j in “jet.” Our consonant j does not exist in the Mayan languages and thus the English pronunciation is never used. The place name Abaj Takalik is “a-bah tak-a-leek” and Kaminaljuyu is “ka-mee-nal-hoo-yoo. ”

In Mayan words, the accent usually falls on the last syllable, as in the following names used in this book.

In this book we will use the word Mayan to refer only to the languages spoken. The name of the people, used either as a noun or an adjective, will be Maya. We will pluralize Mayan words such as ahau with the pluralizing suffix -ob taken from the Yucatec and Choi. More than one ahau, therefore, is ahauob, which is pronounced a-ha-wob.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-41.jpg 70f][Map 1: the Southern Lowlands Contour intervals at 1000 feet]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-42.jpg 70f][Map of the Western Region of the Southern Lowlands
Contour intervals at 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 feet
drawings of these three maps by Karim Sadr]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-43.jpg 70f][Map of the Eastern Region of the Maya Region
Contour intervals 2,000, 5,000, 7,000]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-44.jpg 70f][The Yucatán Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands
_{Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet}]]

| 1100 B.C. | First settlers in the Copan Valley | | 1000 B.c. | Florescence of Gulf Coast Olmec; early villagers and beginnings of hierarchical social organization in the Pacific zone; the Copan Valley has permanent settlements |

MIDDLE PRECLASSIC

| 900 B.C. | Rich tombs in the Copan Valley | | 600 B.C. | Tikal settled by early villagers | | 500 B.C. | Large towns and long-distance trading |

LATE PRECLASSIC

| 300 B.C. | Late Preclassic period begins | | 200 B.C. | Early Izapa monuments with Popol Vuh mythology in the south; activity in the Copan Valley diminishes | | 100 B.C. | Sculpted temples begin to appear throughout the northern lowlands; carved and dated monuments and large towns in the southern zone; appearance of writing in the Maya zone; formulation of the institution of kingship | | 50 B.C. | Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros; North Acropolis and stelae at Tikal; Group H at Uaxactun; El Mirador the dominant lowland center; green obsidian from Teotihuacan region at Nohmul | | 50 A.D. | El Mirador, Cerros, and other centers abandoned |

EARLY CLASSIC

| 120 | 8.4.0.0.0 | First object with deciphered date (DO celt) | | 150 | 8.6.0.0.0 | The kingdom of Copan established | | 199 | 8.8.0.4.0 | First dated stela (Hauberg) | | 219 | 8.9.0.0.0 | Reign of Yax-Moch-Xoc and founding of the Tikal dynasty | | 292 | 8.12.14.8.15 | Stela 29, earliest monument at Tikal | | 320 | 8.14.2.17.6 | Yat-Balam of Yaxchilan accedes and founds the lineage | | 328 | 8.14.10.13.15 | Stela 9, earliest monument at Uaxactun | | 376 | 8.17.0.0.0 | Great-Jaguar-Paw ends the katun at Tikal | | 378 | 8.17.1.4.12 | Tikal conquers Uaxactun; first appearance of Tlaloc-war complex in Maya imagery | | 379 | 8.17.2.16.17 | Curl-Snout accedes at Tikal under Smoking-Frog | | 396 | 8.18.0.0.0 | Smoking-Frog ends katun at Uaxactun; Curl-Snout ends it at Tikal | | 411 | 8.18.15.11.0 | Astronomically timed “accession” event at Tikal | | 426 | 8.19.10.0.0 | Probable accession of Stormy-Sky of Tikal | | 426 | 8.19.10.11.17 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ of Copan enacts a God K-scepter rite and establishes the dynasty | | 431 | 8.19.15.3.4 | Bahlum-Kuk accedes and founds the dynasty of Palenque | | 439 | 9.0.3.9.18 | Last event on Stela 31 at Tikal: Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting | | 445 | 9.0.10.0.0 | Tikal Stela 31 dedicated | | 475 | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar rules at Tikal | | 488 | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw Skull, the 14^th king, rules at Tikal | | 504 | 9.3.16.18.4 | New ruler (name unknown) accedes at Tikal | | 514 | 9.4.0.0.0 | Summit of North Acropolis reworked at Tikal | | 527 | 9.4.13.0.0 | The 19^th king of Tikal rules | | 537 | 9.5.3.19.15 | Double-Bird, the 21^st king, accedes(?) | | 553 | 9.5.19.1.2 | Lord Water of Caracol accedes | | 556 | 9.6.2.1.11 | Caracol conducts “ax-war” action against Tikal | | 557 | 9.6.3.9.15 | Last date at Tikal before the conquest | | 562 | 9.6.8.4.2 | Caracol conducts “star war” against Tikal |

LATE CLASSIC

| 599 | 9.8.5.16.12 | Oldest son of Lord Water becomes the king of Caracol | | 603 | 9.8.9.13.0 | Pacal the Great is born at Palenque during the reign of Ac-Kan | | 612 | 9.8.19.7.18 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, accedes at Palenque | | 693 | 9.13.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo, grandson of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, accedes at age five | | 695 | 9.13.2.16.0 | Naranjo’s second attack on Ucanal | | 615 | 9.9.2.4.8 | Pacal of Palenque accedes | | 618 | 9.9.4.16.2 | Lord Kan II, younger son of Lord Water, becomes the king of Caracol | | 619 | 9.9.5.13.8 | Lord Kan II of Caracol interacts with Calakmul’s king (Site Q?) | | 626 | 9.9.13.4.4 | Caracol’s first attack against Naranjo | | 627 | 9.9.14.3.5 | Caracol’s second attack against Naranjo | | 628 | 9.9.14.17.5 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan accedes | | 630 | 9.9.17.11.14 | A lord of Naranjo dies | | 631 | 9.9.18.16.3 | Star war against Naranjo by Caracol | | 635 | 9.10.2.6.6 | Chan-Bahlum, son of Pacal of Palenque, is born | | 636 | 9.10.3.2.12 | Second star war against Naranjo by Caracol | | 640 | 9.10.7.13.5 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, dies at Palenque | | 641 | 9.10.8.9.3 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque is designated heir to the throne | | 642 | 9.10.10.0.0 | Caracol victory stair dedicated at Naranjo | | 643 | 9.10.10.1.6 | Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, Pacal’s father, dies at Palenque | | 644 | 9.10.11.17.0 | Kan-Xul, brother of Chan-Bahlum, is born at Palenque | | 645 | 9.10.12.11.2 | Flint-Sky-God K accedes at Dos Pilas | | 647 | 9.10.14.5 10 | Pacal dedicates his first temple at Palenque | | 647 | 9.10.15.0.0 | Shield-Jaguar, son of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 649 | 9.10.16.16.19 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) born | | 652 | 9.11.0.0.0 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan celebrates the period ending with a monument at Quirigua and with the pattern of outlying stelae in the Copan Valley; Pacal celebrates the period ending at Palenque. | | 664 | 9.11.11.9.17 | Flint-Sky-God K captures Tah-Mo’ during his long military campaign in the Petexbatun | | 675 | 9.12.3.6.6 | Pacal begins construction of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque | | 681 | 9.12.9.8.1 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes | | 682 | 9.12.9.17.16 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal accedes as king | | 682 | 9.12.10.5.12 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, daughter of the Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, arrives at Naranjo and reestablishes its royal house | | 683 | 9.12.11.5.18 | Pacal of Palenque dies | | 684 | 9.12.11.12.10 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque accedes in a ten-day-long ceremony | | 686 | 9.12.13.17.7 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) accedes with Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas witnessing the ritual | | 688 | 9.12.15.13.7 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo born | | 690 | 9.12.18.5.16+ | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dedicates the Group of the Cross in a three-day-long ceremony | | 692 | 9.12.19.14.12 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque activates the pib na in the temples of the Group of the Cross | | 692 | 9.13.0.0.0 | Ah-Cacaw plants the first stela and builds the first twin-pyramid group after the defeat by Caracol | | | 9.13.1.4.19 | Naranjo’s first attack on Ucanal: Kinichil-Cab captured under the authority of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau | | 695 | 9.13.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan accedes | | 695 | 9.13.3.7.18 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) | | 695 | 9.13.3.9.18 | Ah-Cacaw dedicates Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rites 260 tuns (13 katuns) after the last date on Stela 31, the stela celebrating Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun | | 695 | 9.13 3.13.15 | Tikal captures a noble of Calakmul (Site Q) | | 698 | 9.13.6.2.0 | Shield-God K, son of Flint-Sky-God K, becomes king of Dos Pilas | | 698 | 9.13.6.4.17 | Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal in a sacrificial ritual at Naranjo | | 698 | 9.13.6.10.4 | Sacrificial ritual at Naranjo with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal | | 699 | 9.13.7.3.8 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo stands atop her captive, Kinich-Cab of Ucanal | | 702 | 9.13.10.0.0 | Stela dedication and period-ending rites at Naranjo in which Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal is bled | | 702 | 9.13.10.1.5 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dies | | 702 | 9.13.10.6.8 | Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, accedes to the throne of Palenque | | 709 | 9.13.17.12.10 | Bird-Jaguar, the son of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 709 | 9.13.17.15.12 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar, lets blood from her tongue | | 709 | 9.13.17.15.13 | Lady Eveningstar, mother of Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, does a bundle rite with Shield-Jaguar | | 710 | 9.13.18.4.18 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Yaxha | | 711 | 9.13.19.6.3 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Sacnab | | 711 | 9.14.0.0.0 | Smoking-Squirrel erects stela at Naranjo; Ah-Cacaw erects a stela and his second twin-pyramid group at Tikal | | 712 | 9.14.0.10.0 | Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal undergoes a sacrificial rite at Naranjo | | 713 | 9.14.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo celebrates his first katun as king by erecting Stelae 2 and 3 | | 715 | 9.14.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan dedicates Temple 22 to celebrate his first katun as king | | 723 | 9.14.11.15.1 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, dedicates the sculpture of Temple 23 | | 726 | 9.14.14.8.1 | Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participate in the dedication rites of Temple 23 | | 734 | 9.15.3.6.8 | Ah-Cacaw’s son become the king of Tikal | | 736 | 9.15.4.16.11 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event | | 738 | 9.15.6.14.6 | 18-Rabbit of Copan taken captive and sacrificed by Cauac-Sky of Quirigua | | 738 | 9.15.6.16.5 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan accedes | | 741 | 9.15.9.17.16 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event with his son, Bird-Jaguar | | 741 | 9.15.10.0.1 | Bird-Jaguar (the son of Shield-Jaguar), Lady Eveningstar (the mother of Bird-Jaguar), Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the wife of Bird-Jaguar), and Great-Skull-Zero (her patriarch) let blood | | 742 | 9.15.10.17.14 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan dies | | 744 | 9.15.13.6.9 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participates in a bailgame | | 746 | 9.15.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending in his father’s name | | 747 | 9.15.16.1.6 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts his own flapstaff ritual | | 749 | 9.15.17.12.16 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan dies | | 749 | 9.15.17.12.10 | Smoke-Shell, the son of Smoke-Monkey of Copan, accedes | | 749 | 9.15.17.15.14 | Lady Xoc, the wife of Shield-Jaguar, dies | | 749 | 9.15.18.3.13 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to celebrate the first katun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession | | 750 | 9.15.19.1.1 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan sacrifices captives as Chac-Xib-Chac | | 751 | 9.15.19.15.3 | Lady Eveningstar, the mother of Bird-Jaguar, dies | | 752 | 9.16.0.13.17 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan takes Yax-Cib-Tok captive | | 752 | 9.16.0.14.5 | Chel-Te, the son of Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 752 | 9.16.1.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes in a nine-day-long ritual that ends with the dedication of Temple 22 | | 752 | 9.16.1.2.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts the tree-scepter rite with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau and a God K-scepter rite with his cahal, Kan-Toc | | 752 | 9.16.1.8.6 | Bird-Jaguar enacts a God K-staff event with Kan-Toc and blood-letting rite with Lady Balam-Ix | | 752 | 9.16.1.8.8 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan captures Jeweled-Skull | | 756 | 9.16.5.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his first period ending in three different ceremonies: one with a cahal in attendance; a second with his wife; and a third with her patriarch and his own son, Chel-Te | | 757 | 9.16.6.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his five-year anniversary with his son, Chel-Te | | 757 | 9.16.6.9.16 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to confirm his support of Ruler 4’s heir | | 757 | 9.16.6.11.14 | Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras dies | | 757 | 9.16.6.17.17 | Ruler 5 of Piedras Negras accedes | | 763 | 9.16.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac of Copan, son of the woman of Palenque, accedes | | 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending with his wife, his son, and his cahals, Great-Skull-Zero and Tilot | | 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan sets up Altar G3 in the Great Plaza | | 768 | 9.16.17.6.12 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates a flapstaff event with his brother-in-law Great-Skull-Zero | | 769 | 9.16.18.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan begins remodeling Temple 11 | | 771 | 9.17.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 21a to celebrate the period ending | | 773 | 9.17.2.12.16 | Yax-Pac dedicates the upper temple of Structure 11 | | 775 | 9.17.5.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Altar Q | | 780 | 9.17.9.2.12 | Yax-Pac’s younger brother become “First Servitor” of the kingdom | | 780 | 9.17.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s scattering rite recorded in Group 9M-18 | | 781 | 9.17.10.11.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates the bench in Group 9N-8 | | 783 | 9.17.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his first katun as king by dedicating Temple 22a; by erecting Stela 8 in the area under the modern village; and by erecting Altar T with his younger brother in the same region | | 790 | 9.18.0.0.0 | Last date at Pomona, Tabasco; last date at Aguateca | | 793 | 9.18.2.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his 30-tun anniversary of accession on the same day his younger brother celebrates his 13^th haab as the “First Servitor” | | 793 | 9.18.3.0.0 | Last date at Yaxha | | 795 | 9.18.5.0.0 | Last date at Bonampak; Yax-Pac places an altar in the Temple 22a council house | | 799 | 9.18.9.4.4 | Accession of 6-Cimi-Pacal at Palenque; the last date at Palenque | | 800 | 9.18.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac and his brother erect Altar G1 in the Great Plaza | | 801 | 9.18.10.17.18 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 18 | | 802 | 9.18.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his two-katun anniversary | | 807 | 9.18.17.1.13 | Ballgame event on La Amelia Stela 1; last date associated with the Petexbatun state | | 808 | 9.18.17.13.4 | Last date at Yaxchilan |

TERMINAL CLASSIC

| 810 | 9.19.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac goes to Quiriguá to celebrate the katun ending; last date at Piedras Negras; last monument erected at Chinkultic; last date at Calakmul; last date at Naranjo; last date at Quiriguá | | 820 | 9.19.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s apotheosis as an ancestor is celebrated on Stela 11 at Copán | | 822 | 9.19.11.14.5 | U-Cit-Tok of Copán accedes and within five years the central government collapses | | 830 | 10.0.0.0.0 | The baktun-ending celebrated at Oxpemul and Uaxactún | | 841 | 10.0.10.17.15 | Last date at Machaquilá | | 842 | 10.0.12.8.0 | Capture on a column on the High Priest’s Grave | | 849 | 10.1.0.0.0 | Bol on-Tun, a Putun-type lord, dominates Seibal and builds a katun-ending complex with five stelae; last date at Altar de Sacrificios; last date at Xunantunich; last date at Ucanal | | 859 | 10.1.10.0.0 | Last date at Caracol | | 862 | 10.1.13.0.0 | Dedication date of the Palace at Labná | | 867 | 10.1.17.15.13 | The earliest date at Chichón Itzá (the Watering Trough) | | 879 | 10.2.0.0.0 | The last ruler of Tikal scattered; last date at Tikal | | 869 | 10.2.0.1.9 | Fire ceremony by Yax-Uk-Kauil and another lord of Chichón Itzá; bloodletting by Kakupacal recorded in the Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá | | 870 | 10.2.0.15.3 | Dedication of Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá | | 874 | 10.2.5.0.0 | Monument erected at Comitán | | 879 | 10.2.10.0.0 | Last date at Ixlú; monument erected at Quen Santo | | 881 | 10.2.12.1.8 | Dedication of the Temple of the Four Lintels at Chichón Itzá by Yax-T’ul and other lords | | 889 | 10.3.0.0.0 | Last date at La Muñeca; last date at Xultún; last date at Uaxactún; last date at Jimbal; last date at Seibal | | 898 | 10.3.8.14.4 | Last date recorded at Chichón Itzá | | 901 | 10.3.11.15.14 | Date on the Ballcourt Marker at Uxmal | | 907 | 10.3.17.12.1 | Date on a capstone in the Monjas at Uxmal | | 909 | 10.4.0.0.0 | Late monument with a Long Count date (Tonina) | | 1200 | 10.19.0.0.0 | Chichón Itzá abandoned | | 1250 | 11.1.10.0.0 | Founding of Mayapán |

POSTCLASSIC

| 1451 | 11.11.10.0.0 | Fall of Mayapán | | 1502 | 11.14.2.0.0 | A Maya trading canoe contacted in the bay of Honduras during the fourth voyage of Columbus | | 1511 | 11.14.11.0.0 | Aguilar and Guerrero shipwrecked on the coast of Yucatán | | 1519 | 11.14.18.17.16 | Cortes lands on Cozumel Island and meets Naum-Pat | | 1521 | 11.15.1.8.13 | Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, falls | | 1524 | 11.15.4.8.9 | Alvarado founds Guatemala City | | 1525 | 11.15.5.2.1 | Cortés meets King Can-Ek at the Itzá capital of Tayasal during his trip across Maya country to Honduras | | 1542 | 11.16.2.3.4 | The city of Mérida founded by the Spanish | | 1618 | 11.19.19.9.1 | Fuensalida and Orbita visit King Can-Ek of the Itzá in Katun 3 Ahau | | 1695 | 12.3.17.10 0 | Avendano’s first visit to King Can-Ek of the Itzá | | 1696 | 12.3.18.8.1 | King Can-Ek of the Itzá accepts Avendano’s invitation to become a Christian | | 1697 | 12.3.19.11.14 | The Itzá are conquered by the Spanish and the last independent Maya kingdom falls |

A Forest of Kings

1. Time Travel in the Jungle

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-45.jpg 70f

Once, many years ago, when we were just beginning our adventure with the Maya, a friend observed that to cross the Texas border into Mexico was to enter a different world where time and reality dance to a different rhythm. After twenty years of moving in and out of that world, both of us have confirmed the truth of that observation for ourselves.

While the experiences of our first journey to that “otherworld” were distinctly our own, they have much in common with the thousands of other pilgrims who go to Yucatán out of curiosity and admiration. For Linda Scheie that first journey came in 1970 when she followed the great arching curve of the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, around to the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. With three students and a husband in tow, she followed the narrow, potholed highway south from Matamoros through the vast, cactus-filled deserts of northern México, skirting the majestic Sierra Madre mountains. At the Gulf port of Tampico, she rode a dilapidated ferry across the Río Pánuco and with the gawking wonder of a first-time tourist entered a world that has known civilization for 5,000 years. The Huastecs, long-lost cousins of the Maya,[6] dwell in the mountains and the dry northern edge of this enormous region. Now we call this world Mesoamerica, a term which refers not only to geography, but to a Precolumbian cultural tradition that shared a 260-day calendar, religious beliefs including definitions of gods and bloodletting as the central act of piety, the cultivation of maize, the use of cacao as a drink and as money, a bailgame played with a rubber ball, screen-fold books, pyramids and plazas, and a sense of common cultural identity.[7] The world view that was forged by the ancient peoples of that land is still a living and vibrant heritage for the millions of their descendants.

The first time you cross the boundary into that world, you may not have an intellectual definition for what is happening to you, but you will sense a change. If nothing else, this region is greener than the desert, and evidence of people and their communities thickens around you. As you drive south, the narrow band of land next to the sea gets squeezed against the waters of the Gulf of Mexico by the huge Sierra Madre mountains and you see for the first time the dramatic contrast between the cool, dry highlands towering above and the hot, humid, forest-covered lowlands. This central opposition is the force that molded life in ancient Mesoamerica into a dynamic interaction between the peoples who lived in these two very different environments.

Moving through the green, hilly land of the Totonacs, another great people of this ancient world, you pass around the modern port city of Veracruz where Cortes’s motley band of adventurers first established a foothold during the time of the Conquest. There you enter the flat, swampy homeland of the primordial Olmec, whose dominions lined the southernmost arc of the Gulf of Mexico. Here amid the twisted courses of sluggish, tide-driven rivers (while carefully dodging the speeding juggernauts of modern tanker trucks that frequent this stretch of road), you see where the first civilization in North America was built. The road rises out of the swamp into a small cluster of black and mottled green volcanic mountains, the Tuxtlas, the natural pyramidal heart of this land, and you can see the flat waterworld of levees and bayous stretching to the horizon in all directions. This was the land of the Olmec, who began building cities at places like San Lorenzo and La Venta by 1200 B.C. They were the people who forged the template of world view and governance that the Maya would inherit a thousand years later when they began to build their own cities.

Southern Veracruz and Tabasco finally give way to the land of the Maya as the coast bends eastward to swing north into the Yucatán Peninsula. The narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, which had widened out briefly into the flat expanse of the ancient Olmec kingdoms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, narrows again as you approach the westernmost Maya city, Palenque. It has always seemed to us that this swampy place could not make up its mind whether it wanted to be land or sea. Patches of dry land peek forlornly up through the flowering hyacinths that have replaced waterlilies to form the floating surface of the dark, still waters the Maya saw as the source of creation. Here is the gateway to the lowlands of the Maya, who developed one of the most fascinating civilizations in the annals of the ancient world.

While our first visits to the hauntingly beautiful ruins that dot the landscape of the Yucatán peninsula were different, we both learned that the Maya are not just a people of the past. Today, they live in their millions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, still speaking one of the thirty-five Mayan languages as their native tongue. They continue to cultivate their fields and commune with their living world in spite of the fact that they are encapsulated within a larger modern civilization whose vision of reality is often alien to their own.

Encounters between the modern Maya and those who visit their lands can also be startling. Linda Scheie remembers vividly the first Maya who truly made a lasting impression on her. As an incredibly naive gringa tourist, she was walking through the market in Merida, when she found herself followed around by a Yucatec woman whose aged, wrinkle-creased face barely came to her shoulder. The old woman’s black eyes gazed upon that foreigner—Ix-tz’ul in Yucatec Mayan—with disbelief, and who could blame her? At five feet eleven and dressed in heavy boots and jeans, Linda was truly an apparition from another world. That tall gringa and the tiny Yucatec shared a moment of contact, but they were from different realities indeed.

That old woman, like millions of other modern Maya, is the inheritor of a cultural tradition that began with the hunter-gatherers who settled the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands to the south eleven thousand years ago. The land her ancestors found was vast and environmentally diverse, covering nearly half a million square kilometers and ranging from high volcanic mountain ranges with narrow cool valleys to dense rain forest interspersed with swamps and rivers to the dry forest plains of the north (Fig. 1:1). This diversity meant that when the Maya became farmers around three thousand years ago,[8] they had to devise many different agricultural techniques, including the terracing of slopes, the raising of fields in swamps and rivers, and the slashing and burning of forest cover. This last technique, swidden agriculture—burning and then planting in the fertile ashes left behind—is both the most ancient and the most common farming method used in the region today.

The archaeological record from those ancient villagers, as well as the description of the Maya by their Spanish conquerors, biased though it was, speaks to us of a cultural heritage which still lives on in Maya farming communities today. Granted that much has changed in the intervening centuries, there is still a basic connection between the ancient Maya and their descendants, just as there is between the ancient Saxons and the modern British. By examining modern village life, we can recover at least a partial picture of what life in those ancient villages was like.

Just as they did in ancient times, modern Maya villagers live in household compounds occupied by extended families. Each family is made up of a group of related adults, including one or more mature couples with growing children; several unmarried adolescents; and, more often than not, a senior couple or grandparents. Such extended families provide the large number of people needed in farming, a labor-intensive way of life. Maya farmers and their families work hard. The yearly cycle of preparing the fields, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing the fruits of their labor leaves only intermittent periods of unoccupied time.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-46.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:1 Topographical map of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Maya Region
_{drawing by Karim Sadr}]]

Extended family organization not only provides a means of ensuring that several farmers are available during the peak periods of work, it also ensures that there are extra hands available to carry out the other necessary activities of the household. Such activities include routine tasks, such as the building and refurbishment of houses, kitchens, and storerooms, the collection of firewood, the preparation of food, and the repair and maintenance of tools. They also include more specialized craftwork, such as the weaving and decorating of cloth, the manufacture of clothing, and the making of pottery. These crafts can be either used by their makers or exchanged for other goods and services needed by the household.

Households live in compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings. The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbors. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.

Despite the diversity in the ways that contemporary Maya communities organize their living space, they cling stubbornly and proudly to local traditions. David Freidel remembers visiting the home of a young Tzotzil Maya farmer in Chiapas. He was very pleased to regard himself as a modern man, and to prove the point he showed David a fine pocket watch that he had acquired. His house had been built by the government as part of a project to improve the living conditions of his people. It was a particularly sturdy structure, but it didn’t fit with the ideals of Tzotzil Maya houses, it had windows, which he had boarded up to avoid drafts. It had a fireplace and chimney, which his wife was using as a store cupboard. His fire was directly on the cement floor with the proper three stones and its smoke was properly blackening the rafters above. No longer a house, now it was a home. Such conservatism in daily practice is vital to the bridges we build between the living Maya and the ruined remains left by their ancestors.

There is a clear division of labor in a Maya family: men farm and women prepare the food in the home. Among the people of Yucatan these role definitions are bestowed upon children in infancy, on the day when they are first carried on their mother’s hip rather than bundled in her shawl. In this ceremony children attain both gender identity and personhood: boys are given little toy field tools, while girls are given toy household utensils.

Participation in this ceremony by adults who are not kinsmen of the child is one of many small ritual ways of forging social ties among different families and even with people from outside the Maya world. As an archaeologist working with Maya from the village of Yaxuná in Yucatán, David Freidel was asked to put a little boy on his hip in just such a ceremony. As it happened the child wasn’t wearing any diapers and, much to the amusement of David’s staff and Maya friends, he reciprocated the honor by making water on his sponsor.

The roles bestowed in this ceremony extend throughout the lifetime of the child. In modern Maya communities, men predominate in the public affairs of the village, while women carry substantial authority within the household and make many economic and social decisions concerning the family in conjunction with the senior men. Women are expert in crafts, especially the making of cloth and clothes.

The public authorities in Maya villages derive from three sources: offices surviving from Precolumbian institutions, those introduced by the Spanish, and those needed for working with the modern national governments presiding over Maya country. In the Maya highlands, the primary hierarchy is made up of cargo officials, adult men who take on the cargo, or burden, of responsibility for organizing the festivals of the saints through the cycle of the year. In many highland communities, there are dual cargo hierarchies. One is responsible for public festivals, and the other for civil matters such as arbitrating disputes which cannot be handled by family patriarchs and matriarchs. Such disputes include unpaid loans, damaged property, sexual improprieties, and other infractions which the national authorities consider too minor to bother with. The cargo officials who try these cases possess an admirable philosophy of justice, one aimed at reconciliation rather than a forcibly imposed verdict from the bench. The civil hierarchy presides over these matters at the cabildo, a municipal building usually found on the square facing the church in the center of the community. Cargo positions are sought after years in advance, and men go to the major festivals to have their names inscribed on waiting lists up to fifteen years long.

To hold a cargo in the public lite of a village is very expensive, often requiring most of the disposable income of a family and its relatives for many years. These officials have to pay for the festivals, and for the many ritual meals, flowers, incense, rockets, and other paraphernalia they use during the performance of their office. They must also live in the population center, away from their households and their fields. In this way, the accumulated wealth of families is put at the disposal of the entire community, and the men buy prestige and authority through their devotion.

The way modern Maya think about cargo officials offers us insight into the ancient attitude toward kings and nobility. Robert Laughlin, a friend of ours and a famous expert on the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, commented at a national meeting where we were presenting our views on Maya divine kingship that modern Maya cargo holders may be saints for a year, but they are still men subject to the same pleasures and needs as the rest of the community. David Freidel remembers spending the night in the home of such a cargo official, Saint John, in the ceremonial center of Zinacantan, a Tzotzil Maya community. After a rough night on the dirt floor, covered not only with warm blankets but with an abundance of fleas, David was awakened before dawn by calls from without: “Saint John, are you dead? Wake up!” To which his host replied: “No, I’m not dead, I’m a little bit alive, wait a minute, come in, come in.” While the wife of Saint John busied herself with the fire, Saint Lawrence and Saint Sabastian strolled in, decked out in wide, flat beribboned sombreros and black ponchos, and everyone huddled on little stools around the growing fire. Someone produced a bottle of homemade cane liquor, a spicy and formidable potion accompanying most ritual business in the town, and a single shot glass. Drinks were poured in proper order, each shot downed in a single gulp after polite bowing to all Saints present; each gulp was followed by spitting on the earth in libation to the unseen but ever-present spiritual beings. With David’s second shot, the memories of fleas faded, replaced by the delicious aroma of coffee laced with cinnamon, fresh thick corn tortillas, and meat jerky broiling on the fire. The Saints proceeded to discuss the preparation of flower arrangements in the church for the upcoming festival of Saint Lawrence: business breakfast, Maya style. Divine kings, like their saintly descendants, no doubt wove their sacred work around the daily pleasures of human life. The beautifully painted crockery from their own official meals, buried in tombs and offerings, is tangible testimony to this tradition.

Unlike its uses in our culture, hierarchy for the modern Maya is an institutional means of maintaining an egalitarian way of life in which everyone has similar material means and no one stands out as wealthy. Wealth is something intrinsically to be feared, as seen in the stories about pacts with the spirits in which people trade integrity for money. People who accumulate wealth or display it in private space are likely to be accused of witchcraft and killed or driven from the village. Unlike us, the Maya are uncomfortable with nonconformity, and such behavior only causes tension within the community.

Shamans also fulfill an important role in the public domain. They cure disease and carry out a wide range of rituals in the fields and homes of a village, and they too have their responsibilities in the public festivals. In contrast with the cargo hierarchies and modern officials, shamans are fundamentally self-selecting and egalitarian in organization. Through their prayers to the age-old divinities of their people, the shamans maintain the link with the past and help modern villagers preserve their language and their most cherished understandings of the world in the face of pressing alternatives from the national cultures.

Although in the ancient world the pressures were different, the shamanistic function has always been to conserve tradition within the community. The shamans were and are public explainers, repositories of the stories and morals of thousands of years of village experience. Their power is intimate and personal, and in the ecstasy of prayer their charisma is unquestionable. They are the keepers of a very complicated world view encoded in special poetic language. We call such knowledge oral history, but in fact it is much more than history. It is an ongoing interpretation of daily life. An example of this way of thinking can be seen in the shaman’s attitude toward disease. Instead of seeing illness as an isolated, purely physical phenomenon, the shaman treats it within the context of the tensions and anxieties of interfamilial and social relationships. The curing of an individual is more than a healing of the physical being. It is a healing of the emotional being, the social being, and the social web holding the community together.

The public rituals of the shamans are occasions for the affirmation of the overarching experience of existence, the cycles of life and death and of the agricultural year, and of the community as the true center of everything important. The poetic form of the shaman’s expression allows him not only to learn and remember encyclopedias of communal knowledge but to express himself effectively in ecstatic states, when he is within the true reality which all of his people know exists behind their common, daily understanding of the world.[9]

The moral and emotional burdens of being a shaman are great, but there are rewards as well. The terrible drought of 1989 finally broke in Yaxuná, Yucatán, only a few days after the village shaman, Don Pablo, had conducted a three-day-long ritual called a Cha-Chae ceremony to summon the storm gods who would bring rain to the parched lands. Having participated in the earlier ceremony, an astounded David Friedel stood in his archaeological field camp watching the rains Don Pablo had called sweep in from the northeast over the pyramids of the ancient city next to the village. With his triumph written across his face in a huge grin, Don Pablo came running over the crest of a nearby hill, clutching his hat in the gusting winds as he fled inches ahead of a gray wall of rain. A great rainbow arched over him in the brilliant orange light of the setting sun in a magnificent display that affirmed the success of his performance as shaman.

Although contemporary villages interact through modern national institutions such as the market economy, the land-tenure system, the school system, and the legal authorities, they also participate in networks °f pilgrimage that come from a far older experience. Villagers attend festivals at other villages and brotherhoods of shamans gather periodically to discuss their craft. These festivals reinforce the local culture and provide opportunities for the arrangement of marriages and the choosing of godparents, acts which link families in real or fictive kinship relationships.

The Spanish overlay of Christianity and the adaptation of village life to the growing impact of modern technological life have produced changes in the Maya village. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable continuity to be seen between modern villagers and their predecessors as described by the Spanish chroniclers. Although the Maya festivals are now arranged according to the Christian calendar, the modern Maya have only switched the timing from the regularities of the katun and the Calendar Round, the ancient way of tracking time. Furthermore, household compounds both of the exalted and the humble, from Preclassic times on, have the same basic identity: small houses arranged around a plaza space. Whether the houses were made of stone and decorated with ornate sculpture, or were the simple wood and thatch constructions of the lowly farmer, the spaces inside them were the same. And both the powerful and the humble buried their dead under the stones of their courtyards so that their ancestors could remain with them and hear the sounds of their descendants’ children playing over their heads.

A vivid reminder of just how strong the continuity is between the ancient and modern ways of life made itself forcefully known to us as we were in the final stages of preparing this book. From the first moment we had turned on the computer to start writing, we knew that shamanism was a fundamental part of Maya life, both ancient and modern. Yet we had only been able to deduce its importance to the older Maya civilization by comparing ancient imagery and the archaeological remains of ritual to the practices of modern Maya shamanism. We had no direct written evidence from the ancient Maya themselves. At the 1989 Dumbarton Oaks conference, David Stuart whispered a miracle into David Freidel’s ear. He and Stephen Houston had deciphered a glyph composed of an ahau face half covered with jaguar pelt as way, the word for “to sleep,” “to dream,” “to metamorphize or transform,” “sorcerer,” and “animal (or spirit) companion.” Here in their writing was the glyph for “shaman,” identifying for all who wanted to see Maya shamans engaged in their Otherworld journeys or manifesting as their spirit companions. Perhaps the most startling coincidence of all was that less than two weeks later, we got a letter from Nikolai Grube of Germany. He had independently found the way reading and recognized what it meant.[10]

This continuity and many others tell us that the villagers of today are the inheritors of more than exotic ruins hidden among vine-draped forests. Moreover, their heritage is not just a collection of myths and half-remembered stories, because their ancestors carved words and images on slabs of stone, on temple walls, and on the objects they used in their ritual lives. These silent monuments hold the names and deeds of kings and nobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity and a place in history. That history was obscured until recently, but those ancient kings now speak again through our new understanding of the words they wrote. It is the decipherment of this writing system that has given us a window into the Maya world. This book is about history as they wrote it and the world as they saw it.

How we came to know about this history is one of the great stories of archaeology. The adventure began with an eccentric nineteenth-century naturalist of dubious renown named Constantine Rafinesque. A man who seemed to just miss fame throughout his lifetime (he almost went on the Lewis and Clark expedition), Rafinesque became interested in the strange writing from Mexico that had been published in the reports of Humboldt’s and Antonio del Rio’s[11] journeys through the region now known as Chiapas. After deciding this odd writing was Maya and deducing how to read the numbers, he published the first modern decipherments in the Saturday Evening Post of January 13, 1827, and June 21, 1828. In a wonderful historical irony, Rafinesque sent letters describing his discoveries about Maya writing to Champolion, who was already famous for his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.[12]

Ancient Maya writing became an abiding part of the public imagination with the publication in 1841 of Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. With carefully detailed illustrations of the ruined cities and vine-covered stone monuments accompanying the authors’ lucid and exciting accounts of their adventures, the Travels became a much-reprinted best seller throughout the United States and Europe. Since then, Europeans and Americans have never lost their fascination with this lost American civilization.

During the ensuing century and a half, many inspired scholars and aficionados contributed to the growing body of knowledge about the Maya and their writing system. The great German scholars Eduard Seler and Ernst Förstemann, along with the American J. T. Goodman, worked out the fundamentals of the calendar and basic questions of reading order by the turn of the century. Just as important as their discoveries was the amazing set of drawings and photographs published by the Englishman Alfred Maudslay in Archaeology: Biología Centrali-Americana and by Teobert Maier in the Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University .

We have often marveled at the hardships these two men and other early explorers endured to complete their work in the hot, forest-covered ruins. Their huge, bulky cameras and the glass-plate technology available to them required gargantuan strength, superhuman patience, and obsessive dedication, but these men left us a priceless heritage[13] that has been basic to the decipherment process. Those glass plates they so laboriously exposed and developed still provide the most detailed records of monuments that have either eroded into near illegibility or been destroyed by looters during the intervening century.

As the early efforts at decipherment progressed, a few people played with the idea that the texts recorded history. One of the most famous near misses was m Herbert Spinden’s[14] 1913 description of the Yaxchilân Lintel 12.

<quote> Upon the bodies of these captives are glyphs which may record their names and the dates of their capture. At the upper part of the stone are two bands of glyphs ... which possibly contain the narrative of the victory or other information of historical interest.

(Spinden 1913:23) </quote>

Two years later in his Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Sylvanus Morley also assumed that history was to be found in the inscriptions. He suggested it was recorded in what he called the “textual residue” left when all the calendric information was accounted for. “It is here, if anywhere, that fragments of Maya history will be found recorded, and precisely here is the richest field for future research, since the successful interpretation of the ‘textual residue’ will alone disclose the true meaning of the Maya writings.”[15]

Ironically, these early suggestions were overwhelmed by the proposition that Maya writing concerned only the stately passage of time. J. Eric Thompson, one of the greatest Maya scholars of this century, was the leading proponent of this viewpoint. It was unfortunate for the field that he was so elegant in expressing his ideas, for the few who argued with him never matched the persuasiveness of his rhetoric. This is the way he put it:

<quote> It has been held by some that Maya dates recorded on stelae may refer to historical events or even recount the deeds of individuals; to me such a possibility is well-nigh inconceivable. The dates on stelae surely narrate the stages of the journey of time with a reverence befitting such a solemn theme. I conceive the endless progress of time as the supreme mystery of Maya religion, a subject which pervaded Maya thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind. In such a setting there was no place for personal records, for, in relation to the vastness of time, man and his doings shrink to insignificance. To add details of war or peace, of marriage or giving in marriage, to the solemn roll call of the periods of time is as though a tourist were to carve his initials on Donatello’s David.

(J. Eric Thompson 1950:155) </quote>

To his everlasting credit, Thompson admitted before he died that he had been utterly wrong. We’ll let him speak the retraction in his own words.

<quote> Touching on the inscriptions of the Classic period, the most significant achievement has been the demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff that texts on stone monuments treat of individual rulers with dates which probably mark birth, accession to power, conquests, and so on. Name glyphs of rulers or dynasties are given, and hints at political events such as alliances.

(J. Eric Thompson 1971:v) </quote>

Proskouriakoff’s accomplishment was truly monumental. Her carefully constructed logic convinced the field instantly and irrevocably that the contents of the inscriptions concerned the deeds of rulers and nobles. Retrospectively, we can’t help but wonder why it took so long to recognize something that is so self-evident today. The answer seems to be that in a barrage of papers published between 1960 and 1964, Proskouriakoff, affectionately known as Tania to her friends, changed the filters before our eyes and altered forever the way we think about the Maya and who they were. Before her work the conclusion was not self-evident.

David Freidel’s first encounter with Tania Proskouriakoff reveals a lot about the character of this great scholar. In the fall of 1971, sensing David’s interest in Maya art, his mentor, Gordon Willey, invited him and Tania to lunch at Young Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, just behind the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge. A brash first-year graduate student, and a long-haired hippie to boot, David arrived sporting a flowing Indian-silk headband. His extravagance raised no eyebrows—great teachers speak to the mind and not to outward appearances—and the conversation ranged over everything from shamanism to Darwinian evolution.

David took what he thought would be a reading course from Tania the following spring, but found that what she taught was actually a “looking” course. He sat in her laboratory in the cluttered, dreary basement of the Peabody Museum for hours on end staring at Maier’s exquisite photographs of stelae, while under a small bright lamp set on a nearby desk, Tania worked away on the beautiful jades that had been dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. She decided that he should work on realistic animal figures in the art on the principle that these are easiest to discern. Like all of the great Mayanists, she was a master typologist who believed that useful insight could come only through painstaking and systematic inventory of empirical patterns revealed as categories in data. She hoped David would follow this sensible approach and she shared her voluminous card catalogs with him to show her own inventory of every motif and element to be found on the known carved monuments, each accurately sketched on a separate card. This inventory undergirds her famous chronological seriation of Maya stelae. Having directed David to the proper methodological path, she did not tell him what to look for. She wanted him to come to his own conclusions about what was conveyed in the art. Periodically she and David would sit by her desk and talk, her clear, intelligent eyes, her quiet, concise words, and her warm wit contrasting sharply with her small, frail appearance and nervous chainsmoking.

Despite her patience, David perplexed and frustrated her. He wanted to interpret whole stela scenes as compositional structures and to establish the patterns of substitution that existed in the objects held or worn as helmets, girdles, and other apparel. Most of all, he wanted to go beyond the first obvious set of patterns to generate more inclusive categories that would let him understand the historical development from natural to grotesque forms. At the end of the course, she said, “David, you have some good ideas, but you need to learn discipline before you can usefully pursue them.” She regarded his deductive leaps as incautious and impossible to prove. She told David that it had taken her many years of careful compilation and study before she was prepared to publicly present her “historical hypothesis.” She believed that one should not publish an argument concerning Maya art, even in article form, until it was incontrovertibly proven.

While no single researcher has ever equaled Proskouriakoff’s central and revolutionary contribution, there were other players[16] in the new historical approach she so elegantly propounded. In 1962, David Kelley published the first history of Quirigua’s dynasty and in 1958 and 1959, Heinrich Berlin identified the name glyphs of historical portraits at Palenque as well as glyphs referring to various Maya cities.

Yet knowing that the contents of the inscriptions concerned history did not help the historical epigraphers figure out how the Maya spelled their words. That discovery belongs to a young Russian named Yuri Knorozov, who in 1952 proposed that the Maya system was not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform in that it was a mixed system composed of full word signs combined with signs representing the sounds of syllables. None of the big three, Thompson, Proskouriakoff, or Berlin, was ever able to accept Knorozov’s ideas. Partly it was because the Russian bureaucracy couched his discovery in the political rhetoric of the day, but just as important was the fact that they never saw the promise of “phoneticism” fulfilled. In one of his many damning criticisms of phoneticism, Thompson[17] said it this way: “A point of some importance, I feel, is that with a phonetic system, as with breaking a code, the rate of decipherment accelerates with each newly established reading .... The first flow of alleged decipherments has not swollen to a river; it has long since dried up.”

In retrospect, the reason the river of decipherment dried up was because only a few hearty souls were ready to ride the current of phoneticism. David Kelley, Michael Coe, and Floyd Lounsbury were the only Western scholars to give Knorozov a fair hearing until the dam broke open at the First Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a tiny little conference held in the village near the ruins in December 1973. At that conference, a new generation of epigraphers, including Linda Scheie and Peter Mathews, were initiated into the mysteries of glyphic decipherment. They joined Kelley and Lounsbury in blending Knorozov’s phoneticism with ProskouriakofTs “historical approach.” During the next five years, in a series of mini-conferences sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks,[18] this group of epigraphers developed a highly successful collaborative approach and forged the last key—the axiom that the writing reflected spoken language and thus had word order that could be used to determine the function of glyphs, even when we could not read them. Thus, while we might not know what a particular glyph meant, we could figure out whether it was a verb or noun by where it fell in a sentence. That simple assumption let us begin paraphrasing inscriptions and dealing with them as whole texts. It was a breakthrough as important as phoneticism and the historical hypothesis because it gave us a larger framework in which to test readings and reconstruct history.

The conjunction of these three approaches—phoneticism, the historical approach, and syntactical analysis—began the acceleration that Thompson evoked as proof that the right system had been found. Now each new discovery ripples outward to trigger other discoveries, which in turn trigger still others. The number of glyphs deciphered and the interpretative fallout is growing exponentially. As the results of epigraphic research have been published, more and more archaeologists have realized that the Maya inscriptions and imagery offer a primary source of data about how the Maya thought about themselves. They are merging epigraphic and iconographic studies with archaeological projects designed to find out how this “history” epigraphers recover looks in the ground. This is a time of marvelous adventure and unprecedented discovery. The process is ongoing and unbelievably exhilarating to those of us privileged to participate in it.

The Maya writing system used to record this ancient history was a rich and expressive script, capable of faithfully recording every nuance of sound, meaning, and grammatical structure in the writers’ language. Calligraphically, it has an unsurpassed elegance, deriving its form from the beauty of freely flowing painted line. Maya scribes, whether carving limestone, engraving jade, inscribing shell, or incising bone, never lost the eloquence of their writing’s original painterly grace. And throughout their history the Maya continued to use the original medium in which writing developed—accordion-folded books made from beaten bark paper that was surfaced with a thin layer of plaster. Four of their books[19] survived the ravages of time and Spanish intervention, but they are but a pitiful remnant of the thousands of books that once formed the basis of Maya knowledge. The four we have are calendar almanacs for the timing of ritual, but we may deduce from other Mesoamerican texts we have in our possession[20] that the Maya also recorded all the details of their lives in their books: genealogy, history, learning, prescriptions for ritual, tribute, trade, mythology, views of the world and history, and perhaps poetry and personal thoughts, ambitions, and dreams. Much information has been lost in the dampness of jungle tombs, but we retain a precious and revealing fragment of this heritage in the public and personal texts they wrote on things of stone and clay.

Millions of Maya today speak languages that descend from the two languages we know were written in the ancient texts—Yucatecan, which was spoken by people living in the northern third and on the eastern edge of the peninsula, and Cholan,[21] which was spoken along the base of the southern lowlands from Palenque in the west to Copan in the east (Fig. 1:2).[22] The area between these two regions was probably occupied by both groups, with Yucatecans concentrated toward the east and Cholans to the west. Like the modern Swiss or Belgians, many of these people were and are culturally bilingual.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-47.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:2 Distribution for Yucatecan and Cholan during the Classic period]]

Speaking two languages that were as similar in vocabulary and grammar as Spanish and Italian gave the people occupying the lowlands an enormous advantage in creating a regional civilization. People living in kingdoms at opposite sides of the Maya region—Palenque on the western edge and Copan on the eastern frontier—spoke the same Cholan language, while people at Dzibilchaltun in the north spoke the same Yucatecan language as people living near Nah Tunich, a cave in the central Peten near the Belizean border. This uniformity of language was one of the factors that facilitated trade and cultural exchange between the kingdoms and gave the people of this region a sense of common identity as Maya. Although fiercely competitive, the Maya, like the ancient Greek city-states, presented a unified ethnic identity to outsiders—especially those who spoke other languages.

Even when speakers could not understand one another, the writing system acted as intermediary, much as the Chinese writing system has functioned for millennia. The wordplays that were so important in the Maya writing system and in the symbolism of their imagery usually worked equally in both Yucatecan and Cholan. Language as the source of visual metaphor provided a common base for the innovation of the symbolic expression of the Classic Maya world view and the institution of kingship. For example, in Cholan and Yucatecan, the words for “snake,” “sky,” and the number “four” are all pronounced in a nearly identical fashion (can in Yucatecan and chan in Cholan).[23] It made good sense to Maya artisans reaching for images to convey the sky arching overhead to portray it as a great snake. They also freely exchanged the glyphs for “sky” and “snake” in titles and names. Since both glyphs were read in the same way, it did not matter which form they used. The fact that only two languages were spoken in such a large geographic area, as much as anything, may account for the remarkable coherency of Classic Maya cultural production during the thousand years of its existence.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-48.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3a]]

The writing system itself worked much like the other great hieroglyphic systems in the world, Egyptian and cuneiform—although it came from an entirely indigenous development. Scribes could spell words with signs representing individual sounds as well as signs representing whole words. We call these “word signs” logographs.[24] For example, the word for “jaguar” (balam in Mayan) could be written simply as a picture of the head of the big cat (Fig. 1:3a). Yet in the Maya world there was more than one spotted cat—for example, there were ocelots and margays. Since confusion could arise concerning this pictorial sign, as with many others, the Maya added syllabary signs to either the front or rear of logographs in order to specify how to pronounce the initial or final consonant. For example, they could attach the syllable sign for ba to the front of the jaguar head or ma to its rear, giving the spelling ba-balam or balam-ma. Since no other word for a cat began with ba or ended in ma, readers knew that here they should pronounce balam, instead of any of the other possible words for “cat.” This type of sign is called a phonetic complement, because it helps to specify the phonetic or sound value of the main glyph it accompanies.

Since these phonetic complements represented the sounds of syllables, the Maya could spell the word using only these phonetic signs, thus eliminating the logograph altogether. The system they devised used two syllable signs to spell a word composed of a consonant-vowel-consonant.[25] For example, cab, “earth,” was spelled with the sign for ca combined with ba to form ca-b(a) (Fig. 1:3b). The final vowel in this kind of spelling was not pronounced. In this phonetic system, the word for “jaguar” used three signs, ba, la, and ma to spell balam(a), again without pronouncing the final a.

The scribes also used other types of signs, called semantic determinatives, which specified that a word should be read with a particular meaning. The most widely distributed sign of this sort was the cartouche that was put around the names of the days in the 260-day calendar. Composed of a hollow circle standing on three scrolled feet, the cartouche told the reader he was looking at the name of a day. When that same sign appeared outside the cartouche, its values were entirely different. For example, the sign that recorded the day Imix became ba outside this cartouche and the day sign Muluc became the syllable u in its naked form (Fig. 1:3c).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-50.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3B]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-51.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3C]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-52.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3D]]

To the despair and sometimes the bemusement of the modern epigrapher, glyphs also had many different graphic forms as well as different phonetic and semantic values. For example, the Imix graph has its regular form, a human form, a zoomorphic form, and a full-bodied form (Fig. 1:3d). The scribe chose the form that fit the space or the elaborateness of his text in the best possible way, and artistry was judged on how elegantly these various forms were combined and used, much like the ornate capital letters used in medieval manuscripts.

Syllables or words (such as u, the third person pronoun, “he/his, she/hers, it/its”) that were frequently used soon developed many different forms, almost as if the scribes got bored writing the same word too many times in the same way. Since each of these alternative signs had its own set of plain, head, and full-bodied forms, the end product was an enormously complex system of writing in which the same word could be written in many different ways. An example of this is the word ahau, which could function both as a day sign and as the rank of the king (Fig. 1:4). The more important parts of a text were often rendered in the more elaborate forms and were larger in scale.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-53.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:4]]

The glyphs in all their various forms were combined into phrases, sentences, and finally the larger texts that have survived into modern times. In the Maya inscriptions, the standard sentence normally began with the time of the action, followed by the action itself, the thing acted upon, and finally the actor. These sentences join with other sentences to become texts, relating sequences of times, actions, and actors, and finally to create a literature with its own style and judgments of what was good and bad writing. Today many of these conventions still survive in the oral traditions of living Maya.[26]

We have found that the surviving Maya literature falls into several genres: the ritual almanacs of the codices; texts marking the ownership of objects from earflares to houses; texts recording the formal dedication of objects, their patronage, and their artists and scribes; and finally, narrative texts. This last category has at least two subdivisions: narratives embedded into pictorial scenes which illustrate the action, and narratives which stand on their own without pictorial illustration. By combining the information recorded in these various kinds of texts, we can reconstruct the history, beliefs, and institutions of the ancient Maya.

The hieroglyphic texts are more than just a history. They constitute a literature, the only written one surviving from the Precolumbian world. The art of writing for the ancient Maya was not only the sequence and structure of words, but included making the image of the word itself. Their writing was one of the most elegant scripts of the ancient world, partially because more than any other writing system, it stayed close to its pictorial and artistic origin. Yet the art of the scribe turned not only on the beauty of the calligraphy but also on how creatively and innovatively he exploited the potential of the writing system and the conventions of text presentation themselves. To the Maya, it was not only what the text said that counted, but also how the scribe chose to say it: and not only how it was said, but also where and on what it was said.

The complexity of the system is often bewildering to the modern reader, just as it must have been to the ancient Maya who was not an expert in its use. But we must recognize that the goal of the writing system was not mass communication, in the modern sense. Few of the ancient Maya population were literate and there were no paperbacks and weekly news journals. Writing was a sacred proposition that had the capacity to capture the order of the cosmos, to inform history, to give form to ritual, and to transform the profane material of everyday life into the supernatural.

History is as much a construction of those writing it as the events it proposes to record, and this is as true of the Maya as of any other civilization. Surviving Maya texts give us, almost exclusively, only the side of the winners—those who were victorious in war, who had the power to commission the great public monuments and buildings, those wealthy enough to fill their tombs with inscribed objects, and those who could afford to buy or commission precious objects as offerings to the gods. In the best of worlds, we would also have more examples of the losers’ stories, as well as the daily records of transactions, taxes, and trade, and the personal thoughts of the humans who lived that history. Time almost never gives us such a complete record. What we have lost of the Maya are the things they wrote in their books and on other perishable material. What we have is history as the kings and nobles wanted their constituents to understand it, the things of faith people wanted to take with them into death, and the words of worth they put on offerings and on the objects they used in ritual and daily life.

Given that the public histories the Maya left behind them are not necessarily the truth, we must use archaeology to provide complementary information of all sorts—some confirming the written record, some qualifying it. It is upon the pattern of conjunction and disjunction between these two records that we base our interpretations of history.

Combining the two streams of information also gives the archaeologist the chronological framework into which we put Maya history. That archaeological history begins with evidence of the first people moving into the Yucatán Peninsula about eleven thousand years ago. For thousands of years, these hunter-gatherers lived quiet lives, leaving behind the chipped stone tools they used as knives, scrapers, and projectile points for hunting game as mute witness of their existence, but by 1000 B.c., they had learned agriculture and begun to build villages.[27] This first phase of settled life is called the Preclassic period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 200). By its end, the Maya had developed a civilized way of life: the social and political institutions, centering on the institution of divine kingship, that would guide the Maya for the next thousand years.

The first subdivision of this long period, the Early Preclassic (1500–900 B.C.), was the time when the first great civilization arose in Mesoamerica. Called the Olmec by modern researchers, this remarkable people built the first kingdoms and established the template of world view and political symbolism the Maya would inherit. Occupying the swampy lowlands of southern Veracruz and parts of highland Guerrero, the Olmec were the first people to create an artistic style and symbolic expression that united different ethnic groups throughout Mesoamerica into a single cultural system.

By the Middle Preclassic (900–300 B.C.), Olmec imagery was used from Costa Rica to the Valley of Mexico and different groups throughout the region were building large population centers and buying into the ideas of kingship and hierarchical society. The reaction of the southernmost Maya peoples to the rise of the Olmec can be seen in their rapid adoption of Olmec innovation in symbolic imagery and social institutions. The Maya in the mountain valleys of western Honduras,[28] Guatemala, and El Salvador began, like the Olmec, to organize their society along more hierarchical lines, a fact which can be extrapolated from the contents of graves from several sites. Some members of society were buried humbly in the floors of their houses, while others were sent to the afterlife accompanied by precious objects such as jade. Throughout the Middle Preclassic period the southern Maya also began raising public buildings—mounds with plazas of earth and stone. On the mountain slopes and foothills above the hot and swampy Pacific coast, other groups[29] began carving stone monuments in styles emulating the Olmec and displaying symbols that presaged the royal iconography of the Maya kings who emerged by the time of Christ. Early rulers were carved in stone along with imagery depicting the symbols of gods and the cosmos of the Middle Preclassic vision. These power images would eventually become the stelae of the lowland tradition, showing the lord frozen at the moment of communication with the Otherworld.

Although surrounded to the west and south by peoples who had elected to unite under the authority of high chieftains and kings, most of the Middle Preclassic villagers of the lowlands chose a different path of social development: tribal confederacies that could convene in the thousands to repel an enemy, but whose members recognized no power above their village patriarchs.[30] Segmentary tribal organization of this type could sustain essentially egalitarian societies of very large size, in spite of the proximity of neighboring hierarchical states. From this type of organization came the template of a kingship replicated in numerous small states, an institution that arose with great rapidity throughout the lowland country in the first century B.C. Early kings were exalted patriarchs, heads of lineages who viewed themselves as brothers because they had all descended from the same mythical ancestors.[31] Segmentary tribal organization was gradually amplified into segmentary state organization.[32]

The Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D. 100) witnessed the emergence of the rank called ahau and the rise of kingdoms throughout the Maya country. From this exalted rank of lords came the person who was the high king, the ahau of the ahauob. From the Pacific slopes of the southern highlands[33] to the northern plains of Yucatán,[34] these lords displayed themselves and their royal regalia on monuments carved with narrative pictures recording their ritual actions. For the first time texts accompanied these scenes, describing who acted, where, and when. It was the beginning of history for the Maya. It was also the beginning of the great political strategies utilized by kings in their creation of public art; for, to the Maya, the cornerstone of historical reality was what could be seen on the temples and public buildings of the city. More powerfully than we can imagine, their art created their reality. It is in this period that the lowland Maya first created decorated temples and the highland peoples[35] raised stone stelae inscribed with texts, and the principles of kingship were firmly established for the next thousand years.

Our story begins in this last phase of the Preclassic period and continues into the florescence of Maya civilization during the Classic period, a phase which traditionally begins with the earliest deciphered date on a stela—now A.D. 199.[36] This time of extraordinary accomplishment falls into two subdivisions: the Early Classic (A.D. 200–600) and the Late Classic (A.D. 600–900).[37] The Classic period ended with a general collapse in most of the Maya region, although in some areas, such as northern Belize and Yucatán, the Classic way of life continued unbroken into the final phase of Precolumbian history, the Postclassic. The Postclassic period lasted from A.D. 900 until the conquest of Yucatán by the Spaniards in 1541, although Maya resistance to Spanish domination continued until the Itzá, Maya Indians who lived around Lake Peten Itzá, were overwhelmed in 1697.

The inscriptions and archaeology also give us information on the world that the Maya inhabited during the Classic period, for it was very different from what we find as tourists. At the height of Classic civilization in the eighth century, the Maya landscape in all its variety supported millions of people. Although the inscriptions from that period tell us the largest domain was Tikal, a kingdom of around 500,000 souls,[38] the average dominion was much smaller, holding jurisdiction over only 30,000 to 50,000 subjects. Maya kings had to cope with a political geography of enormous complexity (Fig. 1:5), resembling the bewildering variety of kingdoms, dukedoms, baronies, and other titled lands of the European Middle Ages. A closer parallel might be the city-states of Classical Greece: little countries that were politically autonomous, yet culturally, socially, and economically interdependent.[39]

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-54.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-55.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:5 Distribution of Emblem Glyph Polities in the Classic Period as suggested by Peter Mathews]]

The first clues about the way the Classic Maya organized themselves came with Heinrich Berlin’s discovery of Emblem Glyphs.[40] Today we । know that these glyphs are titles signifying that people who have them in their names are either a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”), ahau (“lord”), or na ahau (“noble lady”) of a particular kingdom. We also know that these kingdoms were hierarchically organized and included people of many different ranks among their populations. Most of them had a main center or capital, but they also included subsidiary sites ranging from sizable towns up to very large palace compounds and eventually down to hamlets and individual farms.[41]

The glyphic inscriptions give us other kinds of information about the governing hierarchies in these kingdoms, although there was apparently some variation in organization from region to region. The main king was often referred to as the ch’ul ahau. He was always of the rank ahau, but there were also lesser ahauob within the same kingdom who had different responsibilities. Ahauob ruled subordinate population centers within the larger polity and they held important offices, such as war chief, within the main center. The subordinate town of Tortuguero, for example, was ruled by a man named Ahpo-Balam, who was a member of the royal family and an ahau of Palenque. At Copan, the half brother of the last great king ruled a portion of that city. An ahau who was also the son of a king of Naranjo achieved fame as a scribe—not a political office, yet a highly valued specialist rank. In brief, the title of ahau indicated nobility of the highest degree. It was the rank to which the king must belong, but there were many more ahauob than there were kings. This is the typical pattern for a rank that is inherited by several offspring at each generation, as ahau certainly was during the Late Classic period. Obviously, it was in the interests of the kings to find useful work in the government of the realm for their siblings and other ahauob.

Within the kingdoms along the Usumacinta and in the forest to the west of that region,[42] secondary centers might be ruled by a cahal. a noble with less prestige than the ahauob, yet still intimately associated with their kings. The rank of cahal carried many of the ritual prerogatives of the ahauob and produced both provincial governors and officials at the capitals.[43] Both cahalob and ahauob were, therefore, part of the courts that administered the polities, and kings could marry women of either rank to secure political alliances.

Nobles of both ranks were sent to other capitals as emissaries of their high kings,[44] and people of both ahau and cahal rank were important witnesses to the designations of heirs and the accessions of high kings. The powerful and dangerous ritual requirements of accession, along with the preference that the king be ideally the eldest male offspring of his royal sire, suggest that kingship was not elective. Nevertheless, the many exceptions to the ideal of inheritance, including descent of the throne from older to younger brothers,[45] also show how critical the support of the nobility was to the succession.

The number of kingdoms ruled by kings grew from perhaps a dozen in the first century B.C. to as many as sixty at the height of the lowland civilization in the eighth century (Fig. 1:5d).[46] Not all polities survived this span of history, even when they were well established. There were many hazards to challenge kings—wars, intrigues, and natural catastrophes. A king was literally at risk all his life; and more than one king ended his rule, not by dying of peaceful old age but by being taken captive in a war he was too old to fight.[47] It was also true that prosperous and probably autonomous towns always existed within the political geography without ever erecting a royal stela or establishing themselves as an Emblem Glyph polity. Polities both with and without an Emblem Glyph appeared, matured, and disappeared throughout Maya history.

Political coherence and integration characterized life within the dominion of a king, but in the borderlands between these kingdoms, the opportunity must have existed for adventuresome people to maintain independent chiefdoms, or even for whole villages of unallied farmers to exist. Many civilizations tolerate such marginal folk because they service the civilized in a variety of ways, not the least of which is as a human buffer against organized enemies. In the Maya world of the forest, these inbetween people likely gathered many wild plant and tree products—from which they made medicines, poisons, dyes, and incense—and trapped and hunted game for meat and hides. They then sold all these valued commodities to their brethren within the kingdoms. Keeping the border towns under control and assessing tribute were the responsibility of court nobles, and disputed jurisdiction over borderlands was likely one of the causes of wars.

The political geography of the Maya consisted of island cities of royal power in a sea of townspeople and village folk. Kings worked hard to establish firm control over the countryside and to expand their authority as far as possible in the direction of other polities. From the beginning of the institution of kingship, military confrontation was not only a fact of life but a necessary and inevitable royal responsibility. With the proliferation of polities, the civilized territories expanded at the expense of the freeholders. By the Late Classic period, kings looked out at a landscape peopled with brother lords, both enemies and allies, and at escalating conditions of war and strife.

There are certain things about the Maya landscape, about life in the tropics, and about the kind of “technology” available to the ancient Maya that help people of the twentieth century to understand a little better what their lives were really like. They were, first of all, a stone age people, without metal of any kind until several centuries before the Conquest. All they accomplished was done by means of stone tools, utilizing human beings as their beasts of burden: No animals large enough to carry cargo lived in Mesoamerica before the coming of the Spanish. Although the Maya built wide roads to link parts of their kingdoms together, they did not build highway systems. Within the jungle and the rugged mountain landscape, where the wheel was not used, highways did not make a lot of sense. The ancient Maya traveled along paths winding through the deep iorests and cultivated areas, but the major arteries of their transportation were the many rivers and swamps that crisscrossed the landscape. Until very recently,[48] the canoe was the most important form of travel into the interior of the Maya region.

Carved as a single piece from a huge hardwood tree, dugout canoes plied the slow-moving lowland rivers. These rivers drained huge swamps ted by rains that could, and still do, average 150 inches a year in the southern lowlands. Some of this water flows north into the mighty Usumacinta River and its tributaries to empty into the Gulf of México. The rest of it flows east down a network of streams and rivers, large and small, emptying eventually into the Caribbean Sea. Spreading like the veins of a forest leaf, these waterways provided the natural avenues of travel and trade from the southern to the northern lowlands. When we think of lords visiting one another or items being traded between areas, we must remember that these people and trade goods were carried on the backs of bearers in litters or in tumplines[49] or in canoes paddled across the network of waterways that was the superhighway system of the ancient Maya.

These rivers were are not always gentle pathways. At the height of the rainy season, especially when the great thunderstorms and the hurricanes of summer and fall sweep in from the Gulf, these slow-moving rivers can turn into raging torrents of destruction. Conversely, in the dry season they can become too shallow to navigate. Although water, overall, is abundant in the tropics, there is usually too little of it during the dry times, and too much during the torrential rains of summer and fall. Because of these conditions, much of Maya social innovation w’as centered around two great problems: how to store excess water for the times it would be needed, and how to free wet, fertile swampland for farming. The building of reservoirs and massive, complicated canal systems took the labor of thousands and helped develop the concepts of community and central authority. For instance, the Maya of Tikal excavated reservoirs as they quarried stone to build the great houses of the central acropolis. In areas now in the state of Campeche, the lack of permanent water sources forced the Maya to build great rainwater cisterns under their buildings, and at Edzna, to dig kilometers of shallow canals to hold water throughout the dry season.

Further to the north, rainwater collects seasonally in low sinks, but most surface water seeps quickly into the soil and runs underground to the sea. The Maya could reach this underground water only through caves which riddled the limestone. When water dissolved the ceilings of these limestone caves, deep natural wells called cenotes were formed. In the northwestern corner of Yucatán, the water in these wells is close to the surface, but in other regions, for example, at Chichen Itzá, the water table is twenty meters below the surface. Such water is accessible only by long and dangerous climbing down wooden ladders or stone steps carved in the wall of the well itself. The cenotes are a major geographic feature of the northern lowlands, and for a people focused on entrances into the “Other-world” beneath the earth, these caves and water holes became centers of social gathering and the enactment of ritual.

The other great fact of Maya life was the magnificent rain forest, full of towering, liana-draped hardwoods, such as the mahogany, chico zapote, and the most sacred tree of all, the great ceiba. The forest supports a rich web of life, but because the soil under it is thin, nutrients that seep below the surface are captured by the subsoil, which locks them away from the roots of plants. The forest has adapted to this by developing a spectacular factory of insects and fungi which live on its dank and shady floor and digest the fall of leaves, limbs, and trees, returning these precious nutrients to the great spreading roots of the trees. This cycle of life is in full view of humanity, a litany of green blossoming out of death and decay.

The rhythms of the tropical world are not the same as those of the temperate zone in which we live. For us, the central metaphor of death and rebirth derives from the change of winter to spring, but in the Maya tropics spring is the time of drought and the burning of the forest to open the fields for planting. There, the heat of the spring is unending and inescapable as the skies darken with the gritty pall of burning trees, filling lungs with soot and dimming the light of the sun.[50] The forest turns completely white as the trees dry out and many of them lose their leaves. The world becomes the color of bone and the forest smells of death.

The dry season was also the time for wars, for the muddy land dried out then and people could move to and from the battlefield with greater ease. Since planting could not be done until the rains came, there was time for war without endangering the work of farmers. Almost all the battles discussed in this book were fought between late January and early May.

When the rains finally come in late May or early June, the world awakens, literally changing overnight. Thirsty leaves and stems swell with the water of life, and the forest is transformed within hours from the colorlessness of death into a vibrant, unbelievably deep green—the color the Maya called jgx These rains do not bring the riotous color of northern spring, but a sudden change that even more surely emphasizes the transformation of death into life.

In the summer, the rains come in torrential tropical thunderstorms that break across the land with awesome power. In good times, they release their heavy loads of life-giving water with predictable regularity in the late afternoon or early evening, but they can inundate the land as surely as they can bring it life. Eventually, the storms of summer give way in late July and August to a short dry season called the canícula, letting the muddy, saturated earth dry out a little before the fall rains come in their gentle, all-day drizzle. The cold winter storms, today called nortes. can go on for days, chilling the normally warm climate to a bone-deep, shivering, wet cold.

There is a rhythm to tropical life that flows through the experience of all beings living there. In the rich abundance of life that thrives in the forest, in the coming of the rains, and in the terrible consequences of drought, there is a contrast of life and death, of abundance and deprivation, that teaches the lessons of life and cyclic time in metaphors of undeniable power and elegance. Their metaphor is not ours—a spring rebirth timed by the equinox. It is instead the coming of the life-giving rains timed by the summer solstice. This metaphor, however, is just as powerful and penetrating as the temperate cycle upon which the great myths of the Western world are built, and just as effective.

The institution of kingship, and the understanding of the world that fueled Maya civilization welled up out of the experience of the ancient villager. The plants and animals of the forest, the alternation of dry season with the time of rains, the rhythms of planting and burning, were the stuff from which the kings molded the symbols of their power. We are just beginning to understand the patterns of the Maya world and how they used them in the material expression of their culture.

The connections the Maya put into their public history between things spiritual and things human, between things ancestral and things current, between things of the king and things of the community, were not a matter of accident or personal taste. The Maya put them in the public forum of life because they were the things they saw as important. The inscriptions and imagery we have are the propaganda the kings thought their people would believe. They represent the strategies everyone thought gave them a chance to live beyond dying.

These texts and images are a map of the ancient Maya mind and history, of the world as they understood it. Through the words and images they inscribed upon the objects of their lives, they live again in our time. We can remember their deeds, contemplate the power and beauty of their world, and recognize that they accomplished things we honor as civilized, and in the context of human events, as great. The writing of the Maya preserves not only the history of their kings but also their sense of power and sacredness. It lets us utter their names once again—and for a moment see the world as they saw it.

2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, And The Maya World

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-56.jpg 70f

As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon “culture,” and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.

The idea that there are as many “realities” as there are societies may be novel to many of us. Yet whether or not we are aware that we see our world through a filter, our own version of reality guides our actions just as surely as other, different versions have guided other societies around the world in both the present and the past. We in the West live as we do in part because our cultural reality constrains our ability to imagine different ways of doing things. In our world, for example, we could not imagine letting blood from our bodies, as the Maya did, in order to communicate with our ancestors. Such violence seems crazy and “uncivilized” to us. On the other hand, the ancient Maya would find our wartime custom of drafting young men to go and fight in the place of the leaders of our nation both barbaric and cowardly. Maya lords fought their own battles and a king often paid tor defeat in the coin of his own capture and sacrifice.

The principal language of our reality here in the West is economics. Important issues in our lives, such as progress and social justice, war and peace, and the hope for prosperity and security, are expressed in material metaphors. Struggles, both moral and military, between the haves and have-nots of our world pervade our public media and our thoughts of the future. The Maya codified their shared model of reality through religion and ritual rather than economics. The language of Maya religion explained the place of human beings in nature, the workings of the sacred world, and the mysteries of life and death, just as our religion still does for us in special circumstances like marriages and funerals. But their religious system also encompassed practical matters of political and economic power, such as how the ordered world of the community worked.

While we live in a model of the world that vests our definitions of physical reality in science and spiritual reality in religious principles, the Maya lived in a world that defined the physical world as the material manifestation of the spiritual and the spiritual as the essence of the material. For them the world of experience manifested itself in two complementary dimensions. One dimension was the world in which they lived out their lives and the other was the abode of the gods, ancestors, and other supernatural beings. This manner of understanding reality is still true for many of the contemporary descendants of the ancient Maya.

These two planes of existence were inextricably locked together. The actions and interactions of Otherworld beings influenced the fate of this world, bringing disease or health, disaster or victory, life or death, prosperity or misfortune into the lives of human beings. But the denizens of the Otherworld were also dependent upon the deeds of the living for their continued well-being. Only the living could provide the nourishment required by both the inhabitants of the Otherworld and the souls who would be reborn there as the ancestors.[51] To the Maya, the idea of dividing the responsibility for human welfare between politicians and priests would have been incomprehensible. The kings were, above all, divine shamans who operated in both dimensions and through the power of their ritual performance kept both in balance, thus bringing prosperity to their domains.

Because the king lived in the same community as the villager, his explanations of political institutions and rituals had to be voiced in the common language of this shared reality, for the villagers were as much his constituents as were the nobles.[52] For us to understand the actions of Maya kings and their people as rational and necessary for their successful functioning in their world, we must understand how the shared reality of the ancient Maya defined the world for them.

The high art that has so fascinated the modern visitor is the public and private expression of that world view through writing and narrative imagery. This narrative representation of the actions of kings and nobles served a twofold purpose. On the most fundamental level it placed them within the framework of history. Most important, however, it underlined the cyclicality of the cosmic time in which that history unfolded. The Maya were preoccupied with demonstrating historical action as the inevitable result of cosmic and ancestral necessities. It was within this great matrix of belief that the Maya enacted the triumphs, defeats, drama, humor, and pathos of their history and strove to create the greatest and most lasting memorials to their lives.

The World They Conceived

The Maya world was made up of three layered domains: the starry arch of heaven, the stony Middleworld of earth made to flower and bear fruit by the blood of kings, and the dark waters of the Underworld below.[53] To say that the Maya considered these to be three distinct regions, however, is to give a false impression, for they believed all dimensions of existence were interrelated. Furthermore, all three domains were thought to be alive and imbued with sacred power, including the sky, which was represented by a great crocodilian monster. This Cosmic Monster made the rains when it shed its blood in supernatural counterpoint to the royal sacrifices on the earth below.

Ihe Underworld was sometimes called Xibalba,[54] but it is perhaps closer to the original Maya understanding to think of Xibalba as the parallel unseen Otherworld into which the Maya kings and other shamans could pass in ecstatic trance. Like the world of human beings, Xibalba[55] had animals, plants, inhabitants of various kinds, and a landscape with both natural and constructed features. At sundown Xibalba rotated above the earth to become the night sky.

The human plane of existence, like the Otherworld, was a sacred place. The Maya conceived of the human world as a region floating in the primordial sea. Sometimes they represented the earth as the back of a caiman and sometimes as the back of a turtle.[56] The four cardinal directions provided the fundamental grid for the Maya community and for the surface of the world. But for the Maya, the principal axis of the Middleworld was the path of the sun as it moved from east to west on its daily journey. Each direction of the compass had a special tree, a bird, a color, gods associated with its domain, and rituals associated with those gods. East was red and the most important direction since it was where the sun was born. North, sometimes called the “side of heaven,” was white and the direction from which the cooling rains of winter came. It was also the direction of the north star around which the sky pivots. West, the leaving or dying place of the sun, was black. South was yellow and was considered to be the right-hand or great side of the sun.[57] In the Maya conception east, not north, should always be at the top of maps.

This model of the world, however, was concentric as well as quadrangular. The four cardinal directions were also seen in relationship to the center, which also had its color (blue-green), its gods, its bird, and its tree (Fig. 2:1). Running through this center, the Maya envisioned an axis vailed Hocoh Chon (“six sky” or “raised up sky”).[58] The tree which symbolized this axis coexisted in all three vertical domains. Its trunk went through the Middleworld; its roots plunged to the nadir in the watery Underworld region of the Otherworld, and its branches soared to the zenith in the highest layer of the heavenly region of the Otherworld.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-57.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:1]]

The geography of the human world included plains, mountains, caves, cenotes, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and the places and buildings made by people—cities and towns with their houses, palaces, temples, and ballcourts (Fig. 2:2). To the Maya, this world was alive and imbued with a sacredness that was especially concentrated at special points, like caves and mountains. The principal pattern of power points had been established by the gods when the cosmos was created. Within this matrix of sacred landscape, human beings built communities that both merged with t the god-generated patterns and created a second human-made matrix of power points. These two systems were perceived to be complementary, not separate.

As we mentioned above, the world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the wacah chan axis which ran through the center of existence. This axis was not located in any one earthly place, but could be materialized though ritual at any point in the natural and human-made landscape. Most important, it was materialized in.the person of the king, who brought it into existence as he stood enthralled in ecstatic visions atop his pyramid-mountain.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-58.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:2]]

There were two great symbolic representations of this center axis: the king himself, who brought it into being, and his natural analog, the World Tree. The act of communication between the human world and the Other-world was represented by the most profound symbols of Maya kingship: the Vision Serpent and the Double-headed Serpent Bar[59] (Fig. 2:3). In the rapture of bloodletting rituals, the king brought the great World Tree into existence through the middle of the temple and opened the awesome doorway into the Otherworld.[60] During both public and private bloodletting rituals, the Vision Serpent, which symbolized the path of communication between the two worlds, was seen rising in the clouds of incense and smoke above the temples housing the sculptured sanctums. The earthly sides of the portals were within these sanctums.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-59.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:3 Vision Serpents]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-60.jpg 70f][Double-headed Serpent]]

Fortunately for us, one of the greatest of Maya painters[61] 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 (Fig. 2:4). 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.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-61.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:4 The Maya Cosmos Venus as Eveningstar rising from the Underworld in its first appearance after superior conjunction]]

Once brought into the world of humanity, these Otherworld beings could be materialized in ritual objects, in features of the landscape, or in the actual body of a human performer.[62] Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument of this materialization.[63] The ritual of communication was performed on the pyramids and in the plazas of the Maya cities, which replicated in symbolic form the sacred landscape generated by the gods at creation.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-62.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:5 A forest of tree-stones at Copan]]

The names for various parts of the Maya cityscape reinforced this symbolism. The slab-shaped monuments they carved with the images of kings were called te-tun, “tree-stone.” Plazas filled with these tree-stones I then represented the earth covered by a tropical forest (Fig. 2:5). The Maya word for temple was yotot (“his house”[64]) or ch’ul na, “holy edifice.” The doors of such buildings were formed to represent the mouth of a monster (Fig. 2:6) in echo of the Maya phrase for door—“mouth of the house” (ti yotot).

Pyramids and temples were often decorated with images of Witz Monsters[65] (Fig. 2:7) to define them as sacred mountains (witz[66] is the Mayan word for “mountain” or “hill). In this metaphor, the door of the temple is also the cave leading into the heart of the mountain. Inside the sanctum of the cave sat the portal, depicted as the skeletal Maw of the Otherworld. The royal mountain thus contained the cave that formed part of the path that led to the supernatural world. Within this cave grew the Tree of the World marking the center, the place of the portal,[67] in replication of the great ceiba trees that often grow from the entrances of caves in the natural world. A group of temples set together on a platform represented a mountain range towering over the forest of tree-stones in the plazas below. The architecture of ritual space thus replicated the features of sacred geography—the forest, the mountain, and the cave.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-63.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:6 Doorway Sculpture from Temple 1 at Tabasquena, Campeche]]

These same metaphors were also used by patriarchs and shamans in the humble settings of the village. Today, Yucatecan village shamans make their models of the natural world out of green saplings and corn stalks and set them up in the middle of fields, at the mouths of caves, or at the bases of natural hills.[68] Maya peasants throughout the region similarly decorate their altars and images with flowers, leaves, pine boughs, and other living links to surrounding nature. The remarkable correspondences between modern peasant shamanistic practices and ancient royal practices suggest that the ancestral shamans of the peasants, presumably also villagers, carried out modest versions of the noble ceremonies. Nevertheless, these humble rituals activated the sacred energies just as effectively as their counterparts in the great urban centers.[69]

So powerful were the effects of these rituals that the objects, people, buildings, and places in the landscape in which the supernatural materialized accumulated energy and became more sacred with repeated use.[70] Thus, as kings built and rebuilt temples on the same spot over centuries, the sanctums within them became ever more sacred. The devotion and ecstasy of successive divine ahauob sacrificing within those sanctums rendered the membrane between this world and the Otherworld ever more thin and pliable. The ancestors and the gods passed through such portals into the living monarch with increasing facility. To enhance this effect, generations of kings replicated the iconography and sculptural programs of early buildings through successive temples built over the same nexus.[71]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-64.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:7 Witz Monster Masks on the Southwest Corner of Temple 22 at Copan]]

The result was a layered pattern of power points particular to each Maya royal capital, a dynamic pattern that was both conserved and elaborated upon by successive rulers. On the larger scale, dynastic histories affected the sacred geography that had been created by the gods. As kings and nobles built temples to consolidate their power, and as king and commoner buried their dead in the houses they built, human action both added to and shifted the great magnetic centers of supernatural power that dotted the landscape. Sacred geography was affected as much by the unfolding of human history as by the intrinsic structure of the cosmos. But of course, for the Maya these were connected aspects of the same basic forces of nature.

The strategies of political competition were conceived and executed within this matrix of sacred power. Ritual, war, trade, marriage, accession, and other social activities were more likely to succeed if they were conducted at the proper place and time. Specialists in the complex patterns of time and in the movements of the heavens, like Western astrologers, kept track of the movements of the stars and planets to discover when it was favorable to proceed. As the Maya exploited the patterns of power in time and space, they used ritual to control the dangerous and powerful energies they released. There were also rituals which contained the accumulated power of objects, people, and places when they were no longer in active use.[72] And conversely, when the community became convinced that the power was gone from their city and ruling dynasts, they just walked away.

The Maya described the inhabitants of their world, both human and superhuman, in elaborate and powerful stories. These myths, like those in the Bible, not only described but also explained the nature of those beings and their relationships. Because the Maya wrote primarily upon perishable paper, our understanding of their literature and of the many forms such stories must have taken is severely limited. There is one example, however, of a Maya Bible,[73] a compilation of stories that explains the essence of living experience. It is called the Book of Council or the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya[74] people.

Fragmentary versions of these stories and others were written down by Maya literate both in their own script and that of their new masters, the Spanish. Many of these accounts were requested by the Spanish and incorporated into their official documents, but some made their way into carefully guarded caches of books saved by the Maya from the great burning. Other versions were transferred orally from generation to generation of living Maya, making it possible for modern scholars to record them. In fact, one version or another of the creation stories related in the Popol Vuh are found in all periods of Maya history: on the monuments of Preclassic cities like Izapa and Cerros,[75] on Classic period pottery and public art, in documents from the Colonial period, and in the modern oral tradition. There can be no doubt that the creation mythology of the ancient Maya later inspired the genesis stories of the Popol Vuh and that the Precolumbian versions of these stories described the shared world view which linked farmer and king together into a unified society.

The Heroes of Maya myth were twins. In the seventeenth-century Popol Vuh myth, they were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The names most securely associated with them in the Classic period are Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In the version of the myth preserved in the Popol Vuh, these twins were the offspring of an older set of twins who had been called to Xibalba for making too much noise playing the ballgame. Named Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu,[76] these older twins were tricked by the Lords of Death, defeated, and sacrificed. The Lords of Death buried one twin under the ballcourt in Xibalba and hung the skull of the other in a gourd tree as a warning to others so ill advised as to offend the powerful Xibalbans. Found by the daughter of a Lord of Death, the skull impregnated her by spitting in her hand. Frightened by her enraged father, the girl fled Xibalba to the Middleworld, where she wandered until she found the grandmother of the dead twins. The grandmother sheltered her and eventually she gave birth to a new set of twins, named Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

After many adventures, these twins found the ballgame gear their grandmother had hidden after the death of their forebears. The two became great ballplayers and in their turn disturbed the Xibalbans who lived in the Underworld just under the ballcourt. They too were called to Xibalba to account from their unseemly behavior, but unlike the first set of twins, they outwitted the Lords of Death and survived a series of trials designed to defeat them. On the first night they were put in the Dark House and given a torch and two cigars and told to keep them lit all night. They tricked the Lords of Death by putting fireflies at the tips of their cigars and passing a macaw’s tail off as the glow of the torch.

The following day the twins played ball with the lords and allowed themselves to lose. They had till morning to come up with the four bowls of flowers that were bet on the outcome. Thinking to distract Hunahpu and Xbalanque from finding a solution to this problem, the lords had put the twins in Razor House, a place full of stone blades which were constantly looking for something to cut. The twins got the blades to stop moving by promising them the flesh of animals. This accomplished, they sent leaf-cutting ants to the gardens of the Lords of Death to bring back the bowls of flowers. In the morning the lords were enraged to find that they had been paid with their own blossoms.

The twins continued to play ball with the Lords of Death by day and allow themselves to be tested by night. They survived the Cold House, which was full of freezing wind and hail; Jaguar House, a place filled with hungry jaguars; Fire House, a place filled with raging flames; and a house filled with shrieking bats which they escaped by spending the night curled up inside their blowguns.

They did not escape the Bat House completely unscathed, however. As morning approached and the bats grew quiet, Hunahpu peeked out of the muzzle of his blowgun for a look around. Just at that moment a large bat swooped down and knocked off his head, which rolled onto the Xibalban ballcourt. Xbalanque, however, managed to replace the head with a squash, which he carved to resemble his brother’s face.

In the ballgame the next day, the Xibalbans used the brother’s severed head as the ball, but Xbalanque was ready for their tricks. He kicked his brother’s head into the high grass at the side of the court. Out of the grass jumped a rabbit who bounced away like a ball, taking the Xibalbans with him. Xbalanque retrieved his brother’s head, replaced it on his body, and put the squash in its place. He yelled at the Xibalbans that he had found the lost ball and, when play resumed, the squash splattered into bits on the court. The Lords of Death were furious when they realized they had been outsmarted once again.

As a last resort the Lords of Death decided to burn Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Learning of this, the twins instructed two seers, Xulu and Pacam, telling them what they should say when the lords asked for advice in disposing of their remains. The twins cheerfully accepted an invitation to see the great stone fire pit where the Xibalbans were brewing an alcoholic beverage. When challenged to a game of jumping over the pit, they simply jumped in.

Thinking they had won, the lords followed the advice of the two seers and ground the twins’ bones, casting the powder into the river. After five days Hunahpu and Xbalanque were resurrected with the faces of catfish. On the following day they took on human form again, put on the guise of vagabond actors, and began to perform miraculous dances. Hearing of these remarkable new performers, the Lords of Death invited them to demonstrate their skills at court.

The lords were most anxious to see the remarkable dance of sacrifice in which one twin decapitated and dismembered the other. Commanded to perform, Xbalanque dismembered his brother and then brought him back to life. The Lords of Death were overwhelmed and begged to have it done to themselves. The Hero Twins gladly acquiesced, but then they did not bring the lords back to life. Thus was death outwitted and hope brought to humankind. A soul called to Xibalba in death goes with the hope that it too will outwit the Lords of Death, to emerge, like the Hero Twins, in triumph and become venerated as an ancestor.

Xibalba, like the world of humanity, contained many kinds of beings, some of which were found in both worlds and some of which were unique to one or the other.[77] The myth of the Heroes suggests, however, that while people could enter Xibalba, the Lords of Death could not visit the Middleworld except in their nonphysical manifestations—rot, disease, and death. They could not rule as sentient beings here. It was thus the human form of godhood that spanned the worlds, rather than the supernatural form, and that human form was ultimately the king. He was the earthly manifestation of the Hero Twins and he reenacted their triumph over death through ritual.

Maya artists often represented Xibalba as being underground,[78] but they also pictured it underwater with its denizens upside down relative to the human world. In at least one version (Fig. 2:4), Xibalbans lived foot to foot with humans, exactly as if they were mirror people. Xibalba was, furthermore, not always underfoot, for at night it circulated to take its place above in the night sky. The Maya saw stars and constellations, the planets and the moon, as living beings who interacted with the cycles, natural and social, of the Middleworld. To the ancient Maya the world of the stars was as alive as the world of humankind. Astronomical observation was not a matter of simple scientific curiosity, but a source of vital knowledge about Xibalba and its powers. Sky patterns reflected the actions and interactions of those gods, spirits, and ancestors with the living beings of the Middleworld. Both king and commoner adjusted their living to those patterns or suffered the consequences.

From the myth of the Hero Twins came three great axioms that appear repeatedly in the imagery of Classic Maya religion and politics. First, the Hero of the Maya vision did not overpower his enemies: He outwitted them. In the myth, the Twins tricked the Lords of Death into submitting to sacrifice. Secondly, resurrection and rebirth came through sacrifice—especially death by decapitation. The Hero Twins were conceived when the severed head of their father spit into the hand of their mother. They defeated death by submitting to decapitation and sacrifice. Finally, the place of confrontation and communication was the ballcourt. The ballgame, as we shall see in later chapters, was the arena in which life and death, victory and defeat, rebirth and triumph played out their consequences.

The rules and scoring of the bailgame remain elusive to us, but we have images of Classic people in play.[79] The ball was made of solid latex rubber shaped into a sphere slightly larger than a modern basketball. Players wore heavy padding called yokes around their waist to protect them from the bruising hardness of the ball. They also wore heavy padding on one knee and forearm to protect themselves from injury as they hit the ball or threw themselves under the flight of the ball. In bailgame scenes, players are often shown on one knee as they prepare to return the ball, and there are several examples where they have thrown themselves to the ground to prevent it from hitting the floor.

The floor of the ballcourt was usually I-shaped, but the side walls could vary considerably, although the Classic Maya generally preferred slanted walls. Markers of various sorts—stone circles at Chichen Itza, macaw heads at Copan—were mounted high on the side walls, although we do not know if they were used in scoring the play. The center ally of the I-shape usually had three round markers about a meter in diameter distributed down its center line. These markers depict one of three kinds of scenes: bound captives, play between historical people, or play between the Hero Twins and the Lords of Death. While we do not know the rules, the iconography and archaeology associated with ballcourts clearly associate them with captive sacrifice and political pomp and circumstance.

The Shape of Time

As this page is written, our world approaches what we conceive of as two great benchmarks in time—great chronological nodes when we contemplate the symmetries of history and evaluate the progress of our species as a social organism. The year 1992 will mark the five-hundredth year since Columbus “discovered” the Americas and began the process of making us into a global community aware of who and what we are. The second great anniversary will be celebrated in the Christian world, where most of us alive now will see the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, known among non-Christian peoples as the “common era.” The first millennium brought expectations of Christ’s return—the second sees us as a species standing on the edge of what could be a great adventure into the cosmos or the extinction of all people everywhere.

On both of these days, we will pause to consider where we have been, what we have done, and what the future may have in store for us. Yet neither of these days has any intrinsic magic of its own. The millennium, for example, will turn on the first day of the month January, which happens to fall on a Sunday. The moon will be in its last quarter, Venus will be sixty days after its maximum distance from the sun as Morningstar, and we will be eleven days past the winter solstice. It will also be seven days after Christmas and twenty-live days after the 58^th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. That year will see the 224^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

We give meaning to days like this because they are the benchmarks we use to perceive that linear time has passed. By observing them we give form to the flow of time and shape to the conceptions of origins and happenings that we call history.

Time for the Maya was no different. They too devised ways of recording the passage of time. Like us, they named days in many different ways and acknowledged linkages between days and events. In this way they attempted to understand the order underlying human affairs and the cycles of the living cosmos. We count with our fingers and base our numbers on units of ten. The Maya counted with the full person, both fingers and toes, and based their system on units of twenty. The symmetries generated by these two number systems are different, but their purposes are the same. We mark the passage of decades, centuries, and millennia; they marked the passage of 20-year cycles, which they called katuns, and 400-year cycles (20x20 years), called baktuns.

In our reckoning of the solar year, we use fractions, calculating that a full year is 365.25 days. Yet how is it possible to make a quarter day? It can’t be done—so instead we accumulate these quarters until we have a full day and add that day every four years to make a leap year. The Maya did not make life so complicated. Their fundamental unit was the whole day with its two halves—night and day.[80] They never altered the endless replacement of one day by the next and any fractions of years left over were simply ignored.

This endless succession of time was given order by grouping days into ever-repeating cycles ranging from the small to the inconceivably huge. Some of these cycles came from the observation of the natural world, for example, the cyclic movements of the moon, the planets, and the constellations. Others derived from the symmetries intrinsic to the numbers themselves, for example, the practice of counting in twenties. Other numbers and their repetitions were sacred and had magical properties.

This succession of days, like locations in space, were conceived as falling within a structure divided into quadrants, each with its appropriate direction and color. When the Spanish arrived, the Maya used this directional structure in their New Year’s ceremonies. Their ancient forebears used this four-part structure differently: They divided the progression of time into quadrants of 819 days each. In the inscriptions recording this cycle, they said that God K,[81] a small manikin-like god who was called Kawil (see the Glossary of Gods), ruled the appropriate direction during that quadrant of time. There were four such gods, each characterized by a long-nosed face, a mirror in the forehead, a smoking celt piercing the mirror, and often a serpent foot. In this context, each of the four was distinguished by his color: the red Kawil of the east, the white Kawil of the north, the black Kawil of the west, and the yellow Kawil of the south. The exact reason for choosing 819 days as the base of this cycle is not known, but the sum is the result of 7x9X 13, all numbers sacred to the Maya.[82]

These quadrants provided one kind of structure to time—one that directly reflected their directional and color organization of space. Yet each whole day also fell into many other cycles, both smaller and larger. The name and character of a day were derived from the combination of positions it occupied in these many different calendric cycles. The most important of these was the 260-day cycle, called a sacred round or tzolkin by modern scholars (Fig. 2:8). Composed of thirteen numbers consecutively combining with twenty day names, this cycle was shared by all the peoples of Mesoamerica. The tzolkin begins with the number 1 combined with the day name Imix, and proceeds to 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and 4 Kan. After thirteen days the number cycle returns back to one. At this point, because there are more names than numbers, 13 Ben is followed by 1 lx and so on. When we pass the 260^th permutation of number and day name, 13 Ahau, we have once again arrived at the first day, 1 Imix. One easy way to visualize how the tzolkin works is to use letters for the day names so that the first twenty-five days fall in the following pattern: 1 A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6F, 7G, 8H, 91, 10J, UK, 12L, 13M, IN, 20, 3P, 4Q, 5R, 6S, 7T, 8A, 9B, IOC, 1 ID, 12E. It takes 260 days for the combination 1A to recur. The tzolkin continues to repeat throughout eternity—one day following the other just as for us Monday follows Sunday every seven days forever.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-65.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:8]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-66.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:9 The Calendar Round and How It Worked (after National Geographic, December 1975)]]

A second cycle used by the ancient Maya consists of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days, with five days left over at the end of the year. This short five-day month is called Uayeb, “the resting or sleep”[83] of the year (Fig. 2:9). Called both a haab and a vague year by modern scholars, this cycle mimics the solar year, but like the 260-day cycle, it is a count of whole days, one following the other in endless progression without any adjustment to the fractional remainder of the true solar year.

Each of these months had a name as do our own. Any day was named by a combination of its numerical position within the month and the name of the month itself; so, for example, the fifth day of the first month was called 5 Pop. The Maya conceived, however, that the last day of any month could also be thought of as the time that the following month was set in place. They could record this last day as the “end of” the current month, but the ancient Maya preferred to call it the “seating” (chum) of the upcoming month. In this haab cycle, the last day of the year would tall on “the seating of Pop” (0 Pop) and New Year’s would be on 1 Pop. Conventionally, modern scholars transcribe this seating day into Arabic notation as 0, giving the impression to many beginners that the days of a Maya month were numbered 0 to 19. This impression is incorrect: they were numbered 1 to 19 or (during five-day months) 1 to 4, making the final day the seating of the following month.

The famous 52-year cycle of the Mesoamerican calendric system reflects the combination of the name of a day in the 260-day tzolkin with its name in the 365-day haab—for example, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. The combination of these two names recurs every 18,980 (52x365) days. In the Maya system, this 52-year cycle is called a Calendar Round.

In addition to the three cycles discussed above, each day was also ruled by one of the Nine Lords of the Night, who succeeded each other in endless progression like our days of the week. The Maya also kept track of the age of the moon on each particular day and of where each day fell in the cycles of Venus and the other planets. All of these factors provided the detailed combination of cyclic information that gave each day its personality in time.

The Maya also reckoned each day in an era-based calendar that counted whole days accumulated since day zero, which they apparently conceived of as the beginning of the current manifestation of the cosmos, the fourth version of creation to exist.[84] Modern scholars call this era-based calendar the Long Count. Its basic unit was a 360-day year, which the Maya called a tun or “stone” because they marked the end of each of these years by setting a stone in the ground.[85] Each of these tuns consisted of eighteen months of twenty days. The months were called uinic (after the Maya word for “human being,” since humans had twenty fingers and toes)[86] and the days kin. Twenty tuns composed a katun, 400 made a baktun, 8,000 made a pictun, and 160,000 made a calabtun—and so on, in multiples of twenty, toward infinity. Since we have no equivalent cycles in our own calendar, we use the Maya words as the English names for the various periods in this calendar.[87]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-67.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:10 Maya Numbers and How They Work in the Calendar]]

To write the number of years that had accumulated since the base date, the Maya used a place-notation system much like ours. Instead of placing their highest numbers on the left and their lowest numbers on the right, however, they placed their highest numbers at the top of a column and their lowest at the bottom, and read them in that order. While we need ten signs to write our numbers, the Maya needed only three: a dot for one, a bar for five, and one of a number of signs for zero (Fig. 2:10). A single day was written with a dot, four days with four dots, six with a dot and bar, nineteen with three bars and four dots, and so on. To write the number twenty, they put a zero sign in the lowest position and a dot in the next one above it. Since there are only 360 days in this kind of year, there could never be a number larger than seventeen in the month position. Eighteen months was written as one year, no months, no days.

In the Maya conception, the zero day of this era-based calendar fell on 13.0.0.0.0[88] of the Long Count, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku of the Calendar Round, and on a day when the ninth Lord of the Night was ruling (Fig. 2:11). Once these day names had been juxtaposed in this way, the calendar was set for all eternity. All the simultaneous cycles that constituted time would now simply click forward one day at a time. The next day was 13.0.0.0.1 5 Imix 9 Cumku, with the first Lord of the Night ruling; followed by 13.0.0.0.2 6 Ik 10 Cumku, second Lord of the Night; and 13.0.0.0.3 7 Akbal 11 Cumku, third Lord of the Night. In our calendar, their zero day corresponds to August 11, 3114 b.C.[89]

Above we talked of the turning of the millennium as one of our own milestones in time. In the near future Maya time also approaches one of its great benchmarks. December 23, 2012, will be 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, the day when the 13 baktuns will end and the Long Count cycles return to the symmetry of the beginning. The Maya, however, did not conceive this to be the end of this creation, as many have suggested. Pacal, the great king of Palenque, predicted in his inscriptions that the eightieth Calendar Round anniversary of his accession will be celebrated eight days after the first eight-thousand-year cycle in the Maya calendar ends. In our time system, this cycle will end on October 15, 4772.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-68.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:11]]

Just as we can transcribe the great milestones of their time into our system, so can we express the day on which our second millennium falls in their calendar system. January 1, 2000, will fall on 9 Ahau in the 260-day Sacred Round and on the eighth day of Kankin in the 365-day haab. The Calendar Round designation is 9 Ahau 8 Kankin, which will be ruled by the third Lord of the Night. On that day, the moon will be 25 days old. Venus will be 133 days after inferior conjunction; and Jupiter will be 69 days, and Saturn 51 days, after opposition to the sun. It will be 2 years, 50 days after the beginning of the 2,282^nd quadrant of the 819-day count in which the white God K will rule the north sky. And finally, that day will fall on the 1,867,260^th day since the Maya zero date, expressed in the Maya Long Count as 12.19.6.15.0.

Our millennium day, of course, had no particular importance to the ancient Maya: Yet they had many such central and transitional days in their own cycles of time and they celebrated them with no less enthusiasm than we celebrate Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July. For the Maya, however, what happened on such days was not merely a remembrance of days past. It was an actual reiteration of the essential events that had happened, continued to happen, and would always happen on those days. Just as we will contemplate both our past and our hopes for the future on January 1, A.D. 2000, so the Maya regularly contemplated their own history and future potential on the important days of their calendar. For the Maya, history affected the structure of time just as ritual affected the nature of matter.

Political strategies and social events had to be calculated within a complex geography of sacred time, just as they were in sacred space. It was vitally important to know not just the character of a day in the major cycles of the tzolkin and haab, but its position in all of the permutations of cyclical time they measured. Certain days were important because of their relationship to Xibalba and the cosmos. The Maya reckoned this kind of importance with their own form of numerology.[90] The four surviving Maya books[91] describe which gods do what actions on different days in the many permutations of the Maya calendar. These patterns of divine action are far more complex than the relatively simple patterns we ascribe to the planets in Western astrology. For the Maya, on any given day hundreds of gods were acting and the pattern of their actions and interactions affected and were effected by the shape of sacred time and space.[92]

Yet the relationship of the kings to this timescape was not passive. While it was true that some social events, like planting and harvesting, were regular and cyclic, the actions of important humans, their births and deaths, triumphs and defeats, their records as builders and leaders, did leave their individual marks on time. Days in the history of each kingdom took on sacredness derived from the dynasts who ruled. Kings legitimized their current actions by asserting that they reiterated ancestral history. Kingly actions were likened to godly actions and exceptions to the norms of legitimate descent were explained as the reenactment of mythological or legendary history. The Maya linked their actions to gods before, during, and after the present creation and to the history of the legendary first civilization of their world—the Olmec.[93] As history accumulated for each kingdom, particular dates were remembered and celebrated for their local importance, much as different independence days are celebrated by different countries in North America. Thus, the patterns of time, like those of the physical world, had form both on the cosmic and the human scale.

The Community of Human Beings

The Maya community was embedded in the matrix of this sacred space and time. Socially, the Maya people organized themselves into families that reckoned blood membership through males and marriage membership through females. This method of organizing kinship relationships is known as patrilineal descent. The principle of selecting a single inheritor of supreme authority in the family from each successive generation usually focused on the eldest male child. This is called primogeniture[94] and it is a principle underlying hierarchical family organization from ancient China to medieval Europe. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Maya families were large, and included several generations of people under one roof or within one household compound.

The principle of reckoning through the male line made it possible for extended families to combine into larger groups, called lineages, which acknowledged a common ancestor. The Maya further combined lineages sharing an even more distant common ancestor into clans. These clans could function as very big families as circumstances warranted, often crosscutting differences in wealth, prestige, and occupation.[95] Maya families still have such clan structure in some communities today.

Some patrilineal systems regarded families within clans to be equal in status, but the structure also lent itself to hierarchical organization. One particular family could successfully claim a higher status if it could prove that it was on the direct line of descent from the founding ancestor. This was done by demonstrating that direct descent had passed through only one member of each generation. Once primogeniture designated a single inheritor of the line in each generation, it was possible to claim that there was a single line of males stretching back to the beginning of the clan, and that all other member families were descendants of a second rank. Internal ranking could be quite complicated, depending as it did on the reckoning of relative distance or closeness to the central lines of males. The principle was essentially open-ended in this respect, and the logical extreme was the ranking of each individual in each family in a pyramid of people stretching back to the beginning. While most societies, including the Maya, quit far short of this extreme, our point is that family ties were a flexible and powerful means of establishing social hierarchy.

The Maya institution of kingship was also based on the principle of inheritance of the line by a single male individual within any one generation leading back to a founding ancestor.[96] Furthermore, families and clans were ranked by their distance or nearness to the central descent line manifested in the king. Political power based on family allegiance may appear to be relatively simple compared to our own social-classes system, but it effectively integrated states composed of tens of thousands of people.[97]

Not surprisingly, the Maya applied the principle of primogeniture and the reckoning of the central line to other important social statuses in addition to the kingship. At Copan, for example, a lineage house was excavated whose patriarchs specialized in the arts of writing.[98] Their status as scribes gave the family sufficient prestige to warrant their special acknowledgment by the royal house of Copan. In the west along the Usumacinta river, members of another noble rank, cahalob,[99] provided administrators for the king and shared many of the prerogatives of the ahauob. The cahal rank was also inherited through family lines. Archaeology, text translation, and art historical interpretation give us glimmerings of many other types of kinship-based statuses. This principle of inherited status permeated the entire society and affirmed the legitimacy and prerogatives of the most exalted, as well as the most humble, of society’s F members.

Recent archaeology at Copan gives us a good example of the way in which the humble and the well-off maintained their integrity, even when living side by side. The residential compounds of kin groups have been classified by size and complexity into four ranks, ranging from Type 1, the lowest, to Type 4, the highest. Group 9N-8, also known as the Scribe’s Compound, is a Type 4 site—a great sprawling compound with multiple courtyards and many residential buildings. Next to it sits a Type 1, the lowest rank—the residence of a family we would call, in our system, low-middle or upper-lower class. Compared to its high-status neighbor, the Type 1 compound is humble, consisting of only a single, small courtyard, surrounded by two houses and kitchen buildings. The houses have stone walls, but the interior rooms are small, even by comparison to Copan’s tradition of tiny interiors. As humble as the Type 1 site was, excavations show that the lineage living there held its own against the neighboring lineage, even as the higher-ranked group expanded into more and more plaza compounds built as the family grew in size. Throughout its history, the lower-ranked compound remained spatially and, we deduce, socially independent. Within the social system of the Maya, the rights and independence of the lower-ranked lineages were protected as vigorously as those of the exalted.[100]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-69.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 10]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-70.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 11
Fig. 2:12]]

Public monuments erected by the Maya king during the Classic period emphasize not only his role as shaman, but also his role as family patriarch. A large percentage of the texts on stelae focus on his genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. Not only were statements of his parentage regularly included in his name phrase, but pictorial records of all sorts show the parents of the king observing the actions of their offspring, even after these parents had died (Fig. 2:12).

The titles of kings also included their numerical position in a line of succession reckoned from the founders of their lineages. These founders were usually real historical persons, but they could also be supernaturals.[101] In the realm of Copan, however, we see another type of situation. There the small population center of Rid Amarillo was governed by a group of lords belonging to a lineage who claimed descent not from the founding ancestor of the high king but from a local founder.[102] The existence of this state of affairs confirms that many subordinate lineages did not bear a real kinship status to the royal line and hence constituted allied vassals rather than relatives of inferior status. Nevertheless, the overriding metaphor of kingly authority was kinship. Kings at Copan and elsewhere used the regalia and ritual of their office to claim identity with the mythical ancestral gods of the Maya. In this way they asserted ultimate kinship authority over all of their subjects, including such subordinates as the Rio Amarillo lords.

Problems with legitimate descent, such as the lack of a male heir or the death of one in war, were solved in extraordinarily creative ways. Some of the most innovative programs in the sculpture and architecture at Yaxchilan and Palenque were erected to rationalize such divergences from the prescribed pattern of descent, problems that are discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. So critical was the undisputed passage of authority at the death of a king that the designation of the heir became an important public festival cycle, with magical rituals spreading over a period of a year or more. At the royal capital of Bonampak on the great Usumacinta River, exquisite polychrome murals show that these rites included both the public display of the heir and his transformation into a special person through the sacrifice of captives taken for that purpose.[103]

The sculptural record also shows the shamanistic nature of Maya / kingship, central to the Classic conception of the cosmos, by depicting the divine ahau as a conductor of ritual. From the very beginning, royal monuments, such as the miniature Hauberg Stela and the San Diego cliff carving looming high above some forgotten kingdom, have depicted kings as manipulators of the supernatural domain (Fig. 2:13). Both these sculptures show a king with the supernaturals he has materialized by the ritual of shedding his blood. In the case of the Hauberg depiction, we know that this bloodletting preceded the protagonist’s accession to kingly office by fifty-two days.[104] This ritual was most likely a public affirmation of his ability to open a portal to the supernatural realm. Although the verb in both these monuments is “he let blood,” the Maya of these earlier times preferred to depict the materialization of the ancestor or god rather than the actual act of taking blood. There was a logical reason for this preference. By featuring the vision, rather than the sacrifice, the successful performance of the king as shaman could be documented publicly. Throughout the Classic period, Maya public art remained focused on the ritual performances of the king, whether these rituals were part of the regular festivals that punctuated Maya life, such as the calendrically timed ritual of period endings, or special celebrations triggered by dynastic events, such as marriages, births, or deaths.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-71.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:13]]

While the ritual lives of villagers and farmers were not portrayed on the public art of the ancient Maya, high-ranking nobles did have the privilege of erecting monuments. Some of these nobles erected monuments at the subsidiary sites they ruled on behalf of high kings, while others placed monuments within the courts or buildings of their own lineage compounds. These depictions take two forms: the noble acting with his king, and the noble acting alone as the protagonist. In the first type of composition, the noble can be easily distinguished from the king by his smaller size, his characteristic clothing, and his name phrases. In the second type, however, we would never know the actor was a noble, instead of a king, without being able to read the text (Fig. 2:14).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-72.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:14 Yaxchilan Lintel 39]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-73.jpg 70f][Lacanja Lintel 1]]

During the Classic period, the heart of Maya life was the ritual of bloodletting.[105] Giving the gift of blood from the body was an act of piety used in all of their rituals, from the births of children to the burial of the dead. This act could be as simple as an offering of a few drops of one’s blood, or as extreme as the mutilation of the different parts of the body to generate large flows of this precious fluid. Blood could be drawn from any part of the body, but the most sacred sources were the tongue for males and females, and the penis for males. Representations of the act carved on stelae depict participants drawing finger-thick ropes through the wounds to guide the flow of blood down onto paper. Men with perforated genitals would whirl in a kind of dervish dance that drew the blood out onto long paper and cloth streamers tied to their wounded members. The aim of these great cathartic rituals was the vision quest, the opening of a portal into the Otherworld through which gods and the ancestors could be enticed so that the beings of this world could commune with them. The Maya thought of this process as giving “birth” to the god or ancestor, enabling it to take physical form in this plane of existence. The vision quest was the central act of the Maya world.

The practice of personal bloodletting took place not only in the temples of the mighty but at altars in the humble village as well. This fact is witnessed to by the presence of obsidian, one of the main implements of the ritual, at many ancient village sites. Obsidian is volcanic glass spewed forth from the towering fire mountains in highland regions of the Maya country. Skilled craftsmen made long thin, razor-sharp blades of the black glass, and such blades are found in virtually every lowland community context of the Maya—albeit in small quantities outside of great cities or the manufacturing towns near the natural sources of the stone. Obsidian was prized for many reasons—not only for its rarity, but for its unsurpassed ability to make clean, quick wounds. No doubt obsidian blades were used for a wide variety of cutting tasks once their main function as bloodletters was at an end, but for this primary ritual use, obsidian was to Maya propitiation of the divine what wine and wafers are to the Christian communion. What the great kings did with obsidian on behalf of all, the farmer did on behalf of his family. To be sure, the gift of obsidian from a king to his subject in return for labor, tribute, and devotion was a kind of subtle coercion. We can say this in light of the fact that the king held a virtual monopoly over the supply of obsidian and chose who was to receive it and who not. But this gift was also an affirmation of a common covenant with the divine and a common means of sustaining this covenant.[106]

The king upheld his part in this divine covenant through his enactment of many rituals of power performed for his people. Indeed he was power, power made material, its primary instrument. On public monuments, the oldest and most frequent manner in which the king was displayed was in the guise of the World Tree. Its trunk and branches were depicted on the apron covering his loins, and the Doubled-headed Serpent Bar that entwined in its branches was held in his arms. The Principal Bird Deity (see the Glossary of Gods) at its summit was rendered as his headdress (Fig. 2:15). This Tree was the conduit of communication between the supernatural world and the human world: The souls of the dead fell into Xibalba along its path; the daily journeys of the sun, moon, planets, and stars followed its trunk. The Vision Serpent symbolizing communion with the world of the ancestors and the gods emerged into our world along it. The king was this axis and pivot made flesh. He was the Tree of Life.

For the Maya, trees constituted the ambient living environment, the material from which they fashioned homes and tools, the source of many foods, medicines, dyes, and vital commodities such as paper. They provided the fuel for cooking fires and the soil-enriching ash that came from the cutting and burning of the forest. Trees were the source of shade in the courtyards and public places of villages and cities, and the home of the teeming life of the forest. It was natural that the Maya would choose this central metaphor for human power. Like other trees, the king was at once the ambient source of life and the material from which humans constructed it. Together, the kings of the Maya realms comprised a forest of sustaining human World Trees within the natural forested landscape of the Maya world.

The king sustained his people, but he also required much from them in the way of service. The regularities of the Maya calendar and the celebration of local history generated endless rounds of feasts and festivals.[107] The rich ceremonial life of the great public centers, reflected in the smaller towns and villages surrounding them, drew deeply upon the natural and human resources of the Maya. The king and his court commanded the skilled and unskilled labor of many craftsmen and commoners, whose basic needs had to be met by an even larger population of farmers, hunters, and fishermen. It is hard for us to imagine just how much patience, skill, and effort went into the creation of the elaborately decorated objects and buildings used by the king in his performance of ritual. A single small jade F carving must have taken a craftsman months to complete, and we can document the fact[108] that great temples took many years of skilled work by construction specialists, carvers, plasterers, and painters as well as common laborers.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-74.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:15 The Maya King dressed as the World Tree]]

The tribute which the community gave to the royal court to finance such work was no doubt a real burden, but not necessarily a severe hardship. In times of general prosperity, which existed for most of Classical Maya history, the common folk enjoyed ready access to the basic necessities of life, both practical and spiritual. In times of hardship and privation, the commoners and nobles all suffered alike. The ancient Maya view of the world mandated serious and contractual obligations binding the king and his nobility to the common people. Incompetence or exploitation of villagers by the king invited catastrophic shifts in allegiance to neighboring kings, or simple migration into friendlier territory.[109] Such severe exploitation was a ruler’s last desperate resort, not a routine policy. The king and his elite lived well, they enjoyed the most favored loods, the most pleasant home sites, the finer quality of clothing.[110] But the great public displays of the Maya were not designed just to exhibit the personal wealth of the king. They also exhibited the community’s property entrusted to the king, fashioned by the hard work and inspiration of many people, and ignited into luminous power by their most prized possession, the king himself.

The practical arrangements of economic matters were never documented in the public record of ancient Maya communities. However, we can surmise that the major economic institution was the public fair[111] that accompanied every major festival in centers great and small. 1 hese public fairs were, along with daily markets in the major towns and cities, the context in which the Maya carried out their business transactions. Even as late as this century, the yearly festival of the Señor de Escupu/as, Christ in the Sepulcher, turns a sleepy little town near the ancient center of Copán into a teeming bazaar of tens of thousands of Maya from all over that part of their country. In a single week at that festival, British merchants from neighboring Belize carried out the better part of their annual indigo trade with the Maya.

These festivals were a major part of Maya public life throughout their history. They had the practical advantage of being held on days in the calendar cycles known to everyone in the region, and were advertised far and wide by royal invitation. Many of them were occasions for visits by nobles and royalty of one kingdom to the other.[112] In the fairs which accompanied the festivals, and in the market towns in border areas between kingdoms, the Maya merchants and craftsmen transacted business under the watchful eyes of local magistrates and lords who judged contractual disputes and kept the peace of the market.[113] Family patriarchs also kept watch over merchants within their kin group and had to report directly to the king if something was amiss. Merchants calculated exchange contracts in the dirt, using pebbles and sticks to write out their numbers,[114] and honored such agreements verbally—without legal documents.[115]

The ancient Maya used various precious commodities for money— carved and polished greenstone beads, beads of red spiny oyster shell, cacao beans, lengths of cotton cloth, and measures of sea salt.[116] Such currencies were in wide demand throughout the Mesoamerican world.[117] Although currencies were probably fixed in value by the king and court within particular realms, merchants working in the uncontrolled lands between kingdoms could speculate on marginal differences in value and scarcities.[118] Even the Maya had their arbitragers.

Everyone used such money, and everyone participated in the markets and tairs. Farmers had the option of bartering for goods or turning part of their maize crop into currency for important social transactions,[119] such as marriages, christenings, funerals, and house-building parties. All such activities were expensive and required feasts and gifts. Maya men and women wore the hard currencies, jade and shell, as jewelry to display the hard work and enterprise of their families. Farmers might use money to pay tribute to their rulers, but usually they preferred to provide labor on building projects in the urban centers or service on the farms of their kings and lords. These activities enabled them to participate directly in sustaining the lives of those who sustained the prosperity of the community at large. The economy of every kingdom was administered strategically by the king and court, through both the control of the prices of Maya currencies and commodities and the management of contractual disputes and fraud in the fairs and markets.

Merchants operating beyond the borders of the kingdom were thought of euphemistically as state ambassadors bearing “gifts” to royal neighbors who acknowledged these with reciprocal “gifts.”[120] Such royal business was so economically vital that the merchants involved in it were high nobles and even members of the royal household. Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, high merchants traveled to the great festivals of neighbors and distant states that controlled especially strategic goods.

The currencies used by the Maya—jade, obsidian, red spiny oyster shell, cloth, salt, and especially chocolate beans (cacao)—were prized beyond their territories and traded to all of the civilized peoples of the Mesoamerican world. In turn, different peoples produced and controlled different commodities, and traded regularly over long distances to obtain those that were outside their political domains. International relations thus were of central importance to the economic well-being of every state. The Maya king carried the burden of gathering the goods within his realm, exchanging them over long distances, and distributing the cherished goods received in return to his lords and allies. These in turn distributed the goods to their constituents in the form of gifts or exchanges. In this way, a portion of these commodities eventually filtered down into the general everyday transactions of the common folk.

In addition to managing the distribution of goods produced by his people, a Maya king also implemented agricultural work programs in the low-lying swamplands and river margins found in many parts of Maya country. In these regions, the land was not easily worked by individuals and families in a village farming community. Excavating the muck at the I bottom of the swamps to create a system of raised fields and canals took organization of time and labor. The result was worth the effort: Fields were adjacent to steady supplies of water, and the canals became home to teeming schools of fish sustained by waterlilies and other evaporationretarding plants.[121] The bottom mud became loaded with nutrients from fish excretions, thus providing rich fertilizer for the fields. It was a delicate and difficult system to maintain, but one with the prospect of enormous productivity, resulting in two or three crops a year.

So important was such swamp and river-edge agriculture to the Maya state that the kings adopted waterlilies as a primary metaphor of royal power. Nobles were, literally, Ah Nab “Waterlily People.” The heartland of Maya country is swampland, and it is more than likely that the kingdoms of the high forest, as well as the wetlands of the Peten, of the Lacandon Forest, and of northern Belize, were the greatest producers of the strategic agricultural commodities, cacao and cotton, in all of the Mesoamerican world. In these regions, the vast swamps surrounding Maya centers supported large systems of raised fields. Most of these were owned and maintained by patrilineages, but a proportion (perhaps significant in size) were maintained as royal farms through tribute labor. Both these farmers and their communities benefited in turn from the resulting prosperity of the realms. Maya kings were not only central to the economic well-being of their own constituencies. They were essential to the economic well-being of their trade partners in other parts of Mesoamerica, who depended upon them for the reliable supply of their currencies.

The understanding of currency in Mesoamerica did not parallel ours in every sense. Currency had value as a unit of economic exchange, it is true; but it also symbolized other values, far removed from the world of economics. A piece of red spondylus shell could buy something, but the same shell bead worn over the loins of a girl child represented her childhood and, when cut off in her baptism, displayed her newfound social maturity. Whole, the shell carried hematite in a dedication offering that brought the gods and sacred energy to reside in a newly built temple. A jade bead could be exchanged for some other commodity, but when placed in the mouth of a beloved grandparent who had passed on into death, it gave sustenance for the journey to Xibalba. Smeared with blue bitumen and human blood, it was cast by a shaman to divine the patterns of the sacred world and time. Carved with imagery, both the spondylus shell and the jade could be worn by a king to convey his wealth or to focus supernatural power in ritual. For the Maya things did not have an intrinsic meaning in themselves. Rather, meaning was acquired through the context of use and the way people shaped materials to function in their everyday lives and in the public life of the community.

For the Maya all things were alive and had meaning, but not everyone in Maya society was fully literate in all the levels of meaning. The farmer offering a gourd bowl of water and white corn gruel to the spirits of his field was less knowledgeable about the intricacies of royal symbolism and religion than the king who, standing in one of the great plazas of his city, offered his blood in a painted clay plate to the ancestors of all Maya. Yet the farmer knew that what he did was essentially the same. When he attended the great ceremonies in the king’s plaza, the farmer could not have read the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tree stones around him, any more than he could have expounded on the subtleties of meaning in the state religion and mythology. But then, neither can most of us expound on the principles of nuclear physics. The point is that we do not have to in order to live in our world and know it is affected by such knowledge.

The king and the farmer inhabited the same world. Even though they understood the symbology of that world on different levels, their lives in it were dynamically interconnected. The successful performance of the king as the state shaman enriched the farmer’s life in spiritual and ceremonial ways. His performance in economic affairs brought wealth to his kingdom and gave his constituents access to goods from far places. Royal celebrations and rituals generated festivals that touched all parts of the community emotionally and materially. The great public works commissioned by the kings created the spaces in which these festivals and rituals took on meaning. The histories written and pictured by the kings on the tree stones standing before human-made mountains gave form to time and space in both the material and spiritual worlds.

3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-75.jpg 70f

In an age when the word invention has become synonymous with technological progress, it is difficult for us to imagine any other kind of invention. One of the great myths of our culture, the Myth of the Industrial Age, teaches us that the capture of fire and the invention of the wheel led inevitably to the combustion engine, flight, and atomic energy. In this myth of progress, only the energy harnessed by technology drives cultural advancement. In turn, we believe that civilized people have the responsibility to perpetuate technological progress and to invent a viable future through such means. We in the West see ourselves as the inheritors of a great hope—the tradition that technology and scientific discovery will be the salvation of humankind. However, another and more fundamental form of invention exists.

If we judge the Maya only by our own definition of progress, they had few technological wonders.[122] By our standards, they were a Stone Age people lacking even such rudimentary developments as the uses of metal[123] and the domestication of beasts of burden.[124] Yet few people today would deny that they possessed a high civilization and a complex social order. If the Maya did not invent an advanced scientific technology that harnessed natural energy, what then did they invent? The answer to this question is simple: They invented ideas that harnessed social energy. The genius of the Maya was expressed through the creation of new visions of power. They invented political symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized life.

It would be untrue to say that there were no technologies associated with these transformations. The writing and pictorial imagery used to interpret and record these social institutions comprised a particular type of technology—similar in nature to what in our time we call the media. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Maya kingship and Maya writing emerged simultaneously in the century before the Common Era, for the technology of writing served the hierarchical institutions of Maya life.

Our own social institutions seem so basic and intrinsic to daily activity that we do not often realize that, like the technological side of our lives, they too are inventions. The same is true for the Maya. Their hierarchical institutions, which we recognize as the hallmarks of civilization, were invented as problem-solving tools during times of cultural strife.

Many of the great inventions of antiquity were social inventions. Just as the Athenian Greeks, whom we revere as spiritual forebears, invented democracy, so the Maya invented the ideas which cemented their survival as a civilization. The most powerful of these social innovations, and the cultural adaptation which instituted their great Classical florescence, was the invention of the institution of kingship. In the brief space of a century, the Maya translated the politics of village life into the politics of governance by the great ahauob, the high kings.[125]

It would be misleading for us to say that they invented this new institution whole-cloth from their own experience, because kings had been around in Meosamerica for a long time—at least a thousand years. As technological invention in our world is born of old knowledge and known technology, so the Maya transformed ancient ideas into something new and uniquely their own. Our own form of government is no different—we see it as an invention and a great experiment in human experience. Yet it is a transformation of ideas from Greece, Rome, and twenty-five hundred years of social experience inherited from our forebears.

At the time when the institution of kingship was invented, the Maya were faced with cultural tensions so great they threatened to tear their society apart. Outside forces were upsetting the heretofore carefully maintained system of social egalitarianism. Trade, both between Maya communities and between the Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors, such as Mije-speaking peoples of the Pacific Coast, the post-Olmec people of the Gulf Coast, the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Teotihuacanos T of the central Valley of Mexico, was generating a flow of wealth that was unequally distributed among the people. In a culture which regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration, this turn of events created unease and social strife. At the same time, the development of raised-field agriculture and extensive water-management systems created prosperity in regions which had the means to organize the labor pool necessary to maintain these systems. As contacts with trading partners already organized into kingdoms intensified, ideas of rank and privilege further exacerbated the differences in wealth and status that had grown with the success of these commercial and agricultural enterprises. A new leadership appeared within many Maya communities—one that was hierarchical in its nature.

We know that the problem the Maya were trying to resolve was one of social inequality because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the cosmos.[126] The development of a high civilization always creates problems of social inequality, but such differences between people need not be manifested negatively. For the Maya, kingship became the primary symbol of and rationale for the noble class, the ahauob. Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself. The rituals of the ahauob declared that the magical person of the king was the pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, the summit of a ranking of families that extended out to incorporate everyone in the kingdom—from highest to lowest. His person was the conduit of the sacred, the path of communication to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead, and indeed of surviving death itself. He was the clarifier of the mysteries of everyday life, of planting and harvesting, of illness and health. He wielded his knowledge and influence to create advantageous trade agreements for his people. He could read in the heavens the signs which told him when to war and when to maintain the peace. The farmer, the stonemason, and the craftsperson might have to pay tribute to the king, but the king compensated them for their service by giving them a richer, more enjoyable, more cohesive existence. The people reaped the spiritual benefits of the king’s intercession with the supernatural world and shared in the material wealth his successful performance brought to the community.

The Late Preclassic town of Cerros (Fig. 3:1) was one of the Maya communities to experience the advent of kingship during the period of its invention.[127] This village of fisherfolk, farmers, and traders was strategically situated to command the mouth of the New River where it emptied into Chetumal Bay on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The people of Cerros built the early community of clustered households, and the later public center which buried it, directly on the water’s edge. Edges for the Maya, whether between the surface of the earth and the underground as in a cave, between night and day, or between the sea and the shore, were intrinsically powerful and ambiguous. Cerros was at such an edge, not only physically but also culturally, for the people of this village were seafarers[128] and traders familiar with distant peoples.[129]

•

Let us imagine a day in the lives of the Cerros people at the time they had decided to adopt the institution of kingship. It is late afternoon and the heat of the day has begun to yield its brilliance to the shadows cast by the tall thatched roofs of the white one-roomed houses. Each dwelling is grouped around an open paved patio space filled with the cacophony of playing children. Dogs nap in the shadows and villagers busy themselves with a hundred different tasks. The women toil over large red and T brown coarsely made bowls, full of maize soaking in lime, which they will grind into dough on the pink granite stones sitting before them on the plaza floor. Engrossed in quiet conversation, people are working in the shade of the house walls, weaving cotton cloth on backstrap looms, repairing nets for the fishermen, and fashioning tools of hardwood, using chipped-stone adzes made from the honey-brown chert which is abundant a few miles to the south.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-76.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:1]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-77.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:2 Structure 2A-Sub 4-1^st]]

Suddenly, from farther up the coast, comes the sound of the conchshell trumpets and wooden drums of the lookouts announcing the arrival of a trading party. Some of the elder men, who have been expecting this event by their day counts, move with dignity to the white stone and lime plaster docking area. This dock, which fronts the community’s public square, creates a sharp, human-made shore for the mottled green water of the bay. The elders in their painted and dyed cotton cloaks, colorful hip cloths and turbans, jade earrings, and strings of bright orange shell beads, are unspoken testimony to the wealth and power of the community. The dignity they project is dampened somewhat by the noisy gathering of excited villagers and farmers coming in from the fields and orchards and filling the plaza behind them.

The vanguard canoes of the visitors round the point of the turbulent outer bay and enter the calmer waters close to shore. These seagoing canoes are over forty feet long, hewn from single trunks of massive trees, and propelled by multiple paddlers who both stand and sit. The paddlers attack the water in unison and with special energy as they come within sight of the community, where bonfires and billowing incense rise in greeting. From the bay, the village is a slash of white against the uniform green of fallow fields within the young forest which stretches indefinitely in both directions. While some of the boats separate from the main group to land next to the homes of trading partners, the principal voyagers disembark directly onto the dock. They are followed by a crew heavily laden with gifts for their partners and friends and for the patriarchs of the village. The leaders of each party greet each other as equals, formally and briefly, saving the speeches and conversations for the evening banquet.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-78.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:3 Reconstructed by Robin Robertson]]

The visiting traders are themselves patriarchs, wise in the ways of the neighboring Maya cities and the foreign peoples beyond. They are knowledgeable in magical power and its instruments, which they have brought to trade or to give as gifts, and they are warriors capable of defending themselves both at home and abroad. Amid loud music, noise, excitement, and confusion, the group moves slowly across the plaza to a low red platform which has been built to look like a stone model of a house (Fig. 3:2).[130] Sloping panels above the platform resemble thatched roofing and lower inset panels resemble the walls of the house. Instead of a doorway leading inside, however, there is a stairway leading up to an unobstructed summit. In solemn dignity, the leaders ascend the platform and spatter strips of paper with blood drawn from their ears and arms. They then burn these papers with pellets of tree-gum incense in open bowls resting upon clay, drum-shaped stands bearing the masks of the Ancestral Twins (Fig. 3:3).[131] This ritual is an act of thanksgiving to the gods and the ancestral dead for a safe and successful trip. Several curers and sorcerers of the village pray over the patriarchs and bless them on behalf of the spirits of this place.

At the moment when the sun plunges into the sea to begin its daily journey through the Underworld, the elders sit down to a lavish feast consisting of red-fleshed deep-water fish, young sea turtle, pit-roasted deer, endless varieties of steamed maize and vegetable dishes, and fresh fruits from nearby orchards.[132] The last toasts of honey mead, quaffed from ritual red-clay cups,[133] won’t be sworn until the sun and his brother Venus, the Morningstar, end their journey through the Underworld and rise from the eastern sea.

Through the night the firelight flickers on the angular, bright-eyed faces of the leaders, who have painted images over their features to encourage the illusion of their resemblance to the gods. The conversation drifts from accounts of past glories in shared battles, to raids against enemies, to gossip on the planned alliances of neighbors. There are practical reports to be made on how the cotton and cacao crops are faring at home and abroad.[134] There is also speculation about the current reliability of the kings of the southern highlands who jealously trade from their sources of the black volcanic glass, obsidian, and the precious greenstones needed in the rituals that materialize the gods and insure that the earth and sea yield up their harvest.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-79.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:4 The Jewels of Kingship Found in an Offering at the Summit of the Second Temple]]

Finally, deep into the night, the gray-haired leader of the visitors broaches the subject everyone has been waiting for. He pulls a small, soft deerskin bundle from within the folds of his cloak and opens it carefully onto his palm, revealing five stones of glowing green jade carved in the images of gods. Four of these stones are sewn onto a band of the finest cotton, ready to be tied around the head of an ahau. The fifth, a larger image that looks like the head of a frowning child, will ride on the king’s chest suspended from a leather band around his neck. The trader has brought the jewels of an ahau to the patriarchs of Cerros (Fig. 3:4).[135]

The dark eyes of the principal patriarch glitter in the light of the fire. He sees before him the tools he needs to sanctify his rank among his own people. These kingly jewels assert the inherent superiority of their wearer within the community of human beings, transforming a person of merely noble rank into a being who can test and control the divine forces of the world. To have ahauob and an ahau of the ahauob will establish the Cerros community as a presence among the kingdoms of the mighty and the wealthy who rule the wetlands of the interior. Now that the people of Cerros have the means to declare themselves a place of kings, they will be able to deal with the new and changing world of kingdoms and divine power.

Slowly and deliberately, the principal patriarch lakes the bundle from the visitor and puts it into a small jar, with four nubbin feet, covered with red wavy scrolls. Placing the jar at his side in the momentary quiet, he stares into the fire as if to seek his destiny. His companions silently raise their right arms across their chests and clasp their left shoulders in a reverent salute. The Cerros patriarch is in his prime. He has already proven himself in battle and he knows the rituals which call forth the gods and the ancestors from Xibalba. His family is ancient and respected in the community, and wealthy in land and water-going vessels. His gesture of acceptance is the culmination of careful discussion among the families of the village; and it carries with it the blessings of the sorcerers and curers who have prayed, sacrificed, and cast their divination stones. Some unhappy rivals and their followers will leave as enemies, but many new families will join the village as the word spreads of the new king. Cerros is too wealthy a prize to exist for long without a king, and too important a link in the trade network to pretend obscurity. The people of the community also need the resolution that kingship will bring to their own ambiguous feelings toward the wealthy and powerful among them.

•

While it is true that we have told a tale, we have tried to be faithful to the thoughts and motivations of the individuals involved. The people of Cerros did decide consciously to embrace kingship as an institution and the consequences of that decision were profound for all. In the space of two generations, this small fishing village transformed itself into a mighty acropolis. Every living soul in Cerros participated in that transformation, from the lowliest fishermen and farmers who provided food for the laborers, to the most gifted stonemasons who carved the building facades, to the shamans who gave the temples their blessing. It is difficult for us to imagine such complete and rapid social metamorphosis, but what happened at Cerros constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift.

We will never know the names of the individuals who participated in the decision to embrace kingship or of those who bore the rank and responsibilities of ahau. Because the kings of Cerros did not write the details of their lives on stone or clay, they must remain forever anonymous, but their deeds and those of their devout followers clearly declare their commitment to the vision of ahau. In the temples and buildings which remain, we have proof of the awesome energy with which they executed that vision.

Around 50 B.C., the community of Cerros began the revolutionary program of “urban renewal” which buried their village completely under broad plastered plazas and massive temples. Families conducted sacrifices over the foundations of their old homes, acknowledging for one last time the ancestors who lay buried below the floors and patios. They then smashed the vessels of their leavetaking feast, broke jade jewelry with great rocks, and scattered the bits and pieces over the homes they would never see again. Finished with one way of life, they walked outward and began building new homes in a halo some 160 acres in breadth around the new center. To confirm their participation and approval of this new way of life, some patriarchs built their front doorways facing the site of the new temple rather than the sun path. Cerros had begun the transformation that would turn it from village to kingdom.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-80.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:5 The Sacred Precinct and the Ballcourt Group]]

These elders also participated in the rituals that prepared the site of the new temple. Various ceremonies, the breaking of dishes from ritual meals and the burying of water lilies and flowers in the white earth of the temple’s foundation, all helped to thin the membrane between the human world and the Otherworld at this spot and establish it as a place of power. This temple, called Structure 5C by archaeologists, was built directly at the water’s edge, the source of the community’s livelihood. Facing south (Fig. 3:5), it constituted the northern apex of an axis that ran southward through the new urban center. This axis would end eventually in a great ballcourt built just within the reservoir canal the inhabitants had dug to define the limits of their royal capital (Fig. 3:5). Thus, while the king mandated the burial of the old village, he planned the new town that would replace it. The first temple was also in the center of the vertical axis that penetrated the earth and pierced the sky, linking the supernatural and natural worlds into a whole. This plan set the temple between the land and the sea on the horizontal axis and between the heavens and the Underworld on the vertical axis. It materialized the paths of power the king traveled through during ecstatic performance.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-81.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:6 The First Temple at Cerros (reconstructed projection)]]

Since this first temple functioned as the instrument that would convey the king as shaman on his sacred journeys, the builders designed it as a public stage. The rituals that enabled the king’s journey into the sacred world would be enacted in public space so that the full community could witness and affirm their successful performance. That first temple at Cerros was a masterly expression of the Maya vision, one whose effectiveness is equally impressive today. It represented not an experimental beginning, but a complete and resolved statement of a new social and cosmic order (Fig. 3:6).

How did a people who had heretofore built only houses and small buildings obtain the know-how to build temples on such a grand and architecturally complex scale? No one can be certain of the answer, but it is likely that this knowledge came from many sources. The Maya were not the first people in Mesoamerica to build pyramids. The Olmec had raised artificial “mountains” a thousand years earlier and passed the architectural form on to their successors. The pyramidal form developed primarily from the way Mesoamericans built tall buildings by piling up dirt and rock to create a mound on which they could construct a summit temple. The resulting shape emulated the shape of a mountain and created a symbolic landscape in which religious activity took place. Like the cathedrals in Europe, the pyramid temples in Maya country emerged from a long cultural tradition shared by all the peoples of the region. The lowland Maya, however, invented a new way of using the pyramid-temple: They made it a carrier of political messages by adding elaborately modeled and painted plaster facades to both the pyramid below and the temple above. These great sculptural programs became a primary expression of the political and religious doctrines underlying their form of kingship.[136]

The people of Cerros very probably also had the help of master builders,[137] stonemasons, and artisans from already established royal capitals to help them in their first building projects. It is also possible that local artists and builders had sojourned in other communities to learn necessary skills. One thing is certain: The people of Cerros did not invent the royal pyramid, but rather were part of a large number of Maya people who developed and refined its construction.

To begin their task, the builders at Cerros laid the foundation of the new temple and its plaza in layer upon layer of white earth, the soft lime marl underlying the hard capstone of this area. It was the common stuff the people used to build the platforms and patios of their houses. Then they and the elders of the community shattered precious pottery vessels, both the local work of their own craftspeople and pots obtained from trade with the south, and mixed the sherds into the white earth. To the earth and pottery, they added the flowers of fruit trees from their orchards which surrounded the new town.[138] From the foundation upward, the people made this building not only for, but with, devout and sacred action.

The ritual of beginning ended, the builders then laid down a pavement of flat hard stones upon the layers of white earth. They raised a broad platform that would hold both the temple and its plaza. Within this platform masons built a lattice of internal walls that would buttress the internal fill to keep it from spreading as the upper structures were built upon it. The spaces between these walls were filled in with vast quantities of coarse, broken limestone which laborers hauled up from nearby pits that had been driven down to excavate the white earth. When they finally finished this platform, the laborers capped the top of it with soft white lime earth into which they mixed more pottery broken in rituals of devotion and dedication. Upon this surface, the master builders then drew the outline of the temple,[139] a great T shape. The stem of this T represented a long stairway beginning at the bottom of the pyramid and extending southward onto the raised plaza, which constituted the arms of the T (Fig. 3:7). Following this outline, the builders would raise the temple and its stairway simultaneously, an effort of master builders, masons, and laborers drawn from the community, coordinated by the ruler and his counselors.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-82.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:7 Cerros: Plan of the First Temple (Structure 5C-2^nd)]]

The temple platform rose in the form of a steep pyramid with smooth outer walls made of small loaf-shaped blocks. The master builders carefully calculated the proportions of the pyramid in advance in order to accommodate the long stairway and the dimensions of the four elaborately decorated panels which would be mounted on the main, southern side of the building, facing the new plaza. While laborers built up the rubble core of the pyramid, masons fashioned four deep well-like holes which were placed symmetrically to the left and the right of the north-south axis (Fig. 3:7). These holes would contain the great trees of the four directions that T would soar above the thatched roof of the temple.[140]

When the front face of the pyramid approached its full height, master masons were called in to cut and lay the special stones that would function as the armatures of the great masks and ear ornaments which would be modeled on the two upper panels (Fig. 3:8). While some masons worked on these upper panels, others supervised the construction of the stairway which linked the temple at the summit to the plaza below. Much more than a simple means of access, this stairway was the central focus of the whole design, the place where the king would perform his public rituals. This stairway had to be much longer than simple practicality required, for it contained two broad landings, one in the middle of the stairway and one at the threshold of the summit temple. During ritual, the king would pause on the middle and the top landings to perform his ecstatic dance and carry out sacrifice in view of his followers gathered on the plaza below (Fig. 3:9). Four stairs led to the first landing, and nine stairs to the summit threshold. These sacred numbers dictated the length of the whole.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-83.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:8]]

At this point in the construction, it was necessary for the master builder to pause and consult with the king, the patriarchs, and the shamans. The king had a particular decorative program in mind for this building and it was important to follow this program in every respect. The tricky part of the design was about to commence: the building of the front walls of the lower terraces. These walls, like the panels already established on the pyramid face above, would carry great masks. The builders had to establish where to construct the retaining walls of the lower terraces so that the king, when standing on the middle landing, would appear to be in the center of these four great masks. Obviously, this presented a knotty problem in optics. To create this visual impression, they had to set the lower terrace far out in front of the pyramid core, an architecturally awkward solution. The builders had no real choice in this matter, for the ritual function of the facade was more important than its architectural perfection.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-84.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:9 Stations designed for the king to perform ritual in his processional ascent and descent of the temple]]

Once they had agreed upon the position of the lower terrace walls, the masons began laying a second set of armatures into the retaining wall to support the lower pair of masks. These masks had to be of the same scale and proportion as the upper ones. The Maya used strings, plumb lines, and water levels to measure the new mask armatures, but in the end the highly skilled masons adjusted the final proportions by sight. While the building designers worked out the details of each panel, masons built a lattice of walls between the outer retaining wall and the inner pyramid core. The spaces within this lattice would later be filled with loose rock and earth, and the entire terrace capped with smooth plaster.

During the construction of the pyramid and its terrace, woodcutters prepared the massive tree trunks that would be set in the four sockets in the floor of the summit temple. These would represent the trees of the four directions. After floating them as close to the construction site as possible, T the people hauled and rolled these gigantic logs up into the temple where they were shaped and dropped into the floor sockets. Once anchored securely, these trees were ready for the woodcarvers and painters who would transform them into the supernatural trees at the four corners of the cosmos. The king presided over the raising of the world trees, a ceremony commemorating events that occurred at the beginning of creation.[141] Once the building was partially sanctified and activated, it had to be completed rapidly, for the raw power within it was potent and needed the containment that only ritual use by the king could provide. Within this sacred space the king, as shaman, could commune with the supernatural forces of the cosmos.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-85.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:10 The Parallelism Between the Path of the Sun and the Path of the King]]

The masons working at the summit of the pyramid constructed the floor of the temple proper in two levels by raising the rear half of the floor a step above the front half. These two halves were separated by a wall. This design followed that of the fancy homes of prominent people within the community, who preferred a “public” space at the front of the house and a raised, more “private” back area. Unlike the homes of patriarchs at Cerros, however, the temple had walls of stone rather than walls of wood and white earth.

It was ritual need more than prosaic convenience that ultimately dictated the plan of the rooms within the pyramid. The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-86.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:11 The Jaguar Sun mask from the east side of Temple 5C-2^nd]]

The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery of the temple (Fig. 3:10). To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled into the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction— thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west.

This little room, then, was the heart of the temple, the place where the king carried out in solitude and darkness the most intimate phases of his personal bloodletting and the most terrifying phases of his communion with the Otherworld.[142] Here he would prepare himself to meet the ancestors and the gods, fasting and practicing other kinds of trance-inducing physical mortifications. It was here also that the ritual perforation of his genitals took place and that he experienced the first shock of blood loss and the first flood of religious ecstasy. From this little room, he would travel like the sun rising from the earth to appear on the stairway before his people (Fig. 3:6). Dressed in bleached white cotton cloth that clearly showed the stains of his bloodletting, the king would speak to the ancestors on behalf of all.

With the completion of the stone construction of the pyramid, the plasterers set to work covering the walls and the stones of the stairway j with the fine creamy white plaster that produced the softly modeled contours of early Maya architecture. While the plaster was still damp, they painted these surfaces bright red to provide a dramatic contrast to the dominant green of the surrounding forest.

The final work on this temple can only be described as a magnificent performance of consummate skill and cooperative effort. The panels of stone on the terraces of the pyramid base stood ready to be adorned with divine images. The artisans who applied the wet plaster and modeled the elaborate details of these four masks and their complex earflare[143] assemblages and sky frames had to work rapidly and surely (Fig. 3:11). These artisans used a few previously prepared appliqué elements that could be stuck on with plaster glue, but for the most part they had to know what the final images would look like even before they started. It was vital to shape the plaster before it cured. Even with retardants added to the plaster, the sculptors had about thirty minutes in which to apply and work the material before it hardened under their hands.

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-87.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-88.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:12]]

The artisans inherited some unexpected challenges from the master builders and masons: For example, the panels on the western side of the pyramid were more narrow than those on the eastern side.[144] The sculptors compensated by compressing the composition to fit the western panels. They accomplished this primarily by reducing the size of the earflares and then directing the painters to put in any details lost in the places where the plaster could not be modeled.

While the plaster was still damp, the painters began their work, adding red, pink, black, and yellow line to highlight the natural cream color of the raw plaster and to render even finer details in the images. As we saw above, the painters often put in necessary design elements that the plaster modelers left out in their haste. To finish their work before the plaster dried, the artists had to work frantically, dripping and throwing paint with the force of their strokes. Yet even these drip patterns were incorporated as part of the imagery.

The mastery of their craft is evident in the sureness of their drawing and the confidence of their swirling lines. The painters and sculptors knew exactly what the finished panels should look like because, just as with the written word, the panels were designed to be read as symbolic statements about the nature of the kingship and its relationship to the cosmos. And if the artisans were literate in the images of this new, revolutionary religion, then how much more so must their patron the king and his principal followers have been.

We know that the images on this temple were designed to be read because we can read them ourselves. As for actual written text, however, there is very little. While the lowland Maya of those times were literate and wrote brief, rudimentary texts on small objects,[145] they did not write full texts on any of the Late Preclassic buildings discovered so far. Instead, they used isolated glyphs as labeling devices, <verbatim>“tagging"</verbatim> objects and images to clarify and amplify their meaning.[146] Our interpretation of the art on the temple at Cerros is enhanced by such strategic glyphic clues.

The huge masks in the center of each of the four panels of the temple at Cerros derive their meaning from both the glyphic tags and the complex imagery that surrounds them. The lower masks are snarling jaguars emerging totem-pole fashion from the heads of long-snouted creatures whose lower faces merge with the pyramid. These jaguars are marked with the four-petaled glyphs denoting the sun, kin, identifying these beings as the Jaguar Sun God (Fig. 3:12).[147]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-89.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:13 Structure 5C-2^nd and the Cosmos]]

Like a puzzle with one key piece, the whole message of the temple comes into focus with these Sun Jaguars. Since this building faces to the south, a person gazing at its colorful facade would see the sun in its jaguar aspect “emerging” from the sea on the eastern side of the building and “setting” into the sea on the western side. Thus, these terrace panels symbolize the sun at the two most spectacular moments of the tropical day: dawn and dusk. Together, these sun masks display both linear time in the duration of time through the day and year and cyclical time in the return of the cycle to its beginning point over and over again; and it is significant that this path encircles the stairway along which the king must travel on his ritual journeys (Fig. 3:10). Indeed, as we shall see in the passage that follows, these masks made a special statement about kingship.

We know that, for the Maya, the Sun Jaguar represented more than a celestial body. In Classical theology, Yax-Balam, the younger of the Ancestral Hero Twins, is symbolized by the sun.[148] The older brother, Hun-Ahau, in turn, was similarly linked to the planet Venus, that bright celestial body that dances with the sun as Morningstar and Eveningstar. The logic of reading the masks that hover above the Sun Jaguars on the temple as Morningstar and Eveningstar is compelling: (1) if the lower masks denote a celestial body, so then should the upper masks in order to complete the pattern; (2) the upper image should then correspond to some celestial phenomenon hovering above the sun at dawn and dusk; (3) in astronomical terms, the heavenly body associated with the sun in exactly this relationship is the Morningstar which rises in the hours before sunrise and the Eveningstar which follows the path of the sun into the earth in the hours after sunset (Fig. 3:13).

There is other evidence to support a reading of the upper masks of the temple as Venus. Both upper masks have the long snouts that became characteristic of the Cosmic Monster, a being that was especially associated with Venus and the sun as they moved through the heavens.[149] The crowns worn by these masks consisted of three jewels mounted on a headband in the same distinctive pattern as that found on the diadems of early Maya kings (Fig. 3:11). The central symbol of the kingly crown during the Classic period was the three-pointed shape in the center of this band. In its personified form, known as the Jester God,[150] it has a long-nosed head below the three-pointed shape and was worn mounted on a cloth headband by both gods and humans (see the Glossary of Gods). Since it occurs in the writing system as a glyph for ahau, “lord” (Fig. 3:14),[151] we can be reasonably sure that it has the same meaning as a I costume element. We believe that the upper masks of this temple wore these Jester God headbands to mark them as ahau, and therefore, symbolic representations of the first king of Cerros. The Ancestral Twins, of course, are the prototypes of kingship; and in Classic imagery the Jester God headband is a diagnostic feature of the elder twin, named, not surprisingly, Hun-Ahau.[152] This headband marks the upper masks as Hun-Ahau, while the kin sign marks the lower as Yax-Balam, his brother.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-90.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:14 The Jester God]]

The temple decoration was, therefore, more than just a model of the sun’s daily path. It was a depiction of the Ancestral Twins, and was designed to be read in that manner by the king’s constituents. When the king stood upon the stairway landing between the four great masks (Fig. 3:6), he represented the cosmic cycle of the day,[153] but he was simultaneously at the center of a four-part pattern,[154] representing the lineage cycle of the Hero Twins as his founding ancestors—the first ahauob (Fig. 3:15). The lowland Maya established kingship by first crowning their gods[155] and then by proclaiming their living counterparts, the kings, as the direct descendants and spiritual manifestations of these gods.[156] The Maya manipulated their reality through art, and they did so on many levels. The images on this temple were meant to be read not only as eternal, transcendent messages, but also as political statements to be affirmed by congregations who saw them and witnessed the human performances within them. The king of Cerros as the primary ahau could exist, ultimately, because the gods of his community were also ahauob.[157]

As mentioned above, not all of the king’s constituents were equally literate in the new imagery. A farmer, a noble, or a shaman reading the temple would all differ in the depth of their understanding. The point we wish to make, however, is that, on some level, the imagery was recognized and understood by everyone in the community and was an intrinsic part of their reality. We have examples in our own culture of symbols that are universally recognized. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who has not heard of Einstein’s famous equation E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc². The levels of understanding of that formula, however, would differ from person to person. One individual might simply recognize it as Einstein’s equation. Others, because they had taken a physics course, might even know what the letters stood for and what, on a rudimentary level, the Theory of Relativity means. The highest level of understanding, corresponding to that of a Maya ahau or shaman, would be that of a practicing physicist. Regardless of how well we can talk about E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc², it affects our reality. In a very real sense we live in Einstein’s universe, just as the Maya of the Classic period lived in a reality defined by the presence of divine kings.

When the Maya of Cerros built their first royal temple, they gathered the strength of the entire community, the simple hard work of fisherfolk and farmers, the food prepared and served by their women, the leadership of their patriarchs, elders, and shamans. These individuals joined forces with the master builders, masons, and artisans (some local, some probably from other realms) to perform as an act of community the building of a sacred mountain, a portal to the Otherworld. This partnership of effort laid down in rock and white earth shows the people of Cerros as a whole acknowledging and accepting the arrival of kingship in their midst. Throughout the history of the Maya, this phenomenal cooperation was evident anytime a community embraced the institution of kingship.

However unsettling the advent of kingship might have been to the rivals of Cerros, or even to some of its inhabitants, a new social paradigm had taken root in the community. This little royal temple was only the beginning of an enormous release of social enthusiasm and energy. Within a few years, a generation at most,[158] a new and very much more ambitious construction effort eclipsed the original temple and greatly amplified the royal focus of the community. This new building, called Structure 6 by TI the archaeologists, can truly be called an acropolis (Fig. 3:16). Measuring sixty meters long by sixty meters wide, its basal dimensions were more than three times those of the first temple. Its raised plaza stood sixteen meters above the level of the surrounding surface and was well out of view of the populace below. The function of this plaza was clearly different from that of the original temple, which was low enough to allow events upon it to be visible to anyone standing at ground level. Here, at the summit of the new acropolis, the king could carry out actions of the most intimate nature on an open surface rather than inside the walls of the temple (Fig. 3:17).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-91.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:15]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-92.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:16 The Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros]]

It was now possible for the king to enter the Otherworld through bloodletting and sacrifice in full view of those few privileged enough to climb the grand stairway at the front of the pyramid, pass through the doorways of the portal temple, and stand with him on the sacred ground of the upper plaza. This change of architectural strategy was a logical development, for it took the guesswork out of the witnessing and legitimizing roles of the emergent nobility as they played their part in the establishment of royal power. Now they too could see the awesome visions of the supernatural conjured up by the magical performances of their king.[159]

Below this upper plaza was an even larger platform similar in principle to the one underlying the original temple to the north. Not so exclusive as the upper plaza, this space was still not physically or visually accessible to all, for it was partially closed off along its front edge by long buildings. This platform plaza, in turn, gave way by means of a broad grand stairway to a final lower plaza that extended 120 by 125 meters, a huge and fully accessible plaster-covered expanse capable of accommodating festival crowds numbering in the hundreds with room to spare. The new temple precinct thus had a much more complex arrangement of ritual space: three different kinds of space, all interconnected by broad stairways upon which the king could perform. Such complexity of space reflects the growing complexity of ritual activity surrounding the king and the social status attached to participation in such activity. When the king came dancing down the stairs in an ecstatic trance following a bloodletting ritual, supported on either side by his elite nobles, the first people to see him were those standing on the middle platform. These people could then join his procession and follow him down into the immense lower plaza where the general populace awaited.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-93.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:17 Reconstruction of the Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros. Structure 5C-2^nd and Chetumal Bay are in the background drawing by Karim Sadr]]

The very existence of this pyramid with its carefully differentiated viewing spaces indicates the high degree of social stratification that was present at Cerros. For as long as the kingship at Cerros lasted, these social differences worked to the advantage of the government. The organization necessary to coordinate the construction of the new royal precinct required many times the effort put into the first temple. A large labor pool was required, as well as the civil machinery to guide and control it. As mentioned above, however, the coercion of local labor was alien to the Maya. This new project, like the one before it, was done by and for every member of the community, regardless of their social status.

For the people of Cerros. becoming a kingdom created liabilities as well as benefits. The new building program buried much of the original village under its immense plastered plaza. Albeit willingly, the people living in the old village proper were forced to relocate to the lands surrounding the emerging urban center. That land, however, was also being extensively quarried for the thousands of tons of rock and white earth required by the construction workers. In the course of building the temples at Cerros, its inhabitants effectively lowered the surrounding land so significantly it became necessary to build a complicated system of drainage ditches, reservoirs, and canals to keep their homes and patios from becoming flooded during the rainy season (Fig. 3:18).[160]

Another problem people faced, as they moved out from the old village, was the shortage of building materials. The amount of wealth and rank a family possessed suddenly became strikingly apparent in the type of new home they could afford to construct. Some individuals were able to build their new houses on raised platforms of considerable size, while other families lived on small platforms, and still others had homes at ground level. Control of all available construction materials reinforced the power of the king, for he could then dispense them as rewards for loyalty and support.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-94.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:18 Topographic Map and Drainage System at Cerros]]

The political message of the second temple is harder to read than that of the first. The decorations on the uppermost facade, the only one excavated so far,[161] were badly damaged by natural erosion and the fires banked against them in the termination rituals conducted by the Maya when kingship at Cerros failed and the temple was abandoned. Even though only fragments of the imagery survived, we can still tell it was the same as that of the first temple: four great masks, probably of the Ancestral Heroes, flanking a stairway. The fine quality of the modeled stucco elements that were preserved, and their rich, more elaborate painted detail, demonstrate the high level of artistry involved in the decoration of this pyramid. The beauty and complexity of this building is concrete testimony to the charismatic power of the Cerros king, a ruler strong enough to attract and retain the services of skilled artisans literate in the complex theology and imagery of the new religion.

By this time in the history of Cerros, the first king had died and been replaced by a successor. We know this because of a special political message placed in the second temple. Below the summit where the new king stood for public rituals, he buried a set of royal jewels, including the jades of a royal headband and the chest pectoral of a king.[162] Laid carefully face downward in the bottom of a large clay bucket, the four headband jewels were deliberately arranged in the same fourfold pattern we saw in the great masks of the first temple (Fig. 3:19). In the middle of this pattern, the king set the larger greenstone pectoral, face upward. This particular positioning was both deliberate and symbolic. This ahau pectoral rested within a fourfold pattern, just as the first king had stood within the fourfold pattern of the masks on the first temple. These powerful and magical objects were then covered (Fig. 3:20) with layers of mosaic mirrors made of bright blue hematite crystals glued to mother-of-pearl cutouts,[163] and with red-orange spiny oyster shells of the kind worn by later Maya nobles on their robes. A large red pottery plate served as the lid for the bucket, and surrounding it were four of the small pottery cups used for drinking and a jug for pouring beverages.[164]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-95.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:19 The Arrangement of the King’s Jewels in the Offering Bucket of Structure 6B]]

This cache was more than a simple offering of precious materials to the gods. We believe these jewels were valued because they were the very ones owned and used by the first king of Cerros (the kingly jewels of our story). The pattern in which the precious materials were arranged echoed the pattern of power we have already seen in the first temple and established it within the summit of the second one. The second king buried them in his own temple to invoke this power and to link himself with the former king, who was presumably his ancestor. These jewels would aid T him in his communication with the sacred world of the supernatural.

Later Maya kings, like the great Pacal of Palenque, would define their temples as sacred mountains and have themselves buried therein. At the beginnings of the institution of ahau, however, power lay not in the physical remains of the first king, but in the performance and settings of ritual, and in the objects of power themselves. Instead of focusing on the burial of the first king, his successor manipulated the power objects left by him in order to ensure the act of linkage between their reigns. All of those who worked on the new acropolis, thereby affirming the legitimacy of the succession, understood that symbolism. Just as the people of the community gave their most precious possessions in the form of labor to raise the new building, so the new king sacrificed his most precious heirlooms to its construction.[165]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-96.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:20 The Dedicatory Offering from the Summit of Structure 6B]]

Following the triumphant completion of the new royal temple, the community of Cerros began its most ambitious construction project to date: the establishment of an east-west axis to complement the north-south axis laid down by the first king. The rapidity with which the new construction project followed that of the second temple suggests that they were both part of the program of the second king of Cerros. If this is the case, then the ruler of this early kingdom truly enjoyed extraordinary power.

Directly east of the second temple (Fig 3.1), the king erected the largest of the temples at Cerros, an eastward acropolis called Structure 4. We know that the king rebuilt this structure at least once because the foundation of an earlier temple lies almost directly beneath the present structure. This practice of building one structure on top of the razed foundation of another was not uncommon with the Maya, for they believed that a location accumulated power with time. Once the portal to the Otherworld was opened, once the points of power were set in place, the membrane between the worlds was made thinner with subsequent use.

Whereas the old temple had faced the village, the new temple faced the rising sun and towered over a broad plaza of gleaming white plaster. At sixty meters along each side and twenty-two meters high, this was a building of respectable proportions by any Maya standards. This new acropolis, like the earlier two, buried homes and shrines that were the last S vestiges of the old village and the way of life that went with it.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-97.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:21 Construction Pens Inside Structure 4A, the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]

As with the earlier temples at Cerros, the master builders, laborers, and masons raised the new acropolis in a single enormous effort. Because of its huge size, this building required an extensive honeycomb of internal buttressing walls. Once the masons had raised these walls, laborers hurried to fill the spaces between them with alternating layers of loose boulders, gravel, and white earth. The completion of these square “construction pens” (Fig. 3:21)[166] required a good deal of work, contributed by gangs of farmers and fishermen under the watchful supervision of their patriarchs. As was always the case with the Maya, work on the temple was an act of devotion. The laborers threw their maize grinding stones, fishnet weights, and some of their personal household objects into the rubble as offerings to the ancestral gods.

Very little of the sculptural decoration of this building survived, but it was clearly meant to be the tomb of a king. Built with a steep-sided contour, it had a sepulcher at its summit. This mortuary chamber was long and rather wide as Maya tombs go, and at its northern end there was a plastered bench which would have served as the final resting place of the king (Fig. 3:22). The roof of the tomb was spanned with great stone slabs in an early example of corbel-arch construction. Strangely enough, the tomb was never occupied by its patron, a problem to which we will return.

Now that the east-west axis of the community was clearly defined, the current ruler went to work on the remaining axis. Built to the south, a westward-facing temple, Structure 29C (Fig. 3:23), complemented the eastward-facing tomb of the king and completed the north-south axis of Cerros. This last great structure was closely associated with the north and south ballcourts, which formed a triangle arrangement with the new acropolis (Fig. 3:1; 3:24).

The new pyramid was smaller than the eastward-facing acropolis discussed above, but its builders created a distinctive—and for Cerros, atypical—plan for the summit. They erected three separate temple platforms atop this pyramid, the center one facing toward the west (Fig. 3:23). Each of these platforms had a central stairway flanked by a special iconography. On the middle pyramid, the builders mounted carved jaguar heads with great flowing scrolls pouring out of their mouths, and small snarling human heads emerging from the stonework above them (Fig. 3:25). These bloody images were meant to depict the severed head of the Sun Jaguar— the ancestral brother who died in sacrifice and was reborn as the means of defeating the Lords of Xibalba.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-98.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:22 The Unused Tomb in the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]

The image of the severed head is a central symbol of royal power on stelae and panels of the Classic period. Kings during this period sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by decapitating them. The jaguar adorned with waterlily scrolls presided over such warfare and provided it with its central metaphor: battle as the royal hunt. Noble warriors were either prey or predator, depending on their luck; and kings would go into battle with ropes tied around their arms as if daring their adversaries to capture them. This war-sacrifice complex is the central imagery we will see in the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, the monument raised by king Chan-Bahlum to celebrate his designation as heir to the throne. The westward-facing temple of Cerros, adorned with jaguar heads, was the prototype of the later Classic period complex: it was meant as a war monument.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-99.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:24 The playing court from Complex 50 near the westward-facing acropolis]]

The remaining two temple platforms faced inward toward the central temple.[167] The stairways of these flanking platforms sat between longsnouted masks, also surmounted by snarling human faces (Fig. 3:26). The jaguar images on the middle temple correspond to the lower jaguar masks of the first temple built at Cerros; and the long-snouted masks of the flanking temples echo the masks on the first temple’s upper terraces. We can conclude then that the long-snouted characters on the flanking platforms represent Venus, the elder brother of the Ancestral Twins. This elder brother, as we mentioned above, sacrificed his brother, the Jaguar Sun, and then brought him back to life in order to defeat the Lords of Death in Xibalba. In the Classic Period, whenever jaguar imagery appeared, flanked on either side by Venus, the elder brother, it represented the king flanked by his kinsmen. These kinsmen were usually his father, or his mother and father, from whom he received his right to the throne.[168]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-100.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:25 Snarling Jaguars from the Central Platform on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]

The ballcourts nearby were built in relationship to both the northsouth and the east-west axes of the city. Within these ballcourts rituals of war and sacrifice were played out as were rituals legitimizing the descent of the new royal line. The bailgame was played for many purposes. In a more ordinary setting it could be played between friends or professionals for sport or for wager; but it more often took on a ritual or sacred aspect. Highborn captives were frequently forced to play the bailgame as members of the community looked on. As in the Popol Vuh myth, the losers were sacrificed by decapitation. Often these sacrificial victims were bound into a ball-like form and hurled down the stairs of a temple. In its most elevated form the ballgame was played as a reenactment of the Ancestral Twins’ defeat of the Lords of Death in Xibalba, as related in the Popol Vuh.

These games provided the metaphorical setting for the sacrificial events by which a king or heir promoted his legitimate authority.[169] Whether the king was taking the role of supreme athlete, acting out the role of one of the Ancestral Twins, or sacrificing a captive king or noble, the ballgame had deep religious significance.

We do not know if the builder of the ballcourts and the westward-facing temple was the second or third ruler of Cerros, but that knowledge is not critical to our understanding of the development of kingship at Cerros. Expanded building programs indicate expanded ambition, if nothing else. ! he very existence of a war memorial and a ballcourt indicate that Cerros was looking outward, and that its new royalty was taking a growing part in the cosmopolitan and competitive world of lowland Maya kingdoms.

In the long run, however, the pressures from within and without upon this newborn kingdom were evidently more than it could withstand. The king who planned to bury himself in the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis never occupied his sepulcher—it was left open and empty. Why this happened we do not know. One possibility is that this unfortunate king may have died far from home, taken captive in battle. Regardless Sc of what the true story may have been, his successor ultimately failed to fulfill the promise inherent in the Maya vision of kingship.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-101.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:26 Long-snouted Monster from the NOrth and South (Side) Platforms on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]

The failed attempt to bury a king at the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis marked the beginning of the end of the experiment with \ kingship at Cerros. The heir to that ruler did manage to rally the people temporarily and to launch the construction of another temple along the designs of the first and second ones. Situated directly south of the great eastward-facing acropolis, the final temple reiterated the north-south axis of the community. It faced southward like the original two temples. This new acropolis outwardly resembled the other temple complexes, but its construction work was shoddy and no offerings were deposited in the building’s summit.

Shortly after this final effort, the Maya of Cerros gave up their brief embrace of kingship and systematically released the power from the sacred mountains which they had lifted up from their own earth. The kings were gone. The nobility, once attracted by the promise of a great kingdom, abandoned the city and returned to their estates in the surrounding countryside. The remaining people banked great fires against the masks of their ancestors and lords. They sprinkled layers of white marl over the fires and then reset them. They pulled out their jade earflares (the special ear ornaments that were shaped like the end of a trumpet) and smashed them into bits, sprinkling the pieces on the piles of debris accumulating at the TI bases of the decorated panels. They broke the pottery from their final ritual meals as they brought the termination ritual to an end. At the last, they went down to their homes and continued to live around the ruins of their greatness as fisherfolk and farmers once more.

Many years later, after the eastward-facing temple had begun to fall into ruin, devotees returned to the summit to carry out rituals of termination to release the power of the place. Their clay offering vessels stood in solitary stacks until the stone roof of the tomb collapsed and crushed them.

We will never know exactly why the ahauob of Cerros failed, but we can hypothesize. A major difficulty might have been a problem in the transference of power between the generations within the royal line. In a system that depended less on the rules of succession than on the personal charisma and power of a leader, a weak king would not have been tolerated for very long. Another problem the people of Cerros might have experienced was the difficulty of coping with the novelty of a large scale society. While it is true that this community enthusiastically embraced kingship, intention and execution are two different things. At this point in the history of the Maya, the institution of kingship was newly invented and its practitioners were still improvising as they went along. A society based on a great experiment is a potentially unstable society.

There are reasons to suspect that these problems were common to the times in the Maya lowlands, for other early kingdoms also failed precipitously. At Cerros, however, collapse of the institution was not a matter of sudden abandonment of the place by all of its people. Just as they had once opted for kingship, now they opted against it. Maya kingdoms never maintained a standing army or a police force, so there was no one to make the people obey the king. Without the willing cooperation of the people, nobles and commoners alike, the king could do nothing.

The ahauob of Cerros re-created their world, literally transforming the place in which they and their people lived from a village into a place of kings. They could do this because their people wanted to follow their vision and celebrate its power. As mentioned above, the charisma of the king was not absolute in the Maya vision. It was subject to critical testing in performance: the abundance of crops, the prosperity of trade, the health of the people, victory in battle. We will see in later chapters that Maya kings always faced the possibility of a failure of one sort or another that could cripple a dynasty or bring it down decisively. Much of the public art erected by Maya kings was political propaganda, responding to crises resulting from these kinds of failures.

To some, this new form of Maya government might appear as a fragile sort of adaptation, subject as it was to the character and ability of a few central people and their close kin. Yet the vision of the ahau exploded into brilliant colored stucco clarity throughout the lowlands in the first century before the present era. The first Trees of Life propagated a forest of kings from the outset—in good tropical ecological adaptation, a dispersal of the species insuring that some would always survive any localized catastrophe. Individual kingdoms might fail, but the vision of the ahau as ruler endured, the most geographically extensive and long-lasting principle of governance in the history of ancient Mesoamerica.

The ahauob of Cerros—and those of Lamanai, Tikal, El Mirador, and Uaxactun, among the known early kingdoms—were masked, anonymous rulers who left little record of their personal histories among the grand royal statements of their successes and victories. This would soon change, for in the first two centuries of the present era, the written script crystallized and kings began to emerge as the chronicled tigures of royal drama. In spite of their anonymity, the ancestral kings of the Preclassic period did leave a heritage to their successors in the form of their mute complexes of temple, pyramid, plaza, and plaster mask. They promoted the principle of hierarchy, focusing on architectural construction and reconstruction as the means of achieving their political objectives—principally, perpetuation of the dynasty. They created the first centers and, in the act of establishing them, also defined the notion of dominion. Like the trees of the four directions, which raise up the sky over the earth, the king was the central pillar—the Tree of Life who raised the sky that arched over his entire realm.

4. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-102.jpg 70f

During the explosive first flush of civilized life in the Maya world, cities, like Cerros, blossomed in the towering rain forests of the lowlands. El Mirador,[170] located in the swamps and low hills of Peten, the geographic heart of the Yucatan peninsula, was the greatest of these Preclassic cities. Yet even at the height of El Mirador’s glory, when its ahauob were reigning over vast temples, contenders for its greatness were growing to maturity forty miles to the south. These nascent rivals, Uaxactun and Tikal, grew steadily in power, population, and the ability to create magnificent public art throughout the Late Preclassic period, cultivating their ambition until they were ready to step into the political vacuum left by the decline of El Mirador at the outset of the Classic era.[171] Located less than twelve miles apart—not even a day’s walk—Tikal and Uaxactun were perhaps too closely situated for both of them to become kingdoms of the first rank. Their competition, which is the focus of our next story, was resolved violently in A.D. 378 by means of an innovative type of warfare we call Tlaloc-Venus war, or sometimes simply “star wars.”[172] The imagery and method of this new type of conflict was borrowed from the other great Mesoamerican civilization of this time, Teotihuacan, the huge city that had grown to maturity in the Valley of Mexico during the third and fourth centuries. With the advent of this new kind of warfare, a new concept was incorporated into the Maya culture: the idea of empire.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-103.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:1]]

Like other great Maya capitals of the interior lowland, Tikal began as a village of farmers nestled on the high ground between vast swamps. By 600 B.C., the first small groups of people had settled on the hilltop that would become the central area of the city (Fig. 4:1). These people left the debris of their lives under what would, in future years, be the North Acropolis, sanctum of Tikal’s kings (Fig. 4:2), and in a chultun[173] located about a mile to the east of the Acropolis.[174] Even this early in their history, the villagers were using this site as a burial place. Amid the humble remains under the North Acropolis, the interred body of an adult villager was found. Lying nearby was a sacrificial offering in the form of a severed head.[175] This sacrificial practice, begun so humbly, would later be incorporated into the burial ceremonies of Tikal’s kings. The household debris surrounding this burial place contained the shells of freshwater snails, which were part of the diet of these pioneers, and obsidian and quartzite flakes, both imported goods—obsidian from the highlands and quartzite from northern Belize.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-104.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:2 Cross-section of the North Acropolis at Tikal with Preclassic Construction Marked]]

We do not know much about the individual lives of these early inhabitants, but during the next four centuries they continued to multiply and prosper. By the second century B.C. they had already expanded into much of the “downtown” area of Tikal. At that time, they began to define a center for the community by building stone platforms displaying the sloping moldings and inset panels preferred by all the lowland Maya. These platforms were the harbinger of the North Acropolis and no doubt they facilitated the rites of patriarchs and shamans defining their emergent community in relation to their neighbors and the world at large.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-105.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:3 The Painting on the Outer Walls of Structure 5D-Sub-10-1^st at Tikal]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-106.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:4 Tikal Burial 85 and the Pectoral of a King]]

The first century B.C. witnessed expansion and elaboration of this Acropolis, via large public buildings and chambered burial vaults of kings and high-ranking nobles. These public buildings prefigured all the characteristics of later state architecture: large apron moldings, pyramidal platforms, steeply inclined stairs, and most important, terraces surmounted by large painted plaster masks depicting the gods fundamental to the newly emerged institution of kingship.

The North Acropolis tombs from this era reveal a unique glimpse of the newly emergent Maya ruling elite,[176] who had themselves buried in vaulted chambers set under shrinelike buildings. We find, interred in these chambers, not only the physical remains of these people and the objects they considered of value, but even some pictorial representations of them. In one of these tombs, images of Maya nobles were drawn in black line on the red-painted walls. These figures were perhaps the ancestors or kinsmen of the woman[177] buried inside the chamber. The paintings, along with the rich burial goods laid around the woman’s body, mark the tomb as the “earliest interment of someone of patent consequence”[178] at Tikal. It is interesting that the deceased person in this tomb was a woman, for the Maya of Tikal, like other Maya, gave primacy to males in the reckoning of social status through the principle of patrilineal descent. This tomb, however, shows that status had transcended gender and was now ascribed to both the men and women of noble families. The foundations were laid for a hereditary elite, the clans of the ahauob.

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-108.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-109.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:5]]

Other burials from the same century also featured vaulted chambers with shrines and rich offerings of pottery, food, stingray spines, and human sacrifices (if the disarticulated skeletons of an adult and an infant can be so identified). Among the buildings constructed during this time was 5D-Sub-10-lst, a small temple blackened inside by the smoke of sacrificial fires. Outside, artists decorated the shrine with elegant polychromatic paintings that were later piously defaced during the termination rituals of this phase of the Acropolis. These paintings are of people or, perhaps, of gods in the guise of people; but because the North Acropolis is the royal sanctum throughout its later history, we think these paintings depict the Tikal ruler and other nobles,[179] suspended in the red-painted blood scrolls of the Vision Rite (Fig. 4:3).

Finally, a very rich tomb, called Burial 85 by the archaeologists (Fig. 4:4), contained a headless, thighless corpse tied up in a cinnabar-impregnated bundle along with a spondylus shell and a stingray spine (both instruments of bloodletting rituals).[180] Sewn to the top of the bundle was a green fuchsite portrait head that once served as the chest pectoral of the ruler buried therein.[181] The human face on this pectoral wears the Jester God headdress that would be the crown of kings for the next thousand years.[182] We do not know why some of the king’s bones were missing. The Maya are known to have retained bones of important relatives for relics, so that the skull and thighbones may have resided in the house of his descendants for many generations. Without further evidence the answer must remain a mystery.

The noble status of the individuals we find in these tombs is demonstrated not only by the wealth they took with them to the Otherworld, but by the physical condition of their bones. They are larger and more robust than the common people of the kingdom who were buried in other parts of the city.[183] They had a better diet than the people they ruled and were generally taller.

This new, ambitious elite commissioned more than just one or two buildings. During the first century B.C., the lords called upon their people to remodel the entire central area of Tikal—no doubt with an eye to the works of their rivals at El Mirador and Uaxactun. This construction proceeded in three stages. The first stage[184] involved both the renovation of the North Acropolis and the initial leveling and paving of both the Great Plaza and the West Plaza. During the second stage, the huge East Plaza was leveled and paved. The North Acropolis in the city’s center was now flanked on the east and the west by two huge paved areas.[185] In the third phase, the same three areas were repaved once again, perhaps under the direction of the ruler found in Burial 85 or perhaps shortly after his interment.[186] These large plazas were the gathering places from which the common people witnessed the ritual performances of the king. The labor costs in quarrying stone, burning limestone to yield plaster, and finally building the structures, must have been enormous. If the elite of Tikal were constantly expanding this public space, we can assume that the prosperity and prestige of this kingdom were attracting a steady influx of new people whose participation in the ritual life of the kingdom had to be accommodated.[187]

During the same six centuries, Uaxactun to the north underwent a florescence as substantial and dramatic as that of its neighbor Tikal. Late Preclassic platforms in Uaxactun underlying Groups A, E, and H (Fig. 4:5) bear some of the most remarkable Late Preclassic sculpture to have survived into modern times. Temple E-VII-Sub, with its elaborately decorated platform and great plaster masks, was the first of the great Late Preclassic temples to be excavated by archaeologists.[188] At that time it was believed that, up until about A.D. 300, the Maya had possessed only the most simplistic type of farming culture. That vision of Maya history could not accommodate such an elaborate building, so for fifty years that temple stood as an oddity in Maya archaeology. Since then, excavations at Tikal, Cerros, Lamanai, El Mirador, and other sites have uncovered similar structures and shown that Temple E-VII-Sub is a typical expression of Late Preclassic kingship.

E-VII-Sub is no longer an oddity even at Uaxactun itself. Deep within and beneath the complex of the South Plaza of Group H[189] (Fig. 4:6) lies a remarkable assemblage of buildings displaying the largest program of Late Preclassic monumental masks yet discovered. This group, composed of six temples mounted on a small acropolis, was superficially buried by an Early Classic acropolis built at a later date. The largest of the masks on this buried complex can be found on the main eastern building (Sub-3) (Fig. 4:7). These massive stucco sculptures decorate the panels of the upper and lower terraces in typical Maya architectural fashion, similar to the decorative programs we have seen at Cerros. Here, however, the visual “stack” of masks does not display the celestial cycle of the sun and Venus, as found on Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros (and also on Structure E-VII-Sub at Uaxactun).[190] Instead the masks featured here are models of the sacred living mountain (Witz) rising through the layers of the cosmos.[191] The lower panel displays a great Witz Monster sitting in fish-laden primordial waters with vegetation growing from the sides of its head. Above, on the upper panel, sits an identical Monster (probably the mountain peak above the waters)[192] with a Vision Serpent penetrating its head from side to side.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-110.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:6 Uaxactun, Group H, the South Plaza after Valdes 1988]]

It is important to realize that the facade of Uaxactun Structure H-Sub-3 is simply another version of the sacred cosmos, parallel in function to the sun/Venus iconography of the kings at Cerros. In this particular representation of the cosmos, we see the sacred mountain rising from the primordial sea to form the land, just as the land of Peten rose above its swamps. As always, the Vision Serpent is the symbol of the path of communication between the sacred world and the human world. Here, the Vision Serpent’s body penetrates the mountain just as the spiritual path the king must take penetrates down through the rock floor of the pyramid and reaches into the heart., of the earth itself. Like his counterparts at Cerros and Tikal, the ahau of Uaxactun materialized that path through the rituals he conducted on the temple stairway, the physical representation of the path to the Otherworld. Behind him stood his living sacred mountains, signaling and amplifying his actions.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-111.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:7 The Cosmos as Rendered on Uaxactun Structure H-X-Sub-3 after Valdes 1988]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-112.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:8 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Sculptures from the Portal Building Leading to the Inner Plaza of the Acropolis pop , “mat,” sign after Valdes 1987]]

The ahau who commissioned this group portrayed himself on a gateway building situated in the center of the acropolis’s western edge.[193] Designed to create a formal processional entrance along the east-west axis of the complex, this small Sub-10 temple has both eastern and western doors. The king and his retainers could enter through this gateway in ceremony, and at certain times of the year the light of the setting sun would shine through it as well. The stairways leading to each of the gateway doors were flanked by stucco jaguar ahau masks[194] surmounted by panels set into the walls of the temple itself. These panels carried modeled-stucco with oven-mat patterns, one of the main symbols of kingship (Fig. 4:8). Stucco portraits of the king (Fig. 4:9) stood in vertical panels between these mats.

We know this is the king for several reasons. First of all, the figure represented here wears the royal costume—an elaborate ahau head and celt assemblage on a belt above a bifurcated loin apron. This apparel would become the most sacred and orthodox costume of the Classic king. This figure also stands atop a throne mat. Most important, he is encircled by the same scroll signs we saw surrounding his contemporary, the ruler of Tikal (Fig. 4:3). Here, and in the comparable shrine 5D-Sub-10-lst at Tikal, we see Late Preclassic kings memorializing themselves for the first time. They do so at the front of their principal temples, on the main axis of their sacred precincts. This practice is a prototype of what is to come, for the kings of the Classic period will also raise their stelae portraits in such a place and in such a manner.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-113.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:9 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Figures of the King Standing amid Blood Scrolls after Valdes 1987]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-114.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]

Throughout the first century A.D., neither Tikal nor Uaxactun managed to outproduce or dominate the other, but both cities continued to support the institution of kingship. We can see this by the elaborate public architecture and other, smaller ritual objects that have come into our knowledge through archaeological excavation. The imagery each city used to define its kings and to demonstrate the sacred foundations of kingly authority partook of the same fundamental understanding of the world and how it worked. Though Uaxactun may perhaps have had a slight edge, the public constructions of the two kingdoms were relatively equal in scale and elaboration.[195] Tikal and Uaxactun moved into the Classic period as full equals, both ready and able to assume the role of El Mirador when that kingdom disintegrated.[196]

Tikal’s inscriptions tell us of a single dynasty which ruled the kingdom from Early Classic times until its demise in the ninth century, a dynasty that could boast of at least thirty-nine successors in its long history. The historical founder of this extraordinary dynasty was a character (Fig. 4:10) known as Yax-Moch-Xoc.[197] We have no monuments from his reign, but we can reconstruct that he ruled sometime between A.D. 219 and A.D. 238[198]—that is, at least a century and a half later than the ahau who commemorated himself on Structure 5D-Sub-10—1 st in the North Acropolis. This founder, then, was not the first ruler of Tikal, but he must have performed in such an outstanding fashion that later descendants acknowledged him as the leader who established their dynasty as a power to be reckoned with. The recognition of Yax-Moch-Xoc as founder by later Tikal kings is important for another reason. It constitutes the earliest example yet recognized in ancient texts of the principle of the anchoring ancestor. From this man would descend the noble families that would comprise the inner community of the court, the royal clan of Tikal.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-115.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]

The earliest historical Tikal king we have in portraiture is the man i depicted on Stela 29, dated at 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Zip (July 8, A.D. 292).[199] This king, Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar[200] (Fig. 4:11), appears surrounded by a complicated system of emblems which designate his rank and power. The twisted rope that hangs in front of his earflare transforms his head into the living embodiment of the glyphic name of the city. He is the kingdom made flesh.[201] Floating above him is an apparition of the dynastic ancestor from whom he received his right to rule.[202] The king’s “divine” right to the throne is manifested in another kind of imagery: In his right arm, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar from which the sun emerges in its human-headed form. This human-headed manifestation of the sun is none other than GUI of the Triad Gods, one of the offspring of the first mother who existed before the present creation. GUI is also the prototype of the second born of the Ancestral Heroes, whose Classic name was Yax-Balam (“First Jaguar”). The Serpent Bar demonstrates the ability of the king to materialize gods and ancestors in the world of his people.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-116.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:11 Stela 29, the Earliest Dated Monument at Tikal and the King Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-117.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:12 The Leiden Plaque and Zero-Moon-Bird]]

Another image of the Yax-Balam head adorns the chest of the king and a third stares out from his uplifted left hand. The imagery of the disembodied head as a symbol of kingship descends directly from Preclassic times in Mesoamerica. The Olmec, for example, were one of the first cultures to use this symbol, portraying their shaman kings in the form of enormous heads the height of a man. The bundle glyph that signified the kingdom of Tikal appears, surmounting the head attached to the king’s belt and the one he materializes in the mouth of the Serpent Bar, while the king’s own name glyph, a miniature jaguar with a scroll-ahau sign, rides upon the head in his left hand. This is the type of complex imagery the Maya used to designate their rulers and the reason their artistic vision was so powerful and potent.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-118.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:13 Pre-conquest Stelae from Uaxactun
drawing by Ian Graham]]

The next Tikal ruler we can identify, Moon-Zero-Bird,[203] is portrayed on a royal belt ornament called the Leiden Plaque (Fig. 4:12). The inscribed text on the reverse side of this ornament records Moon-Zero-Bird’s seating as king on September 17, A.D. 320. Like his predecessor, he stands holding a Serpent Bar. This time, however, we see emerging from the serpent’s mouth not only the sun, but God K, the deity of lineages. This king also wears an elaborate royal belt. Hanging from this, behind his knees, is a chain with a god suspended from it. The ruler wears a massive headdress, combining the imagery of the Jester God and the jaguar, thus declaring his affiliation with both and his rank as ahau. At his feet a noble captive struggles against his impending fate as sacrificial victim.[204]

The presence of this captive documents the crucial role played by war and captive taking in early Maya kingship. The Maya fought not to kill their enemies but to capture them. Kings did not take their captives easily, but in aggressive hand-to-hand combat. A defeated ruler or lord was stripped of his finery, bound, and carried back to the victorious city to be tortured and sacrificed in public rituals. The prestige value a royal captive held for a king was high, and often a king would link the names of his important captives to his own throughout his life. Captives were symbols of the prowess and potency of a ruler and his ability to subjugate his enemies.[205]

Uaxactun, like Tikal, entered the Classic period with a powerful dynasty and, as with Tikal, the first public records of this royal family are fragmentary and incomplete. Uaxactun’s earliest surviving monument, Stela 9, is dated at 8.14.10.13.15 (April 11, A.D. 328). The ruler depicted on it is anonymous because the glyphs containing his name are eroded beyond recall. The ritual event being recorded here is dated thirty-six years later than Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar’s Stela 29 and some eight years after Moon-Zero-Bird’s accession to the throne of Tikal. Although badly eroded, the scene (Fig. 4:13a) depicts essentially the same images as those found on contemporary stelae from Tikal: The elaborately dressed ruler holds a god head in the crook of his arm. We cannot identify the nature of the event taking place because that information did not survive the ravages of time and wear. But we do know, from the date, that this stela commemorated a historical occasion in the king’s life and not an important juncture in the sacred cycles of time, such as a katun ending. As on the Leiden Plaque, a sacrificial victim cowers at the feet of the king,[206] emphasizing war and captive taking as an activity of crucial public interest to the ruler.

Uaxactun boasted the earliest surviving Maya monuments to record the public celebrations at the ending of a katun—Stelae 18 and 19 in Group E.[207] The image carved on Stela 18 has been lost to erosion, but Stela 19 (Fig. 4:13b) repeats the royal figure on Stela 9 and underscores the conventional nature of Uaxactun’s manner of presenting rulers. The king wears the royal belt with its god image suspended on a chain behind his legs, while he holds either a god head or a Serpent Bar in his arms. A captive of noble status kneels before him with bound wrists raised as if in a gesture of supplication. We can assume from the recurrence of this captive imagery that the festivals associated with regularities in the Maya calendar required the king of Uaxactun to undertake the royal hunt for captives, just as he was required to do for accession rituals and other dynastic events. The likely source of his victims: Tikal, his nearby neighbor to the south.

The rivalry between these two cities comes into dramatic focus during the reign of an extraordinary king. Great-Jaguar-Paw, the ninth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, came to the throne sometime between A.D. 320 and 376. This ruler changed the destiny not only of Tikal and Uaxactun, but also the nature of Maya sacred warfare itself. Under his guidance, Tikal not only defeated Uaxactun, but emerged as the Early Classic successor to the glory and power of El Mirador as the dominant kingdom in the Central Peten region.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-119.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:14 Tikal Stela 39 and Great-Jaguar-Paw]]

Despite the fact that he was such an important king, we know relatively little about Great-Jaguar-Paw’s life outside of the spectacular campaign he waged against Uaxactun. His reign must have been long, but the dates we have on him come only from his last three years. On one of these historical dates, October 21, A.D. 376, we see Great-Jaguar-Paw ending the seventeenth katun in a ritual depicted on Stela 39[208] (Fig. 4:14). This fragmentary monument[209] shows him only from the waist down, but he is dressed in the same regalia as his royal ancestors, with the god Chac-Xib-Chae dangling from his belt. His ankle cuffs display the sign of day on one leg and night on the other. Instead of a Serpent Bar, however, he holds an executioner’s ax, its flint blade knapped into the image of a jaguar paw. In this guise of warrior and giver of sacrifices, he stands atop a captive he has taken in battle. The unfortunate victim, a bearded noble still wearing part of the regalia that marks his noble station, struggles under the victor’s feet, his wrists bound together in front of his chest. He will die to sanctify the katun ending at Tikal.[210]

Warfare was not new to the Maya. Raiding for captives from one kingdom to another had been going on for centuries, for allusions to decapitation are present in even the earliest architectural decorations celebrating kingship. The hunt for sacrificial gifts to give to the gods and the testing of personal prowess in battle was part of the accepted social order, and captive sacrifice was something expected of nobles and kings in the performance of their ritual duties. Just as the gods were sustained by the bloodletting ceremonies of kings, so they were nourished as well by the blood of noble captives. Sacrificial victims like these had been buried as offerings in building terminations and dedications from Late Preclassic times on, and possibly even earlier. Furthermore, the portrayal of living captives is prominent not only at Uaxactun and Tikal, but also at Rio Azul, Xultun, and other Early Classic sites.

The war waged by Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal against Uaxactiin, however, was not the traditional hand-to-hand combat of proud nobles striving for personal glory and for captives to give to the gods. This was war on an entirely different scale, played by rules never before heard of and for stakes far higher than the reputations or lives of individuals. In this new warfare of death and conquest, the winner would gain the kingdom of the loser. Tikal won the prize on January 16, A.D. 378.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-120.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:15 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]

The date of the victory, 8.17.1.4.12 11 Eb 15 Mac, is recorded twice at Uaxactun (on Stela 5 and retrospectively on Stela 22) and twice at Tikal (retrospectively on Stela 31 and on a Ballcourt Marker found in Group 6C-XVI). This is one of the few non-period-ending dates ever recorded by the Maya at more than one site. As we shall see, it was a date of legendary importance for both cities. The two primary characters in this historical drama were the high king of Tikal, Great-Jaguar-Paw’, and a character named Smoking-Frog.[211]

The single visual representation of this event occurs at Uaxactun on Stela 5 (Fig. 4:15), which depicts Smoking-Frog as the triumphant leader of the Tikal forces. On the rear of the monument, he proudly names himself as an ahau of Tikal, while on the front he wears the full regalia of a warrior. He grips an obsidian-bladed club, while a bird, perhaps a quetzal, flutters beside his turban. A cluster of long tails arches from the back of his belt and he stands in front of a censer much like the one that appears with Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39 at Tikal (Fig. 4:16).[212]

Aside from the fact that it commemorates the war between Tikal and Uaxactun, this stela is important for another reason. On it we see depicted the first visual representation of the Tlaloc-Venus cpstyme. This costume, with its balloon-shaped headdress and its spearthrower, is profoundly different from that which we have seen adorning Maya ahauob celebrating war and sacrifice at both Tikal and Uaxactun in earlier times. We know that this kind of regalia marks the occasion of a new type of war— conquest war. Smoking-Frog’s celebration of this conquest on Stela 5 may mark the first known display of this complex in the imagery of public monuments, but the costume in several variations (Fig. 4:17) became one of the standard uniforms of the king as conqueror and warrior.[213]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-121.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:16 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]

The Maya borrowed the costume, and probably the rituals that went with it, from the great central Mexican city, Teotihuacan, whose emissaries appeared in the lowlands at about this time. Although initially adopted as a rationale for conquest, the Maya quickly made these symbols and rituals their own. This imagery held firm at the heart of Maya culture for the next thousand years. For the Maya, among many other peoples in Mesoamerica, this particular costume came to have an overwhelming association with war and sacrifice.[214] Soon after they adopted this kind of war, which we shall call Tlaloc-Venus war,[215] the Maya began timing their battles to particular points in the Venus cycle (especially the first appearance of Eveningstar) and to the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn.[216]

We do not know why the Maya saw this association with the planets, especially Venus, as important to their concepts of war. However, the fact that later groups, such as the Aztec and Mixtec, also had such associations, which they may have inherited from either the Teotihuacanos or the Maya or both, suggests they were part of the wider Mesoamerican tradition. The date of the Uaxactun conquest, January 16, A.D. 378, has no astronomical significance that we can detect, but this event is also the earliest known appearance of the international war ritual. The astronomical associations may have come later and then spread to other societies using this type of warfare. Certainly, the association clearly had been made within forty years of the conquest because two related events in the reigns of the next two Tikal kings, Curl-Snout and Stormy-Sky, were timed by astronomical alignments (see Notes 57 and 58–5).

The subjugation of Uaxactun by Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog, which precipitated this new kind of war and its rituals, survives in the inscriptional record almost entirely in the retrospective histories carved by later rulers at Tikal. The fact that these rulers kept commemorating this event shows both its historical importance and its propaganda value for the descendants of these conquerors. Stela 31, the first of these texts, tells us that the conquest took place twelve days, four uinals, and one tun after the end of the seventeenth katun (Fig. 4:18). The passage records two actors: Smoking-Frog, who “demolished and threw down (homy’ the buildings of Uaxactun,[217] and Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal, who let blood from his genitals[218] to sanctify the victory of his warriors.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-122.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:17 Tlaloc War Costume in Late Classic]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-123.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:18 Tikal’s Record of the Conquest of Uaxactun drawing by John Montgomery]]

The Ballcourt Marker, the second of these inscriptions, records the event (Fig. 4:19) using a glyph in the shape of the head of an old god. This god has a trifurcated blade over his eye and a four-petaled flower on the side of his head. This same god appears as a full-figured effigy in Burial 10 at Tikal. There he sits on a stool made of human leg bones and holds a severed human head on a plate. We do not know the precise word value intended by this glyph, but the god is clearly a deity of human sacrifice, probably by decapitation. In this conquest text, the portrait of his head is used to record one of the actions taking place on that particular day, very probably to the unfortunate captives taken at Uaxactun. These captives were very likely sacrificed by decapitation, perhaps in honor of this gruesome deity. For all of the distinctiveness of the international regalia marking this war and its political consequences, the ultimate ritual of decapitation sacrifice was the same as that which had been practiced by ahauob since time began. We shall see, however, how this international symbolism, grafted onto orthodox Maya practices, functioned as part of the propaganda that enabled Smoking-Frog to be installed as usurper king at Uaxactun.

Pictorial representations of the battle for Uaxactun have not survived, but we know enough about the way the Maya conducted warfare to reconstruct what this struggle might have been like.[219] One thing is clear: This battle would have been unlike anything the seasoned warriors on either side had ever experienced. And for the people of Uaxactun, it would be more devastating than their wildest imaginings.

Imagine the growing sense of horror felt by the people of Uaxactun as they watched their vanquished nobility straggle into the central, dazzling white plazas of their city. The clear, hard winter light of the yax-colored sky was the backdrop to a world changing before their frightened eyes. High above them on the bloodred flank of his living mountain, their king struggled to calm himself so that he might enter into the darkness of his portal with a mind clear and purposeful, to challenge his ancestors. Why this violation of all rules of the way men fight? Where was the path to escape this disaster?

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-124.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:19]]

It had begun well enough. He had led his warriors through the days of tasting, the rites of purification and sacrifice. Deep in the night, with his own hands he painted the strong faces of his kinsmen. In the flickering torchlight of the many-chambered men’s hall, he adorned them with the black and red patterns that would terrify any who dared come against them. How proud he had been when their wives handed them the great honey-colored knives of stone and the shields which they rolled up and hung across their backs. Lastly, their wives gave them the great lances hafted with teeth of lightning, the great flint blades flaked to slice smoothly into the flesh of their enemies.

The king’s principal wife, who was pregnant with their next child, had waited until the men of lesser status were prepared before she brought his battle gear.[220] His second wife stood nearby holding their infant child, and his firstborn child by his principal wife watched the proceedings with wide eyes. One day, he, like his father, would lead the men into battle in defense of the portals of the sacred mountains. Dressed in his full regalia, the king smiled at his son and led his family out into the darkness of the predawn morning.

In the still darkness his warriors awaited him, already dressed, their battle jackets tied loosely closed across their muscled chests. When he appeared in the flickering torchlight, a low-throated shout greeted him and his army began their last stages of preparation. They strapped on their helmets emblazoned with the images of their animal protectors. His ahauob donned the fearsome god masks, made in the image of the ax-wielding executioner Chac-Xib-Chac and the other denizens of the Other-world. They draped the wizened, shrunken heads of now-dead captives around their necks to let the enemy know they faced seasoned men of high reputation and proven valor.

Then there had been the rush of fear and the anticipation of glory as the warriors of Uaxactun reached the open savanna south of the city. There the battle would be fought against the age-old rivals who lived among the swamps to the south, at the right-hand side of the sun. The warming light of the rising sun had burned away the ground mist to reveal the warriors arrayed in tension-filled stillness as they waited to join in battle.

It had begun in the old ways of battle, following twenty katuns or more of honorable precedent. Standing in the waist-high grass, the old men sounded the great wooden trumpets whose piercing song cut through the bass thunder of the great war drums, the tunkul, filling the forest with the sound of great deeds in progress. His people stood together like a c writhing vision of multicolored glory against the green of those trees, shouting insults about the ancestry of the Tikal enemy ranked in their hundreds across the sea of grass. One after another, singly or in groups, I his ahauob shouted their challenges toward their counterparts across the savanna. Charging out onto the battle ground, they screamed their insults, then retreated once again to the massed safety of their own side. Their bravado and rage rippled through the ranks, transforming them into a pulsing sea of hysterical faces and trembling bodies.

Suddenly, the tension became unbearable. Ihe warriors’ rage exploded into frenzied release as the two armies charged across the grass, trampling it into a tight mat under their thudding feet. They merged in the middle of the field in a screaming discharge of released energy, lightning blade clashing against woven shield in the glorious and dangerous hunt for captives to give as gifts to the gods.

The lines struck and intermingled in crazed chaos, screams of pain punctuating the cries of challenge. There was a brief flare of victory as Uaxactun’s surging mass of men flowed across the field like a summer flood, sweeping first toward the clump of men who protected Great-Jaguar-Paw, Tikal’s high king, and then back northward toward the Uaxactun lines. The entangled horde of men finally separated, and bloodied, exhausted warriors fell back toward the safety of their own side in the glaring light of midmorning. They needed to wet their dry throats with water and bind up their oozing wounds with strips of paper. Some of the warriors had taken captives who had to be stripped naked and tied down before they escaped in the heat and confusion of the battle. With such great numbers present from each city, the battle would last all day.

It was then that the treacherous enemy lord struck. Smoking-Frog, the war chief of Tikal’s army, flashed an unseen signal and from the forest came hundreds of hidden warriors. In eerie silence, never once issuing challenge, they hurled a cloud of spears into the thick ranks of the Uaxactun warriors. Shocked and horrified, the king realized the enemy was using spearthrowers, the hunter’s weapon, killing his people like food animals gathered for slaughter.[221]

The surprise of the attack was too great and many of his very best warriors fell to the flying lances, unable to get to safety in time. Many died and even more were crippled by a weapon that the king had seen only foreigners use in war, the foreigners who had come into their lands from Teotihuacan, the giant capital to the far west. The hidden hundreds of Tikal’s militia advanced, all carrying bunches of light, obsidian-tipped darts and throwing-sticks. He heard one of his kinsmen scream as a spear drove through his cheek, turning his black-painted face red with blood.

Shouting their hatred for the enemy, the king and his captains leaped toward the Tikal general, Smoking-Frog, where he stood on the far side of the field. Jamming a wedge of bloody spears through the twisting bodies of Tikal’s young men, the warriors’of Uaxactun tore a pathway through enemy ranks for their vengeful king. But it was too late. Above the blare of the long wooden trumpets and the moan of the conch-shell horns, the high chants of Tikal’s triumph sounded in the broken, corpse-strewn meadow. More spears rained down and the king of Uaxactun was forced to pull back to the forest with the shattered remnant of his army. The young men of the royal clan and many valiant men of the great families of Uaxactun lay dead or bound, resigned to suffer the torture that awaited them at the hands of Smoking-Frog and his ahauob.

Now in the darkness of his sanctum, the king of Uaxactun heard again that awful chant of victory. The warriors of Tikal were entering his city and he could feel the ancestral gift of his world slipping from his grasp. An unthinkable disaster had befallen him and his people. He emerged into the blinding daylight; and as his vision cleared, he saw smoke billowing from the fires of destruction, which consumed the spacious homes and public halls of his city’s center. Screaming taunts of desperation, the lords of Uaxactun gathered on the sides of their living mountains, throwing their stabbing spears, rocks, and finally their bodies at the advancing and implacable Tikal forces.

In spite of all their efforts, Smoking-Frog and his company swirled around the base of the king’s pyramid, killing and capturing the valiant warriors of the Uaxactun royal clan. The king and his men fought to the last. At the moment of his capture, the king of Uaxactun reached furiously for Smoking-Frog’s throat. Laughing, the Tikal lord jerked him to his knees by his long bound hair. The defeated king glared up at the arrogant Smoking-Frog, costumed in the regalia of the new, barbarous warfare— the round helmet, the spearthrower, and the obsidian club. He cursed him as his captor’s minions stripped him bare and tied his elbows behind his back with rough sisal rope.

They would all die. There would be no ransom. Under the code of this new, foreign battle strategy, Smoking-Frog would be able to bring his own Tikal ancestors to the portal of Uaxactun. He and his descendants would rule not only the people of the city but their venerated ancestors as well. It was an act of audacity beyond imagination: war to take not only the king but also his portal—and if possible to hold that portal captive. For as long as Smoking-Frog and his kin reigned, the people of Uaxactun would be cut off from the loving guidance of their ancestors, a people stripped of their very gods.

•

In time to come, this kind of war would require a novel alliance with the denizens of the Otherworld—an unleashing of the forces of Xibalba, particularly Venus, to conquer not only the living royal clan but also all of the apotheosized ancestors of that clan. Kings now had a policy and a strategy that would inspire dreams of conquest throughout the Maya world. Venus would prove a powerful, but treacherous ally in the realization of these dreams.

The most tantalizing mystery surrounding the conquest of Uaxactun is the identity of Smoking-Frog. Who was this warrior who appears in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal? We know he was an ahau of Tikal because he consistently included the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Second, we know he was the principal actor in the conquest of Uaxactun, despite the fact that the conquest took place under the authority of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal. All of this leads us to believe that he was most likely the war chief who led Tikal’s army against the rival kingdom, and as a result of his success, was installed as the ruling ahau of Uaxactun by the victorious Tikal king. We know that eighteen years after the conquest, Smoking-Frog was still at Uaxactun. On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396) he conducted a ritual to celebrate the katun ending, an event he depicted on Stela 4 (Fig. 4:20), which he planted next to his portrait as the conqueror (Fig. 4:5). The people of Tikal didn’t forget him on this occasion either. Back at his home city, Smoking-Frog was named on Stela 18 (Fig. 4:20) which recorded the celebration of the same katun ending. He was also prominently named in the retrospective histories recorded on Stela 31 and the Ballcourt Marker.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-125.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:20 Smoking-Frog at Tikal and Uaxactun]]

Yet even considering his prominence in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal, we are reasonably sure that Smoking-Frog never ruled Tikal as its king. Instead, another ahau named Curl-Snout (Fig. 4:20) became high king of Tikal on September 13, 379, less than two years after the conquest. Curl-Snout apparently held his throne, however, under the sufferance of Smoking-Frog, who appears to have ruled the combined kingdom that was forged by the conquest. We would like to put forward the hypothesis that Smoking-Frog was the brother of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal at the time of the battle of Uaxactun, and that Curl-Snout was his nephew.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-126.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:21 Stela 31: Curl-Snout in the Land of Smoking-Frog drawing by John Montgomery]]

There are several clues leading to this conclusion. One of the ways we can infer the relationship between Curl-Snout and Smoking-Frog is from the inscriptions at Tikal, which always name Curl-Snout either as the yahau “the noble of” (in this case, “the vassal of”) Smoking-Frog (Stela 18) or as acting u cab “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (Stela 31). When Curl-Snout depicted himself acceding to Tikal’s kingship on Stela 4 and ending Katun 18 on Stela 18, he found it advisable to record publicly his relationship to Smoking-Frog. Perhaps the most important reference to their relationship occurs on Stela 31 where an important event in Curl-Snout’s life, possibly his accession, is said to have taken place “in the land of Smoking-Frog” (Fig. 4:21).[222] From these references we surmise that Curl-Snout ruled Tikal, but under the aegis of Smoking-Frog.[223]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-127.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:22 Kinship Relationships of Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal]]

There are additional hints as to the identity of Smoking-Frog and his relationship to Curl-Snout. The text on the Ballcourt Marker names Smoking-Frog as the ihtan,[224] “sibling,” of a person named “Spearthrower-Owl.” It is interesting that Stela 31, erected many years later by Curl-Snout’s son and heir, Stormy-Sky, names Curl-Snout as the “child of” a person named by an almost identical glyph, “Spearthrower-Shield” (Fig. 4:22). We have now realized that these two seemingly different glyphs are merely different ways of writing the same thing—the shield-owl-spear-thrower substitution that would become Pacafs name at Palenque and the name of the third Lord of the Night.[225] If this substitution is correctly identified, then we can assert that Smoking-Frog was the brother and Curl-Snout the son of the same man. Our remaining task is to determine the identity of the person whom these “spearthrower” glyphs name.

The solution to this mystery involves some complicated detective work. The “spearthrower” name also occurs on Stela 31 in another context. It is the title on the headdress Stormy-Sky holds aloft, prior to donning it in the public ritual depicted on the front of the monument (Fig. 4:23). A medallion attached to the front of the headdress depicts an owl with a shield on its wing and a throwing dart piercing its breast. Stormy-Sky is about to become a “spearthrower-owl-shield” person by putting on this headdress.

The last readable clause of the text on this monument tells us that Stormy-Sky performed this ritual on June 11, A.D. 439, when Venus was near its eastern elongation.[226] The glyph that records this ritual action is the same as the one recording the bloodletting event (Fig. 4:23) that Great-Jaguar-Paw performed on the day Uaxactun was conquered. The use of the same verb in both contexts is to declare a “like-in-kindness” between the two actors. If Stormy-Sky became the “spearthrower-owl” person by performing this rite, we may assume that Great-Jaguar-Paw had taken on this identity in the same ritual context. The “spearthrowerowl” named as the brother of Smoking-Frog and the father of Curl-Snout was none other than the first great Tikal king to call himself by that title—Great-Jaguar-Paw, the king who made war with spearthrowers his own. Furthermore, it is this very equation between grandfather and grandson that Stormy-Sky intended to portray in the first place. It is not by accident that he designated himself the “spearthrower-shield” when he reenacted his ancestor’s bloodletting event. By doing so, he intended to remind his people that he was the grandson of this powerful and innovative man.

[[][Fig. 4:23 The Spearthrower Title and Stormy-Sky at Tikal
drawing of text and stela by John Montgomery]]

In the scenario we have reconstructed, forces from Tikal under the military leadership of Smoking-Frog, the brother of the high king, attacked and defeated the forces of their neighboring kingdom, Uaxactiin, on January 16, 378. The victory placed Smoking-Frog on the throne of Uaxactun, where he oversaw the accession of his nephew, Curl-Snout, to Tikal’s throne on September 13, A.D. 379. For the next eighteen years, and perhaps as long as twenty-six years,[227] Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, possibly marrying into its ruling family as well. Even though Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, however, he remained extremely important at Tikal. It’s possible he was the overall ruler of the new combined kingdom that resulted from his victory in battle.

That the conquest of Uaxactun remained a glorious event of historical memory both at Uaxactun and Tikal is clear from the inscriptions at both sites. The descendants of Smoking-Frog continued to erect monuments at Uaxactun on a regular basis. One hundred and twenty-six years after the conquest, on 9.3.10.0.0 (December 9, 504), a Uaxactun ruler celebrated the conquest by erecting Stela 22. The day of the victory, 11 Eb, appears with the same conquest verb (hom, “to knock down or demolish buildings”) describing the action. Even at such a late date, the borrowed glory of the battle of Uaxactun could burnish the deeds of Smoking-Frog’s progeny.

Another example of this “glory by association” can be seen on the above mentioned Stela 31, erected at Tikal. This monument was commissioned by Stormy-Sky, the grandson of the conqueror, and focused on the defeat of Uaxactun.[228] Stormy-Sky’s motivation in featuring this conquest was, of course, to remember the glories of his grandfather and the triumph of his kingdom against an old rival; but he also gained personal prestige by reminding his people of this event. By concentrating on retrospective historical events on this stela, Stormy-Sky was also able to emphasize the extraordinary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus on 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, A.D. 411, see Note 58–5) which occurred during his father’s, Curl-Snout’s, reign. He then used the conquest and the hierophany as a background to emphasize the importance of his own bloodletting on June 10, 439. So effective was this strategy that his own descendant, Ah-Cacaw, remembered and celebrated this same bloodletting event thirteen katuns later (9.13.3.9.18 or September 17, 695).[229]

The most extraordinary record of the conquest was inscribed on the Ballcourt Marker[230] that was recently discovered in a lineage compound south of the Lost World group. The bailgame with its decapitation and sacrificial associations had been a central component of Maya ritual since the Late Preclassic period, but the marker recording the Uaxactun conquest is not typical of the floor-mounted stone disk used in the Maya ballcourts. This Tikal marker, in the shape of a thin cylinder surmounted by a sphere and disk, is nearly identical to ballcourt markers pictured in the murals of the Tlalocan at Teotihuacan itself.[231] It rests on its own Teotihuacan-style platform and a two-paneled inscription wraps around the cylinder base (Fig. 4:19c). Its form emulates the style of Teotihuacan ballcourt markers as a reflection of the importance of the Tlaloc-Venus war in its records.[232]

The inscription is as extraordinary as the object itself. One panel records the conquest of Uaxactun by Smoking-Frog (Fig. 4:19a), while the opposite side records the accession to office of the fourth lord to rule the lineage that occupied this compound.[233] This was presumably the lineage head who went to war under the leadership of Smoking-Frog. The Ballcourt Marker itself was planted in the altar on January 24, 414, some thirty-six years after the conquest of Uaxactun, but it was not commissioned by a king. It was erected by a lord who named himself “the ahau (in the sense of “vassal’) of Smoking-Frog of Tikal” (Fig. 4:19c).

The people who lived and worked in this ritual/residential complex were members of one of the important, nonroyal lineages of the kingdom. They were not themselves kings; but like their king and his descendants, they remembered the conquest of Uaxactun as the most glorious event in living memory. Like Stormy-Sky, they gained prestige by celebrating its memory in texts recording the history of their own lineage. This lineage presumably provided warriors, perhaps even leaders, for Smoking-Frog’s army and forever gained recognition and glory by their participation.

The war and its aftermath affected more than just the two kingdoms and the people directly involved. Tikal’s victory gave the lords who ruled that kingdom the advantage they needed to dominate the central Peten for the next 180 years. However, this great victory also coincided with an intensified interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan, whose influence, as we have seen, appeared in Maya symbolism just about the time this war was fought. What did this interaction mean for the Maya culture and how far did their involvement with the civilization of Teotihuacan go? To answer this question, we must examine a little history.

During the same centuries that saw the development of lowland Maya kingdoms, the new state of Teotihuacan had simultaneously been growing to maturity in the valley of Mexico (Fig. 4:24). We know that the lowland Maya and the Teotihuacanos had been in contact with each other from at least the first century A.D. Offerings of the distinctive green obsidian mined by the Teotihuacanos have been discovered in Late Preclassic Maya sites at Nohmul and at Altun Ha in Belize.[234] Furthermore, the exchange of material goods was not just in one direction. Just as Teotihuacan-style objects occur at Tikal and elsewhere in the lowlands, Maya-style objects also occur at Teotihuacan. Yet even in light of this long-term exchange of exotic goods between the two regions, something very special and different, at least in scale, took place on the occasion of the war against Uaxactun. What was exchanged this time was not just goods, but a whole philosophy. The Maya borrowed the idea and the imagery of conquest war from the Teotihuacanos and made it their own.

On Stela 5 at Uaxactun (Fig. 4:15), the conqueror, Smoking-Frog, chose to depict himself in ritual war regalia of the Teotihuacan style. On Stela 4 at Tikal (Fig. 4:20), Curl-Snout, the son of Great-Jaguar-Paw, ruler of Tikal at the time of the conquest, depicted himself wearing a shell necklace, also in the style of Teotihuacan, when he acceded as king. ^ Curl-Snout appears again on the sides of Stela 31 (Fig. 4:25), but this time in the same war regalia worn by Smoking-Frog at Uaxactun. If we recall that the Maya utilized their public art for purposes of propaganda, we can see the reasoning behind this costume. When Stormy-Sky acceded to the throne, he needed to present his father (the forebear upon whom his right to rule depended) in the most powerful light possible. What could be more prestigious than for Curl-Snout to appear in the costume worn by Smoking-Frog at the moment of his greatest triumph?

[[][Teotihuacan: the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun]]

[[][The Talud-tablero Style of Architecture Characteristic of Teotihuacan
Fig. 4:24]]

To give the impression that we are seeing Curl-Snout standing behind his son, Stormy-Sky represented him twice, on opposite sides of the stela. On one side we see the inside of his shield and the outside of his spearthrower; on the other we see the inside of the spearthrower, and the outside of the shield. Upon his shield we see the image of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed deity that the Maya would come to associate with this particular kind of war and bloodletting ritual.[235]

Burials from this period at Tikal also give evidence of the Maya interaction with Teotihuacan. Two of our protagonists were buried in the North Acropolis at Tikal: Curl-Snout in Burial 10 and Stormy-Sky in Burial 48.[236] Both tombs include significant numbers of pots made in the style of Teotihuacan, emulating imagery particularly associated with that city. Even more to the point, a special cache at Tikal called Problematic Deposit 5O[237] included what may very well be the interred remains of resident Teotihuacanos of high rank. The most interesting object in this deposit is a vase that appears to depict the arrival of a group of Teotihuacanos at a Maya city (Fig. 4:26).

[[][Fig. 4:25 tails Curl-Snout as the Spearthrower Warrior on the Sides of Stela 31]]

On this vase six Teotihuacanos, marked by their clothing, walk away from a place of talud-tablero-style architecture, the ethnic signal of Teotihuacan (Fig. 4:24), to arrive at a place that has both talud-tablero temples and stepped pyramids of Maya design. At the city of departure, they leave a child and a squatting figure, perhaps representing the family members who see them off on their long journey. Four of the <verbatim><</verbatim> Teotihuacano visitors wear the long-tailed costume we have seen at Uaxactun and Tikal. These same persons carry spearthrowers and appear to escort two other characters who carry lidded cylinders, a pottery shape particularly associated with Teotihuacan.[238] At the end of this “journey,” the arriving Teotihuacanos are greeted by a person dressed like a Maya.

We do not know for sure which cities the artist intended to represent on this vessel—although it would seem logical to identify Teotihuacan as the starting point and Tikal as the point of arrival.[239] The four Teotihuacanos carrying weapons constitute a warrior escort for the two vase-carrying individuals behind them. The rear figures are distinguished by tasseled headdresses of the type that also show up prominently at Kaminaljuyu and Monte Alban in contexts where Teotihuacan symbolism have merged with local traditions. The individuals who wear these headdresses are most likely special-status people who traveled as emissaries, or professional merchants representing their great city throughout western Mesoamerica.[240]

[[][Fig. 4:26 A Visit by Teotihuacanos Carved on a Black Cylindrical Vase from Problematic Deposit 50]]

The appearance of this kind of imagery at Tikal has been explained in several ways, ranging from the military conquest of these sites by Teotihuacan to the usurpation of Tikal’s throne by lords from Teotihuacan or Kaminaljuyu.[241] The last alternative seems unlikely. The status of Curl-Snout as Stormy-Sky’s father is certain. If we are accurate in our analysis of the “spearthrower-shield” glyph, Great-Jaguar-Paw was Curl-Snout’s father and Smoking-Frog’s brother. If these relationships are correctly deciphered, then we can verify an unbroken descent in the Tikal royal line during the very time Teotihuacano imagery begins appearing in such prominence.

If we dismiss conquest and usurpation, then what does the presence of this imagery imply? There is little doubt that the Teotihuacanos were physically present at Tikal, at least in small numbers, just as small numbers of lowland Maya were also present at Teotihuacan. The reason for this was not military occupation. Rather, during the fifth and sixth centuries, Teotihuacan had established a network binding the individual societies in Mesoamerica together in a great web of trade and exchange.

When the Teotihuacanos departed their city to travel among the different areas participating in that trade network, they went as tasselheaded ambassador-traders, protected by warriors. Sacred war as they defined and practiced it is registered in the murals of Atetelco and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in their own great city.[242] The symbology in these images is clearly related, if not identical, to the Tlaloc warfare practiced by the Maya. As these Teotihuacanos spread out from their sacred city, which they believed to be the point on earth where the supernatural world was embodied,[243] they took their form of war and sacrificial rituals with them.

The arrival of the Teotihuacan trader-ambassadors in the central Peten may have intensified the rivalry that already existed between Uaxactiin and Tikal. At the very least their presence inflated the stakes at risk—the wealth in material goods and ideas that came with controlling the trade network of the central Peten region. Certainly when Smoking-Frog depicted himself—and later on, his father—in the costume worn by the Teotihuacan warriors, it was because this costume was prestigious and important propaganda to his people. How much more impressive must the Teotihuacan symbolism have been to the people of the whole Peten region when its adoption by Tikal’s rulers coincided with their conquest of Uaxactun?

Both the son and grandson of the triumphant Great-Jaguar-Paw knew the propaganda value of the Tlaloc complex. They enthusiastically adopted the imagery and its associated rituals, and then quite deliberately commemorated their ancestor’s great feat whenever possible on their own public monuments. By the time Stormy-Sky erected Stela 31, this war and sacrifice ritual was firmly associated with Venus or Venus-Jupiter-Saturn hierophanies, most probably a Maya adaptation.

With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, the Maya adopted this ritual and made it their own. It survived the collapse of the Classic period civilization and is prominent at Chichen Itza and other northern sites of the Postclassic period. It may even have traveled back to central Mexico via Cacaxtla and Xochicalco: For it is the Maya version of the Tlaloc complex that appears at those sites at the end of the Classic period.

Why did the Maya take to this new ritual so readily and enthusiastically? Perhaps the best answer is that it helped Tikal win a staggering victory that made her kings the dominant ahauob of the central Peten. Intensified trade and political association with Teotihuacan were other likely results of this victory. As a ruler of empire, Tikal experienced an inflation of prestige perhaps unprecedented in Maya history and rarely replicated again. This conquest was the stuff of legends and the people of Tikal never let the story pass from memory. Thirteen katuns later another descendent memorialized this legendary conquest when he sought to rebuild the glory of Tikal after a disastrous defeat on the battlefield.

But there is more to this scenario than just the adoption of a new art of war. From early in their history, the Maya honored offerings of blood above all others as the most sacred gifts to the gods. Individuals were often sacrificed to sanctify the construction of a new building. Indeed, the people of Cuello killed and dismembered twenty-six individuals to place under the floor of a new platform they built around 400 B.C.[244] Bloodletting regalia and caches are consistently found at Late Preclassic sites. Some early communities were also fortified, suggesting that ritual war for the taking of sacrificial victims was an important part of Maya life from a very early time. The trifurcated scrolls representing blood, which flow from the mouth of the Tlaloc image, are found on the great plaster masks of Late Preclassic Maya architecture. The symbolism and ritual of the Teotihuacanos’ war imagery fell on fertile ground.

The Maya did more than just borrow the imagery and ritual: They adapted it to their needs. To the Maya the Tlaloc complex with its associated jaguar, bird, spearthrower, and mosaic headdress imagery (see Note 45) meant war and sacrifice above all things. The association of this war/sacrifice complex with planetary conjunctions may have been present at Teotihuacan, but we can never test for that since the Teotihuacanos did not record dates in their art. We do not know when their rituals occurred or if the murals at Teotihuacan even represent specific historical acts. For the Maya, however, the Tlaloc complex became associated with war and sacrifice timed by the apparitions of Venus and Jupiter.[245]

The prominence of Teotihuacan-style imagery in the tombs and on &’the stelae of Tikal lasted only through Stormy-Sky’s reign. By A.D. 475, the rulers of Tikal abandoned this way of representing themselves and concentrated on other aspects of kingship. The intensive interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan lasted for only a hundred years, shifting thereafter to the neutral ground at Kaminaljuyu.[246] Contact between the Teotihuacanos and the lowland Maya must have continued at least until the eighth century when Teotihuacan ceased to be a major intercultural power. The first flush of intense contact is what we have observed at Tikal and it brought prestige and wealth to both parties.

From the Teotihuacanos the Maya gained a sacrificial ritual and a new kind of warfare that would remain central to their religion at least until the ninth century. We know less about what Teotihuacan gained from the interchange. The end result, however, was the establishment of an international network of trade along which moved material goods and ideas. This interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica resulted in a florescence of civilized life, a cultural brilliance and intensity that exceeded even the accomplishments of the Olmec, the first great civilization to arise in Mesoamerica.

5. Star Wars in the Seventh Century

The kingdom of Tikal throve after the conquest of Uaxactun, fulfilling the promise of its victory by becoming the largest and most prosperous Early Classic kingdom in the Maya heartland. This prosperity can be seen in the astounding proliferation of temples and public art commissioned by the ahauob of ensuing generations. The descendants of the victorious king, Great-Jaguar-Paw, launched an ambitious building program that changed the face of the city and studded the terrace in front of the North Acropolis with a forest of tree-stones. These stelae tell us something about the changing emphasis of kingship in Tikal, for the kings who reigned after Great-Jaguar-Paw’s grandson, Stormy-Sky, chose a different style of representing themselves, one that emphasized their humanity by simplifying the cluster of symbolism surrounding them.[247] In place of the old-style portraits that depicted them in full royal regalia, these rulers depicted themselves (Fig. 5:1a and b) holding simple decorated staffs in rituals celebrating period endings in the Maya calendar.[248] In this manner they removed the focus of history from the arena of personal and dynastic events, like birth, accession, and conquest, and placed it instead upon the rhythms of time and the great festival cycles by which these rhythms were celebrated.

[[][Fig. 5:1]]

After thirty years of depicting themselves in this style, the rulers of Tikal began experimenting again, encouraging their artisans to expand the frontiers of tradition into fresh and innovative areas. These artists created new styles by an imaginative combination of elements both old and new. Around 9.4.0.0.0 (A.D. 514), for example, the manner of depicting kings on stelae switched to a front view carved in a relief deep enough to model the king’s face three-quarters in the round. Sculptors also experimented with formats that placed the king’s parents on either side of the stela (Fig. 5:1c) in a modern echo of Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece, Stela 31. Old themes, like the bound captive lying at the feet of the king (Fig. 5:Id), returned to stelae compositions. Eventually the styles for representing kings took their inspiration from even earlier times, creating the Maya version of the adage “Everything old is new again.” In 557, the twenty-first successor, Double-Bird, commissioned a monument in a style that was popular during Tikal’s first flush of conquest glory, depicting himself in shallow relief, standing profile to the viewer (Fig. 5:5). Double-Bird’s monument, Stela 17, holds a unique place in the commemorative art of Tikal. It was the last monument erected before a 130-year period of silence fell upon the inscribed history of this great capital. The reason for this long silence was the conquest of the city by a new kingdom that had grown to maturity m the region to the southeast.

Piecing together the true story of Tikal’s two centuries of cultural innovation is a difficult and painstaking task. Many of the existing stelae and art objects were deliberately effaced or smashed by the conquerors in the time following the erection of Stela 17. Even in such a shattered form, however, one can see the extraordinary beauty and power of Tikal’s artistic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the written history that has come to us from this period is as poor and spotty as the visual one. Many of the texts that survived the destructive frenzy of Tikal’s nemesis treat only of the period-ending celebrations that had become the focus of Tikal’s ritual life. Although the records of the actors who entered and left the stage of history during this period are sketchy, they still provide at least a partial account of the kings who held Tikal’s throne.[249] The kings we currently know from this period are as follows:

| Date | Name | # | Monuments | Date | | | Staff Stela | | | | | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar | 12^th | St. 9, 13 | 475 | | | Mah-Kina-Chan | 13^th | Pot, St. 8? | | | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw-Skull | 14^th | St. 7 | 488 | | 9.3.O.O.O | | | St. 3,15,27 | 495 | | 9.4.0.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 6 | 514 | | | Frontal Style | | | | | 9.3.9.13.3 | birth, Lady of Tikal | ??? | St. 23 | 504 | | 9.3.16.18.4 | accession, ?? | .??? | St. 23 | 511 | | 9.4.3.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 25 | 517 | | 9.4.13.0.0 | Curl-Head | 19^th | St. 10, 12 | 527 | | 9.5.O.O.O? | ??? | | St. 14 | 534 | | | Profile Style | | | | | 9.5.3.9.15 | Double-Bird | 21^st | St. 17 | 537 |

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-49.jpg 70f][The Sequence of the History of the Caracol-Tikal-Naranjo Wars]]

| Maya date | A.D. | Tikal | Naranjo | Dos Pilas | Caracol | Calakmul | | 9.5.3.9.15 | 12/31/537 | Double-Bird acts (accedes) | | | 9.5.12.0.4 | 5/7/546 | | Ruler I accedes | | 1Q1 7 | 4/1R/SS1 | | | | Lord Water accedes | | 9.6.2.1.11 | 4/11/556 | | | | ax-war against Tikal | | 9.6.3.9.15 | 9/17/557 | Double-Bird’s last date | | 9.Ó.8.4.2 | 5/1/562 | | | | star-war at Tikal | | 9.9.4.16.2 | 3/9/618 | | | | Lord K3” 11 accedes | | 9.95.13.8 | 1/9/619 | | | | | lord acts at Naranjo | | 9.9.13.4.4 | 5/28/626 | | | | sacrifice of “he of Naranjo” | | 9.9.14.3.5 | 5/4/627 | | | | bailgame and sacrifice | | 9.9.17.11.14 | 10/4/630 | | | | death of Naranjo lord | | 9.9.18.16.3 | 12/27/631 | | | | star war against Naranjo | | 9.10.3.2.12 | 3/4/636 | | | | star war against Naranjo | | 9.10.4.16.2 | 11/24/637 | | | | 1 katun of rule, Lord Kan II | | 9.10.10.0.0 | 12/6/642 | | victory stair dedicated by Caracol | | 9.10.12.11.2 | 7/5/645 | | | Flint-Sky-God K accedes | | 9.10.16.16.19 10/9/649 | | | | | | Jaguar-Paw born | | 9.11.11.9.17 | 3/2/664 | | | capture of Tah-Mo’ | | 9.12.9.17.16 | 5/6/682 | Ah Cacaw accedes | | 9.12.10.5.12 | 8/30/682 | | Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau arrives from Dos Pilas | | 9.12.13.17.7 | 4/6/686 | | | | Jaguar-Paw accedes | | 9.12.15.13.7 | 1/6/688 | | Smoking-Squirrel born | | 9.13.0.0.0 | 3/18/692 | katun ending and Stela 30 twin pyramid complex | | 9.13.1.3.19 | 5/31/693 | | Smoking-Squirrel accedes | | 9.13.1.4.19 | 6/20/693 | | Kinichil-Cab captured | | 9.13.1.9.5 | 9/14/693 | | smoke-shell event | | 9.13.1.13.14 | 12/12/693 | | smoke-shell event | | 9.13.2.16.0 | 2/1/695 | | war against Ucanal | | 9.13.3.7.18 | 8/8/695 | Ah-Cacaw captures Jaguar-Paw of El Perú | | | | Jaguar-Paw captured | | 9.13.3.8.11 | 8/21/695 | sacrifice of captives | | 9.13.3.9.18 | 9/17/695 | dedication of Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rituals | | 9.13.3.13.15 | 12/3/695 | sacrificial (war?) ritual with Ox-Ha-Te of El Peru | | 9.13.6.2.0 | 3/27/698 | | | Shield-God K accedes | | 9.13.6.4.17 | 5/23/698 | | smoke-shell event with Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal | | 9.13.6.10.4 | 9/7/698 | | smoke-shell event with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal | | 9.13.7.3.8 | 4/19/699 | | sacrificial rite with Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau | | 9.13.10.0.0 | 1/26/702 | | Smoking-Squirrel dedicates stela | | | | | and displays Shield-Jaguar in sacrificial rites | | 9.13.18.4.16 | 3/23/710 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Yaxha | | 9.13.18.9.15 | 6/28/710 | | sacrifice of Yaxha captive | | 9.13.19.6.3 | 4/12/711 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Sacnab | | 9.14.0.0.0 | 12/5/711 | | Venus and period-ending ceremonies | | | | Stela 16 twin-pyramid complex | | 9.14.0.10.0 | 6/18/711 | summer solstice and Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal in sacrificial rite |

While we know little of the personal history of these rulers, they did leave their permanent mark upon the city in the form of the magnificent buildings raised under their patronage. Much of this construction took place in the sacred precincts of the North Acropolis. One of the most extraordinary projects commissioned there was the new version of Temple 5D-33—2^nd (Fig. 5:2), a temple that covered the tomb of the great ruler Stormy-Sky.[250] During the ensuing centuries, this magnificent new temple served as the central stage front of the face of the North Acropolis, which looked out onto the Great Plaza to the south. It was an important symbol of kingship during the middle period of Tikal’s history and the backdrop for all dynastic rituals conducted within the Great Plaza.

In contrast to the novelty of the stelae of this era, Temple 5D-33-2^nd was a model of tradition. The great plaster masks that surmounted its pyramid and its temple walls restated the symbolism of the Late Preclassic period. This symbolic message was similar to the one we saw on Group H at Uaxactun, a cosmology based upon the Sacred Mountains rather than the arch of the sun and Venus.[251] The lowest masks on Temple 33–2^nd are Witz-Mountain Monsters, whose mouths have been rendered as caves (Fig. 5:2). The middle masks represent more Witz Monsters. These have small, severed human heads and blood scrolls (or perhaps maize) emerging from their summits. The masks on the very top level of the temple depict dragons in the shape of what is probably Venus, representing the front head of the Cosmic Monster. Vines, representing the forests of the world, sprout from the top of these open-mouthed heads.[252] As the king performed his sacred rituals, this facade, like the great mask assemblages of Preclassic Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun discussed in earlier chapters, enveloped him in the ancient, orthodox, and transcendent cosmology of the Maya people.

Temple 33–2^nd was but one building in a rash of construction (Fig. 5:3) that continued into the sixth century. This renovation took place over a period of seventy years under the direction of ten successive rulers, many of whom sat the throne for only a short time.[253] The reason for the brief length of their reigns is not known, but it is possible that what we see here is the passing of the kingship from sibling to sibling at the death of a brother.

Beginning around 9.4.0.0.0, these rulers reworked the summit of the North Acropolis into a pattern of eight buildings, a unique pattern that all future Tikal kings would honor and maintain. One of the most lasting innovations of this time, however, was the twin-pyramid complex, whose prototype was erected in the center of the East Plaza.[254] This new type of architecture, with its uncarved pillars and lack of focus on personal history, facilitated the celebration of period-ending rites, a practice that had been initiated at Tikal by Curl-Snout on Stela 18. His successors sustained that practice, developing what would henceforth be an architectural hallmark of this city and a principal focus of Tikal’s festival cycle for the rest of its history.[255]

Suddenly, amid the exuberant brilliance of sixth-century life, the fortunes of Tikal’s twenty-first king took a disastrous turn for the worse. He and his kingdom fell victim to a new and dangerous dynasty that had been on the rise throughout the fifth century in the forests to the southeast of Tikal. The bellicose rulers of this new kingdom, called Caracol by archaeologists, would take not only Tikal but the entire Petén region by storm, eventually controlling the politics of the Classic Maya heartland for more than a century.[256]

Caracol Goes on the Rampage

The portion of Caracol’s dynastic history that survives in its inscriptions begins in A.D. 495; but the protagonist of our story, a king named Lord Water, did not accede to the throne until April 18, A.D. 553 (9.5.19.1.2). Lord Water recorded part of his personal history on Stelae 6 and 14; but until archaeologists discovered a new altar in recent excavations at Caracol, we had no idea what a deadly and pivotal role this ruler played in the drama at Tikal.

The impact of Lord W’ater upon the Maya world was of such proportions that even before the discovery and translation of the key texts, archaeologists and epigraphers had detected the presence of a cataclysmic pattern. The modern story of this history began in 1950 when the great Mayanist, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, published her seminal study of “style” in Maya sculpture.[257] Noting an absence of monuments between the years 9.5.0.0.0 (A.D. 534) and 9.8.0.0.0 (A.D. 593), she proposed that there must have been a hiatus[258] in Maya civilization during this time. She also noted that this hiatus corresponded to the change in ceramics styles, from the Early Classic period to the Late Classic. Another great Mayanist and a colleague of Proskouriakoff’s, Gordon Willey,[259] also suggested that the Maya experienced a regional crisis at this time—a crisis so great it foreshadowed in scale and impact the great final collapse that would come in the ninth century.

Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s second great contribution to Maya studies, the “historical hypothesis,”[260] contracted the time span of the hiatus somewhat. Up until the publication of this hypothesis in the 1960s, the prevailing view of the Classical Maya was that they were benign calendar priests, peacefully recording endless cycles of time on stelae whose written texts would never ultimately be translated. Proskouriakoff proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these texts not only could be read but were the history of kings and kingdoms. The retrospective histories made possible by her discovery filled in some of the gaps in time at various sites. Nevertheless, archaeologists working at Tikal still have found no stela to fill the gap between Stela 17 dated at 9.6.3.9.15 (September 17, 557) and Stela 30 dated at 9.13.0.0.0 (March 18, 692). Moreover, as we have pointed out earlier, stelae erected before this Tikal hiatus were deliberately effaced by abrading or shattering the stone.[261] Obviously, someone intentionally removed this history from the record. We suspect now that the culprit was none other than Lord Water, the rapacious king of Caracol, who opened a campaign of military conquest by attacking his huge neighbor Tikal.

The first clue to his role as Tikal’s nemesis came in 1986 when archaeologists working at Caracol excavated a ballcourt.[262] On its central axis, they discovered a round marker (Fig. 5:4) with a long 128-glyph text circling its upper surface. The text on this “altar” begins with the birth of the king who commissioned the monument, Lord Kan II, and tells of the accession of his ancestor, Lord Water, on April 18, A.D. 553. From our point of view, however, the most important information on this marker is the text recording Lord Water’s aggression against Tikal. This text tells us that on April 11, 556 (9.6.2.1.11), following the end of Katun 6, Caracol conducted an “ax-war” action “in the land of” the ahau of Tikal.[263]

We know, however, that this initial “ax war” wasn’t fatal to Tikal. Shortly thereafter, on September 17, 557, the city’s ruler, Double-Bird, raised his Stela 17 to commemorate a one-katun anniversary—perhaps of his own accession (Fig. 5:5). Those rituals, however, were the last recorded in the public history of Tikal for a very long time. As the scribe of Altar 21 at Caracol exults, a “star-at-Tikal” war event, usually lethal to the loser, took place five years later, on May 1, 562 (9.6.8.4.2).[264] The tables had been turned. Caracol had mastered the same Tlaloc-Venus war that had defeated Uaxactun two centuries earlier. The long darkness at Tikal had begun.

The correspondence of Caracol’s claim of victory to the all-out destruction at Tikal shows us this claim was not a fabrication. Lord Water’s war had indeed broken the back of Tikal’s pride, independence, and prosperity. We are not sure, however, to what extent, or for how long, Caracol was able to maintain political dominance over its huge rival.

Present archaeology does offer us certain clues to Caracol’s ubiquitous presence in the lives of Tikal’s citizens. For example, Tikal’s art and funerary practices exhibit influence from the region of Caracol[265] beginning with this period. We can also see, as we mentioned above, that DoubleBird and his dynasty ceased to erect stelae and other monuments, and that the building of temples and pyramids slowed down. We can speculate as to the reasons for this. Double-Bird had no doubt been captured and killed, his dynasty ended, and his remaining ahauob cut off from the vast trade routes that provided their wealth. We can vividly see the effects of this impoverishment in their burial practices. The well-stocked tombs of the Tikal nobility gave way to meager caricatures of their former glory, lacking both the quantity and quality of earlier grave goods. Tikal’s oppressors permitted only one tomb of wealth—Burial 195, the resting place of the twenty-second successor of the Tikal dynasty. Never permitted to erect public monuments, this man was at least allowed the privilege of a rich burial and a dignified exit to the Otherworld, perhaps to offset the humiliation of being denied his place in history.

Lord Water enjoyed an unusually long and prosperous reign—prosperous for Caracol at least. After forty-six years as king, he died and left the throne to the eldest of two brothers, who were presumably his sons.[266] Born in 575, the older brother became king on June 26, 599, and reigned lor nineteen uneventful years. The younger brother, however, was a king in the mold of his father. After acceding on March 9, 618, this young ruler took his father’s name as his own and then set out to prove that the earlier victories of Lord Water had not been historical accidents. He launched a campaign that would eventually result in the defeat of Naranjo, a major kingdom located to the east of Tikal.

Lord Kan II recorded the history of his wars on Stela 3 in his own capital and on the Hieroglyphic Stairs erected in the capital of his defeated enemy, Naranjo. The earliest events of Kan H’s reign still resist decipherment, but we do have allusions to a strategic alliance he formed soon after becoming king. On 9.9.5.13.8 (January 9, 619), we read that Lord Kan II performed an important but unidentified action in “the land of” an ahau of Calakmul (Fig. 5:6a), a huge kingdom lying to the north of Tikal within sight of the abandoned mountain-temples of El Mirador.[267] Whatever this action may have been, its declaration marked the beginning of an bond between Kan II and the kings of Calakmul that would prove fateful for both Tikal and Naranjo in the katuns to come. Through this alliance, and others like it, the king of Caracol would surround his intended victims with a ring of deadly enemies.

Calakmul was not new to the stage of Maya history. The city had monuments dating from the Early Classic period and was still going stiong by the Late Classic. Calakmul was most probably the inheritor of El Mirador s power in the north and was a long term rival of Tikal.

1 he firs, major mention of a Calakmul king in the interkingdom politics of the times appears in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, a city to the west of Tikal. A passage found on Lintel 35 of the Early Classic Structure 12 records that a vassal lord of the king of Calakmul participated in a ritual at Yaxchilan on 9.5.2.10.6 (January 16, 537). The king of Calakmul is named with a Cauac-in-hand-Ix glyph, but we shall refer to him hereafter simply as “Cu-Ix.”[268]

The name Cu-Ix also appears on Stela 25 at Naranjo, accompanied by the date 9.5.12.0.4 (May 7, 546). This was the most important date in the life of Naranjo’s king, Ruler I, for he repeatedly celebrated anniversaries of it throughout his lifetime. We have presumed that the event was his accession, but whatever it was, the text on Stela 25 records that it took place a cab “in the territory” of Cu-Ix, the Ahau of Calakmul. This text suggests that the Calakmul king was important, if not instrumental, in the installation of Ruler I as the king of Naranjo. Certainly, these two references demonstrate the far-flung influence of the Calakmul king. They also suggests an envelopment strategy against Tikal involving Calakmul in the north, Caracol in the south, Naranjo in the east, and, perhaps, Yaxchilan in the west.[269]

If Naranjo ever was allied with Calakmul, however, that alliance did not last long. We do not know what happened between Ruler 1 of Naranjo and his erstwhile ally at Calakmul; but we have evidence that in later years, the kings of Caracol felt free to skirmish with Naranjo without endangering their own alliance with Calakmul. Thus, on May 28, 626, Lord Water’s second son, the rapacious Lord Kan II, launched a full-scale campaign against Naranjo. He began his military aggression by committing what we can only broadly interpret as an aggressive or sacrificial action against a lord designated in the text of Caracol Stela 3 simply as “he of Naranjo” (Fig. 5:6b). On that day, Venus was at its stationary point as Morningstar,[270] a position believed to be favorable for victory in battle.

On May 4, 627, one year after the initial battle, Lord Kan II staged his second confrontation with Naranjo. The result was again a war or sacrificial ritual, but this time events took place in his own city (Fig. 5:6c). This event was also commemorated on the stairway text at Naranjo, but here it was clearly referred to as a ballgame (Fig. 5:6d).[271] Although we do not know exactly what was meant by “ballgame” in this context, we do know that the game was often used as a ritual for the disposition of captives. The person recorded here as the “player” (read “captive”) did not die, however, for another three years. His name can be found next to a glyph recording his death on October 4, 630 (Fig. 5:6e). We can’t be sure, but we think this person was Ruler I, the king who had been installed by the Calakmul king in A.D. 546 (9.5.12.0.4). Since the inscription of Naranjo Stela 27 describes Ruler I as “five-katun-ahau,”[272] we surmise that he was over eighty years old when he died.

Whether Lord Kan II was recording Ruler Ts death or that of some other powerful noble in his account of these events, the end result was the same. The death of this individual created a power imbalance at Naranjo which invited the next stage of Caracol’s war. In the following year, on December 27, 631, when Venus as the Eveningstar first appeared in the skies over Naranjo,[273] Lord Kan II attacked that kingdom and decisively defeated its hapless warriors (Fig. 5:7a-b).

Why did Lord Kan II of Caracol choose Naranjo as his next target after his victory over Tikal? Ironically, Ruler I of Naranjo may himself have been responsible for this state of affairs. After Tikal was defeated and its nobility stripped of their wealth and influence, the resulting power vacuum may have tempted the king of Naranjo to betray his former allies. He apparently reached out to Tikal in friendship and alliance, involving himself somehow in the politics of that kingdom.

Behind all these gestures of friendship, however, might linger something even more intriguing: a love story. Sometime in the early seventh century, nobles of Tikal mourned the death of a woman of high rank and special status. This Tikal noblewoman was buried with extraordinary pomp and honor. The Tikal ahauob cut her resting place into the living rock, down under the central axis of Structure 5G-8 in the suburbs of their benighted city. The masons then vaulted the chamber with stone in the manner of the great ancestors of the North Acropolis, the only other people of Tikal to have been honored with vaulted tombs. Their parting gift to the spirit of this woman was a single beautiful polychrome bowl with painted images of the Celestial Bird (Fig. 5:8). On its rim is a text recording that its original owner was Ruler I of Naranjo. How it came to Tikal we do not know, but its presence in the tomb of this woman suggests she had some special association with Naranjo, either through marriage or through the exchange of gifts. The occasion symbolized by this bowl may have called down the wrath of Caracol on the aged king of Naranjo.

Neither of the accounts of this “star-war” event found at Caracol and Naranjo actually records the name of the king of Naranjo as a captive. This deletion does not prove, however, that the victim was not the king. We know for certain that some Naranjo notable was eventually sacrificed in a rather gruesome victory celebration which took place in the city of Caracol’s ally, Calakmul. The Hieroglyphic Stairs the defeated Naran-janos were forced to build as a subjugation monument record that a nasty follow-up event spelled k’uxah[274] (“to torture” or perhaps “to eat”) was perpetrated upon this individual “in the land of” the king of Calakmul (Fig. 5:7c). For the time being, Calakmul would benefit from its alliance with the top dog, Lord Kan II; but in the end, as we shall see, it would pay dearly for its role in this deadly game of war and sacrifice.

This victory seems to have temporarily sated the ambitions of Lord Kan II, for he neither attacked Naranjo nor took any more of its lords hostage for the next five years. Instead, he was content to watch and wait for Venus to once again reach an optimum battle position. On 9.10.3.2.12 (March 4, 636), such a favorable position occurred. When the Morningstar was fifteen days and .6° past its maximum elongation, he attacked Naranjo yet again. This time when he recorded his participation in the battle, he prominently featured his personal capture of a lord named 18-Rabbit (Fig. 5;7d). Ironically, 18-Rabbit gained his own kind of immortality by being the victim.

A little over a year later, on 9.10.4.16.2 (November 24, 637), Lord Kan II completed the final act in this long drama by celebrating the completion of his first katun of reign (Fig. 5:7e). Adding insult to injury, he recorded these rites not at his home city but at Naranjo on its subjugation monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs. This ceremony must have rubbed a great deal of salt into the wound of Naranjo’s defeat.

Caracol’s rampage through the Peten changed the lives of noble individuals in many proud and ancient cities. Lord Kan II and his allies no doubt claimed many valuable goods from the losers as tribute. Defeated cities were forced to give up precious commodities like obsidian, shell currencies, heirlooms, craftsmen, handwoven cloth, and highly skilled artists. This tribute was the key to the domination Caracol held over this region. Because the Maya had no standing armies, conquering troops could not be garrisoned as watchdogs in a defeated city. But such policing was unnecessary. A city stripped of its wealth and its king could rarely strike back at its enemies. Loss of prestige resulted in far more than humiliation. It meant waning or destroyed political influence and the inability to recruit population and goods from the hinterlands. Without these people and goods, a city could not hope to prosper and grow.

Perhaps one of the most devastating results of defeat, however, was the stripping away of all public art. When Caracol effaced the monuments of its enemies and impoverished them to the point where they could erect no others, it was taking away their most cherished possession—history. Both Tikal and Naranjo suffered terribly in this sense. In the 130 years after the defeat of Tikal, only one king, the twenty-second, left his name in the inscribed history of the kingdom, and this not in a public space. We would not have known of him at all but for the pottery and wood texts deposited in his tomb, Burial 195, perhaps in defiance of Caracol’s rule.

The lords of the allied city of Uaxactun also suffered in the wake of Caracol’s victories, while no doubt appreciating the bitter irony of the situation. 1 ikal had been undone by the very same Tlaloc-Venus war that the brothers Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had waged against Uaxactun 180 years earlier: The victors of that conflict were hoisted by the same petard of warfare they had introduced among the Maya. Yet rather than being able to celebrate the irony of the situation, the Uaxactun nobility, as part of Tikal’s hegemony, found themselves deeply affected by this defeat as well. With the demise of the royal dynasty at Tikal, Uaxactun also lost the kingship, and the public ritual life of that city virtually stopped. Its leaders ceased erecting monuments in 9.6.0.0.0[275] and did not resume the practice for two hundred years.

At Naranjo, the impact of defeat was shorter-lived, but no less dramatic. On December 6, 642 (9.10.10.0.0), the victorious Caracol ruler lorced the defeated people of Naranjo to dedicate the Hieroglyphic Stairs, a monument that glorified his triumph over them. This kind of stairway not only celebrated defeat and victory, but was used to dispose of captives, who were trussed into bundles and rolled down it after sacrifice in the ballgame. In their stairway, the surviving elite of Naranjo had a constant reminder of the hegemony of Caracol. That disgraceful monument was the last written record placed in public space for the next forty years.

As the katuns ground slowly by, new lords bent on revenge and on rebuilding the reputations of their cities lit sacred fires on the altars of the Peten to lighten the pall of disaster over Tikal and Naranjo. Unlike Smoking-Frog of Tikal, whose triumphs at Uaxactun inspired the admiration and imagination of an entire region, Lord Kan II and his Calakmul allies never succeeded in quelling the hatred and consolidating the submission of their enemies. In the short term, their failed experiment in empire building fired the ambitions of new challengers from the Petexbatun region to the south. These new lords from the kingdom of Dos Pilas would eventually pull Naranjo up from the ashes of defeat and jar Tikal into taking back its own. In wreaking vengeance against the former victors, however, the lords of Dos Pilas would seal the Maya doom even as they rejuvenated the dynasts of the defeated kingdoms. In the long run, the Maya struggle to forge a political unity powerful enough to match their shared vision of divine power would break on the pride of kings and their thirst for vengeance.

Dos Pilas Joins the Party

In an era of great kings who strove to stretch their power beyond traditional boundaries, the long and illustrious career of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas stands out as one of most remarkable of his times. His home was a hilltop city located near Lake Petexbatún and the Pasión River in a region that had played a significant role in Maya cultural history since the Middle Preclassic Period. Here, in the middle of the seventh century. Flint-Sky-God K declared a new kingdom, perhaps carrying with it the hopes of the house of Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal. This new kingdom, Dos Pilas, shared its Emblem Glyph with that ancient kingdom; and it is possible that its ruling family was an offshoot of the Tikal royal lineage— highborn individuals who left Tikal sometime after its downfall and found their way to this new region.[276]

Flint-Sky-God K was a master strategist in the game of politics and domination. He declared kingship at Dos Pilas on 9.10.12.11.2 (July 5, 645) and immediately began to consolidate his power with a series of marriage alliances with nearby kingdoms. He married a woman from the kingdom of Itzan, who bore him two sons. One son inherited both the kingship and his father’s military brilliance. The other son is mentioned in the inscriptional record but never acceded to the throne.[277] Flint-Sky-God K also sent women of his own house, perhaps sisters or daughters, to marry rulers from nearby El Chorro and El Pato.[278]

At the same time, Flint-Sky-God K began a dynastic tradition of rule by conquest. He and his nobles terrified their enemies in a campaign spanning twenty years, from A.D. 664 to 684. He began his glorious saga with the capture of a lord named Tah-Mo’ (“Torch-Macaw”) on March 2, 664 (Fig. 5:9a). In a fashion typical of Maya warriors, Flint-Sky-God K recorded the personal names of his captives, but not the names of their kingdoms, so we do not know what city this hapless man was from. Flint-Sky-God K followed up this victory with a whole series of wars, including several of the Tlaloc-Venus variety. His ambition led him ultimately to intervene in the affairs of the central Petén kingdoms under Caracol’s sway, but he did so in a cunning and circuitous way, as we shall later see.

The power he gained through his successful campaigns eventually brought Flint-Sky-God K to the attention of the powerful kingdom of Calakmul, the erstwhile ally of Caracol and the deadly enemy of Tikal and Naranjo. Part of the story of the contemporary Calakmul king, Jaguar-Paw, is told on a series of panels looted from the region of Calakmul, and part in passages from the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas. One of these looted panels lists Jaguar-Paw’s birth date as October 9, 649 (Fig. 5:9c). Another tells us that around 9.11.10.0.0,[279] this young prince participated with Flint-Sky-God K in a ceremonial event at a place called Yaxhá (Fig. 5:9b), which was perhaps the lake region located near Naranjo. On February 25, 683, Jaguar-Paw returned to the Petexbatún region for another ritual’celebration held on Lake Petexbatún near Dos Pilas[280] (Fig. 5;9d). We are not sure of the nature of these ceremonies, because that part of the text is missing, but they imply some kind of significant connection, perhaps an alliance, between Jaguar-Paw and the vigorous Dos Pilas warlord.

Whatever the relationship between the two men, it was an important one that led to the participation of Flint-Sky-God K in Jaguar-Paw’s accession as king of Calakmul on April 6, 686 (Fig. 5:10a and b).[281] Jaguar-Paw’s accession was also recorded at the kingdom of El Perú, to the north of Dos Pilas. We find this passage on a pair of looted stelae, recorded in association with the period-ending rites conducted by the El Perú king Mah-Kina-Balam and his wife. On one of the monuments, the El Perú lord noted that he had displayed the God K scepter in the company of Jaguar-Paw. These texts suggest that the kings of the western kingdoms traveled to Calakmul to participate in the accession ritual of Jaguar-Paw, who in turn made reciprocal visits to their kingdoms.

At Dos Pilas, Flint-Sky-God K commemorated his participation in Jaguar-Paw’s accession on his own Stela 13 (Fig. 5:10b), which he mounted on the platform supporting his great war monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs 2. The juxtaposition of Jaguar-Paw’s coronation text next to Flint-Sky-God K’s war memorial associates the founding of Dos Pilas with the accession at Calakmul. By doing so, Flint-Sky-God K was paying Jaguar-Paw a powerful compliment.

This all-glyphic Stela 13 conveys first that Jaguar-Paw acceded on 9.12.13.17.7 (April 6, 686). Second, it says that this accession ritual “was seen (yilahy[282] by Flint-Sky-God K, captor of Tah-Mo’, at a place called Nab Tunich, the toponym designating a location somewhere within the kingdom of Calakmul.[283] Presumably, Flint-Sky-God K traveled to Nab Tunich to observe and to participate in the accession rites of Jaguar-Paw.

Regardless of the “friendliness” of this association, there is some evidence that Jaguar-Paw—perhaps before he became the king—was in a subservient position to Flint-Sky-God K, at least in some circumstances. In a scene on a looted pot,[284] Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul is painted kneeling in the position of subordination before a Dos Pilas Lord (Fig. 5:10c). We presume this Dos Pilas lord was Flint-Sky-God K or perhaps his heir.[285] The question that arises, however, is: How’ did a lord of Calakmul and ally of the powerful Caracol find himself in this position in the first place? Since the evidence does not exist to accurately answer that question, we can only suggest various scenarios. Perhaps Flint-Sky-God K was playing “godfather” to Jaguar-Paw, cultivating this young prince before he became the king to secure his support for the new Dos Pilas hegemony in the west. Or, in light of Flint-Sky-God K’s military campaign in the Peten at this time, it is just possible that he wished to establish his own alliance with Calakmul—or at least the promise from its king that he would not interfere with the ambitions of Dos Pilas. At any rate, somehow Flint-Sky-God K made the Calakmul lords an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Whatever the scenario might have been, by neutralizing the king of Calakmul, Flint-Sky-God K was able to extend his influence eastward toward the defeated city of Naranjo. It was a strategy that effectively removed Caracol as a major player in the events to come. Flint-Sky-God K’s command of the primary political instruments of his time, war and marriage, forged the foundation of a new pattern of power in the Peten.

Part of Flint-Sky-God K’s genius as a leader in this complex and interconnected arena of power politics was this very ability to implement different policies in different kingdoms as the situation warranted. While he was neutralizing Calakmul to the north, Flint-Sky-God K was also expanding eastward into the power vacuum left by the defeat of Tikal and Naranjo. Curiously enough, he concentrated his efforts on the lesser prize, Naranjo. This time he resorted to marriage, rather than war or political alliance, as his strategy. He sent a daughter[286] named Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau (“Six Celestial Lord”)[287] to Naranjo in order to reestablish a royal house at this ancient community after its destruction at the hands of Caracol. Although we do not know all the particulars, we can visualize s her pilgrimage.

•

The journey to her new home was difficult and dangerous, for the route she had to take crossed the war-torn heart of the Peten region. In spite of the danger, the wedding party traveled in ceremonial splendor, braving the dangers hidden in the arching forest and the hot fields that lined the way to Naranjo. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau sat in her sedan chair of dark polished wood upon royal pillows of stuffed jaguar skin, veiled from the prying eyes of village spies by a canopy of fine cotton gossamer. A company of sturdy bearers surrounded the four sweating men who carried the long poles of the sedan chair on their shoulders, ready to relieve them in the work of relaying their precious burden to its final destination. Behind came more bearers with bundles of cotton and bark cloth laden with gifts of jade, painted pottery, embroidered textiles, perfumed wooden boxes, and carved-shell diadems.

At the head of this party, the bravest and most experienced of the noble warriors of Dos Pilas strode in full battle gear, resplendent and frightening in their helmets of stuffed deer, peccary, and jaguar. The bright plumage of forest birds and the shrunken heads of defeated enemies dangled from their chests and waists. They carried throwing darts and spearthrowers, stabbing spears tipped with long leaf-shaped points of stone, and clubs studded with razor-sharp imported obsidian blades. Takers of captives and sacrificers, these men would not negotiate if confronted on the trail: They would die to the last man before letting their lady fall into the hands of the enemy. Finally, the best woodsmen of the Dos Pilas household were deployed in a wide circle around the route, moving swiftly and cautiously, alert for treachery.

We can imagine the courage and resolution of the Dos Pilas princess, a living declaration of war against the most powerful enemies of her family, as she traveled to her new home. The first sacred rituals she performed after her arrival lasted three days, beginning on August 30, 682 (9.12.10.5.12), in the time of the beneficent rains of late summer. One hundred and sixteen days earlier, Ah-Cacaw had resurrected the kingship at Tikal. Four years would pass before her father’s journey to Calakmul to participate in Jaguar-Paw’s accession rituals. In this time of changing destinies, a young queen stood at the center of the Maya world. High on her pyramid she spilled her blood in rapture, calling forth the ancestors to witness and confirm the new destiny she brought to this place, while the gathered hosts of the city danced and sang in the broad plazas below, jeering the authors of the hated Hieroglyphic Stairs in their midst. The red towering temple mountains of Naranjo reverberated with the pulsing call of the drums and the deep moan of the shell trumpets reaching friend and foe alike across the vast green canopy of the forest: The royal ahauob of Naranjo were back. The lady from Dos Pilas and her new nobility would reckon their history from this joyous celebration for katuns to come; and under the leadership of her son, Smoking-Squirrel, they would bring back enemies to writhe and die before the monuments commemorating that fateful day.

There are four separate texts recording the events surrounding Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival in Naranjo, but only two of them are still legible today. In both of these texts (Fig. 5:1 la-b), the glyph describing her ritual actions resembles the hand (hom) glyph[288] that Stormy-Sky used to record the conquest of Uaxactun on Stela 31 at Tikal. Here, however, conquest in the sense of “the destruction of buildings” couldn’t possibly be the intended meaning. The action recorded on these stelae is one that led to the dedication of a pyramid three days later (Fig. 5:11c) and most likely the reestablishment of the royal house of Naranjo. As we have described in our historical reconstruction above, we believe both these events were direct results of the marriage of the daughter of the king of Dos Pilas to a noble of Naranjo. One meaning of horn is “borders or boundaries” and certainly these are essential qualities of a viable state. When Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau dedicated the pyramid three days after her marriage, she was reopening the portal to the Otherworld, reestablishing the sacred connection to the ancestors, which had been broken by Naranjo’s enemies so many years ago. This interpretation of events is further borne out by the fact that the pyramid used the Naranjo Emblem Glyph as part of its proper name, indicating that it was the Otherworld portal of this new dynasty. Naranjo had again become a place of kings, a power to be reckoned with once more.

Naranjo Strikes Back

Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s efforts to found a new dynasty were not in vain. On January 6, 688, five years after the dedication of the Naranjo royal house, a male heir, named Smoking-Squirrel, was born to the royal family. This youngster was only five years old when, on May 31, 693, he became the king of Naranjo.[289] Never in all the historical texts of Naranjo do the scribes acknowledge the parentage of Smoking-Squirrel, so for many years his origins remained a mystery. It took the insight of the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff to realize that Smoking-Squirrel was most likely 5 the child of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.

There are many clues leading to this assumption. Not only does Wac-Chanil-Ahau live long into Smoking-Squirrel’s reign, but every time he erected a monument to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, he paired it with a monument dedicated to this woman. These monuments always featured the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival at Naranjo and depicted her engaging in the exact same rituals of state as her son (Fig. 5:12).[290] Smoking-Squirrel constantly portrayed himself with his mother in this fashion for one very important reason: She was the source of his legitimacy and his link to the throne.

Smoking-Squirrel did not, however, find it to his advantage to feature his father on any of his monuments. His male parent was probably a local man whose modest achievements and social rank did not lend prestige to his son. Instead, Smoking-Squirrel capitalized on the celebrity that came from his mother’s pedigree as the child of the illustrious Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas (Fig. 5:13), his maternal grandfather. The texts suggest that this pedigree from Dos Pilas was considered more historically important and politically significant than even his own status as son to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.

The revival of the dynasty and the ascendancy of this child to the ancestral throne of his kingdom smashed the fragile peace of the central Peten. The revived Naranjo nobility launched a campaign to reestablish the power of their royal family, challenging their enemies to meet them on the battlefield. There under a relentless tropical sun, fortune delivered many sons of noble families into their hands.

Naranjo’s first victim was not its enemy Caracol, but rather a strategic border community called Ucanal which stood between Naranjo, Tikal, and the city of Lord Kan II. The kingdom of Ucanal had a hilltop capital to the south of Lake Yaxha[291] on the west bank of the Mopan River. Probably an ally of Caracol, since it straddled the shortest route Lord Kan’s marauders could take on their forays into the Peten, Ucanal was targeted perhaps as much to humiliate the kings of Caracol as to gain military victories for Naranjo.

The campaign began on June 20, 693, only twenty days after the five-year-old boy was placed on the throne. It was the day before the summer solstice, and the Eveningstar was gleaming its last before it would disappear into the glare of the sun on its journey to become the Morningstar. The warriors of Naranjo struck, taking captive a lord of Ucanal named Kinichil-Cab (Fig. 5:14). Doubtless the young king, Smoking-Squirrel, was still too tender in age to have led his army personally. Instead, it appears that Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau took credit for the capture of the unfortunate Kinichil-Cab, for on Stela 24, she stands upon his battered body (Fig. 5:15b).

This battle and the capture of a lord of Ucanal were but the opening blows against Caracol’s hold on the Peten. Naranjo continued to chip away at its enemy’s strength, harassing them at every turn. One hundred days after the first attack, on September 14, 693, the warriors of Naranjo engaged Ucanal in yet another battle, this one probably on the order of a skirmish. They attacked again on December 12 of the same year. This military campaign culminated on February 1, 695, when Naranjo once <verbatim></verbatim> again engaged the main forces of Ucanal in bloody combat, this time with a lord of Dos Pilas in attendance to participate in the victory. The major prize taken in this second full-scale battle of the war was the lord Shield-Jaguar, the unfortunate captive who is featured in the grim rites recorded on both Stela 22 (Fig. 5:15a) and Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17).[292]

Now the star of war glinted brightly for Naranjo. Smoking-Squirrel, like his earlier counterpart at Caracol, timed his battles and war-related rituals according to the position of Venus. He declared his kingship as Venus hovered on the stationary point before inferior conjunction. His S first war event occurred at the helical setting of Eveningstar on the eve of the summer solstice. Finally, his second triumphant battle against Ucanal was waged when Venus rose helically as the Morningstar, exactly one cycle later.

As we have mentioned before, prestigious captives taken in battle were often kept alive for years on end. They were displayed in public rituals and often participated in these rituals in gruesome, humiliating, and painful ways. Smoking-Squirrel and Wac-Chanil-Ahau were enthusiastic practitioners of this sacred tradition. Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal survived his capture to reappear four years later, on May 23, 698, in an event that was in all probability a sacrificial ritual of some sort (Fig. 5:14). Later in the same year, on September 23, Shield-Jaguar suffered through the same rite in “the land of Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo.” A year later, on April 19, 699, it was Lady Wac-Chanil’s turn. The hapless Kinichil-Cab appeared again in a public ritual she conducted. On Naranjo Stela 24 (Fig. 5:15b) we see her standing on the bound, nearly naked body of this unfortunate warrior. Finally, on 9.13.10.0.0 (January 26, 702), the day Smoking-Squirrel dedicated both Stela 22 and Stela 24, the young king displayed his famous captive, Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal, in a public blood-letting ritual (Fig. 5:15a). As depicted, the ill-fated captive is nearly naked, stripped of all his marks of rank and prestige, holding his bound wrists up toward the magnificently dressed fourteen-year-old king who sits high above him on a jaguar-pillow.

In spite of his achievements, this energetic young king was still far from the fulfillment of his military ambitions. When Katun 14 was nearing its end, he began yet another series of battles, which he later recorded on Stela 23 (Fig. 5:16). This time his target was a nearer kingdom, Yaxha, located to the south on the shores of a lake bearing the same name. It was perhaps there that his grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul had acted together in a ritual years before. On March 23, 710, just after the spring equinox, Smoking-Squirrel attacked Yaxha, accompanied by an individual who was the sibling of either his mother or his wife.[293] On this day, Venus was making its last appearance as Morningstar and Jupiter and Saturn hung in conjunction at their second stationary points.[294] Ninety-seven days later, on June 8, shortly after the summer solstice, there was an even more spectacular alignment in the heavens, this time among Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury.[295] On this occasion Smoking-Squirrel conducted a ritual with a prisoner from Yaxha. We have not yet deciphered the glyphs describing this ritual, but at least part of it included the scattering of blood. A year after this rite, on April 12, 711, when Venus again appeared as Morningstar, Smoking-Squirrel went to war once more, this time on the shore of a lake adjacent to Yaxha, a place known as Sacnab, or “Clear Lake.”[296]

Stela 23’s history ends with the battle at Sacnab, but we can pick the story up again on Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17). There Smoking-Squirrel begins his account with the celebration of the period ending on 9.14.0.0.0 at the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar. This heavenly event was celebrated not only at Naranjo but at Copan and Tikal as well, showing how widespread these Venus rituals had become in the Maya world.[297] Two hundred days later, on the summer solstice (June 22, 712), Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal reappears in a rite which is enacted on the occasion of the maximum elongation of Eveningstar. Eighteen years of public humiliation had passed since his capture. We suspect this long-suffering prisoner did not survive this ritual, for with this date he disappears from the record.

[[][Fig. 5:18 Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau at Her Son’s First Anniversary of Rule]]

Smoking-Squirrel’s rampage through the central Peten finally ended, to the relief of neighboring kingdoms, on February 16, 713, with the first katun anniversary of his accession. As he had since the beginning of his reign, Smoking-Squirrel paired the stela commemorating this event with a stela depicting his mother, the founder of his line. Stela 2, which is essentially a war monument, stood adjacent (Fig. 5:12) to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 3 (Fig. 5:18), which shows her participating in her s son’s anniversary celebration. In this text, Smoking-Squirrel once again memorialized her arrival. He also created some useful political propaganda by linking the date of the first katun anniversary of his own accession to the same anniversary date of Naranjo’s Ruler I. Ruler I was, of course, the king who had fallen victim to Caracol’s victory eighty-one years earlier. With this pair of inscriptions, Smoking-Squirrel completed the circle of defeat and triumph for Naranjo. The glory of that city had been revived by a new and vital dynasty.

Smoking-Squirrel’s fame as a warrior was no doubt legend in the region of the Fetén. His successful military campaigns upset the destinies of cities as dramatically as the past victories of his hated enemy, Caracol; and his postconquest strategies were cleverly designed to keep his enemies powerless. For example, by keeping his high-ranked captives, Shield-Jaguar and Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal, alive for many years, Smoking-Squirrel most likely disrupted the succession within both their families and their kingdom. This elegant strategy created chaos in a social structure where these individuals could not be replaced until after they were dead. To display these captives in public rituals over many years confirmed the military prowess and the political power of the young king among his own constituency, and sowed fear and respect among Naranjo’s rivals. Smoking-Squirrel also made optimum use of the powerful allies that came to him through his mother’s line. He fought his wars with the support of his formidable and aggressive grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and most probably Shield-God K, his mother’s half brother, who became ruler of Dos Pilas on 9.13.6.2.0 (March 27, 698). These battles secured the region surrounding Lake Yaxhá, making the journey between Naranjo and the Petexbatún stronghold held by his mother’s people both easier and safer.

The campaign of battles waged by Smoking-Squirrel and his people was not totally inspired by a spirit of revenge and conquest, however. This campaign was also imbued with a spiritual content, chartered by the now venerable mandates of Venus-Tlaloc warfare. Smoking-Squirrel planned his military actions according to the movements of Venus, calling upon the power of that god of conquest to sanction his aggression. The costume he wears on Stela 2, in fact (Fig. 5:17), is the Late Classic version of the same war costume we saw Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal wear in their first Venus war victories. Timing his attacks by Venus also gave Smoking-Squirrel the opportunity to re-create the same cosmic setting as that in which his own predecessor, Ruler I, had suffered ignominious defeat. Thus, Smoking-Squirrel’s successes worked to neutralize his ancestor’s defeat, proving that the god once again favored Naranjo and accepted the restoration of the dynasty.

There can be little doubt that Smoking-Squirrel’s ultimate goal had always been to redeem his city from its disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol. He accomplished this by systematically crushing Caracol’s allies, and bringing a resounding finish to Caracol as a force to be reckoned with in the Petén. Once he was certain that he had reestablished the flow of history in Naranjo’s favor, Smoking-Squirrel finally dismantled the hated stairs the victorious Caracol warlords had erected in his capital. Resetting it in illegible order, he created a nonsense chronicle, a fitting end for a monument erected by his enemies to rob his people of their own place in history.

One of his most telling acts of revenge was to have one of the stairs’ glyph blocks transported to Ucanal. There he placed it in the center alley of the ballcourt,[298] probably in conjunction with some very unpleasant sacrificial rituals involving the defeated lords of that kingdom. The fine irony of this ceremony was surely not lost on the king of Caracol, who was forced to sit passively and watch from afar the neutralization of the monument with which his ancestor had humiliated Naranjo. What more elegant revenge could Smoking-Squirrel have conceived of than the transfer of this block to the city of Caracol’s own ally?

The Giant Stirs

Almost simultaneous with Naranjo’s reemergence as a power in the Peten, Tikal began to reach out and regain its position in the Maya world. The strategy used by its new king exactly paralleled Smoking-Squirrel’s: a successful war waged against the alliance that had once defeated his ancestors.

It’s puzzling that the two principal victims of Caracol’s military rampage, Tikal and Naranjo, make little mention of each other’s efforts to throw off the bonds of their mutual enemy. The reason for this rather deliberate silence is not certain. Perhaps the meddling of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas in Naranjo’s affairs sowed distrust between cities that should have been logical allies. In any event, we are not yet certain if the timing of Tikal’s revival was connected in any way to Naranjo’s; nor do we know to what extent these cities’ struggles to recoup themselves might have been mutually reinforcing.

We do know that Tikal’s liberation may have begun somewhat earlier than Naranjo’s. Although no stelae dated between the years A.D. 557 and 692 survived at Tikal, we know that a ruler named Shield-Skull began an ambitious remodeling project in the North Acropolis and East Plaza during the middle of the seventh century.[299] Even as the dynasty of Great-Jaguar-Paw was plotting its revenge, its kings had already begun the healing process by rebuilding the center of their city. By this act they began wiping out the evidence of Lord Water’s depredations and reaffirming their own cosmic greatness. The mere fact that they got away with this new, architectural program is telling evidence of Caracol’s weakening grip on the Peten in the waning decades of the seventh century.

On 9.12.9.17.16 (May 6, 682), just as Flint-Sky-God K was preparing to send his daughter Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau to Naranjo, a new vigorous ruler, named Ah-Cacaw,[300] ascended to the throne of Tikal and began a campaign to restore the honor of its ruling family. A large man for his times, Ah-Cacaw would live into his fourth katun, and be over sixty years old when he died. At 167 cm (5 feet 5 inches), he was a veritable giant,[301] standing ten centimeters above the average height of the men of his s kingdom.

No sooner had he claimed the throne than Ah-Cacaw began a tremendous new building program, rallying the pride and ingenuity of the entire metropolis with his enormous demands for both skilled and unskilled labor. He mobilized clans of masons, architects, painters, and sculptors and put them to work reshaping the most important ritual space in the city: the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza to the south of it. Embodying five hundred years of royal ritual and history, the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza were not merely the heart of the city, they were the enduring expression of the ruling house of Tikal. Significantly, these monuments also bore the marks of the ignominious desecration placed upon them by Tikal’s conquerors. Ah-Cacaw’s visionary plan was not only to reclaim these monuments, but to surround them with the largest buildings ever known in the Maya world, a group of temples that would ring the Great Plaza, the ceremonial center of his revived kingdom.

The first step in Ah-Cacaw’s plan was to deactivate the ritual spaces of the North Acropolis by cutting them off visually and physically from the Great Plaza. He then shifted the focus of dynastic celebration into the Great Plaza itself. To do this, he reworked the south side and ceremonial front of the North Acropolis. When he began this work, the south side of the Acropolis already held some of the finest pyramids ever built in the history of the kingdom. These “sacred mountains” stood in a row behind the tree-stone forest of stelae created by Tikal’s great kings (Fig. 5:19). On the right side of this magnificent temple group stood Temple 32–1 st,[302] the structure built over Burial 195, the tomb of the twenty-second ruler of Tikal. Ruling around A.D. 600, this fellow was the first king to endure the darkness of a reign without history under the heel of Caracol. On the opposite end towered Temple 34–1^st, built over Burial 10, the tomb of Curl-Snout, the son of the conqueror of Uaxactun and the father of Stormy-Sky.

The centerpiece of the North Acropolis’s facade, however, was the magnificent Temple 33–2^nd (Fig. 5:2) built before the disastrous defeat. Raised in the era of the staff kings, its exquisitely modeled and painted stucco masks displayed the original great architectural programs of the Late Preclassic period. This sacred mountain, above all others, had been the orthodox focus of royal ecstasy and the dramatic backdrop against which the stelae commemorating each king’s vision stood for all to witness. Throughout much of the sixth and seventh centuries this temple remained as the indomitable image of Tikal’s kingship. Under its sculptured pyramid lay Burial 48, the tomb of the great Stormy-Sky; and newly set into its base were Burial 24 and Burial 23, which was probably the tomb of Shield-Skull, Ah-Cacaw’s father. It is no wonder then that this s was the location Ah-Cacaw chose to raise his breathtaking Temple 33.

Ah-Cacaw’s first major political act was to honorably bury two of the desecrated stelae that had been left as trash in the Great Plaza by the victorious Caracol ahauob. We can reconstruct some of what happened during these rededication rites from the archaeological record. At least two of the rituals focused upon the shattered remains of the beautiful Stela 26 (Fig. 5:20) and Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece documenting the victory of Tikal over Uaxactun more than three hundred years earlier.

Over a period of several days, Ah-Cacaw buried these stelae with great ceremony within Temples 33 and 34 (Fig. 5:21). He would have regarded this as a time of solemn ceremonial preparation, an initial, pivotal action in his campaign to repair the dishonor done to his ancestral kings by the blasphemous conquerors. In the following passage, we will visualize the events comprising this important historical occasion.

Ah-Cacaw, a full head taller than his silent companions, halted the procession moving across the broad plaza in the slanting orange light of dawn. His long shadow thrust like a finger from a fist toward the forest of tree-stones standing before the looming temple-mountains. The crooked shadows of the stelae, in turn, fell back onto the steps which led up to the lineage houses holding the earthly remains of his holy ancestors. He raised his eyes to the central temple. The huge plaster faces of the gods, mounted upon this sacred mountain, shone as brightly as they had when first made by his ancestors long before the disastrous defeat of the twenty-first successor of his line. It had taken the entire lifetimes of the four kings before him to bring the kingdom back from that defeat. Now the day of rebirth had finally arrived. As the twenty-sixth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, he was determined that his brother kings would learn to respect Tikal once more, as they had when Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had won their victory over Uaxactun.

Two of those four intervening kings were now buried in the great mountain that held the tomb of Stormy-Sky. One of them was Ah-Cacaw’s father, Shield-Skull, who had begun the restoration of the city to its former glory[303] by commissioning monuments in the Central Acropolis and in the large plaza east of the ancestral mountains. Tikal’s twenty-second king lay within the pyramid on the eastern shoulder of Stormy-Sky’s burial temple, placing three of the kings who had suffered through the humiliation of a reign without history in the threshold zone of the ancient acropolis.[304]

The silence of his reverie was broken by the grunts of struggling men. Ah-Cacaw turned to face the stelae platform before the westernmost of the three temples at the front of the range of sacred mountains. With a unified cry of effort, six of the men straightened their backs, lifting the enormous chunk of broken stela. The stone, cradled in a net of thick ropes suspended from the thick pole they carried on their shoulders, tore at their strength as they took trembling steps toward the steep stairs that rose toward the dark inner sanctum of the western temple. Here the revered Curl-Snout, father of Stormy-Sky, lay at rest under tons of quarried stone mortared with the sweat of the laboring hundreds who had shaped his tomb into its mountain form. As the first six lords staggered up the steps, a second team of men worked to fasten ropes around the other large fragment of tree-stone that lay broken on the plaza floor. This sacred monument was Tikal history incarnate. It carried the names of the ninth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Conqueror of Uaxactun; his grandson, Stormy-Sky, the eleventh successor; Kan-Boar, the twelfth successor; and the thirteenth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, who had been named for his illustrious forebear. Hoisting the carrying pole onto their shoulders, the second cluster of young lords staggered forward in the warming light of the rising sun.

It took the young men, all sons of the royal clan and its high-ranking allies, the entire morning to complete their task. Only five or six of them could bring their strength to bear upon the carrying pole at one time. They had to work slowly and in turns, anxious to protect the exquisitely carved text fragments from the further desecration a careless movement might cause. For three hours the king and his closest companions stood upon the steps of the sacred mountain, watching the slow and halting upward progress of the men. A crowd of witnesses gradually formed on the plaza below as patriarchs and their entourages arrived from both the city and the regions beyond. It was a quiet, tense occasion. Finally, Ah-Cacaw’s lords eased the first large fragment of stone into a neat pit they had cut through the floor of the rear chamber. This pit lay just before the blank back wall of the temple, in the rear room that was the inner sanctum and the portal to the Otherworld.[305] Soon thereafter the second fragment of the broken stela was lowered into the pit.

When the young men emerged from the temple, Ah-Cacaw went to the place where the tree-stone had lain and picked up a handful of fragments left in dusty disarray on the hard plaster surface of the plaza. Cradling the broken fragments reverently against his naked chest, he carried them up the stairs and into the cool darkness of the temple. There he laid them gently into the pit with the larger pieces. Kinsmen and men of high rank followed his lead, moving single file up the stairs until all that remained of the great tree-stone lay in the pit. Ah-Cacaw had ordered that one large chunk be kept back. This fragment would be placed in another offering pit along with the altar of Stormy-Sky’s tree-stone, soon to be deposited in the central temple. Burying the tree-stone fragment with the altar would link the two ritual burials so that his ancestral dead would understand his motivation. By this act, Ah-Cacaw hoped to erase the desecration visited upon their memory by the victors from the southeast and to summon their spirits to help him in the coming war.[306]

The king waited in silence until the solemn procession had ended. Then he led the shamans and the principal men of his lineage into the rear chamber where the fragments lay in their grave. In front of the pit that held the pieces of the tree-stone were three deep holes dug into the floor. These holes would hold the offerings that would both amplify the power emanating from the ancient stela and seal it into the threshold of the portal.

The mood of the crowd intensified as sounds of drumming echoed throughout the huge plaza. It seemed as if everyone in the city was present. The piercing cry of flutes and clay whistles rose from the children of Tikal. Rattles shivered on the dancing ankles of farmers, masons, and weavers, counterpointing the deep-throated rhythm of the chest-high drums arrayed along the stairs. The people—ahauob and common folk alike—sang and danced a plaintive dirge to rekindle the spirits of the desecrated tree-stones of the ancient kings.[307] At the culmination of this ritual of remembrance and burial, the gods and ancestors would turn their faces once more toward the great kingdom at the center of the world. The lineage of Tikal’s kings would reign once again with honor restored.

High nobles chosen for their rank and accomplishments moved from the council houses[308] through the swirling crowd. They bore into the sanctum large offering plates called zac lac.[309] The waists of these men were thickly encircled by the wrappings of their hipcloths and skirts, garments made of fine cotton cloth resplendent with painted and woven patterns rendered in the bright hues of forest dyes.[310] The lordly stewards sported turbans of fine fabric, tightly bound around their long black hair with jade-studded leather headbands. Elegant tail feathers arched from the headbands to bob in time with the graceful movements of the procession. Deep-green jade beads and bloodred spondylus shell ornaments gleamed in their earlobes and against their brown chests as they moved with studied dignity, bringing their gifts to the sacred tree-stone.

Ah-Cacaw was pleased with the richness of the offerings they carried in the great plates. There were shells and coral from the distant seas to the south, east, and west,[311] purchased from coastal traders and hoarded for this day. Even more precious were the seaweed, sponges, and other living creatures the young men had conveyed inland in saltwater-filled crocks to keep them from spoiling in the tropical heat. The shamans took each offering from its plate as it was presented to them. Beside each cache pit lay a square of beaten-bark cloth. Others were spread on the floor next to the base of the broken tree. With expert grace, the shamans placed each of the offerings in its turn onto the light-brown cloth, all the while singing the story of the dark seas before the gods made the world. When the fresh sea creatures, the shells, and the coral were carefully arranged, they laid the backbones of fish and the spines of stingrays onto the prepared stacks. The royal merchants had not been able to procure enough of the stingray spines, so effigy spines carved from bone were added to the offerings. Together these tokens established the primordial sea of creation around this tree of Tikal, nourishing its spirit just as the sea had nourished the first tree, the axis of the world, at the beginning of creation.

Next, an old shaman of the royal court brought forward the divination stones—flakes of obsidian carefully incised with the images of eternal power. Eight of the flakes displayed the Jester God, that most ancient symbol of the kingship. The moon marked three others and two bore pictures of the bag of magical instruments carried by kings in rituals of state.

A warrior prince of the blood came forward next, bearing bundles of soft deer hide. The first was opened, revealing seven faceted flints, small in size but chipped by the finest knappers into irregular shapes resembling tiny amoebalike puddles of water. He unpacked other bundles and took out the blades of spears and spearthrower darts. Still more bundles contained the complex abstract shapes that decorated the wands and staves used during ecstatic ritual performance. The flints glittered in the torchlight, Tikal’s famed workmanship brought to honor the tree-stone and to arm the ancestors. Their shapes focused the power of the Otherworld: Flint and obsidian were the fingernails of the Lightning Bolt, the remnants of Chac-Xib-Chac striking the rock of earth.[312]

From his own embroidered bag, the king removed a royal mosaic mirror made of jade and the silver-blue crystalline hematite forged in the southern fire mountains.[313] A precious heirloom of his dynasty, its delicate surface was mounted on a mother-of-pearl backing. He placed the mirror on top of the growing mound of offerings in the principal pit. Small balls of white stone and black obsidian were added to each offering pile. Finally, lineage patriarchs spilled precious red pigment, symbolizing their blood in enduring form, onto the carefully arranged objects. They pulled the jade and greenstone earflares and beads from their ears, smashed and ground them like maize on grinding stones, and sprinkled the fragments across the paint.[314]

The assembled lords and shamans used additional stingray spines to draw blood from their ears and tongues in the ritual that would bring the offerings to life. Then, chanting prayers, they pulled up the corners of the bark wrapping cloths, being careful to preserve the pattern of the offerings within. Folding the cloths carefully, they formed bundles[315] which were decorated with red and blue on their outside surfaces. While one man held each bundle tightly closed, another placed a band of woven fibers around it, drawing these fibers into a tight knot at the top. Cautiously and reverently, they lowered one bundle into each pit. Others were laid against the base of the broken monument.

As the sun plunged westward toward dusk, Ah-Cacaw thrust an obsidian lancet into the loose skin of his penis, drawing his own blood to both nourish and activate the resanctified tree-stone. Singing a chant to call his ancestors’ attention to his offering, the king smeared his blood across the sides of the stela.[316] Satisfied that his dead had realized the honor he did them and their obligation to unleash the demons of conquest upon his enemies, the king rose, making a trail of his royal blood. Thus the divine ahau created a path for the ancestors to follow as they came out of the mountain and back to Tikal.

As the king emerged into the hot glare of late afternoon, ready to dance for his people, master builders hurried into the temple chambers. One of Ah-Cacaw’s chief shamans had stayed behind to guide their work with quiet suggestions. Together, they sealed the pits with plaster so that the floor became even once again. Young men of the minor noble houses vied with one another for the honor of carrying prepared stones from the plaza up to the sanctum. Using these blocks, the master builders began to erect a wall around the broken stela, carefully and reverently placing the stones against it so that it would not be further damaged. They built up the masonry surface with mud and sand mortar until they had made a bench, a throne-altar that filled much of the rear chamber. When they were satisfied with its shape, they coated it with plaster, modeling the bench into a smooth, white surface—forever sealing the ancestral treasure deep inside. Tikal’s history was safe from further depredation and empowered as a living portal awaiting the king’s command. The call to war would soon come.

Festival swirled and eddied across the plazas like the floodwaters of the great rivers. There were dancing processions, pageants, and feasts of special foods and drinks served in exquisite painted vessels crafted by artists of the city and the regions beyond. Members of the royal family drew blood from their bodies and spun in ecstasy across the terraces enclosing the Great Plaza.[317] The witnessing populace responded with great devotional outpourings of their own, emblazoning the plaza in bright red. Finally, when the last light of the sun was sinking behind the horizon and the plaster on the throne-altar had cured into a hard surface, Ah-Cacaw mounted the stairs and entered the temple once again. His shamans and the principal men of his lineage accompanied him for the solemn ceremony that would end this part of the ritual.

The old shaman handed him a obsidian lancet struck free from the core only minutes earlier. Ah-Cacaw made his blood flow until the moment came when he could call forth the Vision Serpent that carried his ancestors to him. As the king sank deeply into the trance state, the shaman took the bark cloth saturated with the king’s blood and laid it in a shallow pit dug in front of the newly made altar. When the blood-stained paper of Ah-Cacaw’s kinsmen had swelled the pile to a respectable size, the shaman added rubber, copal, and wood to make a hot fire. Then he spun the fire drill with a bow, gradually creating enough heat to ignite the dried grass on top of the pile. The fire was slow to catch, but eventually the flames rose along the side of the altar, blackening its face with the mark of a sacrificial offering. In the smoke that swirled up into the vault high inside the roof comb, Ah-Cacaw saw the faces of his ancestors and understood that they crowned with triumph his efforts to restore their glory.

This ritual of communication with the ancestors reopened the portal that had been destroyed by their enemies in the war six katuns earlier. The burial of the tree-stone brought power back to the sacred mountains of the kingdom. In the coming days, as the celebration continued, Ah-Cacaw would also honor the desecrated tree-stone of Slormy-Sky and set it inside the great central temple-mountain. At the conclusion of these ceremonies, his people would begin work on the new mountain that would encompass and protect the repose of the ancestors. They would have to work fast, for the king intended to dedicate the new mountain on the thirteenth katun recurrence of Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting. It was the kind of symmetry of time and action that the ancestors and the gods would admire.

In a state of ecstasy, Ah-Cacaw emerged from the smoking inner sanctum to the roaring shouts of his people. Pillars of fire and incense rose from lineage houses throughout the darkened city below. They knew their king would lead them back to victory and the wealth they had lost. Victory and sacrifice would keep their enemies far from the borders of the kingdom. They understood that the determination of this vigorous new king and his ambition to restore the honor of his dynasty affected all their fates. The greatness of the royal past, now recaptured, would unfold into all their futures. They prayed for the ancient strength of the great kings, knowing that the demons of war had to be driven forward to the lands of their enemies. Once unleashed, they would devour all in their path.

Shortly after entombing Stela 26, Ah-Cacaw buried Stela 31, utilizing the same sorts of dedication rituals. The most sacred memorial of Tikal’s glorious military history, Stela 31 was the tree-stone upon which Stormy-Sky himself had engraved the history of the Uaxactun conquest.[318] Enemies had violently torn this magnificent stela from its place in front of Temple 33–2^nd, the building next door to the temple in which Ah-Cacaw later interred Stela 26.

Lifting Stela 31 from where it lay in disgrace, the lords of Tikal carried it in honor up the stairs to the old temple. There they replanted it in the shallow pit they had dug into the floor of the rear room of the temple, laid kindling around its base, and lit a fire to disperse the power accumulated in the stone—just as they had done in the rituals described above for Stela 26. This fire also seared away the dishonor that had been done to the stela’s spirit. Members of the court of Tikal, and those nobles from ancient vassal communities courageous enough to declare for the new king against Caracol, brought elaborate pottery censers in which they burned ritual offerings. After the ceremony, these censers were smashed in a termination ritual and the pieces left scattered on the floors of these soon-to-be-buried temple chambers.

Once Stela 31 was cached in its place, work crews filled the chambers of the old temple, then collapsed its vaults and roof comb, sealing in its power forever. They then covered the old building with a flat-topped pyramid twelve meters tall, which would provide the construction base for a new sacred mountain which would reach 18.8 meters in height. The engineers and masons used the technique of rapid building, for no doubt Ah-Cacaw intended to strike quickly at his enemies once he had completed the reopening of his family’s sacred portal to the Otherworld. Each level of the rising pyramid was divided into rectangular stone construction pens, which were then filled with mud, mortar, and rubble. When the completed temple stood atop it, this towering pyramidal base provided an impressive new backdrop for the stela row in front of the North Acropolis (Fig. 5:21). The pyramid’s huge mass unified the many buildings of the North Acropolis into a range of living mountains with a single supernatural doorway on its northern horizon. Through this doorway the ancestors of Tikal would emerge once again to aid the new king as he strove to reestablish the glory they had forged before the disaster.[319]

We do not know exactly when the termination rituals for the old building, Temple 33—2^nd, ended and the work on Temple 33—1^st began. We can assume, however, that this building project was under way at the same time that Ah-Cacaw was raising his Twin Pyramid Complex. This complex would hold the first stela of his reign, Stela 30, and its altar (Fig. 5:22), both erected to celebrate the end of Katun 13. This Twin Pyramid Complex was the first to be built since the original complex, which had been buried under the East Plaza in Tikal’s old glory days. Ah-Cacaw no doubt chose this particular style of architecture because he wanted to confirm his continuity with the earlier traditions of his dynasty. He also revived the period-ending celebrations initiated by his ancestor Stormy-Sky, especially the staff ritual that had been so prominent in the golden years after Stormy-Sky’s reign. These rituals would remain central to Late Classic Tikal until its demise.

In spite of the fact that he was busily eradicating all remnants of the conqueror’s influence from his city, Ah-Cacaw did not completely reject Caracol’s stylistic influences in the art he created.[320] The round stone altar (Fig. 5:22) he set in front of his portrait, in fact, was carved in a style that was popular in the kingdom of Tikal’s conquerors (Fig. 5:4). This style utilized Caracol’s favorite device of putting the name of the katun in the center of the top surface of the altar and surrounding it with text. It is possible that Ah-Cacaw chose this style for the altar to be placed in front of his first monument precisely because he wished to neutralize the shame of Tikal’s ancient defeat. This conjecture finds further support when we examine his portrait: He chose to depict himself here in a style much like that of Stela 17, the last monument of the hapless twenty-first successor, who had fallen to Caracol so many years ago.

If we had only the archaeologically excavated construction record of Temple 33 and the deposition of Stela 31, there would be little more we could say about the events surrounding its dedication. But Ah-Cacaw rightfully regarded the rekindling of the spiritual fires of his dynasty, in Temple 33—1^st and the Great Plaza, to have been the most important events of his life. These were the pivotal scenes he chose to feature when he memorialized his reign on the broad hardwood lintels spanning the doorways of his great funerary house, Temple 1, high atop the huge pyramid that was built over his tomb. On the dark polished surfaces of these lintels we find Temple 33’s history in wonderful detail.

The construction of Temple 33-lst must have been finished shortly after 9.13.3.0.0 (March 3, 695), for Lintel 3 tells us that the dedication events began with this period ending (Fig. 5:23). One hundred and fiftyeight days afterward, Ah-Cacaw went to war and took captive King Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. The battle that won him this famous captive was in the same style as Caracol’s war against Naranjo (Fig. 5:6) sixty-eight years earlier, and Smoking-Squirrel’s recent war against Ucanal (Fig. 5:14).[321] It was Tlaloc-Venus war. There was one significant difference, however. Aside from the fact that Jaguar-Paw fell to Ah-Cacaw on August 8, 695, two days after the zenith passage of the sun, there was none of the usual astronomical significance we have come to expect in Maya warfare. Ah-Cacaw timed this victory not by the strict mandates of the heavens but by the history of his own people, marked by the thirteen katun anniversary of Stormy-Sky’s war event celebrated on Stela 31.

Thirteen days after the battle in which Jaguar-Paw fell, Ah-Cacaw displayed his Calakmul captives in a ritual in which they were humiliated and probably tortured.[322] This dramatic scene, modeled in plaster, can be found on the upper facade of Structure 5D-57, one of the complex of council houses and temples called the Central Acropolis (Fig. 5:24). Here we see one of the captives, seated and with his wrists bound behind his back. He is held by a tether which stretches to the hand of the victorious king. Ah-Cacaw, standing behind the captive, is dressed in the Mosaic Monster garb of the Tlaloc complex associated with Venus war, the same costume worn by his ancestors during Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun. The captive pictured is not Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul himself, but someone named Ah-Bolon-Bakin, who was an ally or vassal of that captured king.

Twenty-seven days later, Ah-Cacaw sacrificed these unfortunate captives in the dedication ritual for Temple 33. He recorded this event in a triplet form, giving different types of information about the event with each repetition. This critical record was carved on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 (Fig. 5:23). First, Ah-Cacaw recorded the ritual as a dedication event in which he himself let blood from his tongue.[323] Aswe shall see in the chapter on Yaxchilan, this ritual involved the piercing of the tongue to create a wound-through which a cord was drawn. The blood loss and pain an individual experienced during this self-wounding process elicited a trance state in which the Vision Serpent could appear. This Vision Serpent was the conduit through which the ancestors came into the world and spoke to their descendants. We suspect that Ah-Cacaw called on Stormy-Sky, bringing him up through the sacred portal in Temple 33 to witness the dynastic renewal accomplished by his descendant.

[[][Fig. 5:23 Texts recording the Dedication Rituals for Temple 33 on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 and Temple 5D-57]]

The second passage in the triplet declares that the dedication ritual[324] took place in a location named with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph. This location was very likely the Great Plaza, the community’s spiritual center. In this passage, Ah-Cacaw asserts his legitimate right to open the portal to the Otherworld by declaring his royal pedigree as the child of Lady Jaguar-Throne and King Shield-Skull. The final description of the dedication of Temple 33 links the event to Ah-Cacaw’s accession.

[[][Fig. 5:24 Structure 5D-57 and the Rituals of Dedication]]

How do we know that the events recorded in Temple 1 refer to the dedication of Temple 33 and the refurbished Great Plaza area? The answer is that we don’t, except by inference, but the evidence supporting our deduction is strong. The date of Ah-Cacaw’s dedication ceremony as recorded in Temple 1 is the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last date preserved on the broken Stela 31. We know that the date on the broken stela marked a bloodletting ceremony enacted by the ancient king Stormy-Sky on the occasion of a maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[325]

The fact that Ah-Cacaw timed his own dedication rites to this thirteenth katun anniversary date was not accidental. Unlike his royal contemporaries who timed their actions in war and peace by the cycles of Venus, Ah-Cacaw chose a cycle that would connect the rebirth of his dynasty to the old Tikal of the glory days. Stormy-Sky was the pivotal hero of the old dynasty from Ah-Cacaw’s point of view. We believe it was no accident that Ah-Cacaw built his magnificent Temple 33 over the tomb of this great king and there buried Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s beautifully carved war memorial, as part of the termination rites. As we have seen, Ah-Cacaw also timed his war against Calakmul by this thirteenth katun anniversary cycle. This 260-year anniversary was one of the most sacred cycles to the ancient Maya. It alone of the ancient cycles would survive the conquest to be preserved by the Maya in the katun wheel famous in the books of Chilam Balam in Yucatan.

More evidence for our claim can be found by comparing the imagery on Stela 31 with the scenes on the lintels of Temple 1. These scenes clearly portray the essential details of the king’s performance in the Great Plaza on the occasion of the dedication of Temple 33. On Lintel 2 (Fig. 5:25b) Ah-Cacaw sits astride a throne covered with a jaguar pelt, his feet resting on a stepped base marked with bands of waterlilies representing the dark and dangerous surface of Xibalba. He wears the balloon headdress of the Tlaloc war complex and a frightful deity mask, the last earthly thing his sacrificial victims were likely to see. In his hands he holds spearthrower darts and a shield. This is the same battle gear worn by his ancestors, Smoking-Frog on Uaxactun Stela 5 and Curl-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. The Mosaic Monster conjured up by the seated Ah-Cacaw looms above him, menacing the foes of Tikal. This monster is the same god of conquest worn by Curl-Snout as a headdress in his portrait on the left side of Stormy-Sky’s Stela 31 (Fig. 5:25a). The imagery of Lintel 2 refers to much more than the individual portraits of the ancestors on Stela 31. The royal house and the city of Tikal had suffered for katuns while the star of war shone for their enemies. Now their luck had changed. Ah-Cacaw once again commanded the monsters of Tlaloc war his forebears had unleashed with the conquest of Uaxactun.[326]

The innermost lintel of Temple 1 depicts Ah-Cacaw in the other costume he wore during rituals of dedication (Fig. 5:26). Again, Stela 31 seems a likely source of inspiration for this lintel. On Stela 31, as you recall, Stormy-Sky stands holding the cruller-eyed GUI, the jaguar-featured member of the Hero Twins, in his arms. From Stormy-Sky’s belt hang two more versions of the Jaguar Sun, an anthropomorphic version in front and a zoomorphic version in back. This jaguar is the great patron deity of Tikal. He is also equated with the jaguar masks modeled on Late Preclassic temples at Cerros, Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Tikal. He is found in the hand of the king in the earliest known royal portrait at Tikal, Stela 29. We suspect “jaguar” may even be one of the names of the kingdom of Tikal itself.[327]

On Lintel 3, we see the Gill-Jaguar God again, this time looming protectively over Ah-Cacaw. In this scene, the king again sits on a seat covered with jaguar pelts atop a stepped platform. In his right hand, he holds a God K scepter and in his left a round shield. He is heavily adorned with jewelry marking both his rank and his ritual role. His feathered headdress is mounted on a Roman-nosed profile of the sun god and a remnant of his huge backrack can be seen behind him. To announce his rank as ahau, a Jester God rides on his chest over a large pectoral composed of jade beads of varying sizes. Ah-Cacaw is seated on a palanquin which he has ridden into a ritual space, perhaps the Great Plaza itself, in order to conduct the public sacrifices that were part of the dedication celebrations.[328]

Out of the ruins of Tikal’s broken history, Ah-Cacaw reshaped a formidable new place of power and sacrifice. Using the deeds of his ancestor Stormy-Sky as a bridge, he healed the breach in Tikal’s history caused by the long years of darkness. One question remains, however: Why did Ah-Cacaw attack Calakmul?

Calakmul’s alliance with Caracol in the war against Naranjo no doubt made its young king, Jaguar-Paw, a target for Tikal’s wrath. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the participation of Calakmul’s earlier kings in a strategy that had encircled Tikal with the enemies and allies of Calakmul. One of those erstwhile allies, the first king of Naranjo, had found himself the target of the same alliance in the waning years of his life. His descendants focused their wrathful vengeance to the south against Caracol’s neighbors, while Ah-Cacaw of Tikal turned north toward Calakmul itself.

What role did Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas play beyond taking advantage of the resulting power vacuum and setting his own descendants on the throne of Naranjo? We are not sure, for in his early years he had courted the young heir to Calakmul’s throne and attended his accession as a powerful friend. Flint-Sky-God K won a great strategic victory at Naranjo in the power politics of the time, but he must have lost prestige when his most prized ally died at the hands of the new I ikal ruler.

Flint-Sky-God K was the founder of a vigorous new dynasty which may have been an offshoot of the Tikal royal family, but considering his alliances, he was very likely the enemy of that kingdom during its recovery.

The tangle of elite obligations and vendettas we have outlined in this chapter rivals any in recorded history. Caracol conquered Tikal and later, in alliance with Calakmul, conquered Naranjo. A branch of the defeated Tikal family may well have moved into the Petexbatun region to establish the new kingdom of Dos Pilas. Flint-Sky-God K, the founder of the Dos Pilas dynasty, then began a campaign of battles that won him the friendship of the powerful heir and soon-to-be king of Calakmul. He also sent a daughter to Naranjo to reestablish the dynasty there, after the defeat of a king who had been installed in the presence of a former ruler of Calakmul. Tikal attacked Calakmul, the ally of Dos Pilas, while Naranjo rampaged southward toward Caracol, conquering Yaxha (which may have been subordinate to Tikal) and Ucanal. As far as we can tell, CaracoFs response was to duck and hide in the deepest cover it could find, and ride out the crisis. Certainly, its fortunes declined with the reemergence of Tikal and Naranjo as major powers.

Some Thoughts and Questions

These are some of the spare facts of the matter, and with any luck more will come to light in the future. Already, however, we can sense a more subtle and treacherous diplomatic landscape behind the facts we know. Did, for example, Flint-Sky-God K deliver Jaguar-Paw into the hands of Ah-Cacaw? One can envision the young monarch of Calakmul, trapped on the battlefield and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Dos Pilas warriors who never appear, raging in frustration as Ah-Cacaw draws steadily nearer with his fierce companions. Certainly the house of Dos Pilas benefited from the outcome of this battle. The alliance of Calakmul and Caracol had spanned the entire central Peten region, holding many great families hostage. With that axis broken, with Tikal in a celebratory mood, and with relatives ruling Naranjo to the east of Tikal, the kings of Dos Pilas could enjoy a free hand in the Petexbatun , spending the next eighty years consolidating a substantial conquest state of their own.

The impact of these maneuvers on Caracol was profound. No inscriptions exist, as far as we know, from the period spanning the end of Lord Kan H’s reign up until the end of Katun 17. That silence lasted for seventy years. At Calakmul, the results were different, perhaps because that kingdom was so huge and so far to the north that it managed to survive the defeat of its king without major effect. By the next period ending following the death of Jaguar-Paw, the people of Calakmul had already begun to erect stelae once more.

Whatever effects Ah-Cacaw’s deeds may have had on the liberation of the Peten, his rituals of dedication and his family’s program of rebuilding seem to have accomplished their primary purpose. Tikal regained its position as one of the largest and wealthiest kingdoms in the central Peten.

In spite of these very substantial gains, however, the king did not rest on his laurels. The architectural remodeling of downtown Tikal and the wars of Ah-Cacaw were far from over. Less than a year after the dedication of Temple 33, Ah-Cacaw attacked Calakmul again, this time taking captive a lord named Ox-Ha-Te Ixil Ahau, who was immortalized in one of the most elegant drawings left to us by the Maya (Fig. 5:27). The artist incised the image of this man on two carved bones deposited in Ah-Cacaw’s tomb. On these bones we see Ox-Ha-Te Ixil standing in public humiliation with his head bowed, stripped to his loincloth, his wrists, upper arms, and knees bound together. The battle in which he fell took place in the land of a person named Split-Earth, who was the king who apparently succeeded Jaguar-Paw at Calakmul.[329] This captive was one of his nobles. Ironically, both these Calakmul stalwarts enjoyed the privilege of history only because they accompanied a great enemy king to his grave.

At the end of the katun, 9.14.0.0.0, just when Smoking-Squirrel was attacking Yaxha, Ah-Cacaw built his second Twin Pyramid Complex and placed Stela 14 and Altar 5 (Fig. 5:28) in the northern enclosure. On this stela, Ah-Cacaw stands front view with the staff favored by the Early Classic Tikal kings balanced on his forearms. The feathers of his backrack fan out in a torso-high circle behind him. In recognition of the first appearance of the Eveningstar, he wears the skeletal image of this celestial being as his headdress.

Ah-Cacaw may have built one more twin pyramid complex, but this one, which celebrated 9.15.0.0.0, never had any carved monuments erected within it, so we are not sure of the identity of its originator. It was not the custom at Tikal in the Late Classic period to erect stelae recording the details of the kings’ lives. Instead, the kings vested public energy and historical memory into their personal twin pyramid complexes and the rites they conducted on period-endings. This new emphasis began after Stormy-Sky’s death in the fifth century and it was a custom that Ah-Cacaw reinforced. For that reason we have little information about the last twenty years of Ah-Cacaw’s life: A few dates with obscure events appear on the incised bones deposited in his tomb. One clear historical footnote recorded on these bones, however, is the death of Shield-God K, the son of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas.[330] Surely if Ah-Cacaw had strained good relations with the Dos Pilas family when he took Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul, he must have repaired the breach by the time of his demise.

Ah-Cacaw’s son, Ruler B, succeeded him on 9.15.3.6.8 (December 12, 734). This son most likely built his famous father’s funerary mountain, Temple 1, because we have evidence that the pyramid was erected after the tomb was sealed. Still, the absence of any editorial comment by this young man in the hieroglyphic texts on the masterful lintels of this temple suggests that they were completed under the watchful eye of an aging Ah-Cacaw. The devout son, no doubt, merely installed them.[331]

We are less sure about the end of Smoking-Squirrel’s life at Naranjo. All we know is that his son Smoking-Batab succeeded him on November 22, 755.[332]

Many parallels can be drawn between the lives of Ah-Cacaw and Smoking-Squirrel. Both kings inherited polities that had suffered humiliating defeats at the hand of the same enemy—the kingdom of Caracol— and both kings spent their lives successfully reestablishing the prestige and central position of their kingdoms in the affairs of the Late Classic Maya world. Their strategies were essentially the same. Ah-Cacaw began his reign with the honorable deposition of desecrated monuments in the older buildings that fronted the North Acropolis, the ritual center of Tikal. Although his father, Shield Skull, had already begun the process of reawakening the state with a preliminary rejuvenation of the North Acropolis, it fell to Ah-Cacaw to complete the program. He erected the huge Temple 33 over the stela recording the history of his kingdom’s greatest conquest—the deeds of his mighty ancestors, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Curl-Snout, and Stormy-Sky. On the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last readable date on the desecrated monument, he went to war and took a captive high enough in rank and prestige to wipe away the dishonor on the spirit and history of his kingdom. With the building of Temple 33, he remade the ceremonial heart of the city into a new configuration on a scale and proportion worthy of the glory he had regained.

Smoking-Squirrel used the same tools of reclamation to reestablish his kingdom’s honor. His success in war demonstrated both Naranjo’s regained prowess as a military power and the renewed favor of the gods. His success as a charismatic ruler can be seen in his ability to gather the tremendous numbers of laborers and skilled craftsmen needed to remake the center of his kingdom on an even greater and more glorious scale. Smoking-Squirrel built Groups A15 and C (Fig. 5:12), both designed to reproduce the triadic arrangements of Late Preclassic buildings we have seen at Cerros and Uaxactun. His appeal was not only to size, but more important, to the ancient orthodoxy of Maya kingship. This was a pattern seized upon by Ah-Cacaw as well, for by sealing the interior courts of the old temple complex away from processional access, he turned the North Acropolis into the northern point of a new triadic group. Temple 1 formed the second point and Temple 2 the third. Thus, both kings reestablished the prestige of their defeated kingdoms by publicly and forcefully demonstrating their prow’ess as architects and warriors.

What we have tried to show in these histories of the Peten kingdoms is how the interrelationships of the many polities that inhabited this landscape together comprised what we call Maya civilization. In alliance, in war, and in marriage, the great families that ruled these kingdoms wove together a fabric of meaningful existence as intricate as any they wore on state occasions. The patterns of destruction and creation were shared. More important, the destiny of any kingdom hinged upon its successful performance not only within its own borders but also before the watchful eyes of its friends and foes. History was a matter of mutual interpretation and the mutual elaboration of innovative new ideas like Venus-Tlaloc s warfare. In later chapters, as we shift our focus to a close-up of the inner workings of specific kingdoms, we need to bear in mind that the Maya ahauob were always performing for the wider audience of their neighboring peers. Their deeds always required the validation of that larger congregation of true and resplendent people. For the nobility, as for all the people of the community, to be Maya was to be part of the patterns of history formed by the actions of kings within the framework of sacred space and time.

Photo Gallery

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-2.jpg 70f][The magic of these waterfalls at Palenque enchanted Linda Scheie on her first visit to the ruins. The ancient Maya who built their city around their lifegiving pools must have seen these streams as meaningful symbols of the processes of destruction and creation, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1972)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-3.png][Tikal Temple 33 (A.D. 400–700), which was dismantled by archaeologists, was the first major building constructed by Ah-Cacaw. He placed Stela 31 inside the old temple before construction on this final version began. The enormous new temple was dedicated on September 17, A.D. 695, exactly 260 years after the last date on that early stela, (photo by Peter Harrison)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-4.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Cerros shows Structure 5C-2^nd (100 B.C.-A.D. 100), the first temple built at that center, to the right peeking out of the forest next to the shore. The eastward-facing Acropolis of a later king sits at the end of the modern dock extending into Chetumal Bay. During the first century B.C., people of Cerros experimented with kingship and then abandoned it a hundred years later to return to their lives as villagers and farmers, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-5.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Tikal shows the North Acropolis at the top, the Great Plaza in the center, and the Central Acropolis to the lower right. Temple 1 is on the right of the Great Plaza and Temple II on the left. Most of the visible architecture in the North Acropolis is Early Classic (A.D. 300–600), while the Great Plaza and most of the Central Acropolis is Late Classic (A.D. 600–800). (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-6.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph features many of 18-Rabbit’s greatest works. The Great Plaza and its forest of tree-stones (at the top) was built during the early eighth century. 18-Rabbit built the Ballcourt (lower right) six months before he was sacrificed by a rival at the nearby site of Quirigua. The stela on the end of the Ballcourt was commissioned by his father, while the tiny altar near it was placed there by the last tragic king of Copan, the Maya kingdom that dominated western Honduras and the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-7.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the greatest work of King Chan-Bahlum—the Group of the Cross (A.D. 692) at Palenque, México. The view is from the door of the Temple of the Foliated Cross and includes the Temple of the Sun on the left, the Palace in the center, and the Temple of the Cross on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-8.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the south end of the Palace at Palenque. House E, the building housing Pacal’s accession panel, is on the left with the Group of the Cross visible above its roof, while the Temple of Inscriptions, where Pacal is buried, nestles against the mountain on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-9.jpg 70f

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-10.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-11.jpg 70f][This brightly painted clay figurine (A.D. 600–800) depicts a Late Classic Maya ruler wearing the god Chac-Xib-Chac in his befeathered headdress. His ornate costume includes a royal belt around his waist, huge pendants on his chest, a decorated apron, and tasseled sandals. He wears a round shield on his left wrist and probably once had a tiny spear in his right hand. His mouth ornament is like one worn by Pacal into his grave. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-12.jpg 70f][This painted vessel (A.D. 426) was found in Curl-Snout’s tomb (Burial 10) inside Temple 34 of Tikal, Guatemala. The vessel shape is Maya, but the images reflect contact with Teotihuacán, the great city near modern México City, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-13.jpg 70f][Lintel 41 (A.D. 755) was once mounted over a doorway into Structure 16 at the ruins of Yaxchilán in México. The carved scene depicts Bird-Jaguar standing with a wife from Motul de San José as she helps him prepare for battle. He holds a battle spear in his hand and wears a Tlaloc-war headdress. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-14.jpg 70f][Lintel 24 (A.D. 700–725) was mounted over the left door of Structure 23 at Yaxchilán, México. The carved scenes depict a bloodletting rite celebrating the birth of a son to the sixty-two-year-old king, Shield-Jaguar. He holds a torch over Lady Xoc, his principal wife, as she pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue to sanctify the birth of a younger wife’s child. This child, Bird-Jaguar, became king after ten years of competition with rivals who may have been Lady Xoc’s offspring, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-15.jpg 70f][Dedicated in A.D. 715, Temple 22 of Copan, Honduras, was commissioned by 18-Rabbit to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of his accession. This extraordinary sculpted door leads to the inner sanctum where 18-Rabbit and his successors let blood and talked to their ancestors and the gods. The image represents the arch of the sky held away from the skeletal realm of the Underworld by gods called Pauahtun. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-16.jpg 70f][This jade earflare (50 B.C.-A.D. 50) was once mounted on the side flanges of a headdress worn by a Late Preclassic king from Pomona, Belize. The glyphs are arranged to form a quincunx pattern with the central hole. The inscription evokes the Sun God and the Maize God and the rituals that celebrated their power. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-17.jpg 70f][18-Rabbit, one of the greatest kings of Copan, as he was depicted on the east face of Stela C (A.D. 711), the first tree-stone he planted in the Great Plaza. The intense red color is the original paint. (photo by Linda Schele)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-18.jpg 70f][These great masks (50 B.c.) were modeled from plaster on the eastern terraces of Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, Belize. They represent the Sun God (lower mask) and Venus (the upper mask) as they rise from the horizon at dawn. (photo by James F. Garber)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-19.jpg 70f][The tumbled colonnade attached to the Temple of the Warriors (A.D. 850–950) at Chichón Itzá in Yucatán, México. (photo Graph © Barbara Kerr 1975)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-20.jpg 70f][Stela 31 (A.D. 447), the tree-stone of the great king Stormy-Sky, as it was found inside Temple 33 at Tikal. This side represents Stormy-Sky’s father, Curl-Snout, dressed as a Tlaloc warrior, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-21.jpg 70f][These jade jewels (50 B.C.) were deposited in an offering in the summit of Structure 6, the second temple complex built at Cerros. The center head was worn as a pectoral, while the four smaller heads were mounted on a headband that functioned as the crown Of kings. (photo by Linda Schele)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][Yucatec Maya conducting a primicia ritual at Yaxuná, Yucatán, in 1986. The boughs at the four corners of the table represent the trees at the corners of the world, while the food and drink are located on the central axis once symbolized by the Wacah Chan Tree. The symbolism of the altar and the ritual descend directly from Precolumbian belief and practice, (photo by Debra S. Walker)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][The west gallery (dedicated in A.D. 654) of the building the people of ancient Palenque called the Zac Nuc Nah, the “White Big House.” The Oval Palace Tablet seen on the right shows Pacal receiving a headdress from his mother during his accession rites. Most of Pacal’s successors were inaugurated into the office of king while seated on a throne that once sat below this tablet, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-23.jpg 70f][This is a photo rollout of a bowl sent by Ruler 1 of Naranjo to a noble woman of Tikal as a gift. Buried with her in Structure 5G-8, the bowl (A.D. 590–630) was decorated with images of the Celestial Bird carrying snakes in its beak as it flies across the sacred world of the Maya, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-24.jpg 70f][This extraordinary statue of the God of Scribes and Artists (A.D. 725–750) once decorated Structure 9N-82, the house of a noble scribe at Copan, Honduras. The net headdress, paua, combines with the sign on his shoulder, tun, to spell his name, Pauahtun, while his face is that of a howler monkey, who was an artisan in Maya myth. Here, he holds scribal tools—a paintbrush and a shell paintpot—in his hands. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-25.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-26.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a vase painting (a.D. 600–800) shows warfare as it was practiced in ancient times. Warriors wearing short-sleeved battle jackets, elaborate headdresses, and the shrunken heads of past victims carry stabbing spears, battleaxes, and flexible shields. They seize captives, who are disarmed but still wearing their battle finery, by their hair to bring them under control. One grabs the leg of his captor as he looks back at his companion’s suffering, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-27.jpg 70f][A modern divination ceremony in progress before an ancient sculpture at La Democracia in Guatemala. Copal incense hovers in front of the head, while a shaman’s pouch with its rock crystals and maize seeds rests on the stone altar. Unseen in the photograph is a chocolate bar the shaman had placed in the mouth of the sculpture to bring it alive for the ritual. The same kinds of objects and rituals were used by the Precolumbian shamans two thousand years ago. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-28.jpg 70f

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-29.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-30.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a corpulent lord from Motul de San Jose leaning back against his pillow as he admires himself in a mirror held by a dwarf. Lords surround him as another dwarf, a hunchback, and a flower-bearing lord sit on the floor in front of him. The local band of three musicians plays a conch-shell trumpet and two wooden horns just offstage behind the palace wall. Three enema pots sit on the floor outside the room along with a large round pot that apparently holds the liquid sipped by the dwarf, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-31.jpg 70f][This is the northern vista of Palenque as seen from the Temple of the Inscriptions. The Palace, which was the main ceremonial and residential building of the king, sits in the center of the photograph, while the Group of the Cross, the accession group built by King Chan-Bahlum in the late seventh century, is seen on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-32.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a scene taking place inside a palace painted with images of jaguar gods and watery quadrifoils holding the skeletal visage of a death god. A lord from Dos Pilas sits on a bench bearing a pillow for his back and a set of bundles and boxes to his left. Four lords of high rank sit on the floor in front of him, while an attendant holds an object out to him. Two of the lords face him in rapt attention, while the other two lean toward each other as they converse, perhaps about the business at hand, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-33.jpg 70f][This rollout of a vase painting (A.D. 600–800) shows a lord of Dos Pilas sitting on a bench in front of a large pillow. Two nobles bring him bouquets of flowers, perhaps to be used with the round-bottomed enema pot sitting on the floor between them. Other pots of various shapes sit on the bench and the floor around the principal lord. The three-glyph phrase behind his head names the artist of this vase, who may have depicted himself in the center of the scene with his paintbrush thrust into his headdress, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1989)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-34.jpg 70f][This Early Classic vessel (A.D. 200450) depicts the Sun God paddling his canoe across the watery surface of the Otherworld. The nose-down peccary legs support not only the vessel but the waters of the world depicted on its sides and lid. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-35.jpg 70f][A jade head (A.D. 350–500) representing the god of decapitation sacrifice that was used to record the conquest of Uaxactün on the Tikal Ballcourt Marker. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-36.jpg 70f][This cylindrical vase (A.D. 600–800) was painted with a scene showing a woman from Dos Pilas dressed in a delicate, transparent lace huipil as she kneels before a lord of Motul de San José. While sitting cross-legged on a mat-covered bench inside a curtain-draped palace, he holds a small deity effigy against his chest as he extends a rattle (or perhaps an enema bag) toward her. Behind him rests a large pillow, while two large vessels sit on the floor below him. (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]

6. The Children of the First Mother: Family and Dynasty at Paleonque

Like a white, shimmering jewel, Palenque perches above the misty, deep green of the forest shrouding the waterlogged lands that stretch northward from the base of the Chiapas mountains to the swampy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. To the south of the city, rugged, jungle-covered hills gradually rise to climax in cold, volcanic highlands. Temples, palaces, and noble homes, all built with the distinctive sloped roofs characteristic of Palenque’s architectural style, line the clear streams that bubble up from within the heart of these mountains to tumble down rocky slopes and into the rolling plain below. As if to instruct humanity in the ways of destruction and rebirth, these life-sustaining w’aters rise through the limestone strata to break onto the surface of the earth. Laden with calcium, the running water fashions a fantasy world of crystal lacework by encasing the decaying leaves and branches of the forest in what will become the fossilladen strata of floriforous limestone a million years hence. The pearly deposits shroud temple and tree alike, creating a mirror to the Otherworld, like a cave turned inside out. Even today, you know you stand on sacred ground here at the western gate of the sun’s journey across the world of the ancient Maya.

Palenque’s magic has fascinated the Western mind since the adventurers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first published accounts of their visits. The drawings and commentaries of intrepid travelers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood especially captured the imagination of nineteenth-century readers and created a special vision of Palenque as the lost city of an intelligent and civilized indigenous people.[333]

Yet Palenque has done more than appeal to the romantic side of the Western imagination. This city has played a crucial role in the modern study of ancient Maya history and religion, as well as in the decipherment of their writing system. The kings of Palenque left a substantial record of texts carved on the fine-grained limestone monuments of their city. Many of their most outstanding monuments are preoccupied with one issue: the relationship between the legitimate inheritance of divine status through family descent and the personal charisma of the king. As we have seen in other kingdoms, the Palenque ahauob had practical reasons for their obsession with history.

Two Palenque kings, Pacal, whose name means “shield,” and his oldest son, Chan-Bahlum,[334] “snake-jaguar,” stand out as primary contributors to the history of their city. They are both members of that class of remarkable people who are responsible for creating what we call a civilization’s “golden age.” Not only did they make their kingdom into a power among the many Maya royal houses of the seventh century; they also inspired and nurtured the exceptional beauty of Palenque’s art, the innovative quality of its architecture, and the eloquence of the political and theological visions displayed in its inscriptions and imagery. The royal literature commanded by these men represents the most detailed dynastic history to survive from Classic times. Their vision wove it into the most beautiful and far-reaching expression of the religious and mythological rationale of Maya kingship left to modern contemplation.

Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the essential details of their dynasty on four separate king lists. According to these family accounts, Palenque’s dynastic history began on March 11, A.D. 431, when a thirty-four-year-old ahau named Bahlum-Kuk (“Jaguar-Quetzal”) became the king. The descent of the royal line continued through subsequent generations of divine ahauob—with only a few minor sidesteps—into the glorious reigns of our two protagonists. Finally, the kingship failed in the hands of their progeny sometime after A.D. 799, the last date recorded in the inscriptions of Palenque. These “minor sidesteps” in the succession are the subject of our tale and the reason for the extraordinary detail of the record those ancient kings have left to us.

Pacal began his task of historical interpretation with the construction of his funerary building—the Temple of Inscriptions (Fig. 6:1). In the corridors of this magnificent temple, he mounted the first of his king lists on three huge stone slabs. These slabs comprise the second-longest[335] inscription left to posterity by the ancient Maya (Fig. 6:Id).[336] In his tomb deep under the temple, Pacal recorded the deaths of the same kings he named above. He also pictured them on the side of his coffin, as part of an ancestral orchard growing out of the cracked earth. His son, Chan-Bahlum, extended this ancestral list back to the founder of the dynasty— and beyond to the divinities who established the order of the cosmos at the beginning of this current manifestation of the universe.

Combined, these four great king lists overlap in time and recorded history to constitute the most detailed and complete dynastic history known from the Classic period (Fig. 6:2). When a Palenque ruler was recorded in all four lists, we have his dates of birth, accession, and death, as well as good information on his kinship relationships with other members of the dynasty. For those kings recorded only on Chan-Bahlum’s list, we have their births and accessions, and a reasonable estimate of their ages at death. We can surmise the latter since we know a new king usually acceded shortly after his predecessor’s death. For those kings whose I names occur only on the sarcophagus and panels of the Temple of Inscriptions, we have only their dates of accession and death, and thus w e cannot estimate length of life or their ages at various events. Still, these four lists taken together allow us to reconstruct the history of Palenque’s dynasty for the ten generations culminating with Chan-Bahlum.[337]

[[][Generation 6 Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ LadyZac-Kuk]]

The very existence of these king lists raises questions about their context and the motivations of the men who made them. What so fascinated and troubled these men that they felt compelled to present such a comprehensive treatise on their dynasty on such important monumental spaces? Here, as in any true history, it is not so much a matter of the facts of the history as their interpretation that reveals the intentions of the chronicler. The royal preoccupation with these lists, and the parallel information that comes to us from other sources, hint of troubles in the very dynastic succession the two kings so obsessively recorded.

The essential problem, as we surmise it from their public efforts to explain it away, was to extricate dynastic succession from the same principle of lineage that originally fostered and legitimated it. As we shall sec, Pacal inherited the throne of Palenque from his mother in violation of the normal patrilineal inheritance patterns that governed Maya succession. His most pressing concern, then, was to justify this departure from the normal rules. To prove his point, he and his son, who inherited the problem, made elegant and imaginative use of the Maya mythology that was the basis of social order and kingly rule.

Pacal’s portrait gallery of his direct ancestors, carved on the sides of his sarcophagus, gives us his version of how each of his ancestors appeared (Fig. 6:3). Each rises with a fruit tree from a crack in the earth to create an orchard of the ancestral dead. Chaacal I in the southeast corner begins the progression through time and lineage that culminates with the mother and father of Pacal, who rise on both the north and south ends of the sarcophagus.

Within this ancestral orchard, Pacal depicted two women—his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, and his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal— and each is depicted twice. Why would Pacal have chosen to double the portraits of these women when he could just as easily have doubled a male ancestor or added portraits of even earlier ancestors to the portrait gallery? In the case of his mother, we might infer that he doubled her portrait precisely because she was his mother. After all, he did the same for his father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, in spite of the fact that his father never ruled. This line of reasoning, however, cannot explain why his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal, held an honored place on the sarcophagus. Some other factor must explain her special status.

From our vantage at least, these two women were certainly deserving of special attention. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were very unusual individuals in that they are the only women we can be sure ruled as true kings. They were neither consorts nor, as in the case of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo, regents for young heirs. Yet by their very status as rulers, they created serious dilemmas for the government of their kingdom. When the throne of Palenque descended through Kanal-Ikal to her children, it became the prerogative of a different lineage, for the Maya nobility reckoned family membership through their males. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were legitimate rulers because they were the children of kings and, as such, members of the current royal lineage. The offspring of their marriages, however, belonged to the father’s lineage. Each time these women inherited the kingship and passed it on to their children, the throne automatically descended through another patriline. This kind of jump broke the link between lineage and dynasty in the succession.

Because the line changed twice through these women rulers, Palenque’s dynasts did not belong to one patriline, but rather to three (Fig. 6:4). The first lineage to declare command of the high kingship descended from the founder Bahlum-Kuk through eight successors to Lady Kanal-Ikal. Even though they were of a different lineage, Pacal and his successors to the throne of Palenque claimed that they derived their right to rule from this man. In this respect, while they followed the traditional practice of other Maya dynasties, which also claimed descent from a founding king, they were declaring the dynastic succession to be a force transcending patrilineality.

[[][Fig. 6:4 The Three Descent Lines in Palenque’s Dynasty]]

Lady Kanal-lkal must have been a charismatic and exceptional woman to have successfully ascended to the throne of a high kingship. What history she herself may have created lies deeply buried under later construction—if indeed she was even permitted the royal prerogative of recording personal history. In all likelihood, she would have based her legitimate claim to the kingship on her status as the child of an acknowledged ruler. Her progeny claimed the throne after her, although they belonged to the lineage of her husband—a man never mentioned by name in the Palenque chronicles. Notables in this second lineage included the king Ac-Kan and his brother Pacal, who died before he could become the high king.

Even though he himself was never a king, this first Pacal appears in the royal grove carved on the side of the sarcophagus. There is a good reason for this. In each generation, the royal line could pass through only one sibling. In this case, the first Pacal was probably the father of Lady Zac-Kuk, the next ruler and last scion of this second royal lineage.[338] The presence of the first Pacal on the side of the great sarcophagus confirms that Pacal the Great was trying to make something more than a list of kings here. He was orchestrating a careful political manipulation of an orthodox belief. By placing his direct ancestors, both kings and nonkings, into a frame of reference that both honored the rules of lineage and transcended them, he worked to establish an unshakable claim to the throne.

The third lineage began with Pacal the Great himself. As the son of a ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, he had the same legitimate claim to the throne as Lady Kanal-Ikal’s child, Ac-Kan. Difficulties arose, however, when Pacal’s own children, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul, followed their illustrious father to the throne. These men belonged to the lineage of their father and their paternal grandfather, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’. Hence the problems with their claim to the kingship were different from Pacal’s and analogous to those of the descendant kings of the second lineage, Ac-Kan and Zac-Kuk. They were the offspring of a lineage that had no legitimate claim to produce kings.

We do not know what happened the first time one of these sidesteps in the royal dynasty occurred because we have no contemporary inscriptions from Lady Kanal-Ikal or her children.[339] The second time it happened, however, in the case of her granddaughter Zac-Kuk, the contradictory imperatives of lineage and dynasty precipitated a crisis. Lady Zac-Kuk’s offspring, Pacal, and his son, Chan-Bahlum, responded to the crisis with the two extraordinarily innovative projects under discussion—the Temple of Inscriptions and the Group of the Cross. These remarkable monuments were designed to interpret the dynastic history of Palenque in such a fashion as to make their legitimate rights to the throne undeniable.

In their presentations of the dynastic sequence at Palenque, both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the descent line as if it were historically unbroken. At the same time, they substantiated their claim of legitimacy by using the current mythology, explaining the historical breaks in the descent sequence as if they were preordained by the cosmos.

Their twofold strategy was brilliant. First they declared Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, to be like-in-kind to the first mother of gods and kings at the beginning of the present creation. This goddess was the mother of the three central gods of Maya religion—the deity complex known as the Palenque Triad. Secondly, Pacal and Chan-Bahlum asserted that Pacal was born on a day that exactly replicated the temporal symmetry of that goddess’s birth. In this way they were able to imply that the human king was made of the same divine substance as the goddess. Having thereby demonstrated that the mother and son were the stuff of the gods, they declared that their own inheritance of the throne from Pacal’s mother replicated the actions of the gods at the beginning of creation: the direct transmission of rule through females as well as males. Here was a radical new definition of dynastic succession that denied patrilineality as the sole fount of power. But who could possibly disagree with something that replayed creation?

Pacal’s overall strategy to hold the throne was more subtle than his son’s, perhaps because he acceded at age twelve while his mother was still alive and after she had been ruling for three years. Lady Zac-Kuk may have left no direct history of her reign; but like her grandmother, Kanal-Ikal, she stands out as a masterful politician, able to manipulate the rival interests of her paternal clansmen away from the succession and toward each other or outside enemies. No doubt her husband, the consort of a princess of the blood, figured prominently in her success through appeal to his own influential noble clan and his own deeds of valor. Just getting her young son on the throne was a triumph. Consolidating that victory required an acceptable historical and theological rationale for this audacious move, one that would calm the discontent of all the noble clans of the kingdom whose own high social status hinged upon lineage descent.

Lady Zac-Kuk lived another twenty-five years after Pacal’s accession. While she lived, she and her husband, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, apparently sustained the alliances necessary to support her son’s rule; but she very probably kept the real power in her own hands. Not until after her death in 640 did Pacal commission works that left their mark in the archaeological record of Palenque. It is also likely that during the delicate transitional period, this resplendent lady helped to craft the ingenious political resolution to the succession celebrated by her son in subsequent katuns.

In 647, seven years after his mother’s death and four years after his father’s, Pacal celebrated his newfound independence by dedicating the Temple Olvidado (Fig. 6:5) in the western zone of the city.[340] On the ridge side above a residential zone spanning one of two permanent water sources that coursed through the city, Pacal’s architects built a new kind of temple that held the seeds of a revolution in architectural technology.[341] With its double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls, multiple doors, and trefoil vaults, this building foreshadowed the technology that would soon produce the largest interior volume and best lighting ever known in Maya architecture.

At the successful completion of his first construction project, Pacal began an extensive building campaign which included the Temple of the Count, the subterranean galleries of the Palace, House E, House B, and finally House C in the Palace which was dedicated in 659 when he was fifty-six years old.[342] With each new building, Pacal experimented with the new style and pushed the innovative technology further.

When Pacal reached his early seventies, he must have begun feeling his mortality, for he began the last great project of his lifetime: the construction of the great mortuary Temple of the Inscriptions. This building, which housed his ultimate statement on dynasty, became one of the most famous monuments in the Mesoamerican world. Built in the stylistic tradition he established with the Temple Olvidado,[343] this spectacular pyramid was a labor of imagination and complex engineering. First, the work crews cleared and leveled a section of ground next to the Palace. This site was located at the foot of the sacred natural mountain which loomed over the great central plaza opening on to the northern horizon. Against the mountain face (Fig. 6:1), a pit was dug into which the laborers set a huge block of limestone that would become Pacal’s coffin when finished.

Consulting with the king, Palenque’s greatest artists designed an image (Fig. 6:3) that would represent his fall down the great trunk of the World Tree into the open jaws of the Otherworld. At the same time, they incorporated a sense of resurrection into this death image. As Pacal falls, he is accompanied by the image of a half-skeletal monster head carrying a bowl of sacrifice marked with the glyph of the sun. This particular glyph is a powerful symbol, representing the sun in transition between life and death, poised on the brink of the Otherworld. Like the sun, the king would rise again in the east after his journey through Xibalba. He was, after all, the living manifestation of the Hero Twins who had set the example of how to defeat the Lords of Death.

Around the hollowed coffin in which he would lie, the artists drew the images of his direct ancestors. These images were arranged in ascending generations, moving from south to north and from east to west, culminating with the central pivot—the king himself. When they were done with the drawings and Pacal had approved them, workmen moved in to construct a protective wall around their work. They then filled the chamber with sand and the masons and architects began to raise the pyramid. Into its center they built a vaulted stairway that would let the sculptors get to the coffin when it was no longer in danger from the construction. Down this dark stairway they would bring the body of the king when he died, setting it into the hollow at the center of the sarcophagus before they rolled the lid across the opening and sealed him in forever.

Pacal’s death was still far off, however, as the great mass of rock and earth rose upward in the nine great terraces upon which the six-doored temple would rest. His masons built the foundation platform of the temple first and then raised the central and rear walls that would hold up the roof. While these walls stood unencumbered by the heavy stone vaulting of the roof, sculptors went to the special quarries where the finest sculptural stone was found. There they cut huge, thick slabs to mount within the bearing walls of the temple—two to fit into the front surfaces of the walls separating the front and back rooms, flanking the doorway into the rear sanctum; and a third to fit into the back wall of the temple in a position where the light from the doorways could still shine upon it. Pacal’s scribes then drew a grid to accommodate a total of 640 glyphs which would record Pacal’s katun history and the important events of his own reign. They reserved the last two columns of the text for his death. Then, as with the sarcophagus, they built a protective wall around the inscriptions until the construction of the vaults and the plastering work was completed.

The passages on these temple tablets give us our first glimpse of this family’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. Less than three years before his own accession, Pacal recorded the accession of a woman whom he named in a mysterious and unusual way (Fig. 6:6). This woman took the throne on October 22, 612, 202 days before the end of the ninth katun, when Pacal was nine years old. Her name is recorded with a glyph written in the form of a screaming bird: Its bulging beak lies back against its forehead, and its gaping mouth is filled with feathers. Since this strange bird is a variant of the Palenque Emblem Glyph, we can assume that Pacal meant to connect the woman in question with the sacred name of his kingdom. Even more important, this same glyph was also used to name the First Mother, affectionately dubbed Lady Beastie by scholars, who was born before the present creation. This goddess, as we have mentioned above, was the mother of the gods and the creatrix of Maya myth.

Is Pacal telling us, then, that the person who held the throne before he became the king was the First Mother? In a way that is exactly what he intended to say, for this mysterious woman was indeed a mother, I although a human one. She was his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk,[344] who gave him life and then the crown when he acceded to power (Fig. 6:7). By using the name of the goddess to refer to his mother, Pacal declared her to be analogous to the mother of the gods. By logical extension, Pacal like-in-kind to the lords who were the three gods of the Palenque Triad, the Late Classic version of the gods the Late Preclassic ahauob fashioned on the temples of Cerros.

The great Pacal died in his eightieth year and was buried by his sons in rituals that involved the highest and lowest people in his realm. Opened again in 1952 by the great Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz, his tomb contains a record of his funerary rites frozen forever in time. We can visualize the rituals that, in the final hours, sent him on his lall into the realm of Xibalba to face the Lords of Death.

•

Chan-Bahlum tasted the salty sweat that rolled into the corner of his mouth as he lowered himself to the last of the high, slippery steps that descended down through the rock of his father’s sacred mountain.[345] Nearby was the vaulted tomb where his father awaited the rites that would begin his fall into the Otherworld. Dizzy from three days of fasting, the hard climb up the outer stairs, and the descent down the inner ones, Chan-Bahlum reached out to the white plastered wall to steady himself. At last, he stepped down into the dank cloud of smoke that filled the corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Masking the sweet smell of death, the blessed incense hovered around a sphere of torchlight before vanishing upward, like the Vision Serpent, following the dark path upward to the human world.[346]

His brown chest heaving like a frightened deer, Chan-Bahlum paused once more, this time to catch his breath. Sixty-seven high steps led from the world of light above, down to the gate of Xibalba. As the senior son of the dead king, and the king-elect, it had been Chan-Bahlum’s obligation to descend deep into this most holy mountain to send his father on the journey only the few and the prepared survived: the journey to confront the Lords of Death and to trick them into relinquishing life once again.

The long days of fasting and grief were taking their toll. Chan-Bahlum felt all his forty-eight years weighing on him like stones upon the backs of his father’s masons. Remembering his duty, he threw off his exhaustion and straightened his heavy jade pendant so that it lay squarely on his chest. His dignity restored, he turned to look into the black eyes of his younger brother. The thirty-eight-year-old Kan-Xul, by their father’s decree, would be king after him. The older man looked upon the more delicate features of his brother and saw in them the image of their father as he had been in his prime. Together they continued into the tomb.

Startled from his concentrated effort, a sculptor saw the princes approaching through the swirling smoke and tore himself away from his last-minute work,[347] carving the great king’s death date on the south edge of the massive sarcophagus lid. He quickly gathered his tools and the debris from his work into a net bag and slung them over his naked, sweat-damp shoulder. Pushing past the princes in the narrow confines of the hall, he mumbled apologies and began his climb out of the tomb. Kan-Xul smiled briefly to reassure his nervous brother. Even with the final rush to transform the imagery of the dead and reborn kings on the sarcophagus from painted line to carved relief, the burial rites would go without mishap. Chan-Bahlum knew it fell to him, as patriarch of Pacal’s lineage, to bury his father properly and heal the wound his death had caused in the fabric of the kingdom. He was determined the ritual would go well and dispel the danger of this time.

Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to his brother and turned back toward the heavy stone door and the three steps that led up to the inner chamber. Xoc,[348] his father’s adviser and a respected member of the lineage, awaited them at the door. He, along with a cadre of shamans, would assist the brothers as they sent their father into the terrifying fall to the Otherworld. First, however, they would equip the dead king with the power to rise like the dawning sun. Chan-Bahlum stepped through the triangular opening in the upper part of the tomb vault and entered the stifling hot chamber filled with the shamans who would sing the king’s spirit on its way. They would contain the dangerous energies that would be left by the king’s departure.

Standing on the threshold above the five stairs that led down into the tomb chamber, Chan-Bahlum paused to gaze at his father’s body. Nestled in an arm-deep cavity cut into the huge limestone block that served as the sarcophagus, Pacal lay on his back with his hands at his sides. His legs were extended and his feet relaxed to the sides as if he were sleeping. The dry, wrinkled skin of the eighty-year-old man seemed transparent in the flickering light of the torches held by the shamans. The jade collar that covered his chest and the cuffs on his wrists gleamed against the red walls of the coffin. The green headband with its Jester God lay on his forehead where it would tell the Lords of Xibalba that a great king had come among them.

Chan-Bahlum and his brother advanced down the steps with slow dignity, passing between the plaster portraits of their father modeled on either side of the entrance. Their horny feet rasped on the cold limestone of the steps as they moved to the platform that had been built so that they could stand level with the body, above the floor of the chamber. Together they stepped from the platform and onto the sarcophagus itself. Chan-Bahlum walked to the right side of the hollow that held his father’s body, while his brother went to the left side. Simultaneously they dropped to their knees and gazed for the last time upon their father’s face. Kan-Xul reached down into the coffin to straighten the ornament in Pacal’s left ear and to align the mica rectangle piece that enframed his mouth.

The two brothers locked eyes as Chan-Bahlum instructed the shamans to join them on the narrow surfaces surrounding the coffin depression and begin the final rites. Xoc stepped to his side and handed him a delicate mosaic mask of jade, shell, and obsidian formed into a likeness of his father’s face. Carefully balancing his weight, Chan-Bahlum leaned forward, reaching down into the coffin to lay the mask across his father’s features. The obsidian eyes of the dead Pacal stared heavenward from under the shining green brow. The visage of this great king would not be lost as his flesh decayed and left only bone.

Satisfied with the positioning of the mask, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul slowly moved until they were kneeling by the dead man’s waist. A shaman gave Chan-Bahlum a cube of jade which he laid reverently in the open palm of the right hand, already adorned with five rings of deep green jade. Another shaman gave Kan-Xul a sphere of jade to be set in the ring-laden left hand to balance the cube in the right. Leaning forward again, Chan-Bahlum set a small jade statue on the rich embroidered cloth that covered his father’s genitals from whence had come the seed and the blood of the greatest of all beings in the kingdom.

Together, the brothers moved to their father’s feet, each of them laying a sphere next to the sole of the foot closest to him. Lastly, Chan-Bahlum took a large hunk of jade that had been reverently and skillfully carved into the image of the patron god of the month Pax. It was an image that read te, the word for the tree down which the dead king was falling in the image on his sarcophagus lid and which he had embodied in his person while alive. The high-pitched, droning voices of the shamans echoed off the walls of the vaulted chamber, as they sent prayers to accompany the falling soul of the king. Satisfied that the body was prepared in the honorable manner appropriate to a high king, Chan-Bahlum and his brother stood up and stepped off the sarcophagus and back onto the platform at its south end.

Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to Xoc who disappeared through the door and called up the stairs. The sounds of the shamans’ prayers counterpointed the shuffling sounds of footsteps descending the high steps from the temple above. Finally, the frightened face of a young boy appeared in the doorway. It was Chac-Zutz’, scion of an important and honored cahal lineage which had served the high king for many generations. Chac-Zutz’ tugged gently on the arm of the four-year-old Chaacal who lagged behind him. The youngest male issue of Pacal’s line, this child might one day be the king if neither Chan-Bahlum nor his brother could produce an heir who lived long enough to inherit the throne.[349]

Chan-Bahlum stared at the two boys with dark-eyed intensity and spoke in a commanding voice, instructing them to look upon the great king who had transformed the face of the kingdom and made them all great. Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul stood in patient dignity while all the important men of the clan filed in behind the boys and then quickly ascended after taking this last opportunity to gaze upon the great Pacal before he was sealed forever into the Otherworld of the ancestors.

When it was done, the king-to-be gestured to the men of the royal lineage who had been chosen to help seal the coffin. After hushed consultation, two of them jumped down to the chamber floor. They handed the heavy stone lid, cut to fit inside the hollow holding the body, up to the four men standing on top of the sarcophagus. These men threaded ropes through holes drilled into each corner of the lid and then lowered it carefully onto the inset ledge around the coffin hollow. Once there, it formed a smooth stone surface across the top of the monolith. With the body now sealed in, they withdrew the ropes and dropped a stone plug into each of the drilled holes. The plug in the southwest corner had a notch cut in it so that the spirit tube, built into the stairway, could connect the chamber where the dead king lay to the world of his descendants above.

The time had finally come to pull the enormous carved lid over the top of the sarcophagus. This action would finish the sealing process and set the dead king amid the symbols that would insure success in his confrontation with the Lords of Death. Chan-Bahlum and his party stepped outside the tomb chamber to give the workers room to carry out this last difficult task. Strong young men of the ahau and cahal rank had been chosen to execute this dangerous and precise operation under the direction of the head mason who had overseen the construction of the tomb chamber. The prayers of the shamans were soon overwhelmed by the controlled pandemonium. The men whispered hoarsely to each other as they brought the equipment into the tomb. They set log rollers on top of the massive stone box that now held the king’s body and arranged themselves as best they could along the sides of the carved slab. Throaty grunts underscored the straining of their muscles as they heaved at the impossibly heavy lid. From the steps above, Chan-Bahlum watched as the great lid finally began to slide slowly forward onto the rollers. Struggling and sweating, the men worked in the close space of the chamber, urging the great lid into its place. Once this was accomplished, they labored to extricate the rollers and seat the lid with the help of ropes strung from the great stone beams in the upper vaulting of the tomb.

Finally, however, it was done. The young men passed the rollers out of the chamber and up the stairs to the venting tunnels in the side of the sacred mountain. Then, more quickly than Chan-Bahlum had believed possible, they were gone, taking all the equipment and the debris of their effort with them. The urgent pandemonium diminished until suddenly only the steady chants of the shamans reverberated through the tomb. The brothers crossed the threshold and stepped down to the platform to gaze at the image of their father carved upon the lid. There they saw him poised in the first moment of his descent down the World Tree into the jaws of Xibalba—his forehead pierced by the smoking ax that marked him as the incarnation of the last born of the First Mother’s sons.

Without speaking, the younger brother lowered himself onto the floor of the tomb chamber to stand at the southwest corner of the great sarcophagus. His eyes were level with the portraits of the ancestors carved on its sides. Chan-Bahlum, who had jumped to the floor at the southeast corner, reached back up to take a plaster head from Xoc, who stood on the platform above. He waited until Xoc had given another head to Kan-Xul, and then the two of them knelt down. As older brother, it was Chan-Bahlum’s perogative to act first. Lying down on his belly, he crawled forward between the stone piers that supported the platform at the south end of his father’s sarcophagus. It was a tight fit but he managed to wriggle between the obstacles until he could reach far under the massive stone sarcophagus, which stood on six low stone blocks.[350] With a silent call to the ancestors of his line, he stretched his arm as far inward as he could reach and gently deposited a life-sized head made of plaster. Torn from another building as an offering to help Pacal’s soul in its journey, it represented his father as he had looked in his prime. Kan-Xul, in his turn, wriggled under the huge sarcophagus and placed his sculpture next to the first. The second sculpture depicted Pacal as he had looked at the age of twelve when he became king.[351]

Sweating in the heat, the two of them extricated themselves and stood to take the ritual cup and plate Xoc handed down to them. The brothers then knelt in unison, carefully balancing the containers which were filled to the brim with food and drink to succor the dead king’s soul on his journey. They placed the offerings on the floor under the south side of the platform while the shamans chanted prayers asking that Pacal’s journey be swift and his defeat of the Lords of Death sure. Finished with the ritual, the two brothers accepted a hand from Xoc, who helped them up onto the platform again.

Chan-Bahlum looked at the red-lidded sarcophagus once more— examining every detail of the preparations. The flickering torchlight played across the relief images of Pacal molded on the plaster walls of the chamber. In front of him, on the north end of the lid, was the carved image of his father. It almost seemed to him as if the dead king were present, sitting cross-legged on the stone platform that had supported the lid before it had been wrestled atop the sarcophagus. Chan-Bahlum stood still, lost in the memory of his father and in the anticipation of his own transformation into the high king. He was a three-katun lord in his forty-eighth year of life. To the people of his world, he was already an old man, and he wondered if the gods would give him time to leave as great a mark on the flow of history as his father had.

At his feet a plasterer worked, laying the spirit tube from the notch in the south end of the lid, across the platform, and up the five stairs to tie into the hollow pipe that ran up the vaulted stairs to the floor of the temple above. The kings of Palenque were practical men as well as people of faith. To help their ancestors ascend into the world of humankind, they created a physical path for the Vision Serpent to follow when a dead king wished to speak to his descendants.

With the spirit tube ready, only one ritual remained. Chan-Bahlum turned to his brother, who handed him the great jade belt his father had worn to mark his status as a divine ahau. The flint pendants dangling under the jade ahau heads clanked together as Chan-Bahlum grasped the leather ties and stretched the heavy belt out between his extended hands. With reverence, he stepped up onto the red surface of the sarcophagus lid and knelt upon the image of his falling father. Leaning forward, he laid the belt down on the lid, stretching it out across the god image that marked the World Tree as a holy thing. The king’s belt rested above the center point of his human body, now hidden under the heavy lid. His soul could at last begin its journey, released from the case of worldly flesh, prepared for the fall to the Otherworld with food, images of his human form, and the belt that would signal his divinity and rank as he met the Lords of Death.

The shamans’ song changed as Chan-Bahlum and his brother voiced their farewell, asking their father to help them when he emerged from Xibalba. Heavy with grief, they climbed the five short stairs leading out of the chamber and prepared themselves for the next stage of the ritual. Stepping down into the outer corridor, they watched as the shamans pushed the huge triangular door closed. Masons rushed down from the venting passages with baskets of wet plaster, which they threw onto the edges of the door with loud slapping noises. Using wooden spatulas and their hands, they smoothed the plaster until all evidence of the door was gone. One of them shouted an order and other men rushed down the long stairs with more plaster and stones. With the same efficient haste, they constructed a stone box at the end of the corridor setting one side of it against the now hidden door. Finishing in a rush, they cleaned up the debris, gathered their tools, and left in a silent hurry for they knew what was coming. A great king had died and it was time to sanctify his journey with a sacrifice so that he could be reborn.

In the sudden silence that fell after the workers had departed, Chan-Bahlum could hear the scuffling descent of more people, this time from the temple above. He turned and saw five captives being dragged down the stairs by the honored kinsmen of the dead king. A woman and four men would go to Xibalba this day to accompany Pacal on his journey. Some of them moaned in terror, but one young man trod forward to meet his fate with insolent pride. He was an ahau taken in battle and chosen to go with Pacal because of his arrogant courage and reckless bravado.

Chan-Bahlum grabbed the young ahau’s hair and wrenched his head up so that he could see the captive’s eyes. He closed his hand on the hilt of the flint knife he had brought with him for this act of sacrifice. In silence he plunged it into the captive’s chest and struck up into the heart. This was the signal. His kinsmen screamed in a cacophony which echoed in the waiting ears above and fell upon the victims, slaughtering them with furious slashes of their bloodstained knives. The limp bodies of the dead were tossed in tangled abandon into the box.

With the sacrifice completed, Chan-Bahlum left the blood-splattered corridor and began to mount the stairs in slow dignity, conserving his strength for the final rite he must perform in the temple above. The muscles in his legs burned with exhaustion as he turned at the midway platform and began the climb up the second flight of stairs. His beblooded kinsmen followed him in a reverent silence broken only by their heavy breathing as they struggled with the hard climb and the residual emotions from the sacrificial ritual.

Chan-Bahlum emerged through the floor of the temple, where the spirit tube from his father’s coffin ended in the head of the Vision Serpent. When he had made his careful way around the ledge beside the stairway entrance, shamans took him by the arms and stripped away his loincloth. One of them handed him a fresh blade of obsidian just struck from a core. He reached down and grasped his penis, holding it tightly as he pierced it three times with the point of the bright black razor. Handing back the blade, he pulled long strands of bark paper through the wounds and watched them turn red with the sacred blood of sacrifice. It was his first sacrificial act as patriarch of the royal clan, an act of symbolic birth in the midst of death.

His brother performed his own act of sacrifice, as did the men who had helped them dispatch the captives. Stained crimson with the flow from his own body and the blood of the captives below, Chan-Bahlum stepped out of the back chamber. He passed through the great katun history his father had commissioned to appear between the central piers of the outer wall. A great roar of grief rose from the gathered multitude in the plaza below as they saw him emerge, the blood on his white loincloth clearly visible in the oblique light of the setting sun. The people of the kingdom in their thousands had come to witness the beginning of the great king’s journey. When Chan-Bahlum’s bloodstained body appeared and cast its shadows on the whitened walls of the temple piers, they knew it was done. Like the setting sun that lit the scene, the great king was falling toward Xibalba. Hundreds began their song of grief and cut their own flesh in pious prayers for the king. Drums beat a mind-numbing rhythm accompanied by the piercing notes of clay whistles blown by people exhausted by days of dancing and fasting in preparation for this moment.

Chan-Bahlum stood above, swaying slightly, looking down on the seething mass of his people. The paper hanging down against his legs was now saturated with his blood, which dripped to stain the white plaster floor below his feet. His younger brother stood off behind his right shoulder, reddened by his own act of sacrifice. The corridor behind them was filled with the most important people of the royal clan. On the terrace just below the temple summit stood ahauob of other lineages and the cahalob who had governed the towns of the kingdoms for the king. They too had drawn blood that now stained the cloth bands tied to their wrists and hanging from their ears and loins.

Shamans stood beside hip-high braziers modeled in the image of the great Ancestral Twins, and watched Chan-Bahlum closely. He began to dance slowly in place, preparing to enter the trance of communication with the dead. When the shamans saw the trance state descend upon him, they threw handfuls of copal resin and rubber (the “blood of trees”) into the fire burning in the conical bowls sitting atop the clay cylinders. Others brought shallow plates filled with blood-saturated paper from the king-to-be and his brother. As great billows of black smoke rose from the braziers, cries of wonder rose with them from the plaza below. The last light of the sinking sun lit the rising columns of smoke to tell the thousands of watchers that the ancestors had arrived. The moaning wail of conch trumpets echoed off the mountain walls and spread over the great plain below. The dead king’s ancestors knew that he was coming to join them. They would go to help him in his conflict with the Lords of Death.

•

The forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum waited 132 days after his father died to conduct his own rituals of accession. The responsibility of finishing his father’s funerary temple fell to him, and this task provided the first step in his own campaign to prove the legitimacy of his ascent to the throne. To do so, he asserted that he had received his power by direct transfer of authority from his dead father in an act replicating events that occurred at the time of creation. In this way, he redefined dynastic succession as a supernatural rite of ecstatic communion between the heir and the dead king, who was in the Otherworld.

The first project of Chan-Bahlum’s reign demonstrates his preoccupation with this new definition of dynasty: the direct ritual transmission of power in place of the traditional system of lineage succession. While finishing his father’s funerary monument, he usurped the outer piers of the temple at the summit. On these he depicted the rituals in which his father chose him as the legitimate heir and transformed him from a human child into a living god[352] (Fig. 6:8). In this scene, modeled in brightly painted stucco, Pacal and three other adults present the six-year-old Chan-Bah-lum from the edge of a pyramid. The height of this structure enabled the audience below, which consisted of the nobility and probably a large number of the commoners as well, to see and acknowledge that this child, of all Pacal’s offspring, was the one who would become the next ruler.[353] Chan-Bahlum, however, mixed the portrayal of the actual ritual with images conveying the supernatural sanction of the new status this ritual bestowed upon him.

The child who is cradled in the arms of his predecessors has both divine and purely human features. His status as a divinity is emphasized by merging other parts of his anatomy with the signs of the god G1I, the third-born child of the First Mother (Fig. 6:8a). One of Chan-Bahlum’s legs, for example, transforms into a open-mouthed serpent in the fashion characteristic of the god. Moreover, penetrating the baby’s forehead is the smoking-ax blade that is so often depicted stuck through the forehead mirror of the god. The identical symbol impales the forehead of Pacal, his father, on the sarcophagus lid in the tomb deep below to bear witness to his divine status as he falls into the Otherworld. Yet to insure that the baby on the Temple of Inscriptions piers was not taken simply to be an image of the god, he was depicted with six toes on each foot (Fig. 6:9a), a physical deformity shown repeatedly in Chan-Bahlum’s adult portraits (Fig. 6:9b-d). The inclusion of this characteristic deformity affirmed the humanity of the baby figure and its personal identity as the six-toed heir Chan-Bahlum. Combining these contrasting features asserted the essential divinity of the human heir.

This ritual display of the child heir, then, constituted the public affirmation of Chan-Bahlum’s new identity as a “divine human.” This new identity was sanctified by the sacrifice of captives taken in battle by Pacal. Another proud father, King Chaan-Muan, depicted exactly this sequence of events explicitly and graphically in the murals of Bonampak, a contemporary Late Classic kingdom on the Usumacinta river.[354] Chan-Bahlum, like the Bonampak king, turned this ephemeral ritual of heir display into a permanent public declaration of his legitimate status by placing it on the facade of a temple which dominated the central public plaza of his city. The fact that the temple housed his father’s grave made the assertion all the more powerful.

During the time when he was finishing his father’s temple, Chan-Bahlum also began work on the Group of the Cross, the buildings that would house his own version of Palenque’s dynastic history—the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Sun. In pictures and texts of unsurpassed eloquence, the new king completed the presentation of his new doctrine of dynasty as an institution transcending lineage. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary for him to reach back to the fundamental and orthodox concepts of royal authority. Chan-Bahlum approached the nebulous and paradoxical nature of political power with the vision of a great theologian and statesman. He divided his pictorial and textual treatise into three temples, thus recalling the triadic arrangement of primordial Late Preclassic royal architecture.[355] In this way, his statement evoked “origins” to the Maya—just as we “borrow” from the architecture of the Parthenon and Pantheon in our own state and religious monuments to declare the Greek and Roman origins of our cultural heritage.

The three temples of the Group of the Cross rise from the summits of pyramidal platforms. The tallest temple is in the north, the middle one in the east, and the lowest in the west (Fig. 6:10). The south side of the group is open, both to preserve the triadic form of the group and to accommodate a large audience for ritual performances. This arrangement was all part of Chan-Bahlum’s plan to assert the ancient and pristine quality of his legitimacy. Although this design violates the landscape of Palenque, which would logically dictate that the principal building face toward the broad plain below, not away from it, it does conform with the primarily southward orientation of the first royal temples built at Cerros and other Late Preclassic kingdoms.

Chan-Bahlum pursued the triadic theme further in the design of the buildings themselves. In each temple, three doors pierce the front wall of an interior which is divided into an antechamber and three rear sanctums (Fig. 6:11). In the central chamber of each temple his masons built the holy portals which opened into the Otherworld. These powerful foci of supernatural energy were set inside miniature houses—called by the Maya pib nau[356] or “underground buildings”—built within the back chamber of each temple. While these little houses were only symbolically underground, they replicated in principle the real underground buildings of Palenque: the tombs of Pacal and other kings in pyramids which dotted the sacred landscape of the city.

Artists decorated the outer facades of the temples with huge plaster reliefs modeled on the roof combs, the entablatures, and on the piers between the doors (Fig. 6:11). Unfortunately, only the sculptures of the Temple of the Cross entablature remain legible. These depicted frontal views of great Witz Monsters gazing out from all four sides of the roof. The Maya thought of this temple as a living mountain. Thus, its inner sanctuary was “underground” because it was in the mountain’s heart.

Into these “underground houses in the hearts of the mountains” the king would tread, alone and stripped of earthly trappings, to meet his father and his ancestors in Xibalba. He would hazard the perils of hell, as the Hero Twins had before him, to bring back life and prosperity for his people. The plaster sculptures that adorned the outer entablatures of the pib na declared their supernatural purpose. Great slabs of stone brought from special quarries bore the words and images that would open these portals to the Otherworld. These stone panels were set into the rear walls of the interior, and into the outer, front walls on either side of the entry doorways. Another set of inscribed doorjamb panels lined the inside of that door (Fig. 6:11).

The images used to represent the visions special to each pib na were all arranged in the same basic pattern. The resonances and contrasts designed into the three compositions provided a means of enriching the information they conveyed and emphasizing the unity of their spiritual source. The pictures in each temple were carved on the central axes of the main tablets set against the back wall of the pib na (Fig. 6:12). Each composition represented one of the three paths to Xibalba, as well as the three forms that supernatural power would take during the king’s ecstatic trances. In each temple, the central image was flanked on the one side by a short figure encased in a heavy cloth costume, and on the other by Chan-Bahlum wearing simple dress. From there the action moved to the two exterior panels, following the path of the king from the Otherworld to the natural one. On the outer panels the king is shown returning in triumph from his transformational journey: He has changed from heir to the reigning monarch of Palenque.

The texts embedded in these narrative scenes tell us exactly which historical events were critical to this transformational process. The text describing the heir-designation of Chan-Bahlum was extremely important. This information appears often, always near the small figure muffled in heavy clothing. This text tells us that the rituals surrounding the presentation of the boy from atop the pyramid took place on June 17, 641, and ended five days later on the summer solstice when he became the living manifestation of the sun.[357] Other significant texts relate that on January 10, 684, the forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum became king 132 days after his father’s death. The glyphs recording this celebration are next to his portrait. They appear on the inner panels of the Temples of the Cross and the Foliated Cross, and over the shield in the center of the Tablet of the Sun.

[[][Fig. 6:12]]

When the scene moves to the outer panels, other important events are emphasized. In the Temple of the Foliated Cross and the Temple of the Sun,[358] we see two different scenes from Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites. In both these temples, the left panel shows him on the first day of these rites, and the right panel shows him at their conclusion, ten days later, when Venus was at its greatest elongation as Eveningstar. In the Temple of the Cross, only the culminating event of the succession rites is shown. In this version, we see Chan-Bahlum facing God L, one of the most important gods of Xibalba, who has evidently guided him out of the Otherworld and back into the light of life. Finally, the text behind Chan-Bahlum on the Tablet of the Cross puts a period to the historical proceedings by recording the three-day-long dedication rites for the completion of this monumental group on July 23, 690.

If we have accurately identified these events—the designation of Chan-Bahlum as heir, his accession as king, and his dedication of the temples—who then is the mysterious personage shown in these final narrative scenes? The answer is simple: The small muffled figure is none other than the dead Pacal, the father of the king-to-be,[359] who stands facing his child in the ritual that will make him king. Chan-Bahlum designed the inner scenes of the temples to represent places in Xibalba where he would meet his father and receive the power of the kingship from him directly. Pacal is shown transferring the kingship to his son through a ritual of transformation paralleling the one he enacted for a frightened six-year-old boy forty-two years earlier. On each of the inner panels, the son is dressed simply in the Maya equivalent of underwear, his long hair wrapped in readiness to don the heavy headdress of kingship. His father stands nearby, his chest muffled in heavy cloth wrapping bands. His neck too is bound in a thick twisted cloth which hangs down his back. This apparel most likely represents the burial clothing he wore in his own final portal deep beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions. At any rate, the costume clearly portrays him in his role as denizen of Xibalba.

On the inner panels, the dead Pacal still holds the insignia of royal power. Transformation and the passing on of authority occurred only during the ten days of the accession rites. At the end of these days and nights of fasting, sacrifice, and communion in the place of death, we finally see Chan-Bahlum coming forth from thepib na wielding those very power objects and wearing the age-old garb of kings. The royal belt, with Chac-Xib-Chac dangling behind his knees, girds his loins. The heavy elaborate feathered headdress adorns his brow with the responsibility of authority. On his back rests the burden of divinity symbolized by the backrack with its image of a god. This was the dress of kings when Tikal conquered Uaxactun. By donning this most ancient and powerful garb, Chan-Bahlum became the ahau of the ahauob—“the lord of lords.”

The central icon at the portal of each of the three temples in the Group of the Cross specifies the nature of the cosmic power and community responsibility that defined kingship for that temple. At the portal of the Temple of the Cross, we see a variant of the World Tree (see the Glossary of Gods). This cross-shaped Tree, with the Serpent Bar of kingship entwined in its branches and the Celestial Bird standing on its crown, was the central axis of the cosmos (Fig. 6:12a).[360] Along this axis rose and descended the souls of the dead and the gods called from the Otherworld by the vision rite to talk to human beings. It was the path the Cosmic Monster took as the sun and Venus moved through its body on their daily journeys.[361] The king himself was the worldly manifestation of this axis, and this emphasized his role as the source of magical power. He was not only the primary practitioner of the rituals that contacted the Otherworld: He was the pathway itself (see Chapter 2, Fig. 2:11). In this portal the dead Pacal gives his son a scepter in the form of the monster that rests at the base of the World Tree—the same sun-marked monster that bore Pacal to Xibalba. Chan-Bahlum wields a disembodied head as an instrument of power, as had the Early Classic kings of Tikal and other kings before him.

The portal of the Temple of the Foliated Cross (Fig. 6:12b) bears a foliated variant of the World Tree formed by a maize plant rising from a band of water and Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, one of the symbols of the watery world of raised fields and swamps (see the Glossary of Gods). In the crown of this foliated tree sits a huge water bird wearing the mask of the Celestial Bird. The branches of the tree are ears of maize manifested as human heads, for, in the Maya vision, the flesh of human beings was made from maize dough. This Foliated Cross represented the cultivated world of the community through the symbol of a maize plant rising from the waters of the earth as the source of life. Maize was not only the substance of human flesh, but it was the major cultigen of the Maya farmer. As the sustainer of life, and as a plant that could not seed itself without the intervention of humans, maize was an ultimate symbol of Maya social existence in communion with nature. In this portal Pacal is shown giving his son the Personified Bloodletter. This was the instrument of the bloodletting rite and the vision quest. It drew the blood of the king and brought on the trance that opened the portal and brought forth the gods from the Otherworld.

Images of war and death sacrifice adorn the panel in the pib na of the Temple of the Sun. A Sun Jaguar shield and crossed spears dominate the central icon (Fig. 6:13). These images are sustained aloft by a throne with bleeding jaguar heads emerging from one axis, and bleeding dragons from the other. As at Cerros, these bleeding heads represent decapitation sacrifice. The throne and its burden of war rest on the shoulders of God L and another aged god from the Otherworld. Both are bent over like captives under the feet of victorious warrior kings.[362] This scene recalls the defeat of the Lords of Death at the beginning of time by the Hero Twins. Captive sacrifice was the source of life through the reenactment of the magical rebirth of these heroic ancestors of the Maya people. God L, who received the greetings of the new king in the Temple of the Cross, now holds up the burden of war and sacrifice. In both cases, ritual performance by the king involved Otherworld denizens in the human community.[363]

Here in the Temple of the Sun, the power object is not actually passed from the inside scene to the outside, as in the other temples; but the intent of the composition is still the same. On the inner panel, Pacal holds a full-bodied eccentric flint and a shield made of a flayed human face: symbols of war among the nobility of Palenque and other Maya kingdoms. If we move to the outer panels, on one we see Chan-Bahlum holding a bleeding jaguar on a small throne as the symbol of sacrificial death. On the opposite panel, he wears cotton battle armor with a rolled flexible shield hanging down his back. The tall staff he wields is probably a battle spear typical of the kind carried by warrior kings at other sites. The parallelism here is nicely rendered. On the one side, he is emerging from the pib na as a warrior prepared to capture the enemies of his kingdom; on the other, he comes forth as the giver of sacrifice, the result of victory.

Once he had memorialized the scenes of his transformation within his living mountains, Chan-Bahlum framed the imagery with the finest examples of royal literature left to the modern world by the ancient Maya. We know that, on the one hand, his actions were politically motivated and designed to gain personal glory. That knowledge, however, cannot obscure our awareness that these texts constitute a magnificent poetic vision of the universe, a remarkable expression of the high level of philosophical and spiritual development within the civilization of the Maya. These texts comprise the only full statement of creation mythology and its relationship to the institution of ahau that we have from the Maya Classic period. They define the sacred origin and charismatic obligations of kingly power.

In these texts, Chan-Bahlum resolved the relationship between lineage and dynasty by evoking the origin myths of the Maya, declaring that his own claim of descent from his grandmother replicated the practices of the gods at the time of the genesis. He pursued and elaborated the same divine symmetries his father had asserted before him, symmetries between the First Mother, First Father, and their children, and the historical realities of Palenque’s dynastic succession. The First Mother was Lady Beastie, who we mentioned above as the mother of the gods and the Creatrix in the Maya vision of the cosmos. As we shall see the Palencanos saw her operate in their lives through her spirit counterpart, the moon. Her husband and the father of her children is called GT (G-one-prime) by modern scholars. He established the order of time and space just after the fourth version of the cosmos was created on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. Both the Creatrix and her husband were born during the previous manifestation of creation, but their children were born 754 years into this one.

The three children are known as the Palenque Triad because Heinrich Berlin[364] first recognized them as a unit of related gods in Paienque’s inscriptions. He dubbed them GI, GII, and GUI for God I, God II, and God III. We now know that the firstborn child, GI, had the same name as his father, GI’, in exactly the same pattern as the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh where Hun-Hunahpu is the father of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. GI is a fish-barbled anthropomorphic god who wears a shell-earflare. He is associated with Venus and with decapitation sacrifice. GII, also known as God K, Bolon Tz’acab, and Kauil, is a serpent-footed god who wears a smoking-ax through his obsidian-mirrored forehead. He is the god of lineages and blood sacrifice. GUI is the cruller-eyed Jaguar God, who is also known as Ahau-Kin, “Lord Sun.” See the Glossary of Gods for full descriptions and pictures.

As the most ancient and sacred of all Maya dieties, these three gods played a crucial role in the earliest symbolism of kingship we saw at Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun. Chan-Bahlum makes them the crucial pivot of his own claim to legitimacy. On the right half of each text, he recounted their actions in the Maya story of the beginning of the current world. On the left he recorded the connections between those sacred events and Paienque’s history. Here is a chronology of the mythological events in the order they are presented. (See Fig. 6:14,15,16 for the full decipherment and drawings of these texts.)

<verse> On December 7, 3121 B.C., when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled, five days after the moon was born and the 2^nd moon had ended, X was the moon’s name and it had 29 days.

It was 20 days after God K had set the south sky place on November 16, 3121 B.C.

that Lady Beastie was born. [Al-Cl]

8. years, 5 months, and no days after he was born and then the past epoch ended. On August 13, 3114 B.C., 13. baktuns were completed.

1 year, 9 months, and 2 days after the new epoch began, GF entered the sky.

On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ dedicated it. “Wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” was its name. It was his house of the north. [DI —C13]

753 years and 12 months after GF had set the wac chan and then the matawil person was born. On October 21, 2360 B.C., the matawil, the blood of Lady Beastie, touched the earth. [D13-F4]

827 years, 11 months, and 2 days after she had been born, and then she crowned herself on August 13, 2305 B.C. [E5-F8]

1,330 years, 12 months, 2 days after August 13^th came to pass and then U-Kix-Chan, the Divine Palenque Lord, was born.

26 years, 7 months, 13 days after U-Kix-Chan had been born ... [E10-F17] </verse>

Alfardas flanking the main stairs

<verse> On October 21,2360 B.C., GI, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,094 years, 11 months, 10 days later On January 10, 692 ... </verse>

The Temple of the Cross

<verse> On December 7, 3121 B.C., Lady Beastie, the First Mother, was born. On June 16, 3122 B.C., GI’, the First Father, was born. On August 13, 3114 B.C., the 13^th baktun ended and the new creation began. On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ entered into the sky and he dedicated the house named ‘wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (the “World Tree house of the north”).[365] </verse>

<verse> ... and then U-Kix-Chan crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. He was a Divine Palenque Lord. [P1-Q3]

On March 31,397 Kuk was born. It was 22 years, 5 months, 14 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself on March 11,431. He was Divine ????? Lord. [P4—Q9] On August 9, 422, “Casper” was born. 13 years, 3 months, 9 days after “Casper” had been born and then it was August 10, 435, 123 days after “Casper” crowned himself and then December 11,435, came to pass, on that day 3,600 years (9 baktuns) ended. <verbatim>|Pl0—S2]</verbatim> 28 years, 1 month, 18 days after “Manik” had been born and then he crowned himself on July 29,487. [R3-S7] 36 years, 7 months, 17 days after he had been born on July 6,465, and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself on June 5, 501. [R8-R13] 39 years, 6 months, 16 days after Kan-Xul had been born and then he crowned himself on February 25, 529. [S13-S18] 42 years, 4 months, 17 days after he had been born and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself on May 4,565. [T1-T6] 1 year, 1 month, 1 day after Chaacal-Ah-Nab had been born on September 5, 523 and then Chan-Bahlum was born. [U6-T11]

48 years, 4 months, 7 days after Chan-Bahlum had been born on September 20, 524 and 18(?) years, 8 months, 2 days. [U11-U18] </verse>

<verse> it was housed the wacah-chan (six-sky) it was the sanctuary of it was the holy thing of Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal and the child of Lady Ahpo-Hel. It happened at the Waterlily Place. </verse>

On October 21, 2360 B.c., GI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.

On August 13, 2305 B.C., at age 815, Lady Beastie became the first being in this creation to be crowned as king.

On March 1 1, 993 B.c., U-Kix-Chan was born.

On March 28, 967 B.C., at age thirty-six, U-Kix-Chan, Divine Lord of Palenque, was crowned king of Palenque.

On November 8, 2360 B.C. when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled, it was ten days after the moon was born, 5 moons had ended, X was its name and it had 30 days.

It was 14 months and 19 days after God K set the west quadrant.{1}

It was the third birth and GII was born. [A1-D2]

34 years, 14 months after GII, the matawil, had been born and then 2 baktuns (800 years) ended on February 16, 2325 B.C.

On that day Lady Beastie, Divine Lord of Matawil, manifested a divinity through bloodletting. [C3-D11]

It had come to pass on Yax -Ha! Witznal in the shell place at the Na-Te-Kan{2} on November 8, 2360 B.C.

2,947 years, 3 months, 16 days later{3} ... [C12-D17]

{1} The scribe made an error here by adding rather than subtracting the Distance Number. The correct station is 1.18.4.7.11 Imix 19 Pax with red and east.

{2} These three locations refer to the Mountain Monster under Chan-Bahlum’s feet, the shell under Pacal’s feet, and the Foliated Cross in the center of the panel (See Figure 6:12).

{3} The Distance Number should be 7.14.13.1.16.

<verse> Alfardas flanking the main stairs On November 8, 2360 B.C.. GII, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,050 years, 63 days later on January 10, 692 ... <verse>

The Temple of the Foliated Cross

<verse> November 8, 2360 B.C., GII was born. Thirty-four years later, on February 17, 2325 B.C., Lady Beastie let her blood when two baktuns ended. ... on July 23, 690, (III and Gill were in conjunction [L1-M4] On the next day, the Mah-Kina-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated in the house of Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord. <verbatim>|L6-L9]</verbatim> On the third day Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord, he let blood with an obsidian blade; he took the bundle after it had come to pass at the Waterlily Place. Wac-Chan-Chac Ox-Waxac-Chac acted there. [L10-L17] 49 years, 6 months, 4 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord on January 10, 692. [M17-P5] 6 years, 11 months, 6 days after he had been seated as ahau and then GI, GII, Gill and their companion gods came into conjunction. Lord Chan-Bahlum enacted a ritual. In 1 year, 12 months, 4 days it will happen, the end of the 13^th katun on March 17, 692. And then it came to pass July 23, 690 and then they were in conjunction the gods, who are the chcrcished-ones of, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord. it was housed, the Na-Te-Kan (Foliated Cross) it was the pib nail of it was the divine-thing of Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal the child of Lady Ahpo-Hcl. It happened at the Waterlily Place. </verse>

<verse> On October 25, 2360 B.C. the third Lord of the Night ruled, it was 26 days after the moon was born, four moons had ended, X was its name and it had 30 days ....

It was 1 year, 46 days after God K set the north quadrant on July 24, 2587 B.C.

On that day he was born, Mah Kina Tah-Waybil-Ahau, Kin-tan “decapitated jaguar.” Ti Nah, Zac-Bac-Na-Chan, Atin Butz’, TITI, Mah Kina Ahau-Kin.. [A1-D6]

765 years, 3 months, 6 days after the wac-chan had been set, and then the matawil, the child of Lady Beastie, Divine Palenquc Lord, was born. [C7—D13]

3,858 years, 5 months, 16 days ... [Cl—D16]

Alfardas flanking the main stairs

On October 25, 2360 B C., GIII, the matawil, touched the earth. [3,894 years, 11 months, 6 days later on January 10, 692 ...] </verse>

The Temple of the Sun

On October 25, 2360 B.c., 754 years after the era began, GUI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.

<verse> ... after the present epoch began on August 13, 3114 B. C., and then July 23,690, came to pass. GUI came into conjunction. 1016–06]

One day later on July 24, 690, the Kinich-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated, in the house of the Bacel-Way Lord Chan-Bahlum. [N7-O12]

Three days later he materialized the divinity through bloodletting. He did it at the Waterlily Place, the Old God of Kuk-Te-Witz.{4} (N13-N16]

146 years, 12 months, 3 days after November 20,496, when Kan-Xul took office as the heir-designate. It had come to pass at the Toc-tan Place. and then June 17, 641, came to pass. He (Lord Chan-Bahlum) became the heir. And on the fifth day after (on June 22,641) Lord Chan-Bahlum became the sun in the company of GI. [O16-Q10]

6 years, 2 months. 17 days after he had been born on May 23, 635, and then he was designated heir. [P11-Q13]

It was 1 year, 167 days until December 6, 642, when 10 years ended (9.10.10.0.0), he warred{5} as heir. [P14-Q16] </verse>

{4} Kuk-te-witz is the ancient name for the mountain behind the Temple of the Foliated Cross, known today as El Mirador.

{5} This is the same war event Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo enacted against Ucanal (Stela 22) and Ah-Cacaw of Tikal enacted against Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul.

<verse> It was an action in the Mah Kina ???? Cab, it was the pib nail of he completed 13 katuns on March 18, 692, Lord [Chan-Bahlum ...] </verse>

This pattern of events reveals Chan-Bahlum’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. In the Temple of the Cross, the first event recorded is the birth of Lady Beastie, the First Mother. In the next passage, we are told that the First Father, GT, was born on an even earlier date.[366] Both these gods were born during the previous creation, indicating that the nature of their power comes from a time before the existence of our world. On 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the cosmos re-formed into the new pattern of creation which manifested the present world. As the text continues, it describes how GT, the First Father, established the order of the new world on 1.9.2, 542 days after the present creation began.

Chan-Bahlum provided a lot of information about these primordial times, beyond their naked existence as dates and events. His real theological and political intentions, however, are revealed by the manner of his presentation. In the text of his accession monument, the Temple of the Cross, he recounted the birth of the First Mother as if it were the first, and not the second, chronological event in the historical sequence. Initially, when recording the birth of the First Father, he didn’t even identify him. The reader had to wait until a subsequent passage to discover that this mysterious person, born eight years before creation—and 540 days earlier than the goddess—was in fact the First Father, GT. Chan-Bahlum manipulated the focus of the text at the expense of the First Father specifically because the First Mother was the pivot of his strategy of legitimization.

In his accession monument, therefore, Chan-Bahlum placed the focus entirely on Lady Beastie and her relationship to the three gods of the Palenque Triad. Pacal had already set the precedent for this association by linking Lady Beastie’s name to that of his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, implying by this reference that his mother was the human analog of the mother goddess of all Maya. Chan-Bahlum went further by contriving to make the birth date of the goddess like-in-kind to the birth date of his own father, Pacal.[367] With a little calendric manipulation, this was easily done. To the Maya, days that fell at the same point in a calender cycle shared the same characteristics in sacred time. Days that fell on the same point in many different cycles were very sacred indeed. By extension, events, such as births, which fell on days that were related cosmically, were also “like-in-kind.” Because of the symmetry of their birth dates, Chan-Bahlum could declare that his father, Pacal, and the mother of the gods, were beings made of the same sacred substance.

The symmetry of sacredness between the First Mother and Pacal was vital for another reason. The mother of the gods was born in the world of the past creation; therefore, she carried into the new world the cumulative power of the previous existence.[368] The date 4 Ahau 8 Cumku represented a membrane, comprised of the horrific chaos of creation, separating the symmetry and order of the former world from that of the present one. The contrived relationship between Pacal’s birth and the goddess’s asserted that his birth held the same sacred destiny as hers and that this symmetry came from the time before the creation.

The parallel Chan-Bahlum wished his people to see is both elegant and effective. He focused their attention on the old and new creation, then demonstrated that Lady Zac-Kuk and her royal clan represented the old ruling lineage at Palenque, while her son Pacal represented the new order of another patrilineal clan—a “new creation,” so to speak. When his mother passed the sacred essence of the kingship on to Pacal, she successfully passed through the chaotic violation of kinship principles of succession to arrive at this new order. Chan-Bahlum’s legitimate claim to the throne rested on this principle: direct transmission of the sacred essence of royal power between kings, irrespective of their gender or family.

Chan-Bahlum extended the similarity between the kings of Palenque and the gods even further by recording the births of the three gods of the Palenque Triad on the left sides of the tablets inside the pib na. There he emphasized their relationship to the First Mother by labeling GI (the namesake of the First Father) and GUI, who were the first and second born of her children, with the glyphic phrase “he is the child of Lady Beastie.” These gods were her children, exactly as Pacal was the child of Lady Zac-Kuk. GII, the god most closely related to Maya kings, was also her child, but Chan-Bahlum chose to relate him to the First Father by setting up contrived numerology between their births, exactly as he contrived to make Pacal’s birth “like-in-kind” to Lady Beastie’s.[369] The equation is, of course, his own claim to legitimacy: As GII was descended from the substance of First Father so was he the descendant of the divine Pacal.

This declaration of parallelism might have been enough, but Chan- Bahlum, intent on proving his right to the throne beyond the shadow of any doubt, was not content to stop there. On the Tablet of the Cross he declared that after she brought the firstborn of the Palenque Triad into the world, Lady Beastie, at age 815, became the first living being to be crowned ruler in the new creation. The crown she wore is called glyph- ically zac uinic (“pure or resplendent person”) and it is visually represented as the Jester God headband we saw first at Cerros. This glyph is the key title taken by all the subsequent kings of Palenque who were recorded on the historical side of this panel. Once again, Chan-Bahlum did not say that the First Father became the king: It was the goddess that he chose to emphasize. The text itself reads: “2 days, 11 uinals, 7 tuns, 1 katuns, and 2 baktuns after she had been born and then she crowned herself the zac uinic, Beastie, on 9 Ik seating of Zac” (Fig. 6:17).

At this point, Chan-Bahlum could certainly have rested from his labors. He had already created a simple and effective equation between the First Mother and the children of the gods on the one hand, and Lady Zac-Kuk and her descendants on the other. But instead he decided to bridge the temporal gap from the accession of the First Mother to the accession of the founder of his dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. He accomplished this by evoking the name of a legendary king, U-Kix-Chan. We know that this man was a figure of legend because Chan-Bahlum tells us he was born on March 11, 993 B.C., and crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. These dates fall during the florescence of the Olmec, the first great Mesoameri- can civilization. The Olmec were remembered by the Classic peoples as the great ancestral civilization in much the same way that the Romans evoked Troy from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as their source of their legitimacy. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec, like the Greeks of the Old XV orld, forged the template of state art and religion for their world by developing many of the symbols, the rituals, and the styles of artistic presentation that would be used by their successors for millennium.

U-Kix-Chan may not have been a real person, but Chan-Bahlum deliberately set his birth date in Olmec times. In this way he could claim that the authority of Palenque’s dynasty had its roots in the beginnings of human civilization as well as in the time of the divine. The passages recording U-Kix-Chan’s name began on the mythological side of the Tablet of the Cross, with his birth, and bridged to the historical side with his accession. He was immediately recognizable as human, no matter how legendary his time, because of the scale of his life. He was twenty-six years old when he became the king of Palenque; the First Mother was 815 when she took the same throne. Since their ages were read with their accessions, their status as divine versus human would have been immediately and emphatically self-evident.

From the legendary “Olmec,” U-Kix-Chan, Chan-Bahlum moved to the birth and accession of the founder of his own dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. The text then proceeded through each succeeding king, finally culminating with Chan-Bahlum I, the ancestor from whom Chanappears as the verb when the Vision Serpen-Bahlum, the author of this text, took his name. The Palenque dynasty envisioned by him descended from the original accession of the mother of the gods.

Lady Beastie was depicted not only as the first ruler of Palenque. Chan-Bahlum also portrayed her as the first to shed her blood for the people of the community in the cathartic act which opened the path to Xibalba and allowed prosperity to flow into the human world. On the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, Chan-Bahlum recorded that thirty-four years after the birth of GH (her third-born child), Lady Beastie celebrated the end of the second baktun with a “fish-in-hand”[370] glyph (Fig. 6:18) that appears as the verb when the Vision Serpent is materialized through bloodletting. Chan-Bahlum’s decision to record this vision-bringing ritual in the Temple of the Foliated Cross was not accidental. If you remember, the Personified Perforator was the instrument that Pacal, on the inner tablet, passed to Chan-Bahlum, on the outer. When Chan-Bahlum spilled his own blood in the rituals that took place within this pib na, he was activating his own portal and generating the energies these images represented: agricultural abundance for the human community. In Chan-Bah- lum’s version of the genesis story, therefore, the First Mother was not only the first being to become a ruler in this creation; she also taught the people how to offer their blood to nourish life, to maintain the social order, and to converse with their ancestors in the Otherworld. The model for human and kingly behavior was again manifested through the actions of the First Mother rather than the First Father.

[[][Fig. 6:18 The First Mother and the First Vision Rite in This Creation]]

Chan-Bahlum did not entirely ignore the father of the gods, however. In the Temple of the Cross, he related the story in which the First Father, GT, as a boy of ten, established cosmic order a year and a half after the creation of the present world. The text calls this action “entering or becoming the sky (och chan).” We can see a beautiful rendering of these actions in a scene from an ornamental pot: GI’ has set up the World Tree which lifted the sky up from the primordial sea of creation. Now he crouches below it, ready to shoot his blowgun at the Celestial Bird sitting atop the Tree, imitating the glory of the sun. It was these actions, separating out the elements of the natural world and assigning them their proper roles, that brought chaotic nature into order[371] (Fig. 6:19).

In the expression of this great cosmic event at Palenque, we learn that this “entering the sky” also resulted in the dedication of a house called “wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (see Note 33). Phis is the name of the structure created by GI’ when he set up the World Tree. It is the dome of heaven and the movement of the constellations as they pivot around the great northern axis of the sky—the pole star. But Wacah-Chan was also the proper name of the pib na in the Temple of the Cross, which, in turn, was named for the central icon on the main tablet—the World free itself. When Chan-Bahlum dedicated his own temples in the Group of the Cross, he replicated the establishment of celestial order brought about by the First Father.

Chan-Bahlum made records of the rituals in which he dedicated the Group of the Cross in all three temples, but he featured them especially in the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun. In both instances he created bridges between the mythological events in the left column of the tablets and the dedication rituals in the right. In this way he declared that the essential causality of these rites derived from the actions of the First Mother and Father (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for the paraphrases and arrangements of these texts).[372]

The rituals themselves fell on three distinct days during a four-day span. On the first day (9.12.18.5.16 2 Cib 14 Mol, July 23, 690), Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the moon appeared in a spectacular conjunction with all four planets less than 5° apart in the constellation of Scorpio.[373] Chan- Bahlum and his people apparently envisioned this conjunction as the First Mother (the moon) rejoined by her three children (manifested as the three planets). Seen this way, this extraordinary alignment in the sky was an omen of enormous portent. On the next day (3 Caban 15 Mol), Chan- Bahlum dedicated his temples with exactly the same ritual that the First Father had enacted to establish the Wacah-Chan at the center of the cosmos. Chan-Bahlum’s own house was named Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Na, “Lord Bahlum-Kuk House” (Fig. 6:20), therefore making it the house of the founder of his dynasty.[374] By proclaiming that his new portals to the Otherworld were also those of his founding ancestor, Chan-Bahlum joined the three patrilineages of Palenque’s kingship into a coherent totality. At their completion, the three temples of the Group of the Cross housed the divine sanction for the dynasty as a whole and gave the rationale for its descent through females’as well as males.

Two days after the house dedication on 5 Cauac 17 Mol,[375] Chan- Bahlum consummated the ritual sequence with a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. The timing of this last bloodletting linked the dedication rites back to Pacal, occurring just three days short of the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of his accession (July 29, 615 to July 26, 690). Chan-Bahlum’s final sacrifice put the finishing touch to the extraordinary document he had created. Having begun these rituals when the First Mother reassembled in the sky with her children, he ended with her action of bloodletting, completing the symmetry he had forged between the creator gods and himself.

The last event Chan-Bahlum recorded in the Group of the Cross was the activation of the pib na themselves on 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab, the eighth tropical year anniversary of his own accession (January 10, 684 to January 10, 692). He recorded this ritual on the jambs around the sanctuary doors, on the outer piers of the temples, and on the balustrade panels mounted on either side of the stairs rising up the pyramidal base of each temple. The most public parts of the dynastic festival were the dedication of the stairway panels and the piers. These events could be easily viewed by an audience standing in the court space in the middle of the temple group.

On each set of balustrades (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for paraphrases), Chan-Bahlum began his text with the birth of the patron god of each temple: GI for the Temple of the Cross, GII for the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and GUI for the Temple of the Sun. On the left side of the stairs, he recorded the time elapsed between the birth of the god and the dedication of the temple. On the right he listed the actors in the dedication rituals and their actions. In this manner, he connected the birth of the god in mythological time to the dedication of the pib na in contemporary time.

Chan-Bahlum also used the four outer piers of each temple to record the dedication ceremonies. Here, once again, he depicted himself engaged in ritual. These more public displays of his political strategy were rendered in plaster relief, like the sculptures he had placed on the piers on the Temple of the Inscriptions. The inscription recording the date of the dedication festival and its events occupied the two outer piers, while the two inner ones illustrated the action. Unfortunately, only the two piers of the Temple of the Sun have survived into the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, given the temple’s focus on warfare, Chan-Bahlum was portrayed in the costume of a warrior. The particular regalia he chose is that which we have already seen at Tikal, Naranjo, and Dos Pilas. The king is shown holding a square, flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it,[376] declaring that he engaged in Tlaloc warfare. No doubt the object of his battles included those captives whose blood would sanctify the pib na as the gods came to reside in them.[377]

Like the balustrades, the doorjambs inside the sanctuaries are all glyphic,[378] but they record no information aside from the pib na dedications. All three sets of inscriptions describe the action in the same manner.

[[][The Mah Kina ???? Cab
_{from the Tablet of the Sun}]]

The verb <verbatim>‘to</verbatim> house” is followed by the proper name of each sanctuary, followed by the glyph u pib nail, “his underground house.” Each pib na was named for the central image on its inner tablet[379] (Fig. 6:21): Wacah Chan for the World Tree on the Tablet of the Cross, Na Te Kan for the maize tree on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, and Mah Kina ????-Cab for the shield stack on the Tablet of the Sun.

Chan-Bahlum’s final message to his people was that the performers of the “house” events were none other the gods of the Palenque Triad themselves. On the doorjambs he referred to these deities as “the cher- ished-ones[380] of Chan-Bahlum,” while on the balustrades he called them the “divinities of Chan-Bahlum.” For this event, Chan-Bahlum depicted himself in the guise of a Tlaloc warrior; but in this instance the costume symbolized more than just warfare. Dressed thus, Chan-Bahlum also became the “nurturer” of the gods[381] through his role as the provider of their sustenance—the blood of sacrifice. He offered them both the blood of captives taken in battle and his own blood.

If he himself was the principal actor, however, why did Chan-Bahlum tell us that the actors were the gods? Perhaps we are meant to understand that they acted in the divine person of the king. Although we do not have the precise phonetic reading of the verb, we suggest that each of the Triad gods came into his pib na on this day and brought the temples of the Group of the Cross alive with the power of the Otherworld. They were witnesses, like the nobility on the plaza below, to the awesome might of the Palenque king.

In his attempt to disengage his dynastic kingship from the prerogatives of the patrilineal clans, Chan-Bahlum brought to bear every major principle in the religion that bound the Maya states into a coherent cultural totality. As the Jaguar Sun and the Tlaloc warrior, he protected the realm from enemies. In war he captured foreign kings and nobles to offer as sacrificial instruments for the glory of Palenque. He recalled the First Father, GT, who raised the sky and established the ancestral home of creation within which his people could dwell at peace on their verdant mountainside. He also recalled the namesake of the First Father, GI, who like his father was an avatar of Venus. Just as the First Mother had shed her blood, causing maize—the raw material of humanity—to sprout from the waters of the Otherworld, so also did Chan-Bahlum shed his blood to nurture and “give birth to” the gods. The metaphor of kingship in both its human and divine dimension stretched from the contemplation of genesis to the mundane lives of farmers who plucked dried ears of maize from the bent stalks of their milpas to grind the kernels into the stuff of life.

The three gods of the Triad were known and exalted by all lowland Maya ahauob, but Chan-Bahlum and Pacal evoked them in very special ways. They gave them birth in temples which celebrated both the creation of the cosmos and the founding of the dynasty by their anchoring ancestor, Bahlum-K.uk. Called forth into this world through the unique courage and charisma of the reigning king, these three gods, like the three historical lineages leading up to Chan-Bahlum, were manifested for all to witness. All the events of the past, both human and mythological, encircled Chan-Bahlum: The dynasty existed in the person of the king.

Even the universe conspired to affirm Chan-Bahlum’s assertions of divine involvement. On the day he began the rites to sanctify the buildings housing his version of history. Lady Beastie and her offspring reassembled as a group in the sky on the open south side of the Group of the Cross.

A year and a half later, on the day he celebrated his eighth solar year in office, the three gods of the Triad housed themselves. By this action they brought the sanctuaries inside the three temples, the pib na, alive with their power. So powerful and eloquent was Chan-Bahlum’s statement of the origins of his dynasty and the preordained nature of its descent pattern, that no subsequent king ever had to restate any proofs. When later kings had problems with descent, they simply evoked Chan-Bahlum’s explanation of the workings of divinity to justify their own right to the throne.[382]

Pacal’s and Chan-Bahlum’s vision of the Maya world has crossed the centuries to speak to us once again in the twentieth century. Their accomplishments were truly extraordinary. Pacal’s tomb with its access stairway and innovative structural engineering is so far a unique achievement in the New World. The imagery of his sarcophagus lid is famous around the globe, and the life-sized plaster portrait of this king found under the sarcophagus has become an emblem of modern Mexico (Fig. 6:22a).

Chan-Bahlum (Fig. 6:22b), in his own way, exceeded even the accomplishment of his father by creating the most detailed exposition of Maya kingship to survive into modern times. His tablets have captured the Western imagination since they were first popularized in 1841 by Stephens and Catherwood in their Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Chan-Bahlum’s masterful performance is the clearest and most eloquent voice to speak to us of both the ancient history of kings and the religion that supported their power.

Both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum had personal agendas as they worked out the political and religious resolution to their problems of dynasty. Their success, however, was meaningful within a larger context than just their personal pride and glory. During the century of their combined lives (A.D. 603 to 702), Palenque became a major power in the west, extending its boundaries as far as Tortuguero in the west and Miraflores in the east. Under their inspired leadership, Palenque took its place in the overall political geography of the Maya world. In the end, however, Palenque’s definition of dynasty as a principle transcending lineage did not provide salvation from the catastrophe of the collapse of Maya civilization. The descendants of Pacal, “he of the pyramid,” followed their brethren into that final chaos when the old institution of kingship failed and the lowland Maya returned to the farming lives of their ancestors.

7. Bird-Jaguar and the Cahalob

In the distant past, a gleaming white city[383] once graced the precipitous hills lining the western shore of a huge horseshoe bend of the great river known today as the Usumacinta (Fig. 7:1). One of the early visitors to the ruins of that once magnificent city, Teobert Maier,[384] named it Yaxchilan. Since Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s pioneering study of its inscriptions, this kingdom has been central to the recovery of historic information about the Maya.[385]

In Yaxchilan’s heyday, visitors arriving by canoe saw buildings clustered along the narrow curving shore which contained and defined the natural riverside entrance into this rich and powerful community. The city ascended in rows of broad, massive terraces built against the face of the forest-shrouded hills that stood as an impassive natural citadel alongside the mighty river. From the temples (Fig. 7:2a) built upon the summits of the tallest bluffs, the lords of Yaxchilan commanded the sweeping panorama of the rich green, low-lying forest which extended, on the far side of the river, all the way to the hazy horizon in the northeast. The light of sunrise on the summer solstice[386] would spill over that horizon to shine through the dark thresholds of the royal sanctuaries whose presence declared the authority of the Yaxchilan ahau over all those who lived below.

Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,”[387] or more delicately put, “Progenitor-Jaguar,” on August 2, A.D. 320, founded the dynasty that ruled this kingdom throughout its recorded history. From that day on, until Yaxchi- lan was abandoned five-hundred years later, the descent of the line was unbroken.[388] Of Yat-Balam’s many descendants, the most famous were Bi Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar, a father and son who collectively ruled the kingdom for over ninety years, from A.D. 681 until around A.D. 771. These two rulers stamped their vision of history upon the city with such power and eloquence that they were the first of the ancient Maya kings to have their names spoken again in our time.[389] Yet in spite of the glory of their reigns and their long-lasting effect upon history, they faced problems of descent from the father to the son. Bird-Jaguar’s claim to the throne was vigorously disputed by powerful noble clans who were allied with other members of the royal family. Even after Bird-Jaguar overcame his adversaries and became king, many of the public buildings he commissioned were erected to retrospectively defend his own actions and prepare a secure ascent to the throne for his heir. In this chapter, we will focus on his problems and the political strategies and alliances that finally enabled him to fulfill his ambition to rule that ancient kingdom.

The history of Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors in the Early Classic period does not survive in great detail. Most of the monuments from those times were either buried or destroyed as each new king shaped the city to his own purposes. However, thanks to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of reusing ancestral texts in his own buildings (Temples 12 and 22), we do have records of the first through the tenth successors of Yaxchilan. One of these venerable texts, a badly eroded hieroglyphic stairway, provides the dates of several early accessions, as well as accounts of the visits of lords from other kingdoms. These brief and sketchy early inscriptions outline the first three hundred years of Yaxchilan’s history. It was a time in which its dynasty prospered and held an important place in the overall political landscape of the Maya.[390]

The foreign visitors mentioned above were ahauob sent by their high kings from as far away as Bonampak, Piedras Negras, and Tikal to participate in Yaxchilan festivals. Reciprocal visits were made as well. Knot-eye-Jaguar, the ninth king of Yaxchilan, paid a state visit to Piedras Negras in the year 519. The relationship between these two kingdoms was apparently a long-lasting one, for another Yaxchilan ahau, presumably Bird- Jaguar, participated in the celebration of the first katun anniversary of the reign of Piedras Negras Ruler 4 in 749, 230 years later. These state visits affirm the ancient and enduring value that the kings of Yaxchilan placed upon the participation of high nobility in the rituals and festivals of their city. Public performances under the aegis of the high king, by both foreign and local lords, affirmed the power of the king and demonstrated public support for his decisions. We shall see shortly how the manipulation of such dramatis personae on monuments was the vital key to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.

Our story opens around the year 647[391] with the birth of a child to the Lady Pacal, favored wife of the king, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar,[392] and scion of a powerful family allied to the king through marriage. The child, whom the proud parents named Shield-Jaguar, was to have a glorious career at Yaxchilan, living for at least ninety-two years and ruling as high king for over six decades. His mark on the city was long-lasting and profound, for later kings left many of his buildings untouched. Among his greatest works were the vast number of tree-stones he set among the plazas and in front of his temples on the summits of his sacred mountains. Shield- Jaguar inherited a city already built by his predecessors, but the accomplishments of his long lifetime exceeded their work by such a factor that, while much of his work is still preserved, most of theirs is forgotten, buried under his own construction and that of his son, Bird-Jaguar.

Most of Shield-Jaguar’s early life is lost to us. What little biographical data we do have tells us that when he was around eleven, one of his siblings participated in a war led by Pacal, the king of Palenque we met in the last chapter.[393] This event must have lent prestige to the royal family of Yaxchilan, but their public monuments say nothing about it. We only know of this event because it was preserved on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C at Palenque. The fact that Pacal described his Yaxchilan cohort as the “sibling” of the eleven-year-old Shield-Jaguar tells us that, even at that early date, Shield-Jaguar had probably been named as heir. Otherwise, Pacal would have chosen to emphasize the captive’s status merely as the son of a male of the royal family.[394]

Later in his life, the demonstration of the young heir’s prowess as a military leader took on a special political importance—enough so that the lords of Yaxchilan required that Shield-Jaguar take a high-ranked captive before he could become king. As prelude to his accession, Shield-Jaguar went into battle and captured Ah-Ahaual, an important noble from a B kingdom whose ruins we have not yet found, but which was highly important in the Maya world of that time.[395] A little over a year later, on October 23, 681, at the approximate age of thirty-four, Shield-Jaguar became high king of Yaxchilan.

Strangely enough, the only picture of Shield-Jaguar’s accession rite to have survived shows not the new king but his principal wife, Lady Xoc, in rapt communion with Yat-Balam, the founding ancestor of the Yaxchi-lan dynasty. Lady Xoc achieved a central place in the drama of Yaxchilan’s history in this and in two other bloodletting rituals she enacted with, or for, her sovereign liege.[396] Her kinship ties with two powerful lineages of the kingdom made her political support so important to Shield-Jaguar that he authorized her to commission and dedicate the magnificent Temple 23. On the lintels of that building were recorded the three rituals that comprised the apical actions of her life.

Thus, with the approval and probably at the instigation of her husband, Lady Xoc was one of the few women in Maya history to wield the prerogatives usually reserved for the high king. Unlike Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque, however, Lady Xoc never ruled the kingdom in her own right. The hidden hand of her husband, Shield-Jaguar, underlies the political intentions of the extraordinary Temple 23. His influence can be seen in both the substance of its narrative scenes and in the texts[397] carved on the lintels that spanned the outer doorways. Constructed in the center of the city’s first great terrace, and in a position to dominate the plazas that extended along the riverfront, this temple is one of the greatest artistic monuments ever created by the Maya.

The carved lintels above the doorways of Temple 23 combine to present a carefully orchestrated political message critical to Shield-Jaguar’s ambition and to the future he hoped to create. Made of wide slabs mounted atop the doorjambs, these lintels displayed two carved surfaces. The first, facing outward toward the public, was composed of pure text. The second was a series of narrative scenes hidden away on the undersides of the lintels, facing downward toward the floor (Fig. 7:2b). A general viewer approaching the building could read only the text above the doorways, which recorded the dedication rituals for various parts of the temple. This text stated that the house sculpture (probably the stucco sculpture on the entablature and roof comb) had been dedicated on August 5, 723, and the temple itself on June 26, 726.[398] The all-important narrative scenes could be seen only by those privileged to stand in the low doorways and look up at the undersides of the lintels.

It is here, on the undersides of the lintels, that we see Lady Xoc enacting the three bloodletting rituals that are today the basis of her fame (Fig. 7:3). The sculptors who created these great lintels combined the sequence of events into a brilliant narrative device. If we look at the lintels from one perspective, we see that each portrays a different linear point in the ritual of bloodletting. Over the left doorway we see Lady Xoc perforating her tongue; over the center portal we see the materialization of the Vision Serpent; over the right we see her dressing her liege lord for battle. If we shift our perspective, however, we see that Shield-Jaguar intended these scenes to be interpreted on many different levels. He used the texts and the detail of the clothing the protagonists wore to tell us that this same bloodletting ritual took place on at least three different occasions:[399] during his accession to the kingship, at the birth of his son when he was sixty-one, and at the dedication of the temple itself.

Over the central door, Lady Xoc is depicted with a Vision Serpent rearing over her head as she calls forth the founder of the lineage, Yat-Balam, to witness the accession of his descendent Shield-Jaguar in 681[400] (Fig. 7:3a). This critical event in the lives of both the principal players was appropriately located on the center lintel, at the heart of the drama. Shield-Jaguar himself is not portrayed here, although his name does appear in the text after the “fish-in-hand” verbal phrase. The sole protagonist is the woman, who by her action as bloodletter materializes the founder of the dynasty to sanction the transformation of his descendant into the king. Since we know of no other pictorial representation of Shield-Jaguar’s accession,[401] we may speculate that he considered his wife’s bloodletting the most important single action in this political transformation.

Over the left door, Lady Xoc kneels before Shield-Jaguar and pulls a thorn-laden rope through her mutilated tongue in the action that will materialize the Vision Serpent. Shield-Jaguar stands before her holding a torch, perhaps because the ritual takes place inside a temple or at night. Although this lintel depicts the first stage in the type of bloodletting ritual shown over the central door, this particular event took place almost twenty-eight years later.[402]

The occasion for this particular act of sacrifice was an alignment between Jupiter and Saturn. On this day those planets were frozen at their stationary points less than 2° apart, very near the constellation of Gemini. This was the same type of planetary alignment we saw celebrated at Palenque when Chan-Bahlum dedicated the Group of the Cross, even though the conjunction at Yaxchilan was perhaps less spectacular, since it involved two planets rather than four. Significantly, this hierophany (“sacred event”) took place only sixty-two days after a son was born to Shield-Jaguar. The birth of this child on August 24, 709, and the bloodletting event that followed it on October 28, were special events in Shield- Jaguar’s reign. This bloodletting would later become the pivot of his son’s claim to Yaxchilan’s throne.

Over the right door (Fig. 7:3b), the sculptors mounted the final scene. Lady Xoc, her mouth seeping blood from the ritual she has just performed, helps her husband dress for battle. He already wears his cotton armor and grasps his flint knife in his right hand, but she still holds his flexible shield and the jaguar helmet he will don. Here Shield-Jaguar is preparing to go after captives to be used in the dedication rites that took place either on February 12, 724, or on June 26, 726.

The depiction of a woman as the principal actor in ritual is unprecedented at Yaxchilan and almost unknown in Maya monumental art[403] at any site. Lady Xoc’s importance is further emphasized by the manner in which Bird-Jaguar centers his own strategy of legitimacy around this building. The three events portrayed—the accession of the king, the bloodletting on the Jupiter-Saturn hierophany, and the dedication of the building itself, were all important events; but the bloodletting on the hierophany was the locus of the political message Shield-Jaguar intended to communicate. Perhaps the planetary conjunction alone would have been enough reason for such a bloodletting to take place. We suspect, however, that more complex motivations were involved. Later, when Bird-Jaguar commissioned monument after monument to explain who he was and, more importantly, who his mother was, he focused on this event as the key to his kingdom.

There are points of interest to make about this bloodletting ritual and the birth that preceded it. Lady Xoc, patroness of this building and the giver of blood, was at least middle-aged at the time of this birth.[404] She had been shown as an adult at Shield-Jaguar’s accession, twenty-eight years earlier, and she may well have been beyond her childbearing years at the time of the later bloodletting. Certainly, other inscriptions make it clear that the child in question was born to Lady Eveningstar, another of Shield-Jaguar’s wives. Why, then, is Lady Xoc celebrating a celestial event E linked to the royal heir born to another woman?

Some startling information about Lady Xoc’s role in Shield-Jaguar’s political machinations is revealed on a lintel mounted over the door in the east end of Structure 23. On its underside, this all-glyphic lintel (Lintel 23) records Shield-Jaguar’s twenty-fifth year anniversary as ruler and also Lady Xoc’s dedication of this extraordinary temple. On the edge of this obscure lintel, facing outward toward the viewer, we find some critical and unexpected information about Lady Xoc. The text tells us that this particular passageway[405] into the temple was dedicated by Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s sister—his aunt, in other words. The title sequence in this aunt’s name is relevatory, for it delineates an up-to-now unknown genealogical relationship between Lady Xoc and the king (Fig. 7:4).[406] We learn here that Lady Xoc was the daughter of Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s father’s sister. In plain English, she was the maternal first cousin of his mother, and his own maternal first cousin once removed.

What this information tells us is that Lady Xoc was distantly related to the patriline of Shield-Jaguar’s mother, but he married her not because of her mother’s relatives but because her father was a member of a powerful noble lineage. How do we know that her father’s line was important, when it is not even mentioned in the inscriptions? We can deduce its importance from the fact that it was worthy to take a wife from the same family that provided the woman who was wife to the king 6-Tun-Bird- Jaguar and mother to the heir, Shield-Jaguar. In other words, anyone powerful enough to marry a woman from the same family that provided the queen-mother to the royal house must also be of extraordinarily high-rank. The importance of the line of Lady Xoc’s father is further confirmed by the fact that it was eligible to provide a wife to the royal house in the next generation. Thus, it was a lineage important enough to take a wife from the highest levels in the kingdom and in its own right to be in a wife-giving alliance with the royal house. In fact, it is precisely this marriage alliance with Lady Xoc’s father that led Shield-Jaguar to take her as his wife in the first place.

What we find amazing here is that Lady Xoc’s patriline is utterly absent from the public record. On Lintel 23, Lady Xoc’s relationship to that patriline is suppressed in favor of her kinship to her mother’s people. As we have shown above, her mother’s clan was already allied to the royal house of Yaxchilan, for Shield-Jaguar’s mother was a member of that patriline. In the best of worlds, Shield-Jaguar could have safely ignored such a well-attested and secure alliance in the public record. What, then, led Shield-Jaguar to commission the extraordinary Temple 23 with its homage to Lady Xoc and her mother’s clan? Why did he deliberately eliminate her father’s clan from public history by redefining her importance in terms of people who were already his allies?

We suspect that the answer to this question lies in a new marriage that Shield-Jaguar contracted late in his life. His new wife, Lady Eveningstar, who bore him a son when he was sixty-one, was apparently a foreigner of high rank. On Stela 10, her son, Bird-Jaguar, recorded her name in his own parentage statement, remarking that she was a “Lady Ahau of Calakmul” (Fig. 7:4).[407] Yet Shield-Jaguar’s treatment of his new wife and the powerful alliance she represented was not what we might expect. Despite the great power and prestige of Calakmul, Shield-Jaguar never once mentioned Lady Eveningstar on his own monuments. Instead, the principal concern of his late monuments was to secure support for Bird- Jaguar, the child she gave him.

To this end, he commissioned Temple 23 when his son was thirteen years old.[408] He honored Lady Xoc, who represented local alliances with two important lineages, as the major actor of the critical events in his reign. And, in the same series of lintels, he emphasized her relationship to her mother’s patriline.[409] But what of her father’s people, not to mention the royal house of Calakmul?

To elect a child of Lady Xoc to succeed him would have brought Shield-Jaguar strategic alliance with her father’s people, a local lineage of extraordinary importance. Alternatively, to designate Lady Eveningstar’s child as the heir would have sealed a blood bond with one of the largest and most aggressive kingdoms of the Peten, but it was also an alliance with a foreign power.[410] The decision for Shield-Jaguar was a difficult one: increased prospects for peace and stability within his kingdom versus an elevated position in the grand configuration of alliance and struggle embracing all of the great kingdoms of the Maya.

Temple 23 was his effort to forge a grand compromise: to honor Lady Xoc and the principle of internal alliance while building support for the child of the foreign alliance. He chose the greatest artists of his kingdom to carve what are even today recognized as great masterpieces of Maya art. In the elegant reliefs he depicted his senior wife carrying out the most sacred and intimate act of lineage fealty, the calling forth of the royal founding ancestor. When she gave her blood for his new heir, she did so in the most horrific ritual of tongue mutilation known from Maya history. No other representation of this ritual shows the use of a thorn-lined rope in the wound. Her act was one of extraordinary piety and prestige—and an act of audacity by the king, for he simultaneously consigned the mother of the heir, scion of Calakmul, to public obscurity. For Shield-Jaguar, this was a masterful three-point balancing act. By honoring Lady Xoc, he was also honoring that patriline. He used texts upon the lintels of the temple to publicly emphasize her relationship to his mother’s family and thus secure that alliance. Lastly, he satisfied his foreign alliance by choosing the child of that marriage as the heir.

This strategy of compromise worked, at least while he was still alive. Perhaps Shield-Jaguar’s extraordinary age was one of the contributing factors in this drama. For him to have lived long enough to marry again and to sire a child in that marriage may have surprised the lineages allied to him by previous marriages. Furthermore, any children born in his youth would have been in their middle years by the time of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. By the time of Shield-Jaguar’s death in his mid-nineties, many of his children may well have been dead or in advanced age themselves. Because of this factor, Bird-Jaguar’s rivals would have had as legitimate a claim on the throne as he; it is likely that he faced the sons and grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar. We cannot, of course, prove that these rivals existed, for they did not secure the privilege of erecting monuments to tel! their own stories. This is one of those situations in which we have only the winner’s version of history. Nevertheless, we know that some set of circumstances kept the throne empty for ten long years, when a legitimate heir of sufficient age and proven competence was available. We surmise that Bird-Jaguar needed those ten years to defeat his would-be rivals. During this long interregnum no other accessions appear in the record. There was no official king, although there may have been a de facto ruler.

There could, of course, be many reasons for such a long delay between reigns. Bird-Jaguar’s own program of sculpture after he became king, however, clearly indicates what he felt were his greatest problems. The first was public recognition of his mother’s status and her equality with Lady Xoc.[411] The second was his need to forge alliances among the noble cahal families of Yaxchilan to support his claim to the throne and force the accession ritual. He built temple after temple with lintel upon lintel both to exalt the status of his mother and to depict his public performance with those powerful cahalob. Like his father, he married a woman in the lineage of his most important allies and traded a piece of history for their loyalty.

The fathering of an heir at the age of sixty-one was not the final accomplishment of Shield-Jaguar’s life. He remained a vigorous leader, both politically and in the realm of war, for many more years. Work on Temple 23 began around 723, when he was seventy-two years old. In his eighties, he still led his warriors into battle and celebrated a series of B victories in Temple 44, high atop one of the mountains of Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:1). Even at eighty-four, Shield-Jaguar went to battle and took a captive, but by then he must have been feeling his mortality. He began a series of rituals soon after his last battle to demonstrate forcefully his support of Bird-Jaguar as his heir-apparent—at least according to the story Bird- Jaguar gives us. In light of the political statement that Shield-Jaguar built into Lady Xoc’s Temple 23 at the height of his power, there is reason to believe that at least the essence of Bird-Jaguar’s account of events leading up to his reign is true.

The series of events preceding Shield-Jaguar’s death and Bird-Jaguar’s ascent to the throne began on June 27, 736. On that day Shield- Jaguar, at the age of eighty-eight, conducted a flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:5a and b), a celebration usually occurring shortly after a summer solstice. We do not know the exact nature of this ritual, but pictures of it show rulers and nobles holding a human-high, wooden staff with a four-to-six-inchwide cloth tied down its length. This narrow cloth was decorated with elaborately woven designs and flapped openings, usually cut in the shape of a T. Shield-Jaguar recorded his first display of this staff on Stela 16, which he erected at the highest point of the city in front of Temple 41. Bird-Jaguar commissioned his own retrospective version of his father’s action on Lintel 50 (Fig. 7:5b).

The next time we see this flapstaff ritual is on Stela 11, a monument erected by Bird-Jaguar soon after his accession. Designed to document events that culminated in his successful ascent to the throne, this stela includes the image of another flapstaff ritual which had occurred on June 26, 741, exactly five years after Shield-Jaguar’s earlier flapstaff ceremony. In this scene (Fig. 7:5c), the shorter Shield-Jaguar,[412] who was then ninety- three years old, faces his son under a double-headed dragon representing the sky, above which sit Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors.[413] Both men now hold the same flapstaff that Shield-Jaguar displayed on Stela 16. Bird-Jaguar took pains to emphasize the importance of this mutual display. He did so by depicting this scene both atop and between texts that recorded his accession to the throne, thus asserting that his father had shared this ritual with him to legitimize his status as heir. Furthermore, Bird-Jaguar set this dual depiction in front of Temple 40 (Fig. 7:5c and e), which was situated on the same hill summit as Temple 41 where Shield-Jaguar had placed his earlier depiction of the flapstaff ritual. This close juxtaposition emphasized the linkage between the two rituals and supported Bird-Jaguar’s political aspirations.

This father-son flapstaff event took place only four days before the end of the tenth tun in the fifteenth katun on 9.15.10.0.0. Five days later, on 9.15.10.0.1 (July 1, 741), another ritual took place that was so important and involved so many critical people that Bird-Jaguar recorded it glyphically and pictorially three times (Fig. 7:6), in three different locations. These locations all pivoted thematically around Temple 23, the building that became the touchstone of his legitimacy.

The most distant of these depictions, Lintel 14 of Temple 20, shows two persons. One is a woman named Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and the other is a man with the same family name, Lord Great-Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:6a). This woman would become the mother of Bird-Jaguar’s son and heir, and the man, who is named as her brother, was most likely the patriarch of her lineage.[414] Great-Skull-Zero belonged to a cahal lineage that was apparently an important source of political support, for Bird- Jaguar continued to depict him on public monuments, even after his own accession. In this earlier ritual, both Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother hold a Vision Serpent the two of them have materialized through bloodletting.[415] She also holds an offering bowl containing an obsidian B blade and bloodstained paper, while he holds the head of the serpent aloft as a female ancestor materializes in its mouth. The name of this ancestor, “Lady Ahau of Yaxchilan, Lady Yaxhal,” appears in the small text above the apparition’s head.

It is possible that this bloodletting rite was part of the rituals of marriage between Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero, but none of the glyphs recorded on this lintel refer to marriage. Whatever the occasion, we can presume that this lady and her kinsmen were vitally important to Bird-Jaguar’s successful campaign to replace his father as high king. Going against precedent, he gives them an unusually prominent place in history, depicting them as participants in this critical bloodletting ritual.

The second time we see this bloodletting is on a retrospective stela (Fig. 7:6b) found next door in Temple 21, a building in which Bird-Jaguar deliberately replayed the iconographic program of Lady Xoc’s temple in celebration of the birth of his own heir.[416] This newly discovered stela[417] shows Bird-Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, engaged in the same bloodletting as his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her brother. This stela emulates the style and iconographic detail of Lintel 25 on Temple 23, which depicts Lady Xoc materializing the founder of the dynasty at Shield-Jaguar’s accession. Bird-Jaguar declares—by means of this not-so- subtle artistic manipulation—that his mother’s actions were every bit as important as those of his father’s principal wife.

On the front of the stela and facing the entry door, Lady Eveningstar is depicted holding a bloodletting plate in one hand and a skull-serpent device in the other, while a huge skeletal Vision Serpent rears behind her. As on Lintel 25, this Vision Serpent is double-headed and emits Tlaloc faces. The text records the date, 4 Imix 4 Mol, and states that a “fish-inhand” vision event took place u cab chan kina “in the land of the sky lords.” A coupleted repetition attests that “Lady Eveningstar let blood.” On the rear, she is shown drawing the rope through her tongue and here the text specifies that she was “the mother of the three-katun lord, Bird- Jaguar, Holy Lord of Yaxchilan, Bacab.” Bird-Jaguar very likely installed this monument to emphasize his mother’s legitimate status, as well as her ritual centrality during his father’s lifetime. At any rate, this stela was part of his program to assert the legitimacy of his own son and heir, whose birth was celebrated on the central lintel of this temple.[418]

Bird-Jaguar set the third depiction (Fig. 7:6c) of this critical bloodletting ritual over the central door of Structure 16, a building located at the eastern edge of the river shelf. Carved on the outer edge of Lintel 39, the scene shows Bird-Jaguar sprawled on the ground as he supports a Serpent Bar, skeletal in detail and emitting GII as the materialized vision. The date is again 4 Imix 4 Mol[419] and the action a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. Now, however, the actor is the future king himself.

Based on these three representations of this critical bloodletting, as well as depictions of similar events at other sites,[420] we can visualize this great ritual in the following vignette.

The starlit darkness broke before the first flush of light as the sun rose from Xibalba over the dark waters of the river. Venus, who had preceded his brother out of the Underworld by almost two hours, now hovered brightly near the seven lights of the Pleiades and the bright star Aldeba- ran.[421] Nine times had the Lords of the Night changed since the sun had taken its longest journey through the sky on the day of the summer solstice. Birds waking in the trees across the river and along the hills above the city raised a crescendo of song, counterpointing the barking of the village dogs and the squawks of brilliant red macaws flying along the edge of the water. Far in the distance, a howler monkey roared his own salutation to the new day. The celestial stage was set for an important festival and the community of people who lived along the river waited anxiously for the rituals that would soon begin.

A crowd of ahauob, cahalob, and people of lesser rank milled restlessly within the cool plaza beside the great river. The iridescent feathers of their headdresses bobbed above their animated conversations like a fantastic flock of birds. The brilliantly embroidered and dyed cloth of their garments swirled in a riot of color against the hard whiteness of the plaster floor and the distant green backdrop of the mist-shrouded forest. As dawn broke through the darkness of night, more people drifted toward the plaza from the distant hillslopes. Still more arrived in canoes, having fought the high floodwaters to cross the river so that they too could witness the great ritual announced by the king.

The king’s family, arrayed in front of the gleaming white walls of the Tz’ikinah-Nal, the house Lady Xoc had dedicated many years ago, and the Chan-Ah-Tz’i,[422] the house of the seventh successor of Yat-Balam, watched the sun rise over the huge stone pier that had been built over the river on its southern side. No one could see the pier now, of course, for the great Xocol Ha[423] was in flood from the thunderstorms of the rainy season. The roar of the tumbling waters played a ground behind the rhythms of drums and whistles echoing through the great open spaces along the canoe-strewn shore. Merchants, visitors, pilgrims, and farmers from near and far had laid their wares along the river for the people of Yaxchilan to peruse. They too joined their voices to the cacophony of sound swelling throughout the gleaming white plazas of the city.

The royal clan stood in two groups, the hard and dangerous tension between them radiating down into the crowd below. The cahalob and ahauob of the court arranged themselves in clusters, clearly indicating their support for one or the other branch of the family. The aging but indomitable Lady Xoc[424] took up position with her kinsmen in front of the Tz’ikinah-Nal. In this, the place of her glory, she contemplated the irony of her fate. Here, in the most magnificent imagery to grace the city, she had commemorated her devotion to Shield-Jaguar. The finest artisans of the realm had carved the lintels in the house behind her, declaring publicly and permanently that she had materialized the founder when her lord acceded as king. And the reward for that sacrifice? She had been forced to deny her own father’s kinsmen and to let her blood to sanctify the final issue of her aged husband’s loins: Bird-Jaguar—son of a foreigner.

Even now the men of her father’s lineage were as reluctant as she to give up their privileges as kinsmen of the king’s principal wife. The gods had favored Shield-Jaguar by giving him a life span beyond that granted to other humankind. He had lived so long that most of the sons of her womb were dead, as were many of their sons.[425] The sharp pain of remembered grief cut through her reverie. The matriarch, soon to enter her fifth katun of life, glanced at her remaining offspring, her thwarted and angry kinsmen, and the powerful cahalob allied to her father’s clan. All stood quietly, grimly, allowing the old woman her moment of bitter reflection.

Most of the witnessing emissaries from towns along the river gathered before the other royal group in anticipation of the celebration to come. Bird-Jaguar, renowned warrior, defender of the realm and future king, quietly conversed with his mother, Lady Eveningstar, and his new wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero. They were framed by the splendor of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. At thirty-one, the heir radiated a physical strength to match his valor and ambition. The bride’s lineage patriarch, Great-Skull- Zero, stood beside her, accompanied by the other cahalob who, by their presence here, declared themselves allies of the king’s son. Chief among them, Kan-Toc proudly and dispassionately surveyed potential friends and foes below, ready to place his prowess as warrior at the disposal of the future king.

The nobles flanking the principal players in this drama stood in small groups on the steps of the temples. Their arms folded across their chests, they spoke of the day’s events, the condition of the new crop, and hundreds of other topics of concern. Some were bare-chested, but the most important lords wore blinding white capes closed at the throat with three huge red spondylus shells. This cotton garb was reserved for those privileged to serve as attendants to the king, or those who held the status of pilgrims to the royal festivals.[426] Farther away, warriors of renown in their finest battle gear stood with other notables who carried the emblazoned staff-fans of Maya war and ceremony. Other nobles sat in informal groups, engaging in lively conversation among the riot of color in the long-shadowed light of the brilliant morning. Excitement and anticipation were becoming a palpable force pulsing through the crowd of people that now included a growing number of farmers and villagers who had come in from the surrounding countryside to share in the festivities.

Shield-Jaguar, the ninety-three-year-old king, sat frail but erect upon the long bench inside the central room of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. The morning light coursing through the door warmed his bony chest, bared above his white hipcloth, as he mused over the many shivering hours he had spent in such rooms in the dark time before dawn. Now with his aged cronies, the last of his most trusted lords, he sat in this venerable house that had been dedicated 286 years earlier by the seventh successor of Yat-Balam.

Shield-Jaguar’s years weighed heavily upon him. This would surely be the final festival of his life—his last opportunity to seal his blessings upon Bird-Jaguar before the gods, the ancestors, and the people of his kingdom. Four days earlier, he had stood before the people with his son and heir and displayed the ceremonial cloth-lined flapstaif. It was important that all his people, noble and common folk alike, witness and accept his gift of power to Bird-Jaguar. The issue of the inheritance still tormented his spirit so powerfully he feared he was not adequately prepared for his trial with the Lords of Death. It was common scandal among all the great houses on the river that the men of Lady Xoc’s lineage continued to press their claims on the king, despite all that he had done for them and for her. The kinsmen of his principal wife had become his most formidable enemies. They would surely maneuver to place one of her own offspring on the throne after his bones lay in the vaulted grave that awaited his fall into Xibalba. Bird-Jaguar would have to be a subtle and powerful leader to take and hold his rightful place as the successor of his father.

A shout from the crowd outside brought Shield-Jaguar back to the present and his immediate duty to the dynasty of Yat-Balam. The Ancestral Sun had climbed above the mouth of the eastern horizon until he hovered free of the earth. Despite the fierce glare the sun brought to the world, Venus retained his strength on this special day so that the brothers could be seen together in the morning sky, momentary companions like the aged king and his energetic son. It was one day after the halfway point of Katun 15. The bloodletting rituals about to begin would consecrate that benchmark in time and demonstrate the king’s support for his youngest son.

The old man’s eyes sparkled as he watched Lady Eveningstar, mother of the heir, move gracefully into the frame of light before his doorway. She would be the first to offer her blood and open the portal to the Other- world.[427] Dressed in a brilliant white gauze huipil, high-backed sandals, and a flower headdress, she stepped forward to stand before her son. Shield-Jaguar was too frail to make the precise ceremonial cut in his wife’s body and that role now fell to Bird-Jaguar. Holding a shallow plate within the circle of her folded arms, Lady Eveningstar knelt before Bird-Jaguar. The bowl was filled with strips of beaten-bark paper, a rope the thickness of her first finger, and a huge stingray spine. Her eyes glazed as she shifted her mind into the deep trance that would prepare her for what was to come. Closing her eyes, she extended her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could. Bird-Jaguar took the stingray spine and, with a practiced twist of the wrist, drove it down through the center of his mother’s tongue. She did not flinch, nor did a sound pass her lips as he took the rope and threaded it through the wound.[428] She stood near the edge of the platform so that all the assembled witnesses could see her pull the rope through her tongue. Her blood saturated the paper in the bowl at her chest and dribbled redly down her chin in brilliant contrast to the deep green jade of her shoulder cape.

Bird-Jaguar removed some of the saturated paper from the plate and dropped it into the knee-high censer that stood on the floor beside his mother’s left leg. After placing fresh paper in her bowl, he removed her head covering and replaced it with the skull-mounted headdress that signaled Venus war and gave honor to the brother of the Sun.[429]

Lady Eveningstar pulled the last of the rope through her tongue, B dropped it into the bowl, and stood swaying as the trance state took possession of her consciousness. In that moment Bird-Jaguar saw what he had been seeking in her eyes—the great Serpent Path to the Otherworld was opening within his mother. He set the ancestral skull into her hand and stood back. That was the signal. The deep moaning voice of a conch trumpet echoed throughout the city, announcing the arrival of the Vision Serpent. Black smoke billowed and roiled upward from the god-faced censer behind Lady Eveningstar and formed a great writhing column in which Bird-Jaguar and his people saw the Double-headed Serpent and the god of Venus war she had materialized with the shedding of her blood. A song of welcome and awe rose from the crowd below as they drew blood from their own bodies and offered it to the god now born into their presence.

The crowd writhed and sway ed as a tide of ecstasy coursed throughout the city. Trumpeters and drummers, caught in the tumult of their music, accelerated their rhythms to a frenzied tempo. Dancing lords whirled across the terrace below the king and his family, their glowing green feathers and hip panels suspended at right angles to their whirling bodies. People throughout the crowd drew their own blood and splattered it onto cloth bands tied to their wrists and arms. The plaza was soon brightly speckled with devotion. Smoke columns rose from censers which stood upright throughout the plaza as the ahauob and the cahalob called their own ancestors forth through the portal opened by the Lady Eveningstar.

Feeling the awesome strength of his mother’s vision, Bird-Jaguar knew he had chosen the penultimate moment to publicly affirm the alliance he had forged by his marriage to Lady Great-Skull-Zero. 1 he numbers of fierce and powerful cahalob who had allied themselves with his cause would give his rivals pause and strengthen his own claim as the rightful successor of the great Shield-Jaguar.

Motioning through the haze of smoke that drifted along the terrace from his mother’s sacrifice, he signaled Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother to bring their own vision through the portal. His wife wore a brilliantly patterned huipil, a heavy jade-colored cape, and a bar pectoral. On her head sat the image of the Sun God at dawn to complement the symbols of Venus worn by his mother. Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of his wife’s lineage, was richly dressed in a skull headdress, a cape, a bar pectoral, knee bands made of jade, a richly bordered hipcloth, a heavy belt, an ornate loincloth, and anklet cuffs. Both were barefoot and grasped the deified lancets of the bloodletting ritual in their hands.

Holding in readiness a shallow plate filled with paper strips, Lady Great-Skull-Zero gestured toward her brother. Like her mother-in-law, she extended her tongue far out of her mouth and permitted Great-Skull- Zero to make the cut of sacrifice. Grasping the obsidian, he pierced her tongue in one deft motion, then handed the bloody blade to Bird-Jaguar. Gazing into the eyes of his new kinsman and future king, Great-Skull- Zero remained motionless while Bird-Jaguar slashed down into his extended tongue. Bleeding heavily and deep in the vision trance, Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Great-Skull-Zero danced together, bringing forth the Serpent known as Chanal-Chac-Bay-Chan.[430] As the great Serpent writhed through their arms, they saw the ancestor Na-Yaxhal materialize between them. A roar rose from the plaza, coming most loudly from the throats of those lords allied with Bird-Jaguar and his wife’s clan.

Finally it was time for the king’s son to sanctify the day with the gift of his own blood. Bird-Jaguar was more simply dressed than Great-Skull-Zero. His hair, worn long to tantalize his enemies in battle, was tied above his head with a panache of feathers which hung down his back. Around his neck he wore a single strand of beads, and a bar pectoral suspended on a leather strap lay against his brown chest. His wrists, ankles, and knees were bejeweled with deep blue-green strands of jade and in the septum of his nose he wore a feather-tipped ornament. His loincloth was simply decorated and brilliantly white so that his people could see the blood of sacrifice he would draw from the most sacred part of his body.

His wife, still weak from her own sacrifice, came to his side to help him with his rite,[431] but his main assistant would be an ahau who was skilled in communication with the gods. The white cape shrouding this ahau’s shoulders contrasted vividly with Bird-Jaguar’s sun-darkened skin. Lady Eveningstar grasped a shallow basket filled with fresh, unmarked paper in one hand, and held the stingray spine her son would use in the other. Still dazed, Great-Skull-Zero stepped in front of Bird-Jaguar, took the basket from his kinswoman’s hand and placed it on the plaza floor between Bird-Jaguar’s feet. Face impassive, Bird-Jaguar squatted on his heels, spreading his muscular thighs above the basket. He pulled his loincloth aside, took the huge stingray spine, and pushed it through the loose skin along the top of his penis. He pierced himself three times before reaching down into the bowl for the thin bark paper strips it contained. Threading a paper strip through each of his wounds, he slowly pulled it through until the three strips hung from his member. His blood gradually soaked into the light tan paper, turning it to deepest red. From the saturated paper, his blood dripped into the bowl between his legs. When he was done, his wife reached down for the bowl and placed the bloodstained paper of his sacrifice in the nearby censer along with offerings of maize kernels, rubber, and the tree resin called pom.

The rising columns of smoke revived the attention of the milling, tired crowd below. Many of the people who had drifted away to the adjacent courts and riverbank to examine the goods brought in by traders and visitors from other cities and kingdoms hurried back to the main plaza. They wanted to witness Bird-Jaguar’s materialization of the god. Times were dangerous along the Xocol Ha, and they hoped for a young, vigorous ruler, skilled in battle and wily in statecraft, to lead the kingdom through the growing peril of the times.

High above the crowd, Bird-Jaguar’s legs gave way beneath him as the trance state overpowered him. Sitting back onto his right hip, he stretched his legs out through the billowing smoke. In his arms, he held the Double-headed Serpent that manifested the path of communication special to kings. God K—the god called Kauil who was the last born of BI the three great gods of the cosmos—emerged from the mouths of the serpents. The great conch-shell trumpets sounded for the third time, warning that a god had been materialized from the Otherworld, this time by the king’s son, Bird-Jaguar.

It was midmorning when the royal family’s bloodletting obligations were fulfilled. Walking with a painfully careful gait, Bird-Jaguar led his mother, his wife, and Great-Skull-Zero to the bench in the Chan-Ah-Tz’i where Shield-Jaguar had been sitting throughout the ritual. The white- caped attendants moved aside as Bird-Jaguar sat down on the right-hand side of his father.[432] His own wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, sat to his right. Lady Eveningstar moved to take the position on Shield-Jaguar’s left, but before she could mount the bench, Lady Xoc entered and usurped that position for herself. In silent menace, the old woman forced the younger woman to take the outside position, jarring everyone present into realizing that neither she nor her kinsmen would ever yield their power without a fight. In a state of uneasy truce, the royal family watched the remainder of the rituals unfold as the ecstasy of the morning’s activities ebbed into the exhaustion of afternoon.

Bird-Jaguar understood all that his father had done for him. First there had been the flapstaff ritual of four days ago and now this great blood ritual so close to the period ending celebration. His father’s public acknowledgment of his favor could not be denied nor would it be forgotten. In the years ahead, this ceremonial recognition would be the most important single component of his claim to the throne. His fight would be a hard one, but now he knew that not only his father but all the ancestors of the royal clan had selected him as the inheritor of the glory of Yaxchilan. After this moment together in eternity, it was simply a matter of time and patience.

Shield-Jaguar was in his mid-nineties and not far from death when this multiple bloodletting took place. We surmise that his advanced age precluded his direct participation in this critically important rite; but, as we have seen, just about everyone else who was important to Bird-Jaguar’s claim participated: his wife and her brother, who was the patriarch of her lineage, Bird-Jaguar himself, and his mother. The four-day-long sequence that began with the flapstaff event and ended in this multiple bloodletting was well-timed. Less than a year later, on June 19, 742, the old man died, and at age thirty-two Bird-Jaguar began his campaign to follow his father into office.

Bird-Jaguar’s first action of public importance after his father’s death was a ballgame (Fig. 7:7) he played on October 21, 744. On the front step of Structure 33, his great accession monument, his artists depicted a captive, bound into a ball, bouncing down hieroglyphic stairs toward a kneeling player.[433] The text carved on this step associated this bailgame with events in the distant mythological past, placing Bird-Jaguar’s actions firmly within the sacred context of the game as it related to the larger cosmos.[434] Bird-Jaguar framed this event with the scenes he felt would most powerfully serve his political ends. Successive panels flank the central scene on the upper step[435] of the stairway leading to the temple platform. To the immediate left of his own bailgame scene, Bird-Jaguar portrayed his own father kneeling to receive a ball bouncing down a hieroglyphic stairway. On his right, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, also kneels to receive a ball. Other panels show important cahalob engaged in the game, as well as Bird-Jaguar’s wives holding Vision Serpents in rites that apparently preceded active play.

Two years later, on June 4, 746 (9.15.15.0.0), Bird-Jaguar celebrated his first big period ending. He recorded this rite in an unusual way, embedding it into the Stela 11 scene depicting him and his father engaged in the flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:8). The text for the period ending tells us that on that day, Shield-Jaguar erected a tree-stone and that he held a staff in his hand.[436] This claim is a bit strange, since Shield-Jaguar had been in his grave for over four years (he died on June 19, 742). In reality, we know that Shield-Jaguar could not have erected a tree-stone, held a staff, nor done anything else on that date. What the reader is meant to understand is that Bird-Jaguar acted in his place.

Even more curious, the final phrase in this text states that these actions took place u cab, “in the land of” Bird-Jaguar. How had the BI kingdom become “the land of” Bird-Jaguar when he hadn’t yet acceded to office and would not qualify for that event for another six years? The embedding of this period-ending notation into the scene of the father-son flapstaff ritual had a special intention. By this juxtaposition Bird-Jaguar implied that he and his father (even after death) acted together on both occasions, and that the kingdom had become Bird-Jaguar’s by this time, if only in de facto status.[437]

The next time we see Bird-Jaguar on a monument, he is once again displaying the flapstaff (Fig. 7:5d). The date is now June 25, 747, eleven years after Shield-Jaguar’s first performance of this ritual, and some six years after the father-son event. By repeating this flapstaff rite yet again, Bird-Jaguar was commemorating his growing command of Yaxchilan’s ritual life.

Two years later on April 3, 749, Lady Xoc, Shield-Jaguar’s principal wife, died and went to join her husband in Xibalba. She had survived him by seven years. A little over a year later—exactly four years after the 9.15.15.0.0 period ending discussed above—Bird-Jaguar conducted a ritual in which he acted as warrior and giver of sacrifices. On June 4, 750, wearing the mask of the god Chac-Xib-Chac, he presented three unnamed victims for sacrifice. He carved this scene on the temple side of Stela 11 (Fig. 7:8), opposite the depiction of the father-son flapstaff event and the unusual period ending text discussed above.[438] These three events—the flapstaff, the period ending, and the GI sacrifice—were of such central importance to his campaign for the throne that Bird-Jaguar surrounded them with texts recording his accession. One text recording that event as hok’ah ti ahauel, “he came out as king,” was carved on the narrow sides of the tree-stone. A second text recording the event as chumwan ti ahauel, “he sat in reign,” was carved under the scene of the flapstaff event. As a finishing touch to the program of Stela 11, Bird-Jaguar placed miniature figures of his dead mother and father in the register above the sacrificial scene. They view his performance with approval from the world of the ancestors.

Bird-Jaguar’s campaign of legitimization was now close to completion, but some barriers still remained. He had yet to prove his prowess as a warrior by taking a captive of sufficient prestige to sacrifice in the accession ceremonies, and to demonstrate his potency by fathering a male child and heir. These last events were never witnessed by his mother, for she died in the following year. On March 13, 751, Lady Eveningstar went to join her rival, Lady Xoc, in the Otherworld.

With the principal female players in this historical drama dead, Bird-Jaguar embarked on the last phase of his crusade. On February 10, 752, 357 days after the end of the sixteenth katun, Bird-Jaguar went to war and took a captive named Yax-Cib-Tok, a cahal of an as-yet-unidentified king.[439] Eight days later, on February 18, Lady Great-Skull-Zero bore him a son, Chel-Te-Chan-Mah-Kina. This son would later take Shield- Jaguar’s name when he himself became the king. With these events Bird- Jaguar’s long struggle for the throne came to an end. Seventy-five days later he was crowned king of Yaxchilan.

Like the multiple bloodlettings that preceded Shield-Jaguar’s death, this capture and the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir loomed large in his program of propaganda. He inscribed the capture on a glyphic step (Fig. 7:9a) located in front of a door leading into Temple 41, the structure built by his father on the highest point of the city. This was the location where Shield-Jaguar himself had erected the depiction of his first flapstaff ritual and the stelae recording the most famous captures of his career. By inscribing the record of his own battle triumph on this building, Bird- Jaguar associated himself with his father’s triumphs as a warrior.

Bird-Jaguar also mounted a pictorial representation of this capture (Lintel 16, Fig. 7:9b) inside Temple 21. Temple 21, if you remember, was BI the structure designed to parallel the glory of Lady Xoc’s magnificent Temple 23. In the scene on this lintel, Bird-Jaguar, dressed in battle armor, stands before his seated captive who bites on his thumb in a gesture of submission or fear.

Bird-Jaguar also depicted the rituals celebrating the birth of his son in two separate locations, maximizing the political implications of the event in the public record. He placed the bloodletting ritual that celebrated the birth over the right-hand doorway of Temple 21, next to the central capture scene described above. If we look at this scene (Fig. 7:9c), we see Bird-Jaguar preparing to draw blood from his own genitals, while one of his wives, Lady Balam, Lady Ahau of lx Witz,[440] pulls a rope through her tongue while holding a plate filled with blood-splattered paper.

This depiction corresponds to Lintel 24 in the program of Temple 23, the bloodletting celebration at the birth of Bird-Jaguar himself. Obviously, Bird-Jaguar wished the audience to draw some parallels. In the earlier bloodletting on Temple 23, Lady Xoc was shown acknowledging the birth of a son to a co-wife, Lady Eveningstar. Here Lady Balam acknowledges the birth of her husband’s heir, also the child of another wife. The only logistical difference is that Lady Great-Skull-Zero is not a foreign wife, as Lady Eveningstar had been, but a woman from a prominent cahal lineage of Yaxchilan. In addition, Temple 21 houses the stela (Fig. 7:6b) that depicts Bird-Jaguar’s mother in the critical 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, which we described in such detail in the vignette. The presence of this stela linked yet another critical bloodletting ritual to the birth of the heir.

In an adjacent temple (Temple 20), Bird-Jaguar mounted another representation of the birth rituals. In this second depiction, Lady Great- Skull-Zero, the mother of the newborn child, holds a Personified Bloodletter in one hand and a bloodletting bowl in the other (Fig. 7:10b). Against her ribs she grasps the tail of a Vision Serpent which winds its way across empty space to rest in the hand of the infant’s father, Bird-Jaguar. The text recording the birth sits immediately in front of the human head emerging from the Vision Serpent’s mouth. This head most likely represents either an ancestor recalled to witness the arrival of the infant heir or the infant himself, Chel-Te-Chan, being metaphorically born through the mouth of the Vision Serpent. This birth scene is mounted in the same building as Lintel 14, which shows Lady Great-Skull-Zero holding the Vision Serpent with Great-Skull-Zero in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting rite (Fig. 7:6a and 7:10c). Thus, in both Temples 20 and 21, Bird-Jaguar connected the birth of his heir and the taking of his captive to the multiple bloodletting event that was so fundamental to his political claim.

With these last two acts—the taking of a captive and the production of an heir, Bird-Jaguar became the king. It is curious that after all his long struggles for the throne, he was never particularly interested in picturing this hard-won accession rite. He did, however, inscribe textual records of this event on Stela 11, the steps of Stela 41, and on the lintels of Structure 10, which he built directly across the plaza from Lady Xoc’s building.

The only actual surviving picture of his accession appears in Temple 33, one of the largest and most important constructions he commissioned during the first half of his reign. Built on a slope above and behind the string of buildings documenting his right of accession (Temples 13, 20, 21, 22, and 23), this building has a lintel over each of its three doors and a wide step portraying the bailgame events discussed earlier (Fig. 7:7) on its basal platform. The accession portrait is over the left door (Lintel 1, Fig. 7:11a). There, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself holding the manifestation of GIF[441] outward toward an audience we cannot see. Behind him stands the mother of his new son, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a bundle to her chest.[442] The verb in the text over her head records that she will soon let blood,[443] just as Lady Xoc did for Shield-Jaguar on the day of his accession (Lintel 25, Fig. 7:3b). Presumably, as the bloodletter for the king, she, like her predecessor Lady Xoc, would be responsible for materializing the founder of the dynasty. Her name is also written in a form that identifies her as the mother of the heir—the child who would become the second Shield-Jaguar.

Bird-Jaguar’s accession rites culminated nine days later with the dedication of a new building, Temple 22, located on the river terrace immediately adjacent to Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s memorial (Fig. 7:12). Into this new building, he reset four very early lintels. These lintels were presumably removed from the important ancestral building now encased within the new construction. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of lintels and inscriptions from the buildings of his ancestors was a very important part of Bird-Jaguar’s political strategy.

On the brand-new lintel he placed over the central doorway of Temple 22, he commemorated the dedication of the earlier temple, which had been named Chan-Ah- Fz’i by King Moon-Skull, the seventh successor in the dynasty. This ancient dedication had taken place on October 16, 454. The inclusion of the earlier texts was meant to link Bird-Jaguar’s dedication of the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i temple to the actions of the ancestral king. The official dedication of Temple 22 took place on May 12, 752, nine days after Bird-Jaguar had become the new king.

Obviously. Bird-Jaguar had to have begun construction of Temple 22 at a much earlier date for its dedication rituals to have played a part in his actual accession rites. This is but one more example of the extent of the power he wielded before he officially wore the crown. His choice of this building as his first construction project, and the one most closely associated with his accession rites, was deliberate. Not only was Temple 22 a new and impressive version of his illustrious ancestor’s Chan-Ah-Tz’i, it stood right next door to Lady Xoc’s pivotal building. Through this construction project, Bird-Jaguar asserted both his mastery of Lady Xoc’s imagery and his connection to a famous and successful ancestor. The purpose of this building (and Temple 12, in which he reset another group of early lintels), was to encase and preserve earlier important monuments and to declare his status as the legitimate descendant of those earlier kings.

This construction project was just the opening shot in a grand strategy that would completely change the face of Yaxchilân over the next ten years (Fig. 7:12). Bird-Jaguar dedicated the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i just nine days after his accession. To the left of the adjacent Temple 23 and attached to it, he built Temple 24 (dedicated on September 2, 755). Its lintels recorded the deaths of his immediate ancestors: his grandmother’s on September 12, 705; Shield-Jaguar’s on June 19, 742; Lady Xoc’s on April 3, 749; and his own mother’s on March 13, 751.

While still working on the huge terrace that supported the group of buildings surrounding Temple 23, Bird-Jaguar began construction on yet another temple, Temple 21. This structure also replicated the magnificent lintels of Lady Xoc’s building. Bird-Jaguar designed the program on this temple around the following scenes: his capture of Yax-Cib-Tok; his own bloodletting in celebration of his son’s birth; and a bloodletting rite that took place on March 28, 755, probably as part of the dedication rites for the temple itself (Fig. 7:9d). The giver of blood in the final event was Lady 6-Tun, a woman from Motul de San José, another of Bird-Jaguar’s wives. These images, of course, deliberately echoed the lintels of Temple 23. Bird-Jaguar intensified the association of this new building with Lady Xoc’s monument by planting inside it the stela recording his mother’s B pivotal bloodletting rite on 9.15.10.0.1. Carved in a style emulating the Lintel 25 masterpiece from Lady Xoc’s temple, this stela depicts Lady Eveningstar (Fig. 7:6b) wearing the same costume as her rival while materializing the same double-Tlaloc-headed Vision Serpent. This, and other imagery, shows us how obsessed Bird-Jaguar was with equating his mother with Lady Xoc.

Next to this building, he constructed Temple 20, which had three lintels showing many of the same events. One depicts his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her patriarch participating in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting. A second shows his wife letting blood along with Bird-Jaguar in celebration of the birth of their son. The third lintel depicts the ritual display of four captives by Bird-Jaguar and an unnamed noble. This lintel has been tentatively dated to November 13, 757.[444]

Across the plaza trom temple 23, Bird-Jaguar constructed three more buildings: Temples 10, 12, and 13. In Temple 12, he reset another series of Early Classic lintels. These recorded the first through the tenth successors of the dynasty, and the accession of the tenth king, Ta-Skull, on February 13, 526. This building, along with Temple 22, honored the members of the long dynasty of Yaxchilan from which Bird-Jaguar descended, and preserved important public records which would have otherwise been lost when he covered over earlier structures during the course of his building program.

To the west of Structure 12, Bird-Jaguar commissioned a great L-shaped platform surmounted by two buildings housing two sets of lintels. The first set, Lintels 29, 30, and 31, are all glyphic and record his birth, accession, and the dedication of the building itself (Temple 10) on March 1, 764. The other building (Structure 13) housed pictorial lintels of extraordinary interest (Fig. 7:13). The first, Lintel 50, shows Shield- Jaguar’s original flapstaff ritual, the event that began Bird-Jaguar’s race for the throne.[445] Balancing Shield-Jaguar’s flapstaff rite is Lintel 33. This lintel, found over the right-hand door of the temple (Fig. 7:13c), shows Bird-Jaguar conducting his own flapstaff event eleven years later on June 25, the summer solstice of the year 747.

Lintel 32 (Fig. 7:13b), found over the middle door, shows Bird- Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, in a bundle rite. According to his inscription, this rite took place the day after his father persuaded Lady Xoc to let her blood in acknowledgment of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. The masterly representation of Lady Xoc’s extraordinarily painful suffering is just across the plaza, so we may assume that Bird-Jaguar used Lintel 32 to show that his own mother was also directly involved in the rituals surrounding his birth. In fact, she holds a bundle that very probably contained the bowl, rope, and lancet used in the bloodletting rite. By this means, he asserted that her role on that occasion was every bit as important as Lady Xoc’s. As a finishing touch, he framed his mother’s participation in the bundle ritual with the flapstaff events he considered to be a key part of his legitimization. The program of this building thus links those crucial events together into a single web of causality. It is retrospective history at its best. Bird-Jaguar masterfully orchestrated events, with their many shades of meaning and connections, to fit the conclusions he wished his people to accept as fact.

With the completion of this last building, Bird-Jaguar had accomplished his campaign of political legitimization. His major problem now was to maintain the loyalty of his nobility and secure their support for his own son. His own problems with the succession appear to have marked B1 him deeply; so much so that the efforts of his remaining years were spent in a concentrated effort to insure that his own heir did not suffer the same fate.

Bird-Jaguar began this new campaign with a set of buildings constructed on the slopes above the river shelf. Pivotal to the program was the huge Temple 33, which he flanked with Temple 1 to the west, and Temple 42 to the east (Fig. 7:14). The ten lintels on these three buildings record a sequence of events beginning with Bird-Jaguar’s accession and culminating with its fifth anniversary. He repeated the same narrative strategy he had used in the building sequence which centered around Temple 23: the repetition of key scenes in more than one location. In this way he was able to feature several different people, thereby allowing many of his nobles and allies the prestige of appearing with the king in the permanent public record of history (Fig. 7:14).

Forty days after his accession, Bird-Jaguar staged the first of these ceremonial events, a bundle ritual, on June 12, 752, ten days before the summer solstice (Fig. 7:15a). One pictorial representation of this event shows us Bird-Jaguar (on Lintel 5 of Temple 1) holding a tree-scepter in each hand, while Lady 6-Sky-Ahau, another foreign wife, this time from Motul de San José,[446] holds a bundle. In the second depiction of this ritual (Lintel 42 of Temple 42), Bird-Jaguar appears not with his wife but with Kan-Toc, one of his most important cahalob.[447] The king holds out a GII Manikin Scepter, an important symbol of the kingship, toward this cahal, who is shown gripping a battle ax and shield.

We do not know the occasion for this ritual event, but Bird-Jaguar found it politically advantageous to represent it on these two lintels—one displaying a foreign wife who probably brought a powerful alliance with her, and the other featuring one of his most important nobles. In the Maya tradition, subordinate nobles were rarely depicted on the same monuments as the high king. Here Bird-Jaguar is obviously flattering his cahal, perhaps cementing his allegiance by publicly acknowledging his importance. The same reasoning would apply to the monument depicting his foreign wife. She must have brought her own set of alliances with her when she came to marry the king of Yaxchilân.

Later in the same year, on October 16, 752, Bird-Jaguar staged another series of rituals, once again depicting each of them in double imagery. During the first ceremony, he displayed a strange-looking staff mounting a basket with a GII miniature sitting atop it (Fig. 7:15b). In one version of this ritual (Lintel 6, Temple 1), Kan-Toc, the same cahal we saw above, stands before the king. He is holding bloodletting paper in one hand and a jaguar-paw club in the other. In the contrasting depiction (Lintel 43 of Temple 42), another wife, Lady Balam of lx Witz, stands with Bird-Jaguar. She holds a bloodletting bowl with a bloodstained rope hanging over one side. She is the same wife we saw letting blood on Lintel 17 to celebrate the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir. Here Bird-Jaguar watches her let blood again in an event occurring either just before or just after his scene with the cahal. Note that the paper held by Kan-Toc in the alternate depiction now rests in Bird-Jaguar’s hand. The fact that the paper is depicted in both scenes lets us know we are seeing different moments in the same ritual.

This particular ritual apparently lasted for several days, for two days later Bird-Jaguar reappears on Lintel 7 (Fig. 7:15c), this time holding the GII Manikin Scepter. Another of his wives appears with him, hugging a large bundle to her chest. While we cannot positively identify the woman depicted here (her name is badly eroded), we are reasonably certain she is another foreign wife, this time a second wife from Motul de San José.[448]

The final episode in this series of lintels records the most famous and important capture of Bird-Jaguar’s lifetime—the taking of Jeweled-Skull (Fig. 7:15d). Once again, he commissioned two versions of the event. As before, one shows him acting with a cahal and the other with a wife. On Lintel 41, Lady 6-Sky-Ahau of Motul de San José stands before the king, who is dressed in full battle regalia including cotton armor and lance. She has been helping him dress for war in the same type of ritual we saw Lady Xoc perform for Shield-Jaguar thirty-one years earlier. In this scene, however, the action is a little farther along than that shown on the earlier Lintel 26 (Fig. 7:3c). Here Bird-Jaguar is already fully dressed in the Tlaloc war costume and ready to enter the battle.

The capture itself appears on Lintel 8 of Temple 1. Bird-Jaguar, dressed in the battle gear his wife had helped him don, holds the unfortunate Jeweled-Skull by the wrist. Kan-Toc, the cahal he had shown twice before, yanks on the bound hair of his own captive. The manner of Bird-Jaguar’s presentation is highly important. Not only does he share his moment of victory with a subordinate, he represents the two captures[449] as equally important.[450] If it were not for the more elaborate detail of Bird- Jaguar’s costume and the larger size of the text describing his actions, a E casual onlooker might be hard-pressed to identify who was the king and who the lord. Both protagonists are about the same size and occupy the same compositional space.

Why would Bird-Jaguar share the stage of history with his wives and cahalob? In the age-old political traditions of the Maya, the high king’s performance of public ritual affirmed the legitimacy of his power and gained public support for his decisions. Few rulers before Bird-Jaguar had felt compelled to document these mutual performances in monumental narrative art. By allowing his subordinates onto the stage of public history, Bird-Jaguar was actually sharing with them some of his prerogatives as king.

Shield-Jaguar had used this same strategy to deal with his wife Lady Xoc and the lineage she represented. Bird-Jaguar was merely extending this strategy further to include the cahal lineages whose alliances he needed to secure his own position and to insure that his son inherited the throne without dispute. Notice, however, that Bird-Jaguar produced his heir with a woman of this internal cahal lineage, opting for a different solution than his father had with his marriage to a foreigner. We suspect he did not want his own son, Chel-Te, to face the opposition from the internal lineages that had very probably kept him off the throne for ten B years.

Setting his son and heir into the midst of this web of alliance became the preoccupation of the second half of Bird-Jaguar’s reign, and the strategy and emphasis of his political art reflect his new goal (Fig. 7:16). The centrally placed Temple 33 was the first sculptural program designed to focus on the problem. In it Bird-Jaguar employed a uniquely Yaxchilan strategy. At Palenque, in the Group of the Cross, and in the murals at Bonampak, other Maya kings recorded specific rituals which were designed to publicly affirm a child’s status as the chosen heir. Bird-Jaguar never recorded a similar heir-designation rite for his own son, Chel-Te. Instead, he repeatedly depicted himself and the most important of his cahalob in public performance with his heir.

This new strategy was begun with the celebration of the five-tun period ending on 9.16.5.0.0 (April 12, 756). Once again, Bird-Jaguar created multiple representations of the event. He mounted the first of these depictions over the right-hand door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11c). In this scene, Bird-Jaguar holds a GII Manikin Scepter out toward the smaller figure of a cahal. This noble, named Ah Mac, is someone we have not seen before. The cahal holds his own Manikin Scepter and wears the same type of clothing as the king, although his headdress is different.

The second depiction of this period-ending rite is located several hundred meters up the river in Temple ST[451] (Fig. 7:16), one of the first of a series of buildings to be erected in that new area of the city. On the central lintel (Fig. 7:17b), Bird-Jaguar is depicted with his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, celebrating the period ending with a bundle rite. The bundle holds the bloodletting instruments he will use to draw his holy blood. The composition of this scene echoes both his accession portrait on Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11a) and the bundle rite celebrated by his own father and mother to commemorate his birth (on Lintel 32, Fig. 7:13b). The replication of these earlier ritual actions was designed to deliberately link all these actions together in one great string of causality. Just as Shield- Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar had performed the bundle ritual before them, so would Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero reenact it for both his accession and this period ending. The parallel Bird-Jaguar wished to draw is obvious: The first pair of actors were his own parents; the second were the parents of his heir, Chel-Te.

The bundle ritual conducted by Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull- Zero is linked to Chel-Te by the events depicted in the lintels over the flanking doorways. Over the right portal, Chel-Te stands before Great- Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:17c), the patriarch of his mother’s lineage. Great-Skull- Zero is depicted here precisely because he is Chel-Te’s mother’s brother. Exactly this relationship (yichan[452] in Mayan) stands between his name and the heir’s below.

Over the left door (Fig. 7:17a), Chel-Te stands before his mother who sits on a bench and gestures to him with her right hand. Since the flanking scenes have no date, we presume that all three lintels depict different actions that took place on the same day. First, Bird-Jaguar and his wife enacted a bundle rite; next, Chel-Te presented himself to his mother; finally, he appeared before his maternal uncle, who was the head of his mother’s clan. The goal of these juxtapositions was not to glorify Bird-Jaguar, but to show his wife’s lineage giving public support to his son as the heir.

One year later, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself and his son over the central door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11b). The date is 9.16.6.0.0 (April 7, 757), and the event, the celebration of his fifth year in office as king. Both father and son display the same bird scepters Bird-Jaguar held out to Lady 6-Sky-Ahau forty days after his accession on June 12, 752 (Lintel 5, Fig. 7:15a). Bird-Jaguar chose this location carefully. Temple 33, if you remember, is the building that housed the only picture of Bird-Jaguar’s accession. It was also prominently located on the slope immediately above the temple program of legitimization. By depicting his son’s participation in this important ritual at this key site, Bird-Jaguar hoped to document in public and permanent form Chel-Te’s status as the heir.

Nine years later, Bird-Jaguar erected another series of lintels for his son, elaborating upon strategies he had used in earlier buildings. Going upriver again, he built a new temple next to the one that showed his son and wife celebrating the five-tun period ending. This time the event he chose to focus on was the fifteen-tun ending date, 9.16.15.0.0 (February 19, 766). Over the center door (Fig. 7:18), he depicted both himself and his son displaying GII Manikin Scepters in these period-ending rites.[453]

Bird-Jaguar took a different strategy, however, in the two flanking lintels. Over the right door, he showed a woman, presumably his wife Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a Vision Serpent in her arms as she materializes a vision. Over the left door (Fig. 7:18c), he repeated for the second time the scene of his mother Lady Eveningstar acting with Shield- Jaguar on the occasion of his own birth during the Jupiter-Saturn hiero- phany. This juxtaposition is critical. The center lintel proves that Bird-Jaguar acted with his son, and the left lintel relegitimizes his own claim to the throne by declaring once again that his mother acted with his father in the same ritual sequence his father memorialized with Lady Xoc. This is but another example of Bird-Jaguar’s oft-repeated declaration that his mother was as good and as exalted as his father’s principal wife. Clearly the man “doth protest too much.”

Any problems Bird-Jaguar encountered, either because of his mother’s status or because of rivals with better claims to the throne, would very likely be inherited by his son. Aware of the difficulties his heir might still face, Bird-Jaguar was not yet willing to rest on his laurels. He apparently used the same period-ending date, 9.16.15.0.0, to seal the allegiance B of yet another cahal for his son. This fellow, Tilot, ruled the territory on the other side of the river from a subordinate town called La Pasadita. Three lintels mounted on a building at that site show Bird-Jaguar acting in public with Tilot. On the center lintel (Fig. 7:19b), Bird-Jaguar scatters blood on the period ending while Tilot stands by as his principal attendant. Flanking this critical scene is a picture of Tilot and Bird-Jaguar standing on either side of an unfortunate captive taken in battle on June 14, 759 (Fig. 7:19a). On the other side (Fig. 7:19c), Tilot stands before Chel-Te, who sits on a bench as either king or heir.

These lintels lent prestige to Tilot by depicting him in public performance with the high king. The third scene, however, was the payoff, for it shows this powerful cahal in public performance with Bird-Jaguar’s son, Chel-Te. The price Bird-Jaguar paid for this allegiance was the personal elevation of Tilot into a co-performer with the king; but by sharing his prerogatives and his place in history, Bird-Jaguar reinforced the submission of this cahal to his own authority and secured Tilot’s loyalty to the heir.

[[][]]

The last monument Bird-Jaguar erected during his life continued his effort to secure the succession. It also brought his story full circle. Set on Lintel 9 (Fig. 7:20), the single lintel within Temple 2, a building situated on a terrace just below Temple I,[454] this scene shows Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of the queen’s lineage, conducting a flapstaff ritual with Bird- Jaguar. As we mentioned above, this was the ritual first enacted by Shield- Jaguar on June 27, 736 (Fig. 7:5a and b). It was also the ritual Bird-Jaguar enacted with his father on June 26, 741, just before Shield-Jaguar died (Fig. 7:5c). It was the ritual depicted on Lintel 33 as well (Fig. 7:5d), on June 26, 747, with Bird-Jaguar as the sole actor. This final ritual took place on June 20, 768, nearly thirty-two years after its first enactment.

The flapstaff rituals had always been critical to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy to prove himself the legitimate heir to Shield-Jaguar. To show himself enacting the same event with his brother-in-law was an extraordinary elevation of that cahal’s prestige. But his reason for allowing such honor to fall to Great-Skull-Zero is also patently clear from the text on Lintel 9. There Great-Skull-Zero is named yichan ahau, “the brother of the mother of the ahau (read ‘heir’).” Bird-Jaguar participated in this double b display to insure that Great-Skull-Zero would support Chel-Te’s assumption of the throne after Bird-Jaguar’s death. The strategy apparently worked, for Chel-Te took the throne successfully and was known thereafter as the namesake of his famous grandfather, Shield-Jaguar.

Ironically, even though Bird-Jaguar had had problems demonstrating his right to the throne on his home ground, his regional prestige had been secure even before he was formally installed as king. The king of Piedras Negras had felt his presence prestigious enough to invite him to participate in the designation of the Piedras Negras heir; and this event took place three years before Bird-Jaguar was even crowned. Bird-Jag- uar’s royal visit is recorded in an extraordinary wall panel (Fig. 7:21) commissioned retrospectively by Ruler 7 of Piedras Negras. The panel depicts a palace scene where a celebration is taking place. The occasion is the heir-designation of Ruler 5, Ruler 7’s predecessor. The events recorded on the wall panel are these: On July 31, 749 (9.15.18.3.13), Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras celebrated the end of his first twenty tuns as king, in a ritual witnessed by Jaguar ofYaxchilan,[455] who had come down the river by canoe to participate in it. The date of this anniversary falls during the period when Yaxchilan was without a king. We cannot identify the Yaxchilan visitor with absolute certainty, but it was most likely Bird-Jaguar, who would have come as the de facto king of Yaxchilan.

When next Bird-Jaguar appears in a Piedras Negras text, his name and actions are clear. The cahalob portrayed in the scene on this particular wall panel are divided into four groups. The king of Piedras Negras sits on a bench and talks to the seven cahalob seated on the step below him. An ornamental pot divides them into two groups—one of three and another of four people. On the king’s immediate right stands an adult and at least three smaller figures, one of which is the heir to the Piedras Negras throne.[456] At the king’s far right stands a group of three lords talking among themselves. The texts around and in front of this latter group identify these people as Yaxchilan lords; and, according to the text next to the Piedras Negras king, one of them is the great Bird-Jaguar himself.

This scene took place on October 20, 757 (9.16.6.9.16), during the fifth year of Bird-Jaguar’s reign. He had come down the river to conduct a bundle rite for the designation of the Piedras Negras heir. This ritual was apparently celebrated just in the nick of time, for forty-one days later, on November 30, Ruler 4 died. Ruler 5, the heir whose inheritance Bird- Jaguar publicly affirmed, took the throne on March 30, 758 (9.16.6.17.17).

Interestingly enough, Bird-Jaguar’s visit to Piedras Negras was never recorded in the public forum at Yaxchilan. It would seem that the Piedras Negras heir and his descendants are the ones who gained prestige from this visit and wished to record it for their posterity. What then did Bird- Jaguar gain? Presumably, if he went to Piedras Negras at the behest of Ruler 4 to give his public support to the Piedras Negras heir, he secured reciprocal support for his own son’s claim.

Bird-Jaguar’s political problems and his use of monumental art to work out solutions were by no means novel either to his reign or to the political experience at Yaxchilan. Other Maya rulers, such as Pacal and Chan-Bahlum of Palenque, had their own problems with succession. Within the history of the Classic Maya, however, Bird-Jaguar’s solution— sharing the public forum with powerful political allies—was new. The fact that this strategy worked so well would gradually lead to its adaptation by other kings, up and down the Usumacinta River, in the years to come.

Before Bird-Jaguar, Maya kings did not depict themselves on public monuments with cahalob, regardless of how noble or powerful these nobles might have been or how important to the king’s political machinations they were. In indoor mural paintings, of course, the practice was different. Even in the very early murals of Uaxactun, the court, not just the king, was represented. On stelae and architectural lintels, however, kings normally depicted only themselves and occasionally family members—especially mothers and fathers from whom they claimed legitimate inheritance. Cahalob could and did commission monuments to celebrate important events in their lives, but they erected them in their own house compounds or in the subordinate communities they ruled for the high kings. Bird-Jaguar was the first to elevate his cahalob to stand beside him in the public eye. He did so to secure their support for his claim to the throne. That alliance must have been a fragile one, however, for he was forced to share the stage of history with them again and again in order to maintain the alliance, both for himself and his son.

Bird-Jaguar was not the first Maya king to find himself in a struggle to command the succession. Primogeniture can go wrong as often as right, especially when ambitious offspring from multiple marriages are competing for the throne. We can be sure that Bird-Jaguar was not the first son of a foreign wife to compete for a Maya throne. Others before him manipulated the system and strove to use the nobility to support their claim. Bird-Jaguar, however, was the first to exalt those cahalob by depicting them standing beside him in the public record, and we know he did not do so out of a sense of largess. Those cahalob he portrayed with him sold their loyalty for a piece of Yaxchilan’s public history. The price they—and B the people of the city—paid was more than sworn fealty to the king. The precedents established by Bird-Jaguar were dangerous and eventually debilitating. A king with Bird-Jaguar’s personal charisma and ferocity in battle could afford to share the power of the high kingship; but the legacy of conciliar power he left to the cahal families he honored was not so well commanded by his descendants.

8. Copán: The Death of First Dawn[457]

The mountain spine of the Americas wends its way through Maya country, creating a cool high region of mists and towering volcanoes. From the base of these mountains, the peninsula of Yucatán stretches far to the north through the territory of the kings. Located on the southeastern margin of the Maya world, the Copan River drains the valley system it has carved from the rugged, forest-shrouded mountains of western Honduras. This waterway eventually joins the mighty Motagua River on its way to the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea. The broadest valley in this system shares its name, Copan, with that river.[458]

This river is responsible for the richness of the land in the Copan Valley. Each year during the rains of summer and fall, floodw’aters deposit the alluvial soils from the mud-laden river waters onto the valley floor. The resulting fertile bottomlands follow the ambling path of the river through low foothills and the higher ridge lands of the rugged mountains (Fig. 8:1). On their upper reaches, these mountains are covered by pine forests, while deeper in the valley, they are covered with tropical growth—including the mighty ceiba, the sacred tree of all Mesoamericans.

From the dawn of time, the Copan Valley was an inviting place to live. Between 1100 B.C. and 900 B.C. the first settlers, who were just learning to rely on agriculture to feed themselves, drifted into the valley from the Guatemalan highlands or perhaps the adjacent mountains of El Salvador. These earliest immigrants lived in temporary camps, enjoying a good life in the tall gallery forest along the water’s edge. They hunted deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary[459] among the trees and ate the maize and beans they harvested from clearings they had cut with stone axes. By 900 B.C., their farmer descendants had built permanent homes and spread out to occupy the entire valley. There, throughout the bottomlands and foothills, they left the debris of their pottery cooking vessels and the bowls, plates, and cups of their daily meals. Eventually these people established at least three villages—one in the Sepulturas Group, another in the area called the Bosque, and the last under the Great Plaza later built by Copan’s kings (Fig. 8:9).

These prosperous pioneering farmers buried their loved ones under their patio floors within earshot of the children and descendants working and playing above them. In proximity to their homes and families, ancestral spirits could dwell happily in the Otherworld. When the family patriarch stood on the patio and conducted a bloodletting, he knew the ancestors were below his feet—close at hand should he want to call them forth. The departed were buried with an array of gifts and personal belongings, including quantities of highly prized jade, as well as incised and painted pottery with sacred images the Maya had borrowed from the I Olmec—the creators of the first great interregional system of thought and art in Mesoamerica.[460]

These rites for the beloved dead show us that the people of the valley had already begun the process that led to the creation of social stratification, for the privileged were more able than others to take rich offerings with them into Xibalba. The differences in social standing among families in the villages, engendered by bountiful harvests or success in varying commercial enterprises, would become both the foundation of kingship and its burden in the centuries to come. During the Middle Preclassic period, however, the people in the Copán Valley were blessed with an unfailing abundance of all the requirements of life. Their prosperity may well have outstripped even their contemporaries in the lowlands of the Petén, for the quantity of jade found in their tombs exceeds all other burials known from that time.[461]

By contrast, we know little of the Copanccs who lived in the valley during the Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D.150). This was the time when their Maya brethren in the lowlands, at places like Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactún, were acknowledging their first kings. In contrast, Copán saw a major reduction of population and building activity during this 450-year span. Archaeologists have found traces of human activity from the first three centuries of this period in only two locations—one south and the other southwest of the Acropolis. And even this weak trace disappears from the record during the last 150 years of this period.

Scholars working on the history of the Copán Valley have no explanation for this curious lapse. This inexplicable disappearance of population from a thriving area becomes even more enigmatic when compared with Maya activities in both the Pacific areas to the south and the lowlands to the north. In all other parts of the Maya world, the Late Preclassic was a time of exuberant innovation and social experimentation. It was a time when the institutions of government achieved their Classic forms with the invention of kingship. To all appearances, however, the valley of Copán was seriously depopulated, and those who lived among the remnants of a more glorious past did not participate in the events sweeping the Maya society of that time. Kingship, for the Copanecs, would come to the valley only in later years when the mythology and symbolism of governance had already been developed.

By A.D. 200, however, the valley of Copán had recovered and her people had joined the mainstream of Classic Maya life. The construction of the first levels of the Acropolis stimulated a series of building projects, including floors and platforms that would serve, in future centuries, as the foundations lor the Great Plaza, the Ballcourt, and the Acropolis of Copán’s cultural apogee (Fig. 8:1). During this early time, farmers and craftspeople settled the rich agricultural bottomlands north of the river, building their homes as close as possible to the valley’s growing center of power.

This pattern of settlement created no difficulties in the beginning when there was plenty of farmland and only a moderate number of people to support. But slowly the surrounding green sea of maize and forest gave way to a city of white and red plazas—with fine structures of stone, wood, and thatch all jostling for position. Soon, social standing and proximity to the dynamic pulse of the city became more important to these exuberant people than their own food production. Meter by meter, over the centuries, they usurped the richest cropland, constructing their lineage compounds on acreage that used to be fields, gradually forcing the farmers up into the margins of the valley.[462] These new urban elite established particularly dense neighborhoods around the Acropolis, in the area now under the modern village of Copan, and on the ridge above it at a spot called El Cerro de las Mesas. Aristocrats and commoners alike vied with each other for the privilege of residing in the reflected brilliance of the Acropolis and the concentration of power it represented.

[[][Fig. 8:2 The Founding of Copan as a Kingdom
_{b-c: drawing by B.W. Fash}]]

The Classic dynastic chronicles of Copan refer to this dawning era of the kingdom in ways that closely match the archaeological evidence. Later Copan kings remembered the date A.D. 160 as the year their kingdom was established as a political entity. At least three kings recorded 8.6.0.0.0 (December 18, A.D. 159) as a critical early date of the city, and Stela 1 (Fig. 8:2) records the date July 13, A.D. 160, in connection with the glyph that signifies Copan both as a physical location and a political entity. Unfortunately, the area of the text that once recorded the precise event is now destroyed, but we believe that later Copanecs honored this date as the founding of their kingdom.[463]

By A.D. 426, Copan’s ruling dynasty was founded and the principle of kingship was accepted by the elites reemcrging in the valley society after the dormancy of the Late Preclassic period. No doubt here as elsewhere in the Maya world, the advent of this institution consolidated the kingdom, creating a politically coherent court in which the ahauob could air their differences and rivalries while at the same time presenting a unified front to their followers.

Yax-Kuk-Mo’ (“Blue-Quetzal-Macaw”), who founded the ruling dynasty, appears in the historical and archaeological record[464] about 260 years after the recovery from the Late Preclassic slump. We know that he founded the dynasty of kings who led the kingdom of Copan throughout the Classic period. All the subsequent kings of Copan counted their numerical position in the succession from him, naming themselves, for example, “the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[465] In all, sixteen descendants followed Yax-Kuk-Mo’ onto Copan’s throne, and these kings ruled the valley for the next four hundred years.

| <verbatim>#</verbatim> | Name | Accession | Death | Other dates | | 1 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ | | | 426–435? | | 2 | unknown | | | | | 3 | unknown | | | | | 4 | Cu-Ix | | | 465 ± 15 yrs | | 5 | unknown | | | | | 6 | unknown | | | | | 7 | Waterlily-Jaguar | | | 504–544 + | | 8 | unknown | | | | | 9 | unknown | | 551, Dec. 30 | ???? | | 10 | Moon-Jaguar | 553, May 26 | 578, Oct. 26 | | | 11 | Butz’-Chan | 578, Nov. 19 | 626, Jan. 23 | | | 12 | Smoke-Imix-God K | 628, Feb. 8 | 695, Jun. 18 | | | 13 | 18-Rabbit-God K | 695, Jul. 9 | 738, May 3 | | | 14 | Smoke-Monkey | 738, Jun. 11 | 749, Feb. 4 | | | 15 | Smoke-Shell | 749, Feb. 18 | ???? | | | 16 | Yax-Pac | 763, Jul. 2 | 820, May 6 -( | mos. | | 17 | U-Cit-Tok | ???? | 822, Feb. 10 | |

In actuality, Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the first king of Copan. It is probable, however, that he earned the designation of founder because he exemplified the charismatic qualities of the divine ahau better than any of his predecessors. It is important to remember that here, as at Palenque and the other kingdoms that acknowledged such great statesmen, the definition of a founding ancestor served a deeper social purpose. Aristocrats who descended from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ constituted a distinct cluster of noble families, the clan of the kings, by birth superior to all the other elite in the valley. In principle, these people owed the reigning monarch a special measure of loyalty and support.

The earliest date associated with Yax-Kuk-Mo’, 8.19.0.0.0, (February 1, 426), appears as retrospective history on Stela 15, a monument of the seventh successor, Waterlily-Jaguar. At the other end of the historical record, Yax-Pac, the sixteenth successor and the last great king of the dynasty, also recorded events in the life of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He did so on his Altar Q (Fig. 8:3), which he called the “Altar of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” Yax-Pac used the sides of the altar to unfold the sixteen successors of his line, beginning with the founder and ending with himself. On the top, he inscribed two important deeds of Yax-Kuk’-Mo’.[466] There we can read that on 8.19.10.10.17 (September 6, 426), Yax-Kuk-Mo’ displayed the God K scepter of royal authority. Three days later on 8.19.10.11.0 (September 9) I Yax-Kuk-Mo’ “came” or “arrived” as the founder of the lineage[467] (Fig. 8:4a and b). Yax-Pac recorded these two events as if they were the fundamental actions that spawned the dynasty and the kingdom. His commemoration of these events was critical to his campaign for political support from the many ahauob who reckoned their aristocratic pedigree from this founder. Later in the chapter we shall see why Yax-Pac was so anxious to associate himself publicly with the charismatic founder of his dynasty.

The thirteenth successor, a particularly powerful man named 18- Rabbit, also evoked these early rituals of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the basis of authority over his own ahauob. On Stela J, 18-Rabbit inscribed his own accession and that of his immediate predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K, in an intricate text rendered in the form of a mat, the symbol of the kingly throne. On the first strand of the mat, he linked 9.13.10.0.0, the day this extraordinary monument was dedicated, to 9.0.0.0.0 (December 11, 435), a day when Yax-Kuk-Mo’ performed another “God K-in-hand” event (Fig. 8:4c).

Recent excavations under the Acropolis have turned up a building erected either during or shortly after the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Discovered under the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (10L-26), this newly excavated temple once held in its back chamber a stela dated at 9.0.0.0.0,[468] Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is recorded as the king in power when the baktun turned, while his son, the second king of the dynasty, was the owner of this tree-stone. Most important for our understanding of Copan’s history, the text associates the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ with the same date that would be evoked by his descendant, 18-Rabbit. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not an invention of later kings who were fabricating a glorified past for political reasons. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ did rule Copan, and in doing so he left a sacred legacy of tree-stones and temples to his descendants that is now coming to light in the excavations of the Acropolis.

This early temple, which is called Papagayo by the archaeologists,[469] was built only a few meters away from the first Ballcourt, which had been built during an earlier predynastic time. These two buildings became two of Copan’s central metaphors of power throughout its recorded history— the temple of kings and the ballcourt portal to the Otherworld. As the centuries progressed, the successors of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ commissioned temple after temple, building layer upon layer until that first temple and its companions grew into a range of sacred mountains overlooking a forest of tree-stones in the Great Plaza below.[470]

Papagayo temple held not only the 9.0.0.0.0 tree-stone, but also a step placed inside it during a remodeling project by the fourth successor, a ruler named Cu-Ix. Its text and accumulating evidence from ongoing excavations show that Papagayo was embedded in predynastic architecture and that it remained a focus of dynastic activity for centuries after the founder died.[471] This marvelous little temple emerged from obscurity when a tunnel was excavated into the southwest corner of the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs.[472] Both the step and the above-mentioned stela are part of the growing body of inscriptions from the Early Classic period that have been emerging in recent excavations. Among the early kings who have been identified from this collection of inscriptions are the first ruler, Yax-Kuk-Mo’; his son, the second ruler; the fourth, Cu-Ix; the seventh, Waterlily-Jaguar, who left us two tree-stones (Stelae 15 and E) in the Great Plaza; the tenth, Moon-Jaguar, who left at least one tree-stone in the area under the modern village; and the eleventh, Butz’-Chan, who erected a tree-stone both in the village area and in the growing Acropolis. (See Fig. 8:3b for a summary of chronology that has been recovered to date.)[473]

Late Classic Copanec kings considered that their authority sprang from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and his charismatic performance as king. From his reign onward, Copan’s dynastic history unfolded steadily until the system itself collapsed four hundred years later when the civilization of the Classic Maya as a whole failed. Many of the works of Copan’s earliest kings still lie buried under the Acropolis and inside other structures, and are just beginning to come to light. Unfortunately, even when we uncover a buried building or find a fragmentary stela, we rarely find names associated with it. The reason for this is clear. Inscriptions are often unreadable, either because they were already old and worn when they were buried or because they were ritually “terminated” when they were placed in their final resting places. Earlier monuments were torn down to make room for the newer ones, and older buildings were either buried or broken up to be recycled as building materials. There is reason to suspect, however, that the destruction and reuse in construction of inscriptional materials was not a casual matter. The Copanecs, like other Maya, probably defused the power of places and objects they wished to cover or dispose of through special termination rituals involving defacement and careful breakage. These rituals are a source of much of the damage to early inscriptions at Copan.

Our access to recorded history really begins in earnest with the twelfth successor, Smoke-Imix-God K. This ruler stands out as a man of extraordinary accomplishment in a world that produced many great kings. One of the longest-lived kings in Copan’s history, he reigned for sixty-seven years, from A.D. 628 to 695. He presided over the Late Classic explosion of Copan into a major power in the Maya world, expanding the dominion of its dynasty to the widest extent it would ever know. The period ending on 9.11.0.0.0 (A.D. 652) represented one of the pinnacles of his reign. On that date, he erected a series of stelae throughout the valley, making it his personal sacred space in the same manner that other kings marked out the more modest spaces of pyramid summits and plazas for their ecstatic communion.[474] At the eastern entrance to the valley, he set Stelae 23, 13, 12, and at the western entrance, Stelae 10 and 19, all pivoting off Stelae 2 and 3 set up in the huge main plaza north of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:5a). Thus Smoke-Imix-God K activated the entire city of Copan and its valley as his Otherworld portal. Even recalcitrant lords of the noble lineages might hesitate to plot intrigue within the supernatural perimeter of a king so favored by the Ancestors.

Smoke-Imix-God K’s conversion of the entire community of the Copan Valley into a magical instrument bent to his will was more than a boastful gesture. Under his aegis, the Copan nobility enjoyed prestige and wealth at the expense of their rivals in neighboring cities. They were the dominant elite of Maya civilization’s southeastern region.[475] On the same 9.11.0.0.0 period ending, Smoke-Imix-God K celebrated his preeminence over his nearest neighbor, Quirigua, by erecting Altar L there[476] (Fig. 8:5b). In years to come this nearby kingdom, which straddled the rich trade routes of the Motagua River, would throw off the yoke of Copan in a spectacular battle. As Smoke-Imix-God K pursued his dream of empire, however, that day was far in the future. While the king grasped lands to the north and west on the Motagua, Maya lords, most likely from his own city, established themselves in the Valley of La Venta on the Chamelecon River between Copan and their non-Maya neighbors to the east.[477] In the hands of the powerful and ambitious Smoke-Imix-God K, Copan may have been one of the largest Maya royal territories of its time.

In A.D. 695, 18-Rabbit succeeded Smoke-Imix-God K and began his own transformation of his ancestors’ work. Where his predecessor had defined the boundaries of the sacred valley, 18-Rabbit chose the pivotal center of Copan as the stage for his own contribution to the glorious I history of the dynasty. Exhorting the truly exceptional sculptors, architects, scribes, and artisans of his time to extend their arts well beyond the limits of precedence, 18-Rabbit brought about the creation of many beautiful dramas in stone. In the course of a lifetime, he transformed the center of Copan into a unique and beautiful expression of Maya royal power that has endured to the present, unfailingly touching the most dispassionate of modern visitors.

One of his many projects was the remodeling of the Ballcourt. 18- Rabbit capped the older markers created by his predecessors with new images emphasizing his personal role as the incarnation of the Ancestral Hero Twins in their triumph over the Lords of Death. Next to the Ballcourt and within the adjacent space of the Great Plaza, 18-Rabbit also created a symbolic forest of te-tunob (Fig. 8:6). Within this magnificent grove each tree-stone bore his portrait in the guise of a god he had manifested through ecstatic ritual. All the tree-stones found in the Great Plaza were placed there between 9.14.0.0.0 and 9.15.5.0.0 (a.1). 711 — 736).[478]

One of 18-Rabbit’s final projects focused on the Acropolis directly south of his Ballcourt. There he rebuilt one of the ancient living mountains of his forebears, a monument referred to today as Temple 22.[479] 18-Rabbit commissioned his best artists to decorate this amazing building inside and out with deeply carved stone sculpture. Outside the temple, great Witz Monsters reared at the four corners of the cosmos, while the doorway of the inner sanctum, the king’s portal to the Otherworld, was framed by an arching Celestial Monster—the sky of the apotheosized Ancestors—laced with the blood scrolls of royal sacrifice (Pl. <verbatim>#).</verbatim> This sky of the king was held aloft by Pauahtunob, the age-old burden-bearers who stand at the four points of the compass and lift the heavens above the earth. Here they allowed the king to enter the darkness where only divine ahauob could go and return alive.

The magnificence of 18-Rabbit’s work lay not in the themes, which were traditional for Copan and all Maya ahauob, but rather in their execution. Unlike Pacal and Chan-Bahlum at Palenque, 18-Rabbit revealed no special political agenda in his efforts. Instead he focused solely upon the centrality of the king in the life of the state. From Smoke-Imix- God K he had inherited a court of nobles already accustomed to governing neighboring cities. To control these noble subordinates, 18-Rabbit needed to energetically and eloquently assert the prerogatives of his kingship over them. As we can see from the examples of his monumental art shown above, he accomplished his purpose with theological sophistication and poetic passion. Few kings in Maya history have ever wielded the canon of royal power with results as truly breathtaking as those of 18-Rabbit. But this balance of power was not to hold for long. From the clear vantage afforded us by hindsight, we can understand the root of the disaster that ended his reign. His beautiful expressions of the pivotal role of the divine king were aimed at a noble audience who would become increasingly convinced of their own ability to manage the affairs of the kingdom without the king.

The beginning of the end can be seen in the monumental art created by these very nobles. As the prosperity of the kingdom overflowed from the king to the valley elite, this elite began putting up monuments which, although erected in private and not public space, emulated royal practices. During 18-Rabbit’s reign, for example, a lineage of scribes occupying Compound 9N-8 built an extraordinary family temple (Structure 9N-82- Sub; Pl. <verbatim>#)</verbatim> dedicated to God N, the patron god of writing, and hence, of history itself. The texts of the temple mention the high king and probably also his predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K.[480] Not only were the nobility of 18-Rabbit’s reign privileged to commission such elaborately decorated buildings, they were able to take full advantage of the extraordinary artistic talent flourishing in the community of this time. In the case of Structure 9N-82, the <verbatim>scribes</verbatim> lineage was able to hire one of the finest masters in the valley to execute their sculpture.

During 18-Rabbit’s forty-two-year reign, Copan not only flourished as an artistic center of the first rank, but also became an multi-ethnic society, drawing in non-Maya people from the central region of Honduras around Lake Yojoa and Comayagua.[481] The recruitment of these people into the city created a truly cosmopolitan state, but one in which a slight mythological adjustment had to be made. Traditionally, the high king had always been the living manifestation of the special covenant which existed between the Maya people and their supernatural ancestors. By bringing in people from a non-Maya ethnic group, however, 18-Rabbit had to expand upon this tradition. There is not the slightest hint of unorthodox ritual in his monuments. Still, his lavish amplification of the cult of the king as god and supernatural hero may register his public appeal to barbarians less knowledgeable in Maya theology, and more impressed by pageantry, than local aristocrats. He may have persuaded such new converts to Maya culture that he was indeed their advocate to the Other- world, just as he was the advocate for his own people. Whether or not he enacted such a strategy, he did succeed in enhancing the power base of his kingdom and increasing the population of the valley.[482]

As had happened in other ambitious Late Classic kingdoms, the path of war and expansion taken by Copan finally turned back upon itself. The unfortunate 18-Rabbit reaped the whirlwind caused by his predecessor’s actions. In mid-career and at the height of his glory, he had installed a new ruler named Cauac-Sky (Fig. 8:7) at Quirigua, the kingdom brought under the hegemony of Copan by his father, Smoke- Imix-God K. The installation ritual, a “God K-in-hand” event, had taken place on January 2, A.D. 725, in “the land of (u cab}” 18-Rabbit of Copan.[483] Thirteen years after this accession, Cauac-Sky turned on his liege lord and attacked, taking 18-Rabbit captive in battle and sacrificing him at Quirigua on May 3, 738.[484]

The subsequent fate of Copan was profoundly different from that of Tikal or Naranjo after their defeat by Caracol. In their excavations, archaeologists have found no evidence that Quirigua dominated Copan at all. The population of Copan continued to burgeon, its lords pursued their architectural plans, and its merchants plied their trade with the rest of Honduras. In other words, everything was business as usual. A person looking at the record of the city’s economic and social life would never l> guess that anything had changed.[485]

Although it is possible that Cauac-Sky just wasn’t able to dominate so vast a neighbor from his more modest city, a more convincing explanation to this puzzle emerges. The absence of effect in the archaeological record may register a fundamental reaction of the Copan people themselves. The death of the king precipitated no faltering in the orderly world of the nobility and common tolk, perhaps because they were coming to believe that they could get along without a king. Apparently, the ruling dynasty was in no position to challenge that belief for quite some time. According to the inscriptional record, it took the dynasty almost twenty years to recover the prestige it lost when 18-Rabbit succumbed to his rival. Ultimately, this failure fooled the patriarchs of the subordinate lineages into believing that their civilized world could survive quite well without a king at the center.

There was still a king at Copan, however, even if he was an unremarkable one. Thirty-nine days after the defeat of 18-Rabbit, on a day close to the maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar,[486] a new king named Smoke-Monkey acceded to the throne. We have not been able to associate this king with any stelae or structures at Copan. In fact, the only historical episode of his reign that we know of was recorded by one of his descendants. This event, a first appearance of Eveningstar, was recorded in Temple 11 by the sixteenth successor of the dynasty, Yax-Pac.[487] After ruling for ten silent years, Smoke-Monkey died, and Smoke-Shell, his son,[488] became the king on February 18, 749.

Although Smoke-Shell reigned only fourteen years, he succeeded in reestablishing the tradition of glorious public performance, if not the glory, of his dynasty. In contrast to the long decades of humiliation that were the price of defeat paid by the ahauob of Tikal and Naranjo, Smoke- Shell brought his kingdom back from the ignominy of defeat within a katun. The strategy he used featured two main components: an ambitious building program and a judicious political marriage.

Shortly after taking the throne, Smoke-Shell began reconstruction work[489] on one of the oldest and most sacred points in the city center—the locus that had grown over that very early temple that contained the 9.0.0.0.0 temple and its adjacent Ballcourt. The magnificent result of his effort, the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (Structure 10L-26), is one of the premier monuments of the New World and a unique expression of the supernatural path of kings.[490] Inscribed upon this stairway of carved risers is the longest Precolumbian text known in the New World, comprising over twenty-two hundred glyphs.[491] This elegant text records the accessions and deaths of each of the high kings of the Yax-Kuk-Mo’ dynasty. This record of Copan’s divine history rises out of the mouth of an inverted Vision Serpent, pouring like a prophetic revelation of the cosmos, compelling the ancestors of Smoke-Shell to return through the sacred portal he 1 had activated for them. Flowing upward in the midst of this chronicle sit the last five successors of the dynasty, Smoke-Monkey, 18-Rabbit, Smoke- F Imix-God K, Butz’-Chan, and Moon-Jaguar, carved in life-sized portraits <verbatim><</verbatim> (Fig. 8:8). These ancestors are girded in the battle gear of Tlaloc-Venus 1 conquest war we have seen in full bloom at Tikal, Caracol, and Dos Pilas. In his version of history, Smoke-Shell proclaimed the prowess of his predecessors as warlords despite the personal defeat of 18-Rabbit by a vassal ahau.

As the building on his portal progressed, Smoke-Shell sent to a faraway, exotic place to bring a new wife to Copan. From the opposite side of the Maya world, a royal woman from the famous kingdom of Palenque crossed the dangerous lands to marry her new husband and bear him a son who would become the next king.[492] His strategy echoes the marriage alliance between Naranjo and Dos Pilas that revived the Naranjo dynasty after its defeat by Lord Kan of Caracol. This marriage likely occurred late in Smoke-Shell’s life, for his heir came to the throne when he was less than twenty years old.

Smoke-Shell’s efforts to revive the dynasty and to persuade his nobility to follow him apparently succeeded only in the short term. He bequeathed his child, Yax-Pac, a variety of problems touching every stratum of society, from the highest to the most humble. In every long-lived dynasty, the pyramid of royal descendants increases every generation until an enormous body of people exists, all sharing the prerogatives of royal kinship. Not only are these people a drain on the society that must support them, but they create political problems by intriguing against one another. The general nobility was also growing in wealth and power at this time. Needless to say, Yax-Pac would have to be a very strong king to control and satisfy all these political factions. In addition to this, the valley of Copan was plagued by a variety of economic and ecological problems. The rulers of Copan, by and large, had done their job too well. The valley resources had been overdeveloped and strained to their very limits. Now it seemed that the trend toward progress was reversing itself.

Overpopulation was one of the primary problems Yax-Pac would have to deal with during his reign. The kingdom had continued to grow at a steady rate during the two reigns following 18-Rabbit’s capture. Throughout the eighth century, more and more residential complexes[493] sprang up on the rich bottomlands around the Acropolis (Fig. 8:9). The region within a one-kilometer radius of the Ballcourt contained over fifteen hundred structures, with an estimated density of three thousand people per square kilometer. At least twenty thousand people were trying to eke out a living from the badly strained resources. This population simply could not be supported by local agriculture alone, especially since T the best land was buried under the expanding residential complexes around the Acropolis.[494]

When Yax-Pac came to the throne, he inherited a disaster in the C making. Over the generations, expanding residential zones had covered J the best agricultural lands, forcing farmers into the foothills and then onto the mountain slopes. There they were forced to clear more and more forest to produce maize fields. Clearing, in turn, caused erosion. Shorter fallow periods were depleting the usable soils at an even faster rate, just when the kingdom was required to feed the largest population in its history.[495]

Deforestation caused other problems as well. People needed wood for their cooking fires, for the making of lime in the construction of temples,[496] for building houses, and for dozens of other domestic and ritual uses. As more and more people settled in the valley, the forest gradually retreated, exposing more and more of the poor soils on the mountain slopes and causing more erosion. The cutting down of the forest also affected climate and rainfall, making it yet more difficult for people to sustain themselves. With an insufficient food supply came malnutrition and its resultant chronic diseases, rampant conditions that affected the nobility as well as the common people.[497] The quality of life, which was never very good in the preindustrial cities of the ancient world, fast deteriorated toward the unbearable in Copan under the pained gaze of its last great king.

As his father had before him, Yax-Pac continued to place the focus of his royal performance upon dynastic history, holding up the values of his predecessors as the canon by which he would guide Copan through the dangers and crises of the present. After becoming king on July 2, 763, Yax-Pac’s first action on Copan’s beautiful stage[498] was the setting of a small carved altar representing the Vision Serpent into the Great Plaza amid the tree-stones of his rehabilitated predecessor, 18-Rabbit (Fig. 8:20). This small altar celebrated 9.16.15.0.0, the first important period ending after his accession.

Shortly thereafter, the young ahau turned his attention to an ancient temple standing on the northern edge of the Acropolis, overlooking the forest of tree-stones. This old temple had been built by the seventh successor of the dynasty and named on its dedication step “Holy Copan Temple, the House of Mah Kina Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[499] At the base of the temple stairs, Yax-Pac’s father, Smoke-Shell, had erected Stela N, his final contribution to Copan’s public history. Yax-Pac chose the locale of that old temple as the site of his greatest work. There he planned to raise Temple 11, one of the most ambitious structures ever built in the history of the city. In the tradition of his forebears, he encased the old temple in the new, shaping the imagery of the new temple into a unique and spectacular expression both of cosmic order and of the sanctions that bound the fate of the community to that of the king. Through this building and the Otherworld portal it housed at the junction of its dark corridors, Yax-Pac began his lifelong effort to ward off the impending disaster that hung over the valley.

We are not sure of the exact starting date for the construction of this temple, but work on it must have begun in the first few years of Yax-Pac’s reign. Six years later, on March 27, 769, following the celebration of the equinox, Yax-Pac dedicated the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the temple. This Reviewing Stand faced the inner court and temples of his forebears which studded the West Court of the Acropolis. Built against the first terrace of the pyramid that would eventually support Temple 11, the Reviewing Stand was a metaphorical Xibalban Ballcourt, complete with three rectangular markers set into the plaza floor below in the pattern of a playing alley (Fig. 8:10). Jutting outward into the West Court, this stairway was a place of sacrifice where victims were rolled down the stairs as if they were the ball.[500] The stair itself carried an inscribed history of its dedication rituals, naming the structure as a ballcourt. Huge stone conch shells marked the terrace as the surface of the Xibalban waters through which the ax-wielding executioner god Chac-Xib-Chac (an aspect of Venus, the firstborn of the Twins) rose when he was brought forth by the king’s ecstasy.

Yax-Pac further indicated that the entire West Court was under the murky waters of the Underworld by placing two floating caimans[501] atop the platform opposite the Reviewing Stand. The southern side of this pyramid was thus a representation of Xibalba. It was the “place of fright,” the Otherworld where sacrificial victims were sent into the land of the Lords of Death to play ball and to deliver messages from the divine ahau.[502] With the construction of such an elaborate, theatrical ballcourt, Yax-Pac was making an important statement about his strategies for the kingship: He would require himself to excel in battle against noble enemies and bring these enemies here to die.

As the king set about preparing his new temple and the supernatural landscape surrounding it, he reached back to 18-Rabbit, the source of both his dynasty’s success and its profoundest failure. In August of the same year in which he dedicated the Reviewing Stand, Yax-Pac built within the Acropolis what would be the first of many bridges to his paradoxical ancestor. The king set Altar Z on the platform between Temple 22—the magnificent temple created by 18-Rabbit on his first katun anniversary— and Temple 11, the structure that would become his own cosmic building (Fig. 8:11). Yax-Pac may also have set another important precedent with this small monument, for we think it makes mention of a younger brother of the king.[503] This inscription is significant because it indicates the beginning of a trend in Yax-Pac’s strategies in regard to the public record. In the course of his lifetime, Yax-Pac peopled Copan’s stage of history with an ever-increasing troupe of ahauob. This is a strategy we have seen before at Yaxchilan—sharing power is always better than losing it.

[[][Fig. 8:12 Temple 11: Architectural Detail]]

The first katun ending of Yax-Pac’s life was a significant one. Not only was it the first major festival of his young career, but by coincidence it tell on the day of a partial eclipse, followed sixteen days later by the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar.[504] To celebrate the katun ending,[505] Yax-Pac sandwiched a tiny building, Temple 21a, between 18-Rabbit’s great cosmic building, Temple 22, and the now-destroyed Temple 21.[506] The small scale of Temple 21a and its position between the two huge buildings suggests Yax-Pac had assigned most of the available labor to the ongoing construction of Temple 11. Yet regardless of the scale, Yax-Pac was clearly intent upon associating himself with the earlier king. Perhaps Smoke-Shell had successfully restored 18-Rabbit’s reputation and he was, by that time, remembered more for the accomplishments of his reign than the ignominy of his death. Nevertheless, the repeated efforts by Yax-Pac to embrace the memory of this ancestor suggest that there was a pressing need to continue the process of rehabilitation not only of 18-Rabbit but also of his dynasty in the face of a disenchanted nobility.

On 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773), two years after the katun ending, Yax-Pac dedicated Temple 11. The magnificent cosmic statement he made in this monument would become the basis of his fame. Before the passage of time had sullied its original splendor, this building was truly one of the most unusual and intriguing temples ever built in the F Precolumbian Maya world. Facing the northern horizon, this two-story-high temple with wide interior vaults towered over the Ballcourt and 1 Great Plaza. Its principal north door opened through the mouth of a huge Witz Monster,[507] which glared down at the gathered populace below. At each of the two northern corners of this microcosmic world stood a giant Pauahtun (Fig. 8:12a), its huge hands holding up images of the Cosmic Monster, arching across the roof entablatures in symbolic replication of remnant of the full-figured inscription that was over the door the arch of heaven and the planetary beings who moved through that path on their supernatural journeys.[508] It was as if he took the magnificent sculpture at the heart of Temple 22, 18-Rabbit’s greatest building, and turned it inside out so that it became the outer facade rather than an arch over the door to the inner sanctum. Today, fragments of the scaled body of this Cosmic Monster litter the ground around the fallen temple.

Yax-Pac designed the ground floor of this temple with a wide eastwest gallery crossed by a smaller north-south corridor. In this way he engineered an entrance to the building from each of the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west. Just inside each of these four doors, panels facing one another record historical events important to Yax-Pac’s political strategy and the dedication of the temple itself.[509] What is curious about each pair of texts is that one is in normal reading order, while the other facing text reads in reverse order as if you are seeing a mirror image. It is as if you were standing between the glass entry doors of a bank—the writing on the door in front of you would read normally while the writing behind you would be reversed. If you were standing outside, however, the texts on both door would read in the proper order. In Temple 11, of course, the walls are not transparent, but this made no difference, since the audience addressed by these texts consisted of the ancestors and the gods. Apparently, they could read through solid walls. Furthermore, each pair of texts is designed to be read from a different direction starting with the north door: To read them in proper order (that is, “outside the bank doors”) the reader would have to circulate through all four of the directions. This attention to the “point of view” of the gods is not unusual in Maya art.

Just to the south of the place where the two corridors cross, Yax-Pac built a small raised platform set within the skeletal, gaping jaws of the Maw of the Otherworld. The carved image of this great Maw was set at both the southern (Fig. 8:12b) and northern (Fig. 8:13) entries onto the platform. He made the northern side special by replacing the lower jaw of the Maw with a bench depicting twenty ancestral figures, ten each on either side of an inscription recording his accession as king (Fig. 8:14). These were the dynasts who had preceded him onto the throne of Copan.[510] Yax-Pac had brought them forth from the land of the ancestors to participate in his accession rite. Their sanction of this rite was forever frozen in this stone depiction, serving as a testament to those privileged elite who would enter the temple to see and affirm.

Temple 11 was the greatest work of Yax-Pac’s life. To be sure, he built other buildings during his reign, but none so grand in size, ambition, and conception as this one.[511] Temple 11 was an umbilicus linking the kingdom of Yax-Pac to the nurturing, demanding cosmos: the final great expression at Copan of the Maya vision. Its lower level, especially to the south, manifested the underwater world of Xibalba.[512] The great rising Acropolis that supported it was the sacred mountain which housed other portals into the Otherworld. The temple roof was the sky held away from the mountain by the Pauahtunob at the corners of the world. The front door was the huge mouth of the mountain, the cave through which the king entered sacred space. At the heart of the temple was the raised platform defined as the portal to the Otherworld. This building sealed the covenant between Yax-Pac, his people, and their collective destiny. Its enormous size and grand scope were designed to proclaim the power of the king to rally his people in the face of their difficulties. It may not have been the finest Maya temple ever built—the sculptures weren’t anywhere near the artistry of 18-Rabbit’s. Nor was it the most architecturally sound—the vaults were so wide they had to be reinforced because the walls started to fall down as soon as the builders began to raise the second story. Nevertheless, this temple was the statement of authority the young king hoped would help keep disaster at bay.

[[][Fig. 8:14 Temple 11 bench]]

Yax-Pac continued to refine his fundamental statement of charismatic power during the next three years in construction projects that altered the west side of the Acropolis. At the five-year point of Katun 17, three years after he had dedicated Temple 11, he set Altar Q (Fig. 8:3) in front of the newly completed Temple 16, a massive pyramid he built at the heart of the Acropolis. Replete with images of Tlaloc warfare and the skulls of slain victims, Temple 16 replicated the imagery of his father’s great project—Temple 26—as Temple 11 had reproduced Temple 22 of 18-Rabbit’s reign.[513]

Altar Q, a low, flat-sided monument, was more suited to the functions of a throne than those of an altar. It depicted each of the sixteen ancestors seated upon his own name glyph. The whole dynasty unfolded in a clockwise direction, starting with Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and culminating with Yax-Pax himself. His ancestors sit in front of a monument celebrating war while they ride just below the surface of the symbolic sea he created in the West Court. The program of imagery is an elegant and powerful statement of power. Ironically, the charisma of the divine lord as exemplified in battle and conquest belied the reality of Yax-Pac’s circumstances, for this was to be the last great exhortation of kingship to be built in the valley of Copan.

For all of its elegance and centrality, the West Court and Altar Q mark a change in strategy for Yax-Pac. Up to this time, kings had acknowledged the passage of sacred time with buildings, sculptures, and inscriptions erected only in the ceremonial heart of the community. Now, however, Yax-Pac also began to write his history outside the Acropolis by traveling to the residential compounds of his lords to conduct royal rituals within their lineage houses. This was clearly a comedown for an “ahau of the ahauob,” made necessary by the need to hold the allegiance of his lords in the face of civil disaster.[514]

The next important period-ending date that Yax-Pac celebrated, 9.17.10.0.0, was commemorated not only in the royal precinct of the Acropolis, but also in the household of a noble family of the city. The date and description of the scattering rite that Yax-Pax enacted is inscribed on a bench in the main building of Group 9M-18[515] (Fig. 8:9), a large noble household to the east of the Acropolis. Yax-Pac’s action is recorded as an event still to come in the future at the time the patriarch dedicated his house, the place where he held court over the affairs of his family and followers (Fig. 8:15). Strangely the name of the patriarch was not included on the bench. Instead it records a dedicatory offering given in the name of Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s father.[516] Perhaps the lineage patriarch felt he should not place his name so close to that of his liege lord, so he remained anonymous. Nevertheless, he brought prestige to his own house and weight to the decisions he made astride this bench by focusing on the high kings as the main actors in his family drama.

Shortly after the period ending, another lineage benefited from Yax- Pac’s ritual attention, and bragged about it inside the new house of their leader. The scribal lineage living in Group 9N-8 (Fig. 8:9) dismantled the magnificent structure an earlier patriarch had commissioned during the reign of 18-Rabbit and put a new, larger building in its place. The elegance of this building was unmistakable. Its upper zone was sculpted with mosaic images of the lineage’s own patriarch; and on either side of the door that led into the large, central chamber of the building, a Pauahtun, one of the patron gods of their craft, rose dramatically from the Maw of Xibalba.

Almost all of the floor space of this chamber was occupied by a bench[517] on which the patriarch sat to conduct the business of the lineage. This bench (Fig. 8:16) records that on 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Ch’en (July 10, 781),[518] this patriarch dedicated his new house while the king participated in those rites with him. As Yax-Pac had done for the lineage head of Compound 9M-18, he honored this patriarch by participating in rituals on his home ground. The king was breaking precedent, going to his subordinate rather than the other way around. At Yaxchilan, Bird-Jaguar had also gone to his subordinate across the river at La Pasadita, but in that instance he had functioned as the principal actor while the cahal was clearly in a position of subservience. In the scribes’ building, Yax-Pac’s name closes the text, but the noble is given equal billing. Furthermore, this text doubles as the body of a Cosmic Monster, imagery directly associated with the royal house of Copan. Four Pauahtunob hold up the bench in the same way that they hold up the sky in Temples 22, 26, and 11. The head of this scribes’ lineage utilized the same symbolic imagery as his king, and he did so apparently with Yax-Pac’s approval.

Yax-Pac thus gave away some of the hard-earned royal charisma of his ancestors to honor the head of this lineage. Was this the act of a desperate man? In all likelihood the king was fully aware of the potential danger in his capitulation to the nobility, but regarded it as a necessary step in his efforts to save the kingdom from impending economic disaster. He was clearly seeking solutions to immediate political problems threatening the peace and stability of the domain destiny had placed in his hands. Like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan in the west, Yax-Pac tried to secure the continuing loyalty of the patriarchs of his kingdom by sharing his prerogatives with them, particularly the privilege of history.

Once Yax-Pac had embarked on this policy, he pursued it systematically and creatively during the second half of Katun 17. He raised monuments in the community at large and in the main ceremonial center and “lent” his historical actions to the monuments of significant others in the political arena of Copan. In the region now under the modern village of Copan (Fig. 8:5), the king erected two monuments to celebrate the first katun anniversary of his accession. Here, in the village area, he planted Stela 8 (Fig. 8:17), on which he recorded this anniversary and a related bloodletting which took place five days later. As we have seen so often before, the anniversary date fell on an important station of Venus: the maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[519] Yax-Pac also chose to record his parentage on this stela, reminding his people that he was the child of the woman from Palenque. This is the only monument ever to mention Yax-Pac’s relationship to his mother, and it is possible that he did so here in order to lend prestige to his half brother by the same woman.

The second monument celebrating Yax-Pac’s first katun anniversary, Altar T, also graced the central plaza of the town. Here, for the first time, we are formally introduced to Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, the king’s half brother by the woman Smoke-Shell had brought from Palenque to rejuvenate the lineage.[520] As we shall see shortly, this sibling would become an important protagonist in the saga of Copan during the twilight of its dynasty.

Altar T was decorated on three sides with twelve figures, some human and some animalistic. All of these figures faced toward a central inscription referring to the half brother (Fig. 8:18). The figures on Altar T emulate the style of Altar Q, Yax-Pac’s great dynastic monument of twenty years earlier.[521] This design was chosen quite intentionally to honor the king’s half brother. The top surface has a rendering of the image of ‘ a great crocodile sprawling in the waters of the earth. Waterlilies decorate his limbs, and his rear legs and tail drape over the corners and the back of the altar. Like fanciful scales, the king’s name marches down the spine of the crocodile, and the tail of the great beast falls between two humanlike figures personifying the date of Yax-Pac’s accession and its anniversary twenty years later. Sitting among the extended legs of the floating crocodile in the world under its belly are six human figures, presumably ancestors. To be sure, Altar T and its imagery celebrated the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s accession, but the protagonist whose name sits under the nose of the crocodile is the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac himself.

We know Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac was the half brother of the king because his status as child of the king’s mother was prominently inscribed on Altar U, a monument he himself raised (Fig. 8:19) in the town which once existed under the modern village. The “sun-eyed throne stone,”[522] as the Copanecs called it, depicts a sun-eyed monster flanked by two old gods who sit at the open Maw of the Otherworld. The inscriptions on the rear and top surface retrospectively document Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s participation in rituals on 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793) and the seating on January 29, 780, of yet another player on Copan’s historical stage. Named Yax-Kamlay, this man, who may have been a younger full brother of the king, also played a crucial role in the last half of Yax-Pac’s reign. The name Yax K’amlay means “First Steward”[523] so that this full brother may have functioned in a role like “prime minister,” while the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, governed the district of the ancient city under the modern village area for the high king. This type of governance, rule by a council of brothers, ultimately failed in Copán, but it succeeded at Chichón Itzá, as we shall see in the next chapter.

The altar stone was dedicated on June 24, 792, a day near the summer solstice, but the text also records events later than this date. We surmise that the altar was commissioned as an object in anticipation of its function as a historical forum. The anticipated rituals occurred on the day 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793), a day that happily coincided with the thirtieth tun anniversary (30x360) of the king’s accession and the thirteenth haab anniversary (13x365) of Yax-Kamlay’s seating. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, who dedicated the altar, honored both his kingly half brother and the man who was the king’s first minister by celebrating this unusual co-anniversary. It was Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, however, who is clearly the protagonist of the inscription.

Let us stop for a moment and imagine what the king would have seen as he led a procession from the Acropolis to the village on the day these anniversaries were to be celebrated.

•

Yax-Pac paused on the causeway near the ancient tree-stone erected by his ancestor, Smoke-Imix-God K, when the valley had known happier times and lived in hope. He could see the visage of his ancestor etched by the shadows cast in the sharp morning light. The great te-tun displayed two faces—a proud human one facing the rising sun, and another masked with the image of the Sun God watching the ending of the days. Smoke- Imix was forever caught in his act of sacrifice, eternally materializing the sacred world for his people with the shedding of his blood.[524]

For a moment, Yax-Pac wondered what kind of immortality his forebear had won with the great tree-stone he had erected halfway between the Acropolis and the old community now governed by his younger half brother, the son of the royal woman from Palenque. He was grateful that the ancestors had provided him with such a capable sibling. The vigorous, optimistic Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac strove to give him the labor and tribute necessary to keep the kingdom together in these hard times, and now he was overseeing the celebration of the thirtieth tun of reign. By coincidence, Yax-Pac’s anniversary fell on the same day that ended the thirteenth haab of Yax-Kamlay’s administration. They would commemorate the two anniversaries together.

Yax-Pac walked twenty paces ahead and paused again when he saw the smaller tree-stone[525] visible in the small compound to the west of the double portrait of his ancestor. This portrait of Smoke-Imix was less impressive in scale, but equally important, for it preserved the memory of the king as warrior, celebrating the half-period of Katun 12. On that day, Venus had stood still just after he had journeyed across the face of his brother, the Sun, to become Morningstar.[526] 18-Rabbit had made his debut as the heir on the occasion of that period ending. Who among the nobility remembered, or respected, such things nowadays? There was a coughing and shuffling of silent impatience in the halted entourage behind him. He ignored them.

As the low, long-shadowed light of the morning sun rose above the mountains rimming the far side of his lands and broke through the mist, Yax-Pac sighed and turned back to look across the valley. He gazed with pride on the Kan-Te-Na, Pat-Chan-Otot,[527] the house he had dedicated soon after the solar eclipse at the end of Katun 17. Silhouetted against the beams of brilliant yellow light,[528] it towered above the Acropolis, echoing the huge mountains that rose above the valley floor in the distance. The sacred mountains beyond the sacred portals built by the men of his dynasty were bare now, like bones drying in the sun. It was winter and those mountains should be green with growth from the fall rains, but all he saw was bone-white rock and the red slashes of landslides scarring the faces of the witzob. The stands of forest that had once graced the ridgetops were only memories now in the mind’s eye of the very, very old. Even the occasional patches and scraggly survivors he had found in his childhood wanderings were gone—not a single sapling reared its silhouette against the blue sky.

Thirty tuns ago today he had followed his father, Smoke-Shell, onto the throne. Then he had been a young man who had not even seen the end of his first katun. He had harbored great hopes of a glorious and prosperous reign, but the gods and the ancestors seemed to be turning their backs on the people of the sacred Macaw Mountain.

Yax-Pac’s eyes swept across the valley, catching an occasional glimmer of light from the distant waters of the river. Mostly he saw the white houses of his people—hundreds of them—filled with children, many of them sick and hungry. Smoke still rose from the kitchen fires, but Yax-Pac knew the young men had to walk many days now through wider and wider strips of barren land to find firewood. From time without beginning, the earth had yielded up her abundance—wood to cook the bountiful harvests of earlier generations and to make the plaster covering for the buildings and plazas commissioned by the ancestors. What was one to make of a world without trees? The earth itself was dying, and with it all must eventually die.

In the glory days of his grandfathers, his people had believed in the favor of the gods and in the endless cycles of wet and dry that gave rhythm to the passage of days and life to the earth. More and more children had been born, and more and more people had come from distant lands to live in his valley. The more there were, the more they needed fuel and lumber, and the more they cut the forest. The river ran red with the soil of the mountains, naked now, having given up their flesh to the hard storms of summer and the floods of the winter months. Always there was too much rain, or not enough. The hard rains washed away the earth and the rock below could no longer nourish the seeds of the sacred maize. Too much of the good land along the river was under the houses of the noble clans.

The farmers had been driven higher and higher up the stony mountainsides looking for land that could hold their crops. Some of them even had to tie ropes around their waists as they worked the nearly vertical walls of the mountainsides. Anywhere the hard rock cradled a shallow pocket of earth, they planted their seed and hoped the young sprouts of maize would find enough water and nourishment to lift their delicate leaves into the air.

Yax-Pac felt a shiver run up his back in the cold morning air. It was only thirty-five days after the winter solstice, but already it was clear that there had not been enough rain during the fall and winter. His people were facing another bad year, with too many mouths to feed with what little the earth yielded to the hard labor of his farmers. He knew in his heart that they must somehow bring back the forest, for it was the source of life. But what was he to do? His people were sick and dying already. They had to cut and burn the scraggly bush that patched his land like scabs to plant their crops or death would win its final battle with the people of the land of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He saw no way out of this losing battle with the Lords of Death, except more prayer and sacrifices to the gods and the ancestors of the Otherworld. If they would only hear the cry of his people and touch the earth with the gift of gentle rain, perhaps the times of his fathers would return.

Yax-Pac’s eyes traveled up again toward the impassive face of Smoke-Imix and he shivered once more. This was the face of his ancestor which turned toward the west and the death of the sun. Straightening his shoulders, Yax-Pac firmly dismissed all thoughts of doom from his mind and resumed his march toward the house of his brother. Today they would meet to celebrate the years of their reigns: Yax-Pac as the king would be together with his younger brothers and councillors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay. Perhaps, in the quiet moments between their public performances in the rituals, he would have time to talk to the two men who shared the burden of rule with him. They all longed for the old days when there was plenty of everything and no end in sight for the glory of Copan. Maybe together they could get the ancestors to pay attention to the plight of the children of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Pondering the past and his grim vision of the future, Yax-Pac resolved to harness the power and will of his people. While he lived in this world, all of his thoughts, the wisdom of his ancestors, the skill of his scribes and artisans, would be bent to the salvation of his people and his kingdom.

•

This remarkable co-anniversary and the two men who shared it with the king were also celebrated in the Acropolis at almost the same time. On 9.18.5.0.0 when Altar U was about to be completed, Yax-Pac set a small throne stone inside the back chamber of Temple 22a, the council house (Popol Nah) that had been erected next to 18-Rabbit’s Temple 22 by his successor, Smoke-Monkey.[529] On the throne, he celebrated his own katun anniversary (which had been commemorated by Altar T and Stela 8 in the Village area), the co-anniversary he had shared with Yax-Kamlay, and finally the hotun ending. This final date he associated with Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac so that all three of them appear prominently together. In the council house built by his grandfather in the dark years after 18- Rabbit’s defeat, Yax-Pac celebrated his own council of siblings.[530]

[[][Fig. 8:20 Yax-Pac and the Vision Serpent Altars in the Great Plaza]]

The altars of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay signal Yax- Pac’s radical intentions in his efforts to sustain the government, for these brothers must have stood as close to the status of co-regent as the orthodox rules of divine kingship could allow. Furthermore, the two altars Yax-Pac erected in the old village area constituted major historical and theological statements. Not only did the king and his half brother call upon Copan’s best artists and scribes to execute their new vision of authority, but they communicated this vision in a style that was highly innovative, even in the expressive and daring tradition of Copan’s artisans.[531] These large, dramatic, boulderlike altars were the first to combine glyphs and zoomorphic figures, and the first altar monuments to stand on their own without a stela to accompany them.

Yax-Pac shared his royal prerogatives with his brothers in response to the growing stress in the valley as social and economic conditions worsened. He also invited people of lesser status, such as the lords of Compounds 9M-18 and 9N-8 to share royal privilege by erecting monuments memorializing the king’s participation in the dedications of their houses. In this way, he broadened his power base. Perhaps the pressures were different, but Yax-Pac, like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, chose to share his power in order to conserve it. For a while, his strategy worked. In the end, however, the precedents of sharing central power with nonroyal patriarchs destroyed the divinity that had sustained the Copan kingship for more than seven hundred years.

As Copan declined, bits of her history slowly began to slip from the grasp of her people. Neither Yax-Pac nor his lords left any major monuments that celebrated the turning of the katun on 9.18.0.0.0. For reasons yet unknown, the next hotun, 9.18.5.0.0 (September 15, 795), saw a lot of activity. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s Altar U, found in the town beneath the modern village, mentioned that period ending and it was celebrated in Temple 22a as we discussed above. Perhaps more important was Yax- Pac’s return to the forest of tree-stones erected by 18-Rabbit in the Great Plaza. On the eastern side of this plaza, between Stelae F and H, he set I another of the Vision Serpent altars (G2) next to the first monument (Altar G3) he had erected there just after he became the high king (Fig. 8:20).

Five years later on the half-period, 9.18.10.0.0, the third of these Vision Serpent monuments, Altar Gl, was erected. With this monument in place, the triangular portal set in the middle of 18-Rabbit’s tree-stone forest was completed. This altar, right in the ceremonial center of the city, also affirmed the political duality binding Yax-Pac to his half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This superb sculpture, called the “na-chan altar” by the Copanecs, presented a double-headed image of the Cosmic Monster, skeletal at one end and fleshed at the other (Fig. 8:21). Each side of its body displayed a special text. On the north side, the dedication of the altar “in the land of Yax-Pac” was recorded; on the south, Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac’s name. The placement of this altar was highly significant. It was one thing for the half brother to get star billing in the town under the modern village, but entirely another for him to be featured in the sacred precinct in the center of the kingdom. The Acropolis and the Great Plaza had always been the sanctuary of the divine kings.

Yax-Pac’s next project, Temple 18 (Fig. 8:22a), must have been under construction during the time of this same 9.18.10.0.0 period ending. This temple is the last building Yax-Pac ever built on the Acropolis, and its smaller scale is good evidence of the reduced assets available to the king less than twenty-five years after he dedicated his magnificent Otherworld portal in Temple 11. Set on the southeast corner of the Acropolis, directly across trom Temple 22, this final royal sanctuary contained an elaborate vaulted tomb chamber that was looted in ancient times.[532]

Yax-Pac placed this building in one of the most potent points in the city, an area that had been the focus of his attention for thirty years. This temple completed a skewed southward triangle with Temples 21a and 22a, anchored on Temple 22, the sacred building housing the portal of his ancestor 18-R.abbit (Fig. 8:11). The inscription carved into the interior walls of the outer chamber of this temple recorded the date of its dedication as 9.18.10.17.18 4 Etz’nab 1 Zac (August 12, 801), the day of the zenith passage of the sun (Fig. 8:22b). The imagery carved on the jambs of the doors in the outer and the center walls is a radical departure from precedent at Copan and reflects the dark final days of its dynasty. Yax-Pac and a companion (most likely his half brother) wield spears and strut in the regalia of warriors (Fig. 8:23) at the place of the waterlily. They wear cotton armor, shrunken heads, ropes for binding captives, and the bones of past victims. Grasping shields and weapons, they are ready for battle with Copan’s foes.

The symbolism on these two doors reflects a change in strategy in direct correspondence with the violent death throes of Copan. In this last building, Yax-Pac did not reiterate the cosmic sanction of his reign. Instead, he announced his success and prowess as a warrior. Although all Copan’s kings had been warriors and sacrificial executioners, this choice of portraiture is unusual in Copan’s history.

The Hieroglyphic Stairs built by Smoke-Shell emphasized the role of the ancestral kings as warriors, and this same Tlaloc-war iconography was prominently displayed on Temple 16 and Temple 21. Nevertheless, these were merely ancestral portraits or stage backdrops for rituals. Such rituals may have required wars to provide victims to send to the Otherworld in the tradition of Maya political life, but the Copanec tradition since the time of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had been to show the ruler standing in the portal of the Otherworld. It was his role as communicator with the ancestral dead and the materializer of the gods that preoccupied Copan royal portraiture.

In all of the city’s long history, this is the only building on which the king is actually shown in battle, wielding the weapons of war.[533] We can only assume the role of king as active warrior became increasingly important to his public image as the crisis within his kingdom deepened. None of Yax-Pac’s enemies are mentioned by name, but neighboring kingdoms may well have been making forays, or perhaps the non-Maya peoples who had always lived just beyond the borders decided to move against the failing kingdom. Copan may also have been suffering from internal political problems. The nobles who had ruled parts of the kingdom for the high king, especially in its expanded version, may have decided to strike out on their own. War apparently was the only means at Yax-Pac’s disposal to fend off these challenges. Sadly, when authority fails, force is the last arbiter.

In spite of these upheavals, the machinery of the state ground on. Yax-Pac recorded the end of his second katun as king on 9.18.12.5.17 2 Caban 15 Pax (December 4, 802), on a beautifully carved stone incensario. This incensario is the only monument we have identified so far from the second half of that katun.[534] We do have one other record of Yax-Pac’s activities from the end of this katun, albeit an unusual one. Yax-Pac paid a state visit to Copan’s old rival, Quiriguá, in order to perform a scattering rite on 9.19.0.0.0 (June 28, 810) (Fig. 8:24). This visit was unusual on two counts. First of all, kings rarely traveled to neighboring kingdoms; they preferred to send ambassadors.[535] Second, this sort of scattering rite was usually performed at the homesite, not in another king’s city. As far as we know, Yax-Pac did not perform a similar sacrificial ritual at Copán, although we know he was still ruling there, for his death was commemorated there some ten years later.

Yax-Pac died shortly before 9.19.10.0.0 (May 6, 820).[536] Although he had struggled valiantly to retain the loyalty and cooperation of the nobles in his valley, his strategy did not ultimately succeed. After seven hundred years, the central authority in the valley of Copan had less than a decade of life left.

Although we do not know the exact date of Yax-Pac’s death, his survivors chose this half-period date (9.19.10.0.0) to commemorate his entry into the Otherworld. On that day they erected Stela 11 in the southwest corner of the platform supporting Temple 18 (Figs. 8:11 and 8:22), the last building he constructed. The imagery on this stela (Fig. 8:25) depicts Yax-Pac standing in the watery Otherworld holding the bar of office. In this instance, however, the bar is missing the serpent heads that symbolized the path of communication between the supernatural world and the human world.[537] Yax-Pac no longer needed them for he was already among the supernatural beings, a state marked by the smoking torch piercing his forehead. In the Otherworld Yax-Pac was manifested as God K, the deity of kings and their lineages.[538]

The inscription on this strange rounded stela is enigmatic, but we have hints of its meaning. 1 he verb is a phonetic spelling of hom, the verb we have already seen recording ‘I ikal’s war. Ilere, however, the word does not refer to the destruction of war, but rather to the other meaning of the verb, “to terminate” and “to end”—as, for example, “to end a katun.” Following hom is the glyph that stands for “founder” or perhaps “lineage” or “dynasty” in other texts at Copan Putting all this together, we understand this text to mean that the people of Copan believed the dynasty of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had ended with the death of Yax-Pac.[539]

Yax-Pac was not, however, the last king of Copan Although his reign was a difficult one, he was fortunate in one respect. He lived long enough to gain a place in history, but died soon enough to avoid the final tragedy. The king who oversaw those last days of kingship at Copan was named U-Cit-Tok. His is perhaps the saddest story of all the Maya kings we have met, for he inherited a world that had already fallen apart. There were too many people, too much of the forest gone, too many nobles grabbing honor and power for their own benefit, too little faith in the old answers, too little rain, and too much death.

This tragic man became the new king on 9.19.11.14.5 3 Chicchan 3 Ho (February 10, 822),[540] a day that contained some of the old astronomical associations beloved by the Maya, it was the day of disappearance for the Morningstar and a time of conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, which were just visible in the hours before dawn. The accession rituals of that day were commemorated on an altar placed on the mound at the north end of the Ballcourt (Fig. 8:11) near Stela 2, the old monument that commemorated Smokc-Imix-God K and the earlier days of Copan’s glory.

[[][Fig. 8:26 U-Cit-Tok, the Last King of Copan]]

The south side of the altar (Fig. 8:26) depicts the new king seated across from Yax-Pac in direct emulation of Altar Q, and in the tradition pursued by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac on his monument. As on Altar Q, the Calendar Round sits between the two kings, but U-Cit-Tok felt the need to qualify its meaning even further by writing chumwan, “he was seated,” after it.[541] On the left, in the same place occupied by Yax-Kuk-Mo’ on Altar Q, the new ruler sits on his own name glyph, holding out a fanlike object toward his predecessor. On his opposite side, in the same position he occupies on Altar Q, sits Yax-Pac. Perched on his name glyph, Yax- Pac mirrors the position and clothing of his successor, passing on, by analogy, the power and sanction of his divinity. It was not the younger version of the king that U-Cit-Tok wished to evoke, but the divinity of the mature and aged Yax-Pac. The pattern of Yax-Pac’s beard emulates his portrait on Stela 11, the image of his last and irreversible journey into Xibalba.

The final hours of the kings of Copan are frozen in this amazing altar. On the other side is a scene of two figures, seated profile to the viewer while engaged in some sort of ritual (Fig. 8:27). We will never know what the sculptor intended to depict here because the altar was never finished.[542] In the middle of his cutting the imagery into the stone, the central authority of Copan collapsed. The sculptor picked up his tools and went home, never to return to his work on the altar. Copan’s dynastic history ended with the echoing slap of that sculptor’s sandals as he walked away from the king, the Acropolis, and a thousand years of history. The kings were no more, and with them went all that they had won.

The residential compounds beyond the Acropolis continued to function for another century or so. Some of the lineages even profited enough from the disintegration of central power to continue adding to their households. But without the central authority of the king to hold the community together, they lost it all. The lineages would not cooperate with each other without the king to reduce their competition and forge bonds of unity between them. Toward the end, one of the buildings in Compound 9N-8 collapsed onto an occupant, but his relatives never even bothered to dig him out. It was the final straw—the people simply walked away.[543] Within two centuries of the demise of the last king of Copan, 90 percent of the population in the Copan Valley system was gone.[544] They left a land so ravaged that only in this century have people returned to build the population back to the levels it knew in the time of Yax-Pac. Today, history is tragically replaying itself, as the people of Copan destroy their forests once more, revealing yet again the bones of the sacred witzob—but this time we are all threatened by the devastation.

9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichen Itza

Maya kingdoms were dying as the tenth cycle of the baktun neared its end. The epidemic of political chaos spread a thousand miles across the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, from Palenque to Copan; and in the southern lowland country, few dynasties endured into the ninth century. Yet in the northern part of the peninsula, in the dry forest lands of the northeast, in the rugged hill country of the west, on the northwestern plain, and along the coasts, Maya states not only flourished during the Terminal Classic period, but grew in strength and numbers (Fig. 9:1).[545]

The cultures of these northern lowlands were distinctive from those in the south in several respects. The northerners, for example, developed architectural techniques using concrete wall cores surfaced with veneer block masonry.[546] They used this construction technique to render elaborate programs of political and religious imagery (Fig. 9:2) in complex stone mosaic facades and wall carvings. Further, the northern Maya developed a historical tradition of their own, distinct from the south’s, collected in books called the Chilam Balam. In them, each community compiled and kept its own version of history, which, after the Spanish conquest, was transcribed from its original hieroglyphic form into an alphabetic system using Spanish letters to record Mayan words.[547] The histories kept in these many books describe successive incursions of foreigners from outside Yucatán, some from as far away as central Mexico. Because these Classic period societies of the northern lowlands had a significantly greater interaction with outsiders than the Maya in the south, they assimilated a greater amount of foreign culture. This interaction resulted in their developing a more international outlook in politics and trade.

[[][Fig. 9:1 The Yucatan Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet]]

In spite of its international tradition, the northern region merges into the southern lowlands without geographic interruption; and from the time of the earliest kingdoms, the Maya living in both regions were linked, linguistically, culturally, economically, and politically.[548] Although the destinies of southern and northern kings in the Terminal Classic period diverged, they ultimately shared a common root. Since the institution of ahau was at the heart of government in both regions, we must look at the distinctive ways the northerners modified its relationship to central leadership in order to understand how the northerners transcended the limitations that led to failure in the south.

The social catastrophe of the ninth century was the culmination of the gradual faltering of Maya kingship over a thousand years of history and many ingenious attempts to accommodate change. Yet in the end, this chain reaction of collapsing governments became the catalyst that pushed some of the peoples of the north toward a fundamental revision of the basic institution of ahau.

Few of the Maya kingdoms were able to make the crucial transition from one form of government to another. The southern kingdoms of the Terminal Classic period tried, but their leaders failed because they attempted to solve their burgeoning social problems using methods that were fast becoming obsolete: the time-honored politics of the divine dynasties. The aggrandized kingdoms of such men as Great-Jaguar-Paw and Lord Kan II were never able to establish stable empires because they could not transcend the pride and exclusivity of the kingship—pride that compelled conquered dynasties to resist the acknowledgment of permanent subordination; exclusivity that prevented would-be emperors from effectively sharing power. On the other hand, some ahauob in the northern lowlands did succeed in perpetuating central government in this time of turmoil. Like the conqueror kings in the southern lowlands, the Itzá lords sought to break out of the limitations imposed by many small, competing realms. The way they accomplished this was to forge a conquest state and hegemonic empire with its capital, Chichén Itzá, in the center of the north. This city witnessed the birth of a social and political order based upon a new principle of governance, mu! tepal, “joint rule.”

For a few centuries, Chichén Itzá ruled the Maya of the north without rival. The ahauob of Chichén Itzá honored many of the religious and political protocols laid down by generations of kings before them. Yet, at the same time, they were revolutionizing the ancient royal institutions, creating new policies, rituals, and symbols partly inspired by foreign traditions. At the height of their power in the lowlands, they extended the boundaries of their military and economic interests—and their religious and political vision—to the point where all of Mesoamerica knew of Chichén Itzá, as either a valuable ally or a formidable enemy.

Our last royal history will recount the transformation of Chichén Itzá, its rise and triumph through foreign invasion and alliance—through war on an unprecedented scale, diplomacy, and brilliant political innovation. It is also the story of the Itzá’s opponents in this struggle: the orthodox Maya ahauob of Cobá and the innovative and international ahauob of the Puuc hills region. In their conflicts with Chichón Itzá, these powers endured and lost the closest thing to a world war the northern Maya would experience before the coming of the European conquerors.[549]

At the northern apex of the ancient city of the Itzá, the Castillo rises into the clear air above the dry forest that stretches away into the distance across the flat plain (Fig. 9:3) of central Yucatán. This structure is a mute but eloquent testimony to the engineering elegance and revolutionary vision of a city that, in its heyday, stretched for at least twenty-five square kilometers[550] beyond its wide central plazas (Fig. 9:4). Here at the heart of the community, the vision is a silent one. Unlike the kings of the south, the last divine lords of Chichón Itzá chose not to use hieroglyphic texts on their stelae and buildings to proclaim their histories and triumphs. Instead, these rulers pursued a magnificent architectural program of bas- reliefs carved on piers, walls, pillars, and lintels. The decision to tell their story in pictures unencumbered by the written word was a deliberate one, for these cosmopolitan Maya had changed the institution of ahau and the kingship derived from it.

Archaeology and the carved-stone inscriptions found in other parts of the city also give testimony to this transformation. These two sets of E evidence, however, tell two quite different, though ultimately related, versions of Chichén Itzá’s history.[551] During the Late Classic period, while the southern lowland kingdoms flourished, new cities came to prominence in the range of low hills called the Puuc in the northwestern part of the peninsula.[552] While divine ahauob ruled these cities,[553] the culture of their people shows strong ties to the Gulf Coast region and highland Mexico. These ties can be seen in features of architectural decoration and ceramic styles. One group of foreigners, called by archaeologists the “Putun” or “Chontai” Maya,[554] traded with the Puuc communities during the Late Classic period, and heavily influenced their culture. Indeed, the elite of the Puuc region may well have regarded themselves not only as ethnically Putun, but also as the political inheritors of the great traditions of the southern Classic period kingdoms. Described as crude barbarians by the Yucatecan Maya in some of their later books, these Chontai speakers were probably no more barbarian than the Germanic generals who, by diplomacy and force, took over Roman provinces in the waning years of that civilization.

% hile the Puuc hills in the west nurtured a prosperous and cosmopolitan constellation of new cities, the eastern region witnessed the establishment of a huge Late Classic state with its capital at Cobâ. With more than seventy square kilometers of homes, temples, house-lot walls, and stone causeways, Cobâ was undoubtedly the largest city in the northern region of Maya country.[555] Beyond its teeming multitudes and towering pyramids, Cobâ reached out for the agricultural produce and human labor of the surrounding towns. These communities were physically linked to the great city by stone roads that helped to reinforce the alliances and obligations between the noble families of vassals and the ahauob in the center.[556] In contrast to the Maya of the Puuc cities, the people of Cobâ and their kings sustained strong cultural ties to the southern kingdoms. The style of their great pyramids reflected Petén traditions and their divine lords raised tree-stones with extensive, and unfortunately badly eroded, hieroglyphic texts. Like the ahauob of Palenque and Copân, the nobility of Cobâ apparently regarded themselves as frontier stalwarts of a great Maya tradition with its heart in the southern lowlands.

Archaeological research documents that, soon after the consolidation of these distinctive western and eastern kingdoms in the northern lowlands by the end of the eighth century, a series of strategic coastal strongholds was established by canoe seafaring peoples. These people were called the Itzâ by archaeologists, after references to them in Books of Chilam Balam.[557] These coastal Itzâ used pottery styles which would become characteristic of Chichén Itzâ, and they brought with them foreign goods, such as Mexican obsidian, both black and green.[558] Eventually, these merchant warriors founded a permanent port facility on an island off the northern coast, at the mouth of the Rio Lagartos, where they could command a rich trade in the sea salt prized in Mexico and elsewhere. Called Isla Cerritos,[559] this small island was literally transformed by artificial construction into a single round and massive platform with masonry docking along its entire periphery for the large dugout canoes used by these peoples.

At some juncture in their expansion along the coastal areas, the Itzâ moved inland to establish a new state in the north. Although the Chilam Balam books claim the Itzâ incursions came from the direction of Cozumel Island and the east coast of the peninsula, the archaeological evidence suggests they came directly inland from their outposts along the coast. It is hardly accidental that their final major capital at Chichén Itzâ was established in the center of the northern plain, directly south of their port at Isla Cerritos. That central zone, however, was already a frontier between the state of Cobâ to the east and the Puuc cities to the west and south. The Itzâ marched provocatively into a region that was already occupied by formidable kingdoms. It is clear that they intended to stay. The first step in their plan was the conquest of Izamal, a kingdom that boasted one of the largest and most famous pyramids in the north.[560] Once they had overcome Izamal, the Itzâ armies kept right on going. They aimed for a border city between Coba and the Pune, an ancient center known as Yaxuna (or Cetelac, as some call it).

The massive pyramids of Yaxuna had been raised by kings in the Preclassic and Classic periods and were the largest such structures in the central northern lowlands. Following a decline in the Late Classic period, Yaxuna experienced a resurgence of both population and prestige in the Terminal Classic. At the time of the Itza incursions, Yaxuna was probably a sizable town, marking the boundary between Coba’s sphere of influence and the Puuc cities to the west. In this flat land without rivers, there were only two clear geographic markers: the deep natural wells, called cenotes, and the sacred mountains raised by ancestral peoples. Both were used by the northern Maya to stake out political centers and frontiers. Yaxuna had large ancient pyramids and the aura of power and legitimacy such places contain. It also had a great natural well. Both of these landmarks made it the logical choice for a border city.

The Itza could not take Yaxuna immediately because the king of Coba and the rulers of the Puuc cities claimed it as their own. By dint of diplomacy or force of arms, these two kingdoms initially repelled the invaders’ advance, thus forcing the Itza to chose another nearby sacred spot for their new capital. The Itza established their new city at a another cenote that would come to be known as Chichen Jtzd, “the Well of the Itza.” This site was located twenty kilometers to the north of Yaxuna.

This first confrontation was but the opening round in a grim war for control of the northern part of the peninsula. Responding to the new intruders, the king of Coba commissioned the construction of the most ambitious political monument ever raised by the Maya: a stone road one hundred kilometers long, linking the center of Coba to the ancient center of Yaxuna. Townsmen and villagers living along the route of this sacred causeway quarried three quarters of a million cubic meters of rock from the earth for its construction. They filled the masonry walls and packed down tons of white marl on the road’s surface, using huge stone rolling pins. This road declared Coba to be master of a territorial domain covering at least four thousand square kilometers, nearly twice the size of the southern lowland kingdom of Tikal at its height.[561]

At Yaxuna, the arrival of the masonry road triggered a frenzy of building activity on the foundations of the ancient ruins (Fig. 9:5). Early Classic buildings were quarried to provide building blocks for the new temples and palaces that rose at the edges of the broad plaza area where the Coba road ended. Masons removed the rubble and stone from the sides of the Preclassic Acropolis and piled it up again into a pyramid twenty-five ] meters high, facing eastward toward Coba. To this conglomerate of old and new, the Yaxuna people added a ballcourt and its associated temples and platforms. We know that the Puuc cities also had their part in the rebuilding of Yaxuna because the style of the new buildings emulated the Puuc tradition, rather than that of Coba.

Surrounding this new seat of authority, the inhabitants founded a perimeter of smaller communities, one almost exactly midway between Yaxuná and Chichón Itzá (Fig. 9:6). To decorate their small palaces, artisans of these towns carved stone bas-reliefs displaying the warriors of the polity taking captives (Figs. 9:7 and 9:8). They also displayed bas- reliefs of the accession of their lords, including one who acceded to the rank of cah, a variant of the cahal status of nobles in the southern lowland kingdoms (Fig. 9:9).

Ultimately, however, the efforts of the Puuc cities and Coba to remain in power in the center of the northern lowlands failed. After many years of bitter fighting, Chichón Itzá’s armies won the battle on the fields of Yaxuná. The rebuilding of that city ended almost as soon as it had begun. Quarried blocks of stone lay strewn at the base of ancient platforms, abandoned in hasty retreat before the masons could use them. The occupants of the perimeter communities likewise fled, leaving their little decorated palaces unattended and their homes to fall into ruin.

We cannot say how long this war lasted, but its final outcome is certain. The war reliefs of Yaxuná[562] were cast down from their buildings to be rediscovered a millennium later by archaeologists (Fig. 9:10). The inhabitants of Chichón Itzá, by contrast, went on to expand their city, adding many ambitiously conceived buildings dedicated to their triumph and glory. The cities of the Puuc region and the great capital of the northwestern plain, Dzibilchaltún,[563] likewise collapsed as political capitals. As Chichón Itzá prospered, these rival kingdoms were eventually abandoned. The final occupation of Uxmal also shows the presence of the pottery styles of Chichón Itzá.[564] Cobá may not have been abandoned in the wake of this catastrophe, but it experienced a slow, steady decline in public construction.[565]

The archaeology of Chichón Itzá itself yields an enigmatic and controversial picture of these events.[566] Traditionally, archaeologists regarded the city as having had two major occupations: an earlier “Maya” community with Puuc-style temples and palaces, including dedicatory lintels with hieroglyphic texts; and a later “Toltec” or foreign community established by Mexican conquerors and their Maya allies. In reality, Chichen Itza shows evidence of having always been a single city occupied by a remarkable. increasingly cosmopolitan nobility. This nobility manipulated diverse political expressions in their public art—some Maya, some Mexican—but all aimed at reinforcing and consolidating their authority.

This revised vision of Chichen Itza as a single, unified culture is based upon a realization that the pottery style of the “Toltec” city was at least partly contemporary with the pottery style of the Puuc and “Maya” Chichen. It is also based upon recognition that the settlement organization of the city is unitary: A network of stone roads links principal groups into a whole. Finally, although the artistic style of the “Toltec” part of the city is distinctive, this style also utilizes Maya hieroglyphic texts.[567] The royal patrons of this “Toltec” complex in the northern section of Chichen Itza may have favored murals and sculpture over texts, but they were not illiterate foreigners. They were true Maya citizens.

What the archaeology of Chichen Itza does suggest is that several generations of rulers built public architecture and sculpture to commemorate their increasing success in war and trade. As the ahauob of Chichen Itza w’orked to forge a conquest state that incorporated the territories of their enemies, the political statements they commissioned departed more and more from the prototypes they had inherited from the southern kings. These kings abandoned narrative portraits with inscribed texts in favor of assemblies of portraits carved on pillars in the great colonnades or engraved on the interior walls of their temples, throughout this book we have shown how changes in the strategies of public art reflect improvisations in the institution of ahau. In the case of the Itzá, these changes were designed to legitimize not only conquest but also consolidation. We have seen such improvisation before in the case of Early Classic Tikal, but here the strategy is more comprehensive, reaching into the very essence of the institution of ahau itself—namely its focus upon the lineal connection between males of descending generations.

The political organization of Chichón Itzá, as conveyed in its hieroglyphic texts, was revolutionary even before the initiation of the non- glyphic public art programs. This innovativeness is particularly evident in the treatment of family relationships between ahauob,[568] as we shall see shortly. The nobles of this city shared extraordinary privileges with their rulers. The texts of Chichón Itzá are scattered throughout the city in places traditionally reserved for the use of kings: on the stone lintels spanning the doorways of public buildings; on the jambs of these doorways; on freestanding piers in doorways, an architectural fashion of the Terminal Classic period; and on friezes decorating the interiors of these buildings.

The written history of Chichón Itzá covers a remarkably short span for a city of such importance. The dates associated with these texts are all clustered within the second katun of the tenth baktun. The earliest clear date at the site, July 2, A.D. 867, is inscribed on a monument that was found lying on the ground. This monument, know n as the Watering Trough Lintel, has a deep corn-grinding-metate surface cut into it. Recently, the intriguing question has arisen that an inscription on a temple called the High Priest’s Grave,[569] traditionally regarded as the latest date at the site (10.8.10.11.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, or May 13, A.D. 998) might actually have been carved much earlier. We suggest instead that this date fell on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, 842) and is thus the earliest date in the city. This alternative makes better sense in light of the tight clustering of the other inscribed dates found within the city. The date inscribed on the High Priest’s Grave is only one of several texts, including several undeciphered historical ones, on the temple. Hence it clearly falls into the phase of public literacy in the city.

At the same time, the High Priest’s Temple is architecturally a prototype of the four-sided Castillo with the famous serpent sculptures on its stairways.[570] The Castillo is the focal point of the later northern center only a few meters to the north and east of it. The imagery within the High Priest’s Temple, including a bound noble on a column and a serpent- entwined individual over the inner dais, clearly anticipates the iconography of buildings in the great northern center such as the Temple of the Chae Mool and the Temple of the Warriors. This earlier placement of the High Priest’s Grave would tie the “Toltec” northern center to the “Maya” southern center architecturally and spatially. If confirmed, it would also make the original implementations of the “Toltec” iconographic and architectural styles which lack inscriptions completely contemporary with the “’Maya” styles found with the dedicatory monuments throughout the southern districts of the city.

The restricted distribution of dates at Chichón Itza is commensurate with the intent of the texts, for they do not delineate a dynastic history like those we encountered in the southern kingdoms. The inscriptions of the southern cities focused on the commemoration of major events in the lives of kings and their significant others, often tying these events to major conjunctions in the cycles of time. The focus of attention in the Chichén Itzá texts is upon rituals of dedication carried out by groups of lords. The historical information given consists not of personal history but of dates, names, and the relationships among the actors who participated in these rituals.

The Temple of the Four Lintels is one of three Puuc-style buildings containing inscribed monuments in a group that terminates the main north-south sacbe, or roadway, of the city (Fig. 9:11). The assemblage of lintels from this building illustrates the general rhetoric of these inscriptions. The name of the principal protagonist is listed, along with the date of the inscription and the action being commemorated. This information is followed by a statement of his relationship to a second person. This second person may then be qualified as the agent of yet another ritual in the overall process of dedication. Finally, in a couplet structure, there is a reiteration of the dedication by the principal individual, followed by a listing of two more individuals who are said to be related to one another. The date of this particular dedication, July 13, A.D. 881, is thrice recorded on the lintels of this temple.

This focus upon dedicatory rituals and their participants leaves us with only a brief and enigmatic history of the important people of Chichén Itzá. We are not told when these people were born or when they acceded, warred, or died as we were in the southern kingdoms. We do, however, have some glimmering of the kinds of rituals being carried out. In the Four Lintels texts, there are references to the drilling action which creates new fire[571] and several of the individuals named carry a “fire” title. Furthermore, two of these lintels carry images on them which, when found in other scenes at Chichén Itzá, pertain to sacrifice. The most prominent images are the bird which claws open the chests of victims to extract the heart and the serpent which rises above the sacrifice.[572]

The Casa Colorada is a sizable temple south of the main city center and next to the sacbe leading to the southern group containing the Temple of the Four Lintels. Here, a hieroglyphic frieze records a series of events that took place on two different dates, 10.2.0.1.9 6 Muluc 12 Mac (September 15, 8 69),[573] and 10.2.0.15.3 7 Akbal 1 Ch’en (June 16, 8 70). Again, we see the names of several different lords listed along with the ritual actions they performed on these days. We find recorded, among others, a “fish- in-hand” bloodletting ritual and the ceremonial drilling activity associated with the creation of fire (Fig. 9:12). Here, as in the case of the Four Lintels texts, the emphasis is again upon a series of individuals who are named as agents of different actions.

The bridge between the textual programs and the purely artistic programs in the city can be found on the carved doorway column in Structure 6E1[574] (Fig. 9:13). In this one instance, the artist wrote out the names of the individuals glyphically, but rendered their actions in portraits. On the doorway column of this building, we see four striding figures. One of them carries a handful of throwing-stick darts and a severed human head. The others carry axes of the kind used in decapitation sacrifice[575] and knives used in heart-extraction rituals at Chichen Itza.[576] Here then we have a group of titled individuals[577] who are participants in, or witnesses of, a death sacrifice. Another glyphic inscription is found in the nearby Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs (Structure 6E3). This temple is associated with a particular kind of elite residence called a Patio Quad structure,[578] which finds its most spectacular expression in the Mercado, a colonnaded palace in the main northern center. In the past this Patio Quad type of house has been attributed to the “Toltec-Chichen Itza,” illiterate foreigners living within the city. The presence of these traditional Maya-style glyphs on a building which is clearly the household shrine of this group, however, is but one more example that the “Maya” and “Toltec” styles existed simultaneously in time, as part of one unified culture.[579]

Any overview of the monumental art of Chichén Itzá raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Who were these mysterious lords who did not care to celebrate their births, accessions, and triumphs as Maya rulers had done before them? This is a matter which is not easily resolved. First of all, the actual number of historical individuals recorded in the texts is still a point of controversy. Those people we can identify with relative certainty are listed in Figure 9:14. Second, sorting out the kin relationships at Chichén is a perplexing task. The relationships we are sure of are given in Figure 9:15. The connections here are between women of ascending generation and their progeny, as expressed in the glyphic expressions “mother of” and “child of mother.”

At the most, these glyphs tell us that there were two, perhaps three, generations of women who were mother, grandmother, and possibly greatgrandmother to the major group of men named as “siblings” in these texts. The kinship ties among these five men can be determined in the following ways: (1) Two of them, Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi, are the children of the same mother, and (2) four of them are named in the kind of yitah, or “sibling,” relationship we have seen recorded at Caracol and Tikal. Kin- Cimi, Ah-Muluc-Tok, Wacaw, and Double-Jawbone are all named in this “sibling” group. Since Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi share the same mother, Kakupacal can also be added to this group of brothers.

We have seen siblings before in the royal histories of the Maya, but not in sets of five. Moreover, although there are many more discoveries to be made in these texts, as of now there is no clear evidence that any one of these individuals was superior in rank to any of the others. All carry such noble titles as ahau and yahau kak, “lord of fire,” but there is no single individual whom we can identify with certainty as king. This situation is exacerbated by the presence of at least one, and perhaps two, more such sibling sets in these texts, as shown in Figure 9:14. While there may eventually be evidence to suggest generational relationships among the groups, for the present there are no clear father-son relationships in any surviving record from Chichen Itza. The dates of the texts in question cover a span of time which is relatively brief by Maya standards, and the texts imply contemporaneous actions by these people. The native chronicles of the Itza declare that Chichen Itza was ruled by brothers in its heyday[580]—and a brotherhood of princes is exactly what we see emerging from the ancient texts.

There are precedents for the sharing of power between a Maya king and his key relatives. Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal ruled their expanded domain together. Yax-Pac of Copan had co-regents of a sort in his brothers. Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan elevated his cahalob, his noble kin, and his supporters to stand beside him on the royal monuments of the realm. Of course, the king had always been an ahau, like many of the nobles around him. The dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles, however, was still a fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years.

At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya had a word for this kind of government: multepal, joint or confederate government.[581] It was a multepal that ruled Mayapan, the last regional capital of the northern Maya, which was established after the fall of Chichen Itza, during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200–1450) and just before the Spanish conquest.[582] Within the Mayapan government, there was a particularly powerful family, the Cocom, whose patriarch was generally regarded as the “first among equals.” There was also a rival political faction, the Xiu, whose family patriarch was high priest of the cult of Kukulcan and carried the title of Ah Kin Mai, Priest of the Cycle. Neither of these leaders, however, could successfully claim to rule their constituents in the manner that the Classic period southern kings did. We are convinced that the present textual evidence at Chichen Itza points to an earlier and precedent-setting multepal as the institution of government in that city.

The Cocom family of the Conquest period claimed to be the descendants of the ancient rulers of Chichen Itza. According to legend, the Cocom returned to the territory of the city of the sacred well after the fall of Mayapan in A.D. 1450.[583] Chichen Itza texts from the end of the Classic period provide some support for their claim to be the former rulers of that city. In the text of the Casa Colorada frieze discussed above, Yax-Uk-Kauil, Kakupacal, and other notables are associated with Hun-Pik-Tok, who is called “Divine Cocom, the ahau (vassal) of Jawbone-Fan” (Fig. 9:12).[584] The name Hun-Pik-Tok also appears on the lintel from the Akab Tzib, where he is again named the vassal of the “Divine Cocom” overlord, Jawbone-Fan. The ancient pedigree of the Cocoms is thus confirmed by their appearance in the inscriptions of Kakupacal and his siblings in the early history of Chichón Itzá.

Since neither Hun-Pik-Tok nor Jawbone-Fan is tied to any of the sibling sets, we have no way of knowing what kin relationship they may have had with Kakupacal and his siblings. Hun-Pik-Tok, moreover, does not get the amount of historical attention we have seen on the monuments of other Maya kings. Instead, he is, at most, an antecedent presence to the sibling sets, either providing them with some form of legitimacy or acting as their ally. Nevertheless, we can assume from all of this evidence that the multepal form of government probably did not originate at Mayapán, as some have believed, but in Chichón Itzá itself.

We also know that Chichón Itzá, like the more orthodox Maya kingdoms, also used an Emblem Glyph, which can be loosely translated as “divine Chichén Itzá lord.”[585] The main phrase of the Chichén Itzá Emblem Glyph is comprised of male genitalia and a le sign. Male genitalia are one of the most ancient and venerable of titles taken by kings, and probably connote the concept of “progenitor.”

The Emblem Glyph was widely used in the names of Chichén’s leaders: Several members of the sibling sets used the Emblem Glyph as a title. This “male-genitalia” glyph even occurs as part of the name of the oldest female appearing on the monuments. In the name of this woman, the grandmother of the five brothers, the glyph probably simply connoted the simple idea of an ancestress. In the southern kingdoms, contemporaries of the ruler could also refer to themselves with the Emblem Glyph title. In those cases, however, there was never any ambiguity as to which of these lords was the high king and which were in positions of subordination. The ambiguous nature of the hierarchical labels at Chichón is just one more piece of evidence supporting the concept of confederate rule.

The texts we have surveyed so far give us only a glimpse of Chichón Itzá’s rich and complex-history. To examine the culture and political structure further, we must turn to the richer and more extensive political statements found in the imagery on its public art. Here we find a marked thematic contrast to the art of the southern lowland Maya kingdoms, particularly those of the Late Classic period. Chichén Itzá’s many carved panels, pillars, piers, lintels, sculptures, and murals do not celebrate the king, but rather groups of people, particularly in processional arrangements.

One of the most spectacular of these stone assemblies is the gallery of notables carved on the squared columns of the Northwest Colonnade and the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9.16). The Northwest Colonnade is a spacious, beam-and-mortar roofed building found at the base of the raised pyramid crowned by the Temple of the Warriors. The gallery of notables is, literally, a frozen procession representing 221-plus striding men. These stone figures frame the processional route which leads to the temple stairway (Fig. 9:17).[586]

For the most part, the individuals portrayed are warriors, as the name of the building complex implies. The majority are armed with spearthrowers, although some carry bunched spears and others clubs studded with ax blades. There is also a depiction of another defensive weapon, a curved stick evidently used to parry spears hurled by enemies.[587] These weapons are associated with the Tlaloc-warfare complex which we saw operating among southern lowland kingdoms. In the art of Chichen Itza, however, there are abundant and explicit depictions of the actual waging of war with such weapons. Some of the warriors in the procession are clearly veterans, proudly displaying their amputated limbs. Each is an individual portrait, differing in details from the others (Fig. 9:18). In addition to the warriors, there are other important people. Some have been identified as sorcerers or priests by the regalia they wear and the fact that they are not armed (Fig. 9:18d). There is also one intimidating old matriarch striding among all of these men.[588] She is probably either the matriarch of the principal sodality or a representative of the Moon Goddess Ix-Chel, also known as Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. This figure echoes images from elsewhere in the city and we find her as well in the Temple of the Jaguars across the great platform from the Temple of the Warriors.

In the center of the procession, on the columns in front of the stairway leading upward to the sacrificial stone, the Chae Mool, there is an assembly of prisoners. This group of bound captives confirms the essential intent of the overall composition—to celebrate victory in war. Despite the brilliant and innovative architectural framework, the political message here is the same as the one we have seen throughout our earlier histories— capture and sacrifice of rival lords by the powerful. There is one significant difference, however. In the monumental art of the southern kingdoms, we have seen prisoners stripped, humiliated, and often mutilated. Here, the captives are dressed in rich regalia, in most respects the same kind of attire worn by the highest ranking of the victorious warriors surrounding them (Fig. 9:18c). Obviously, the Itzá preferred to absorb their enemies rather than destroy them.

Although the elite of Chichón Itzá clearly had ties to the non-Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the winners celebrating here are as clearly “Maya” in their appearance as their victims. Let us pause now to imagine what a procession like this would have been like in the days when Chichón was entering into the era of its glory.

A bewhiskered, grizzled face swam before the eyes of the adolescent boy as the old steward shook him awake in the cold dampness of the colonnaded hall. It was still dark in the plaza in front of his family compound. Inside, the red-painted walls and heavy wooden rafters glinted in the flickering torchlight, festooned with stone-edged weapons and sparkling gear. Already the boy’s elder kinsmen were dressed in their sleeveless jackets of embroidered cotton armor. Their golden-feathered, greenstone- studded helmets shone in the dim light. As the men engaged in animated conversation, the small blue birds, which hung like diadems from the front of their helmets, bobbed with the movements of their heads. They reminded the boy of the pretty little birds that swooped among the swarms of insects at half-light, devouring them by the thousands, like the Itzá overwhelming their enemies on the field. The men’s green-feathered back- shields were emblazoned with the fearful insignia of their family and their city. Schoolboys from the villages vied with one another to supply the long strips of cotton[589] with which the men strapped each other’s arms and legs for war.

Laughter and casual conversation filled the boy’s ears, and his belly growled as the scent of hot corn gruel laced with chocolate and chili filled his nostrils. He moved quickly to join the others. No battle today. Instead, they would march in victory to the great council hall of the lords.

Accompanied by the ancient shamans, his father emerged from the family shrine which sat on a steep platform across the plaza. The blood of last evening’s sacrifices stained their long robes and matted their flowing hair. The boy’s heart swelled with pride as he remembered the lords the men of his family had taken captive in the campaign of the hill towns. His older brother had told him how the shouts of victory had mingled with the screams of terror as the women of the vanquished had fled their burning homes.

If the sacrifices were finished, the boy knew it was getting late. As he dressed hastily, he could hear the defeated nobles in their finery being assembled by his siblings on the plaza before the great hall. The drums of his clan began sounding the march. Still straightening his helmet, the boy rushed down the stairs to join the procession as it moved off led by his father, their great captain.

Drumsong and the smoke of morning temple fires rose from the arcade of tall shade trees and fruit orchards lining the road. Dawn was just turning the sky pale-blue as the boy’s clan reached the main thoroughfare, joining the other groups of warriors who were pouring in greater and greater numbers from the paths among the trees. Together, they headed northward on the great white limestone road. The jogging rhythm of the warriors surrounding him propelled the boy forward, even as he strained to catch a glimpse of the prisoner-kings of the enemy whom the high lords of the council paraded among them. The company marched the battle dance of the Itza, a frightening, sinuous rush of warriors that carried death to all who opposed it. The massive red walls of the first house of the siblings loomed to the boy’s right as the swelling ranks of the army emerged onto the plaza of the old center. Their arrival was punctuated by a roar of approval from the crowds lining every side.

The great captains danced forward, reenacting the capture of their enemies. Uttering his distinctive hawklike war cry, the boy’s father grabbed a valorous ahau by the hair and pushed him off balance, stabbing his spear into the air. Up ahead, the procession slowed as the vast stream of men expanded out onto the broad avenue, flanked on one side by the Observatory and on the other by the Red House. Elbowing past the intent ranks of his clan and their provincial allies, the young boy maneuvered himself to the edge of the battle group. It was his responsibility, he reminded himself as the older men gave way, to stand at the exposed edge of his family’s ranks, moving them at the signals from his father and his elder siblings.

Moving forward with the impetus of the men-at-arms, the boy passed the old Castillo, its sacred cave now sealed by the graves of seven great lords.[590] It loomed high above the far side of the parade. The new Castillo, still under construction, rose proudly before them, surrounded by a sea of city folk. As the crowd fell back cheering, the army writhed onto the blinding white plaza and danced across to the Great Ballcourt. Also unfinished, this structure was vast beyond all imagining, encompassing an awesome vision of victory and sacrifice at the heart of the mighty city. The sweet stench of death filled the boy’s nostrils as he passed the huge skull rack before the Ballcourt. The hollow-eyed heads of defeated enemies glared back at him, sending a shiver down his spine as he contemplated their earthly remains mounted in row upon row on the tall wooden rack. The older trophies shone in the morning light with the creamy-white brillance of naked bone, while others taken more recently still bore the flesh and hair of their unfortunate owners. All hung as grim reminders of what the wargame would bring for some of the prisoners today.

At full strength now, the army swirled around the Castillo, gyrating to the reverberation of hundreds of great wooden drums and the wail of the conch trumpets. Thousands upon thousands of warriors arranged in long sinuous lines moved with the discipline of years of combat, pushing back the crowds to the edges of the plaza and up onto the flanks of the buildings. The prisoners moved in their midst, each one the ward of a great veteran. The boy’s father signaled his son to shift his battle group into tormation along the eastern side of the great northern plaza, joining the others of his province. In a moment the wargames would begin in earnest.

Vibrating with tension, the men faced a wide sea of their compatriots across the plaza. When the signal whistles and cries rose from their captains, they rushed forward to engage each other as they had engaged the enemy in the battle of the hills. The crowd roared encouragement. More warriors rushed forward in the melee to dampen the danger of accident. Circles opened in the crowd as brave enemies were freed from their bonds and given weapons with which to pantomime deadly combat with the Itzá’s best heroes. Dart duels cut alleyways throughout the ranks as men moved out of the line of fire.[591] The dance of death progressed, parry and thrust, the groans of surprise at a sudden wound. Some Itzá would join their ancestors today if they were not alert.

In the midst of this melee, the boy saw his father squaring off against his highest-ranked prisoner, both armed with stabbing spears. The two men closed vigorously, wrestled, and then closed again. The lord fought well, but the boy’s father was in better condition and soon had his prisoner down on the plaza with a spear under his chin. There was a pause. Suddenly the father raised up his enemy and gave him back his spear. He gazed into his face and then turned his back to him as he would to a sibling and trusted battle companion. The decision he offered his enemy was to die taking his captor with him. Such a death, however, would be a humiliating act of cowardice. Better by far to live as a younger sibling, a prince of the hated Itzá and their city of the new creation. The captive grasped his spear tightly and, for a moment, the boy thought his father’s time had come. But then the captive’s fingers slowly relaxed, his eyes dropped, and he fell into line behind his captor as the group came back together again and moved off toward the council house.[592] The boy felt a flush of pride. Not all of the lords would have taken such a chance, but he knew his father held his position in the high council by means of his courage as well as his wisdom.

The boy’s battle party moved forward to the steps of the Temple of the Warriors, the council house of the Itzá nation. The ambassadors from distant allied cities in the western mountains were arrayed along the front of the halls with their piles of sumptuous gifts. Dressed in long skirts, the dreadful shamans of the city moved among them, waving their crooked staffs and billowing censers and muttering incantations against treachery. The lords of the council gathered on the steps with their highest-born prisoners, announcing the names of those who had joined the nation and those who had chosen to go to the Otherworld today. Those who chose death were honored with ritual celebration before being led through the lower hall and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice. There, as the sun stood high in the sky at midday, one after the other they received the gentle death, so called because no one ever made a sound when his heart was cut out. The great Vision Serpent rose in the clouds of incense surrounding their lifeless bodies.

The sacrifices continued through the afternoon, and the warriors, engaged in their games on the plaza, clustered like angry bees around a hive until the sun sank in bloody splendor. The boy amused himself with the games and wondered if he would ever get to sacrifice in the Great Ballcourt when it was finished by the master builders and masons of the defeated hill cities. Mostly, however, his thoughts were with his father, sitting in the council house plotting the future of the city. Now that there was peace in the land, the Itza could look outward to the world beyond and the challenges it would bring.

•

The eternal stone rendering of this procession in the Temple of the Warriors depicts figures wearing three of the basic motifs of Tlaloc warfare we have seen in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:18a): the Tlaloc mask, the year-sign headdress, and the clawed-bird warrior. In the temple above this procession, a second gathering of portraits was carved on twenty more columns. Here there are no prisoners, but only warriors and dignitaries. These figures, ranged along the back wall of the hall before the throne dais, embody some particularly fine expressions of this particular artistic program. Although these familiar images of warriors and important dignitaries frame the ritual space which the leader occupied, as we have come to expect in the lineage houses of the earliest Maya kingdoms, they are also different. This great procession of VIPs stands in place of the traditional Classic symbol of the domain—the carved portrait of the victorious king. The throne is still upheld by the customary small warrior figures, but at Chichen Itza, the Maya did not attempt to record the personal identity of the man who sat there.

The same principle holds true for the Temple of the Chae Mool, an earlier council house buried beneath the Temple of the Warriors. Above the benches that line the walls of this building’s inner sanctum, brightly painted murals portray seated lords, wearing masks of the gods who ruled their cosmos. Seated upon jaguar-skin pillows, some of these lords extend offerings in flat bowls, while others sport shields and carry ax scepters with the bottom portion carved to represent the body of a snake. These scepters resemble the Manikin Scepters of royal office displayed in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:19, south bench). Still other lords (Fig. 9:19, north bench) carry spearthrowers and throwing spears while they sit on thrones carved to represent full-bodied jaguars. This kind of jaguar throne, even more than the jaguar-skin pillow, was the furniture of rulers among the southern lowland peoples. Yet here we have not a single preeminent personage but whole assemblies of nobles seated upon this type of throne.

The message of this mural is clear. Once again, the throne is empty. What is being depicted with that empty throne is the historical idea of a central public persona in the city’s government, not a real individual. Each of the surrounding figures is depicted in a distinctive manner. They are clearly meant to represent real people. The government of Chichen Itza, in both its earlier manifestation in the Temple of the Chae Mool, and in its later and more splendid expression in the Temple of the Warriors, is pictured as an assembly, a multepal. What are we to make of the historical legends that claim Kukulcan ruled this city, or of the heroic captains such as Kakupacal and Hun-Pik-Tok of the Cocom, who are likewise mentioned? The answer to that question will have to wait on further archaeological evidence, for these figures certainly do not seem to be centrally focused upon in the public art.

The Great Ballcourt, directly across from the Temple of the Warriors complex, expands and complicates the political program. Here, in addition to an assembly of lords, we see other images of central importance. These figures are known as Captain Sun Disk and Captain Serpent (Fig. 9:20).[593] Captain Sun Disk carries a spearthrower and throwing spears and sits inside a nimbus identified by its triangular protrusions as the sun. Captain Serpent also carries the weapons of war, but he sits entwined within the coils of a great feathered snake.

[[][Fig. 9:21 Lower Temple of the Jaguars: The Upper Registers after Maudslay]]

The importance of the individuals bearing these insignia is clear in the assembly compositions, such as the one found in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:21), where Captain Sun Disk looks down upon the upward-gazing Captain Serpent from his place on the central axis of the overall picture. But there are problems in attempting to identify these insignia as the regalia of real people. First of all, in the imagery of the Classic Maya, the nimbus means simply that the individual so portrayed is a revered ancestor.[594] Captain Sun Disk’s position in the compositions of the Great Ballcourt is variable. In two of the main pictures, however— the one found in the North Temple at the apex of the playing court, and the one in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars across from the Temple of the Warriors—Sun Disk is at the top of the overall picture, the favored locality in Classic Maya art for dead predecessors. Second, the Serpent insignia is not confined to one individual, even on the Great Ballcourt scenes. In the Lower Temple of the Jaguars, for example, there are two Serpent Captains, one feathered and the other decorated with cloud scrolls.[595]

Two serpent captains within a composition could be interpreted as indications of the presence of particularly important individuals; but if we go back to the Temple of the Warriors, there are entire processions of serpent captains (Fig. 9:22). Therefore, we can only conclude that the insignia pertains not to an individual but to some important status. Even more significant is the fact that a serpent captain is also found among the prisoners arranged before the stairway of the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9:18). This status then is not even peculiar to Chichen’s own elite.

It is a difficult task to discover individuals who stand out as unequivocal leaders in a program devoted to assembly. The sun-disk status is a real one, and perhaps it pertains to an individual ancestor, but the iconography of this image never shows Captain Sun Disk actively engaged in any of the scenes as a leader. The Serpent insignia is also important, but it too pertains to many people among the nobility at Chichón Itzá.

What can be derived with certainty from these public monuments is that the government of Chichón Itzá carried out successful campaigns of war against its enemies. The murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:23) are explicit illustrations of the kind of warfare actually fought with the spearthrower and throwing spear displayed in Tlaloc warfare throughout the Classic period in the southern lowlands. This battle scene, and others in the Temple, show that these wars were fought within the communities of the vanquished. Women are shown fleeing their homes as the battle rages around them. It was the kind of war that resulted in “the tearing down of vaults and buildings,” or hom as it was written in the texts of Tikal and Caracol.

As always, the penalty of defeat was capture and sacrifice. Victims had their hearts torn out by warriors dressed in the guise of birds, while the great feathered serpent floated above them.[596] Others were shot with arrows or had their heads chopped off. Decapitation sacrifice was particularly associated with the ballgame, as displayed in the reliefs of the Great Ballcourt (Fig. 9:24), but it was also associated with fire ritual, as seen in mural paintings along the basal wall of the Temple of the Warriors. Like their cultural predecessors, however, the people of Chichén Itzá adhered to the ancient Maya notion of the ballgame as a metaphor for battle, and of the ballcourt (or its architectural surrogates in stairways and plazas)[597] E as the primary setting for decapitation sacrifice. Indeed, the Great Ballcourt at Chichén Itzá was evidently constructed as a monument to the successful completion of the Itzá’s wars of conquest.[598]

The volume of sacrifice at Chichén Itzá is grimly commemorated in the skull-rack platform[599] next to the Great Ballcourt. We have reason to suspect, however, that not all of the kings and nobles captured by Chichén Itzá ended up on the skull rack. The well-dressed prisoners paraded in the Northwest Colonnade below the Temple of the Warriors could easily blend in with the victors if freed from their bonds. There are also processing dignitaries in the Lower Temple of the Jaguar that bear a remarkable resemblance to lords of the Yaxuná area (Fig. 9:25). The message here is the clear. In a government organized around the principle of confederation and assembly, the major political consequence of war need not be the defeat and humiliation of a rival dynasty. Instead, this dynasty might be incorporated into the expanding cosmopolitan state. In a city already housing numerous ahauob, there may well have been room for the vanquished.

At its height, Chichón Itzá ruled supreme in the Maya lowlands. We do not know how far its elite extended their claims to dominion, but surely they prevailed over most of the northern lowlands. After the founding of their kingdom, the Puuc cities fell and Coba slowly dwindled to insignificance. There were some hold-out polities in the southern lowlands, but these intrepid survivors of disaster provided no challenge to a city the size of Chichón Itzá and most likely attempted to negotiate an advantageous relationship with its government. How far beyond the lowlands Chichón Itzá’s lords may have extended their domain is still an open question. During this period many fortified capitals of highland México—Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and Tula, to name but a few—show significant connections to the Maya world. We suspect that in future investigations, more of Chichén Itzá’s Maya legacy will be found in the other cultures of Mexico that so astounded the Spaniards.

One idea that the Maya of Chichén Itzá did not pass on to their Mesoamerican neighbors was divine kingship and its concomitant hieroglyphic literature. This docs not, however, imply a paradox in our vision of the last great burst of Maya social innovation. In order to perpetuate the principle of kingship in this period of crisis, to expand it beyond the limitations that caused its demise in the south, the Maya lords of Chichén Itzá terminated the office of king and the principle of dynasty that had generated it. We do not believe, as some have said, that the people of Chichén Itzá were vigorous Mexican foreigners. Their leaders were Maya ahauob as well as participants in the culture of Mesoamerica. Their enemies, at least among the Puuc cities, were similarly cosmopolitan. If earlier Classic iconographic allusions are any guide, the Itzá were certainly not utilizing novel tactics in warfare. They were adhering to the same four-hundred-year-old precepts of Classic Maya Tlaloc-Venus warfare we have already seen in the south.

The key to success for the Chichén Itzá lords lay in their redefinition of the political consequences of defeat in war. They turned away from the dynastic blood feuds of the past and moved toward effective alliance and i consolidation. This consolidation would become the guiding principle of empire among the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Culhua- E Mexica. At the core of this principle of alliance is the notion of itah, “sibling” or “kinsman of the same generation.” Two siblings perpetuated the first Maya conquest state, that of Tikal and Uaxactún. It was this very principle of brotherhood that Bird-Jaguar invoked in his manipulation of his noble supporters. Even as the lords of the Puuc region desperately fought to withstand Chichén Itzá, they began to declare itah relationships among themselves.[600]

[[][Fig. 9:25 Warriors from Chichen Itza and the Yaxuna Region]]

With Chichen Itza, the first and last Mesoamerican capital among the Maya, we come full circle in the history of their kingship. The divine lords who emerged in the Late Preclassic period to dance upon their sculptured pyramids were first and foremost ahauob, members of a category of being that made them all essentially the same substance. They were siblings in a brotherhood that began with the Ancestral Twins and prevailed throughout all subsequent history. The reassertion of the idea of brotherhood marked the dismantling of that first principle undergirding kingship: dynasty. When the Ancestral Heroes, through the magic of sacrifice, killed one another and brought each other back to life in the Place of Bailgame Sacrifice in Xibalba, they became father and son to each other. So divine kings brought life out of death and were brought to life by the sacrifices of their fathers before them. The lords of Chichen Itza did not celebrate dynasty, nor did they contemplate sacrifice as kings. They were brothers and ahauob together, as their ancestors were at the beginning of time.

10. The End of Literate World and its Legacy to the Future

Naum-Pat, Halach Uinic (“true human”), felt the gentle waves of the dark, glittering sea lap against his feet as he watched the strange canoes bob against the stars. They were vast floating palaces really. Lit from within with lamps and torches, their tall masts and rigging graced the cool moonlight of Lady Ix-Chel.

“Mother of all,” he whispered to himself, “where did these foul-smelling barbarians come from?”

He sighed in astonishment and worry. He had been a seaman all his life. Like his people a thousand years before him, he had plied the deep blue waters and treacherous shallows in great canoes, laden with honey, salt, slaves, chocolate—treasure of all kinds. He had fought enemies upon its rolling surface; he had ridden out the great storms that tormented its waters; he knew every port and people that graced its shores. The sea was his, world of his ancestors, great and dangerous and rich in precious, holy things. Now it had vomited up this monstrosity—a canoe that was a house. The light-skinned barbarians wielded great power, no doubt about it. A shiver ran up his spine. They would be worse and more dangerous than the Aztec pochteca—those dangerous merchants from the west who were extending the Mexica empire toward the ancient lands of the true people.

On the temple mountain yesterday, that old fool of a priest had addressed these new strangers as if they were gods. He had blown incense on them only a moment before they had pushed him aside and entered the sanctuary. After defiling and smashing the sacred images of the gods, they had opened the bundles and handled the holy objects of the ancestors, taking those made of sun-excrement—the yellow metal the foreigners coveted. Metal-lovers, these strange creatures wore helmets, armor, and great knives of the bright and hard substance. Wonderful stuff, he thought as he contemplated the price such objects would bring in the Mexica ports. He cursed the hairy strangers, calling upon the powers of the Otherworld to open the sea and consume them ... and soon.

Worse than looting the temple—other pirates had done that—these men had raised up the World Tree in the form of a wooden cross. They had opened a book—small, black, and poorly painted, but still a book— and read from it in their unutterable tongue. The chilan, his city’s prophet and interpreter for the gods, had watched from the crowd at the base of the temple, shaking his head in fear and wonder.

Naum-Pat shuddered with the horror of the memory of what the strangers had done. As he did so, the words of the famous prophecy of the Chilam Balam went through his mind.

“Let us exalt his sign on high, let us exalt it that we may gaze upon it today with the raised standard,” the great prophet had exhorted them so many years ago. “Great is the discord that arises today. The First Tree of the World is restored; it is displayed to the world. This is the sign of Hunab-Ku on high. Worship it, Itza. You shall worship today his sign on high. You shall worship it furthermore with true goodwill, and you shall worship the true god today, lord. You shall be converted to the word of Hunab-Ku, lord; it came from heaven.”

Naum-Pat had watched in stunned disbelief as the strangers threw down the kulche’, the images of the gods, in the Holy House, and put the wooden Tree in its place. A groan had escaped his throat as he saw the prophecy materialize before his eyes. They had put up the Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First Tree of the World. For the people it had been a very powerful sign. The local chilan had been disturbed enough to send word by courier canoe to the chilanob on the mainland.

Like the chilan, Naum-Pat had seen the raising of the Tree as a powerful portent, but somehow the strangers’ black book had frightened him more. In all the world, only real human beings, only Maya, had books. Others, like the Mexica, had pictures of course, but not the written words of ancestors and heroes, not the prophecies of the star companions. Books were records of the past, they were the truth, the guide to the cycles. The strangers’ metal knives were powerful weapons, but many weapons of the Maya could kill just as efficiently. It was the books that Naum-Pat feared, for with books came true knowledge, knowledge that could vanquish his people’s present and capture and transform their future.

Naum-Pat could not imagine the strangers attacking his people on the neutral ground of Cozumel, Lady Ix-Chel’s sacred isle. They had come ashore with smiles and gifts of clear stones that were like strangely-colored obsidian. He had planned a feast for them tomorrow in the council hall and would treat them distantly, yet with dignity. But what of the future? W as this the beginning of the time of discord and change the great chi- lanob had predicted ‘ The fear in his belly whispered that it was so. As Naum-Pat turned his back to the quiet beach and headed home, his thoughts turned to his children.

In the Maya world, its’at, “one who is clever, ingenious, artistic, scientific, and knowledgeable,” was used with the same respect and in the same contexts we use the word “scientist” today. That its’at also meant “artist” and “scribe” was no accident. For the Maya, as for ourselves, the written word held the key to their future survival. Writing was the power of knowledge made material and artifactual. It was the armature of wealth, prosperity, and the organized labor of the state. It was the wellspring from which flowed knowledge and lore, orally repeated and memorized by the common folk in their songs and prayers.[601] The arrival of the Spanish changed all that and subverted Maya literacy to the ambitions of the Europeans.

But the beginning of the end of literacy occurred centuries before the Conquest, with the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms in the ninth century A.D. As much time separates us from Columbus as separated Naum-Pat from the Classic kings. He and his proud people were still Maya, still civilized, and their elite were still able to read and write, but they lived in a dark age of petty lords and small temple mountains.[602] His age, like our own medieval period, was dimly lit by the flickering lamp of literacy and the collective memory of a great past; but his people’s hope for future greatness was snuffed out by the Spanish conquerors. What brought down the awesome power crafted by the kings of our histories and made them, by the time the Spanish appeared, only a dim memory to their descendants?

The end of the Classic period witnessed a major transformation of the Maya world, one that would leave the southern lowlands a backwater for the rest of Mesoamerican history. Sometimes, as at Copán, the public record stopped dramatically, virtually in mid-sentence. Other kingdoms died in one last disastrous defeat as at Dos Pilas. For many, however, the end came when people turned their backs on the kings, as they had done at Cerros eight hundred years earlier, and returned to a less complicated way of living. Regardless of the manner in which the southern kingdoms met their doom, it is the staggering scope and range of their collapse that stymies us. This is the real mystery of the Maya and it is one that has long fascinated Mayanists and the public.[603]

We have no final answer to what happened, but as with all good mysteries, we have plenty of clues. At Copán, the last decades of the central government were those of the densest population. The voiceless remains of the dead, both commoner and noble alike, bear witness to malnutrition, sickness, infection, and a hard life indeed. In the central Petén, where raised fields played an important role in people’s sustenance, the agricultural system was productive only as long as the fields were maintained. Neglect of the fields during conditions of social strife, such as the growing military competition between Late Classic ruling lineages, likely led to their rapid erosion and decay.[604] Rebuilding these complex agricultural systems in the swamps was beyond the capabilities of individual farmers without the coordination provided by central governments, so they moved out as refugees into areas where they could farm—even if that meant jostling the people already there.

The collapse also came from a crisis of faith. The king held his power as the patriarch of the royal lineage and as the avatar of the gods and ancestors. Ecological and political disaster could be placed directly at his feet as proof of his failure to sustain his privileged communication with the gods. Moreover, because of the way the kings defined themselves and their power, the Maya never established enduring empires, an arrangement that would have created new possibilities of economic organization and resolved the strife that grew in ferocity and frequency during the eighth century. Kings could become conquerors, but they could never transcend the status of usurper, for they could never speak persuasively to the ancestors of the kings they had captured and slain. Each king wielded the written word and history to glorify his own ancestors and his own living people.

As time went on, the high kings were driven to unending, devastating wars of conquest and tribute extraction. In part they were urged on by the nobility. During the Early Classic period, this class comprised a relatively small proportion of the population, but even by the time of Burial 167 in the first century B.c. in Tikal, they were growing rapidly in both numbers and privilege. Averaging about ten centimeters taller than the rest of the population, they enjoyed the best food, the greatest portion of the wealth, and the best chance of having children who survived to adulthood. Since everyone born to a noble family could exercise elite prerogatives, it did not take too many centuries of prosperity for there to be an aristocracy of sufficient size to make itself a nuisance to governments and a burden to farmers. Increasing rivalry between nonroyal nobles and the central lords within the kingdoms appears to have contributed to the downfall of both.

The situation forced the gaze of the nobility outward toward neighboring kingdoms and the tribute they could win by military victory. In the short term, the strategy worked, but in the long term that kind of endemic warfare caused more problems than it solved and eventually the rivalry of the nobility helped rupture the central authority of the king.

Foreign relations were also troublesome at the end of the Classic Period. In the wake of the collapse of Teotihuacán in the late seventh century, other regional civilizations like El Tajin, Xochicalco, and Cacaxtla made a bid for power. Barbarians and marginally civilized peoples in the borderlands between the ancient great powers, like the Chontai Maya-speaking people living in the Tabasco coastlands, also asserted control of trade routes and established new states in both the highlands and lowlands. These merchant warriors, called the Putún, meddled in the affairs of Maya kingdoms and eventually established new hybrid dynasties that prospered at the expense of the traditional Maya governments.

[[][Fig. 10:1 The Last Inscriptional Dates Before the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization]]

The failure of the Maya way of life did not descend upon them with the dramatic suddenness of a volcanic explosion, a shattering earthquake, or a sweeping plague. The Maya had time to contemplate their disaster during the century it took for their way of life to disintegrate into a shadow’ of its former self. By A.D. 910, the Maya of the southern lowlands built no more temple-mountains to house their portals into the Otherworld and I they erected no more tree-stones to commemorate the glory of their kings and cahalob. Throughout the lowlands, they abandoned literacy as part of the public performance of their kings (Fig. 10:1) and retreated from the society they had built under their leadership.

We have observed the sad end of the kings of Copan, but U-Cit-Tok was not alone in his suffering, nor was he the first to watch central government fall amid growing crisis. On the other side of the Maya world, at Palenque, the last words written in the historical record occur in a pitiful little inscription carved on a blackware vase. This vase was not even found in a royal context but in a slab-covered tomb under the floor of a modest residential compound below the escarpment where the great ceremonial precinct of the old glory days was located. The man who recorded his accession in the text tried to enhance his renown by calling himself 6-Cimi-Ah-Nab-Pacal[605] after the great king who had brought Palenque to glory one hundred and fifty years earlier. The vase, however, was made in some obscure town on the swampy plain north of Palenque, and was probably a barbarian Putun Maya gift to an otherwise silent king.[606] Within fifty years of this date, Palenque had been abandoned and reoccupied by wandering tribesmen who lived atop the debris in the disintegrating buildings, leaving broken fragments of bailgame yokes and hachas lying forlornly about. As at Copan, one of these wanderers was killed when the north building of the Palace collapsed[607] and no one dug his body out to give it honorable burial.

[[][Fig. 10:2 Piedras Negras Stela 12]]

At Piedras Negras, a venerable and powerful kingdom on the Usuma- cinta River southeast of Palenque, the last king closed the history of his domain on a glorious high note of artistic achievement. Stela 12 (Fig. 10:2) is a masterpiece showing the ritual display of captives taken in a war with the small kingdom of Pomona[608] downriver on the Usumacinta, perhaps in a ploy to stop people from the flourishing Putún homeland farther downriver from coming up into the territory of the ancient kingdoms. If this was the intention of the Piedras Negras lords, it did not work. The victory over those unfortunate Pomona lords apparently did not contribute to the survival of Piedras Negras. Pomona’s last recorded date fell in the year A.D. 790, while the victor lasted only another twenty years. The last inscription at Piedras Negras celebrated the end of the nineteenth katun in A.D. 810.

This same twenty-year period saw the demise of Yaxchilán farther upriver on the Usumacinta. Like Palenque, Yaxchilán went out with a whimper rather than a bang, but as with Piedras Negras, the last inscription speaks of war. Bird-Jaguar’s son Chel-Te had indeed lived to rule, testimony to his father’s political success. Chel-Te, in his turn, sired a son whom he named after an illustrious ancestor—Ta-Skull, the tenth successor, who had made the alliance with Cu-Ix of Calakmul[609] in the sixth century. The last Ta-Skull, however, did not live up to the memory of his ancestor. He commissioned only a single lintel, mounted in a tiny little temple that he built next to the lineage house where Bird-Jaguar, his paternal grandfather, had given the flapstaff to Great-Skull-Zero, his grandmother’s brother (Fig. 7:20). The all-glyphic lintel Ta-Skull set above the solitary door of this new temple celebrated his victory in war, but the victory must have been hollow one. Not only does the paltry scale of the building signal Yaxchilán’s drastic decline, but its inscription was the work of a inept artisan. The glyphs started out large on the left and got smaller and smaller as the scribe ran out of room to the right. Like his liege, the writer had failed to plan ahead. He was not alone, for the kings of Bonampak and other smaller centers in the region fell silent at the same time.

Onward upstream at Dos Pilas in the Petexbatún region, the story was the same. During a final battle at the capital of the famous Flint-Sky- God K and his conqueror progeny, a desperate nobility threw up a huge log stockade[610] around the sacred center of their city, trying to shield themselves against the vengeance wreaked on them by their former victims. The kings who oversaw the last public history of that dying kingdom were forced to erect their tree-stones at other places than their capital. One Dos Pilas king recorded an image of himself in A.D. 790 on a stela at Aguateca at the southern end of his dynasty’s conquered territories. On the northern frontier, the last-known Dos Pilas king struggled to retain I control of the Pasión River. He raised two stelae at the little community of La Amelia, at the northeastern edge of his greater realm, on the Pasión River near its confluence with the Usumacinta. He also raised several tree-stones at the strategic site of Scibal. These last-known (Fig. 10:3a) images of a Dos Pilas king, elegant, dynamic, and confidently carved, show him valiantly playing ball. The recorded date is A.D. 807. Such play usually celebrated victory and sacrifice, in remembrance of what the Heroic Ancestors had won and sacrificed in the beginning. But we know in hindsight that the Lords of Death won this time. This man’s kingdom probably ended in a violent cataclysm soon thereafter. Within a few years of the Dos Pilas ballplayer stelae, barbarian kings, probably from downriver, had taken Seibal, its prize vassal, and had effectively cut its trade routes to the Usumacinta River and the Peten.

[[][Fig. 10:3]]

The end of Katun 19 in A.D. 810 saw the last gasp of many kingdoms throughout the lowlands; 9.19.0.0.0 also marked the end of the royal history declared by two great dynasties in the central Peten heartland, the old rival kingdoms of Naranjo and Calakmul. Calakmul was the strongest of these realms, for its king was able to raise three stelae (15, 16, and 64) on that date. All three present him in front view, standing atop a captive and holding a shield and a God K scepter. Evidently this special show of power exhausted his fund of local support for public historical celebrations, for we don’t hear from him again. For an indefinite time thereafter, kings without history (or at least, without texts discovered by archaeologists) must have ruled at Calakmul, for one holy lord of this capital did evidently witness a katun rite at Seibal thirty-nine years later. Indirectly then, we know that Calakmul still continued to exist, even after the end of its own known texts.

Naranjo’s final historical ruler erected only one monument—Stela 32—but it was an extraordinary one. Unusually large, this tree-stone celebrates both the ruler’s accession and the katun ending. Shown seated on a great cosmic throne, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar drawn in an exaggerated style that seems to turn everything into flying scrolls.

Turning to the far southwest of the Maya world, we find what is perhaps the most interesting of these 9.19 stelae, a tree-stone erected at Chinkultic (Fig. 10:3b) in highland Chiapas. This carving bears stylistic affinities to the emerging art of the Puuc region in the northern lowlands and ultimately to Itza monuments at Chichen Itza.[611] Since dated monuments were not known in this part of Chiapas in earlier times, Chinkultic’s appearance on the stage of history may reflect the beginning of a diaspora, a movement of literate Maya nobility from the lowlands into the highlands.[612] They might have been looking to a new political order as well as to a new land, their eyes turned to the Chontal-speaking Putun and the revolutionary state of Chichen Itza.

Since the greatest part of Maya history took place during the four hundred years of the tenth baktun (9.0.0.0.0–10.0.0.0.0), one would think that the end of the cycle, with its promise of new beginnings, would have been celebrated with hope and enthusiasm by the Maya kings who survived to witness its completion. Ironically, the reverse is true. It was as if they all thought of it as a time of ill omen. Only the king of the resurgent Uaxactun dynasty and the ahau of Oxpemul, a little center north of Calakmul, celebrated the end of this great cycle.

Twelve years into the eleventh baktun, a captive event recorded on the High Priest’s Grave establishes Itza presence at Chichen Itza on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, A.D. 842). The High Priest’s Grave is a massive, four-sided pyramid with Feathered Vision Serpent balustrades. Like the Pyramid of the Sun at the great city of Teotihuacan, it was built over a cave to mark it as a place of “origin.” The raising of the Temple of the High Priest’s Grave with its captive iconography marked (Fig. 10:4a) the triumph of a new social and political order in the northern lowlands and a new era of barbarian, hybrid Maya states throughout the Maya world. Through the sy mbolism of the cave, it also declared the new state to derive frorfFthe same origin as the great states of earlier times.]

Yet not all the new rulers chose revolution. Some attempted to build on the foundation of ancient Maya kingship. The earliest Chichen Itza date is remarkably close to the last date (10.0.10.17.15; A.D. 841) at Machaquila, a kingdom just west of the then-defunct Dos Pilas hegemony. That last Machaquila king, One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint (Fig. 10:4b), depicted himself without the deformed forehead and step-cut hair that had been the T ethnic markers of the Classic Maya elite. Either his people had abandoned the old style by then, or they were intruders who knew how to use Maya l symbolism in the old orthodox ways. In light of contemporary events at neighboring Seibal, we think this lord was a Putun trying vainly to rekindle the ancient royal charisma at an old hearth of power. At Machaquila, 1 the ruler sided with the orthodox Peten ritualists, while at Seibal, as we shall see, the lords worked to create a new vision out of the tattered 1 remains of the old kingship.

With the end of the first katun in the new cycle (10.1.0.0.0) came the last surge of historical kingship in the southern lowlands. On that date a lord raised a monument at Ucanal, the old border town between Naranjo and Caracol, and another lord celebrated at Xunantunich, a hilltop citadel in Belize above the river trail leading eastward to the Caribbean coast. Ueanal’s monument is particularly noteworthy because it is carved in a style that had grown to prominence in the region around Tikal late in Baktun 9. It shows the Ucanal ruler (Fig. 10:5) standing with one of his lords on top of a struggling, belly-down captive, scattering his blood in celebration of the katun ending. Above him, floating in a S-shaped scroll of blood, lies a Tlaloc warrior of the type who haunted Ucanal a hundred and fifty years earlier during the Naranjo wars. Together, the king and his colleague, who ruled other cities on the headwaters of the rivers emptying into the Caribbean, defined a new eastern frontier of the old royal territory. Beyond them to the east, in the rich river valleys of Belize, some communities survived and even flourished, but these Maya eschewed royal history.[613] To the south and west, other Putún, wise in the ways of the literate kings, raised stelae in chorus at Altar de Sacrificios on the Usuma- cinta and at Seibal on the Río Pasión.

[[][Fig. 10:4]]

The simultaneous expression of literate kingship at several surviving capitals reveals the different kinds of strategies their royalty chose in order to cope with changing times. While the Pasión was now the domain of Putún kings trying to forge new and more effective ritual formulae, the territory to the north of this river, the old heartland of Petén, belonged to conservative kings determined to stick to the old ways. These men were caught between the astute merchant warriors working their way along the rivers in the south, the rising Itza hegemony in the north, and other barbarians who carried their commerce along the Caribbean coast and up the rivers of Belize. The world of the holy lords shrank back upon its Petén birthplace, its ancient capitals shattering into petty fiefdoms.

At Seibal, to celebrate the end of the first katun in the new baktun, a new king commissioned one of the greatest displays of creative artistry of the Late Classic period—the extraordinary Temple A3. That Seibal king, like One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint of Machaquilá, appears to have been a foreigner,[614] for he too wore his hair long and had the undeformed forehead of barbarian outsiders. Nevertheless, he knew the Classic Maya way and used it to create one of the most innovative statements of kingship in Maya history.

The new ruler, Ah-Bolon-Tun-Ta-Hun-Kin-Butz’ (Ah-Bolon-Tun, for short), came to Seibal after the disappearance of its last Dos Pilas overlord. He took charge and revitalized Seibal enough to make it a major player in the politics of the time. To celebrate the end of the first katun of the new baktun, Ah-Bolon-Tun commissioned a temple with four stairways, each facing one of the cardinal directions. In this respect, he designed this temple to parallel the High Priest’s Grave at Chichén Itzá.[615]

[[][Fig. 10:5 Ucanal Stela 3 drawing by Ian Graham]]

In contrast to the one at Chichen, however, this building clearly declared the personal power of the king. Ah-Bolon-Tun decorated his temple with an elaborate polychrome and modeled stucco frieze displaying four larger- than-life portraits of himself over the doorways, each holding offerings and standing at his portals to the Otherworld. He also portrayed other people, perhaps the witnesses to his celebration, as well as monkeys, birds, and other animals—all in a great profusion of corn plants. The effect was no doubt quite spectacular, a world-renewal ceremony that all could admire and understand.

[[][Fig. 10:6]]

He placed one tree-stone inside the building and one at the bottom of each stairway to form the quincunx pattern so important to ancient Maya imagery. On the eastern tree-stone, he holds a staff and stretches his right hand out in the scattering gesture. On the northern tree-stone (Fig. 10:6a), he holds the Cosmic Monster as a ceremonial bar and records that three Ch’ul-Ahauob, one from Tikal, one from Calakmul, and one from Motul de San Jose witnessed the period-ending rites at Seibal.[616] This passage affirms that those three ancient capitals, or some local pretenders to their titles, were still active at this time and that the political landscape was stable enough to make royal visits worthwhile. The record of this gathering of holy Maya lords in the southern kingdoms shows that the conservative holdouts in Peten may have attempted to insulate themselves from change, but that they were prepared to deal with and acknowledge the barbarian kings.

The western te-tun shows Ah-Bolon-Tun holding the Vision Serpent, named Hun-Uinic-Na-Chan, as if it were a ceremonial bar. On the south te-tun, the king wears the jaguar-costume of Gill and holds up God K’s head in his right hand. The central tree-stone shows him holding a round shield in his left hand and lifting up the Manikin Scepter in the other. These five images depict Ah-Bolon- Tun in some of the most important costumes of Classic Maya kings, but never had these costumes been assembled into one composition in this way, nor had the Cosmic Monster and Vision Serpent been merged with the ceremonial bar in quite this manner. In addition to his innovative treatment of these themes within the Maya canon, he also introduced new symbols—ones shared by the Itza at Chichen Itza.[617]

Many modern scholars have taken Ah-Bolon-Tun to be a Chontal- speaking intruder from the lower reaches of the Usumacinta.[618] While he may have been from an intruding group, it hardly matters. As we have seen, Ah-Bolon-Tun was a practiced and skillful manipulator of the Classic Maya imagery of kingship and therefore an acceptable Maya ruler. Moreover, his contemporaries in the old dynasties of other kingdoms dealt with him as a legitimate ahau. Unfortunately, whatever synthesis of the ancient kingship with barbarian beliefs he tried to put together soon began to unravel.

His successors gamely attempted to sustain the effort, but evidently lacked his command of the old orthodoxy. They erected tree-stones to celebrate the next two katun endings and by doing so they give us clear and poignant documentation of a people who were losing their roots in this ancient culture. Each image became more confused than the last, diminishing not only in the skill with which the drawings were executed but also in the very syntax of symbols that gave Classic Maya art its meaning (Fig. 10:6b). The last Seibal imagery w’ould have seemed gibberish to the literate Maya of earlier generations.

The central Peten kingdoms managed to stave off most intruders, although some barbarians probably established an outpost on the east end of Lake Peten-Itza at Ixlu. While the newcomers built architecture like their cousins at Seibal,[619] the images their king raised on tree-stones were perfectly standard and deliberately echoed the canon of period-ending presentations particular to Tikal. They were trying to buy into the old orthodoxy. On 10.1.10.0.0 and again on 10.2.0.0.0 (A.D. 879), this king erected tree-stones showing him materializing the Paddler Gods through bloodletting (Fig. 10:7a). The Tlaloc-marked, spearthrower-wielding warrior we saw at Ucanal floats in blood scrolls along with the Paddler Gods. More revealing, however, is a round altar that accompanied Stela 2. In his own name, this Ixlu lord claims status as a Ch’ul-Ahau of Tikal, while his reference to the gods repeats exactly the prose of an earlier stela at Dos Pilas.[620]

[[][Fig. 10:7]]

The kings of Tikal had lost more than the area at the east end of Lake Peten-Itza. The last king of Tikal erected his only tree-stone in the middle of the forest of kings in front of the North Acropolis. The image is fairly well wrought, with the figure presented in front view holding the ribbondecorated staff that had become prominent with the staff-kings four hundred years earlier (see Fig. 5:1a and b). In order to display the detail of the backrack in the manner of the traditional style, the artist wrapped it out to the king’s side in a completely unrealistic pose. A bound captive lies belly down behind the king’s ankles, echoing both the old style of composition and the kingdom’s former glory. As in the case of Ixlú and Ucanal, small figures float above in the blood scrolls of the king’s vision. All in all, the image is conservative and deeply concerned with remaining faithful to the old way of doing things. In contrast to the innovative king of Seibal, this Tikal ahau was a fundamentalist.

[[][Fig. 10:8]]

Perhaps he had reason, for his domain was a shadow of its former self. The final years of Tikal saw the kingdom fragmented into a series of petty, competing domains. All claimed legitimacy as the seat of the Ch’ul- Ahau of Tikal. While the dynasty of its old nemesis, Caracol, erected its last tree-stone in 10.1.10.0.0 (A.D. 859), Tikal’s old subordinate, Uaxac- tún, which had reestablished its independence, erected its own tree-stones until 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). In this final irony, Uaxactún’s monumental art lasted twenty years longer than its former master’s.

Furthermore, on the border halfway between Uaxactún and Tikal, yet another lord had established himself as an independent king at the little site of Jimbal (Fig. 10:8a). This ahau erected a tree-stone on the same date as his Tikal rival—10.2.0.0.0, and like his Ixlú contemporary, he used the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Here again the Paddler Gods float in blood scrolls above the king. This king outlasted the Tikal king by twenty years and erected another all-glyphic tree-stone on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889) on the same date as the lord of Uaxactún.

[[][Fig. 10:9 Toniná Monument 101
drawing by Peter Mathews]]

To the north of Tikal near Calakmul, a king of the site now called La Muñeca erected a tree-stone on the katun-ending in A.D. 889. Xultún, a little-studied kingdom northeast of Uaxactún, had sustained a tradition of stela erection since Cycle 8 times, but it too ended on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). Like Tikal, the last performances of Xultún’s artists (Stelae 3 and 10) evoked the old tradition, but at Xultún, the artistic convention called for the king to be portrayed displaying small effigy gods of the Baby Jaguar and Chae (Fig. 10:8b). We don’t yet know the reason why this date marked the ending of monumental art at so many different sites.

The diaspora up the headwaters of the Usumacinta into the highlands can be seen in two more stelae in Chiapas—one at Comitán dated to A.D. 874 and one at a place called Quen Santo in A.D. 879. The last historical declaration of the Classic Maya kings was raised not too far away, also in the Chiapas highlands, at the unlikely kingdom of Toniná. A bellicose realm during most of its Late Classic existence, Toniná’s most glorious moment came when its king captured Kan-Hok-Xul, the aged second son of Palenque’s most famous king, Pacal. For a brief time, the same Toniná king also had a Bonampak lord as his subordinate.[621] Perhaps the military skill of Toniná’s warriors preserved them longer than other Classic-period kingdoms, or perhaps it was their isolated position at the western edge of Maya territory in a valley off the major trade routes. Whatever it was, Toniná’s people retained their Classic heritage longer than any other Maya kingdom. Their last king erected a tree-stone (Fig. 10:9) to celebrate the ka- tun 10.4.0.0.0, which fell on January 20, A.D. 909. This was the last kingly portrait and inscription ever mounted publicly by the Maya of the southern lowlands, and it conformed exactly to the generations-old artistic tenets of that kingdom.

[[][Fig. 10:10]]

However, the collapse of the southern lowlands was not the end of Maya civilization. In the northern lowlands where rainfall rather than raised-field agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, kingdoms prospered as never before in the ninth and tenth centuries. It is in the north, rather than in the south, that the Maya finally established empires over the dominions of kings. As we have seen, the greatest of these empires had its capital at Chichén Itzá, a city with allies at Tula in highland Mexico but with no equal in Mesoamerica during the eleventh century a.D. First cousins of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s people at Seibal, the Itzá constructed a world without kings—a world that was instead ruled by councils of lords.

The Classic Maya view of a world without kings was of a world beyond the pale, a barbarian place without true order. The Chilam Balam chronicles of the northern lowland Maya suggest that the ahauob of Chichón Itzá were sufficiently barbarian to devise such a state. These confederate lords were also Maya enough to regard their solution as a perpetuation of a time-honored practice. They transformed kingship into an abstraction, vested in objects, images, and places, rather than in the individual identity and written words of a person. Their principal image of kingship was not the living king, but a dead king sitting on his sun disk, an icon that had developed from the Classic period ancestor cartouche. Captain Sun Disk may or may not have been an actual person, but his identity as an individual was not the critical message. The function of this imagery was to symbolize the idea of an ancestral king presiding as a spirit over the realm of Chichón Itzá.

For the Itzá the image of such an ancestral king was an anonymous human sitting inside the sun disk wielding the spearthrower and darts of Tlaloc war (Fig. 10:10a). His image could be replaced by a mirror, another ancient symbol of kingship from the Classic period. These two critical symbols of kingship at Chichón, the mirror and the ancestral king, were found together in a cache inside one of the earliest and most important temples at Chichón Itzá—the Temple of Chae Mool, the structure that was later buried inside the Temple of the Warriors. Under the throne seat inside this earlier temple, the ruling council placed a hollowed-out stone column. Inside was a sun disk (Fig. 10:11) carefully wrapped in a sacred bundle, along with stones of divination, the bodies of a finch, representing the warriors of Chichen, and of a pygmy owl, symbolizing Tlaloc war.[622]

[[][Fig. 10:11 Turquoise Mosaic with a Pyrite Mirror. Offering in the Bench from the Temple of Chac Mool]]

In the center of the disk was a golden mosaic mirror of iron pyrite. Surrounding it was a gleaming turquoise mosaic version of the sun disk divided into eight compartments. A profile serpent with a crest of feathers arcing around its head occupied every other compartment, forming a pattern like the four-serpent design that decorated the Classic period ancestor frame (Fig. 10:10b). These crested serpents are the late versions of the Vision Serpent we saw rising in the scene of Shield-Jaguar’s accession, spitting out the image of the founder dressed in the garb of Tlaloc war.

At Chichen Itza, this mosaic mirror was not passed through the generations from king to king. Instead, it was set into the throne to endow it with power and authority. The person who sat on that throne was rendered the temporary steward of ancestral power, a “two-day occupant of the mat,” as the enemies of the Itza scornfully called them.

Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent—Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans and the Vision Serpent of the southern Maya—became the second great abstract symbol of kingship. While images of serpents—feathered, scroll- covered, and plain—abound in the art of Chichen, nowhere in the existing texts is this being given a person’s name. The role of the Feathered Serpent as it writhed between the victims of sacrifice and the hovering ancestor above was clearly derived from the Vision Serpent of Maya kingship. But for these Itza Maya, the Vision Serpent ceased to be the instrument the king used to communicate with the ancestors and became a symbol of the divinity of the state.[623] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the cult of Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, was still the cult of the Maya nobility in Yucatán.

The revolutionaries at Chichón Itzá and the final orthodox kings of the Peten seem to have converged on a central and shared ritual theme in their pursuit of political survival: the Vision Serpent and the calling forth of the Gods and Ancestors through it. In a set of gold plates called the Battle Disks, dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichón Itzá, acts of war (Fig. 10:12a) and sacrifice are depicted. Above many of these scenes writhe Feathered Serpents, Vision Serpents, and blood scrolls embracing Tlaloc warriors, bird warriors, and even GUI, the ancient Sun deity. The similarities to southern lowland images of the same period are striking and underscored by other correspondences in the iconography and epigraphy of these disks and the Cycle 10 monuments of the south.[624] But while the southerners tried to call forth the ancestors to reinforce the ancient definitions of kingship, the lords of Chichón called them forth to proclaim a new order of power. The economic and military success of Chichón Itzá in this contest was undeniable and may have served to seal the doom of the holdouts in Petén.

However, while the Maya of the northern lowlands did succeed in transforming the structure of their government to establish an empire, Chichón at its height was a capital without a public history, without the written declarations of kings embedded into its stone walls. It was a capital that turned its back on a thousand years of Maya royal practice and relegated literacy to the books of chilanob, men who were sorcerers and prophets, but not kings. Joining the ranks of the nonliterate peoples of Mesoamerica, this kingdom looked to the larger world of the Mexican and the Gulf Coast peoples for its prosperity and future. The result of the success of Chichen lords was the Mayanization of Mesoamerica.[625]

Chichen Itza was a great state indeed, but once literate history had been disengaged from the central authority, Maya lords would never again harness the beliefs and aspirations of their own people as once they had. How long that state endured is still a matter of debate among scholars, but it evidently became the template for a cyclic form of government in which power became centralized at one regional capital, then dissolved to re-form elsewhere. After the fall of Chichen Itza, another regional capital arose in the northern lowlands at Mayapan—founded by Cocom lords who claimed descent from the lords of Chichen Itza.

The lords of Mayapan also erected their own tree-stones, but they had become something very different from those of the Classic lords. Their imagery shows gods (Fig. 10:12b) like those in the Dresden and Madrid codices, books that prescribed the timing and nature of ritual. One badly damaged image appears to show a Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First World Tree, mentioned in the prophecy of Chilam Balam. A bird flutters in the sky above the tree in an image that recalls the World Trees at Palenque. Mayapan flourished for a time and then disintegrated as the factions comprising its government struggled among themselves for power. Although the Spanish cut short the bickering among the several small states ruled by these factions, the pattern of cyclical centralization was a precedent the Maya would have likely continued.

The last king of the Maya to reign independently was a man named Can-Ek, king of the Itza who fled after the kingdom of Mayapan failed to the region that had once been ruled by the Ch’ul-Ahauob of Tikal. The last Can-Ek (a name probably meaning Serpent-Star[626]) was at least the third ruler of that name to appear in Spanish chronicles. The first greeted Cortes and his expedition as they made their way across the Peten to Honduras in 1525.

Another Can-Ek met a second Spanish entrada, or “expedition,” to the Itza made in 1618 by the Padres Fuensalida and Orbita. Their goal was to convert the Itza to Christianity. Can-Ek’s reaction to their message bears witness to the power accorded the written word among the Maya. Can-Ek told the padres that, according to the prophecies of the katuns— which projected history to predict the future—their spiritual message was not correct. The padres described his reaction in these words:

<quote> “The time had not yet arrived in which their ancient priests had prophesied to them they were to relinquish the worship of the Gods; because the period in which they then were was Oxahau, which means Third Period ... and so they asked the padres to make no further attempts in that direction, but to return to the village of Tipu and then, on another occasion, to come again to see them.”[627] </quote>

Finding the Itza unwilling to listen, the priests left, and several other attempts to convert the Itza during the next seventy years were met by the same intransigence and sometimes even with violence. It was not until 1695 that the resistance of the Maya to Christianity eased. At that time another padre, Andres de Avendaño y Layóla, accompanied by two other Franciscans and a group of Maya from the town of Tipú in northern Belize, journeyed to the shores of Lake Petén-Itzá to a town named Chacan.[628] After a long night filled with tear and overactive imaginations fueled by memories of past massacres, the three Franciscans emerged from their hut in the morning to see a wedge of flower-adorned canoes emerging out of the glare of the rising sun. The canoes were filled with resplendent warriors playing drums and flutes. Sitting in the largest of the canoes at the apex of the wedge rode King Can-Ek, whom the Spanish chronicler described as a tall man, handsome of visage and far lighter in complexion than other Maya.[629]

Dressed with all the elegance of his station, King Can-Ek wore a large crown of gold surmounted by a crest of the same metal. His ears were covered with large gold disks decorated with long dangles that fell to his shoulders and shook when he moved his head. Gold rings adorned his fingers and gold bands his arms. His shirt was made of pure white cloth elaborately embroidered with blue designs, and he wore a wide black sash around his waist to mark his status as priest of the Itzá. His sandals were finely wrought of blue tread with golden jingles interwoven. Over everything else, he wore a cape made of blue-flecked white cloth edged with an blue-embroidered border. It bore his name spelled in glyphs.[630]

After Can-Ek stepped ashore onto a mat, his men followed him off the canoes while keeping the music going without a break. Silence fell across the plaza when he raised the feather-mounted stone baton he held in his hand. The black-dressed priests of the Chacans came forward to do the king reverence and argue for the sacrifice of the foreigners who had invaded their lands.

Protecting his guests from the Chacan priests, Can-Ek returned to his canoe, taking the Spanish and their party with him for the two-hour canoe trip to his home island. There he hosted Avendaño and his fellow padres in his own house, where they were fed and tended by two of his unmarried sons and two of his unmarried daughters, all of very attractive appearance, according to the Spanish commentator. With the help of two interpreters, Gerónimo Zinak and Ah-Balan-Chel, Avendaño tried to convince Can-Ek that the time prophesied by the Chilam Balam and the katun histories was soon to come.

Can-Ek listened politely to what Avendaño had to say and told him to return another time. That time came later in the same year when Avendaño, in yet another entrada, journeyed south from Merida through the land of the Cehaches, past the huge ruins of Tikal,[631] and to the shore of Lake Petén-Itzá. Once again Avendaño and his party waited for Can- Ek in Chacan. When the Itzá arrived, “they came in some eighty canoes,” Avendaño wrote, “full of Indians, painted and dressed for war, with very large quivers of arrows, though all were left in the canoes—all the canoes escorting and accompanying the petty King, who with about five hundred Indians came forward to receive us.”

The time Avendano had spent learning to speak Mayan and to know Maya prophecies as thoroughly as the Maya’s own chilanob was about to bear fruit. He was to use Maya memory of history to turn their future to his own ends.

Can-Ek must have known it was a special moment too, for in the trip back to Tayasal he tested the courage of his Spanish guest. While they were in the canoe surrounded by painted and befeathered Maya warriors of fierce demeanor, Can-Ek reached down to place his hand over Avendano’s heart. “Are you frightened?” he asked. Hoping to elicit signs of fear, Can-Ek found instead a man prepared to die for what he believed. Avendano looked up at the fearsome ahau and told him he had come in fulfillment of the very Maya prophecies that earlier Can-Ek had used against Padres Fuensalida and Orbita.

“Why should my heart be disturbed?” he retorted. “Rather it is very contented, seeing that 1 am the fortunate man, who is fulfilling your own prophecies, by which you are to become Christians; and this benefit will come to you by means of some bearded men from the East; who by signs of their prophets, were we ourselves, because we came many leagues from the direction of the east, ploughing the seas, with no other purpose than borne by our love of their souls, to bring them, (at the cost of much work) to bring them to that favor which the true god brings them.”[632]

Avendano had turned the tables on Can-Ek. In an act of bravado and perhaps of remarkable insight, he reached up and mimicked Can-Ek’s challenge by putting his own hand on the king’s chest and asking, “Are you now the one who is disturbed by the words of your own prophets?” Can-Ek replied, “No,” but he was putting a good face on the matter, for his own action would soon show he had accepted that the time foretold by the prophecy had come.

When Avendano landed at Tayasal, the capital of the Itza, he and his men were led, for the second time that year, through the streets to Can- Ek’s palace. In the center of the house sat a round stone pedestal and column which the Itza called Yax-Cheel-Cab, “First Tree of the World.” On the western side of the pedestal base, the ill-made (according to Avendano) mask of a deity called Ah-Cocah-Mut rested. Since mut is the word for both “bird” and “prophecy,” we take the image to be the remnant of the Celestial Bird that stood on the crown of the Wacah Chan Tree in Classic-period imagery. Here was the sad echo of the image on Pacal’s sarcophagus, of the great tree-stones of the Classic period, of the tree carved on the stela of Mayapan, and of the tree Naum-Pat saw the Spaniards raise in the temple on Cozumel.

In a temple behind the Yax-Cheel-Cab, Avendano saw a box holding a large bone. He realized later he had seen the remains of the horse Cortes had left with the first Can-Ek 172 years earlier.

Avendano and his companions spent several days in Tayasal, surrounded wherever they went by curious and suspicious Itza. He complained that neither the admonitions of the king nor the protest of the Spaniards forestalled the curious Maya, who touched them everywhere including “the most hidden parts of a man.”[633] All the time Avendano used the old prophecies to work on Can-Ek’s mind. When he finally convinced the Itza king to be baptized, Can-Ek remained suspicious, demanding to know what the bearded priest intended to do, “since they thought that there was some shedding of blood or circumcision or cutting of some part of their body.” The king, like the suspicious Xibalbans of the Popol Vuh, volunteered a child to try it first. Satisfied that he would sustain no physical injury, he suffered himself to be baptized, and soon thereafter three hundred of his people followed his example.

In the midst of these conversion efforts, “governors, captains, and head men of the four other Petens or islands,”[634] arrived at Tayasal splendid in the riotous color of their full war regalia. Avendano calmed them down by inviting them to share food and drink. In his own words, he “treated them kindly, speaking to them more frequently and pleasantly, discoursing with them in their ancient idiom, as if the time had already come (just as their prophets had foretold) for our eating together from one plate and drinking from one cup, we, the Spaniards, making ourselves one with them.”[635]

To argue with these new lords, who would soon prove to be formidable enemies, Avendano spoke to them in Yucatec, read their own books to them, and used their katun prophecies to convince them it was time to accept conversion. He described these books in detail.

It is all recorded in certain books, made of the bark of trees, folded from one side to the other like screens, each leaf of the thickness of a Mexican Real of eight. These are painted on both sides with a variety of figures and characters (of the same kind as the Mexican Indians also used in their own times), which show not only the count of the said days, months and years, but also the ages and prophecies which their idols and images announced to them, or, to speak more accurately, the devil by means of the worship which they pay to him in the form of some stones. These ages are thirteen in number; each age has its separate idol and its priest, with a separate prophecy of its events.

(Means 1917:141)

The hostile chiefs, especially one named Covoh, did not like his words and soon drove Avendano and his companions out of Tayasal in a dangerous, near-fatal retreat through the forest. But a year later, another expedition came back, this one armed and prepared to take on the stubborn Itza by force, if necessary. After a few hours of token resistance, the Itza gave up and fled their island home, leaving the houses of their gods and the site of their Yax-Cheel-Cab to be ravaged by the Spaniards. After 178 years of resistance, the Itza gave up with barely a whimper on March 13, 1697, the day 12.3.19.11.14 1 lx 17 Kankin in the Maya calendar.[636]

The Long Count position of the fall of Tayasal is not that important because the Maya had long since given up the Long Count as a way of keeping time, but they had retained the count of the katuns. The ends of the katuns were the ages Avendano described. Named for the ahau day on which each twenty-tun cycle ended, the katun cycled through the full thirteen numbers used in the tzolkin count. Because the 7,200 days that make up a katun are divisible by 13 with a remainder of -2, the ahau number of each successive katun drops by two. 13 Ahau is followed by 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, 7 Ahau, 5 Ahau, 3 Ahau, 1 Ahau, 12 Ahau, and so on until the count runs through all the numbers. This unit of thirteen katuns formed the basis of the katun prophecies that Avendano used against Can-Ek; each katun ending within the thirteen had its prophecy. The date of Avendano’s visit fell in the katun that ended on 12.4.0.0.0 10 Ahau 18 Uo (July 27, A.D. 1697).

The Chilam Balam of Chumayel records the following prophecy for Katun 10 Ahau:

<quote> Katun 10 Ahau, the katun is established at Chable. The ladder is set up over the rulers of the land. The hoof shall burn; the sand by the seashore shall burn. The rock shall crack [with the heat]; drought is the change of the katun. It is the word of our Lord God the Father and of the Mistress of Heaven, the portent of the katun. No one shall arrest the word of our Lord God, God the Son, the Lord of Heaven and his power, come to pass all over the world. Holy Christianity shall come bringing with it the time when the stupid ones who speak our language badly shall turn from their evil ways. No one shall prevent it; this then is the drought. Sufficient is the word for the Maya priests, the word of God.

8 Ahau, the katun that followed 10 Ahau, was even more ominous than the prophecy above, for throughout Maya history as it was recorded in the katun prophecies, 8 Ahau was a katun of political strife and religious change. These prophecies were the basis of Avendano’s success and Can-Ek’s resigned acceptance of baptism and eventually his defeat.[637] The fatalism that was at the heart of Can-Ek’s thinking came from the katun prophecies. This fatalism was part of the legacy of the Classic-period attitude toward history and its relationship to cyclic time and supernatural causality. Classic-period scribes emphasized the connectedness among the actions of their living kings, the actions of ancestors in the historical and legendary past, and the actions of gods in the mythological past. We do not think men like Jaguar-Paw, Smoking-Frog, Chan-Bahlum, Bird-Jaguar, and Yax-Pac believed that the past dictated the present, but that these events unfolded within the symmetries of sacred time and space. They looked for symmetries and parallelisms as part of their political strategies, and when they could not find them, they very probably manufactured them. The result of this type of thinking, transformed by the exigencies of the Collapse and then the Conquest, became predictive history and produced the fatalism of Can-Ek.

The Spaniards who met Naum-Pat on the island of Cozumel, and 178 years later convinced Can-Ek that his world had come to an end, brought with them a different vision of history and the importance of human events. In their view, w hich we of the Western world have inherited, the history of the New World began with the arrival of Columbus. The eyewitness accounts of these times registered the cataclysmic clash of worlds and realities that was the Conquest and its aftermath; but, as with the story of Can-Ek, we see these events only through the eyes of the Conquerors, not of the peoples they found and changed forever.

Yet as we have shown, the peoples of Mesoamerica had a long and rich historical tradition preserved in many different forms, including myth, oral literature, ritual performance, the arts, painting, and writing. The Maya had kept their written history pristine and untainted by foreign interests for sixteen hundred years before those first Spaniards stepped ashore and surprised Naum-Pat. The conquerors knew the importance of written history to the identity of the people they subdued and used this knowledge to their own ends. They worked to destroy glyphic literacy among the Maya by burning their books and educating Maya children, when they allowed education at all, in Spanish and Latin only.[638] Their logic was clear and compelling: Native literacy perpetuated resistance to the Conquerors and their religion. Denied public history, the stubborn Maya continued to write their own books in secret, eventually in the Roman alphabet as they learned the ways of the Europeans. There are h-men among the Yucatecs today who still read and keep a book of prophecy in the tradition of the Books of Chilam Balam, and the Maya of highland Guatemala still observe and record the ancient count of days and use it to make sense of their lives.

Driven underground, glyphic literacy and the history that went with it was lost until the process of decipherment began to remove the veil. Because we can once again read their words, the ancient Maya are no longer a mute receptacle of our vision of what they must have been. We of the modern world no longer see the historical Maya as our immediate intellectual forebears envisioned them—as serene astronomer priests telling their charges when to plant the crops. Neither were the ancient Maya the “rational economic” people of some current theoretical schemes of social science, nor mindless automatons “behaving” without will or self- awareness as they lived their lives and left witness of their existence in the archaeological record. They were, as occasion warranted, warlike, politically acute, devout, philosophical, shortsighted, inspired, self-serving human beings. Their rulers were fully engaged in managing governments and ruling large populations through the myths and symbolisms they shared with their people. The language and images they used are ones their distant descendants can still understand today.

Recently, Linda Schele had a unique opportunity to observe firsthand the shift of the ancient Maya into the active voice and the potential this transformation holds for the Maya of the modern world. In 1987 while working on the archaeological project in Copán, Honduras, Linda was the guide to a group of American linguists and Maya Indians from the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, México, who came to visit those ancient ruins. During that afternoon and the following day, she shared what she knew of the ancient kings of the city. Some of the visitors were bored and others distracted or doubtful, but for the most part, the Maya and Americans alike were enchanted with what those working at the site had learned. Most of all, they came to the realization that the ancient inscriptions could actually be read. A few grasped that there was powerful history locked up in those silent stones.

They finished the final tour and ate a late lunch together before piling back into their buses to begin the long trip home. While they ate, the leader of the Maya, a Cakchiquel named Martin Chacach Cutzal.[639] asked Linda if she would come to Antigua, Guatemala, that summer and give a workshop on the ancient writing system to a group of modern Maya. She thought about it (for about five minutes) and realized that a lifetime’s dream was about to come true. The modern Maya had asked to learn about the writing and the history of their forebears. Linda[640] traveled to Antigua and, amid the earthquake-shattered ruins of a Spanish church, went on a marvelous four-day journey of discovery into the ancient past with forty Maya men and women.

During the last day, they all worked on reading the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque, one of the most beautiful inscriptions ever carved by the ancient Maya. Everyone cut up a drawing of the inscription and, following Linda’s lead, taped the disassembled text down onto a large sheet so that they could write a translation below each glyph. The resulting grid displayed the structure of the text, showing how its time statements, verbs, and actors worked.

The final session had to end with the text only half translated so that everyone could prepare for the traditional closing ceremony required for such events. Excited with the results, even though they were only half done, almost everyone came forward to express their feelings about the magic that had happened during those four days. Exuberant that it had worked so well, Linda was nevertheless disappointed and a little hurt when one of the most enthusiastic participants, a Kekchi named Eduardo Pacay, known as Guayo to his friends, disappeared without saying a word.

Two hours later, everyone reassembled for the closing ceremony, which was held at the headquarters of the “Francisco Marroquin” project. A polyglot of conversation in at least ten languages floated over the sounds of a marimba as everyone drank rum and cokes or soft drinks and nibbled on snacks of beef, chicken, beans, and tortillas. Finally done eating, everyone stood or sat around the courtyard of the old house as the formal ceremony began in which gifts were given to the teachers and everyone got a diploma declaring that they had participated. Toward the end, Guayo and the two other Kekchi who had been in his team appeared carrying the meter-high chart they had made during the workshop. They opened the tightly rolled paper, and while two of them held it stretched out, Guayo read their translation—in Kekchi. Before forty awestruck witnesses, a Maya read aloud one of the ancient inscriptions in his own language for the first time in four hundred and fifty years.[641] That day, 12.18.14.3.5 1 Men 3 Xul in the ancient calendar,[642] was 291 years after Can-Ek’s conversion and 1,078 years after the last dated monument of the Classic period.

The magic of that moment was special to Guayo and his friends, but it was equally important to the rest of us. In the “world history” courses that punctuate our childhood education, we learn to place a special value on written history and the civilizations that possess it. In antiquity, history was a very special and rare kind of consciousness and it is a momentous event in our own time when we rediscover a lost reality encapsulated in written words. The Maya inscriptions that have been unlocked by the decipherment offer us the first great history of the Americas.

Maya history as we have presented it is, of course, a construction of our times, sensibilities, and intellectual agendas. The ancient Maya who lived that history would have seen it differently, as will their descendants. Even our own contemporaries who work with different patterns of data and different agendas w ill eventually change some of the details and ways of interpreting this information; but that is only the natural result of time and new discoveries. Yet for all the limitations that lie within the proposition that history cannot be separated from the historian, these very limitations are part of the nature of all history—ours as well as theirs. Each generation of humanity debates history, thus turning it into a dynamic thing that incorporates the present as well as the past. This process has been happening with American history both before and after Columbus; it is happening to the history of the last fifty years even as we watch events unfold with mind-boggling rapidity on the evening news. It will happen to the Maya history we have constructed here. But you see, that is the miracle. There is a now Maya history that can be debated and altered into a dynamic synergy with the present and the future. And with that synergy our perception of the history of humanity is changed.

Epilogue: Back to the Beginning

On a warm night in May of 1986, Linda and I, Mary Miller, and many friends celebrated the opening of the Blood of Kings exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by letting a little blood from our fingers onto paper and copal incense and burning the offering. I carefully wrapped the ashes, along with the obsidian blades we had used, in a paper bundle. The following summer, I buried the bundle in the cement benchmark at the center of Yaxuna, a place where I hope to work for ten more years. So we take our thoughts and our feelings for the ancient Maya from this book and from our distant homes back to the Maya field with us, Linda to Copan, me to Yaxuna. Maybe we are a little superstitious, but I’d rather think we’re empathetic, for the Otherworld still shimmers over the Maya landscape even as we of the West pass through it in oblivious innocence.

Don Emetario, captain of the Maya workmen at Yaxuna, and my friend, took me aside at the end of the summer’s work in 1988 to tell me this story. A few years ago he was walking home to the village from his fields along the modern dirt road that cuts through the ruins of Yaxuna. It was dusk, and in the reddening light he saw a tiny boy standing before him, naked and bald. Thinking it might be his son, Emetario cried out to him, but the child ran off the road and disappeared into a hole in the rocky surface of the ancient community. Emetario ran home for a flashlight and peered down into the hole, but all he could see was something furry like a night animal. Was this the “lord of money (the Earthlord)”? Emetario asked me. 1 replied that there are always strange things to be found in ruins, but that I did not know what it was he saw.

I rather suspect that Emctario’s cousin, Don Pablo, knows more than I do about such things. Don Pablo is a H-men, a “known,” or shaman, of the village, who also works for the Yaxuna project. On the last day of our work in the summer of 1988. Don Pablo was working with our photographer in the southern end of the community, clearing the grass from stone foundations for pictures. In the course of the conversation, tie regarded the principal acropolis of the south, a fine raised platform with three buildings upon it, erected in the Preclassic period, at the dawn of Maya history.

“Here was a great temple,” he said, “but the portal is now closed.”

We cannot open the Maya portals to the Otherworld with excavation alone, no matter how careful and how extensive. For the portals are places in the mind and in the heart. We, as pilgrims from another time and reality, must approach the ruined entrances to the past with humility and attention to what the Maya, ancient and modern, can teach us through their words as well as their deeds. So our book is a beginning for us on that path—I look forward to hearing what Don Pablo has to say about our progress.

<right> David Freidel
Dallas, Texas
September 1988 </right>

Update 1991

Since A Forest of Kings went to press, new information relevant to our stories has been discovered. In the 1990 season, excavators in the Caracol Project under the direction of Arlen and Diane Chase discovered several new stelae. According to project epigrapher Nikolai Grube, one of these records an attack on Tikal during the war in which Lord Kan II conquered Naranjo in A.D. 637. Simultaneously, in the Dos Pilas project under the direction of Arthur Demarest, excavators cleared a hieroglyphic stairway, which Stephen Houston and David Stuart, the project epigraphers, analyzed as recording the capture of Shield-Skull, the father of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal on the date 9.12.6.16.17 11 Caban 10 Zotz’ or May 3, A.D. 679. Because we knew only of Caracol’s conquest of Tikal in A.D. 562 when we wrote our story of this period, we could not explain why it had taken so long for Tikal to recover from this single defeat nor why the broken stelae had been allowed to lie unattended in the Great Plaza for over a hundred years. Now it seems likely that Tikal was defeated and devastated at least two more times after the first Caracol victory and that Flint-Sky-God K and his allies disfigured the monuments in the Great Plaza only three years before Ah-Cacaw’s accession in A.D. 682.

The third great discovery came from Nikolai Grube, who deciphered the glyph for “dance” (ak’ot) in May 1990. This new discovery is particularly important to the Bird-Jaguar story in Chapter 7 because the Flapstaff, Basket-staff, and Bird-staff rituals as well as the display of the God K scepter and the bundle can now be identified as public dances. Dance, it turns out, has been one of the focal acts of Maya ritual and political life even until today.

<right> Linda Schele
Austin, Texas
February 1991 </right>

Glossary of Gods and Icons

The Baby Jaguar appears frequently in paired opposition with Chac-Xib-Chac in scenes of dance and sacrifice. He most often appears with the body of a infantile human, although he may also be represented as an adult, fully zoomorphic jaguar. In both aspects, he wears a scarf and is associated with the sun. His human aspect sometimes wears a cruller, associating him with GUI of the Palenque Triad. The Baby Jaguar is particularly important at Tikal in the early inscriptions where it appears as if it were the name of the kingdom. At minimum, it was considered to be a god particularly associated with Tikal, perhaps as its patron. The Baby Jaguar also appears in early inscriptions at Caracol. See Chac-Xib-Chac.

Bicephalic Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Blood is represented by a bifurcated scroll, sometimes with plain contours and sometimes with beaded outlines representing the blood itself. To mark the scroll as blood rather than smoke or mist, the Maya attached a number of signs representing precious materials: kan, “yellow,” yax, “bluegreen,” chac, “red,” shells, jade jewelry like beads and earfiares, obsidian, mirrors of various materials, “zero” signs, and bone. This imagery merges with that of God C, which imparts the meaning “holy” or “divine.” Blood is the holy substance of human beings. See God C.

The Bloodletting Bowl is a flat, shallow plate with angled sides, called a lac in Mayan. It held offerings of all sorts and was often used in caches in a lip-to-lip configuration in which a second bowl was used as the lid. In bloodletting scenes, the bowl usually holds bloodied paper, lancets of various sorts, and rope to pull through perforations.

Cab or Caban, see Earth.

Cauac Signs consist of a triangular arrangement of disks in groups of three, five, or more, combined with a semicircular line paralleled by a row of dots. These signs derive from the day sign Cauac, but in the iconography they mark both things made of stone and the Witz Mountain Monster. When they appear in zoomorphic form or with a wavy contour, cauac signs mark the Eccentric Flint. Combined with the God C-type head, the cauac signs refer to sacred stones, like altars. When the zoomorphic form has eyelids and a stepped forehead, it is the Witz Monster or Living Mountain. See Witz Monster.

The Celestial Bird, also known as the Serpent Bird and the Principal Bird Deity, has a long tail, personified wings, and the head of a zoomorphic monster. Often it appears with a round object and woven ribbon held in its mouth, with a trefoil pectoral around its neck, and a cut-shell ornament attached to a jade headband. In its most common representation it sits atop the World Tree or astride the body of the Cosmic Monster. In its earliest manifestations, it appeared prominently in the Late Preclassic art of the southern highlands. There it represented the idea of nature out of control but brought into order by the Hero Twins and their avatar on earth, the king.[643] This concept of the king as the guardian of ordered nature first came into the iconography of the lowland Maya with the image of this bird, especially in the context of the World Tree.

The Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster.

The Ceremonial Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Chac-Xib-Chac is frequently paired with the Baby Jaguar in early inscriptions, while in Late Classic pottery painting they occur together in scenes of dance and sacrifice. Chac-Xib-Chac can appear in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form, but he is distinguished by a shell diadem, a fish fin on the face of his human version, a shell earflare, and his frequent wielding of an ax. All but the shell diadem and the ax are features shared by G1 of the Palenque Triad, and in fact the two may be aspects of the same entity. Chac-Xib-Chac was the prototype of the great god Chae of the Maya of Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Kings frequently portray themselves in the guise of Chac-Xib-Chac or wear him behind their legs suspended on a chain. On the Cosmic Plate (Fig. 2:4), he is identified by date and actions as Venus as Eveningstar.[644] See Baby Jaguar.

The Cosmic Monster, also known as the Celestial Monster and the Bice- phalic Monster, is a dragon-type monster with a crocodilian head marked by deer ears. The body has legs, usually terminating in deer hooves with water scrolls at the joints. Its body sometimes resembles a crocodile marked with cauac signs, but it can also appear as a sky band or as the lazy-S scrolls of blood. At Yaxchilán, the Monster appears with two crocodile heads, but usually the rear head is the Quadripartite God, which Y hangs upside down in relation to the front head to mark it as a burden of the Cosmic Monster. The front head is usually marked as Venus while the Quadripartite Monster is the sun. Together they represent the movement of Venus, the sun, and by extension, the planets across the star fields at night and the arc of heaven during the day. The Cosmic Monster marks the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds as it exists on the perimeter of the cosmos. See World Tree and Quadripartite Monster.

The Death God (God A) appears as an animated skeleton, sometimes with the gas-distended belly characteristic of parasitical disease or the decay of a corpse. There appear to have been many versions of this god, differentiated by slight variations in the anatomy, the objects carried, and the actions done in the scene. These variations may represent different aspects of the same god, or just as likely, different Lords of Death named for various diseases or actions.

The Directional Gods, see Four-Part Gods.

The Double-headed Serpent Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Earth is represented by bands marked with cab signs from the glyph meaning “earth.” These bands may be split to represent a cleft from which a tree grows or ancestors emerge. In some representations, earth bands may also represent the concept of territory or domain.

Eccentric Flint and Flayed-Face Shield combine a flint lance blade or an eccentric flint with a shield made from a flayed human face. It is an object transferred from ancestor to king in the accession rites at Palenque. At other sites, like Tortuguero, Yaxchilan, and Tikal, this symbol combination is directly associated with war and capture.

The Foliated Cross is a maize tree, representing the central axis of the world in the symbolism of cultivated nature. At its base is the Kan-cross Waterlily Monster representing the canals and swamps of raised-field agriculture. Its trunk, like that of the Wacah Chan tree, is marked with <verbatim><</verbatim> the God C image meaning “holy” or “sacred.” Its branches are ears of maize with a living human head substituting for the grains of maize as a A reference to the myth of creation in which human flesh was shaped from maize dough. Perched on its summit is the great bird of the center, in this context represented as the Waterbird associated with the canals around raised fields. The Waterbird wears a mask of the Celestial Bird. See World Tree.

The Four-Part Gods: Many gods in the Maya system occur in repetitions of four associated with the directions and colors of the four-part division of the world. In the Dresden Codex, Chae (God B) is the principal god shown in a four-part set, but in the Classic period the Pauahtunob[645] or Bacabob are the most frequent deities shown in four repetitions. In the 819-day count of the Classic inscriptions, GII (God K) appears in fourfold division associated with colors, directions, and the appropriate quadrants of the sky. See Pauahtun, GII, and Chac-Xib-Chac.

GI, GII, GUI, see the Palenque Triad.

God B, see Chac-Xib-Chac.

God C is a monkey-faced image that will often have representations of blood drops and other precious materials attached to it. The phonetic reading of the glyphic version as k’ul, the Maya word for “divinity,” “holy,” or “sacred,” identifies the icon as a marker for the same quality. When the image is associated with the depiction of a living being, such as a king or deity, it marks that being as a “divinity.” When it is merged with the image of a thing, such as a tree, stream of blood, or a house, it marks the image as a “holy” thing. See Blood and World Tree.

God D is the most difficult of the old gods to identify iconographically. He has large square eyes, an overhanging nose, a toothless mouth, and wears a headband embossed with a hanging flower. His glyphic name in the codices and the Classic inscriptions is Itzamna. In glyphic expressions at Naranjo and Caracol, which are structurally similar to those naming the Palenque Triad, he appears paired with Gill or the Baby Jaguar.

God K, see Palenque Triad (GII).

God L is one of the aged gods who appear principally in scenes of Xibalba. He is frail and bent with age, wrinkled in feature, and has a huge nose overlapping a toothless mouth. He is a smoker, preferring huge cigars or smaller cigarettes. His most important costume element is a headdress in the form of the mythological bird named Oxlahun Chan (13 Sky). He has a house in the Otherworld, where he is attended by the beautiful young goddesses who personify the number two. His rule of Xibalba is chronieled by a rabbit scribe.[646] He is also the god who presided over the assemblage of gods when the cosmos was ordered on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.

God N, see Pauahtun.

The Headband Twins, who are characterized by ornate headbands displaying the Jester God of kings, occur most frequently in pottery scenes where they are named as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In their fully human aspect, they are the Classic period prototypes of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hun-Ahau Twin carries large dots on his cheek, arms, and legs and functions in the writing system as the anthropomorphic variant of the glyph for lord, ahau. In the Dresden Codex, this Twin appears as the god Venus in his manifestation as Morningstar. His Twin is marked by patches of jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs, and by a cut shell, read ds yax, attached to his forehead. This god functions also as the personification of the number nine and the glyph yax, meaning “blue-green” or “first.” See Palenque Triad.

The Hero Twins, see Palenque Triad and Headband Twins.

The Jester God began as the personified version of the tri-lobed symbol that marked headband crowns of Late Preclassic kings. By the Classic period, this personified version had become the zoomorphic version of the glyph for ahau. Putting a headband with the Jester God, the ahau sign, or a mirror on any animal or human head glyph converted its meaning to ahau. Named for the resemblance of its pointed head to a medieval jester’s cap, this god can appear in miniature form held by the king; but it is most commonly attached to the headband of the king or worn on his chest as a pectoral. The Jester God will sometimes have fishfins on its face.

The Kan-cross Waterlily Monster is a special version of the waterlily distinguished by the presence of a Kan-cross on its forehead. Often the root formations, blossoms, and pads of the waterlily emerge from its head.

It is especially associated with the water environment of agricultural canals. See Waterlily Monster.

The Maize God was represented by a beautiful young man with maize foliation growing from his head. He is identified with the older set of Twins who were the father and uncle of the Hero Twins[647] and his most common representation is as the Holmul Dancer.

The Maw of Xibalba is depicted as the great gaping head of a skeletal zoomorph. This creature has much in common with the mouth of the Witz Monster, but it is always represented with skeletal features and split-representation of two profiles merged at the lower jaw, whereas the mouth of the Witz Monster is shown either in profile or front view as the natural mouth of a fleshed creature. The Maw symbolizes death or the point of transition between the natural world and the Otherworld of Xibalba. In Temple 11 at Copan, the mouth of the Witz Monster was the outer door of the temple itself, while the central platform inside the building was the Maw to Xibalba. In that context, one reached the Maw by entering the mountain. A possible interpretation of the contrast in these images is that the Maw is the portal on the side of the Xibalbans, while the mouth of the Witz Monster is the portal in the world of humans.

The Mexican Year Sign is a trapezoidal configuration that is associated with the Tlaloc sacrifice complex. Its name comes from the function of a similar sign which marks year dates in the Aztec codices. See Tlaloc.

The Moon Goddess in her Classic period form often sits in a moon sign holding a rabbit. Her head functions both as the numeral “one” and as phonetic na. Since na was also the word for “noble woman,” the head of the Moon Goddess precedes female names, distinguishing them from the names of male nobles. In the codices and the Yucatec Colonial sources, the Moon Goddess was called Ix-Chel and she may appear as an aged woman with a toothless mouth.

The Paddler Gods are named from their appearance on four bones from the burial chamber of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal. In the scenes incised on these offerings, they paddle the canoe of life carrying the king’s soul through the membrane between the worlds and into death. The Paddlers appear with special frequency in references to period-ending rites, where they are born of the king’s blood offering. Both gods have aged features. The Old Stingray God is distinguished by squint-eyes and a stingray spine piercing the septum of his Roman nose. He sometimes wears the helmet of a mythological fish called a xoc. His twin is also aged, but he is distinguished by a jaguar pelt on his chin, a jaguar ear, and sometimes a jaguar helmet. From glyphic substitutions, we know this pair represents the fundamental opposition of day and night. The Old Stingray God is the day and the Old Jaguar God the night.[648]

The Palenque Triad is composed of three gods most fully described in the inscriptions and imagery of Palenque where they are asserted to be the direct ancestors of that kingdom’s dynasty. Sired by the mother and father of the gods who had survived from the previous creation, they were born only eighteen days apart. Although their kinship to human kings is detailed only in the inscriptions of Palenque, we surmise they were considered to be ancestral to all Maya kings and thus central images in Maya iconography.

GI, the first born of the Triad, is human in aspect and distinguished from his brothers by a shell earflare, a square-eye, and a fish fin on his cheek. He is particularly associated with the imagery of the incense burner in the Early Classic period and as a mask worn by kings during rituals. GI often wears the Quadripartite Monster as his headdress and is associated with the Waterbird.

GII, the last born of the Triad, is always zoomorphic in aspect. His most important feature is a smoking object—such as a cigar, torch holder, or ax head—which penetrates a mirror in his forehead. He may appear as a reclining child, as a scepter held by a ruler, or as an independent full-figured being. His face always has the zoomorphic snout traditionally called a long-nose, but his body is often shown as human with a leg transformed into a serpent. He is thus the serpent-footed god. He is also called God K,[649] the Manikin Scepter, and the Flare God and has been identified with the Maya names Tahil, Bolon Tzacab, and Kauil.[650] GII is particularly associated with the ritual of bloodletting, the institution of kingship, and the summoning of the ancestors. He is the god most frequently shown on the Double-headed Serpent Bar.

GUI, the second born, is also human in aspect, but he is marked by a jaguar ear and a twisted line called a cruller underneath his eyes. Gill is also called the Jaguar God of the Underworld and the Jaguar Night Sun. His most frequent appearance is as an isolated head worn on a belt, carried in the arm, or surmounted on shields carried by kings and nobles. Both GI and GUI have Roman-nosed, square-eyed faces, long hair looped over their foreheads, and human bodies. GI and GUI will often appear as twins.

The Pauahtuns (also known as God N) are aged in feature with snaggleteeth, small human eyes, and a wrinkled visage. They often wear net headbands in combination with cauac or ‘‘stone” markings on their bodies as spellings of their name, paua (“net”) plus tun (“stone”). Characteristically, they wear a cut-shell pectoral or their bodies emerge from a conch shell or turtle carapace. The version that wears waterlilies in addition to the net headband might have the body of a young man.

The Classic Maya represented the Pauahtuns as beings who held up the four corners of the world. Sometimes they were the sky and sometimes the earth. The image of the Pauahtuns as world bearers is seen, for example, on Temples 11 and 22 of Copán. Pauahtuns are also depicted with scribes and artisans on painted pottery and on sculpture, as in the case of the Scribe’s Palace at Copán. The number five is personified as Pauahtun.

The Personified Perforator is a blade of flint or obsidian, or sometimes a thorn or a stingray spine attached to the ubiquitous long-nosed head that Y personifies inanimate objects in the Maya symbol system. Its other critical feature is a stack of three knots, a symbol that evokes bloodletting with S the perforator.

[[][Principal Bird Deity, see Celestial Bird.]]

The Quadripartite Monster appears in three major versions: as the rear head of the Cosmic Monster, as an independent image at the base of the World Tree, and as a scepter or headdress. It never has a body and its head is usually fleshed above the muzzle and skeletal beneath it. A flat bloodletting bowl marked with the sign for the sun, kin, forms its forehead and a stingray spine, a shell, and crossbands rest in the bowl. The stingray spine represents the blood of the Middleworld; the shell symbolizes the water of the Underworld; and the crossbands are the path of the sun crossing the Milky Way, a sign of the heavens which can be represented by a bird’s wing in Early Classic examples. GI of the Palenque Triad often wears this image as its headdress. The Quadripartite Monster represents the sun as it travels on its daily journey through the cosmos. See Cosmic Monster, World Tree, and GI.

The Royal Belt consists of a heavy waistband to which jade heads were attached at the front and sides. Typically, these heads, which read ahau, surmount a mat sign (or an equivalent sign of rule) and three celts made of polished jade or flint. A chain hung from the sides of the belt to drape across the back of the wearer’s legs where a god hung from the chain. Many examples of the dangling god are identified iconographically as Chac-Xib-Chac. This dangling version of Chac-Xib-Chac also occurs as the head variant of an important title reading chan yat or in some versions chan ton. The first paraphrases as “celestial is his penis” and the second as “celestial is his genitals.”

The Serpent Bar, also known as the Bicephalic Bar, the Double-headed Serpent Bar, and the Ceremonial Bar, is a scepter carried in the arms of rulers, usually held against their chests. To hold the Bar, Maya rulers put their hands in a formal gesture with their wrists back to back and their thumbs turned outward. Its original function in the Late Preclassic period was to symbolize “sky” based on the homophony in Mayan languages between chan-“sky” and chan-“snake.” In Early Classic times, kings began to hold the double-headed snake as a scepter. Since it had originally marked the environment through which the gods move, its structural position in Maya symbolism overlaps partly with the Vision Serpent. In its fully developed form, it signals both sky and the vision path, as well as the act of birthing the gods through the vision rite.[651] See Vision Serpent.

Serpent Bird, see Celestial Bird.

The Skyband consists of a narrow band divided into segments by vertical bars. Inside each segment is a glyph for a planet, the sun, the moon, or other celestial objects.

The Sun God is related to Gill of the Palenque Triad. This particular version features a Roman-nosed human head with square eyes and squintlike pupils in the corner. The four-petaled flower kin marks the head as the image of the sun.

Tlaloc is a symbol of war and bloodletting consisting of a jawless head with blood scrolls emerging from its mouth and large circles around its eyes. It is associated with spearthrowers, darts used as weapons, and a certain type of flexible, rectangular shield. Warriors dressed in the costume of this complex usually wear a full-body suit made from a jaguar pelt. Often, a horned owl will also occur with this imagery. This symbolic complex and its sacrificial meaning is shared by many contemporary Mesoamerican societies, including Teotihuacan, which may have lent this ritual complex to the Maya during the Early Classic period.

Twins and Oppositions: The principle of twinning and opposition is at the heart of Maya cosmological thought. Paired gods, like the Paddlers who represent day and night, are common in Maya religious imagery. Some twins represent oppositions and others are actual twins, born of the same parents. Any god could, however, if need be, appear alone outside its normal pairing. New oppositions could also be generated by new pairings. The most famous examples of twins are the Ancestral Heroes of the Popol Vuh, who are related mythically and historically to several of the frequently shown twins of the Classic period. Another context in which oppositions appear with regularity is in the glyphs that introduce Distance Numbers. In this context, the oppositions function as metaphors for the concept of change, the replacement of one thing by another. Some of the oppositions expressed in this context are male-female, life-death, windwater, Venus-moon, blood-water. The principle of paired oppositions remains today a fundamental characteristic of Mayan languages and metaphor. See Headband Twins, Paddlers, Palenque Triad, Chac-Xib- Chac, and Baby Jaguar.

The Vision Serpent is usually depicted as a rearing snake, sometimes with feathers lining its body and sometimes with its body partially flayed. Personified (or ‘’Holy”) Blood is usually attached to its tail as a symbol of the substance which materializes it. It symbolizes the path out of Xibalba through which the ancestral dead and the gods enter the world when they are called in a bloodletting rite. Normally, Vision Serpents are depicted with a single head, but two-headed versions are known. The Maya apparently softened the distinctions between Vision Serpents and Double-headed Serpent Bars because they considered them to be related in meaning.[652] See Serpent Bar.

Wacah Chan, see World Tree.

Water is the substance in which the world floats. It is shown welling up out of the portal to the Otherworld. In at least some images, water is the atmosphere of Xibalba and actions which occur there take place as if they were underwater. Water is depicted in two ways: as Water Bands composed of alternating rows of dots, scrolls, and stacks of rectangles representing the surface of water, especially shallow water as in swamps or agricultural canals; and as bands filled with the images of waterlilies. Because nab, the word for “waterlily,” was homophonous with words for “lake,” “swamp,” and “river,” Waterlily Bands represented these bodies of water. Waterlily Bands often merge with the symbolism of Blood Bands. A Water Hole is a glyphic and symbolic version of water contained under the earth, in cenotes, and perhaps in rivers. It is related to the glyphic and iconic version of the Maw of the Underworld.

The Waterbird represents a generic class of bird the Maya associated with water, especially the waters of rivers, swamps, and the canals of raised- field agriculture. This bird usually has a long neck, but as in the case of the Palenque Emblem Glyph bird, it can also have a short neck. The head has the crest of the heron and the upturned, bulging beak of the cormorant. See the Celestial Bird.

The Waterlily Monster is the personification of lakes, swamps, and other bodies of still water. It is characterized by the pads and blossoms of the waterlily and in some cases it will appear with an Imix glyph (distinguished from other imix glyphs by cross-hatching in its center) in its forehead. This particular version is closely associated with the tun and uinal glyphs that are used in Long Count notations. A particularly important title of Classic nobility was based on the uinal substitution as a reference to the nobility as “people of the waterlily” or, perhaps, “people of the swamps and lakes.”

The Witz Monster is the symbol of the living mountain. It is depicted as a four-legged zoomorphic creature marked with the distinctive signs of the Cauac and “stone.” To differentiate the Witz Monster from the zoomorph representing “stone,” the Maya portrayed the mountain with eyelids and a stepped cleft in the center of its forehead. On pottery, the mouth of the Witz Monster is often depicted agape. The Witz Monster was placed on temples to transform them into sacred, living mountains. Its open mouth then became the entry into the mountain, symbolizing both the doorway of the temple and the mouth of a cave. To specify which mountain they were picturing the Maya would attach icons to the Witz or write its name within its eyes. See Cauac Signs.

The World Tree is the central axis of the world. Called the Wacah Chan (“six sky” or “raised up sky”) in the glyphs, it appears in the form of a cross marked with God C to denote it is a divine or holy thing. The bejeweled, squared-snouted serpents which usually terminate its branches represent flows of liquid offering—human blood and its analogs, rubber, copal, and the red sap of the ceiba tree. Draped in the branches of the tree is the Double-headed Serpent Bar of kings and perched on its summit is the Celestial Bird Deity, who is the bird of the center in the directional model of the world. The World Tree often emerges from behind the rear head of the Cosmic Monster. The front head of the same creature can be depicted as its roots. The Tree is the path of communication between the natural and supernatural worlds as it is defined at the center of the cosmos. The Cosmic Monster is the same path of communication configured for the periphery of the cosmos. The king personifies this World Tree in his flesh. See Foliated Cross.

Notes

Prologue

[1] This conference, organized by Merle Greene Robertson at Palenque, was a pivotal meeting, bringing together thirty-five of the most active people in Maya studies. The acceleration of the glyphic decipherment and iconographic studies can be traced to this meeting and the timely publication of its results a year later.

[2] Our work with the dynastic history of Palenque was built on Berlin’s (1968) identification of the rulers we called Pacal, Kan-Xul, Chaacal, and Kuk, and Kubler’s (1969) discussion of persons he called Sun-Shield and Snake-Jaguar. Kelley (1968) demonstrated the phonetic reading of one king’s name as Pacal or “shield.” Our work identified two new kings and an accession phrase that allowed us to fill in the gaps in Berlin’s and Kubler’s earlier work.

[3] David Kelley was the first to read Pacal’s name as it was originally pronounced; George Kubler identified the builder of the Group of the Cross as Snake-Jaguar (a name w’e later translated into Choi as Chan-Bahlum); and David Stuart read the inscription that dated Temple 22 and thus identified its builder as 18-Rabbit.

[4] The Harvard-Arizona Cozumel Project was directed by Jeremy A. Sabloff and William L. Rathje and was principally funded by the National Geographic Society. See Freidel and Sabloff (1984) for a description of the ruins on the island.

Foreword

[5] Ahau is glossed in the Motul dictionary, one of the earliest colonial sources on Yucatec Maya, as “rey o emperador, monarca, principe or gran señor” (“king or emperor, monarch, prince or great noble”). In the inscriptions of the Classic period, the high king was an ahau, but so were many of the high nobles in his court. The inscriptions record that the king took the office of ahau when he became king and that he was a k’ul ahau, “holy (or divine) lord” of his kingdom. We shall use the ahau title to refer to Maya of this highest rank, and following the custom of using pluralizing suffixes from other languages as legitimate forms in English, we will pluralize ahau in the Maya fashion as ahauoh.

1. Time Travel in the Jungle

[6] Huastec is recognized by modern linguists as a Mayan language. Archaeologically and linguistically, the separation between Huastec and other Mayan languages occurred very early—probably by 2,000 B.c.

[7] The term Mesoamerica was invented by Paul Kirchhoff (1943) as both a cultural and geographic term to identify a region limited by aboriginal farming, which did not extend into the deserts of northern Mexico, to an eastward limit defined by Mayan- speakers and their cultural and economical influence.

[8] There is still much controversy over the relationship between the hunter-gatherer populations who have left scattered stone-tool evidence ofcampsites in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and in the lowlands of Belize and the farming populations which emerge in the Middle Preclassic period (1000–400 B.C.) Some scholars believe that substantial new populations of farmers moved into the lowlands at the beginning of this period, bringing with them settled village life, the use of ceramic vessels, and the use of domesticated plants. They suggest that these are the true ancestors of the civilized Maya. However, Fred Valdez (personal communication, 1989), reports the presence of preceramic archaic occupation directly underlying the Middle Preclassic village at the site of Colha in northern Belize. With further research, the relationship between an indigenous hunter-gatherer population and the ensuing village farming populations will become clearer. Migration of peoples between the Maya highlands and the adjacent lowlands certainly did occur in antiquity, as it is continuing to occur today.

[9] To say that the shaman conserves culture is only partly accurate, for his constant improvisation of interpretations must be anchored in the changes his people constantly experience from the world around them. His actions are indeed homeostatic in all senses of that word: They work to heal the contradictions in village priorities which inevitably come with the imposition of change from without. These actions conserve things of value by constantly reshaping the changes the Maya perceive in their world to fit fundamental cherished ideas which can be traced thousands of years into the past.

[10] We called Stephen Houston and David Stuart asking them if they would send a letter to us documenting the new reading so that we could refer to it. Houston’s and Grube’s letters arrived within twenty-four hours of each other. This is typical of the growing dynamism in the field of decipherment. As more and more decipherments are made, they in turn generate new readings, so that when a critical mass is reached, many people at once come to the same conclusions. Houston and Stuart (1989) have since published their evidence for this reading.

[11] Humboldt included five pages from the Dresden Codex in his 1810 narrative of his scientific travels in Mexico with botanist Aimé Bonpland. Del Rio’s travels were published by Henry Berthoud of London in 1822 in a book called Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City, which included seventeen plates depicting stone carving from Palenque.

[12] Our recounting of these interesting events is all based on George Stuart’s (n.d.) detailed study of the history of publication and research in the field.

[13] Ian Graham, director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, follows in their footsteps by publishing fine drawings and photographs of Maya inscriptions. Merle Greene Robertson is another of the great archivists. She has spent the last thirty years making rubbings, photographs, and drawings of Maya inscriptions and carvings.

[14] This description was included in his A Study of Maya Art (1913). Completed originally in 1909 as his doctoral dissertation, Spinden’s work represents the first systematic study of Classic period iconography. Many of its observations and connections still hold good today.

[15] Morley (1915:26) proposed this methodology and actually applied it to become the first to suggest a war event at Quiriguâ. Shortly after this time, however, he began a lifelong campaign to photograph and analyze all the Classic period inscriptions he could lind. 1 he two resulting works, The Inscriptions of Copan and The Inscriptions of the Petén. are still critically important resources, but in both, Morley paid almost exclusive attention to calendric material. He was never again interested in the “textual residue,” which ironically he systematically excluded from his drawings.

[16] The critical papers outlining these discoveries were all published between 1958 and 1964, including Berlin (1958 and 1959), Proskouriakoff (I960, 1961a, 1961b 1963- 1964), and Kelley (1962).

[17] This statement was published in the preface to the 1971 edition to his (Thompson 1971:v) Maya Hieroglyphs: An Introduction, but it was but one of several devastating criticisms he published against phoneticism as proposed not only by Knorozov but also by Whorf (Thompson 1950:311–312). His voice was powerful enough to shut down debate until the mid-seventies. Although there are still holdouts against phoneticism today, many of them strident in their opposition, the accumulated evidence, and especially the productivity of the phonetic approach, has convinced most of the working epigraphers that Knorozov was right. We are still engaged in energetic debate about details and individual readings, but there is wide consensus as to how the system works.

[18] Elizabeth Benson, director of the Pre-Columbian Library and Collections of Dumbarton Oaks until 1979, called a series of mini-conference between 1974 and 1978. The participants, David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, and Linda Scheie, worked out detailed paraphrases of the inscriptions of Palenque. This work resulted not only in many new decipherments but in the important methodology of paraphrasing based on syntactical analysis of the texts.

[19] Three of the four known Maya books are named for the cities where they are now found: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Paris Codex. The fourth, the Grolier Codex, resides now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of México. Made of beaten-bark paper folded in an accordion form, each codex combines pictures and written text drawn in bright colors on plaster sizing. The Maya read their books by folding the leaves from left to right until reaching the end of one side; they then turned the codex over and began reading the other side.

[20] Codices from the Mixtec recorded lineage histories as the land documents of their communities. Aztec sources record tribute lists, histories of various sorts, and calendric almanacs and were used to carry news from one part of the empire to another.

[21] Yucatecan is the ancestor of modern Yucatec, Itzá, and Mopán, while Cholan diversified into Choi, Chontai, Chorti, and the extinct language, Cholti. Most linguists consider that the diversification into these daughter languages occurred after the Classic period ended (A.D. 900).

[22] The descendant languages of these two proto-languages were found in approximately this distribution at the Conquest, but with the now extinct Cholti language spoken in the area between Choi and Chorti. Examples of glyphic spelling specific to one or the other language occur in roughly similar distributions, suggesting that they were in approximately the same distributions during the Classic period. Yucatec and Choi also evidence profound interaction in their vocabularies and grammars beginning during the Late Preclassic period, although they diverged from each other many centuries earlier.

[23] This particular homophony has long been known to epigraphers and iconogra- phers, although Houston (1984) was the first to fully document its use in the writing system.

[24] We use the word logograph rather than pictograph because most word signs were not pictures of the things they represented. All pictographs are logographs, but most logographs are not pictographs.

[25] The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov (1952) first identified the way the phonetic spellings work, but it was many decades before his work became generally accepted by Western scholars.

[26] Kathryn Josserand has explored the discourse structure of hieroglyphic texts and found a fruitful comparison of the ancient patterns to the modern. She has found that many of the features that the ancient Maya repeatedly used, such as couplets (Lounsbury 1980), oppositions, building a text toward a peak event, and disturbance in syntax around the peak, are still used today.

[27] Continuities in their toolmaking techniques suggest these people gradually developed village societies between 1500 and 1000 B.C., at least in the eastern Caribbean coastlands of Belize, where there is a gradual shift toward settled village life along the shores of the rivers. R. S. MacNeish (1982) carried out a survey in Belize and discovered the sites and stone artifacts dating from the archaic, prefarming period.

Up until 1988. radiocarbon samples from the remarkable village site of Cuello in northern Belize dated the earliest Maya farmers at roughly 2000 B.C. This period of occupation fell in the Early Preclassic period of Mesoamerica. The weight of evidence (as announced by Norman Hammond, the excavator of Cuello, at the Austin Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in 1988) now favors redating the Cuello village occupation about a millennium later, in what archaeologists call the Middle Preclassic period.

[28] By 900 B.C., hierarchical society was established in the Copán Valley, resulting in a burial tradition with wide-ranging access to exotic goods, especially jade. These burials, especially Burial XVIII-27, are among the richest so far known from the early period in the Maya region (W. Fash n.d. and Scheie and M. Miller 1986. 75, Pl 17).

[29] 1 he groups in the Pacific lowlands have long been accepted to have been May an- speaking. Linguists, especially Terrence Kaufman, Lyle Campbell, Nicholas Hopkins, Kathryn Josserand, and others, now propose that those peoples were speakers of the Mije-Zoqucan language family with the Zoqueans living in the western region closer to the Isthmus and with Mije groups in the east toward El Salvador (Kaufman, personal communication, 1989). If this distribution is correct, then much of the early symbolism of kingship from that region derives from the Mije-Zoqucan cultural tradition, rather than the Mayan.

[30] This kind of social organization is called segmentary because it consists of politically autonomous groups who, for purposes of trade, ritual communion, marriage, and the management of hostilities, regard themselves as descendants of common ancestors and hence as segments of a large family. The lowland Maya developed other forms of social organization as their society became more complex—patron-client relationships, for example, between noble families and families devoted to crafts and skilled labor. Nevertheless, the segmentary lineage organization remained a fundamental building block of Maya society and politics throughout the span of the civilization. The period of civilization has been called segmentary state organization and this is a reasonable label in light of the enduring role of kinship in the hierarchical structure of royal governments.

The archaeological investigation of the origins of Maya complex society in the lowlands is proceeding at a very rapid pace in the interior of the peninsula. Richard Hansen and Donald Forsyth (personal communication, 1989) have recently discovered that the community of Nakbc near El Mirador contains pyramidal mounds of 18 to 28 meters elevation dating to the Middle Preclassic period, perhaps between 600 and 300 B.c. This discovery indicates that before the advent of the Late Preclassic period, some lowland Maya communities were already experiencing the centralization of ritual activity and the concentration of labor power characteristic of the ensuing era of kings. The people of Copan already enjoyed extensive trade contacts and access to precious materials such as carved greenstone during this Middle Preclassic period. Recently, the elaborately decorated Swazy ceramics of northern Belize were redated from the Early Preclassic period into this Middle Preclassic period. Several sites in northern Belize, including Cuello and Colha, were sizable villages with centralized ceremonial activity and extensive trade contacts during this period. The famous Olmec heartland site of La Venta in the Gulf Coast lowlands flourished during the same era and was clearly importing vast quantities of exotic materials from highland sources. Some of the La Venta sources may well be situated in the Motagua drainage in the southeastern periphery of the Maya lowlands.

Viewing this shifting landscape, we now suspect that during the Middle Preclassic period, a long-distance trade network, a “jade trail,” crossed the interior of the peninsula from the Caribbean coast of Belize, through the vicinity of El Mirador, and thence across to the Gulf Coast lowlands. We suspect a pattern similar to the situation after the collapse of the southern kingdoms in the ninth century. Then, a few complex societies endured in the interior to form a demographic archipelago across the sparsely inhabited forest. These societies facilitated trade in exotic commodities and also provided local products for export. This pattern may also exist at the outset of the demographic buildup leading to the emergence of civilization in Preclassic times. Eventually, further discoveries in the interior may push the origins of the institution of ahau back into the Middle Preclassic period. Even were this to be the case, however, ethnographic analogy with other areas of the tropical world, such as Central Africa, shows that small complex societies can coexist with large tribal societies for centuries without the tribal societies developing into states. The empirical record of the Late Preclassic still suggests that the institution of kingship coalesced and dominated Maya lowland society in a rapid transformation during the last two centuries B.c.

[31] We discuss the structural transformations of kinship ideology which accompanied the invention of Maya kingship in Freidel and Scheie (1988b).

[32] See John Fox’s (1987) study of this kind of organization among the Postclassic Quiche of the Guatemala highlands.

[33] Lee Parsons (personal communication, August 1987) excavated a Late Preclassic offering in a major center of the Pacific slopes area which contained a set of three carved greenstone head pendants suitable for wearing as a crown. One of these head pendants is the Jester God, the diagnostic diadem of ahau kingship status from the Late Preclassic period until the Early Postclassic period (Freidel and Scheie 1988a). On Stela 5 at the site of Izapa, a major center of the Late Preclassic period in the southern highlands, the Jester God diadem is also depicted worn by an individual in authority (Fields n.d.). Under the circumstances, there is reason to believe that the institution of kingship predicated on the status of ahau was present in the southern regions of the Maya world as well as in the lowlands to the north during the Late Preclassic period.

[34] There is a massive four-sided pyramid at the northern lowland site of Acanceh in Yucatán which Joesink-Mandeville and Meluzin (1976) correctly identified as Preclassic on the basis of a partially preserved monumental stucco mask illustrated by Seler (Seler 1911). The iconography of this monumental mask is commensurate with the royal iconography of Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros (Freidel and Scheie 1988b). The famous noi thern-lowland bas-relief in Loltún Cave depicts a Maya king. Although not firmly dated by epigraphy or archaeological context, the style of the royal regalia is Late Preclassic (Freidel and Andrews n.d.).

[35] The city of El Mirador raised stelae in the Late Preclassic period (Matheny 1986), and Richard Hansen (1988) has discovered Late Preclassic-style stone stelae at the site of Nakbe, near that great city. We have yet to find any with hieroglyphic writing.

[36] This early date is recorded on the Hauberg Stela (Scheie 1985c and Scheie and M. Miller 1986:191). The names of the phases of Maya history—Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic—are misleading in that civilized life and with it public works of enormous size began earlier than the Classic period. Although an important temple of the Late Preclassic period was excavated at Uaxactun early on (Ricketson and Ricketson 1937), it was not until the last fifteen years that archaeologists finally began to uncover the truly amazing accomplishments of the lowland Maya during the Late Preclassic period.

[37] The latest dated monument from the Classic period is found at the site of Tonina. It has the date 10.4.0.0.0 or the year 909.

[38] Pat Culbert (1988 and personal communication, 1986) gives an overall population distribution of 200 people per square kilometer for the entire Maya region. He estimates a population of 500.000 at Tikal.

[39] We will describe the Maya state with several words, including kingdom, domain, dominion, and polity—a word that technically connotes territoriality and political dominion without additional qualifications as to the nature of the organization or whether it can be considered a nation or a state.

[40] Berlin (1958) noticed this special type of glyph in the inscriptions of many different sites. He showed that it is composed of two constants—the “water-group” affix, which we now know to read ch’ul (“holy”), and the “ben-ich” affix, which reads ahau—and a variable, which corresponded to the city in which the Emblem Glyph was found. Since he could not decide whether this new type of glyph referred to the city as a place or to its ruling lineage, he decided to call it by a neutral term—Emblem Glyph.

Peter Mathews (1985a, 1985b, 1986) has done the most recent work on Emblem Glyphs. Following Berlin’s and Marcus’s (1973 and 1976) work, he observed that the rulers of some neighboring communities, such as Palenque or Tortuguero, are both named as ahau of Palenque, suggesting that the territorial entity named by the Palenque Emblem Glyph is larger than the capital city. He also noted that in star-shell war events the main signs from Emblem Glyphs appeared as if they were locations. Combining these data, he proposed that Emblem Glyph are titles, naming the person who has it as a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”) of a polity. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have additionally recognized glyphs representing geographical features and separate population centers within an area described by a single Emblem Glyph. Finally, we have evidence from Copán that noble lineages tracing their descent to different founders, and presiding over distinct communities within the realm, nevertheless used the same Emblem Glyph. The Copan Emblem Glyph appears on Altar 1 of Rio Amarillo in the name of a governor who ruled that subordinate site, and at the same time traced his descent from a founder other than the founder of Copán’s royal line (Scheie 1987d). Emblem Glyphs thus denote a kingdom or polity as a territorial and political entity with a hierarchy of social positions and different geographical and urban locations within it.

[41] Joe Ball (1989) reports that in the Buena Vista region of northern Belize the larger palace complexes are distributed at five-kilometer intervals throughout the region he surveyed. In between the larger compounds, residential clusters and single-family holdings are found distributed at regular intervals. He has found pottery at the smaller compounds that was probably made at the large Buena Vista center. More important, in debris at Buena Vista, he also has found very well-made pottery with the name of the king of Naranjo (Smoke-Squirrel, whom we shall meet in one of our histories) painted on the rim. Seiichi Nakamura (1987) and the Japanese team working in the La Venta Valley near Copán in Honduras have found the same pattern. One of the largest sites in their survey area, Los Higos, has a stela in the style of Copán, while at least one second-level site had an ahau important enough to have received an incised alabaster vase as a gift from Yax-Pac, the high king of Copán. This gifting down of elite goods was apparently one of the ways Maya kings retained the loyalty of their subordinate lords.

[42] Research to date by Mathews and Justeson (1984:212–213) and Stuart (1984b and 1986c) has documented the use of this cahal title only in sites of these regions. However, other Maya polities certainly had parallel constructions of political ranking and may also have used this title. Stuart and Houston (personal communication, 1987) have now expressed doubts as to the phonetic value of this title glyph, although they do not question its basic meaning. We will continue to employ it as a useful technical term for this rank that is already known in the literature.

[43] Cahalob appear as attendants to kings at Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but they also ruled sites like Lacanjá and El Cayo under the authority of the high kings of larger cities. At least one, Chac-Zutz’, was formerly identified as a king of Palenque, but it is now clear he was in fact a cahal probably serving as a war captain to the high king (Scheie n.d.b).

[44] The inscriptions from kingdoms up and down the Usumacinta record royal visits by people who are named theyahau, “the ahau of,” the high kings of allied kingdoms (Scheie and Mathews n.d.). These royal visits appear to have been one of the important methods of establishing and maintaining alliances between kingdoms and within them.

[45] Lateral descents of this kind are recorded several times in the inscriptions of Palenque, Tikal, Caracol, and Calakmul, among others (Scheie n.d.e). Enough examples are now documented to presume that brother-brother inheritance was an accepted pattern, which may still survive in the highlands of Guatemala. In many of the Maya groups living there, the youngest son inherits the house of his parents and is responsible for caring for them in their old age. Often the son will become owner of the house and the responsible male of the household while his parents are still alive.

[46] Mathews (1986) generally requires the presence of an Emblem Glyph to define a polity, but since Emblem Glyphs usually do not occur in the northern inscriptions, he used other less certain data to suggest polity boundaries in this northern region. His resulting map of Late Classic polities shows a network of small states covering all of the lowlands, and if anything, his numbers may be overly conservative.

[47] Kan-Xul of Palenque and 18-Rabbit of Copán were both captured late in their lives after long and successful reigns. They were apparently sacrificed by their captors—the rulers of the smaller towns of Toniná and Quiriguá, respectively.

[48] When we went to Palenque the first time in 1970, the Chois and Tzeltals living south of Palenque had to rely on canoes to carry cargo from their homes in the Tulijá Valley to Salto de Agua and Villahermosa. At that time there were many men who knew how to make dugout canoes, but when the new road was built from Palenque to San Cristóbal de las Casas, this region opened up to truck and bus travel. The younger generation uses modern transportation and the art of canoe making is being lost. See Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzman (1985) for a description of canoe making and its role in Choi society.

[49] This carrying system places the cargo in a band passed across the bearer’s forehead and down his back. The weight is thus distributed into the muscles of the neck and onto the back, allowing amazingly heavy loads to be carried substantial distances. This method is still used throughout Central America, where one often sees small children walking down the highway bent under the huge load of firewood they carry back to their houses each day. Their parents will carry 100-pound sacks of grain using the same method.

[50] We have all seen recent photographs of the pall of smoke from the burning forest hanging over the Amazon Basin. In the dry season, this is a fact of life across the Maya landscape as well. We might suppose that it would not have been nearly as bad during the Classic period, but archaeology and settlement-pattern studies suggest that the population of the Classic period at least equaled current levels and may well have exceeded them. At the height of the Classic period, soot from dry-season fires would have hung as oppressively over the landscape as it does today.

2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, AND THE MAYA WORLD

[51] The scene on the Acasaguastlan pot (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:181, 193–194) suggests that in Classic Maya thought these two planes of existence were more than just reciprocally dependent. The scene shows the Sun God in the midst of a vision represented by mirrored Vision Serpents—one manifesting day and the other night. Interspersed among the folds of these Vision Serpents are the beasts of the field and forest, elements representing the human community, the waters of both worlds, and sacrificial ritual which communicates between the two. The “waking dream” of the god is the world in which human beings live. On the other side of the equation, David Stuart (1984a, 1988c) has shown that the Maya believed that this vision rite, when performed by kings and other human beings, “gave birth” to the gods. Through this process, the beings of Xibalba, both supernaturals and ancestors, were materialized in the world of humans. If this reciprocity of the vision rite in both worlds was widely believed (and there is evidence to suggest it was), then the w’orld of human experience came into existence as a vision of the gods, while humanity gave the gods material presence in the Middleworld of people through performance of the same rite. In a very real sense, each plane of existence is materialized through the vision rituals performed by inhabitants of the other.

[52] This is more than mere speculation. One of the results of the revolution in Maya hieroglyphic translation is confirmation of the hypothesis that what Maya villagers think of the world today, what their ancestors thought of it at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and what the Classic Maya kings thought of it are all transformations of one and the same model (Vogt 1964). These connections are possible only if, in fact, the villagers of the Classic period, the direct ancestors of the post-Conquest villagers, also shared this model of reality.

[53] These layers are represented in the three elements surmounting the sun-marked bowl of sacrifice in the forehead of the Quadripartite Monster. This symbol, which rests at the base of the World Tree or rides on the tail of the Celestial Monster, represents the sun as it moves through these domains. In turn, the three domains are symbolized by the signs resting in the sacrificial plate, with the crossed bands representing the heavens, the stingray-spine bloodletter representing the blood of sacrifice composing the Middleworld of earth, and the shell representing the watery world of Xibalba.

[54] Xibalba is the Quiche Maya term used in the Popol Vuh for the Underworld. Recinos notes the following about the derivations of this word: “Chi-Xibalba. In ancient times, says Father Coto, this name Xibalbay meant the devil, or the dead, or visions which appeared to the Indians. It has the same meaning in Yucatán. Xibalba was the devil, and xibil to disappear like a vision or a phantom, according to the Diccionario de Motul. The Maya performed a dance which they called Xibalba ocot, or ‘dance of the demon.’ The Quiche believed that Xibalba was the underground region inhabited by the enemies of man.”

While Xibalba is traditionally regarded as the name of the Underworld, and certainly this is the principal spatial location of Xibalba in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1985), we suggest that the Classic Maya regarded the Otherworld as an invisible, pervasive, ambient presence. Even in the Popol Vuh, there are celestial aspects to Xibalba as interpreted by Dennis Tedlock: “They [the Ancestral Hero Twins] choose the Black Road, which means, at the terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld will take them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that they were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they descended below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the Road to Xibalba.” (Tedlock 1985:38; brackets ours). Tozzer’s (1941:132) annotated discussion of Landa’s understanding of Maya hell and heaven likewise reveals the fact that in Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya supernatural abode of gods and ancestors traversed the Underworld, Middleworld, and heavens.

Our analyses of the texts and images pertaining to the Otherworld of the Classic Maya suggest that this is a parallel world revealed in trance. The ritual public spaces of the kings, where people congregated to witness sacrifice, were explicitly designed to convey the idea that they were in the Otherworld (see the acropolis plazas of king Yax-Pac at Copán in Chapter 8). We believe that in the thrall of great public ceremonies, the combination of exhaustion, bloodletting, intoxication, and expectations of trance yielded communal experiences of the Otherworld denizens conjured forth by royalty. Such experiences confirmed the legitimate power of the kings who bore primary responsibility for the interpretation of the visions.

[55] The Popol Vuh stories give the best and most humorous view of Xibalba. We recommend the translation by Dennis Tedlock (1985). Michael Coe has done more than any other scholar to associate the Popol Vuh vision with imagery from the Classic period. See Michael Coe (1973, 1978, and 1982) and Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more detailed discussion of Xibalba and Maya concepts of the afterlife.

[56] Thompson (1950:10–11) was the primary proponent for the crocodile identification. Puleston’s (1976) work on the iconography associated with raised fields supported Thompson’s ideas. Recently, Taube (1988) has presented convincing evidence that the turtle was also used as a symbol for the land surface of the world.

[57] The expressions for the directions vary greatly from language to language, and depend to some degree on whether the speaker faces east or west when naming them. East has different names in different Mayan languages: In Yucatec, it is lakin or “next sun”; in Cholti, it is tzatzib kin or “strong sun”; in Chorti, it is wa an kin, “risen sun ; and in Choi, it is pasib kin or “arrived sun.” North is xaman (there is no etymology for this word) in Yucatec; in Choi chiik iklel and in 1 zeltal kini ha al refer to the north as the direction of winter rains. In Chorti north is tz’ik, “left (side of the sun),” and in Izotzil it is xokon winahel, the “side of heaven.” West is chikin, “eaten sun,” in A ucatec and yaram kin, “below the sun,” in Lacandon. In Choi bdhlib kin, “set sun,” or mahlib kin, “gone away sun’—as well as male! kakal, “gone away sun ’ in Tzotzil—refer to the west as the leaving or setting position of the sun. South, known as nohol in Yucatec and nool in Cholti, is the great side of the sun, because this direction is on the right-hand side as one faces the rising sun.

[58] The glyph wac ah chan is recorded in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque as the name of the sanctuary inside the Temple and by extension the name must refer to the central image of the interior panel. That central image is the World Tree. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the Temple of the Cross.) Nicholas Hopkins in the 1978 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing was the first person to suggest a decipherment for the glyph naming this axis as “stood-up or raised up sky,” and David Stuart’s (personal communication, 1986–87) work with the proper names of buildings and stelae contributed greatly to the recognition of this wac ah chan as a proper name.

[59] David Stuart (1988c) has made an argument that the Double-headed Serpent Bar is another manifestation of the path of communication between the Otherworld and our world.

[60] As we shall see, other important people in addition to kings could participate in opening the portal to the Otherworld through elicitation of the Vision Serpent. As long as the Maya had kings, they remained the pivotal characters in such royal dramas.

[61] This plate was painted by the same artist who executed the famous Altar de Sacrificios vase. See Schele and M. Miller (1986:304—307, 310–312) for a detailed analysis of this plate.

[62] Symbols representing the power of objects began as a profile polymorphic image directly attached to objects such as earflares and bloodletters during the Late Preclassic period, personifying such objects as alive with power (Schele and M. Miller 1986:43–44 and Freidel and Schele 1988b). Objects and people continued to be decorated with these little power polymorphs in public art throughout the Classic period. The metaphysics of this way of regarding the material world is cogently summarized by the great Mayanist ethnographer E. Z. Vogt speaking of the modern highland Maya of Chiapas: “The phenomenon of the inner soul is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to the Zinacantecos also possesses an inner soul: domesticated plants, such as maize, beans, and squash; salt; houses and the fires at the hearths; the crosses; the saints in the churches; the musical instruments played in ceremonies; and the Ancestral Gods in the mountains, as well as the Earth Lord below the surface of the earth. The ethnographer in Zinacantan soon learns that the most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons, nor between persons and objects, as we think of these relationships, but rather between inner souls inside these persons and material objects, such as crosses.” (Vogt n.d.:10-l 1). Crosses, we should add, are further described by Vogt: “In Chiapas they symbolize ‘doorways’ to the realm of the Ancestral Gods who live inside the hills and mountains and/or represent Ancestors themselves, as the Classic Maya stelae depict rulers or royal ancestors” (Vogt n.d.:25). David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has associated these same concepts with the God C “water group” set of signs. This set reads ch’ul, “holy” or “sacred,” in the writing system.

[63] The Spanish describe the Maya drawing blood from all parts of their bodies as their principal act of piety. In Classic representations and post-Conquest descriptions, the most important rites required blood from the penis or tongue, although it could also be drawn from any part of the body (Joralemon 1974 and Thompson 1961). The ritual served two primary purposes in the understanding of the ancient Maya: as the nourishment and sustenance of the gods and as the way of achieving the visions they interpreted as communication with the other world (Furst 1976). The Maya believed this bloodletting-vision rite gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a, 1988c), and thus materialized them in the human world. Every important dynastic and calendric ritual in Maya life required sanctification through bloodletting (Scheie and M. Miller 1986). It brought the central axis into existence and allowed communication with the ancestral dead and the gods.

[64] Mayan languages have two words for “house”: otot is a “house,” but the word incorporated the idea that someone possesses it (analogous perhaps to “home” in English). Na, on the other hand, is a building that does not include ownership in the concept of the word. The word otot cannot be uttered without implying that the house is owned—it is always someone’s house. Na was used in the proper names of temples, but otot is the glyph used to name the category of object to which “temple” belonged. Temples were sacred houses owned by the gods and the spirits of the ancestral dead who resided in them. Thus we know that the ancient Maya thought of the temple as an inhabited place.

[65] The term “monster” has been in Maya scholarly literature since Spinden’s (1913) first study of Maya iconography, but it is a loaded term to English speakers recalling the Frankensteinian tradition in literature and films. Nevertheless, “monsters” in our own tradition usually exhibit features combining animal and human or distorting the normal features of either to the level of the grotesque. The Maya generated their images of supernatural creatures in the same way, combining animal with human or exaggerating the features of both to produce an image that could never be mistaken for a being from the natural world. It is in this sense that wc use the term “monster,” without intending to associate it with any of the negative connotations that have become attached to the word. We use it in its original sense of “something marvelous, a divine portent or warning, something extraordinary or unnatural” and “an imaginary animal (such as a centaur, sphinx, minotaur, or heraldic griffin, wyvern, etc.) having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animal forms” (OED:1842- 1843).

[66] David Stuart (personal communication 1987) first recognized the glyph for witz in its many permutations at Copan and interpreted it as “mountain.” Most important, he found a passage on the Hieroglyphic Stairs where witz is written with the zoomorphic image formerly identified as the Cauac Monster. Distinguished from the cauac zoomorph meaning “stone” by the presence of eyelids and a stepped indention in the forehead, this “mountain” image is the long-nosed god, so prevalent in Maya art and on buildings, which has in the past been called Chae. Rather than referring to the raingod, however, the image identifies the temple as a “mountain” as well as a sacred house. The doorways of temples at Copan and especially in the northern regions are often built in the form of this monster to identify them as the ti’ otot “mouth of the house.” The mouth of the mountain is, of course, the cave, and Maya mythology identifies the road to Xibalba as going through a cave. The Maya not only used natural caves as the locations of bloodletting and vision ritual (MacLeod and Puleston 1979), but the inside of their temple was understood to be the cave pathway to the Otherworld. The ritual of bloodletting materialized the World Tree as the path to the supernatural world. See “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: 301–316) for a detailed examination of the imagery associated with this pathway.

[67] These are elementary and pervasive metaphors of shamanistic ecstasy (sec Mircea Eliade 1970:Chapter 8). It is our basic working hypothesis that Maya royal charisma was essentially shamanistic as this concept is defined by Eliade (see Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

[68] Ritual activities of the modern Maya generally involve the creation of altars, arbors, and corrals which, in their essential features, realize the structure of the world given in this model: four trees at the corners, or six poles holding up the altar. And the associations given by modern “knowers” of these rituals are the same as those to be found in the ancient royal performances: the fourfold arrangement of the cosmos; the use of sacrifice (now chickens, turkeys, deer, or pigs), and most significant, the principle that the created “place” is a conduit to the supernatural. The fact that the modern village Maya, and their direct village ancestors as described by the conquering Spanish, performed ritual that is resonant with that of Precolumbian Maya, albeit of elite and royal status, clearly implies that the knowledge and the performance were the province of the commoner ancients as well.

[69] The pervasive quality of access to the supernatural in shamanistic cosmology is well articulated by Mircea Eliade: “Although the shamanic experience proper could be evaluated as a mystical experience by virtue of the cosmological concept of the three communicating zones [heaven, earth, underworld], this cosmological concept does not belong exclusively to the ideology of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism, nor, in fact, of any other shamanism. It is a universally disseminated idea connected with the belief in the possibility of direct communication with the sky. On the macrocosmic plane this communication is figured by the Axis (Tree, Mountain, Pillar, etc.); on the microcosmic plane it is signified by the central pillar of the house or the upper opening of the tent— which means that every human habitation is projected to the ‘Center of the World, or that every altar, tent, or house makes possible a break-through in plane and hence ascent to the sky.” (Eliade 1970:264–265; brackets ours, italics original.)

[70] Vogt (n.d.) describes the staffs of high office among the modern peasant Maya of the highland region in terms strictly commensurate with this hypothesized attitude of the ancient Maya toward sacred objects and facilities. For example, he states, “The batons are washed and censed in communities such as Chamula in order not only to rid them of accumulations of sweat and dirt, but also to rid them symbolically of any mistakes made by a predecessor serving in the same position. Note that the first washing in Chamula rids the batons of sweat and dirt, and administrative errors, while the water and liquor used in the second and third cleanings are served to the officials who in drinking these liquids renew the sacred power that has come down to them from the Ancestral Gods via these batons. Note also that the silver-headed batons are believed to be infallible; if administrative errors have been made, they are the mistakes of human officials who hold these batons while serving in high offices” (Vogt n.d.:39^4O). Similar repeated ritual results in accumulative power endowed in the silver coin necklaces of the saints housed in Zinacantan center (Vogt 1976:127–128).

[71] New excavations of Temple 26 at Copan have demonstrated that the iconography of the Ballcourt at Copan remained the same in all of its manifestations from Early Classic through Late Classic times. Other buildings, such as Temple 22, retained the same sculptural program through different construction phases, suggesting that those particular foci were symbolically defined early in the city’s history and remained unchanged through subsequent centuries. When new buildings were to be constructed, the Maya performed elaborate rituals both to terminate the old structure and contain its accumulated energy (Freidel and Scheie n.d. and Scheie 1988b). The new structure was then built atop the old and, when it was ready for use, they conducted elaborate dedication rituals to bring it alive. These dedication and termination rituals permeate the archaeological record and they represent a major component of the history recorded in the inscriptions at many sites.

[72] The containment rituals were elaborate and their effects widespread in the archaeological record. The portrait images of both humans and deities were effaced, often by destroying the left eye and nose. Color was removed or whitewashed and sculpture slashed, broken, burned, or sometimes carefully sealed in. Holes were drilled in pottery vessels and other objects were broken or effaced to contain their power. In an earlier building under the summit of Temple 26 at Copan, a circle of charcoal and broken stingray spines, remaining from a ritual conducted to terminate an earlier version of the temple, was recently discovered (W. Fash 1986). At Cerros, this ritual involved the careful burial of the old facade and rituals in which hundreds of pottery vessels were broken over the building. The huge percussion holes that mar the Olmec colossal heads are also remnants of termination rituals (Grove 198 1), reflecting the long-term presence of this ritual and its underlying definition of sacred energy in Mesoamerican thought.

[73] The Old Testament Bible is a complex compilation of history, law, poetry, and prophecy (Drane 1983:22–23) written down over an extended period of time by several authors (Spuhler 1985:113) during the emergence of the Hebrew nation as a state. Behind the Bible is a long history of literacy and of literature both in Greater Mesopotamia and in Egypt. In these respects, the Quiche Popol Vuh is quite comparable. It too is a complex compilation of law, poetry, and history pertaining to a nation. It is also subsequent to a long history of literacy in bordering territory and related society, namely among the lowland Maya. The parallels between the histories of the Old Testament and earlier sacred literature from Mesopotamia are often striking, particularly with respect to Genesis (Spuhler 1985:114–115). In the same fashion, the parallels between the Creation story in the Popol Vuh and the allusions to Creation in the sacred literature of the Classic lowland Maya are beginning to become clear. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the Popol Vuh does not register direct transmission of the Classic Maya cosmology or theology any more than the Old Testament registers directly the beliefs of Sumerians. In both instances, we are dealing with long and complicated literary and theological traditions. Ultimately, our interpretations of the Classic Maya reality must be anchored in the contemporary Classic period texts, images, and archaeological record.

[74] The surviving version of the Popol Vuh combines stories of the great protagonists of Maya myth, the Hero Twins called Hunahpu and Xbalanquc, with creation stories and the dynastic history of the Quiche. Found in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango by the Spanish priest Ximénez in the seventeenth century, the book records the history of Quiche kings to the year 1550. Ximénez hand-copied the original and transcribed it into Spanish. The original is now lost, but we have the copy made by Ximénez. Of the three English versions by Recinos (1950), Edmonson (1971), and Tedlock (1985), we recommend the Tedlock version as the easiest reading for those interested in knowing these stories. The Popol Vuh is one of the finest examples of Native American literature known to the modern world.

[75] See Freidel and Scheie (1988b) and Cortez (1986).

[76] Karl Taube (1985) associated the older set of twins with the maize god and the image from pottery painting known as the Holmul Dancer.

[77] Many of the underworld creatures pictured on Classic Maya pottery have Emblem Glyphs in their names. Houston and Stuart (1989) have shown these beings are the way or “coessences” of the ahau of those kingdoms.

[78] Sec Michael Coe’s (1973, 1978, 1982) works on Maya pottery painting for a corpus of images showing Xibalba and its denizens.

[79] There are as many modern myths about the Precolumbian ballgame as there are ancient ones. The most persistent is that the winner was sacrificed, because the loser was considered unworthy. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that curious idea and the stories of the Popol Vuh, our most detailed information on the game, clearly demonstrates that the loser not the winner was the victim of sacrifice. The father and uncle of the Hero Twins were decapitated after they lost to the treacherous Lords of Death. The most interesting recent work on the Precolumbian ballgame is Ted Leyenaar’s (1978) documentation of a game still played in the state of Sinaloa. His photographs of the equipment and the play resemble Classic Maya imagery to a remarkable degree.

[80] All Maya calendar counts are in whole days. Since fractions were not available, the Maya used only whole-day adjustments to account for remainders in cycles of fractional lengths. For instance, a lunation is approximately 29.53 days long. To account for the accumulating error in a whole-day count, the Maya alternated a 29-day and 30-day moon to give a 29.5-day average. However, even this approximation soon accumulated discernible error between where the count said the moon should be in its cycle and what one observed in actuality. To adjust for that error, the Maya would place two 30-day months back to back, with different sites using different formulas of 29- and 30-day sequences. None of these approximations produced a particularly satisfactory result. With the true tropical year of 365.2422 days, they did not even try. Instead they kept a simple whole-day count that proceeded day by day without attempting to adjust for the .2422 day that accumulated each year. They were aware of the length of the true solar year and reckoned by it when necessary so that rituals would fall on the same point within it—for example, on a solstice. In their calendar, however, they let the count of days drift, with their New Year’s day, 1 Pop, falling one day later in the solar year every fourth repetition. See Floyd Lounsbury (1978) for a detailed discussion of the Maya calendar and number system.

[81] The use of letters of the alphabet to name these gods comes from Schellhas (1904), the first modern scholar to systematically study their images and glyphic names in the codices. God K, the deity of the 819-day count, appears in four versions which are distinguished by the color glyph and direction of the four quadrants through which the count moves. The first 819-day-count station began 6.15.0 before the creation day and is associated with the birth of the mother of the gods in the text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque (Lounsbury 1976 and 1980; Scheie 1981 and 1984b).

[82] No apparent relationship to astronomical or seasonal periodicities has been discovered, so that we presume the cycle is based on numerology.

[83] Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1987) has proposed that uayeb is an agentive noun derived from the Choi word waye!, “to sleep.” Uayeb (the five-day month at the end of a year) is, thus, the “resting or sleeping” part of the year.

[84] The Maya, like other Mesoamerican people, believed the world had been created more than once and then destroyed. Each creation used one form of matter that was destroyed by its opposite, for example, a world of fire destroyed by water. Aztec myth makes the current creation the fifth to exist. The writers of the Popol Vuh described these successive creations as the attempts of the gods to create sentient beings who would recognize their greatness. The gods tried different solutions; animals, people of mud, and then wood. Finally in the fourth attempt, they succeed in creating humanity of maize dough. If this seventeenth-century version corresponds to the ancient myth, the current existence is the fourth version in the cosmos to have been created.

[85] Justeson and Mathews (1983) have proposed that the name of this 360-day year is Yucatec and derived from the practice of setting stones to mark the end of years in this count.

[86] The ancient Maya called these twenty-day months uinic or “human being” because people have twenty fingers and toes just as a month had twenty days. Modern scholars most often use the term uinal because that is the term found in the Colonial sources from Yucatán. Both terms were apparently extant in the Classic period, for both spellings occur in the inscriptions; however, there is a preference for uinic over uinal. The Maya apparently thought of the month as a “person,” while they thought of the year as a “stone-setting.”

[87] Except for katun, these terms are coined by modern scholars from Yucatec dictionaries of the Colonial period. Each term is a Yucatec number, bak, pic, calab, combined with tun, the word for year or stone.

[88] We transcribe the Maya vertical arrangement into a left to right format using arabic numbers with periods separating the various cycles. The highest cycle, the baktun (“400-stone”), is written 13.0.0.0.0: 13 baktuns, no katuns, no tuns, no uinals, no days.

[89] The thirteenth 400-year period of the Maya Calendar is soon to end. 13.0.0.0.0 will occur again on December 23, 2012, but this date falls on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, rather than on the creation day, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. From the ancient inscriptions, we know that the Maya did not consider it to be the beginning of a new creation as has been suggested. At Coba, the ancient Maya recorded the creation date with twenty units above the katun as in Date 1 below.

| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 0. 0. 0. | 0 | 4 | Ahau |
| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 9.15.13. 6. | 9 | 3 | Muluc |
| 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. | 8 | 5 | Lamat |

These thirteens are the starting points of a huge odometer of time: each unit clicks over from thirteen to one when twenty of the next unit accumulate. The baktun clicked from thirteen to one four hundred years after the creation date. The Olmec lived during the fifth 400-year cycle; the earliest written dates in Mesoamerica fall into the seventh cycle; and Classic history took place in the last quarter of the eighth and all of the ninth 400-year cycle. The latest Long Count date known is 10.4.0.0.0 at Tonina. Since dates rarely required that numbers higher than the baktun be written, the Maya regularly excluded them from their dates.

We have one exception to this practice at Yaxchilan, where a scribe wrote a date on the stairs of Temple 33 with eight of the larger cycles above the baktun recorded (Date 2 above). The Yaxchilan scribe intended to set this important historical date in its larger cosmic scale, and by doing so told us that all of the higher cycles of the calendar were still set at thirteen during Maya history. Another inscription, this one from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, projects into the future to the eightieth Calendar Round of the great king Pacal’s accession. They give us a count of the precise number of days it will take to come to this date which happens to be only eight days after the end of the first 8,000-year cycle in this creation (Date 3 above). The pictun will end on October 15, 4772, in our calendar and the anniversary will occur eight days later on October 23, 4772.

Combining the information from all these dates, we have reconstructed the nature of Maya time in this creation. On the day of creation, all the cycles above the katun were set on 13, although this number should be treated arithmetically in calendric calculations as zero. Each cycle within the calendar is composed of twenty of the next lowest units, moving in the order 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000, 3,200,000, 64,000,000, and so on toward infinity. With this information, we can project how long it will take to convert the highest thirteen in the Coba date to one—41,341,050,000.000,000,000,000,000,000 tropical years.

These huge numbers are meant, of course, to represent the infinite scale of the cosmos, but ihey give us other kinds of information. Although the Long Count appears to record a linear concept of time, it, like the other components of Maya calendrical science, was cyclic. Different eras came and went, and each era was itself composed of ever larger cycles, one within the other and all returning to a starting point. The metaphor used by modern scholars is that of a wheel rolling back on its starting point. It is the huge scale of the higher cycles that allowed the Maya to unite linear and cyclic time. From a human point of view, the larger cycles can be perceived only as a tangent, which has the appearance of a straight line. We use this type of scale in the same way to build a cyclic concept into our essentially linear definition of time—our cosmologists place the “Big Bang” 15,000,000,000 years ago and they contemplate the possibility that it was but one of many “Big Bangs.”

[90] Lounsbury (1976) has discussed “contrived numbers,” as deliberately constructed time distances which link days before the creation date to days in the historical present. The function of these contrived relationships is to demonstrate that some historical date was “like-in-kind” (on the same point in many of the important cycles of Maya time) to the pre-creation date. The worlds that exist on either side of that creation date (13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku) have their special symmetries and patterns of sacredness. To demonstrate that a historical date is “like-in-kind” to a pre-creation date is to say it has the same characteristics and brings with it the symmetry and sacredness of the previous pattern of existence.

[91] These four books, named for the cities in which they are found or for their first publishers, are the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex. Made of beaten-bark paper coated with a fine plaster surface and folded like accordions, the books record in pictures and writing which gods and what acts were associated with days in the calendar. Tables for anticipating the cycle of Venus and eclipses of the sun are also included as books of learning and prognostication for calendric priests specializing in the use of the calendar.

[92] In trying to understand how the ancient Maya thought about time and space, modern people can think of the fabric of time and space as a matrix of energy fields. These fields affect the actions of human beings and gods, just as the actions of these beings affect the patterns within the matrix. For the Maya, it was a relationship of profound and inextricable interaction.

[93] At Palenque, Tikal, and Copan, historical texts recall events that occurred during Olmec history, 1100–600 B.C., or in Late Preclassic times, 200 B.c. to A.D. 200. The texts at Palenque and Tikal imply that each of those dynasties had ruled during those early times, although archaeology has shown that neither kingdom existed during Olmec times. The symbolic relationship they meant to imply was similar in nature to the Aztecs’ proclamation of themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Toltec or our own invocation of Rome or Athens as the source of our political ideology.

[94] When we started writing this book, we presumed that primogeniture was the primary system of inheritance and that the examples of brother-brother successions were historical rarities. Our research, however, has shown that lateral succession was far more frequent than we had believed (Scheie n.d.e.). We still believe that primogeniture was the preferred pattern, but that lateral succession from older brother to younger brother was also acceptable.

[95] William Haviland (1968) provides a lucid and remarkably prescient discussion of Classic Maya kinship organization from the vantage of ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnological information. The epigraphic data generally support the patrician organization he describes.

[96] Although clan structure is a common social institution in the prcindustrial world, in the case at hand there is a specific glyph that designates the founding ancestral king of a royal Maya clan (Scheie 1986b). This characterization of Maya elite organization is documented in Classic Maya history and is not an extrapolation backward from the period of the Spanish Conquest. The function of designating a founding ancestor is to define a group of descendants as relatives and to internally rank these people.

[97] Several reconstructions of the Classic period kinship system have been posited based on evidence from the inscriptions and languages, but we find the evidence for a patrilineal and patrilocal system to be by far the strongest. The major proponents of this system have been Haviland (1977) and Hopkins (n.d.).

[98] This lineage compound was excavated during the second phase of the Proyeto Arqueologia de Copan. Dr. William Fash first proposed the identification of this compound as the residence of a scribal lineage, an interpretation we accept (W. Fash 1986 and 1989).

[99] The glyph for this rank was first identified by Mathews and Justeson (1984) as a title for a subordinate rank. David Stuart (1984b) greatly expanded their discussion by analyzing the distribution and iconographic context for the title. Although the proposed decipherment of the title as cahal is disputed by some epigraphers, we shall use it as a convenient way of identifying this office, accepting that the reading may change in the future.

[100] The type-rank system used in the Copan Valley survey developed during Phase 1 of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan (Willey and Leventhal 1979). Phase 11 of the PAC excavated one example of each of the four types under the direction of Dr. William Sanders. These four excavated examples have been consolidated and are now open to the public. The excavations will be published by the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia in a series of volumes entitled Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán. The information related here comes from personal conversations with Dr. William Fash, who participated in the excavations (see also W. Fash 1983b).

[101] Peter Mathews (1975) first identified the “numbered successor” titles as a way of recording lineage successions, an idea that was elaborated by Berthold Riese (1984). We subsequently found these counts are reckoned from a named ancestor who occurs with the notation “first successor” (Scheie 1986b and Grube 1988). In the Group of the Cross at Palenque and on Altar 1 at Naranjo, a complementary succession is reckoned from mythological ancestors who lived beyond the bounds of human history—that is, before this manifestation of creation materialized on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.

[102] Recorded on Altar 1, the Rio Amarillo ruler names himself as an ahau of the Copán polity, but lists his lineage as descended from its own founder (Scheie 1987d).

[103] Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) began five days before the summer solstice of 641 and ended on December 6 of the following year. Muan-Chan of Bonampak began the rites for his heir on December 14, 790, and ended them on August 6, 792, with a battle in which he took captives for sacrifice. He memorialized this series of rites in the amazing murals of Temple 1 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986b).

[104] See the chapters “Kingship and the Rites of Accession,” “Bloodletting and the Vision Quest,” and “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986) and Stuart (1984a, 1988c) for a full discussion of these rituals and their representations in Maya art.

[105] Peter Furst (1976) first discussed this bloodletting ritual as a quest for a vision which the Maya interpreted as communication with the supernatural world. Furst associates this bloodletting ritual with similar beliefs in many other societies, and he has been a longtime advocate of the role of shamanism in the institution of rulership from Olmec times on. David Stuart (1984a and 1988c) has added rich detail to our understanding of the complex of imagery and texts associated with bloodletting. Bloodletting has been discussed in the context of both rituals and objects manufactured for use in ritual by Scheie and M. Miller (1986).

[106] David Joralemon (1974) provides a clear iconographic discussion of the prismatic- blade bloodletter. Scheie (1984a and n.d.d) describes the epigraphic and iconographic evidence for obsidian as a material from which prismatic-blade bloodletters were made. Freidel (1986a) reviews some of the larger economic implications of the control by governments of obsidian as a prized ritual commodity.

[107] All Maya communities would have celebrated the great regularities of the Maya calendars: the hotun (five-year) endings within a katun, the katun (twenty-year) endings, New Year’s, the 819-day count, the coming of the rains, important points in the solar year, such as solstices and the zenith passages, and stations in the planetary cycles. But each great city also had its own histories that generated a series of local festivals celebrating the founding of the city, the date associated with its special patron gods, the anniversaries of its great kings and their births, triumphs, and deaths. Thus the system of festivals combined those occasions celebrated by all Maya with a complementary series derived from the individual histories of each dynasty. Both kinds of celebrations appear in the glyphic record.

[108] David Stuart has been instrumental in identifying a set of verbs recording rituals of dedication for temples as well as for their plaster and stone sculptures. His date for the dedication of lemple 11 at Copán (September 26, 773) is four years after the dedication of the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the building on March 27, 769. At Palenque, we have about the same time span in the Temple of Inscriptions. The last date in the ongoing history of the interior panels is October 20, 675, some eight years before the death of Pacal on August 31, 683. The 675 date appears to be the last historical date recorded before the tablets were sealed inside a containing wall to protect them during the rest of the construction. Given that the center and back walls must have been standing so the huge panels could be set in them, we deduce that the construction and decoration of the temple took about nine years.

[109] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya rulers in the northern lowlands were explicitly concerned with the well-being of their farming populations precisely because ill treatment encouraged migration, which they could not easily impede (Roys <verbatim>[1962];</verbatim> N. 1 arris <verbatim>[1984]</verbatim> on demographic fluidity). During the Precolumbian era, the periodic abandonment and reoccupation of some centers and the clear evidence of demographic fluctuation at others indicates similar principles in operation. See Freidel (1983).

[110] Analysis of skeletal materials at Tikal by Haviland (1967) suggests that Classic elite populations enjoyed taller stature and generally somewhat greater physical robusticity than the commoners.

[111] The public fair is, and was in antiquity, a temporary marketplace established in town squares near the important civic and religious buildings during religious festivals. Such fairs occurred in cycles and were also no doubt occasioned by great historical events in the lives of rulers. (See Freidel [1981c] for a discussion of this economic institution among the Maya.)

[112] See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of visits between elites.

[113] R. L. Roys (1957) summarized descriptions of marketplaces on the north coast of the peninsula.

[114] Since the place-notation system of the Maya used only three marks—one, five, and zero—addition and subtraction were simple geometric operations that could be conducted with any handy material laid out on a grid drawn in the dust. To add, the two numbers were laid side by side and then collapsed into a sum. The twenties only needed to be carried up to obtain the answer. Subtraction reversed the process and was, thus, a simple geometric operation, which like addition required no memorization of tables. Multiplication was more difficult, but still possible without tables or much training. The system allowed the illiterate to do simple arithmetic needed for trade and exchange without formal education.

[115] Colonial period sources describe verbal contracts, but there is no reason to suppose that contracts, tribute lists, and some form of accounting were not kept in written form, especially since we have just these sorts of documents from the Aztec of Central Mexico. Unfortunately, the writing surface that would have been used for such purposes, bark paper sized with plaster, did not survive in the tropical forest that was home to the Classic Maya.

[116] See Landa’s descriptions of life in Yucatán shortly after the conquest (Tozzer 1941) and Roys’s (1943) discussion of Indian life during the Colonial period of Yucatán.

[117] See Freidel (1986a) for a recent discussion of Mesoamerican currencies.

[118] For a discussion of Maya merchant activities and such speculation see Freidel and Scarborough (1982).

[119] “...they traded in everything which there was in that country. They gave credit, lent and paid courteously and without usury. And the greatest number were cultivators and men who apply themselves to harvesting the maize and other grains, which they keep in fine underground places and granaries so as to be able to sell (their crops) at the proper time.” (Tozzer [1941:96], parens original)

[120] Such visits by high-ranked nobles who represented high kings are documented at Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras (Scheie and Mathews n.d.) and at least one vessel from Burial 116 of Tikal depicts such a visit by lords from the Usumacinta region who display- gifts before Tikal lords (see W. R. Coe [1967:102] for a drawing of this scene). In fact, the offering of gifts, especially cloth and plates full of various substances, is one of the most commonly represented scenes on Maya pottery.

[121] Dennis Puleston (1976 and 1977) accepted the central importance of raised-field agriculture to ancient Maya civilization and proceeded with experimental reclamations of ancient canals to see how the system worked. The experiment not only yielded information on the productivity of the system, but demonstrated how the Maya used the animals and landscape associated with it—water lilies, water birds, fish, and caiman—as important components of their cosmic model and their royal symbolism.

3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings

[122] Some modern visitors are aw ed by the architectural scale and design of Maya ruins. Yet the architectural techniques they used—corbeling and the post-and-lintel system— were primitive even by the standards of the ancient world. The most spectacular exploitations of the corbel systems are found at Palenque and in the use of concrete core construction in some northern lowland kingdoms. The most wonderful technology of the Maya, from our vantage, was their agricultural system. Despite evidence in some instances that the Maya over exploited and allowed the degeneration of their land, generally their success in producing food and commercial crops was nothing short of spectacular, in an age when modern nations are allowing the rapid destruction of the tropical forest belt of the globe, we have much to learn technologically from the Maya who maintained a civilization of millions for over a thousand years in such an environment.

[123] The Maya knew of metals from at least the Early Classic period onward, because their tribal and chiefly neighbors in lower Central America used them. 1 he lowland Maya chose not to use metals, for reasons yet unknown, until very late in their history.

[124] There were no eligible beasts of burden in Mesoamerica at the time of the emergence of farming village life. The largest animals—the tapir, the peccary, the deer, and the large felines—were categorically unsuited either to domestication or service as burden carriers.

[125] The regional timing of the establishment of large-scale public centers in the Maya lowlands is a matter of continuing debate. Matheny (1986) and Hansen (1984) place the initial construction of the Tigre complex at El Mirador in the second century B.C., while W. R. Coe (1965a) identities major public construction at Tikal somewhat later, in the middle of the first century B.c. The Tikal dating is commensurate with the dating at Cerros in Belize (Freidel and Scarborough 1982). Our position is that while the point dates of radiocarbon samples range over roughly a century, 25 B.c. to 125 B.c. for the earliest decorated buildings in the lowlands (perforce the earliest evidence of the kingship they celebrate), the statistical range of possibility for the radiocarbon assay representing an actual absolute date shows an overlap of all the reported contexts. For example, a date from Structure 34 at El Mirador of 125 B.c. + 90 years and a date from Structure 2A-Sub 4 at Cerros of 50 B.c. + 50 years, have a statistically high probability of being contemporary.

[126] We have outlined the technical arguments from iconographic and archaeological evidence for this interpretation of Maya history in a series of papers, principally Freidel and Scheie (1988b).

[127] Cerros (“hills”) is the modern name of this place; its original name was lost long ago.

[128] The evidence for sea travel by the people of Cerros is principally in the form of faunal remains of reef and deep-water fish (Carr 1986b). Dugout canoes made from great tree trunks are traditional to the Maya of Belize and are made even today in some parts of the country.

[129] The evidence for long-distance trade between Cerros and people to the north along the coast of Yucatán, down into the mountainous regions of the southern highlands, and into the interior of the southern lowlands is derived from analyses of exotic materials which do not normally occur in down-the-line trade between neighbors. The Cerros people had available, for example, distinctive marine shells from the northern coast of the Peninsula (Hamilton n.d.) and their craftspeople were familiar with a wide range of foreign styles, which they used freely in the pottery manufactured at the site (R. Robertson n.d). Additionally, there are numerous examples of exotic materials at the site which must have been traded in from other parts of Belize or from the southern highland region (Garber 1986).

[130] A simple public platform of this description is Structure 2A-Sub 4–1^st, which, like the first true royal temple at Cerros (Structure 5C-2^nd) was built as part of the final phase of the nucleated village underlying the later ceremonial center (Cliff 1986). Similar platforms preceded the construction of royal temples in the North Acropolis at Tikal in Guatemala during the same time period (W. Coe 1965a).

[131] Clay drums with cutout and applique faces were found as smashed fragments in the deposits of the nucleated village at Cerros. Elements of the iconography include the “cruller” of GUI (a Sun God and the younger of the Ancestral Heroes Twins) and shark teeth, a signal of GI, who characteristically wears a fish barbel and is associated with Xoc, the shark (see the Glossary of Gods). These drums initiate a long tradition of effigy vessels and vessel supports among the lowland Maya (Freidel, Masucci, Jaeger, and Robertson n.d.).

[132] The reconstruction of vegetal environment and foodstuffs is based on research carried out by Cathy Crane (1986). The fish and game animals have been identified by Carr (1986a and 1986b).

[133] The vessels, affectionately termed “beer mugs” by the Cerros crew, are very effectively designed to hold beverages: graspable, narrow at the straight rim, and weighted on the flat base to discourage tipping. They are identified by Robertson as appropriate for liquids and their context is associated with burials and high ritual (R. Robertson 1983).

[134] Cathy Crane has positively identified cotton at Cerros; the presence of cacao is a more tenuous identification, but there are some macrobotanical remains that look promising.

[135] These are, in fact, the jewels of an ahau that were found deposited in a dedicatory cache at the summit of Structure 6B at Cerros (Freidel 1979; Garber 1983; Freidel and Scheie 1988a). Structure 6 was the second royal temple to be built at Cerros, and it was erected while the first, Structure 5C-2^nd. was still open and in use. The location and design of Structure 6 shows that it was constructed by the successor of the patron of Structure 5C-2^nd. It is hence likely that the jewels found buried in the summit of Structure 6B belonged to the first king of Cerros, patron of Structure 5C-2^nd.

[136] See Freidel (1979; 1983) and Freidel and Scheie (1988b) for technical discussions of the origins and distribution of the lowland Maya sculptured pyramid.

[137] We do not know how the building crafts of the ancient Maya world were divided, but we suspect they did not have architects in the sense of the modern world—that is, specialists who design buildings and are responsible for iconographic programs as well as engineering. More likely, the Maya had specialists, perhaps entire lineages, who were trained in the art of building. Their training, however, would have been less as artists responsible for what the building said, and more as master craftsmen responsible for how the message was executed. We have chosen to use the term “Master Builder” for this specialty, rather than architect, in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, I. M. Pei, or Mies van der Rohe.

[138] These activities have the prosaic title of “termination rituals” in our present scholarly reports (Robertson and Freidel 1986), but the practice clearly encompassed both beginnings and endings of major ritual work such as building temples, rebuilding temples, and finally abandoning them. We believe that the vessels broken on such occasions first held the foods of offering and ritual meals, as found among contemporary Maya. The identification of the fruit-tree flowers is based upon palynological analysis in progress by Cathy Crane. A complete anther of a guava flower is a likely prospect in light of the clustering of four preserved grains of this tree in the deposit.

[139] Although we did not find the outline under this particular building, this is a known Maya practice in the preparation of superstructures (Smith 1950) and a logical deduction in light of the fact that the building and stairway were built in a single construction effort. We know, therefore, that their finished proportions were determined by the initial work.

[140] These sockets for massive posts are more than 3.5 meters deep and 1.2 meters in diameter. If the size of the posts used in modern postholes throughout the Maya area (Wauchope 1938) can be taken as a guide, these temple posts rose 6 to 9 meters above the floor level of the summit temple or superstructure. The walls of the summit temple rose about 2 meters, hence these temple posts rose far above the roof of the temple.

[141] The raising of the great posts constitutes one of the episodes in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985). These posts are called acante, “raised up or stood up tree,” in the rituals of the Yucatec-speaking Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest (Tozzer 1941; Roys 1965). The raising of these posts defined the sacred space within which the shaman communed with the supernatural forces. We have given the technical discussion of this interpretation of Structure 5C-2^nd’s posts in Freidel and Scheie (1988a).

[142] The plan of this temple, while unusual, is not unique. Across the bay from Cerros, there is an Early Classic temple at the community called Santa Rita (D. Chase and A. Chase 1986). The plan of this Early Classic building, constructed a few centuries after Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, is more complex but comparable in principle to the one described here. Maya temples generally featured an inner sanctum where the most intimate features of ritual action took place, as described further in Chapter 7 in the context of Chan-Bahlum’s accession monuments. The distinctive character of the Cerros example is that the path of entry into the inner sanctum corresponds to the path of the sun.

[143] These assemblages consist of a fairly constant set of elements. The center ornament was usually made of jade which had been shaped into a thin-walled cylinder with one end flaring out into a flat surface, often carved to resemble a flower. This part, which is called an earflare because of its shape, was carved by drilling, sawing, and abrasion with reeds, string, sand, and water. During the Early Classic period, this main earflare often had a quincunx design with bosses arranged around the central hole at the four corners. The Maya depicted a curling leaf of maize sitting above the earflare and a large counterweight, often made of shell or pearl, hanging below it. Another popular arrangement had a finger-sized cylinder, which was drilled through its long axis, hanging diagonally from the center of the earflare. To hold it out from the face, a thin string, possibly made from deer or cat gut, was threaded through the center drill-hole, through a bead on the end of the cylinder, back through the drill-hole, and finally through the pierced carlobe to a pearl or shell counterweight.

[144] As described by Schele and M. Miller (1986) for Classic period examples, and by Landa (Tozzer 1941) with respect to the carving of sacred wooden images at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya artists may well have performed major public work of this kind in altered states of consciousness achieved by fasting, bloodletting, and the use of intoxicants. Once executed, the error in the proportions of the building may have been left in the design as a divine expression to be accepted and accommodated rather than corrected.

[145] The earliest archaeologically documented inscribed object in the lowlands is a bone bloodletter found in a Late Preclassic period burial at the site of Kichpanhá, a few miles south of Cerros in northern Belize (Gibson, Shaw, and Tinamore 1986).

[146] On this building there are also special raised and modeled glyph panels attached to earflare assemblages. Such panels are also found on other Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros, Structures 6B and 29B. Similar panels are further reported or illustrated on Structure N9-56 at Lamanai (Pendergast 1981), Structure 34 at El Mirador (Hansen 1984), and on Structure H-Sub 8 at Uaxactún (Valdes 1988). The principle of glyphically “tagging” earflare assemblages, the central power objects of the entities represented as head masks on such panels, is thus a widespread convention in the Late Preclassic period. So far, only the glyphs “tagging” the earflares on Structure 5C-2^nd have been read, as discussed further on in this chapter.

[147] This four-petaled flower regularly appears on the cheek of the Sun God in its young human, old human, and cruller-eyed GUI aspects during the entire Classic period.

[148] In the great creation myth of the highland Quiche Maya, given in their Book of Council, the Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985), the ancestral Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, apotheosize as the sun and the moon rather than the sun and Venus. Actually, the younger twin could be associated in the Classic period with the moon as well as the sun (Schele and M. Miller 1986:308–309), while the elder twin was the Sun in the first opposition and Venus in the second. It is important to grasp that such multiple natures as jaguar/sun/moon or Venus/Celestial Monster/sun are not exclusive and unchanging, but rather inclusive and dynamic. The Waterlily Jaguar, for example, the quintessential predator in royal warfare, can be associated with both the sun as it manifests the Sun God and with Venus in the Venus-timed war rituals discussed in Chapter 4. These “aspects” constitute statements of momentary affinity and resonance. The fact that some of these connections are remarkably enduring and pervasive in Maya thought does not belie the perpetual necessity of reiteration in ritual to re-create and sustain them. Ultimately, the charismatic supernature of the king is dependent upon a logic which mandates his inclusion in such cosmic categories.

[149] One of the creatures especially associated with Venus, as described in the Glossary, is the Celestial Monster. Derived from a crocodilian model, this beastie was long- snouted, like the Cerros creature.

[150] Schele (1974:49–50) dubbed this figure the Jester God because of the resemblance of its tri-pointed head to a medieval court jester.

[151] The Maya writing system uses special signs called semantic determinatives to specify particular meanings when a value could be in doubt. One of these determinatives is the cloth headband worn by kings. In various manifestations, the headband can have the regular ahau glyph attached, as well as a mirror and, most importantly for our purpose, a Jester God. Whenever this ahau-Jester God headband is present, the glyph, whether it is a human head, a vulture, a rodent, or whatever, reads ahau. To wear this headband in the Classic period is to be an ahau.

[152] The Headband Twins are the particular manifestation under discussion. Named glyphically as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam, this set of twins has one member marked by large body spots and the Jester God headband, while the other sports a cut-shell yax sign on his forehead and jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs.

[153] There are additional details in the iconographic program of Structure 5C-2^nd which confirm this interpretation. The glyph panels “tagging” the earflare assemblages on the eastern side of the building contain the word jwc, meaning “green” and “first.” Here they denote that the sun and Venus of the eastern side are “first,” as they should be at dawn. On the western side of the building, the Venus image on the upper panel is being disgorged from the split representation of the framing sky/snake (in Cholan languages, the words for “sky” and “snake” are homophonous [chan/chan]), signaling that the movement is down as it should be in the setting of the sun with the Eveningstar above it.

[154] The Maya shaman establishes a four-part perimeter of sacred space. Inside of this space he can pass over the threshold to the Otherworld. We detail the manner in which Late Preclassic kings harnessed shamanistic ecstasy to their emerging definitions of royal charisma in a recent professional article (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

[155] There are Late Preclassic masks wearing the Jester God headdress in Group H at Uaxactiin, a remarkably preserved and recently excavated temple complex in the interior of the lowlands (Valdes 1988).

[156] There are other potential interpretations of these images which we are exploring, including the prospect that the “first” Venus and sun, on the eastern side, represent the ancestors, while the western Venus and sun represent the human king and his heir (Freidel n.d.).

[157] Reading “between the lines” in this fashion is the key to understanding the people and politics behind the masks and ritual portraits of Maya art. Although such interpretations are subject to dispute and discussion as to their content, there is no doubt that the Maya intended their art and public texts as political propaganda as well as offerings of devotion. The documentation of this strategy is to be found in the texts of royal temples of the Classic period, as described in subsequent chapters.

[158] The earliest public architecture at Cerros, Structure 2A-Sub 4—lst, the small and undecorated pyramid next to the dock, has a radiocarbon date of 58 B.C.+ 50 years from a single large piece of carbonized wood from a sealed plaster floor. The abandonment ritual of the latest public building, Structure 29B, provided us with a piece of burnt wood which registered 25 B.c. + 50 years. What must be understood here is that any radiocarbon date is only the best statistical approximation of the age of an object: the + years give a range into which the date may fall. The wider the + range, the higher the probability that the date falls within that range. The beginning and ending dates of public architecture at Cerros fall within the + range of each other, indicating a range of as little as fifty and as much as one hundred years for all of the public architecture of Cerros to have been built. Other archaeological evidence from the site supports this dating. For example, no change in the style or technology of ceramics occurs between the earliest and the latest building (R. Robertson n.d.). And only eight distinct construction episodes, a very low number for most Maya sites, have been detected in the stratigraphic sequence of architecture (Freidel 1986c). Together, this evidence supports the view that Cerros underwent a veritable explosion of public construction in the first century B.c.

[159] Group H at Uaxactun (see Chapter 4) has this same internal court entered through a portal building atop an acropolis.

[160] Vernon Scarborough has written detailed discussions of the impact of construction activity on the surrounding landscape at Cerros (Scarborough 1983; 1986).

[161] The excavations in temples and pyramids at Cerros were limited in scope compared to those carried out in some Maya centers because the archaeological project had many other research objectives to address as well. Future excavation at the site will no doubt expose more examples of the elaborate stucco work of Late Preclassic royal architecture. Despite the limitations of the record at Cerros, this remains the largest analyzed and reported sample of such decoration from a Maya site. Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Lamanai promise to provide substantive new samples as excavations at those sites are reported and extended.

[162] These are the jewels in our little story of the traders’ landing at Cerros.

[163] The grasping of a mirror is one way of signifying accession to the rulership in the texts of the Classic period (Scheie and J. Miller 1983).

[164] The ancient Maya believed the sacred liquids could be transmuted into other forms, resulting in a group of substances that were transformations of one another. This group included blood, fire, smoke, water (Freidel 1985), but other liquids, gases, and vapors were also related (Scheie and M. Miller 1986).

[165] Offerings of precious and powerful objects are common in the record of Maya royal temples. These are typically called dedicatory offerings with the connotation that the objects were given to the gods by the devout to sanctify buildings and carved stone monuments, like stelae. William Coe’s detailed monograph on the offerings from one Maya center, Piedras Negras (W. Coe 1959), documents the complex symbolism of these objects. The cache from Stela 7 at Copan and newly found caches from Temple 26 incorporate ancestral heirlooms made of jade. Such objects were principally used in shamanistic rituals performed by kings to materialize sacred beings in this world (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

The burial of such objects in buildings or carved monuments enhanced their power to function as the pathways of this type of communication and as portals to the Otherworld. Just as the caching of whole objects focused sacred power, the reciprocal act was to smash and burn objects to release sacred power prior to scattering or sprinkling. In an earlier phase of Temple 26, for example, large numbers of valuable greenstone jewelry were shattered in pit fires set on the four sides of a temple to be buried by new construction. This last kind of termination ritual (R. Robertson n.d.) was often carried out in the same general cycle as dedicatory rituals (Walker n.d.).

[166] The technique of using internal buttressing of this kind is common in Maya architectural construction. It was especially valuable when large-scale buildings were being raised rapidly. The Maya masons employed loose angular rubble when they could in such projects, and provided vertical stability by capping off the rubble with small rocks, gravel, and dirt which could then support another layer of large loose boulders. The internal walls provided lateral stability.

[167] Although the resulting arrangement resulted in ridiculously narrow alleyways between the flanking stairways and the central platform, the plan was intended to emulate a conventional arrangement now known on the thirty-three-meter-high pyramid at Lama- nai, which also dates to the Late Preclassic (Pendergast 1981). This arrangement can also be seen on a pyramid at El Mirador (Matheny 1987). The three-temple arrangement of small temples or temple-platforms is one of the more important architectural traditions of Late Preclassic architecture.

[168] This pattern is best illustrated in the tri-figure panels of Palenque (Scheie 1979), but it is also found at other sites. The famous Stela 31 at Tikal (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982) depicts king Stormy-Sky flanked by portraits of his father, Curl-Snout.

[169] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:241–264) and M. Miller and Houston (1987) for further discussion of the Classic Maya ballgame.

4. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun

[170] Some of the largest buildings ever constructed in the Precolumbian world were built at El Mirador at least two centuries before the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan. See Ray Matheny’s description of El Mirador and its amazing architecture in the National Geographic Magazine (September 1987).

[171] The political collapse of El Mirador remains one piece in the puzzle of the Protoclassic period as discussed in Chapter 1. The city was not completely abandoned after its heyday, but the modestly prosperous Classic period inhabitants never again laid claim to dominion in a landscape populated by an increasing number of rival kings.

[172] We call this complex Tlaloc-Venus war because of the imagery worn by its practitioners and the regular association of its conduct with important stations of Venus, Jupiter, and conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn (Kelley 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Closs 1979; Lounsbury 1982, Scheie 1984a, n.d.c). The “star-war” nickname comes from the way the Maya recorded the event by using a Venus sign (Kelley argued that it was simply “star”) over the glyph for “earth” or the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom attacked. See Note 45 for further discussion.

[173] A pit with a constricted neck dug into the bedrock by the ancient Maya.

[174] W. R. Coe (1965a and 1965b) has published detailed descriptions of these very early occupations as well as the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods of Tikal.

[175] William Coe (1965b: 1406) himself makes this suggestion.

[176] The empty Late Prcclassic period tomb at the summit of Structure 4 at Cerros also testifies to the practice of burying exalted dead in the early temple complexes, but in actuality the notion of the corpse as a worthy inclusion in the power structure of places does not appear pervasively until the Classic period. Tikal may prove precocious in this ritual activity.

[177] W. R. Coe (1965b:15) identifies the main burial (two skeletons were found in the chamber) as a female.

[178] See W. R. Coe (1965a:15–17 and 1965b: 1410–1412) for full descriptions of this tombs and its contents. Coggins (1976:54–68) discusses the stylistic affinities of the tomb.

[179] The archaeological record is rapidly changing with respect to the early public depictions of Maya kings. Richard Hansen (1989) reports the presence of carved stone stelae at Nakbe, a satellite of El Mirador, which carry the same kind of elaborate scroll work found here. Because these early representations often depict the individual as masked, their identification as historical people is somewhat problematic.

[180] See XV. R. Coe (1965b:21) and Coggins (1976:79–83) for detailed descriptions of this tomb and its contents.

[181] The mask is about the same size relative to a human body as other pectorals known archaeologically (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:81, Pl. 19) and in Maya depictions of rulers. Most telling are the five holes drilled in the lower edge to suspend the cylinder and bead arrays normally depicted with such pectorals.

[182] This three-pointed symbol of ahau, initially a geometric element, was worn as the central diadem of a characteristic headband with three jewels (viewed from the front). The three-jewel crown is seen on the foreheads of the upper masks of Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros with the geometric forms as described in Chapter 3. On the stucco masks of gods in Group H at Uaxactún (Valdes 1987), the three-jewel crown appears with snarling humanoid faces in the personified form that would become the Jester God of Classic period imagery.

[183] William Haviland (1967:322–323) notes that around A.D. 1, a difference in average height could be seen between those people buried in lavish tombs and the rest of the population at Tikal. This difference continued to grow during the Early Classic period marking what Haviland sees as the development of a ruling elite who had consistent access to better nutrition.

[184] Christopher Jones (n.d.) has associated the construction phases detected in the North Acropolis, Great Plaza, and East Plaza with the dynastic history of Tikal as recovered from the inscriptions.

[185] Chris Jones (n.d.) also speculates that the eastern and western causeways were built at this time as “formalizations of the old entrance trails into the site center.”

[186] Chris Jones (n.d.) suggested an association between these massive building projects and the ruler in this burial.

[187] One of the basic historical problems facing Mayanists is the relatively great size of Peten centers and communities of the Late Preclassic period compared to other parts of the lowlands. One explanation would hold that El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún among other centers had early special relationships with those kingdoms of the southern mountains and Pacific slopes regions that show precocious complexity and which supplied the lowlands with strategic commodities (Sharer 1988). We agree that such special relationships are a possibility and that commerce would have attracted more farmers to the region from elsewhere in the lowlands. At the same time, the real potential of the swampy interior for ordinary farmers lies less in its proximity to the highlands than in the development of intensive agriculture based upon effective water management. The great Late Preclassic public works of El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún suggest to us that these governments attracted and commanded labor for many other overtly practical projects, particularly raised-field agricultural plots. Intensive agriculture, of course, would not only guarantee the prosperity of commoners. It would also generate the surplus of commodities necessary to sustain a flourishing trade with the highlands. This “agricultural attraction” hypothesis, however, points to the great antecedent civilization in Mesoamerica’s swampy lowlands: the Olmec of the Gulf Coast. We anticipate the future discovery of more direct relationships between the lowland Olmec of such centers as La Venta and the Middle Preclassic pioneers who first farmed the swamps of Petén.

[188] This famous building was reported by Oliver and Edith Ricketson (1937) as part of their work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

[189] In 1985, Juan Antonio Valdes (1988) began excavations of Group H as part of the Programa de Patrón de Asentamiento. Trenches excavated that year into the platform yielded only Mamón and Chicane! ceramics, dating all interior construction phases to the Preclassic period. In total, he found seven construction phases including the most extraordinary and complete example of Late Preclassic masked architecture now known.

[190] Freidel has discussed the comparative iconography of Structures 5C-2^nd and E-VII-Sub, suggesting that both display the Sun cycle surmounted by Venus (Freidel 1979; 1981a).

[191] The meanings applied to particular buildings were by no means mutually exclusive. Witz is a general term meaning “mountain,” which was applied in glyphic and symbolic form to Maya buildings to define them as the living mountain. In principle, all Maya pyramids were Witz Monsters. On some buildings, such as Structure 5C-2^nd or Structure E-VII-Sub, the animus of the mountain itself is a relatively minor component of the overall decoration, specifically given in the lowermost frontal masks on those buildings from which the larger and more important sun masks emerge. On other buildings, such as the one discussed here, the Witz aspect is central. Still other buildings, as we shall see at Palenque and Copan, emphasize the World Tree which grows from the heart of the mountain. These are not different messages, but aspects of a single unitary vision. The aesthetics of Maya ritual performance encourage such creative and diverse expression of nuance.

[192] Because the specific signal of the Witz monster is his crenelated forehead, as seen on the lower Monster, we have to be cautious in identifying the upper Monster as another Witz, for the top of the mask is destroyed. Nevertheless, the rest of the mask, including the blunt snout surmounted by a human nose, ‘ breath ’ scrolls flanking the gaping mouth, and the eye panels, comprise a virtual replication of the lower, complete mask. When the Late Preclassic architects intend a primary contrast in meaning between masks at different vertical points in a mask stack, as on Structures 5C-2^nd and E-VH-Sub, they usually distinguished them by using different muzzle forms and other features. Hence it is likely that the upper mask here replicates the primary meaning of the lower mask.

[193] All the other buildings in the group have a single room that was entered from a door on the court side of the building. Sub-10 has a door on both the inner and outer sides with flanking plaster masks on both sides of the substructural platform. One entered the group by mounting a stairway rising up the platform from the plaza to the west of Structure H-X, which was a mini-acropolis flanked by a north and south building. Once atop Structure H-X, one could walk to either side of Sub-10, but the main processional entrance was up its short western stair, through the building, and down the east stairs. The use of a building as a gateway into an acropolis is also found on Late Preclassic Structure 6 at Cerros.

[194] The Late Preclassic architectural jaguar mask varies from the strikingly naturalistic animal depictions of Structure 29 at Cerros, to the blunt-snouted snarling zoomorphic image of the sun on Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, to the anthropomorphic version found here in which the fangs are reduced to residual incurving elements within the mouth panel. What began as a broad incisor-tooth bar under the square snout on the sun jaguar of Structure 5C-2^nd is here reduced to the single projecting tooth which will be characteristic of divinity and the Ancestors in the Classic period. This anthropomorphic jaguar, however, still carries the squint eyes and bifurcated eyebrows of the 5C-2^nd version. On Structure 29 at Cerros, the appearance of this humanoid ahau is enhanced by its physical emergence from a naturalistic jaguar head. At Tikal, Early Classic Temple 5D-23-2^nd has a comparable humanoid ahau mask emerging from a jaguar head. In this case, the jaguar carries the mat symbol in its mouth (A. Miller 1986: Fig. 9). The particular ahau masks on Temple H-Sub-10 at Uaxactun are framed below by enormous knots, signaling that they are in fact giant replicas of the girdle heads worn on the belt of the king. Scheie and J. Miller (1983) have discussed these ahau pop and balain pop (“king/mat” and “jaguar/mat”) images of kingship.

[195] The full extent of Late Preclassic construction is not known in either case, and massive constructions at Tikal likely hide very substantial public monuments of this period (Culbert 1977).

[196] Recent excavations at the site of Calakmul in southern Campeche suggest that it was a kingdom with a substantial Late Preclassic and Early Classic occupation. David Stuart (personal conversations, 1989) reminded us that the pyramids of El Mirador are visible from the summits of Calakmul’s largest buildings. That great kingdom was very probably a significant player in the demise of El Mirador, and as we shall see in the next chapter, a vigorous rival of Tikal and Uaxactun for dominance of the central Maya region.

[197] The name glyph in Early Classic texts (Fig. 4:10) consists of yax (“first” or “blue-green”), a bamboo square lashed at the corners with rope, and the head of a fish. Lounsbury and Coe (1968) suggested a reading of moch for the “cage” portion of the glyph, and Thompson (1944) proposed a reading of xoc for the mythological fish head in this name. In some examples, these two signs are preceded by yax, perhaps giving Yax- Moch-Xoc as the full name. It is interesting that this moch-xoc glyph appears in the name of Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39, although that ruler is listed as the ninth successor, rather than the founder.

[198] Peter Mathews (1985a:31) first proposed this calculation, which Jones (n.d.) subsequently supported by showing that the 349 tuns between the accessions of the eleventh and twenty-ninth successors divides into an average reign of 19.3 tuns. The kings who ruled between 375 and 455 were the ninth, tenth, and eleventh successors, with the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, acceding in 426. Giving an average reign of one katun each to the ten rulers who preceded him places the founding date of the lineage somewhere between 8.9.0.0.0 (A.D. 219) and 8.10.0.0.0 (A.D. 238). These calculations fit well with the known archaeological history of likal and with the appearance of historical monuments and portable objects inscribed with historical information dated between A.D. 120 and A.D. 200 (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82–83, 199).

[199] Chris Jones (n.d.) speculates that Stela 36 is even earlier than Stela 29. Found in a plaza at the end of the airfield at Tikal about 3.5 kilometers from the North Acropolis (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:76), this stela may depict one of the unknown rulers between the founder and the ninth successor. The location of this very early monument away from Tikal’s center is curious in any case.

[200] Mathews (1985a:44) associates this scroll-jaguar image with another scroll-ahau- jaguar, a glyph at C5 on Stela 31 that he suggests is the name of a ruler. Unfortunately the date associated with this character fell in the destroyed section of Stela 31, so that we are not able to identify this personage as the same ahau portrayed on Stela 29 or as a different one because royal names could be reused in the Maya culture, as in the kingdoms of Western Europe.

[201] The main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph is a bundle of strands bound together by a horizontal band tied in a knot. The anthropomorphic version of this bundle glyph is a Roman-nosed head with a twisted rope or jaguar tail hanging in front of the ear. The kings on Stela 29 and other later monuments wore headdresses with a twisted rope or jaguar tail in the same position as a way of marking themselves as the living embodiment of the Emblem Glyph and thus of the kingdom. This same head substitutes for an ahau glyph half-covered with a jaguar pelt, which Scheie (1985a) read balan-ahau or “hidden lord” in an earlier study of the substitution patters of these glyphs.

In October, 1989, Stephen Houston and David Stuart informed us they had read the same glyph not as balan-ahau but as way, the word for “sorcerer” and “spirit (or animal) companion.” Nikolai Grube sent a letter to us at almost exactly the same time detailing his own reading of this glyph and its head variant. All three suggested to us that the kings on Stela 29 and 31 are depicted in their their roles as “sorcerers” and one who can transform into their animal companions in the Otherworld. We accept their observations and further suggest that when this way head appears in the position of an Emblem Glyph on the lintels of Temple 4 that it refers to the king as the ch’ul way, “the holy shaman.”

[202] The floating figure on Stela 29 is not named, but we can reconstruct its function from other representations. At Tikal there are two kinds of floating figures: gods materialized through bloodletting, as on Stela 4 and Stela 22, and ancestors recalled by the same rite. This latter type of image is specifically named on Stela 31 as the father of the protagonist Stormy-Sky. Since the floating figure on Stela 29 is patently human, we presume he is the ancestor from whom Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar received the throne.

[203] Scheie and M. Miller (1986:121) called the Leiden Palenque ruler Balam-Ahau- Chaan, while Mathews (1985a:44) called this ruler “Moon-Zero-Bird,” based on the occurrence of his name glyph on Stela 31 at D6-C7 and on the Leiden Plaque at A10. Fahsen (1988b) followed Mathews in the name usage and identified a new occurrence of his name on Altar 13 at Tikal.

[204] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:63–73, 110, 120–121, 319) for detailed discussions of the iconography and inscription on the Leiden Plaque.

[205] David Webster (1977), among other Mayanists, believes that warfare during the early phase of the lowland civilization was instrumental in the establishment of an elite warrior class. These warlords, in his view, launched wars of conquest against less organized neighbors, which yielded them land and booty for their followers. Rising population and a diminishing ratio of arable land to people spurred this kind of warfare and precipitated elitism among the lowland Maya in Webster’s scenario. Webster argues his case from the instance of an impressive early fortification surrounding the center of Becan (Webster 1976). While we find Webster’s work stimulating, we see no clear empirical support for a general condition of conquest warfare during the Late Preclassic period and the first centuries of the Early Classic. Ancient Maya farming settlements, beginning in the Preclassic, were characteristically open and rather dispersed across the landscape until the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 800–1000; see Ashmore 19 81). Although Maya centers certainly contained acropolis constructions suitable for defense as citadels, walled forts of the kind used by populations experiencing direct attack and capable of withstanding siege are not common among these people. Where internecine warfare is aimed at ordinary settled populations in modern and historical preindustrial societies, it often generates a response of nucleated and defended communities. In this regard, a number of Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya are indeed fortified in this fashion (Webster 1979). Our own position is based upon substantive information from texts and images. From the Maya vantage, warfare explicitly served to prove the charisma of kings and high nobility. Ethnohistorical documents (Roys 1962) confirm that such charisma was fundamental to the attraction of population into emergent and flourishing polities (see also Demarest 1986; Chapter 7.) In particular, kingdoms of the Peten, in our view, required and utilized massive organized commoner labor—not only to create and refurbish centers, but also to create and maintain the intensive agricultural systems upon which their economies depended. While the impact of warfare on Maya commoners remains to be elucidated archaeologically, there is positive epigraphic and iconographic evidence to identify the advent of conquest warfare among these people at the close of the fourth century A.D. Preliminary results from research projects aimed at investigating the consequences of conquest warfare (Chase n.d.) indicate that victory indeed economically benefited the winners at the expense of the losers, probably through rigorous tribute extraction (see Roys <verbatim>[1957]</verbatim> for a discussion of predatory tribute at the time of the European Conquest).

[206] The front of the Stela 9 is badly eroded, but the shape, size, and detail of the object in the crook of his right hand correspond to Tikal and Xultún monuments showing rulers holding heads in the guise of deities. The eroded area in front of his legs probably depicted a kneeling captive.

[207] An earlier katun ending, 8.4.0.0.0, is recorded on a broken celt in the collections of Dumbarton Oaks (Schele and M. Miller 1986:84–85). Coggins (1979:44–45) suggested that the emphasis on the celebration of the katun cycles was introduced via Uaxactún from Teotihuacán and that the celebration of repetitive cycles in the Long Count versus the commemoration of one-time historical events was an introduction from Teotihuacán. Since Teotihuacán shows no evidence of using or even being aware of the Long Count calendars and since katun celebrations are dependent on having the Long Count, we find it implausible that something so fundamentally and exclusively Maya would have been introduced from Central Mexico and a cultural area that shows no evidence of having ever used the Long Count or the katun as a basis of calculation or celebration.

[208] Fahsen (1988b) also identifies Stela 28 as Great-Jaguar-Paw based on the appearance of a prominent jaguar head and paw in the lower left corner of the monument. His identification seems to be a good one, but the style of Stela 28 is a bit problematic, since it would have to mark either 8.16.0.0.0 or 8.17.0.0.0.

[209] Stela 39 was found interred in Structure 5D-86-6 in the Lost World Complex (Laporte and Vega de Zea 1988), a building that sits in the center of a group built on the same plan as the contemporary Group E at Uaxactún. The huge four-staired pyramid, with its talud-tablero terraces, faces on the cast a set of three buildings arranged in the same pattern as Group E at Uaxactún. Group E is known to mark the two solstice points at its outer edges and the equinox in its center. The Lost World complex is much larger in scale and has been identified by Laporte as the work of Great-Jaguar-Paw, whom he believes to be buried in the same building as the stela. The rituals ending the seventeenth katun very probably occurred in the Lost World complex, perhaps atop the great pyramid at its center.

[210] The date in the surviving text corresponds to a katun ending which most investigators have interpreted as seventeen, giving a reading of 8.17.0.0.0. The name at the top of the surviving text is Jaguar-Paw, which is exactly the name occurring with this date on Stela 31. However, while looking at a cast of this monument at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Ethnologia of Guatemala, Federico Fahsen (personal communication, 1986) suggested that the number is nineteen rather than seventeen. I resisted his suggestion at first, but it has merit. The Jaguar-Paw name is followed by a “child of mother” expression and the name of a female. Furthermore, the very first glyph could well be the yunen “child of parent” glyph identified by David Stuart (1985b:7) on Tikal Stela 31. Jaguar-Paw’s name may, therefore, occur in a parentage statement for the king who ruled Tikal at 8.19.0.0.0, presumably Curl-Snout.

[211] This date and the events that occurred on it have been the subject of speculation by Proskouriakoff as quoted by Coggins and by Mathews. Clemency Coggins, following suggestions by Proskouriakoff, has offered several variants of the same essential scenario. Coggins proposed that this date marks the arrival of foreigners in the region, which corresponded either to the death of Great-Jaguar-Paw I or to his loss of power to those foreigners. In the first scenario (Coggins 1976:142; 1979b), she proposed that Curl-Snout, the next ruler to accede at Tikal, was a foreigner from Kaminaljuyu. In the second (Coggins 1979a:42), she suggested that Curl-Snout came from El Mirador via Uaxactún bringing Feotihuacanos with him. These Teotihuaeanos then withdrew’ to Kaminaljuyu around A.D. 450. In yet another interpretation, Coggins (n.d.), following new information from Mathews, proposed that Curl-Snout kidnapped Smoking-Frog, whom she identifies as the daughter of Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal, and took her to Uaxactun on the 8.17.1.2.17 date, where he married her. Curl-Snout then took over Tikal after Great-Jaguar-Paw, his new father-in-law, died.

Peter Mathews (1985a:33–46) examined the Tikal-Uaxactun relationship in the larger framework of the Early Classic period. He pointed out that the two sites account for twenty of the thirty-five Cycle 8 monuments and twenty-two of the fifty-two known Cycle 8 dates. The date shared between them is the earliest shared date (not a period ending) now known, and in subsequent history such shared dates “record major battles,” with a few recording important dynastic dates, such as births or accessions. In the records of the shared date at both sites, Mathews identified a person named “Smoking-Frog of Tikal” as the major actor along with Great-Jaguar-Paw, who let blood on this occasion.

Mathews pointed out a pattern of data that is fundamental to interpreting this event. Since Smoking-Frog appears with the Tikal Emblem Glyph at both sites, he was an ahau of Tikal who became the dominant lord at Uaxactun. The conquest of Uaxactun was apparently directed by Smoking-Frog, but Great-Jaguar-Paw, who must have been an old man at the time, also let blood. Smoking-Frog appears as the protagonist of Uaxactun monuments at 8.18.0.0.0. while the ruler Curl-Snout, who succeeded Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal about a year after the conquest, acts at Tikal on the same dates. At Tikal, however, Smoking-Frog’s name appears on all of the Curl-Snout monuments and Curl-Snout acceded “in the land of Smoking-Frog,” suggesting that the new ruler ofTikal held his throne under the authority of Smoking-Frog.

Mathews offered the following explanation for this pattern:

“...if 1 am correct then the nature of the Tikal-Uaxactun ties at this time originates from the placement of Smoking-Frog or of one of his close relatives in power at Uaxactun. This could have been achieved through marriage or by conquest. The nature of the 8.17.1.4.12 event—bloodletting—could be used to support either possibility. Bloodletting was an important feature of both warfare (sacrifice of the captives) and of royal marriages (autosacrifice by the wedding couple). If the event was war, then presumably Tikal imposed a member of its own royal family as ruler of Uaxactun. If the event was marriage, then Tikal apparently married into Uaxactun’s ruling dynasty. Either way, I suspect that Tikal played the dominant role in the relationship between the two sites.”

We accept Mathews’s scenario as the most likely, and we favor his suggestion of conquest as the type of interaction, although a royal marriage may also have resulted from the conquest. The iconography associated with representations of the events are consistently associated with war and bloodletting in Maya history.

[212] This censer is composed of a zoomorphic head with a tri-lobe device over its eye. The same head appears on Stela 39 with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a sky sign on top of it. This combination also occurs at Copan, where the Tikal Emblem Glyph main sign is replaced by the bat of Copan in a context where the tri-lobed head can be identified as the head variant of the sign known as the “impinged bone.” Combined with the sky sign, the “impinged bone” and its tri-lobed head variant identify place names or toponyms (Stuart and Houston n.d.). In these cases, the “sky-impinged bone” identify the main sign of the Emblem Glyphs as a geographic location corresponding to the polity as a place. On Stela 39, the place where the event took place is identified as Tikal. On Stela 5, it is Uaxactun, which used the split-sky sign that also identified Yaxchilan, although there is no reason to suppose that the two kingdoms were related.

[213] The most elaborate example of this complex in its Maya form is on the monument of a Late Classic conqueror. Dos Pilas Stela 2 (Fig. 4:17b), depicts Ruler 3 (Houston and Mathews 1985:17) hulking over his captive, Yich’ak-Balam (Stuart 1987b:27–28), the king of Seibal. Ruler 3 wears the same balloon headdress as Smoking-Frog, but the costume is now in its complete form with a full-bodied jaguar suit, the trapezoidal sign called the Mexican Year Sign, an owl, the goggle-eyed Tlaloc image, and throwing spears and rectangular flexible shields. Piedras Negras Stela 8 (Fig. 4:17a) depicts Ruler 3 of that kingdom in the same costume as he stands on a pyramidal platform with two captives kneeling at this feet.

[214] The date of the Dos Pilas event (which was also recorded on Aguateca Stela 2) and a set of related verbs called “Shell-star” events at other sites were first associated with the periodicities of Venus by David Kelley (1977b). Michael Goss (1979) and Floyd Lounsbury (1982) showed this category of event to be associated with the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar and the two elongation points. Lounsbury went on to add Jupiter and Saturn stationary points to the astronomical phenomenon included in this complex.

Berthold Riese (in Baudez and Mathews 1979:39) first suggested that the star-shell events were war related, a hypothesis that Mary Miller (1986b:48—51, 95–130) has brilliantly supported with her analysis of the inscriptions and imagery in Room 2 of the Bonampak murals. These paintings depict one of the most amazing battle scenes known from the history of art, all under a register that shows stars being thrown into the scene from the heavens. The day is an inferior conjunction of Venus with a heliacal rising of Morningstar probable on the next day (M. Miller 1986b:51). The day of the event, August 2, 792, was also a zenith passage and the constellations that appear in the east just before the dawn of that day, Cancer and Gemini, are also represented on the register.

The Uaxactun costume with its spearthrower, balloon headdress, and bird is regularly associated with these shell-star events. The costume also appears in scenes of self-inflicted bloodletting (Scheie 1984a), such as those shown on Lintels 24 and 25 of Yaxchilan, where a drum-turban decorated with tassels occurs with the complex. Other icons in the complex include the trapezoidal design known as the Mexican Year Sign and the goggle-eyed image known as Tlaloc to the later Aztecs. Along with the balloon headdress, spearthrowers, owls, flexible shield, a jaguarian image made of mosaic pattern, and a full-body jaguar suit, this set of imagery forms a special ritual complex that meant war and sacrifice to the Maya (see Scheie and M. Miller [198 6:17 5–240]).

This complex of imagery also appears at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Kaminaljuyu, Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and numerous other sites throughout Mesoamerica between A.D. 450 and 900. First discovered at Kaminaljuyu (Kidder, Jennings, and Shook 1946), this merging of traditional Maya imagery with Teotihuacân-style imagery has been taken to signal the presence of Teotihuacanos at the Maya sites, especially at Tikal (Coggins 1976, 1979a, 1979b). Teotihuacan certainly had the same complex of iconography and there it was associated with war (Pasztory 1974) and with sacrifice (Oakland 1982 and Parsons 1985). Teotihuacan has been seen by many of these researchers as the innovator of this ritual complex and the donor and dominant partner in all instances where this complex of iconography appears in non-Teotihuacan contexts. We argue that the relationship between the Maya and Teotihuacan during the Classic period is far more complex that these explanations suppose. See René Millon (1988) for his evaluation of the interaction from the viewpoint of Teotihuacan.

[215] The same iconography appears in later inscriptions with an glyph juxtaposing the sign for Venus with “earth” or the main signs of Emblem Glyphs. This type of war we shall call “star-shell” war or simply “star war.”

[216] The coincidence of this iconographie complex with Venus and Jupiter/Saturn stations of importance to the Maya (the heliacal risings of morning and evening stars, the eastern and western elongation points of Venus, and the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn) is overwhelming. This particular kind of war costume and related iconography occurs at the following sites associated with the following astronomical and historical events:

(1) 17.1.4.12—1/16/378: Uaxactun St. 5, conquest by Tikal on a day with no detected astronomical associations

(2) 9.4.3.0.7—10/19/517: Piedras Negras Lintel 12, display of captive with visiting lords 7 days before maximum elongation (-.7) of Morningstar

(3) 9.4.5.6.16—2/5/520: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded event, first appearance of Eveningstar (26 days after superior conjunction)

(4) 9.8.0.0.0—8/24/593: Lacanja St. 1, period ending rite on the first appearance of the Eveningstar (33 days after superior conjunction)

(5) 9.8.13.10.0—1/4/607: Piedras Negras, Lintel 4, unknown event 17 days before maximum elongation (-1.7) of Eveningstar

(6) 9.8.14.17.16—6/3/608 and 9.9.12.0.0—3/10/625: Lamanai St. 9, days of no astronomical associations

(7) 9.9.15.0.0—2/23/628: Piedras Negras St. 26, period-ending rites 5 days after maximum elongation (-.14) of Morningstar

(8) 9.10.6.2.1—2/6/639: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, death of Ruler 1, retrograde before inferior conjunction of Venus

(9) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, a mosaic helmet with Palenque Triad on first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(10) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Piedras Negras St. 34, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(11) 9.11.6.1.8—10/11/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, war event of Ruler 2; Jupiter is 1.44 before its 2^nd stationary point (345.41)

(12) 9.11.6.2.1—10/24/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 2, war event with heir and youths from Bonampak and Yaxchilan; Jupiter is .45 before its 2^nd stationary point (344.46)

(13) 9.11.9.8.6—2/10/662: Piedras Negras St. 35, eroded (6 days before shell-star event); Jupiter is .40 before its 2^nd stationary point (89.68)

(14) 9.11.15.0.0—7/28/667: Chicago Ballcourt Panel, bailgame sacrifice by Zac- Balam: Jupiter is .06 before its 2^nd stationary point

(15) 9.12.0.0.0—7/1/672: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, mosaic helmet verb with Palenque Triad 5 days after maximum elongation (-.73) of Eveningstar

(16) 9.12.7.16.17—4/27/680: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded action of Lady of Site Q, 12 days after maximum elongation (-.776) of Morningstar

(17) 9.12.9.8.1—10/23/681: Yaxchilan Lintel 25, accession of Shield-Jaguar and fish-in-hand bloodletting by Lady Xoc; Jupiter is .17 after 2^nd stationary point (318.27)

(18) 9.12.10.0.0—5/10/682: Copan St. 6, period-ending rites on the retrograde position after inferior conjunction of Venus

(19) 9.12.11.13.0—1/20/684: Palenque, Group of the Cross, end of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rite 11 days before the maximum elongation of Morningstar (-.53)

(20) 9.12.14.10.11—11/16/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, macah of Lady Ahpo-Katun, 4 days before maximum elongation (-.20) of Eveningstar

(21) 9.12.14.10.19—11/19/686: Piedras Negras St. 8 and 7, death of Ruler 2, 1 day before maximum elongation (-.10) of Eveningstar

(22) 9.12.14.10.17—11/22/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, nawah of Lady Ahpo Katun, 2 days after maximum elongation (-.18) of Eveningstar

(23) 9.12.14.11.1—11/26/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, preaccession rite of Ruler 3, 6 days after maximum elongation (-.62) of Eveningstar

(24) 9.12.18.5.16—7/23/690: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication rites for the Group of the Cross, complex conjunction with Jupiter .33 after its 2^nd stationary point (221.43), Saturn at its 2^nd stationary (225.50), Mars at 219.20, and the moon at 232.91

(25) 9.12.19.14.12—1/10/692: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication of the sanctuary buildings, 23 days before maximum elongation (-1.67) of Morningstar and 8^th-tropical year anniversary of Chan-Bahlum’s accession

(26) 9.13.3.8.11—8/21/695: Tikal, Structure 5D-57, nawah by Ruler A; Jupiter is .42 before the 1^st stationary point (45.64); Saturn is at 2^nd station (282.4)

(27) 9.13.3.9.18—9/17/695: Tikal, Temple 1, Lintel 3, bloodletting and 13^th katun anniversary of the last date on Stela 31; Jupiter is .36 after the 1^st stationary point (45.70): Saturn is at its 2^nd station

(28) 9.13.17.15.12—10/28/709; Yaxchilan Lintel 24, bloodletting of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar; Jupiter is .58 after the 1^st stationary point (117.20); Saturn at 2^nd stationary point (114.92)

(29) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Naranjo St. 1, action by Smoking-Squirrel on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(30) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Piedras Negras St. 7, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(31) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Tikal St. 16, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(32) 9.14.9.7.2—3/9/721: Piedras Negras St. 7, 17^th tun anniversary of Ruler 3’s accession; Jupiter is .81 after the 2^nd stationary point (81.05); Saturn at 1^st (249.77)

(33) 9.15.0.0.0—8/22/731: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), period-ending 5 days before maximum elongation (-.125) of Eveningstar

(34) 9.15.4.6.9—12/3/735: Aguateca 2 and Dos Pilas 16, star over Seibal war on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(35) 9.15.5.3.13—10/7/736: Piedras Negras St. 9, 7^th tun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession, 21 days before maximum elongation (-2.66) of Eveningstar

(36) 9.16.4.1.1—5/9/755. Yaxchilan Lintels 8 and 41, capture of Jeweled-Skull by Bird-Jaguar on a day with no detected astronomical associations

(37) 9.17.0.0.0—1/24/771: Tikal St. 22, scattering rite, visible eclipse 15 days after superior conjunction of Venus

(38) 9.17.5.8.9—6/15/776: Bonampak St. 2, accession of Muan-Chaan 14 days before maximum elongation (-.74) of Eveningstar

(39) 9.17.15.3.13—1/18/786: Bonampak St. 3, capture??? by Muan Chaan 13 days before maximum elongation (-.55) of Eveningstar

(40) 9.18.0.0.0—10/11/790: Cancuen 1, period-ending rites 14 days before maximum. elongation (-.43) of Eveningstar

(41) 9.18.1.15.15—8/16/792): Bonampak Room 2, battle to take captives on the zenith passage of sun and the inferior conjunction of Venus

(42) 10.1.0.0.0—11/30/849: Ixlú St. 2, scattering rite, 16 days after maximum elongation (-.95) of Eveningstar

To test that these astronomical associations are not the product of the natural periodicity of planetary motions and thus coincidental, we calculated the dates and planetary data for every hotun (five-tun period) in Classic history. The pattern holds. The flaloc-war iconography appears when a period-ending date coincided with a important Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn station, and it does not appear on dates without these associations.

If the Tlaloc complex was borrowed from Teotihuacán, an interpretation that seems likely, it may have come with the astronomical associations already in place. However, we will not be able to test that possibility since no Teotihuacán art or architectural objects have dates recorded on them. The Teotihuacanos apparently did not consider the calendar or the days on which the events of myth and history occurred to be important public information. Thus, the astronomical associations with this ritual complex may well have come into being after the Maya borrowed it and made it their own.

[217] We do not understand the full four-glyph phrase yet, but the first glyph is a hand with a jewel suspended from the extended first finger. This same sign is used as the principal verb for the completion of katuns and other period endings, especially when recording the katuns with a reign. Thrice this verb is written with its phonetic spelling appended to it: once on Tortugucro Monument 6, a second time on Naranjo Altar 1, and finally on Copán Stela A (Fig. 4:18). These spellings have a shell marked by three dots superfixed to a sign identified in Landa as ma or surrounded by a dotted circle, generally accepted as the syllable mo. The shell sign is the main glyph in the verb identified in the Dresden and Madrid codices and in the inscriptions of Chichén Itzá as the “fire drill” glyph. For many years, we presumed this glyph to read hax. the back and forth motion of the hands that drives the drill. Recently, however, Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1987) reinterpreted this glyph to read hoch’, also a term for “to drill or perforate” in Yucatec. The shell in his spelling has the value ho, giving the value ho-m(a) and ho-m(o) for the “completion” hand discussed above. In Choi and Yucatec, horn is “to end or finish (acabarse)” (see Aulie and Aulie 1978:66 and Barrera Vasquez 1980:231). Homophones in Yucatec mean “a boundary between property” and most important, “to knock down or demolish buildings or hills (desplomar lo abovedado, derribar edificios, cerros).” The latter meaning especially seems appropriate to the context of conquest.

[[]]

David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) takes the horn discussed above to spell the future suffix on a root ending in -h. Stephen Houston, following Stuart, has suggested lah, a word meaning “to end or finish in Yucatec. This reading is the other possibility, although we find it less likely because in other contexts, such as the west panel of the Temple of Inscriptions, the ma phonetic complement is retained when other tense/aspects are distinguished by different suffixes. However, if this lah suggestion proves to be the correct reading, it still provides an appropriate meaning to the event—that the battle “finished” or “ended” the defeat of Uaxactún.

Regardless of which reading proves to be the correct one in the long run. the association of the “completion” hand with war events seems to be clear. On Lintel 3 of Tikal Temple 4, for example, the same verb appears with an event that took place one day after a “star-war” event against Yaxhá (see glyph C7a on the lintel).

[218] Mathews (1985a:44) observed that the first of the glyphs recording this bloodletting action shows the lower half of a body sitting on its heels in the position assumed by a man when drawing blood from his penis (Joralemon 1974). Mathews suggested the glyph is a direct reference to male bloodletting. Federico Fahsen (1987) has documented other occurrences of the same verb at Tikal with the same meaning. The second verb shows a hand with its thumb extended as it grips a lancet of some sort. The same sign appears in the Early Classic version of the west glyph, which is shown on Yaxchilán Lintel 53 as a monster head biting down on the glyph for the sun. In the two examples of this verb on Stela 31, the hand with lancet has a ba or a bi sign attached to it, producing in the Maya way of spelling a term which should end in -ab or -ib. In Yucatec, the word for west in chikin, “bitten or eaten sun”; the word for “to bite” is chi’; and the word for “bitten” and “to prick or puncture” is chi’bal (Barrera Vasquez 1980:92). The verb is apparently chi’bah, “he was punctured.”

[219] Prescott Follett (1932) compiled a useful summary of the weapons and armor depicted in Maya art as well as Colonial descriptions of warfare. Mary Miller’s (1986b) analysis of the Bonampak murals gives evidence of a battle in progress while Schele (1984a), Dillon (1982), and Taube (1988b) discuss the aftermath of battle.

[220] Marisela Ayala Falcon has called our attention to what is perhaps the most astounding and poignant episode in our entire story. Stela 5, the tree-stone depicting the conqueror Smoking-Frog, was set directly in front of Temple B-VI1I (Fig. 4:5). Excavated by the Carnegie Institution in the thirties, this building was uniquely constructed as a mausoleum. Ledyard Smith (1950:101) describes a tomb built like a chultun directly under the floor of the upper temple and extending down to the bedrock below. He cites the type of loose fill and the construction technique used in the substructure as evidence that the tomb “chamber was constructed at the same time as the substructure” (Smith 1950:52).

Stela 5, the conquest monument, was located in the center of the temple stairs. The stela “lies only a few centimeters from the center of the lowest step of the stairway. The floor was laid at the time of the stairway and turns up to the stela, which was not put through it” (Smith 1950:52). On the other hand, Stela 4, Smoking-Frog’s 8.18.0.0.0 monument, was erected by cutting through this same floor. The stairway and floor then were completed when Stela 5 was set in its place, thus identifying the temple as a victory monument constructed to celebrate the same events as Stela 5.

Of the tomb, Ledyard Smith (1950:52) said this: “It is of interest that it [Temple VIII] was probably built as a burial place; and that the tomb, which contained five skeletons, is one of the few at the site that held more than a single body; and that it is the only example of a group burial found at Uaxactún.” The five people buried in it comprise the most extraordinary detail of all. Smith (1950:101) reported the skeletons included an adult female who was pregnant when she died, a second adult female, a child, and an infant. That the only group grave at Uaxactún should happen to be located in a tomb constructed inside the temple celebrating Tikal’s victory is no accident. The identity of the dead as two women, an unborn child, an infant, and an older child is no coincidence either. These people were surely the wives and children of the defeated king. They were killed and placed inside the victory monument to end forever the line of kings who had ruled Uaxactún.

The defeated king himself was likely taken to Tikal to meet his end. His family stayed at Uaxactún watching the victors construct the new temple at the end of the causeway that connected the huge temple complexes of the city (Group A and B according to archaeological nomenclature). They must have known the tomb was being constructed in the substructure and who would occupy it.

The scene of their deaths can be reconstructed also. A circular shaft dropped to a ledge cut midway down and then fell another couple of meters to the bedrock floor below, dropping five meters in all. The bottom of the shaft widened on its east-west axis to torm the burial chamber. The pregnant woman died and fell on her side with her knees drawn up around her unborn child. Her body lay in the southwest corner. The other woman lay along the north wall with the child lying next to her waist in the center of the tomb. The infant was thrown into the southeast corner. Plates, bowls, and jugs, probably containing food for their journey, were placed around them and then the chamber was sealed with what Smith (1950:101) called an “elaborate stucco adorno painted red. [The] adorno [was] set into the shaft and covered with the floor of the temple.”

[221] Despite the crucial role of weaponry in any interpretation of combat tactics, the investigation of Maya chipped-stone weapon tips remains in the preliminary stages. The hypothesis presented here, that the Teotihuacanos introduced the spearthrower as a weapon in the Maya lowlands, is not original to us. For example, Irvin Rovner (1976:46), from the vantage of Becan, and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (1976:96), from the vantage of Tikal, both note the linkage between the stemmed projectile form and imported Mexican obsidian in the time of the known Early Classic contacts. Gordon Willey (1972:161–177; 1978:102–105) provides some overview discussion of the development of lowland Maya bifacially chipped point-shaped artifacts. The relatively smaller stemmed varieties of point are characteristic of the Late Classic period. Although the function of such points is a matter for empirical investigation through microscopic inspection of edge damage, these points arc in the appropriate range for projectile weapons, such as the spear flung using a throwing-stick. The relatively larger laurel-leaf-shaped points, suitable for the thrusting spears and explicitly depicted by the Classic Maya in their war art, definitely occur by Early Classic times at such sites as Uaxactun and Altar de Sacrificios and persist throughout the Late Classic. During the Late Preclassic period, the smaller stemmed varieties of bifacial point are absent from such communities as Cerros (Mitchum 1986); the characteristic pointed artifact is the large, stemmed, plano-convex macroblade “tanged dagger.” This artifact is suitable for a shock weapon such as the thrusting spear, but not for a projectile weapon; it is broadly distributed in Late Preclassic times throughout the Maya region (Sheets 1976). Nevertheless, there is some preliminary evidence from even earlier contexts tentatively identified as Archaic hunter-gatherer groups in Belize (MacNeish 1981) for the presence of projectile weapons among the original inhabitants of the lowlands. We surmise that while the Maya probably always knew about the throwing-stick and its spear, it did not figure prominently in their politics until it was declared a weapon of war by Great-Jaguar-Paw. In all, the stone-artifact evidence will provide a useful arena for the further exploration of the hypothesized change in battle tactics after A.D. 400.

[222] Mathews (1985a:44—45) proposed much the same interpretation, but there are problems with the calendrics of this passage, which may lead to a different interpretation. The date at the beginning of this passage is clearly 10 Caban 10 Yaxkin with G4 as the Lord of the Night. This particular combination occurred only on 8.6.3.16.17, a date much too early for the chronology of this text and its actors. Christopher Jones, Tatiana Pros- kouriakoff, and others (see C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:70) have pointed out that the accession date on Stela 4 is 5 Caban 10 Yaxkin with the same G4, and thus the date on Stela 31 has been accepted as an error. The problems with this interpretation are twofold:

(1) 8 Men is written just above this Calendar Round on Stela 31 and 8 Men is exactly two days before 10 Caban, reinforcing the likelihood of a 10 Caban reading.

(2) The clause preceding this date records the dedication of a house named Wi-te-na. The reconstruction of the date of this dedication event is problematic because part of the passage was destroyed in the ritual burning that accompanied deposit of Stela 31 in Temple 33. However, if the date recorded immediately before this burned area belongs to the house dedication, it took place 17 tuns, 12 uinals, and 10 kins (or 17.10.12, since the Distance Number could be read either way) after the conquest of Uaxactun. This chronology gives a date of 8.17.18.17.2 11 Ik 15 Zip (June 26, 395) or 8.17.18.15.4 12 Kan 17 Pop (May 19, 395). The relevance of this dedication date is that the 10 (or 5) Caban 10 Yaxkin event, which has been taken to be Curl-Snout’s accession, took place both in “the land of Smoking-Frog” and in the Wi-te-na. Unless the house dedicated seventeen years after the conquest of Uaxactun carried the same name as an earlier house, the Stela 31 event must have taken place after the house was dedicated.

In this second interpretation, the day of the event would be 8.19.7.9.17 10 Caban 10 ‘ axkin (September 2, 423), but the Lord of the Night would be in error, for this day requires G8. Fortunately, the historical argument we propose in this chapter does not depend on the precise date of this event, for the date is not the critical information. Regardless of the timing of the action, the protagonist clearly is Ciirl-Snont, but he acts ‘in the land of Smoking-Frog.” The ahau of higher rank is Smoking-Frog.

[223] The deep interaction of Tikal and Uaxactiin during this period is further supported by the Early Classic murals in Uaxactun Temple XIII. The murals show two high-rank males confronting each other across a three-column-wide text. Next to them sits a palace building with three women sitting inside, and beyond the house, two registers with several scenes of ongoing rituals. The style of dress, the ceramics associated with the building, and the style of the glyphs (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1989) date the mural to approximately the time of Uolantun Stela 1 (8.18.0.0.0) and Tikal Stela 31 (9.0.10.0.0). The main text of the mural has the name of a person called Mah Kina Mo’ (Lord Macaw) and perhaps the name of Stormy-Sky of Tikal. Most interesting, Fahsen (1988a) reports an inscription found on a headless statue in Temple 3D-43, a structure located at the juncture of the Maier and Maudslay causeways. The inscription dates to the time around 8.18.10.8.12 (November 5, 406) and it includes a character named K’u-Mo’. We have no way now of knowing if these two references to someone named Macaw refer to the same person, but the time and place are right.

[224] David Stuart (in a letter dated February 10, 1988) suggested a reading of yilan (or yitah) for the T565 relationship glyph first identified by Kelley (1962) at Quirigua. In Chorti, this term means “the sibling of.” Ihtan is the root, while y is the possessive pronoun used with vowel-initial words. We (Scheie n.d.e) have tested this reading at Tikal, Caracol, Chichen Itza, and other Maya sites and found it to be productive. It is used, for example, to represent the relationship between two kings of Caracol (Rulers IV and V) who were born less than twelve years apart.

[225] At Palenque and Yaxchilan, a horned owl and a shield substitute for each other in the names of the ruler Pacal and G3 of the Lords of the Night. The owl in this context appears with a spearthrowing dart penetrating its body or its head. Exactly this combination occurs in the headdress on Stela 31, which depicts the dart-pierced bird with the shield over its wing. In the title, the spearthrower dart is replaced by the spearthrower itself, so that “spearthrower-owl” and “spearthrower-shield” and combinations of the “spearthrower dart” with the bird and the shield are all variations of the same name.

[[][Spearthrower and owl from the Tikal Ballcourt Marker]]

Virginia Fields (personal communication, 1989) pointed out to me the importance of Stela 32 (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982: Fig. 55a) to the spearthrower-owl identification. This fragment was found in Problematic Deposit 22, a dedication cache intruded into the stair of Structure 5D-26-lst in the North Acropolis. The image depicts a front-view person dressed in regalia identical to the shield carried by C url-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. However, hanging over the chest of the figure is a crested bird very similar if not identical to the bird medallion on Stormy-Sky’s headdress. If Fields’s identification of this bird as the owl in the spearthrower title is correct, then the title is directly associated with the war costume worn by Curl-Snout, just as we propose.

Peter Mathews (personal communication, December 1989) presented us with the final piece of the puzzle by pointing out an entry in the Cordemex dictionary of 1 ucatec (Barrera Vasquez 1980:342) and its relationship to the phonetic value of the cauac sign as cu. The entry has ku (cu in our orthography) as “the omen owl, owl, bird of prophesy in the books of Chilam Balam.” This cu word for “owl” also occurs in Choi and in Tzcltal where it is registered as cuh. Since the objects at the corners of the shield are thought to have the phonetic value hi or he in glyphic contexts, the entire configuration may be the full spelling cu-h(e). Mathews’s observations thus identify the cauac-marked shield as a direct phonetic spelling of the owl and, just as important, with an owl specifically associated with prophecy and fortune-telling. Phis particular association apparently had a very ancient history that derived from the owl’s prominent role in this war iconography.

[226] This final event on Stela 31 took place on June 11, 439, in the Julian calendar when Venus was Morningstar and 44.93+ from the sun. The maximum elongation occurred fifteen days later on June 27 with Venus at 45.62+ from the sun, or .69+ beyond the June 11 position. However, June 11 can be taken as an arrival position for eastern elongation, the point at which Venus is farthest from the ecliptic of the sun as we see them from earth, and on that day Venus was magnitude -4.4, about as bright as it gets. 1 his date then belongs to the same category of astronomical hierophany as the war/Tlaloc events discussed above (See Note 47).

[227] The text on Stela 31 concerning Curl-Snout has proven to be extremely resistant to decipherment. The events and actors as we understand now are as follows:

(1) On 8.17.18.17.2 (June 26, 395) a temple named Wi-te-na was dedicated by Curl-Snout.

(2) On 8.17.2.16.17 (September 13, 379) or 8.19.7.9.17 (September 2, 423), Curl- Snout engaged in a dynastic event that involved displaying a scepter “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (see Note 53 for a discussion of this problematic date).

(3) On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396), Curl-Snout ended Katun 18 in his own land as a one-katun ahau, a title that indicates a person was under twenty years old or else still in his first katun of reign when the event happened. If he was under twenty years old more than seventeen years after his accession, he was indeed young when he acceded, perhaps explaining why Smoking-Frog appears to be the dominant ahau in the kingdom.

(4) On 8.19.5.2.5 (April 13, 421) an unknown event was done by an unknown person.

(5) On 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, 411) another event occurred, but the record of it is lost in the damaged area of the text. We do not know who the actor was, but the event occurs on one of the most extraordinary astronomical hierophanies we have yet discovered in Maya inscriptions. Since July of 411, Jupiter and Saturn had been within four degrees of each other, hovering around an azimuth reading of 72+ as they crisscrossed each other in a triple conjunction that would finally end in March of the following year. This day occurred shortly after the second of these conjunctions just when Venus had swung out 47.22^ to its maximum elongation as Eveningstar.

Federico Fahsen (1988b) has posited that the lost event associated with this date was the accession of Stormy-Sky. We find his suggestion interesting because its fits so well with the chronology of the text on Stela 1 and the date in Burial 48, which is generally accepted as Stormy-Sky’s tomb. Since Stela 1 records the “completion of the second katun” of Stormy-Sky’s reign, he must have reigned at least forty years. Moreover, if 9.1.1.10.10 (March 20, 457), the date painted on the walls of Burial 48, is taken as Stormy-Sky’s death (Coggins 1976:186), then the accession must have been at least two katuns earlier—or 8.19.1.10.10, at the latest. 8.19.10.0.0, the date most of us have taken as his accession date, not only falls after that limit, but its 2-katun anniversary fell on 9.1.10.0.0, nine years after the death date. In contrast, Fahsen’s earlier date has its 2-katun anniversary on 9.0.15.11.0, six years before the tomb date and just after the latest date on Stela 31, 9.0.14.15.15 (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:73). This chronology is much more satisfactory.

We also find support for Fahsen’s suggestion in the fragmentary glyph that follows the 8.18.15.11.0 date on Stela 31. It resembles the T168:518 accession glyph that is used at Naranjo and Palenque. If this date is the accession of Stormy-Sky, then the date under 442 above is likely to correspond to the earlier placement.

(6) On 8.19.10.0.0 (February 1, 426), Stormy-Sky, the son of Curl-Snout, became king or else completed the half-period of the nineteenth katun.

[228] There may have been earlier records of the event, but they have not survived into modern times or archaeologists have not yet found them.

[229] The period of thirteen katuns was very important in Maya thought. The thirteen numbers of the tzolkin (260-day calendar) divided into the 7,200 days of a katun gives a remainder of + 11 or -2. Thus, each time the Long Count advances one katun it reaches the same day name combined with a number two less than the starting point, as in the consecutive katun endings 6 Ahau, 4 Ahau, 2 Ahau, 13 Ahau, 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, and so forth. It takes thirteen katuns to cycle back to the original combination. The 12 Etz’nab 11 Zip (9.0.3.9.18) of the Stela 31 passage cycled back on the katun wheel thirteen katuns later on 9.13.3.9.18 12 Etz’nab 11 Zac. On the occasion of that anniversary, the Late Classic descendant of Stormy-Sky conducted his own bloodletting and war in an episode we will encounter in the next chapter.

[230] This Ballcourt Marker was found inside an altar set inside a court on the north end of Group 6C-XVI-Sub (Fialko 1988 and Laporte 1988). The altar platform was built with a single Teotihuacán-style talud-tablero terrace, a short stairway leading to its summit on which the marker was once mounted in an upright position (Fig. 4:23). We believe that this group was a nonroyal compound, probably for a favored noble lineage subordinate to the high king.

[231] A ballcourt marker with depictions very similar to these murals was found on a ranch in La Ventilla near Teotihuacán in 1963 and is now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico. This Teotihuacan example is made in four pieces joined by tenons and, at 2.13 meters, is twice the size of the meter-high Tikal example (Bernal <verbatim>1969:#8).</verbatim> The Denver Art Museum owns a third example, but we know nothing of its provenience.

[232] This is a unique piece of Mesoamcrican history. First, the lowland Maya of the Preclassic period kingship already celebrated royal events in conjunction with the bailgame played with rubber balls, as we have seen at the center of Cerros where ballcourts are linked to the image of the severed head of the Jaguar Sun. The bailgame is the fundamental metaphor of life out of death: The sacrifice of the Ancestors and their apotheosis occurs in the context of ballgames with the lords of Xibalba. The form of sacrifice associated with the ballgame is specifically decapitation; we have seen that the kings of Tikal and Uaxactún focused upon the severed head resulting from such acts. Further, we know that the severed head of the sun and the bailgame are both central to Maya concepts of warfare.

All well and good: But the lowland Maya did not play the bailgame with markers like the one found at Tikal. Their courts could have carved stones laid into the playing surfaces and sometimes rings or tenoned sculptures mounted in the side walls. The Tikal Ballcourt Marker is a Teotihuacán-style artifact that was used in an entirely different game played with a smaller ball, with sticks, and without courts. Eric Taladoire (1981) has summarized the evidence for this distinctive Early Classic bailgame in his comprehensive review of the Mcsoamerican ballgame. At Teotihuacán, this kind of ballcourt marker and game are depicted in the Mural of Tlalocán, and an actual stone marker was discovered in the La Ventilla Complex at this city. Outside of Teotihuacán, examples of this kind of marker are found in the western region of Mesoamerica; one example is reported from Kaminaljuyu, which clearly had significant ties to Tikal and other lowland Maya capitals during this period (Brown 1977). The Tikal example seems to be of local manufacture, since the long inscription on its shaft is clearly Mayan and refers to local events, but its form deliberately emulates the style of the Teotihuacán game.

[233] The date of this accession is somewhat problematical. The best solution gives 8.16.17.9.0 11 Ahau 3 Uayeb (May 5, 374) for the date of accession, with the alternative being 8.18.5.1.0 11 Ahau 13 Pop (May 10, 411) (Fialko 1988).

[234] Pendergast (1971) found green obsidian in a Late Preclassic cache at Altun Ha, while Hammond reports green obsidian in Late Preclassic contexts at Nohmul (Hammond n.d.). Later materials in Teotihuacan style are known from a cache at Becan (Ball 1974b, 1979, 1983), and Burials 10 and 48 at Tikal (W. R. Coe 1965a). Conversely, Maya-style artifacts have been excavated at Teotihuacan (Linne 1934, 1942 and Ball 1983). The appearance of these objects imported from the opposite region or manufactured in the style of the other culture signals the opening of an extensive interchange network that moved material goods as well as ideas and symbols throughout Mesoamerica.

[235] The Tlaloc complex of imagery is particularly associated with the “star-shell” type of war we have been discussing as battle timed by Venus and Jupiter hierophanies (Scheie 1979, n.d.; Lounsbury 1982; M. Miller 1986b; Closs 1979). Many of the territorial conquests in which rulers of known sites were captured are associated with this complex: Caracol’s defeat of Tikal and Naranjo; Tonina’s defeat of Palenque; Dos Pilas’s defeat of Seibal; Piedras Ncgras’s defeat of Pomona; Tikal’s defeat of Yaxha; and more.

Most captives in Maya art are shown as individuals, some named by glyphs incised on their bodies, most unnamed and anonymous. Their captors stand on captives bodies or display them publicly as offerings whose presentation will gain them merit with the gods. Named prisoners are a minority and those named with their kingdoms identified are rarer still. In most contexts, then, the Maya gleaned prestige from the identities of their captives as individuals as much or more than as representatives of their kingdoms. This remains true of the kingly captives, with the exception that their status as ahauob of their home kingdoms is repeatedly emphasized. If there was war that resulted in territorial conquest as well as political dominance, then these star-shell events are the likely candidates. The first and perhaps the most impressive example of this kind of war was Tikal s conquest of Uaxactun. See Note 47 for a discussion of the astronomical association of this war and sacrifice complex.

[236] Coggins (1976; 1979a:259–268) has presented detailed arguments for these identifications, although the case for identifying Burial 10 as the burial place of Curl-Snout is the weaker of the two cases. We find her evidence well argued and accept her identifications.

[237] Coggins (1976:177–179) remarks that this deposit was found in a dump west of the North Acropolis. She lists seven skeletons, a basalt mano and metate, olivo shells, green obsidian, a mosaic plaque, a couch shell, and thirty-eight vessels, many of them in the style of Teotihuacan. Among these vessels is one depicting the group of Teotihuacanos apparently leaving a Teotihuacan-style pyramid to arrive at a Maya temple, which Coggins speculated was in fact a record of the arrival of Teotihuacanos in the Maya lowlands.

[238] It is just about this time that the cylindrical tripod spread throughout Mesoamerica and became one of the principal pottery forms of the Early Classic period through the entire cultural sphere. The shape, which provides particularly useful surfaces for displaying imagery, was adopted by all of the major cultural traditions of the time. In general the Maya style is taller in the vertical axis than the squatter style of Teotihuacan.

[239] The other possibility is that the cities are Tikal, Kaminaljuyu, and Teotihuacan (Coggins 1979a:263). Kaminaljuyu is a likely candidate for the middle temple depicted on the vase which shares features of both Teotihuacan and Maya architecture. However, if Coggins’s dates of A.D. 386 to 426 for this deposit are correct, the deposit is some seventy-five to a hundred years earlier than the Teotihuacan-style architecture and tombs at Kaminaljuyu. Furthermore, recent excavations in the Lost World group at Tikal by Juan Pedro Laporte (1988) have demonstrated the presence of talud-tablero architecture at Tikal by the third century A.D. A place ruled by Maya which has both styles of architecture is very probably Tikal. The two types of talud-tablero temples represented in the scene are distinguished by their roofcombs and the U-shapes marking the Maya version.

[240] Marcus (1980) has also commented on these tasseled headdresses, also associating them with Teotihuacan emissaries to Monte Alban.

[241] Charles Cheek (1977) proposed a model of conquest to explain the appearance of Teotihuacano architectural and ceramic styles at Kaminaljuyu, placing the time of Teotihuacan conquest in the sixth century. Kenneth Brown (1977 and personal communication, 1986) sees Kaminaljuyu as a port of trade serving as a neutral, secure ground for both lowland Maya and highland Teotihuacanos to trade upon.

At Kaminaljuyu, both lowland Maya and Teotihuacanos seem to have been present during the Middle Classic period (A.D. 400–600). Lowland Maya ceramics and jade artifacts are known at Teotihuacan, especially in the Merchants’ Barrio with its curious arrangement of round buildings (Rattray 1986). Teotihuacanos also seem to have been physically present at Tikal. Moholy-Nagy (personal communication, 1986) believes there were a limited number of people of Teotihuacan ethnic origin at Tikal. This identification is based on a burial pattern consisting of cremation and the use of a pit to deposit the human remains and funerary offerings. Two of these pit burials are known: Problematic Deposit 50 found in a dump west of the North Acropolis and Problematic Deposit 22 found in the center of the North Acropolis in front of Structure 5D-26.

Coggins (1979b:42), following Proskouriakoff, suggested that the appearance of the Teotihuacán imagery at Uaxactún and Tikal signaled the arrival of a foreign people. She has suggested that Curl-Snout was in fact a Kaminaljuyu foreigner who usurped the throne of Tikal on the demise of the old dynasty. Archaeological evidence, however, documents Maya interest in green obsidian for use in cached offerings as early as the Late Preclassic period. New excavations at Tikal place the talud-tablero style of architecture at Tikal earlier than the date of the Uaxactún conquest. The lowland Maya and Teotihuacán had long been known to each other and had long traded for exotic goods originating in each others domains. 1 he appearance of Tikal kings in this Teotihuacán costume represents either an intensification of this contact or the adoption of a Teotihuacán ritual complex by the Maya for their own use. It does not signal the conquest of the central Petén or its dominance by foreigners.

[242] Pasztory (1974) divided Tlaloc imagery into two categories, Tlaloc A, which is associated with water and agricultural fertility, and Tlaloc B, which is associated with war and sacrifice. She pointed out that the goggle-eyed imagery of Stela 31 and the Burial 10 vessels is not a Tlaloc image, but rather humans who wear goggle eyes, which she proceeded to associate with war iconography at Teotihuacán (Pasztory 1974:13–14). This war and sacrifice complex appears as the central theme of the Atetelco murals at Teotihuacán. The iconography of that complex is consistent with Teotihuacán imagery as it appears at foreign sites and may well represent a ritual or religious complex that Teotihuacán traders or political emissaries took with them as they spread outward from Teotihuacán in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Karl Taube (n.d.) has recently identified a war complex he associates with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. The symbolism of this imagery includes the Mosaic Monster headdress, which he identifies as a War Serpent. He cites recent excavations at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Sugiyama 1989; Cabrera, Sugiyama, and Cowgill 1988) in which were found mass burials of warriors who were perhaps sacrificed in dedication rituals sometime during the mid-second century A.D. One of these burials contained eighteen mature males of warrior age. They were buried with obsidian points, mirrors that warriors wore on the back of their belts, war trophies in the form of human maxillas and mandibles, and shell imitations of maxillas and teeth. Other artifacts included 4,358 pieces of worked shell, many of which were drilled at one or both ends. Following suggestions by Berio (1976), Taube suggested these pieced shells were from the Mosaic Monster (his War Serpent) headdress. These recent excavations and work on the war complex of Teotihuacán are enriching our understanding of war in Mesoamerican tradition, especially in the Tlaloc- complex we have seen at Uaxactún and Tikal.

[243] Taube (n.d.) follows Rene Millon in suggesting that all of Mesoamerica saw Teotihuacán as the place where the sun and moon were created. We are not yet convinced that the Maya accepted that view, but the imagery at Teotihuacán, especially in the murals of Tetitla called the Tlalocán (Pasztory 1976), represented the city as the earthly replication of the sacred source of creation and genesis. We contend that the Teotihuacanos thought of themselves as citizens of the central sacred spot in the human plane of existence. The Maya on the other hand understood that all temples performed this function and that all kings were the embodiment of the world axis. We do not see Maya kings, their nobles, or the common folk standing in awe of Teotihuacán, no matter its internal definition of itself.

[244] See the July 1982 issue of the National Geographic Magazine for Hammond’s descriptions of this sacrificial burial.

[245] However, there may be hints that this complex was associated with Venus. Pasztory (1976:245–247) associates the Atetelco warrior iconography with the sun ritual and follows Sejourne in associating the goggle-eyed warriors with half-darkened faces with the later Venus deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. However, the Venus association may also be a Postclassic loan to the people of the Valley of Mexico from the lowland Maya. The sacrificial ritual depicted at Cacaxtla in the eighth century seems to be closer to the Late Classic Maya version of the complex than to Atetelco.

[246] Coggins (1979b:41–42) suggests a variant of exactly this scenario.

Chapter 5: Star Wars in the Seventh Century

[247] The kings changed to a costume consisting of a double-stranded necklace with a pectoral; a thick belt mounting a head-celt assemblage on the tront and a backrack on the rear; a hipcloth overlaid by a pointed loincloth; and elaborate cuffs on the ankles and wrists. The headdresses vary with the particular stela and on Stelae 3 and 9 Kan-Boar wears a cape over his shoulders.

[248] These staff monuments include Stelae 13, 9, 3, 7, 15, 27, 8, and 6.

[249] Coggins (1976:184–208) identified Burial 48 as Stormy-Sky’s grave. Chris Jones (n.d.) dates the construction of 5D-33-2^nd to a time following the sealing of Burial 48. The temporal gap between the sealing of the tomb and the temple construction is unknown, but he assigns the temple construction to the period of the staff portraits. He also dates the spectacular Structure 5D-22—2^nd, the huge temple on the northern edge of the Acropolis, to this same period. Arthur Miller (1986:40–50) describes the imagery of this temple in detail, although he assigns the dates of the tombs and construction phases differently from either Coggins or Jones. Miller points out that once the temple was built, the imagery was unchanged until the seventh century when it was encased by the thirty-meter-high Structure 5D-33-lst. No matter which of these chronologies proves to be correct, it is clear that the iconography depicted on these buildings was commissioned during the period of the staff kings, and that these buildings remained the principal backdrop for royal ritual in the Great Plaza until the seventh century.

[250] The clearest data for ordering the monuments comes from dates and a series of “numbered successor” titles that record the numerical position of a particular king following the founder of his dynasty (Mathews 1975; Riese 1984; Scheie 1986b; Grube 1988). Recorded both on monuments and on a looted pot (Robiscek and Hales 1981:234), these “numbered successor” titles allow’ us to reconstruct the order in which the kings reigned, and to know which kings are still missing from the record. Epigraphers still debate which monuments should be associated with w’hich ruler. The three main theories that describe these events have been put forward by Clemency Coggins (1976), Chris Jones (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982), and Peter Mathews (1985a). None of these reconstructions is likely to be completely accurate: the eroded conditions and incomplete nature of the inscriptional record make study of this period in Tikal’s history difficult. We present our own theory in the main text.

[251] See Chapter 4, Figures 4:6 through 4:9.

[252] A. Miller (1986:43–44) identifies the lower masks as “the sun still in the Underworld.” The center masks he associates with the Old God effigy from Burial 10, which has the same trefoil eyelashes as the Cauac Witz Monster; and the upper masks, he sees as Venus. Although our identifications differ, the interpretative concepts are the same: These masks represent manifestations of the Hero Tw’ins and other cosmic imagery as the sacred definition of the temple in Tikal’s ritual life.

[253] If we calculate the span of time between the death of the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, and the accession of the twenty-first successor, we end up with seventy-two years. Dividing this number by the number of kings who ruled during this period gives us an average reign of about eight years.

[254] C. Jones (n.d.) says that the stairs of the twin pyramids were rebuilt at least once, suggesting that the complex was used for more than one katun celebration. He also notes the existence of two twin-pyramid complexes during this period.

[255] The tw’in-pyramid complexes consist of two pyramids with stairways mounting the four sides of each. These platforms, which never had temples at their summits, sit on the east and west sides of a raised plaza. A row of uncarved stelae paired with plain altars are always erected in front of the west facade of the east pyramid. On the north side of the plaza, a carved stela recording the period-ending rite stands with its altar inside a roofless, walled enclosure entered through a vaulted door. On the south side of each complex is a small building which always has nine doors (see C. Jones <verbatim>[1969]</verbatim> for a detailed description of these complexes at Tikal). Dating the beginning of the twin-pyramid complex to the late fifth or early sixth century is important, for the endings of katuns and their quarter points provide one of the great regular patterns of time on which the Classic Maya system of festival and fair revolved. These complexes are unique to Tikal and they play a role of central importance in the ritual life of Tikal in the second half of the Classic period.

[256] Caracol was first discovered in 1937 by Rosa Mai, a logger. He reported it to A. H. Anderson, the archaeological commissioner of Belize, who visited the site that year. Linton Satterthwaite of the University Museum conducted several field seasons between 1950 and 1958 that resulted in excavations and removal of many of its monuments to safe locations (see A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:3—7 for a history of investigations). Arlen and Diane Chase resumed archaeological investigations in 1985, resulting in the discovery of important new inscriptions and archaeological data of major importance. Chase and Chase confirm earlier reports (Healy et al. 1980) of a very densely packed settlement. The city is situated five hundred meters high on the Vaca Plateau near the Maya Mountains of Southern Belize (A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a: 1–2).

[257] Proskouriakofl ’s work, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, was published in 1950. In this study she carefully compared the manner in which a fixed set of objects were depicted on monuments with inscribed dates in the Maya calendar. By showing how these depictions changed over time, she was able to produce a series of dated examples against which an undated monument could be compared and given a general style date. Her work still stands today as the principal means by which we formally assign stylistic dates to Maya sculptures.

[258] See Proskouriakoff (1950:111–112) for her description of the hiatus.

[259] Willey’s (1974) brief and brilliant discussion of the hiatus as a “rehearsal” for the ninth-century collapse of southern Classic Maya civilization reviews many of the political and economic problems confronting the Maya in the wake of the collapse of extensive trade with Teotihuacan and the proliferation of competing polities in the lowlands (see also Rathje 1971). Although a “pre-historical” view, Willey prophetically pinpointed those very areas of social stress that emerged as significant in our translations of the Maya’s own histories of their times. What the Maya themselves are silent on is the linkage between political and economic power. We are confident that there are more allusions to wealth and prosperity of an economic sort in the texts than we can presently identify, but the essential challenge of extending Maya history into the economic domain rests squarely in the fieldwork of archaeologists. One key will be to pursue the strategic imperishable commodities, such as obsidian, jade, and shell, from their stated functions and values in the texts into the contexts of the actual objects excavated from the earth (Freidel 1986a). Meanwhile, the hiatus remains an issue of regional dimensions in Maya research.

[260] In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff published a study of the distribution of monuments at the site of Piedras Negras and other sites. This study identified for the first time historical events and people in the Classic Maya inscriptions. During the next several years, she published a series of papers that changed the world of Maya studies forever by providing the keys to reconstituting their history through study of the inscriptions. These included identification of women in Maya inscriptions and art (1961b), a description of her discovery of the historical method (1961a), and finally her description of historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan (1963–1964). These articles more than any others are at the heart of the decipherment and the reclamation of Maya history from the darkness of a muted past.

[261] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that almost all pre-9.7.0.0.0 monuments were deliberately effaced, while monuments after that time appear to have been damaged only accidentally. Early monuments were abraded, broken, and moved. Scars from the pecked lines that facilitated their mutilation are still in evidence. Other carvings (the back of Stela 10 and Altar 13) were rubbed smooth. Jones comments, “I would guess that this energetic onslaught was the result of a successful raid on Tikal, probably at the end of the reign of Double-Bird, the man on Stela 17.”

[262] A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:33) report that Altar 21 was found in a central trench dug along the east-west axis of the ballcourt in Group A. The use of the term altar for this monument is something of a misnomer. Beginning in the Late Preclassic Period, Maya placed commemorative stones both in the center and at the ends of the plastered playing surfaces of ballcourts (Scarborough et al. 1982). These markers presumably pertained to the rules of the game and also to the rituals that kings carried out in the ballcourts. Generally, the monuments of ballcourts, including reliefs along the sides of some courts, allude to war and sacrifice. This linkage strongly suggests that the ballgame bore a metaphorical relationship to war (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986; Chapter 6). Located in the center of the playing field, the altar in question is a round monument with 1 Ahau, the day upon which the katun of its dedication ended (9.10.0.0.0), and the events in the lives of the Caracol kings, Lord Water and Lord Kan II (Rulers III and V, in the dynastic list). Stephen Houston (in A. Chase n.d.), the project epigrapher, immediately recognized the implications of that remarkable inscription. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:60–62) proposed that the hiatus at Tikal was the direct result of its conquest by Caracol, an argument that we accept.

[263] We follow the chronological analysis of Altar 21 first presented by Houston (in A. Chase n.d.; A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:99–100). This day, 9.6.2.1.11 6 Chuen 19 Pop, corresponded to an ax event, a type of action that is associated with shell-star war events at Dos Pilas. Most significantly, this same glyph records what happened to 18- Rabbit, a king of Copan captured by Cauac-Sky, his contemporary at Quiriguá. Although the “ax” verb is used in astronomical contexts in the codices, it is clearly associated with war and decapitation ritual in the Classic inscriptions and on pottery (see, for example, the Altar de Sacrificios vase, National Geographic, December 1975, p.774).

[264] Houston (in A. Chase n.d.) noted that the date of this war event, 9.6.8.4.2 7 Ik 0 Zip, corresponds to the stationary point of Venus that forewarns of inferior conjunction. The verb, a star (or Venus) sign, here followed by the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph, occurs throughout the inscriptions of war events timed by Venus apparitions or Jupiter and Saturn stations. The location is indicated by the main signs of the appropriate Emblem Glyph or simply as the “earth.” Here the star war took place at 1 ikal.

[265] Clemency Coggins (1976:258) notes that this period “is characterized by the poverty of its burials.” During this time there is only one burial “rich enough to have had painted ceramics.” Burials in residential areas were equally poor. In an insightful and anticipatory interpretation of stylistic similarities, Coggins (1976:385–386) posited influence from Caracol into the Tikal region exactly during this period and culminating with the first stela known to have been erected after the hiatus, Stela 30 and its altar, depicting the ahau name of its katun in the style of Caracol. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:6O-61) attribute many characteristics, especially in Burials 23 and 24, to Caracol funerary practices.

Chase and Chase (1989) report a 325 percent increase in population at Caracol following the Tikal war. There was a corresponding increase in large, single-phase construction projects both of temples and extensive terracing systems. Tomb space became so sought after that chambers were built into substructures and reused for several people before being finally sealed. Whereas Tikal saw an impoverishment of burial furniture, Caracol experienced a remarkable enrichment. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) have suggested that much of the labor for these construction projects and the wealth of Caracol during this period was transferred from the prostrate kingdom of Tikal.

[266] Houston (in A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:91) suggested that Caracol Rulers IV and V (Lord Kan II) were brothers since they were born only twelve years apart (Ruler IV on 9.7.2.0.3 or November 30, 5 75, and Ruler V on 9.7.14.10.8 or April 20, 5 88). A reading suggested by David Stuart (1987b:27, 1988a, and n.d.) supports Houston’s proposed relationship. On Stela 6, the last clause closes with the information that the halfperiod ending 9.8.10.0.0 was witnessed by Ruler V who was the yitan itz’in, “the sibling younger brother of” Ruler IV. We should also observe that the parentage of Rulers IV and V is not clearly stated in the inscriptions. The most likely reconstruction is that the throne descended from father to firstborn son, but there is some evidence of a break in the descent line with these two brothers.

[267] The Emblem Glyph of this kingdom has a snake head as its main sign. It was identified with Calakmul, a site north of the Guatemala-Mexico border, first by Joyce Marcus (1973 and 1976) and later by Jeffrey Miller (1974). Miller identified looted stelae in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum as coming from the “Snake site,” as Calakmul is sometimes known. Although the Calakmul identification was widely accepted at first, several epigraphers began questioning it because of the unusually wide distribution of this Emblem Glyph and the damaged condition of Calakmul’s monuments. Peter Mathews (1979) assembled all the then-known inscriptions, many of them looted, marked with the Snake site or its dynasty and gave the site the noncommittal designation “Site Q.”

Several years ago, however, Ian Graham discovered the sawed-off remains of the looted monuments currently housed at Cleveland and Fort Worth, in a site called El Perú, located to the west of Tikal in the northwest Petén. Finding the remnants of these shattered stelae at El Perú convinced most epigraphers that the Snake site was finally to be identified as El Perú.

Recently, however, Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have once again questioned the Snake site identification based on the following grounds:

(1) Stelae from El Perú have another Emblem Glyph distinct from the Snake Emblem Glyph. This second Emblem Glyph does not appear paired with the Snake Emblem Glyph in the manner of other double Emblem Glyphs, such as those found at Yaxehilán, Palenque, and Bonampak. This distribution suggests that the Snake Emblem Glyph appearing on El Perú Stela 30 is a reference to a foreign power.

(2) A key Snake site king named Jaguar-Paw appears in the inscriptions of several sites. His birth was recorded on Calakmul Stela 9 and also on Site Q Glyphic Panel 6. His accession was inscribed on El Perú Stela 30 and on Dos Pilas Stela 13. Finally, his capture by Tikal’s Ah-Cacaw was declared in conjunction with a war event in Temple I of that city. The Tikal and Dos Pilas references are clearly to foreigners. The El Perú reference may be taken either as foreign or local, while the Site Q and Calakmul references are more likely to be local.

(3) Finally, Stuart and Houston have identified a place name consisting of a waterlily plant (nab) over a chi hand merged with a tun sign, resulting in the phrase nab tunich. This place name appears with names incorporating the Snake Emblem Glyph at Naranjo, where it is in a foreign context. The Dos Pilas inscriptions say that Jaguar-Paw’s accession occurred at nab tunich, and most important, the ruler on Calakmul Stela 51 has nab tunich in his name. They feel the place is most likely to be some part of Calakmul and prefer the identification of the Snake Emblem Glyph as Calakmul.

We became convinced of the Calakmul identification when Scheie noticed that a fragment in the Tamayo Collection from the side of the Fort Worth stela, recorded a “God K-in-hand” action with two persons named in association. The first of these is the protagonist of that stela, Mah Kina Balam, but his name is followed by ichnal and the name of the current ruler of Site Q. David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has shown that the ichnal glyph means “in the company of.” Given this reading, the fragmentary text records that the El Perú lord enacted the ritual “in the company of” the ruler of Calakmul, giving us strong evidence that Jaguar-Paw of Site Q was a visitor at El Perú for the ritual. Based on this interpretation, we follow Marcus, J. Miller, Stuart, and Houston in accepting Calakmul as the Site Q kingdom. However, we also acknowledge that the evidence is still not indisputable and that Site 2 may be a yet undiscovered city.

[268] This same glyph names the fourth successor of the Copán dynasty who reigned about eighty years earlier (Grube and Scheie 1988).

[269] We have, of course, no direct evidence that Yaxehilán ever participated in the oncoming wars. However, a representative of the Calakmul king attended an important ritual conducted by the tenth king of Yaxehilán. This visit suggests they were at least on friendly terms, if not outright allies. If Cu-ix installed Ruler I on the throne of Naranjo, as Stela 25 implies, then the Naranjo ruler was very likely part of the proposed alliance against Tikal. By the middle of Katun 5, Tikal may have been surrounded by an alliance of hostile states.

[270] This is the stationary point that ends the retrograde movement of Venus as it flashes across the face of the sun at inferior conjunction. The Morningstar would then resume motion in its normal direction, heading toward its maximum distance from the sun.

[271] Captives, especially those of high rank, were sacrificed in a mock ball game played upon hieroglyphic stairs (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:214—263 and M. Miller and Houston 1987).

[272] Mathews (1977) identifies 9.5.12.0.4 as the birth date of Naranjo Ruler I based on an anniversary expression on Stela 3 and a “five-katun-ahau” title included with Ruler I’s name on Stela 27. Based on this last citation, Mathews proposed that Ruler I lived into his fifth katun and ruled until at least 9.10.12.0.4, long after the conquest date. Closs (1985:71), on the other hand, takes the anniversary sequence on Stela 25 as the celebration of the accession of this ruler. Closs’s interpretation has the virtue of placing the birth of this ruler earlier than 9.5.12.0.4 and placing his transition to status as a “five-katun ahau” on a correspondingly earlier date. Since we have neither a clear birth nor accession verb with any of these dates, the final interpretation will have to wait for additional information to appear. The text of Stela 25, however, clearly declares that the event which took place on that date, be it birth or accession, took place “in the land of Cu-Ix of Calakmul.”

[273] Heinrich Berlin (1973), citing a personal communication from Linton Satterth- waite, first commented on this 9.9.18.16.3 7 Akbal 16 Muan date that is shared between Caracol and Naranjo, although he offered no interpretation of its significance. David Kelley (1977b) suggested that it should have corresponded with the heliacal rising of Venus as Morningstar, tempering his suggestion with the caution that his data was too varied to commit to a particular answer. The most important component of his paper was the identification of the “shell-star” complex associated with this particular category of date. Following up on Kelley’s work, Michael Closs (1979) identified the shell-star category as Venus dates and posited that this Caracol-Naranjo date corresponded to the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar, an association confirmed by Floyd Lounsbury and extended to include the Bonampak war scene. See Chapter 4, notes 45 and 47, for a detailed discussion of the war and astronomical associations connected with this set of dates.

[274] David Stuart (1987b:29) first read this collocation as k’u.xa.ah, pointing out that it also occurs on a captive panel at Tonina. He notes that k’ux is “eat/bite/pain in proto-Cholan. Stuart himself suggests that the event may be captive torture, a practice well documented in narrative scenes of the Classic period, but he also notes that Victoria Bricker suggested to him that it might also be cannibalism, a practice documented archaeo- logically in many parts of Mesoamerica, including the Maya lowlands. Freidel participated in the excavation of a deposit of butchered human bones found in a small platform at the Late Postclassic lowland Maya community of San Gervasio on Cozumel Island in 1973. The feet and hands had been sawed away from the meat-bearing limb bones. No matter the action recorded here, it boded no good for the captive.

[275] Mathews (1985a:44) dates Stela 6 at 9.6.0.0.0 and identifies it as the last monument in a 200-year hiatus in monument dedication at Uaxactún.

[276] Berlin (1958) first noted the mutual use of the same Emblem Glyph at both Tikal and the Petexbatún sites, although he posited that the Tikal Emblem Glyph was subtly differentiated from the Petexbatún version. Marcus (1976:63–65) suggested that the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas actually recorded the history of Tikal lords who conquered Dos Pilas and reigned there in the name of the regional capital. Coggins (1976:445^446) sees an offshoot of the Tikal royal family moving to Dos Pilas after the death of Stormy- Sky, and sending one of its sons back to Tikal to reestablish the old family and reign as Ruler A.

Houston and Mathews (1985:9) and Mathews and Willey (n.d.) also think it likely that Dos Pilas was established from Tikal, perhaps by a minor son or a segment of the royal family that moved out of Tikal during the hiatus. With the new information available to us, we know that this hiatus occurred because of Tikal’s defeat by Caracol. They believe the Dos Pilas dynasty intruded itself into the area, using a strategy of intermarriage and war to consolidate its position. They, however, also see the Dos Pilas dynasty as independent of Tikal, a position we accept. We, furthermore, see a tension and competition between Tikal and Dos Pilas that unfolds as Tikal struggled to reestablish the prestige of its rulers.

[277] According to Houston and Mathews (1985:11–12), this second son, named Shield- Jaguar, is recorded on the West Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas.

[278] The El Chorro and El Pato lords name a woman with the Dos Pilas Emblem Glyph as their mother. Mathews and Willey (n.d.) and Houston and Mathews (1985:14) note that the time involved makes their identification as sisters of the king—or at minimum, members of the royal family of Dos Pilas—a likely interpretation.

[279] Unfortunately, since the first half of the stair (Hieroglyphic Stair 2, East 3) is destroyed, we have neither the exact date nor the action recorded in this passage. Since other dates on this stair occur between 9.11.9.15.9 and 9.12.10.12.4, we surmise that this action fell within the same period.

[280] Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified the combination of a waterlily-imix glyph (nab) with a shell-winged dragon as the name of Lake Petexbatún. The action is called a “shell-dragon” ti kan toe, and may have occurred at that lake. The inscription names Jaguar-Paw as ihtah itz’in, the younger brother, of another Calakmul noble, who may also be named at Dos Pilas (HS2, E4).

[281] Jeffrey Miller (1974) first identified the accession date of Jaguar-Paw on a looted monument in the Cleveland Art Museum. He suggested the stela was from Calakmul and was once paired with another looted monument in the Kimbell Art Museum. His pairing of the stelae was correct, but Ian Graham found the remnants of both stelae at the site of El Perú. The Cleveland stela depicts a female who records her celebration of the katun ending 9.13.0.0.0. The accession of Jaguar-Paw is the dynastic event to which this katun celebration is linked.

[282] David Stuart (1987b:25–27) has read this representation of an eye as the verb i/, “to see,” supporting his reading with the phonetic spellings that can accompany or replace it.

[283] Recall that Stuart and Houston (see Note 21) associate this toponym with Calakmul.

[284] Houston and Mathews (1985:14—15) first published this scene and recognized its implications.

[285] The second glyph in the text next to the seated figure is ch’ok, a glyph that Grube, Houston, and Stuart (personal communication, 1988) and Ringle (1988:14) associate with young persons who have not yet taken the throne. Our own study of this title confirms that it appears only in the names of people who are not yet kings, but their ages can range from five to forty-eight years. The title apparently refers to members of a lineage who are not in its highest rank.

[286] Proskouriakoff (1961b:94) first identified this woman in the imagery and texts of Naranjo, pointing out that each of her stelae is paired with another representing a male. She remarked on the presence of the Tikal Emblem Glyph in her name, and observed that the male was born several years after the most important date of the woman. She commented, “She is doubtless older than the man, and one may infer that the relationship could be that of a mother and son.” Berlin (1968:18–20) accepted Proskouriakoff’s analysis, further suggesting that Tikal entered into a dynastic marriage at Naranjo, and that this woman’s male offspring in turn married another woman from Tikal. Molloy and Rathje (1974) and Marcus (1976) both follow the suggestions of their predecessors, but Peter Mathews (1979) noted that the name of the father of this foreign woman in her parentage statement on Naranjo-Stela 24 matches Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas. Houston and Mathews (1985:11) posited two royal marriages for that king—one to a woman of Itzán, which produced the next king of Dos Pilas, and the other to a woman who produced a daughter he sent to Naranjo to marry a noble there. From this marriage came a grandson who was the next king of Naranjo. We accept Mathews’s identification and suggest that the royal woman married a male noble of Naranjo, for the next king, if he was her son, carried the Naranjo Emblem Glyph, rather than that of Dos Pilas.

Berlin (1968:18) observed that the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival also occurs on Cobá Stela 1. On that monument, the date occurs in the last clause on the front in the form of a Long Count, the second notation of this kind in the text. Although the Long Count form of the date suggests that it was especially important in the inscriptional history recorded on this monument, the verb is too eroded to decipher. It appears to have involved a katun, perhaps as an anniversary, but the actor is clearly not any of the principals in the Naranjo-Dos Pilas affair to the south. The scene shows the Coba ruler dressed as the Holmul dancer standing on top of two bound captives who are flanked by two more captives. Although we suspect the Coba inscription records an event important to local history, the fact that the date is shared between Cobá and Naranjo may point to some important connection between the two zones.

[287] Interestingly, a variant of this name occurs in a reference to a foreign wife at Yaxchilán on Lintels 5 and 41 and in a reference to the wife of the ruler Yoc-Zac-Balam of Calakmul. We can come up with a number of explanations as to why the Wac-Chanil- Ahau appellative had this wide distribution: It could have been a special title of royal wives, or perhaps queen mothers; it may have designated foreign women in some way; or it might have been a name popular in the Usumacinta and Petexbatún regions.

[288] In the text at Tikal that records this war event, the extended finger has a bauble dangling from its tip. In this version and a related one on Caracol Stela 3, the jewel does not appear with the hand. However, this hand, both with and without the bauble, occurs in Glyph D of the Lunar Series. We had taken this common occurrence in Glyph D as evidence that both forms are equivalent, but Nikolai Grube and Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1990) have independently shown that the hand without the bauble and its substitutes in Glyph D read hul, “to arrive.” They have convinced us that the two forms of the hand do not substitute for each other in most contexts. Glyph D counts the age of the moon from its hul, “arrival,” a point defined as the first appearance of a visible crescent. In the context of the Naranjo event, they suggest that the verb is simply “she arrived,” an event that was followed three days later by the dedication ritual for a pyramid named with the main sign of the Naranjo Emblem Glyph. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival thus reestablished the house of Naranjo’s rulers.

Archaeologically, there is some evidence supporting the association of termination and dedication rituals with the act of reestablishment or founding. Both kinds of rituals are similar in form and content (Freidel 1986b). Termination rituals involving the smashing of artifacts of pottery, jade, and other materials, and the layering of these materials in white earth, are found not only upon the occasion of the permanent abandonment of buildings, but also at their reconstruction. At Cerros, the first place this ritual activity was identified and documented in the Maya region (Robin Robertson n.d.; Garber 1983), it is clear that the same unbroken ritual offerings which terminate a building can be part of the dedication ceremony of the new building (Walker n.d.). Since the hul event was followed three days later by the dedication of a house, we may very well be dealing with a prime example of a house dedication used to establish a broken dynasty.

Date and universal time: 710 June 28 (Gregorian); 24:22 U 1.

JDN and sidereal time: 1980560.515278; Mean G.S.T.: 18h 49.6m

| Object | G long | G lat | G dist | R.A. | Dec. |
| Sun | 95.45 | 0.00 | 1.017 | 6 23.8 | + 23 30 |
| Moon | 17.46 | 2.58 | 63.016 | 10.3 | + 9 17 |
| Mercury | 117.11 | -2.45 | 0.671 | 7 54.7 | + 18 29 |
| Venus | 116.05 | 1.52 | 1.574 | 7 53.5 | + 22 35 |
| Mars | 115.22 | 1.20 | 2.584 | 7 49.7 | + 22 25 |
| Jupiter | 121.25 | 0.73 | 6.255 | 8 14.7 | + 20 44 |
| Saturn | 115.52 | 0.61 | 10.101 | 7 50.6 | + 21 47 |

As observed from 89.0 degrees west longitude, | 17.0 degrees north latitude:

| Object | Altitude | Azimuth | Mag. | Diam. | Phase(%) |
| Sun | 0.6 | 294.6 | -26.8 | 31 30.9 | |
| Moon | -64.1 | 356.3 | -9.4 | 29 43.8 | 39.6 |
| Mercury | 19.4 | 284.1 | 1.5 | 10.0 | 20.7 |
| Venus | 19.9 | 288.4 | -3.9 | 10.7 | 93.3 |
| Mars | 19.0 | 288.4 | 1.8 | 3.6 | 98.9 |
| Jupiter | 24.4 | 285.5 | -1.8 | 31.5 | |
| Saturn | 19.1 | 287.7 | 0.3 | 16.5 | |

(Outer diameter of Saturn’s rings: 37.2 arc seconds)

[289] Based on the identification of the verb as “accession” at other sites, and on the recurrent anniversary celebrations of this date, Michael Closs (1985) first established that this event was the accession of this child to the throne.

[290] This pairing was first noted by Proskouriakoff (1961b:94). Stela 2, which depicts Smoking-Squirrel on his first katun anniversary, pairs with Stela 3, which represents Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau. The inscription on Stela 3 connects her arrival to his anniversary. Stela 30, depicting Smoking-Squirrel on the same anniversary, couples with Stela 29, which also records her arrival as well as her initial temple dedication. Smoking-Squirrel’s Stela 28 pairs with Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 31. Finally, Stelae 22 and 24 pair together in recording the accession of the young Smoking-Squirrel and its aftermath.

[291] Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2–3:152) notes that Dcanal lies on high ground at the southwestern end of a spur of hills rising above a flat basin on the west bank of the Mopan River. The glyph name for the site is Kan Witz, “Precious Mountain.”

[292] Based on conversations with Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1989), Stephen Houston (1983) first identified this captive and discussed the war between Naranjo and Ucanal. He noted the passages on Stela 2 and 22, and recognized the same name on a pot. He also called attention to this name on Sacul Stela 1, where it appears with the date 9.16.8.16.1 5 Imix 9 Pop (February 12, 760). The text records a scepter ritual enacted by a Sacul lord “in the company of” (yichnal [Stuart, personal communication. 1988]) Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal. Houston pointed out that the time span (sixty-five years) between the Naranjo attack and this event makes it likely that this later Shield-Jaguar was a namesake. He also remarked that Ucanal had reestablished the prestige of its own ruling lineage by that time.

[293] In commenting on this passage, Berlin (1968:20) suggested that it names the wife of the young king as a woman from Tikal. He also posited that the woman named here is not Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, the daughter of Flint-Sky-God K. We agree with his suggestions, but we believe she was also from Dos Pilas. The glyphs that precede her name include “18 ???” and “Lord of the shell-winged-dragon place.” This shell-winged dragon is especially associated with Dos Pilas as the toponym of Lake Petexbatún. The person named thus appears to be a lord of Dos Pilas. His name is followed by yihtah, “the sibling of,” (Stuart 1988a) and a glyph Berlin proposed as “wife.” Lounsbury (1984:178–179) has read it as yatan, “his wife.” The male from Dos Pilas seems to be named as the “sibling of the wife” of the king. The wife was a woman of Dos Pilas. Smoking-Squirrel apparently married a woman in his grandfather’s family to reinforce the alliance with Dos Pilas.

[294] Venus as Morning Star was 6.93+ from the sun, while Jupiter hung at 107.82 and Saturn at 108.09, both frozen at their second stationary points. As we will see in the following chapters, this pairing of Saturn and Jupiter was carefully observed by the Maya and used to time particularly important dynastic events.

[295] The data on the day in question, shown on page 460, was generated with “Planet Positions,” a BASIC program written by Roger W. Sinnott, 1980.

[296] In his map of the Naranjo region, Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 5) used Sacnab as an alternative name for Lake Yaxhá. Sacnab is “clear lake,” while Yaxhá is “blue water.” Maier (1908–1910:70) reported that there are two lakes at the location connected by a natural channel. One of these lakes was called Yaxhá and the other Sacnab. Apparently the names he was given at the end of the nineteenth century come from the Precolumbian names of the lakes.

[297] 9.14.0.0.0 is also recorded on Stela 23, but as a future event, which will follow the current events described in the narrative. The coincidence of the first appearance of Eveningstar on this katun ending was recorded at two other kingdoms. On Stela 16 at Tikal, Ah-Cacaw wears the skeletal god of Eveningstar (Lounsbury, personal communication, 1978) as his headdress, and on Stela C at Copán, 9.14.0.0.0 is connected by a Distance Number to a first appearance of the Eveningstar many years before the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date.

[298] Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 3) reported finding this stone “on the centerline of the ballcourt at the northern extremity of the plaza” in 1972. He posited that it was moved there as the result of Postclassic or even post-Conquest activity, but we believe that the sequence of associated events suggests the placement was deliberate. Caracol conquered Naranjo and erected a stairs there to celebrate its victory. Forty years later, a recovered Naranjo conquered Ucanal and placed a piece of that stairs in the ballcourt of the kingdom they had just defeated. Others (Houston 1983:34 and Sosa and Reents 1980) have also made this connection between defeat, revival, and victory.

Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1976) suggested that triumphal stairs were forceably erected at the site of the loser by the victor. Houston also points out that this type of victory stairs has survived in remarkably good condition at sites like Seibal, Naranjo, and Resbalón, but that they were often reset in illegible order. He suggested that the dismantling and resetting in scrambled order may have been the loser’s way of neutralizing the stair after they had revived their prestige. Apparently one could damage the monuments of a defeated enemy, as Caracol apparently did at Tikal, but the monuments of a victor were not to be defiled in the same way. You reset them out of reading order to neutralize them.

Interestingly, Ucanal’s suffering did not end here. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) report finding a panel at Caracol that depicts two Ucanal captives, bound and seated on legged, stone thrones. Dated at 9.18.10.0.0, the monument documents a Caracol that is once again erecting stelae and returning to its old pattern of aggression. A renewed Caracol apparently struck at the same border community that had felt the earlier wrath of a recovered Naranjo.

[299] Chris Jones (n.d.) dates several important projects to the last part of Tikal’s hiatus: a repaving of the North Acropolis; the completion of its present eight-temple plan; a rebuilding of the edge of the North and Central Acropolis which cut the Central Acropolis off from the East Plaza; and the remodeling of the East Plaza, which included placing a ballcourt in its center over the old Twin Pyramid Complex. Burials 23 and 24 were cut into the pyramidal substructure of Temple 5D-33—2^nd, the huge masked building that fronted the North Acropolis. Jones suggests that Burial 23, the richer of the two, might be the tomb of Shield-Skull, the father of Ruler A, whom he suspects was the patron of much of this construction.

[300] His first name has been read by Chris Jones (1988:107) as Ah-Cacaw, although he also appears in the literature as Double-Comb and Ruler A. Although the reading of one of the glyphs as ca has been questioned, we will use Ah-Cacaw as the name of this ruler.

[301] Chris Jones (1988:107) cited skeletal information from Haviland (1967).

[302] Nomenclature for the phases of these buildings can be a bit confusing for people unused to archaeological conventions. The phases of construction are numbered from the outside to the inside so that Temple 32-lst refers to the last construction phase of Temple 32. Temple 33–2^nd refers to the next phrase inward; 33–3^rd to the next, and so on until the earliest phase of construction is reached.

[303] Both Coggins (1976:380) and Chris Jones (n.d.) speculate that Burial 23, the richer of the two graves dug into Temple 33—2^nd just before the last phase of construction began, contained Shield-Skull. This enigmatic person did not leave any sculpted monuments that survived, but he is recorded on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 as Ah-Cacaw’s father. Jones also describes a significant building program which included Temple 5D-32-lst and the tomb of the twenty-second successor. Other buildings in the East Court and Central Acropolis may have been constructed during the reigns of the four intervening rulers. Unfortunately, since only the twenty-second ruler left us inscribed objects, we cannot know which of those rulers were responsible for the building programs. We interpret the absence of inscribed stelae during the reigns of the twenty-second through the twenty-fifth successors to have been the result of Caracol’s victory; but why the same Tikal rulers left the shattered remains of their ancestors’ stelae lying unattended in front of the North Acropolis, we don’t know.

[304] If our reconstruction of events is correct, the twenty-first ruler was captured by Lord Water of Caracol. The twenty-second ruler is in Burial 195 in Temple 5D-32, located to the immediate east ofTemple 33. The central temple held the older tomb of Stormy-Sky, as well as two others inserted into the substructure shortly before the second phase of construction was buried under the third. If the twenty-fifth ruler was in Burial 23 and if Burial 24 held the twenty-fourth ruler, then three of the four kings who ruled between the defeat and Ah-Cacaw’s accession are buried in the buildings fronting the North Acropolis.

[305] Shook (1958:31) theorized that the stela was originally mounted in the rear chamber of Temple 5D-32. But since all other Tikal stela were erected in plaza space, we surmise that this one had been carried inside the temple from some other location. Chris Jones (n.d.) suggests that Stela 26 had been mounted in front ofTemple 5D-32, while Stela 31 was originally placed in front of 5D-33. The notion that the offering deposit was situated at the physical threshold of the Otherworld portal of these temples is derived from examples of other back-wall locations of altars and symbolic representations of Otherworld beings in the sanctums of Maya temples, as detailed, for example, in Chapter 6.

[306] Chris Jones (n.d.) reports that a fragment of Stela 26 was placed alongside Altar 19 (the altar to Stela 31) in a pit next to the substructure ofTemple 33-lst. Since fragments from both monuments were put in the same cache, he presumes that both stelae were interred in their resting places in a single ceremonial sequence associated with the reestablishment of the Tikal dynastic lineage. Our reconstruction is somewhat different: We do not see any actual sundering in the old line as a result of the defeat by Caracol. There is no epigraphic evidence to suggest the insertion of any usurper Caracol kings; indeed, Caracol evidently did not even raise a victory monument here as they did at Naranjo. The victors apparently contented themselves with the desecration of Tikal royal historical monuments and the imposition of an effective ban on public history in the city. We interpret the ritual deposits of these two stelae—one recording a list of the kings from the lineage during its most aggressive and successful era, and the other recording its most glorious military victory—as a method of compensating for the desecration done to the monuments by the Caracol conquerors and as a means of establishing supernatural support for a new era of military success.

[307] This description is based on images on the lower register of Room 1 at Bonampak. The event associated with that scene is the ‘fire house-dedication ritual now known from many different sites. Although our scenario concerns the honorable deposit of a desecrated stela at Tikal, the fire ritual was very probably of the same type because the material placed in the caches is identical to that placed in dedication caches in other buildings at Tikal (see Note 42 for a discussion of the interrelationship of dedication and termination rituals).

[308] Harrison (1970) has interpreted the presence of family residences as well as administrative and ritual houses in the Central Acropolis. We presume that these buildings functioned both as residences for the royal family and as council houses for the institutions of governance.

[309] The offering plates we describe here are the flat-bottomed plates found in the lip-to-lip caches especially associated with building termination and dedication deposits. One set of this type of cache vessel (Crocker-Delataille 1985:231 <verbatim>[#354])</verbatim> has zac lac incised on the side of the plate. This name associates these lip-to-lip plates with the great stone censers of Copan, which are called zac lac tun (Stuart 1986e). Zac has the meaning of “white,” but also of something “artificial,” in the sense of human-made. Lac is the word tor plate, while tun specifies that the zac lac was made of stone. Both types of vessels were receptacles for offerings [and both have interiors shaped like buckets or deep pans], Shook’s report does not mention either type of zac lac in Temple 34, but his descriptions of the pits dug in the floor closely resemble the bucket shape inside the Copan censers. We suspect that the Maya thought of them as being the same thing; and although no plates were deposited in the Temple 34 cache pits, the material in these caches closely matches dedication offerings from other deposits which have them. Our presumption that a zac lac would have been used to transport the offerings is based on the many depictions of such plates in scenes of ritual activities from painted pottery. The lac plate was one of the principal containers for offerings of all sorts.

[310] These descriptions are based on the wall paintings of Bonampak and Temple XIII from Uaxactun.

[311] Shook (1958:32) reports that some of the marine materials came from the Pacific, while others came from the Atlantic. Presumably, the Tikal lord traded for material both from the Gulf of Mexico and from the Belizean area of the Caribbean coast.

[312] Flint and obsidian are associated with lightning strikes in most Maya languages and in much of their mythology. Most interestingly, the small obsidian blades found throughout the region are called u kach Lac Mam in modern Choi. This phrase translates as “the fingernails of the Lighting Bolt.”

[313] Volcanic hematite is a rare iron mineral. It occurs naturally only in the context of active volcanoes—of which there are several in the southern Maya Mountains. The crystal takes the form of flat flakes with mirror-quality surfaces. Although the crystal is virtually noncorruptible by oxidation, it can be ground into a bright reddish-purple powder that can be used for decorative purposes. This powder contains sparkling fragments of the crystal form. Volcanic hematite was highly prized as a mosaic mirror material—superior even to the iron pyrite which the lowland Maya also imported. Hematite is found in relative abundance in Late Preclassic contexts and in decreasing amounts thereafter, suggesting that the known sources in the highlands were limited and became exhausted during the course of the Classic period. The mother-of-pearl backing on this particular mirror is commensurate with the Late Preclassic volcanic hematite mirrors found in the cache of royal jewels at Cerros as described in Chapter 3.

[314] The practice of deliberately smashing jade artifacts, particularly earflare assemblages, has been identified as an aspect of lowland Maya termination rituals by James Garber (1983). David Grove (1986) has suggested the presence of a similar practice at the Middle Preclassic highland Mexican center of Chalcatzingo and it has been found in relation to one of the earlier phases at Temple 10L-26 at Copan.

[315] This type of bundle has long been known from narrative scenes on pottery, on carved monuments, and in the murals of Bonampak. The Quiche talked about sacred bundles called the Pizom Q’aq’al. which contained relics from their founding ancestors. The Tzotzil today still use bundles in the rituals of office in much the same way they were used in ancient ceremonies. Juan Pedro Laporte found a lip-to-lip cache in the Lost World group. When opened it was found to hold the same array of marine materials, lancets made from the thorns called cuerno de toro in modern Mexico, jade, shell, and so forth. These objects were lying in a black substance which proved on analysis to be amate-fig bark paper, which had been painted blue and red. Around the entire offering, a band of fibrous cloth had been tied. Marisela Ayala (n.d.) was the first to identify this offering bundle with those represented in Maya imagery.

[316] Bruce Love (1987:12) describes the smearing of blood on idols and stelae as these rituals are described in ethnohistorical sources.

[317] In Room 1 at Bonampak, three high-ranked lords are shown being dressed in elaborate costumes. In the dedication scene on the lower register, these same three lords are shown dancing to the music of a band which marches into the picture from their right side. On their left, high-ranked nobles move into the scene in an informal procession. These latter appear to be both witnesses and participants in the ceremonies. I his same kind of dance very likely occurred in all or most dedication rites elsewhere, including 1 ikal.

[318] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that another cache containing fragments of Altar 19, which he associates with Stela 31, and a fragment of Stela 26 were placed in a pit next to Temple 33–1^st. He sees this as evidence that Stela 26 and 31 were deposited at the same time.

[319] W. R. Coe (1967:48) described the construction sequence for Temple 33-lst in detail. Coggins (1976:445–447) and Chris Jones (n.d.) both agree that this construction project was associated with Ah-Cacaw’s reestablishment of the old lineage. Our understanding of this history descends from theirs, although we offer a slightly different interpretation of the data patterns. We see, for example, Temple 33-lst as both a new construction to declare the renewed authority and power of the dynasty, and as a method of ceremonially deactivating the North Acropolis. The Classic period Maya believed that sacred power and energy was accumulated in material objects (1) as they were used to contain the sacred power manifested in ritual and (2) as the actions of kings in the making of history focused the power of the cosmos onto them. To contain the accumulated power of an object which they wished to bury or discard, the Maya used a set of rituals to terminate the object formally. The dispositions of Stela 26 and 31 are examples of exactly these sorts of rituals; but these termination rituals also included drilling holes in pottery, knocking out the eyes of figures, destroying the faces of human imagery, removing color from sculpture, and many others. David Grove (1981) has proposed that this same behavior accounts for the mutilation of Olmec sculpture. Temple 33-lst seems to function like Temple 14 at Pa- lenque. Built by Kan-Xul after his brother Chan-Bahlum’s death, Temple 14 celebrates the dead brother’s emergence from Xibalba. It also contains the power in the Group of the Cross by blocking the main ceremonial access into it (Schele 1988b). Temple 33-lst performs the same function at Tikal by obstructing the formal, processional access into the center of the North Acropolis, deactivating it as the ritual focus of the dynasty.

[320] In an insightful analysis, Coggins (1976:371) noted this stylistic relationship of this altar to the Caracol tradition and, long before the discovery of Altar 21 at Caracol, she suggested there might have been interaction in that direction.

[321] We do not yet have a phonetic reading of this verb, but its association with war and captive taking is widespread. Its other significant occurrence is in the heir-designation ritual of Chan-Bahlum at Palenque. Heir-designation rites as they were portrayed at Bonampak also involved the taking and offering of captives.

[322] This ritual display of captives after a battle is the war event shown most often in narrative scenes in Maya art (Schele 1984a). We can see an excellent example of this in Room 2 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986:112–130). The event in the Tikal scene is spelled nawah. a term meaning “to dress or adorn” (Bricker 1986:158). Here, the action is the dressing of the captive in the garb of sacrifice. This action included stripping him of his regalia, replacing his battle garb with the cut-cloth kilt of sacrifice, replacing his ear ornaments with paper or flowers, and painting him in the color of sacrifice. Landa (Tozzcr 1941:117–119) reported that blue was the color painted on the stripped bodies of sacrificial victims before they were tortured or killed.

Captives most often appear as sacrificial victims, rather than as warriors engaged directly in battle. Capture, and the rank of those captives taken, were central to the prestige of Maya nobles. Sacrificial victims also appear regularly in burials and in dedication rites. Brian Dillon (1982:44) found a deposit of sacrificial victims who were apparently lying in the belly-down position characteristic of captives when they met their fate. Captives, especially high-ranked ones, were often kept alive for years. They appeared repeatedly in all sorts of rituals, and their survival quite possibly created problems of succession in their lineages.

Peter Harrison (1989) has provided us additional information on Structure 5D-57 that enriches this piece of history considerably. At the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, he demonstrated how the builders of the Central Acropolis used the geometry of the triangle in conjunction with older buildings to establish the location of new buildings. Using this technique. Structure 5D-57 was positioned in relationship to what he calls “Great-Jaguar- Paw’s clan house,” known archaeologically as Structure 5D-46, a great two-storied palace built on the west end of the Central Acropolis during the Early Classic period. So important was this palace to subsequent kings that while they added to it, they were careful to retain the original structure as a part of the functioning Acropolis throughout the subsequent history of the city.

The identity of its original patron is established by a eaehe vessel deposited under the west stairs of 5D-46. The inscription on the pot records that it was made for the dedication of the k’ul na (holy structure) of Great-Jaguar-Paw.” Thus, Ah-Cacaw established the location of the building depicting his display of captives at the dedication of Temple 33 in relationship to the residence of the very ancestor whose victory over Uaxactun is celebrated on Stela 31. It was in Temple 33 that he deposited this tree-stone with such reverence. This is a remarkable folding of history back on itself and a wonderful example of the symmetries the Maya found so fascinating and useful in their construction of political history.

[323] The phrase, as written here, includes the “fish-in-hand” verb that records bloodletting and vision rituals at other sites. This verb is followed by a standard phrase including tit and a glyph representing a lancet and an “akbal” compound. In the past, we have presumed this “akbal” glyph referred to a performance of the ritual at night, but Victoria Bricker (1986:73–74) has suggested an alternative explanation that seems to be correct. The glyph consists of the signs ti, ya, the “akbal” sign, and H. If the “akbal” sign reads syllabically as ak\ the combination reads ti yak’il, “in his tongue.”

[324] This verb consists of T79 (value unknown) superfixed to ta (T565) plus the combination -wan, an inflectional suffix for verbs having to do with position in or the shape of space. This same glyph and variants of it occur at Palenque, Copan, and many other sites associated with the dedication rituals for monuments and houses. The “T” in the number above derives from Thompson’s 1962 method of glyph transcription.

[325] For a full discussion of this day and its events, see the later parts of Chapter 4. Proskouriakoff (Coggins 1976:448) first noted that this date is linked to the Temple 1 date.

[326] Even more intriguing is an observation recently made by Karl Taube in his study of Teotihuacan mirrors and war imagery (Taube n.d.). Following earlier work by George Kubler (1976), Taube notes the appearance of a species of cactus found in the highlands of Central Mexico. Both scholars have suggested that the platform under Ah-Cacaw refers directly to Teotihuacan, and Taube suggests it may refer directly to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. We think this may be correct, but we suggest the reference is far more oblique. At the time of the carving of these lintels, Teotihuacan was in severe decline (Millon 1988), but it had been in full florescence at the time of the conquest of Uaxactun when this iconography became so popular. We suggest the reference is to the conquest of Uaxactun and the long-lasting association of that victory with the memory of the Teotihuacanos. See René Millon’s (1988) evaluation of the Maya-Teotihuacan interaction in his discussion of the fall of Teotihuacan.

[327] Scheie (1985a) proposed a reading of bal or balan for the Emblem Glyph ofTikal. New evidence from the Primary Standard Sequence on pottery has lent support to that reading and provided a direct association to this jaguar head. David Stuart (1987b:2–7) has read one of the glyphs in this pottery text as it tz’ibil, “his writing.”

[[]]

In one version of this glyph, the syllable ba is written with a jaguar head, and in another, bal appears as the head of the number 9. This last glyph standardly refers to a human head with the lower jaw covered with a jaguar pelt, and a yax shell sign affixed to its forehead. In many of the toponymic forms of the I ikal Emblem Glyph, the ‘ bundle is prefixed by yax. Since the main sign, as well as the head of the number 9, have phonetic values as bal, the name ofTikal was likely to have been Yax Bal or }ax Balam. The portrait head of the number 9, however, was also used to record the image and the name of the jaguar member of the Headband Twins, who are one of the Classic period manifestations of the Hero Twins. Tikal was apparently named as the special place of this god.

[328] Lintel 3 of Temple 4 depicts the son of Ah-Cacaw seated on a throne, but the point of view is rotated 90+ so that we see a front view of the king. Just as in Temple 1, the throne of the king sits atop a low stepped platform, but here the artist showed clearly the carrying bars of the Maya version of a sedan chair.

[329] Chris Jones (1988:1 10) follows an earlier suggestion by Marcus (1976:90) that the Emblem Glyph of this noble is that of Piedras Negras, based on the identification of the prefix as a leaf. However, the main sign of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph consists of the syllables^, ki, and bi, which can all appear in a variety of substitutions (Stuart 1987b:37). The snake form of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph is formed by simply using the head variant of bi. The Emblem Glyph on this bone has the blood group sign inverted, with the dotted part above the shell sign rather than below it. Therefore, we believe that the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of this captive noble is the snake head associated with Site Q and Calakmul.

[330] Proskouriakoff (in Chris Jones 1988:109) first noted the recurrence of the death date on this bone. The other five events on MT 28 are also deaths, including that of someone named 18-Rabbit-God K on 9.14.15.4.3 and a woman on 9.14.15.6.13. The 18-Rabbit character may be named on Lintel 2 of Temple 1.

[331] Chris Jones (personal communication, 1986) secs little possibility that a passageway could have been left open to give access to the tomb. Ruler B probably oversaw the building of the substructure over the tomb of his father, although Ah-Cacaw is likely to have commissioned the lintels or at least to have overseen the information that would be put on them after his death.

[332] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first recognized that the name phrase on Naranjo Stela 6 is the phonetic version of Smoking-Batab’s name. The day sign in the Calendar Round is eroded, but the three possible readings are:

9.14.18. 4. 8 9 Lamat 11 Muan November 28, 729
9.15.11. 7. 13 9 Ben 11 Muan November 25, 742
9.16.4.10.18 9 Etz’nab 11 Muan November 22, 755

CHAPTER 6: THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MOTHER: Family and Dynasty at Palenque

[333] According to one account by the family of Antonio de Solis of Túmbala in 1746, Palenque came to the attention of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century with its “discovery” by Spaniards. During the next forty years, many visitors, both civilian and government sponsored, went to Palenque and made a series of drawings and maps of the site, which are now in archives in Seville and Madrid and at the British Museum. A set of these early drawing and commentaries by Antonio del Rio and Paul Felix Cabrera appeared in Descriptions of the Ruins of an Ancient City, a two-volume work published by Henry Berthoud in 1822. With this publication, the ruined buildings and sculptures of Palenque came to the attention of the Western world and initiated a fascination with ancient Maya civilization that continues today. The most popular travel accounts were those written by John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in their Incidents of Havel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, published in 1841. These books truly brought the Maya to the attention of the Western world and were immensely popular at the time. For those interested in the history of discovery, see Graham (1971), Berlin (1970), and G. Stuart (n.d.).

[334] This royal name combines the features of a snake and jaguar into one glyph block. At the Primera Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a meeting held at Palenque in December, 1973, at which most of Palenque’s kings were given their modern names, we elected to use the modern Choi spelling of this name combination—chan, “snake,” and bahlum, “jaguar.” Later research into the phonetic complements accompanying this name has shown that it was originally pronounced more like its modern Yucatec version, can-balam, but we have elected to retain the original spelling of this name in order not to add confusion by creating different names for the same person.

[335] The longest inscription was the Hieroglyphic Stair of Temple 26 at Copán. We have deciphered enough of that inscription to know that it recorded a detailed dynastic history of Copán, but unfortunately the stairs were found already badly eroded and out of order for the most part. Time has not been kind to the stairs since they were uncovered in 1898 and much of what was visible then has since been worn away. This inscription is unlikely ever to be deciphered completely, making the panels of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque the longest intact inscription.

[336] Pacal used the nine katuns leading up to and including his own lifetime as the framework for the dyntistic history he inscribed. Beginning with the katun ending on 9.4.0.0.0, he recorded the last royal accession to occur before each successive katun ended. When more than one king ruled within a katun, he linked their accessions to the half-katun or the thirteen-tun point within the katun. He ended the nine katuns with 9.13.0.0.0, the twenty-year period during which he built the temple and commissioned the tablets and their history. By using this device, Pacal locked all the accessions between Chaacal I and himself to specified period endings, thus setting the whole of Palenque’s history into a firm and indisputable chronological framework. This use of katun succession as the framework of history created the prototype of the katun histories that are common in the later books of Chilam Balam in Yucatán. Lounsbury (1974) first offered the chronological decipherment of the sarcophagus edge, while Berlin (1977:136) recognized the nine-katun sequence as the structural framework in which Pacal presented his history on the tablets above. For a detailed decipherment of the tablets from the Temple of Inscriptions, see Schele (1983, 1986c).

[337] Inscriptions document at least three, possibly four, more generations on later tablets, bringing the total number of generations to thirteen or fourteen during the entire history of Palenque.

[338] The inscriptions of Palenque never record the exact kinship relationship between Ac-Kan, Pacal I, and Lady Zac-Kuk, but we can reconstruct it based on the following information. (1) Of the two men, only Ac-Kan became the king of Palenque. The texts of the Temple of Inscriptions are complete in the record of accessions from 9.4.0.0.0 until Pacal II, and Pacal I does not appear in that record. (2) Both men died in 612, but Pacal I died on March 9 while Ac-Kan died six months later on August 11. Most important, the records of their deaths on the edge of the sarcophagus lid are reversed, with the later date recorded first, as if we are to understand these persons in the order Ac-Kan/Pacal, rather than the order of their deaths. (3) Of the two men, only Pacal I is shown as a figure on the sides of the sarcophagus, even though he was never king.

Something about their dynastic roles made it advisable to break the chronological order of the death list to put Ac-Kan before Pacal. At the same time, this something led the Maya to eliminate Ac-Kan from the portrait row and picture Pacal I instead. The most efficient explanation is that they were brothers and that the line passed through Pacal rather than Ac-Kan.

In two other examples on the sarcophagus sides, one of a pair of rulers was eliminated from the portrait gallery, and in those examples we can determine the reason. The first pair, Manik and Chaacal I were born only five and a half years apart, while the other, Chaacal II and Chan-Bahlum I, were born only a year apart. These short periods between births make a father-son relationship between these pairs impossible—they were siblings. Of the first pair of brothers, only Chaacal I appears in portraiture; and of the second pair, only Chan-Bahlum I has a place on the sarcophagus sides. Why? The answer lies in inheritance: The children of only one brother might inherit the throne. The sarcophagus sides depict the direct descent of the line from parent to child. In this interpretation, Pacal I was the sibling of Ac-Kan and he is shown because his child inherited the throne. He won his place in Pacal the Great’s portrait gallery for his role as father of the next ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, and as the grandfather of the child named for him, Pacal, who became one of the greatest American rulers in history.

[339] Such tablets may well be at Palenque in the deep levels of the Palace or in some other building, for deep excavations have rarely been done at Palenque, and then often by accident. The time difference between Lady Kanal-Ikal’s rule and Pacal the Great’s was not long, for she was still alive when her great grandson was born. He was born on March 26, 603 and she died on November 7, 604. Her prominence in Pacal’s records and the twenty-year length of her reign makes likely that Lady Kanal-Ikal commissioned inscriptions and temple constructions during her reign.

[340] He was forty-three years old at the time. He was thirty-seven when his mother died and thirty-nine at his father’s death.

[341] The plan and design of the Temple Olvidado became the hallmarks of Palenque’s architecture: double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls with multiple doors piercing exterior walls, and trefoil vaults arching across the inner galleries. Ihe vault system used in later buildings actually leaned the outer wall against the center wall, above the medial molding. The Palencanos never developed the true arch, but their system gave them the highest ratio of wall thickness to span width ever achieved in Maya architecture. The system also allowed them to pierce the outer walls of their buildings with more doors than any other Maya style, giving Palenque architecture the largest interior volume and best lighting known among the Maya. This innovative sequence began with the lemple Olvidado and culminated with the Group of the Cross and Houses A and D of the Palace.

[342] His construction projects probably also included Houses K and L on the south ends of the eastern and western facades, and perhaps other buildings that were found in excavations of the Palace courtyards.

[343] See Scheie (1986a) for a full discussion of the development of Palenque’s architectural style.

[344] This inference of the identity of the woman named in the Temple of Inscriptions as Pacal’s mother is based on the following pattern of data:

(1) The woman who appears in the equivalent chronological position in the death list on the sarcophagus is his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk.

(2) On the Oval Palace Tablet, the woman named as Pacal’s mother hands him the crown that makes him king, but his father is neither named nor pictured. The parent critical to his legitimate claim to the throne is his mother rather than his father.

(3) His father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, never appears in an accession phrase in any of the inscriptions of Palenque. Furthermore, Pacal depicts Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ only on the sarcophagus where he appears as the king’s father and not as a king in his own right.

(3) The goddess is born on a date deliberately contrived to have the same temporal character (see note 35) as Pacal’s birth.

All of these factors emphasize that Pacal’s right of inheritance descended through his mother rather than his father. Pacal’s strategy for explaining the appropriateness of this pattern of descent was to establish an equation between his mother and the mother of the gods. To have named the woman who acceded shortly before his own accession with the name of the goddess is much in keeping with this strategy.

The name itself consists of the bird from the Palenque Emblem Glyph, which is a heron, with feathers in its mouth. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1977) has suggested that this is a play on the name Zac-Kuk, based on the following word plays. The word for heron in Yucatec and Choi is zac bac, “white bone,” or some expression like “white crest.” The zac bac reading works well as the Palenque Emblem Glyph since the main sign in the Emblem Glyph is a long bone or skull, also bac. Lounsbury suggests that the feathers (kuk) in the mouth changes zac bac to zac kuk, thus making a play on the name of Pacal’s mother which was Zac-Kuk, “White (or Resplendent) Quetzal.” No one has, as yet, suggested a reading for the small sign mounted atop the heron’s head in the name. At the 1989 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Dennis Tedlock offered a different solution by linking the zac bac gloss with the name Xbaquiyalo, the first wife of Hunhunahpu and mother of Hun-Batz’ and Hun-Chuen in the Popol Vuh.

[345] The stairs leading up the front of the Temple of Inscriptions and those leading down to the tomb have risers about 18 inches high. Today, the inner stairs are almost always damp and slippery from condensation in the tunnellike vaults; we assume the same conditions were extant when Pacal was buried.

[346] While we have no way of determining who enacted the rituals described in this scenario, the fact that these particular actions were done is clear from the archaeological record at Palenque and from records of other burial rites, especially those of Ruler 3 at Piedras Negras (Stuart 1985a). The description of the objects deposited inside the coffin and tomb are drawn from Ruz (1973) and from his description of the sacrifice of five victims (1955). The description of the scale and feel of being in the tomb comes from the days Scheie spent locked inside the tomb helping Merle Greene Robertson photograph the stucco sculptures modeled on the walls.

[347] The drawings which survive on the sarcophagus sides are carefully drawn and beautifully designed. However, the carving, especially in the areas at some distance from the image of the falling Pacal, are very sloppily executed. Merle Robertson and Scheie take this contrast to mean that the carving was executed at the last minute and in a rush. See Merle Robertson (1983) for a detailed photographic record of the tomb.

[348] Xoc appears briefly on the Palace Tablet as the man who dedicated the north building of the Palace after Kan-Xul had been taken captive by the king of Tonina. He never became the king, but he apparently was a high-ranked official in the kingdom because he functioned as the surrogate of the captured Kan-Xul until a new king was selected from the royal clan. Given his age of thirty-three at the time of Pacal’s death, we have assumed he served Pacal as well as his descendants.

[349] Chaacal, in fact, did become king after Kan-Xul was taken captive and executed at Tonina. His parentage statements do not name either Chan-Bahlum or Kan-Xul as his father. He was apparently the offspring of one of the women in Pacal’s lineage, perhaps a sister of Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul. Chac-Zutz’ was a cahal, who became an important figure (maybe the war chief of the kingdom) during Chaacal’s reign.

[350] The offerings of the plaster heads, the plates and cups of food, the royal belt, and the slaughtered victims are located in the plans below.

[[][Jester God headband mask]]

[351] The other possibility is that the portraits represent the great king Pacal and his wife Lady Ahpo-Hel.

[352] Merle Robertson (1979) first associated the imagery on these piers with glyphic accounts of Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation. The fact that Chan-Bahlum became a living incarnation of the sun is declared by him in his own textual account of this ceremony in the Temple of the Sun in the Group of the Cross.

[353] The badly damaged condition of these stucco portraits and the texts that once accompanied them preclude identifying them with security, but logically they should be the most important ancestors in Chan-Bahlum’s claim to legitimacy. One possible pattern is that they all represent his father Pacal, but the headdresses, one of which is a jaguar head, suggest that they are meant to represent different individuals. The Maya often represented their names in the imagery of their headdresses. The jaguar headdress, then, may refer to Chan-Bahlum I, his great-great-great-grandfather.

[354] At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan depicted the designation of his heir by showing a high-ranking noble displaying him at the edge of a pyramid. The audience on the mural consists of fourteen high-ranked individuals, but the ritual would have been held publicly, the entire community in attendance (M. Miller 1986b:59–97). At Palenque, Chan-Bahlum did not represent the audience, but we know it included everyone who stood in the plaza under the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions. In the Group of the Cross, he used a pyramid glyph to describe the action of heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) as being “pyramided.” The glyph actually reads le.match’ul na (using the transcription punctuation from Thompson s <verbatim>[1962]</verbatim> A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs) or lem ch’ul na: in Yucatec lem is glossed by Barrera Vasquez as “meter, encajar, introducir. To become the heir was “to introduce the child from the pyramid,” exactly the scenes Chan-Bahlum displayed on the Temple of Inscriptions piers.

[355] Although the first royal temple at Cerros is designed around the quincunx or five-fold principle, the later public buildings there are triadic in concept. The earliest architects created an innovative variety of building designs, but the triadic principle was the most pervasive.

[356] The glyphic phrase for these small inner houses, pib na, consists ofpib, the word for “underground” as in the pits used for cooking, and na, “edifice or building.” Pib na is also the term for a “sweat bath” used by women after childbirth. Many cosmologies of modern Maya in Chiapas refer to a sweat bath in the heart of the mountain. This image may be intended here also.

[357] The text on the Tablet of the Cross writes this second event as yoch-te k’in-k’in, “he became the sun.”

[358] All three panels have the same text on them, but the text is split in different ways in each temple. In the Temple of the Cross, it reads “ten days after he had become the stood-up one (yoch-te acai) and then he spoke of (iwal chi-wa or che-wa) U-Kix-Chan, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, the child of Pacal, Blood Lord of Palenque.” In the Temple of the Foliated Cross, the first event (yoch-te) appears on the left panel and the second (chi-wa) is on the right. In the Temple of the Sun, the glyphs from the left panel survive on Maudslay’s (1889—19O2:P1.86) reproduction of Waldeck’s original drawing, but nevertheless some of them are readable. The first phrase reads chumlah ti ahau le and paraphrases “He was seated as king, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, Blood Lord of Palenque.” The second section of the text is much more difficult, but the best probability is that it begins with a Distance Number that leads to the event ten days after the accession (9.12.11.13.0 5 Ahau 13 Kayab) and then jumps to the right tablet where the event was once written. Today only the long name phrase of the actor, Chan-Bahlum, survives on the right panel.

[359] Mayanists are still debating the identification of this smaller figure. Floyd Louns- bury (in his seminar on Maya hieroglyphic writing, 1975) first proposed that he is Chan- Bahlum at his heir-designation. Since all three of the texts located near his head record this heir-designation and, in’two of the three texts, a war event which took place more than a year later on 9.10.10.0.0, this interpretation has merit. In fact, it has resurfaced recently in a presentation by Basse and it has the support of David Stuart. Another alternative interpretation emerged at the 1987 Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Tom Jones proposed this figure represents the lineage founder, Bahlum-Kuk. Since founders also appear in accession scenes at Yaxchilan (Lintel 25) and Copan (the bench from Temple 11), this interpretation also has merit.

For the present, we still hold to the older interpretation of this shorter figure as Pacal, based on the following arguments:

(1) There is a transfer of a scepterlike object (in the Temple of the Cross a Quadripartite Scepter; in the Temple of the Foliated Cross, a Personified Perforator; and in the Temple of the Sun, a shield and eccentric-shield device). These transferred objects represent the power of the throne, and rulers at Palenque and other Maya sites wield them in scenes of rituals. If the smaller figure is Chan- Bahlum at his own heir-designation, he is already controlling these objects at age six. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1989) has suggested that this is a ritual in which the child was made acquainted with the objects he would one day wield as king. We find this interpretation less satisfying than one in which these objects are transferred from the former king, now deceased, to his son who is becoming the new king.

(2) In the heir-designation presentation on the Temple of Inscriptions piers, the size of the child (104 cm) matches closely the size of six-year-old Choi children in the region today (M. Robertson 1979.132–133). The scale of the child presented in the Bonampak murals conforms to this size in direct proportion to the adult who holds him. The muffled figure in the Group of the Cross may be smaller than the larger figures, but he is still of a size larger than a six-year-old in proportion to the larger figure. The Temple of Inscriptions child when stretched out to full height is only 56 percent of the height of the adults who hold him. while the smaller figure in the Group of the Cross is between 73 percent and 78 percent of the height of the larger figure. According to Robertson’s modern measurements, a 1.04-meter six-year-old from the Palenque region is around 60 percent of the height of a 5’ 6” (1.70m) adult.

(3) If the scene is the documentation of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites, and this interpretation is well supported by the inscriptions, then the composition format of each temple means to present this small figure as the source of power. He holds the objects of power on the inner tablet while the new king holds them on the outer panels. There is a transfer of these objects from the smaller person to the larger one as the scene moves inside to outside. The larger figure also dons the costume of kings in its most ancient and orthodox version during the transition from inside to outside: He wears minimal jewelry and a cotton hipcloth on the inside and the full costume over those minimal clothes on the outside. In addition, the larger figure takes the smaller person’s place when the scene moves from the inside to the outside of the sanctuary, especially in the composition of the Temple of the Cross. The scenes in all three temples emphasize the transformation of the tall figure from heir to king in the movement from inside to outside, and within this program the smaller figure is presented as the source of Chan-Bahlum’s claim to the throne—and that person was either Pacal, his father, or Bahlum-Kuk, the founder of his dynasty.

(4) Finally, in the heir-designation event, the six-year-old child was not the main actor, either at Palenque or at Bonampak. The child was displayed as the heir, but the father, who was the acting king, oversaw that display. At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan went to war, not the child, and at Palenque, Pacal memorialized the thirteenth-haab anniversary of this heir-designation in the Tableritos from the Subterranean building of the Palace without mentioning Chan-Bahlum at all. Chan-Bahlum, the six-year-old child, was the recipient of the action in the heir-designation rites, but the source of those actions was his father, Pacal.

The argument for identifying the smaller figure as Chan-Bahlum at his heir-designation has strengthened with the recognition that the two outer panels of the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun depict Chan-Bahlum at points in his accession rituals separated by at least ten days. The fact that Chan-Bahlum appears on more than one date, involved in more than one action on the outer panels, reinforces the possibility that he is shown at two different ages and in two different actions on the inner panel. Although we believe this latter interpretation to be less probable, it is a viable possibility that must also be kept in mind.

[360] The Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Zinacantan in highland Chiapas still regard the Christian crosses at the base of their sacred mountains as the doorways to the Otherworld which contains their ancestors. The shamans of this community regularly commune with the supernatural at these holy places (Vogt 1976).

[361] See Schele and M. Miller (1986:76–77, 265–315) for a detailed discussion of the World Tree and its appearances in death and bloodletting iconography of the Maya.

[362] The aged god on the right has never been securely identified. Kelley (1965) suggested God M, but demonstration of his identification has not materialized. The only other portrait we have of this god appears on a small incised bone, probably from the Palenque region (see Crocker-Delataille 1985: Pl. 395). The composition of these two old gods bent under the weight of the throne precisely anticipates the display of captives on Late Classic stelae from the site of Coba (Thompson, Pollock, and Chariot 1932).

[363] God L is now recognized as one of the chief gods of the Maya Underworld. Most important, he is the deity shown presiding over the gods on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the day of the current creation (M.D. Coe 1973:107—109). Chan-Bahlum s repeated depiction of this god asserts the ability of the king to control the effects of God L and other Xibalbans in his community, and perhaps his ability as king to gain the willing cooperation of these gods in the affairs of the kingdom.

[364] This set of gods was first noticed by Berlin (1963), who gave it the name Palenque Triad” because it was in the Palenque inscriptions that he first saw them. Building on Berlin’s identification, Kelley (1965) identified their birth dates in the Group of the Cross and suggested associations between these Maya gods and other Mesoamerican supernaturals. Lounsbury (1976, 1980, 1985) sorted out chronological problems concerning their histories and recognized the names of their parents in the I ablet of the Cross. He has also made extensive arguments concerning their identities. In Maya art, these gods appear both singly and as a triad of gods at other Maya sites. Most important, GI and GUI, the first and second-born gods, are the beings most often depicted in the very earliest public images created by the Maya during the Late Preclassic period. They are not just Palenque gods.

[365] The text that records this event falls into a couplet which characterizes the action in two ways. In the first, the god yoch-te ta chan “entered into the sky. In the second, he dedicated a house named “wac-ah-chan xaman waxac na GI or raised up sky north eight house GI.” The first glyph naming the house consists of the number six prefixed to a sky glyph with two ah signs above it. The word for “six is wac. Barrera Vasquez (1980:906) lists a homophone, wac, as “cosa enhiesta” (enhestar means “to erect, to set up, to hoist [up], and to raise [up]“). Wac-ah chan is “raised up sky. i his proper name is followed by the glyph for “north” (xaman) and the portrait head of GI preceded by the number eight (waxac) and phonetic na (“edifice”).

The most likely reference here is to the act of raising the sky from the primordial sea of creation, an act known to be part of many Mesoamerican origin myths. This house is further characterized as yotot xaman, “the house of the north. The same wacah chan phrase names the inner sanctuary of the Temple of the Cross and World T ree on its inner panel. The god’s action was to establish the primary axis of the world by setting the sky in its place and establishing its order. Since this is an action twice associated with the north, we suggest it corresponded in the Maya mind to the set of the polar star and the circular movement of the constellations around that axis. In the tropics, the polar star is much lower than in the temperate zone, and the movement of the constellations through the night is even more noticeable, resembling as much as anything the shifting of patterns around the inside of a barrel. This axial pivot of the sky creates the great pattern through which the sun and the planets move and it was a pattern created by GT 542 days or a year and a half after this era began (Scheie 1987e and n.d.a).

[366] Floyd Lounsbury first deciphered the chronology of this difficult passage. The text begins with a Distance Number of 8.5.0, a birth verb, and then a series of glyphs recording 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the era date. Before Lounsbury proposed this solution, most researchers had assumed that the birth referred to the Initial Series event. In this interpretation, the Distance Number must be in error since the Initial Series date is 6.14.0 before 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, rather than the 8.5.0 written in the text. Lounsbury used known patterns of Mayan grammar to show that there are actually two different births given here, and that the name of the person born 8.5.0 before the era has been deleted from the text. The missing name, however, can be reconstructed—again by using known patterns of Mayan grammar—as the subject of the next event. The name in question is GT, the god who ordered the sky a year and a half after the era began. See Lounsbury (1980 and 1985) for a full discussion of the chronology and grammar of these passages and the identities of the gods of the Palenque Triad.

[367] Lounsbury (1976) called this kind of numerology “contrived numbers.” Such numbers are composed of two dates: The earlier one is usually from a time previous to the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date, and the other is a historical date of significance in the present creation. The Distance Number (amount of time) that separates the two is contrived by using highly factorable numbers, so that both dates fall on the same point in time in several different cycles. The two dates manipulated by Chan-Bahlum, 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahau 18 Zee and 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahau 13 Pop, fall 9.8.16.9.0 or 1,359,540 days apart in the Maya Long Count. This number is 2² x 3² 5 x 7 x 13 x 83 yielding the following relationships:

| 1,359,540 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 5,229 | (26) | gives the same day number |
| | 3,735 | (364) | computing years |
| | 1,734 | (780) | Mars period and three tzolkins (3 x 260) |
| | 1,660 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |

This puts Pacal s birth in relation to Lady Beastie’s on the same day in the tzolkin (8 Ahau), the same point in the Mars cycle, and during the time when the same Lord of the Night reigned. Most important, both persons were born twenty days after time moved into the south-yellow quadrant of the 819-day count. And both quadrants began on 1 Ahau.

[368] In the account of genesis given in the Popol Vuh, First Mother is a daughter of a lord of Xibalba. V hen the skull of First Father impregnates her by spitting in her hand, she is forced to flee to the world of humanity. As in Chan-Bahlum’s story, the First Mother spans the worlds.

[369] The two births are: 12.19.11.13.0 1 Ahau 8 Muan (June 16, 3122 B.c.) for GT and 1.18.5.4.0 1 Ahau 13 Mac (November 8, 2360 B.c.) for GIL The elapsed time between them is 1.18.13.9.0 or 278,460 days. This sum factors out as 2² x 3² x 5 x 7 x 13 x 17 and gives the following patterns of cycles:

| 278,460 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 1,071 | (260) | same day in the tzolkin |
| | 357 | (780) | same day in the Mars cycle and 3 tzolkins |
| | 119 | (2,340) | gives the same Lord of the Night |
| | 765 | (364) | computing year |
| | 153 | (1,820) | seven tzolkin/five haab cycle |
| | 340 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
| | 85 | (3,276) | same quadrant of the four 819-day sequence (east, red, and 1 Imix) |

These cycles make the two births fall on the same day in the 260-day tzolkin, on days ruled by the same Lord of the Night, and on the same day in the same quadrant of the 819-day count. The First Father, GI’, was born in the last creation; his reflection in this creation is his child GII.

[370] The “fish-in-hand” glyph appears on Lintels 13, 14, and 25 of Yaxchilan with scenes of the Vision Serpent, while on Lintels 39, 40, and 41, the scenes depict Bird-Jaguar and two of his w ives holding Double-headed Serpent Bars. The action associated with this verb is the materialization of the Vision Serpent. Since the k’ul “holy” sign follows the “fish-in-hand” when it is inflected as a transitive root, the action is something done to the “holy” liquid of the body—in other words to “blood.” This action results in the appearance of the Vision Serpent. In those examples where it is not followed by the k’ul “holy” sign, God K appears in the object slot, although we do not yet fully understand what meaning is intended. Perhaps this association of God K with “fish-in-hand” reflects the frequent appearance of this god in the mouth of the Double-headed Serpent Bar. It is the vision often brought forth by the ritual. “To manifest a vision (or a divinity)” is an appropriate paraphrase to use for the present, although the final phonetic reading of the “fish-in- hand” glyph may refer to this action metaphorically or through the vision side of the rite.

[371] Constance Cortez (1986) and others have identified this bird with Vucub-Caquix of the Popol Vuh. Cortez suggests that this bird represented the idea of order in nature. When it acted with hubris, imitating the glory of the sun, the natural world was out of order. In the story of the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins opposed Vucub-Caquix, and by defeating him, brought nature back into its proper balance and behavior once again. In this interpretation, the Celestial Bird represents an universe in which order is mediated by the king in his role as the avatar of the Hero Twins.

[372] On the Tablet of the Cross, these events appear immediately behind Chan- Bahlum’s legs, linked to his accession by a Distance Number.

[373] Lounsbury (personal communication, 1978) was the first to recognize that Jupiter and Saturn were frozen at their stationary points less than 5+ apart in the sky. He informed Dieter Diitting of the alignment in 1980 and then Diitting and Aveni (1982) extended the hierophany to include this quadruple conjunction with Mars and the moon also in close proximity on that day (July 20, 690, in the Julian calendar). They located the planets as follows:

| Planet | Longitude | Latitude |
| Mars | 219°.10 | — 2°. 18 |
| Jupiter | 221°.94 | + 0°.83 |
| Saturn | 225°.52 | + 2°.04 |
| Moon | 231°.80 | — 1°.80 |

They describe the phenomena as follows: “... all four planets were close together (a quadruple conjunction) in the same constellation Scorpio, and they must have made quite a spectacle with bright red Antares shining but a few degrees south of the group as they straddled the high ridge that forms the southern horizon of Palenque. The night before 2 Cib 14 Mol the moon would have been just at the western end of the planetary lineup, but the night after it would have been well out of range to the east. The month before and after, Mars would have shifted appreciably away from Jupiter and Saturn. Therefore, the date of the inscription is the best one where the four were closest together.” Aveni continues, “Though conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn with given tolerance in separation are skewed to occur about five times a century, the inclusion of a third planet in the grouping reduces the frequency of occurrence to about once a century.’ Diitting and Aveni speculated that the Palencanos saw this conjunction as a replay of the birth of Triad gods with the moon representing their mother, Lady Beastie. This interpretation seems likely since Chan-Bahium carefully bridged from those births to this 2 Cib 14 Mol event.

Perhaps the most remarkable new piece of information on this date was discovered independently by Stephen Houston and David Stuart (in a letter dated October 19, 1989) and Nikolai Grube (in a independent letter also dated October 19, 1989). The event on this day is written pili u waybil on the Tablet of the Sun and pili u chiltin in the other temples. Houston, Stuart, and Grube all identify way and its past participial waybil as the word meaning “nagual” or “spirit or animal counterpart.” In sixteenth-century Tzotzil (a language very close to the Choi spoken at Palenque), chi’il is “companion, familiar thing, friend” (Laughlin 1988:189).

The verb, which is glyphically spelled pi-lu-yi, seems most closely related to the verb pi’len, which is glossed in Choi (Aulie and Aulie 1978:93) as “acompañar (to accompany)” and “tener relación sexual (to have a sexual relationship).” The second meaning is known to have been used by the Maya as a metaphor for astronomical conjunction, just the event recorded in this phrase. Grube suggested in his letter that the naguals of the Palenque Triad were in conjunction (or had come together) and that the Palencanos regarded the planets as the naguals (or spirit counterparts) of the Triad Gods. Merging his observation with Aveni’s interpretation gives new and important insight into how the Palencanos thought about the events they saw in the sky: The naguals of the three Triad Gods— Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars—were reunited with the nagual of their mother—the moon.

This spectacular hierophany apparently was the trigger event for the house rites that followed over the next three days. However, this day is very near the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of Pacal’s accession, which took place only five days after this hierophany. Considering Chan-Bahlum’s preoccupation with the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, this anniversary must also have played a part in his calculations.

[374] There are several possible houses that may be the Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building. The Temple of the Cross is the most likely candidate because it contains the dynastic list that includes Bahlum-Kuk‘s name as the founder. However, the text behind Chan- Bahlum on the Temple of the Foliated Cross actually has the words pib nah and yotot following Bahlum-Kuk’s name in a passage that may refer to that temple. We suspect, however, that Chan-Bahlum referred to the entire Group of the Cross as the “Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building.” The last and most distant possibility is the Temple of Inscriptions. Mathews (1980) identified an Initial Series date over the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions with the 819-day count appropriate to the 2 Cib 14 Mol series of events. He suggested the date intended here was the hierophany, but it was just as likely to have been 3 Caban 15 Mol, with Chan-Bahlum’s dedication of Ins father’s funerary building as the event taking place. This last solution seems the least satisfactory of the four because of Chan-Bahlum’s deliberate linkage of the 3 Caban 15 Mol dedication event to the mythological dedication of GT. To us, it is more logical to assume he would have reserved such elaborate explanations for his own buildings.

[375] In the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun, a Distance Number of three days stands between 3 Caban 15 Mol and this bloodletting event. However, the 3 Caban 15 Mol event is not recorded at all on the Tablet of the Cross. In that context, the Distance Number must be counted from the date of the astronomical event, 2 Cib 14 Mol. This chronology places the bloodletting on 5 Cauac 17 Mol rather than 6 Ahau 18 Mol.

[376] The only surviving pier reliefs are from the Temple of the Sun. The inscription is fragmentary but the date is indisputably 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab and the verb is the same. The Initial Series date and its supplementary data were on the south pier, while the verb and actor were on the north pier. The figures on both inner piers are badly damaged, but Pier C has a flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it. For the Maya, this Tlaloc iconography signals bloodletting and war, so that we can speculate with some certainty that the 5 Eb 5 Kayab event involved the taking and sacrifice of captives. We have lost the piers on the other two temples, but since the balustrades and sanctuary doorjambs in all three temples repeat the same basic information in the same discourse pattern, it is likely that the piers repeated the same information on all three temples.

[377] Although astronomy plays an important role in the timing of the events of Chan-Bahlum’s history—he ended his accession rites on a maximum elongation of Venus and dedicated the Group of the Cross during a major planetary conjunction—the dedication of the pib na was not timed by astronomy. Like Ah Cacaw of Tikal, he went to Tlaloc war on an important anniversary.

While the association is distant, the 5 Eb 5 Kayab dedication of the inner sanctum may also have been associated with a Venus cycle. The final event of his ten-day-long accession ritual occurred during a maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar. The dedication of the pib na took place almost exactly five rounds of Venus later, but the planet was twenty days from its elongation point on that day. Chan-Bahlum may have been observing Venus as well as the tropical year in timing the dedications of the pib na. although it is clear that Venus was not the primary factor.

[378] Only one jamb panel is preserved from each sanctuary, and of these only the panel from the Temple of the Foliated Cross is complete. Since this panel formed a joint with the outer panel, the border on the outer panel continued onto the edge of the doorjamb. Using this pattern, we can ascertain that the surviving fragments are all from the right sides of the doors. It is possible, therefore, that the left doorjambs recorded the birth of the Triad Gods, but until additional fragments are discovered, we will not know the entire pattern.

[379] The clearest demonstration of the relationship of the central icon with the name of the sanctuary occurs in the Temple of the Foliated Cross. There the icon is a maize tree emerging from a monster with a kan-cross in its forehead while the name of the house is a tree sign over a kan-cross. Since this same relationship must hold for the other two temples, we can identify wacah chan as the name of the tree on the Tablet of the Cross. The Temple of the Sun is more difficult, but the glyph on the balustrade is a variant of the “new-sky-at-horizon” glyph that occurs as a name at Copan. Here it has Mah Kina preceding it, possibly as a reinforcement that the GUI shield in the icon of this temple represents the sun.

[380] The term used here is the T606 glyph which has been taken as “child of mother” (Schele, Mathews, and Lounsbury n.d.). David Stuart (n.d) has recently suggested a reading of u huntan for this glyph, citing glosses from the Motul dictionary of Yucatec for “to take care of a thing” and “to do something with care and diligence.” He suggests that the term refers to the child as the object of the mother’s care and nurturing. It is this sense, as “the objects of caretaking,” that the gods are related to the king—he cares for them like a mother.

[381] In this context, as with the 2 Cib 14 Mol conjunction event, the gods are named as the “cared-ones” of Chan-Bahlum. This same relationship between these gods and Pacal occurs on katun-ending dates in the Temple of Inscriptions. The glyphic terms, Tl.1.606:23, u huntan. identifies the king as the caretaker of the gods in the sense that a mother cares for her child. Since the Maya believed that the act of bloodletting literally gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a), we deduce that the king’s role as caretaker and nourisher took place in the context of bloodletting.

The importance of this role as “nurturer of the gods” is illustrated in the Popol Vuh version of the genesis myth. The following passage describes the gods’ motivation for trying again to create humanity after the first attempt had failed.

“The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth? We have already made our first try at our work and design, but it turned out that they didn’t keep our days, nor did they glorify us.

“So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer.” (Tedlock 1986:79).

The way a community provided sustenance to a king was through tribute, and in Quiche the word tzuqul, “provider,” means “nourish, support, raise, bud, sprout, be born, rear, and support by tribute” (Edmonson 1965:136). The way humanity sustained and nourished ihe gods was through bloodletting. When the king was in this role as “caretaker of the gods,” he became their mother by giving them birth and sustenance. It is this metaphor that Chan-Bahlum used on the doorjambs of the sanctuaries.

[382] Chaacal III evoked the accession of Lady Beastie in his own accession records to relate his own mother to the great founding deity of the Palenque dynasty. Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, was captured late in his reign by a ruler of Tonina. This political disaster apparently threw the succession into confusion. Chaacal III, the next king to come to the throne, chose his accession date so that it would fall into a contrived relationship of numerology with the accession of Lady Beastie (Lounsbury 1976:220–221). Even more interesting is the fact that the date of Lady Beastie’s accession, as written on the Tablet of the Cross, is in error. Two mistakes have been detected:

1. The Distance Number that is written was calculated from the 819-day count date, 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’, rather than the Initial Series date, 8 Ahau 18 Zee.

2. To find the Calendar Round reached by the Distance Number, the scribe used 20 calculating years (1.0.4.0 in the Long Count). Each time one calculating year is added to a Calendar Round, the tzolkin day stays the same, the day of the month stays the same, but the month drops back one as follows:

1.12.19. 0. 2 9 Ik 0 Cumku + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 20. 4. 2 9 Ik 0 Kayab + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 21. 8. 2 9 Ik 0 Pax + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 22. 12. 2 9 Ik 0 Muan + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 23. 16. 2 9 Ik 0 Kankin + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 24. 0. 2. 2 9 Ik 0 Mac + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 25. 0. 6. 2 9 Ik 0 Cch + 1.0.4.0 equals
2. 0. 0.10 2 9 Ik 0 Zac + 1.0.4.0 equals
2. 1. 0.14. 2 9 Ik 0 Yax

The Distance Number written in the text falls between 12.19.13.3.0 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’ (the 819-day count) and the ninth interval above. The Calendar Round written in the text is the eighth interval above, 9 Ik 0 Zac. The scribe stopped one interval short of the correct answer.

The Maya knew they had made a mistake because in the very next notation they counted from interval nine, rather than interval eight. They may have left the erroneous Calendar Round in the text because they believed the gods had caused the error. When Chaacal contrived the numerological relationship between his accession and Lady Beastie’s, however, he used the erroneous Calendar Round rather than the correct one. Apparently. history as it was engraved in the stone, erroneous or not, became the gospel according to Chan-Bahlum.

CHAPTER 7: BIRD-JAGUAR AND THE CAHALOB

[383] According to Teobert Maier’s (1901–1903) descriptions, the temples of Yaxchilân were painted white with a red band below the medial molding.

[384] Maudslay named the ruins Menché Tinamit after the Maya people he found living nearby. Maier (1901–1903:104) renamed the city using a combination ofyax, “blue” or “green,” and the word chilan, which he thought meant “that which lies or is scattered around,” referring to the fallen stones of the ruined buildings. Maier criticized Maudslay’s use of what he believed was an ersatz term, and then he proceeded to supply his own. Unfortunately, Maier’s coined name has stuck, although Maudslay’s name was more likely what the Indians living along the river called the old city.

[385] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) published two detailed studies of the life of Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar. These two studies remain today the finest example of historical studies of the Maya inscriptions.

[386] In her study of the history of kingship and the physical orientation of buildings at Yaxchilan, Tate (1986b) identified a group of temples oriented toward the rising sun at summer solstice. Since many of the house dedication dates at Yaxchilan are on or near summer solstices, this orientation is not simply fortuitous.

[387] This king’s name consists of a sign representing male genitals surmounting a jaguar head. The name was probably Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,” but his name was published as “Progenitor-Jaguar” in the National Geographic Magazine (October 1985).

[388] David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first recognized the accession passage of Progenitor-Jaguar on Hieroglyphic Stair 1. This date is best reconstructed as 8.14.2.17.6 7 Cimi 14 Zotz’. The latest date known at Yaxchilan, 9.18.17.13.14 9 lx 2 Zee (April 13, 808), occurs on Lintel 10. a monument of the last king in the dynasty, Mah Kina Ta-Skull. Yaxchilan was certainly abandoned within fifty years of this date.

[389] The great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakofl’ published two seminal papers on her “historical hypothesis” demonstrating her belief that the contents of the Maya inscriptions were primarily historical. The first study (Proskouriakoff 1960) focused on the dynastic sequence of Piedras Negras to prove her thesis, but she did not give personal names to the Maya rulers she identified. However, in a paper published for a more general audience less than a year later, Proskouriakoff (1961a) described her methodology and gave names to these two great kings of Yaxchilan. as well as other personalities of Maya history.

The six years between 1958 and 1964 were an extraordinary lime in Maya studies. Proskouriakoff’s work followed a study by Heinrich Berlin (1959) that had anticipated her results. Berlin had already identified the names of historical people on the sarcophagus in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque. David Kelley (1962) contributed his own study of the history of Quirigua less than a year later. With these seminal studies, we began to speak truly of Maya history as they themselves wrote it and meant it to be understood.

[390] The history we present here is based on several sources, including Proskouriakoff’s (1963–1964) papers, Carolyn Tate’s (1986a) study of Yaxchilan architecture and statecraft. Mathews’s (1975) work on early Yaxchilan history, and long-term conversationsand debate with Peter Mathews, David Stuart, Sandy Bardslay, and many of Scheie’s students, especially Ruth Krochock and Constance Cortes. After this chapter was finished, we received a copy of Peter Mathews’s (1988) dissertation on Yaxchilan and have added information from that source as it is relevant.

[391] Shield-Jaguar’s birth is not recorded on any of the surviving Yaxchilan monuments, but Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) was able to reconstruct it from other glyphic information as having occurred within five years of 9.10.15.0.0.

[392] The third and the eighth successors were also named Bird-Jaguar, which was probably Xtz’unun-Balam in Mayan. The father of Shield-Jaguar was the third Bird- Jaguar, and his grandson, the great Bird-Jaguar, was the fourth. We shall call the grandfather 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar because his name phrase invariably contains a 6-Tun glyph that is not included in his grandson’s name.

[393] Recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C of the Palace at Palenque. the event (an “ax” war and a “capture”) took place on 9.11.1.16.3 6 Akbal 1 Yax (August 28, 654). The Yaxchilan lord who participated in these events was Balam-Te-Chac, who is named ayihtah (“sibling”) of Shield-Jaguar, the ahau of Yaxchilan. This brother does not appear in Yaxchilan’s inscriptions, but at Palenque the context is clearly war and capture. Note that Shield-Jaguar had very likely already been designated heir to Yaxchilan’s throne. Why else would Pacal demonstrate the importance of the Yaxchilan visitor by naming him the sibling of an eleven-year-old who was not yet a king?

[394] The term used for the relationship, ihtan, is “sibling” in modern Chorti, but in the set of kinship terms used by many Maya people, “siblings” include the children of a father’s brothers as well as one’s own brothers and sisters. The Yaxchilan cohort may, therefore, have been the child of one of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar’s brothers, rather than his son.

[395] On Lintel 45, Ah-Ahaual is named “the ahau of (yahau);’ the king of a domain named with a serpent segment with a phonetic ni attached. On Stela 19, this same location is spelled with the phonetic complements ma and na. Since this same serpent-segment glyph appears in the xaman, “north,” glyph with the value ma or man, we suggest the place was known as Man. This Emblem Glyph appears in several other contexts, including the name of Ruler B’s mother at Tikal (see Stela 5). No one has yet associated this Emblem Glyph with a particular archaeological ruin; but in light of Shield-Jaguar’s focus on this capture, the domain was important and prestigious in the Maya world.

[396] This is a unique event in Maya history as we now understand it. Women were recorded in the historical inscriptions because of their roles either as wives or mothers of important Maya lords. Although two women ruled in their own right at Palenque, Temple 23 is the only major Maya monument known to have been dedicated by a woman for the express purposes of celebrating personal history. The rarity of this circumstance points to the extraordinary and pivotal importance of this woman in Yaxchilan’s history.

[397] At Yaxchilan, kings used two forums to display their political messages—the slab-shaped tree-stones erected in front of buildings and the lintel stones that spanned door openings into the interiors of temples. In the local tradition, tree-stones displayed two complementary scenes (Tate 1986a); A period-ending bloodletting rite was depicted on the temple side and a capture on the river side of the monument. The lintels, on the other hand, displayed only one scene; but since a building usually had several sculpted lintels, the various scenes and texts could be orchestrated into larger programs of information. The scribes favored two kinds of compositional strategies in these larger programs. They could place a series of different actions and actors in direct association within a single building or they could divide a ritual or text into parts, which were then distributed across the lintels of a building. By using these multiple scenes in various combinations, the king was able to construct compelling arguments for his political actions. He could interpret history by showing how individual actions were linked into the larger framework of history and cosmic necessity. Retrospectively constructed, these linkages between different rituals and events became the central voice of Yaxchilan’s political rhetoric.

[398] Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) reconstructed this date as 9.14.8.12.5, but Mathews (personal communication, 1979) has noted that this event recurs on Lintel 23 where the date clearly reads 9.14.14.13.17, a placement supported by the presence of G7 as the Lord of the Night on Lintel 26. We accept the later placement as the correct reconstruction.

[399] There are three sequential narrative lines in these lintels: (1) the texts on the outer sides record three separate rituals in the dedication sequence of the temple (the side of Lintel 24 was destroyed when it was lightened for transport to England [Graham 1975- 1986, vol. 3:54]); (2) the texts on the undersides picture the sequence of historical events; (3) they also picture the three stages of the bloodletting rite which took place on each of those historical occasions. Thus, the sculptors let us understand the action sequence of the bloodletting rite and simultaneously that this ritual took place at three different points in time. See Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more complete descriptions of the iconography and rites depicted on these lintels.

[400] A second glyph, which looks like crossed torches, can be seen in the background next to the serpent’s head. This is the glyph that occurs at Copan as a substitute for the lineage founder’s name in “numbered succession” titles. The presence of this glyph in the name phrase referring to the figure emerging from the serpent’s jaw identifies him as the founder Yat-Balam.

[401] There is the possibility, of course, that other depictions once existed and are now destroyed. However, accession was not a favored subject for sculptural representation at Yaxchilan, although it was frequently recorded in glyphic texts. The only other picture of an accession known is Bird-Jaguar’s on Lintel 1.

[402] The bloodletting on Lintel 24 took place exactly twenty-eight years (28 x 365.25) plus four days after Shield-Jaguar’s accession.

[403] Ihe only other women to hold such prominent places are Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque and Lady 6-Sky of Dos Pilas who appears on the stela of Naranjo. The first woman was a ruler in her own right, while the second reestablished the lineage of Naranjo after a disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol.

[404] Mathews (1988:171) suggests that Lady Xoc, whom he calls Lady Fist-Fish, was probably buried in Structure 23 in Tomb 2. He describes nine carved bones found in the tomb and notes that six of them carry her name.

[405] The inscription records the dedication of an object written as pa.si.l(i). In Chorti (Wisdom n.d.), pasi is glossed as “open, open up, break open, make an opening.” The pasil is apparently the east doorway itself, which was perhaps opened up into the building to become the resting place of this lintel.

[406] Toni Jones and Carolyn Jones discovered the important secrets hidden in this Lintel 23 text and presented them at the 1989 Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas.

[407] The main sign of the Calakmul Emblem Glyph (also known as Site Q) is a snake head. On Stela 10. exactly this main sign occurs with the female head and the word ah po. This is the form of the Emblem Glyph title used especially to designate women. The reader should also note that the identification of the snake Emblem Glyph is still questioned by several epigraphers. This particular version is the one Mathews identified with Site Q. It is also the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom allied to Caracol and Dos Pilas in the star wars history detailed in Chapter 5. It is interesting that the “batab” title in Lady Eveningstar’s name uses the directional association “east.” Berlin (1958) first suggested this title should be read “batab,” a documented title in Yucatec sources meaning “ax-wielder.” Although we now know the title refers to the god Chae rather than to the Yucatec title, epigraphers still use “batab” as the nickname of the title. Normal Yaxchilán versions of this title all have the “west” direction connected with their names. The change in directional association may reflect her status as a foreigner from the east.

[408] Bird-Jaguar was thirteen years old when the sculpture was dedicated and about seventeen at the time of the house dedication rituals.

[409] Other dates and events in Temple 23 texts include the dedication of the temple sculptures on August 5, 723; the dedication of Lintel 26 on February 12, 724; the twentyfifth anniversary of Shield-Jaguar’s accession on March 2, 726; and finally, the dedication of the temple itself on June 26, 726. (Note that this last date is very near a summer solstice [Tate: 1986b].) The inscriptions describing these events also specify that they took place next to the river, probably in or very near the location of Temple 23. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified glyphs naming specific topographic features within a polity. These topographic features can include witz, “mountain,” and nab, “water, lake, or river,” and they are often accompanied by a locative glyph called the “impinged bone.” Lady Xoc’s names on Lintels 24 and 25 end with a combination including T606 (perhaps another locative), the glyph for “body of water,” nab, and the main sign of Yaxchilán’s Emblem Glyph, a “split-sky.” These glyphs should refer either to the river itself or just as likely to the flat shelf next to the river on which Temple 23 was built.

[410] This marriage may have simply renewed an old alliance. The Early Classic lintels from Yaxchilán discussed in Chapter 5 record that an ambassador from the Calakmul king visited the tenth successor of Yaxchilán soon after he acceded to the throne. We suspect Yaxchilán was in alliance with Cu-Ix, the Calakmul king who installed the first ruler at Naranjo. He was surely allied to Caracol in the Tikal wars. The alliance of the Calakmul king with the Yaxchilán dynasty may have secured at least their agreement not to interfere, if not their active participation.

[411] Her name consists of a skull with an infixed ik sign that Lounsbury (personal communication, 1980) has identified as Venus in its aspect of Eveningstar. This component of her name precedes a sky glyph and usually a series of titles.

[412] The inverted-L shape, next to the ankles of the shorter figure on the left, faces that figure and most likely identifies it as Shield-Jaguar. The composition presses this figure against the frame, giving it less space as well as a smaller size. The monument was commissioned by Bird-Jaguar, who apparently used the scale difference and compositional device to subordinate his father, even though at the time of the event shown, Shield-Jaguar was the high king.

[413] The figures shown in the ancestral cartouches above the sky register may be the parents of either actor, but the protagonist of Stela 11 is clearly Bird-Jaguar. His parents (Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar) are named glyphically as the ancestral figures on the other side of the monument. We suspect the ancestors on this side represent Bird- Jaguar’s parents as well.

[414] David Stuart (n.d.) has recently identified Great-Skull-Zero as the ichan of Bird-Jaguar’s son. This relationship term stands for mother’s brother in Choi, making him Lady Great-Skull-Zero’s brother and Bird-Jaguar’s brother-in-law. In fact, the relationships of Great-Skull-Zero and Lady Great-Skull-Zero to Bird-Jaguar’s son and future heir (who was not yet born at the time of this bloodletting) are featured in the two actors’ names. Here her name ends with the phrase “mother of the ahau.” Lord Great-Skull- Zero’s ends with yichan ahau, “the mother’s brother of the ahau.” In his name, the chan part of the yichan glyph is written with the head variant of the <verbatim></verbatim> sky glyph.

[415] Since both the woman and man hold Personified Perforators in their hands, they both apparently let blood in this rite.

[416] The scenes on Lintels 15, 16, and 17 deliberately reproduce the same actions shown on Lintels 24, 25, and 26, which are: Lady Xoc materializing the dynasty founder at Shield-Jaguar’s accession; Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar letting blood to celebrate the birth of his heir; and their preparation for a battle on the occasion of the dedication of the building. Bird-Jaguar’s lintels show him and a wife letting blood to celebrate the birth of an heir; his capture of a noble shortly before his accession; and the vision quest of another of his wives, probably as part of the dedication rites of the building. He carefully echoes the compositions of the Structure 23 lintels, but substitutes ritual events important to his own political succession.

[417] A detail of this stela was published in the National Geographic Magazine. October 1985:521.

[418] Bird-Jaguar became a three-katun lord on 9,15.17.12.10, meaning that this stela could not have been carved until after that date. If it was originally erected in the temple where it was found, it had to have been carved after 9.16.3.16.19. It is a retrospective stela depicting this bloodletting event as a part of Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.

[419] The other two lintels in this building date to April 2, 758, and June 29, 763. They depict Lady 6-Tun of Motul de San José and Lady Balam-Ix engaged in the “fish- in-hand” bloodletting rite on those dates. The Bird-Jaguar depiction is then a retrospective one, carved sometime after 763, to link the bloodletting rites of his wives to the earlier 9.15.10.0.1 ritual so important to his demonstration of legitimacy.

[420] Besides the three lintels depicting this ritual at Yaxchilán, similar rituals occur in detailed depictions in the murals of Bonampak and in several pottery scenes.

[421] This day was nine days after the summer solstice so that the sun rose within 1° of the solstice point. Venus was at 71.06° and frozen at the stationary point after its first appearance as Morningstar. The sun rose through Gemini, and Venus was poised near the Pleiades and the bright star we call Aldcbaran. We do not know what the Maya called this star.

[422] Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s house, is named on Lintel 23 with an sun-eyed dog head. On Lintel 21, Temple 22 is named the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. both in its earlier version and in the later rebuilding dedicated by Bird-Jaguar. This ritual could have taken place anywhere in the city, but we are reconstructing it here because all of the representations of the 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting are distributed around Lady Xoc’s building. This spatial point was critical to Bird-Jaguar’s quest for the throne.

[423] Tom Jones (1985) provided convincing evidence that the Usumacinta was called Xocol Ha at the time of the conquest.

[424] Given that Lady Xoc was around twenty years old when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she would have been between forty-five and fifty years old when Bird-Jaguar was born and very likely beyond her childbearing years. Any of her own children who were still alive would very likely have been adults or adolescents at that time.

[425] At the time of this event, Shield-Jaguar was ninety-four years old (+ two years). Lady Xoc’s birth date is not known, but sixty-seven years passed between Shield-Jaguar’s accession (in which she had participated as an adult) and her death date on 9.15.17.15.14. Presuming she was at least eighteen when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she died around age eighty-five. At the time of this 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, she would have been in her late seventies. If she had given birth to Shield-Jaguar’s child around the time of his accession, that child would have been in his late sixties by the time of our event; grandchildren would have been in their forties; great-grandchildren in their twenties; and great-great-grandchildren in their early childhood. Since most Maya did not live beyond their forties (although the elite appear to have had considerably longer lives and better food resources than the common folk), we suspect that the problem in Yaxchilán’s succession may have been that the extremely long-lived Shield-Jaguar had outlived the sons he’d had by his principal wife and perhaps many of his grandsons from that marriage as well. If this was the situation, the rivalry here would have been between grandsons or perhaps great-grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar on one side and the son of Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar on the other. Both claims would be equally legitimate and interpretable as a direct descent from a king, although the claim of a son would have been the stronger, especially if Shield-Jaguar publicly favored that offspring.

[426] The costume was worn by nobles who aided the king in scattering rites at Yaxchilán, by nobles who witnessed an heir-designation at Bonampak, and by emissaries who delivered gifts to kings. This last scene is depicted on a painted pot in the burial of Ruler A at Tikal.

[427] We cannot know the exact sequence of the events which took place during these rites We have arranged the individuals sequentially as a narrative device, but it is also possible that all the principals drew blood at the same time. The other sequences—the dancers, the placement of the high king inside a building, the musicians, and so forth—are based on the lower register of Room 1 and Room 3 at Bonampak, and on Piedras Negras Lintel 3.

[428] Representations of people undergoing bloodletting rarely show pain, and eyewitness accounts of the ritual specifically mention that the participants do not react in pain. (See Tozzer 1941:114, note 552.)

[429] Exactly this sequence of events, including the change of headdresses, is shown on Stela 35.

[430] David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) first identified a set of glyphs on Lintel 14 (E3-D4) and on Stela 10 and 13 at Copan as the name of the Vision Serpent in the manifestation shown on the Yaxchilan lintel.

[431] Stela 2 of Bonampak shows the king’s mother and his wife helping him in a sacrificial rite exactly as we have imagined in the Yaxchilan event.

[432] We have reconstructed this scene from a stucco sculpture which was modeled on the rear of Temple 21 immediately behind Stela 35, which showed Lady Eveningstar in this very bloodletting rite. In the stucco relief, a large male sits in the center with another male and a female on his right and two females on his left. We propose these are the principals of the bloodletting ritual—Shield-Jaguar with Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great- Skull-Zero on his right and with Lady Xoc and Lady Eveningstar on his left.

[433] M. Miller and Houston (1987) first recognized that these scenes occur not in ballcourts, but against hieroglyphic stairs.

[434] On the day of the bailgame, October 21, A.D. 744, Venus was 46.218° from the sun and only five days away from its maximum elongation as Morningstar. As we have seen repeatedly, this kind of Venus date often provided the stimulus for ritual events, especially those involving war and sacrificial rites. See Lounsbury (1982).

[435] A total of thirteen panels make up this sculpted stoop, which is located immediately in front of the three doors of Temple 33. The center panel, depicting Bird-Jaguar at play, is the widest and is designed to be the pivot of the entire program. Steps I, II, and III show three women, one of which is Lady Pacal (Shield-Jaguar’s mother), holding Vision Serpents in their arms in rituals that perhaps began different ballgames. The fact that Bird-Jaguar’s grandmother is depicted suggests that these three women represent different generations, but the inscriptions are too badly effaced to identify the other two.

The remaining ten steps portray males in the midst of the bailgame. The ball is frozen in flight, either to or from the hieroglyphic stairs. Again the badly eroded texts of some panels preclude identification of the actors pictured, but we can identify Shield-Jaguar on Step VI, Bird-Jaguar the Great on Step VII, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar HI, on Step VIII, and the cahal Kan-Toc on Step X. Presumably these steps represent different ballgames, since different generations are shown engaged in play. We may also assume that Bird-Jaguar used this step to bring together all the people, king and cahal, kinsmen and allies, who were important to his status as high king.

[436] The verb is the so-called “scattering” glyph without the drops. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has recently suggested a reading of .ye for this hand. In proto-Cholan (Kaufman and Norman 1984:137),^e’ is given as “take in the hand.” Lomil, the glyph that follows, is the word for lances or other tall staffs. The actions may be another holding of the tall flapstaff. The first glyph of the highly eroded name phrase following the verbal phrases is “5 katun ahau,” a title exclusively used at Yaxchilan in Shield- Jaguar’s name phrase. We surmise, then, that the actor was the then-deceased Shield- Jaguar.

[437] It is possible of course that Bird-Jaguar fabricated this information after the fact and that in reality he had no authority to conduct any ritual at the time of this period ending. This history was, after all, recorded after his accession and is thus a retrospective creation. We suspect, however, that the record is a true one. When he erected this stela sometime after his accession, that particular period ending would still have been fresh in everyone’s mind. If he was required to recruit and retain alliances with cahal lineages in order to hold his throne, documenting a brazen lie would certainly, it seems to us, be a counterproductive strategy.

For this reason we assume that, by that time, he had gained enough support to participate in, if not lead, the ritual. Therefore, in his reconstruction of the story, he could declare that this rite took place in what had become his kingdom on the later date.

[438] Stela 11 was erected in front of Structure 40, a temple built next to an important Shield-Jaguar temple. Before that temple stood five stelae, four recording Shield-Jaguar’s greatest captures (Stelae 15, 18, 19, and 20) and the fifth recording the first flapstaff event. The proximity of the Stela 11 to Shield-Jaguar’s monument, and the prominent place of Bird-Jaguar’s accession in its texts (this information is recorded in the bottom register and on the edges of the stela), identify the flapstaff event and the captive presentations as events critical to Bird-Jaguar’s campaign demonstrating his right to the throne.

[439] On Lintel 16, Bird-Jaguar designates this captive as the cahal of a king who ruled a site named by an unknown Emblem Glyph with a snakelike head as its main sign.

[440] Ix Witz (Jaguar Mountain) is another unknown kingdom. David Stuart (1987b:21) first identified its Emblem Glyph.

[441] GII is also known as the Manikin Scepter or by the name Kauil.

[442] These bundles were critical to the ritual lives of the Maya. In ethnohistorical sources, they hold the sources of the lineage power, and are olten described as having been left by the semi-divine ancestors who founded those lineages. The bundles are recorded as holding idols, jades, eccentric flints, and similar objects. Eccentric flints and eccentric obsidians were worked into irregular, nonutilitarian shapes that often included human or deity profiles. During the Classic Period, it’s fairly certain they were used to store idols such as the Manikin Scepter and the Jester Gods. A bundle has been found archaeologi- cally in the Lost World group at Tikal (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1986 and n.d.). Made of ficus-bark paper tied closed with a woven-fiber band, the bundle was inside a lip-to-lip cache made of an angle-sided plate with an identical plate inverted and set over it as the lid. The bundle inside held the remains of marine creatures and the thorns used in bloodletting. Other similar caches regularly contain bloodletting instruments such as thorns, stingray spines, obsidian, and flint blades. Archaeologists found human blood on one such flint blade discovered in a cache at Colha, Belize (Dan Potter, personal communication, 1987). Merle Robertson (1972) first proposed the association of these bundles with the bloodletting rite, a suggestion that has since been confirmed archaeologi- cally. This lintel at least partially confirms her hypothesis, for the verb written in the text over the woman’s head states that she will soon let blood.

[443] The text records that she will let blood by naming Chanal Hun Winik Chan, the particular Vision Serpent she will manifest.

[444] The text on this lintel is very badly eroded, but based on a detailed examination ofthe original stone, Tate (1986a:336) has proposed readings of 9.16.6.11.0 3 Ahau 3 Muan or 9.17.6.15.0 3 Ahau 3 Kankin. We think this structure was built by Bird-Jaguar. The lintel, therefore, should be dated to the earlier of these two possibilities.

[445] Tate (1986a:3O7) argues that the careless sculptural style and the lack of a date resembles the very late style used by the last documented ruler of Yaxchilân. However, since the building is part of Bird-Jaguar’s program to legitimize himself, we suggest that the scene depicts the first Shield-Jaguar flapstaff event that is also shown on Stela 50.

[446] This woman has the Ik Emblem Glyph in her name, like the woman on Lintels 15 and 39. Here, however, two different people seem to be named: on Lintels 15 and 29 the woman has the title Lady 6-Tun preceding the Emblem Glyph, whereas on Lintels 41 and 5 the woman has Lady 6-Sky-Ahau as her name. If these are separate women, then Bird-Jaguar is associated with four women—Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the mother of his child), Lady Balam of Ix Witz, and these two ladies from Motul de San José.

[447] The Lintel 42 name phrase of this cahal has the “captor of Co-Te-Ahau” title that appears consistently in this fellow’s name phrase.

[448] Tate (1985) has argued this woman is the same Lady Balam of Ix Witz. However, since that lady had already appeared on Lintel 43 two days earlier, we think it more likely that Bird-Jaguar wished to associate yet another of his wives with this bloodletting sequence. We suspect she is the second wife from Motul de San José.

[449] On lintels carved after the date of this capture, both men, whenever they named themselves, included the names of the captives in their titles. They did this regardless of whether or not the narrative action was set before or after the capture itself.

The scene we are discussing here may not be the actual capture, for the captives are already stripped and wearing the cut cloth that signifies sacrifice. This event probably occurred after the capture when the victims are displayed and torture begins. See the fourth wall of Bonampak Room 2 for a graphic description of this phase of the ritual (M. Miller 1986b: 113–130, Pl. 2).

[450] The two protagonists are about the same height, but more important, the two scenes occupy an equal amount of compositional space. Bird-Jaguar is contrasted to Kan-Toe by the more elaborate detail of his costume and by the larger size of the text referring to his actions. Kan-Toe’s inscription is the smaller secondary text between the figures.

[451] Lintel 54 was over the center door, while Lintel 58 was on the left and 57 on the right.

[452] David Stuart (n.d.) first read the glyph for this relationship and recognized that it clarified the role Great-Skull-Zero played in Bird-Jaguar’s history.

[453] Notice that Chel-1 e is represented on both lintels as approximately the same size as his father, in spite of the fact that he was five on 9.16.5.0.0 and fourteen on 9.16.15.0.0. His smaller scale is apparently designed to represent him as simply “child.”

[454] This is the temple housing the western set of duplicating lintels, which include Bird-Jaguar and his cahal Kan-Loe at the capture of Jeweled-Skull; a bird-scepter ritual with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau; a basket-staff event with Kan-Toc; and a bundle/Manikin Scepter event with another wife. Temple 1 exalts the cahal Kan-Toc, very probably to seal his alliance to Bird-Jaguar during his life and to his son after Bird-Jaguar’s death.

[455] The name of this person is a jaguar head holding a cauac sign in a paw raised beside its head. This position is one of the variants of the penis glyph in the founder’s name. This visitor appears to be named Yat-Balam, but obviously he cannot be the founder of Yaxchilán’s dynasty, who was long dead. Either he is a namesake, or the Piedras Negras lord is flattering the Yaxchilán lord by using the founder’s name for him.

[456] Proskouriakoff (1961a) first identified these figures as youths and suggested that this is an heir-designation rite.

CHAPTER 8: C O P Á N : THE DEATH OF FIRST DAWN on Macaw Mountain

[457] The name of the last great king of that community, Yax-Pac, means “First Sun-at- Horizon” or “First Dawn.” Mo’-Witz, or “Macaw Mountain,” was a sacred place in or near the community alluded to by several Late Classic kings there. The death of Yax-Pac was indeed the death of first dawn in the valley, for the contentious rivalry between the kings and their nobility was a key factor in the demise of the kingdom.

[458] Many of the ideas presented in this chapter are the result of collaboration among Dr. William Fash, Barbara Fash, Rudy Larios, David Stuart, Linda Scheie, and many other people who have worked on the Copan Mosaics Project and the Copán Acropolis Project. William Fash (1983a; Fash and Scheie <verbatim>[1986];</verbatim> Fash and Stuart [n.d.]) first suggested that nonroyal lineages competing with the royal house of Copán contributed to the collapse of central power in the valley.

[459] Data on the history of the Copán Valley is drawn from William Fash’s (1983a) study of the process of state formation in the valley. Found in the deepest levels under Group 9N-8 (Fash 1985), the earliest deposit at Copán consisted of ceramics; obsidian; bones of deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary; burned earth; and carbon. Fash interpreted this as a seasonal camp. Viel, the ceramist for the Proyeto Arqueología de Copán, associates this early ceramic phase, Rayo, with the Cuadros phase of the Soconusco Coast and the Tok phase at Chalchuapa (Fash 1983a: 155). The pottery included brushed tecomates and flat- bottomed, flaring-walled bowls decorated with shell stamping, red slip, and hematite paint.

[460] William Fash (1985 and n.d.a) describes this cemetery in detail and associates its ceramics directly with the Middle Preclassic ceramics discovered by Gordon (1898) in the caves of the Scsemil region of the valley, which Fash interprets as part of a very early burial complex. He (1983a: 157–158) cites Middle Preclassic occupations in Group 9N-8, the Bosque, and in the Main Group, while cautioning that the full settlement pattern cannot be reconstructed from the present data. Of the rich burials containing jade, those referred to as Burials VHI-27 and IV-35, he comments that only Burial V at La Venta (Veracruz, México) rivals the Copán tombs in quantity and quality of jade. He takes the jade and the pottery incised with Olmec imagery to “indicate intimate familiarity with heartland Olmec ritual practices.”

[461] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986: 70, 80, 104, 119, Pl. 17, 28–30) for a discussion of some of the jade and ceramics from this early period.

[462] William Fash (1983a: 176) sees this growing density in settlement on the best agricultural lands as the result of social and political motivations which gradually usurped subsistence needs. As the dynasty established itself at the Acropolis, Copanecs found it advantageous to place their residential groups as near the king as possible, and thus gave over their best agricultural lands to the burgeoning population. Fash speculated that events taking place in the city were important enough to lure people into settling areas previously occupied by permanent agricultural settlements, in one of the zones of occupation, El Cerro de las Mesas, people deliberately chose inconvenient locations for settlement, perhaps for purposes of defense or for some as yet undetected religious or political reasons.

[463] The noncalendric text on Stela 17 does not survive, but phrases in the 8.6.0.0.0 texts on Stela I (Smoking-Imix-God K) are repeated in the record of the same event on Stela 4 (18-Rabbit) (Stuart 1986b). The second event on Stela I is unfortunately destroyed, but the last glyph in the text records the main sign of the Copan Emblem Glyph with the “impinged bone” sign that identifies its function here as a location—the kingdom of Copan as a physical entity with a geographical location. This is equivalent to the locational forms of the Tikal Emblem Glyph we encountered on Tikal Stela 39 in Chapter 5. This reference appears to be to the founding of the kingdom itself (Scheie 1987b).

Altar I’ also has an early date (Morley 1920:192) of 7.1.13.15.0 or October 9, 321 B.C., a date remarkably close to the beginning of Copan’s Late Preclassic decline. Unfortunately, the Copanecs did not record the event occurring on that date.

[464] Excavations in the 1988 and 1989 seasons of the Copan Acropolis Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash have uncovered buildings and inscribed monuments contemporary to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s reign.

[465] Sylvanus Morley in his Inscriptions of Copan (1920) worked out much of the chronology of Copan’s inscriptions. Later scholars, including David Kelley (1962; 1976:238–240), Joyce Marcus (1976), Gary Pahl (1976), Berthold Riese (n.d.; 1988; Riese and Baudez 1983), and David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Linda Scheie, and others in the Copan Notes have revised Morley’s chronology and identified a series of Copanec rulers. Peter Mathews (n.d.) first noted “numbered succession” titles at Yaxchilan and Copan, which Riese (1984) subsequently demonstrated had a wide distribution in the Maya inscriptions. The identification of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the founder began when David Stuart managed to identify his dates as belonging to the fifth century. Stuart communicated his finding to William Fash in a letter dated November 1985. Collaborative work between Stuart and Scheie (1986a and Scheie 1986b) led to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s identification as the dynastic founder. Later Copan kings reckoned the establishment of their dynasty from the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and gave themselves titles which reflected their numerical position in the line following him: for example, Smoke-lmix-God K called himself ‘the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” However, we also note that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the true founder of the kingdom, nor its first ruler. Stuart (personal communication, 1985) identified the notation of an even earlier king as a “first successor” on Stela 24.

[466] See Carlson (1977) for a history of the astronomical conference interpretation of Altar Q and an evaluation of the evidence. David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first suggested that the dates on Altar Q are early, rather than contemporary with the altar itself. Joyce Marcus (1976:140–145) first suggested that the Altar Q figures are portraits of rulers, while Riese (n.d.) identified the entire composition as Copan’s sixteen rulers seated in the numerical order of their succession.

[467] The first event is a “God K-in-hand” event. This verb is associated with the display of scepters and is specified by a noun incorporated into the hand holding the scepter or appended to the rear of that hand. The second event is spelled ta.li, a verb which in Choi and Chorti (the language of the Copan region) means “to come” or “to arrive.” In both phrases, the glyph that follows the verb appears in later texts as a replacement for the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ in numbered successor titles. It appears to refer to the idea of “founder,” or perhaps “lineage,” in some way we do not yet understand.

[468] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) has found this monument, broken into three parts and deposited in a building under Temple 10L-26, the building of the famous Hieroglyphic Stairs of Copan. The date on this monument is exactly the same as that on Stela J, 9.O.O.O.O. The front of the te-tun records the date and the king who reigned when this great period ending turned. David Stuart (in Stuart et al. 1989) found the fragmentary remnant of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s name on the last glyph block in this passage, thus confirming that he was reigning. The protagonist and owner of the te-tun, however, was his son, the second ruler in the Altar Q list. We have confirmation, therefore, from a monument carved during or soon after his lifetime that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was indeed a real historical person. Furthermore, this monument was treated with special reverence, carefully cached inside the temple before it was buried in preparation for the next stage of construction. When a later descendant evoked ancestral greatness by constructing the Hieroglyphic Stairs, he chose to put it in this location very probably because he knew a temple of the founder of his line lay deep under Temple 10L-26.

[469] In the interim nomenclature used by the Copán Acropolis Project, buildings are designated by bird names, substructures by colors, and floors by names of archaeologists and other persons. This early temple has been dubbed Papagayo (‘‘Macaw”) until the history and various levels of the main structure, 10L-26, are fully known and numbered.

[470] Stromsvik (1952:198) published a drawing of a mask he found on a terrace under Structure 10L-26 (The Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs). He considered the terrace to be contemporary with the first Ballcourt. Investigations in the Copán Archaeological Project have refined the chronology dating the first phase of the Ballcourt and the earliest floors of 10L-26 to the last half of the Bajic phase (A.D. 300–400) (Cheek 1983:203). During the Copan Mosaics Project (1985-present), Dr. William Fash has continued Strómsvik’s work and found even earlier platforms and structures, some of which are decorated with massive stucco sculptures. They have also found predynastic levels, but the relationship of those levels to Papagayo Temple and other early levels of the Acropolis are still under investigation. Since Stela 63 was set in the floor when Papagayo was constructed, that temple can be dated to between 9.0.0.0.0 and 9.0.5.0.0 (435–440). It was constructed after Ballcourt I was in place, but throughout the subsequent history of the kingdom, the temple in this location (in whatever manifestation) was always associated with one or another of the various stages of the Ballcourt.

[471] In the summer of 1989, Scheie talked with Rudy Larios, Richard Williamson, and William Fash about the architectural history of this early temple. Although analysis of the archaeological data has just begun, all three archaeologists agree that Stela 63 was set in the back chamber of this building when it was built. This dates the construction to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s son, who was presumably the second successor. At a later time, the fourth successor, Cu-Ix, then placed his step in front of the temple to associate himself with the founder. Larios also has clear evidence that the construction of Papagayo is atop another large platform, which may date to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Furthermore, that platform is atop yet another huge platform that must be from predynastic times. The excavations have not yet reached bedrock so that we anticipate finding even earlier structures during the next few field seasons.

[472] Papagayo Temple was uncovered during the 1988 field season of the Copán Mosaics Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash. The step sits in front of Stela 63, which had been erected in the rear chamber by the second ruler when the temple was built. The step has a now-damaged inscription consisting of thirty glyphs on top of the step and a single row on the front edge. The name of the fourth successor occurs on this edge and also on Stela 34, a fragment of which was found lying on the plaza just west of Stela J (Grube and Scheie 1988). The stela fragment had been recut and used (perhaps as a cache) in some as yet unidentified construction. We now know that Papagayo was open at least through the reign of the fourth successor and perhaps later.

[473] The dates and names in this historical reconstruction are drawn from analyses by David Stuart (1984 letter to Fash and 1987) and in the Copón Notes, a series of short research reports produced during the Copán Mosaics Project. Copies are on file in the Archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Tegucigalpa and Copán, Honduras, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Notes of particular interest to the dynastic history are Notes 6, 8, 14–17 from the 1986 season, and Notes 20–22 and 25–26 from the 1987 season, and Notes 59–67 from the 1989 season.

[474] The ritual demarcation of space to facilitate the entry of powerful people into the Otherworld spans Maya history from the Late Preclassic construction of the four-posted temple summits, such as Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, to the historical treatise of the early Colonial period called the “ritual of the bacabs” (Freidel and Scheie 1988; Roys 1965). Present-day Maya shamans continue this practice in their construction of “corrals” (Vogt 1976) and altars. The posts of the sacred spaces given in the prayers of the “ritual of the bacabs” are called acantun, “upright or set-up stones”; and acante’, “upright or set-up trees.” Stelae at Copán are specifically called te-tun or “tree-stone.” Smoke-Imix-God K departed from normal practice by using stelae to demarcate the entire core area of his kingdom, while under most circumstances Maya kings used stelae as the permanent markings of the central position held by themselves within the sacred space during their entry into the Otherworld.

[475] William Fash (1983a:217–232) suggested that these outlying stelae were erected to mark the establishment of a state under Smoke-Imix-God K around A.D. 652. Much of the epigraphic evidence he cites in that study has since been replaced or reinterpreted. For example, the Early Classic history of Copan is far more detailed and regular than it appeared to be in 1983. While we now question if Smoke-Imix-God K changed the system at Copán as much as it once appeared that he had, he was still responsible lor placing inscribed monuments throughout the valley. Smoke-1 mix-God K also erected a stela at Santa Rita (Stela 23) and, at about this same time, the lords of Rio Amarillo (Schele 1987d) inscribed altars acknowledging the rule of Copán’s high king. While Smoke-Imix-God K may have inherited a polity that already qualified as a state, he extended its domain farther than it had ever been before.

[476] David Stuart (1987a) first identified the name on Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix- God K. The record of the Copán king occupies the outer rim text, while another date and event are recorded in the interior. The interior date, 9.11.0.11.11, falls 231 days after the period ending. The event phrase includes the glyph ta yuc. I his termine is the Chorti word for “join things, unite, a joining, union” (Wisdom n.d.:771). Smoke-Imix may then have united or joined that polity to his own.

This action explains why the first great ruler of Quiriguá, Cauac-Sky, recorded that he acceded u cab, “in the territory of” 18-Rabbit of Copán. Quiriguá was in the hegemony of Copán after 18-Rabbit’s predecessor “joined” it to the kingdom. Further evidence supporting the conclusion that Smoke-Imix actually brought Quiriguá under his hegemony comes from later rulers’ practice of citing themselves as “Black Copán Ahau and of claiming descent from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as their founder (Schele 1989c).

[477] Etsuo Sato (1987) interprets the appearance of polychrome in the Valley of La Venta as evidence of elites who had access to exotic pottery. He sees these elites as being both heavily influenced by Copanecs and in contact with peoples at Naco and in the Sula Valley.

[478] These monuments include the bifaccd Stela C (9.14.0.0.0), Stela F (9.14.10.0.0), Stela 4 (9.14.15.0.0), Stela H (9.14.19.5.0), Stela A (9.14.19.8.0 or 9.15.0.3.0), Stela B (9.15.0.0.0), and finally, Stela D (9.15.5.0.0). Stela C, the first monument in this set, dates to the same first appearance of Venus celebrated by Ah Cacaw on Stela 16 at Tikal (see Chapter 6). Stela C reflects this association with Venus by linking the period ending to a Venus date occurring before the beginning of this creation. Other analyses have placed Stela C at later dates, but the text specifies that the stela was erected (tz’apah) on 9.14.0.0.0.

[479] In the 1987 excavations, William Fash drove a tunnel into the rear of the platform directly under the temple. Although no cache was found, the excavation uncovered a muzzle stone exactly the same size and shape as the corner Witz Monsters that decorated the 18-Rabbit temple. With present data, we have no way of determining which king commissioned the earlier phase of the building, but clearly that earlier building displayed the same iconography as the later version. See Larios and W. Fash (n.d.) for a preliminary analysis of the final phases of Temples 22 and 26.

[480] Two broken fragments with inscriptions were set in the step of the final phase of this temple. One records the first katun anniversary of 18-Rabbit’s accession (David Stuart personal communication, 1987) and the other is the death date of Smoke-Imix-God K (Schele 1987a). These two dates as well as the style of the God N sculpture found cached in the later building identify the time of the earlier building as the second half of the reign of 18-Rabbit.

[481] William Fash (1983a:236–237) cites Viel’s analysis of the source of Ulua polychrome as the Comayagua Valley, rather than the Sula Valley. Furthermore, caches found within the Early Classic phases of Structure 10L-26 (the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs) include greenstone beads and earflares identical in technical workmanship and design to the greenstone artifacts excavated at the central Honduran site of El Cajón by Kenneth Hirth (1988).

[482] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication) documents evidence for death rates higher than birth rates in the Copán pocket during the Late Classic period. 18-Rabbit had to recruit newcomers from outside the valley to keep the population growing, and his strategy apparently succeeded, for by the end of the eighth century, population exceeded the capacity of the Copán pocket to sustain them.

[483] Kelley (1962:324), following a suggestion by Proskouriakoff, pointed out the u cab expressions at Quiriguá, noting that cab means “town, place, and world.” David Stuart (1987a) first interpreted this passage to indicate that Cauac-Sky’s installation was under 18-Rabbit’s authority and perhaps even took place at Copán. This interpretation is in keeping with his identification of the protagonist of Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix-God K of Copán.

[484] Morley (1915:221) first noted that this 9.15.6.14.6 6 Cimi 4 Zee date was important to Quiriguá’s history, while Kelley (1962:238) suggested that it referred to “a conquest of Quiriguá by Copán, or perhaps to the installation of a Copanec ruler at Quiriguá.” Proskouriakoff(1973:168) took the prominence of the date at Quirigua to indicate that the Quirigua ruler had the upper hand in the encounter. Following her mentor’s suggestions, Marcus (1976:134—140) pointed out that Cauac-Sky, the ruler of Quirigua, was the “captor of” 18-Rabbit, the king of Copan. She correctly identified the event as a battle in which Quirigua achieved independence of Copan.

The verb associated with this date consists of an “ax” followed by the T757 auxiliary verb. This verb records “astronomical” events in the codices, and at Dos Pilas and other sites it appears with “star-shell” war events (see Scheie 1982:351 for a listing). In most of the examples from the Classic inscriptions, the event appears to be “battle,” but on pottery, the “ax” glyph is particularly associated both with scenes of decapitation and with the names of gods shown in the act of self-inflicted decapitation (one example occurs on the famous painted pot from Altar de Sacrificios). This association with sacrifice opens the possibility that the action recorded is execution by decapitation. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1989) and Jorge Orejel (n.d.) have both suggested a reading of ch’ak, “to decapitate,” for the glyph.

[485] The case of Copan is not entirely unique. Palenque suffered a similar disaster when Kan-Xul, the younger brother and successor of Chan-Bahlum, was captured by Tonina and presumably sacrificed. Palenque, like Copan, did not enter into a hiatus, but rather continued under the aegis of its old dynasty. The political reactions at both Copan and Palenque included, however, the emergence of the lesser nobility as players in the game of history. In both kingdoms, the kings struggled in vain to reassert the centrality of the dynasty.

[486] Smoke-Monkey’s accession appears on the base of Stela N and on Steps 40 and 39 of the Hieroglyphic Stairs as 9.15.6.16.5 6 Chicchan 3 Yaxkin (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), a day on which Venus was 45.68° from the sun.

[487] This date is recorded on the north panel of the east door of Temple 11 as 5 Cib 10 Pop or 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (the correct form of the Calendar Round). On this date, the Eveningstar was 7.09° beyond the sun, enough for first visibility after superior conjunction. The action recorded on this date is “it appeared, the Great Star.” Previously, Scheie (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:123) had placed this first appearance forty-six days after the accession of the next king, Smoke-Shell, but the Long Count used for that date was in error. Smoke-Shell acceded on 9.15.17.13.10 11 Oc 13 Pop or February 18, 749, fourteen days after Smoke-Monkey’s death.

[488] On the base of Stela N, the name of Smoke-Shell’s father follows an yune “child of” statement. In that phrase, he is named as a Turtle Shell Ahau (Scheie and Grube 1988). The turtle-shell glyph in this title is a variant of the God N (Pauahtun) glyph that names the lord whose accession is recorded in the north-south text-bands on the base. In that clause, the “Pauahtun Ahau” is clearly named as the former king, Smoke-Monkey. The fifteenth successor, Smoke-Shell, was therefore the child of the fourteenth successor, Smoke-Monkey.

[489] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) holds open the possibility that Smoke-Monkey may have started some of the work on the final stage of Temple 26. Considering that six years passed between Smoke-Shell’s accession and the dedication of the building on 9.16.4.1.0 (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), the project may well have been begun during Smoke-Monkey’s reign.

[490] The date of this dedication event is recorded on the center strips on the eastern incline of the Ballcourt. Although reconstructing the date is problematic, it appears to record the Calendar Round 10 Ben 16 Kayab (or less likely 10 Kan 17 Kayab). The 10 Ben possibility falls on 9.15.6.8.13, a day only 113 days before 18-Rabbit’s death at Quirigua. 18-Rabbit’s accession is recorded in an Initial Series date in the same text, thus confirming that he commissioned the final phase of the Ballcourt (Scheie, Grube, and Stuart 1989). Rudy Larios (personal communication, 1989) has confirmed that Ballcourt III is associated with Structure 10L-26—2^nd, the level under the final phase. This juxtaposition of the dedication date with the capture opens the possibility that 18-Rabbit may have been taken captive in a battle to secure sacrificial victims for his new ballcourt.

The proper name of Ballcourt III is recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs on fragments now mounted in Step 44. These fragments include an unreadable date and the name of the Ballcourt as the Ox Ahal Em Ballcourt (Scheie and Freidel n.d.). The proper name translates as “Thrice-Made Descent” and relates to the mythological events recorded on the Bailgame Panel from Temple 33 at Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:7).

The “thrice-made” event is recorded as a descent in this naming and as a decapitation sacrifice at Yaxchilan, but the references are the same. Both the descents and the sacrifices refer to the Popol Vuh myth. The first descent and sacrifice was of Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu, the first set of Twins. The second descent into Xibalba, which resulted in the second sacrifice, was made by the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They sacrificed each other in order to trick the Lords of Death into defeat. The third descent is that of the king in his guise as the avatar of the Hero Twins. This descent can be accomplished by two means—his own ecstatic journey through bloodletting or by the decapitation of a captive who goes as his messenger. The Ballcourt was then a portal to the Underworld as was the inner sanctum of the temple. The iconography of all three sets of Ballcourt Markers reflects this idea, for each shows the confrontation of the Hero Twins with a Lord of Death (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:251–252, 257) through a quadrifoil shape. This shape symbolized the mouth of the cave and the opening to the Otherworld from Olmec times onward. The playing alley was like a glass-bottomed boat with transparent windows opening on to the Underwater domain of Xibalba. There, the great confrontation of humanity with death played itself out in the myths that became the Popol Vuh. Captives played a losing game and were dispatched in the “thrice-made descent.” Ironically, 18-Rabbit himself may have been dispatched by exactly this means.

[491] It has about twelve hundred glyph blocks, but most of the blocks hold two or more words. There are generally thirty-five glyphs per step and a minimum of sixty-four steps. Some of the steps have figures in the center, which reduces the number of words per step, but recent excavation suggests there were more than the sixty-four reconstructed stairs. 2,200 is about the right count.

[492] Marcus (1976:145) first noted the appearance of the Palenque Emblem Glyph on Copan Stela 8, a monument we now know records that Yax-Pac was the child of this woman. When she traveled to Copan, she apparently brought a royal belt inscribed with the names of family members, which her descendants at Copan inherited and passed down through their family. By an unknown process, this belt traveled to Comayagua, where it was bought from an Indian at the end of the nineteenth century and given to the British Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82, Pl. 21).

[493] William Fash (1983b) identified the household groups in the Copan with sian otot, the Chorti Maya patrilocal residential system documented in detail by Wisdom (1940). He posits that the ancient settlement pattern reflects a system similar to the modern one, thus identifying the numerous residential compounds as patrilineal residences.

[494] William Fash (1983a: 192–195) gives a count of 1,489 structures (not including invisible structures or those washed away by the Rio Copan) within the 2.1 km² entered on the Ballcourt. He allows five people per structure and assumes that 84 percent of the total structures were residential, arriving at a density of 2,977 people per square kilometer. Webster (1985:24) accepts a figure of 15,000 to 20,000 for the Copan pocket and a density of 5,000/km² for the Sepulturas and Bosque zones. The rural zones were less densely settled with an overall density of 100/km². Webster (1985:50) argued for a maximum population of 20,000 for the entire Copan drainage, and he communicates that Sanders believes that the densities near the Acropolis were too high to have been supported by any feasible agricultural methods available to the Copanecs in the eighth century. The hinterlands around Copan supported the dense populations in the pocket.

[495] William Fash (1983a:3O5-3O8) calculates that the pocket’s capacity to support about 10,000 people was exceeded by a significant factor in the eighth century, forcing shorter fallow periods as well as massive deforestation. The loss of topsoil on the intramountain zones, he suggests, led to a depletion of the soils that was so permanent that only pine forest could survive in these highly acidic areas, even today. He further notes that deforestation affected local rainfall and exacerbated the problem further. All of this occurred simultaneously, exactly when the nucleated zone around the Acropolis was occupied by up to 15,000 people, 50 percent more than could have subsisted on the agricultural base within the pocket. It was a prescription for disaster.

[496] In the most recent tunneling under the East Court, Robert Sharer and Alfonso Morales (personal communication, 1989) have found a sharp division between buildings constructed with rough stone covered by thick plaster surfaces and those built with finely finished coursing covered with thin plaster. Sharer (personal communication, 1989) tentatively dates this building to the first half of the seventh century—that is, to the end of Butz’-Chan’s reign or to the first half of Smoke-Imix-God K’s. About this time, the Copanecs apparently switched from plaster to stone as the medium of architectural sculpture, thus suggesting that the wood necessary for making plaster had become a rare commodity. Certainly by 18-Rabbit’s reign, stone was the primary medium for architectural sculpture. Indeed, the building under his version of Temple 22 also used stone as its sculptural medium. If this is the correct interpretation, then the valley environs may have been seriously deforested by the beginning of the Late Classic period.

[497] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication, 1987–1989) has documented severe stress in the Copan Valley populations, especially in the eighth century. This stress was indicated in skeletons found in elite contexts as well as those excavated from the lower strata of Copan society. She notes high death rates for people between five and sixteen, exactly the ages that should have had the lowest rate of death, and she has also found evidence of widespread anemia. In her words, the people who lived in the valley during the eighth century were sick and getting sicker, and this was true for the elite as well as commoners.

[498] This is the earliest monument of Yax-Pac left to posterity. In light of its periodending association, it may well be his first foray into public history.

[499] In 1985, David Stuart made a new drawing of the stair under Temple 11 at the end of a tunnel driven by Strdmsvik. He recognized that the text records the dedication of Structure 11-Sub 12, a temple that originally stood on a platform that was the same height as the floor of the West Court.

[500] Mary Miller (1986:83–84; 1988; M. Miller and Houston [1987:59]) pointed out this association of bailgame scenes, hieroglyphic stairs, and sacrificial scenes, and identified the Reviewing Stands at Copan as the sides of a false ballcourt. She identified the location as underwater and the rising god on the stairway as Chac-Xib-Chac.

[501] Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that Proskouriakoff commented on these crocodiles in the field notes she kept while working on reconstruction drawings for the Carnegie expedition under Strdmsvik.

[502] See Scheie (1987c) for an analysis of the chronology and events recorded in this inscription. The date and event is repeated on the west panel of the north door above in Temple 11, where Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s predecessor, appears as the protagonist. We suggested the event corresponded to his apotheosis and emergence from the Underworld after he had defeated the Lords of Death (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986:265–300).

[503] He dedicated the Reviewing Stand 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769) and Altar Z on 9.16.18.9.19 12 Cauac 2 Zac (August 21, 769). The last glyph in the altar text is ya. tz’itni, spelling the word yatz’in. It occurs in the name of a person (not the king) given in a second clause. Since yitz’in is “younger brother,” and since noyatz’ or yatz’in word with an appropriate meaning occurs in either the Yucatecan or Cholan languages, we suspect this glyph may identify this second person as the “younger brother of the king.”

[504] 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahau 18 Cumku (January 24, 771) has long been known as an eclipse date from its appearance in the eclipse tables of the Dresden Codex. David Kelley (1977: 406) noted that the glyph recording “dark of the moon” for 9.17.0.0.0 on Quirigua Stela E is closely related to the glyph recording the same eclipse station on Dresden, page 51b at BL At Tikal, this solar eclipse darkened 20 percent of the sun beginning at 12:49 P.M. and ending at 3:09 P.M. (Kudlek 1978). It is registered in the inscriptions of Quirigua on Stela E and at Copan on the east panel of the south door of Temple 11. The first appearance of the Eveningstar is also recorded in Temple 11 (south panel, west door) on the day 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771). Venus was separated from the sun by 7.46+ and high enough to be observed above Copan’s mountainous horizon.

[505] On 9.17.0.0.0, Yax-Pac also dedicated Altar 41, recording the dedication rituals on two of the edges of the flat slab, and the Cosmic Monster and a toad on the other two edges. This altar reflects the cosmic nature of this katun ending.

[506] Temple 21 has fallen into the cut made by the Copan River along the eastern edge of the Acropolis. We have no information on its patron, but fragments found on the platform behind it include Tlaloc-war iconography among other motifs.

[507] Although very little evidence survives, William Fash and I have surmised the north door was in fact carved as a monster mouth based on some of the fragments lying on the stairway below the temple. Principal among these fragments are huge stones carved with parallel curving lines that appear to represent the palette of an open mouth.

[508] Both Bill and Barbara Fash argued in their comments on this chapter that we have proof for only two of these Pauahtun figures. One head is located under the huge ceiba tree that stands over the northeast corner of the building, and the other lies among the fragments in the Plaza below the temple. Since no evidence of Pauahtunob has been found on the south side, the design probably had the cosmic arch of heaven only on the northern facade that faced out toward the Great Plaza. Barbara Fash also pointed out to us that Proskouriakoff mentioned in her field notes seeing and recognizing segments of the reptilian body of the Cosmic Monster in the rubble associated with Temple 11.

[509] A summary of the events as we understood them in 1985 appears in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123). In the 1987 field season, David Stuart worked extensively with these texts and supervised the reconstruction of several of the most important panels, particularly the two west panels in the north-south corridor. In November 1987, Scheie reconstructed additional parts of the north panel of the west door. These reconstructions and corrections have allowed a much more accurate understanding of the chronology and events, which are as follows:

a. North door, east panel. The accession of Yax-Pac on 9.16.12.6.16 6 Caban 10 Mol (July 2, 763).

North door, west panel. The dedication of the Reviewing Stand and perhaps the apotheosis of Smoke-Shell on 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769). 9.14.15.0.0 (September 17, 726) continues to the south door, where the actor is recorded.

b. South door, east panel. The finish of the 9.14.15.0.0 event with 18-Rabbit as the actor. The 9.17.0.0.0 period ending and eclipse.

South door, west panel. The 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773) dedication of the Temple. David Stuart recognized the nature of this event in his 1987 work.

c. East door, north panel. The first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar on 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (February 15, 747), an unknown event on 9.17.1.3.5 9 Chicchan 13 Zip (March 24, 772), and a repetition of the 9.17.2.12.16 event, but specified for the xay, “crossing,” of the interior corridors.

East door, south panel. The 819-day count and Long Count for the dedication date, 9.17.2.12.16 (continues to west door).

d. West door, north panel. Continuation of the date from east door and the dedication event. 9.17.5.0.0 period-ending ritual and the latest date in the building.

West door, south panel. The dedication event and the 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771) first appearance of the Eveningstar.

[510] The text and figures on this bench are described and analyzed in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123–125), but some new information of interest has surfaced since that analysis. Each of the twenty personages sits on a glyph, but in 1986 we thought the glyphs did not name any of Copan’s rulers. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has suggested the glyph under Personage 14 refers to the seventh successor, and that the one under Personage 15 is identical to the name of the eleventh successor. However, even with several glyphs associated with the names of particular rulers, the glyphs do not appear to record a series of personal names, but rather a continuous text. Furthermore, I had erroneously taken all ten glyphs on the left side to be in mirror image, signaling that the order of the figures unfolded outward from the central text. This interpretation is wrong. The glyphs under the first four personages on the left (Personages 1—4) read in the correct order. The left text is then broken into at least two clauses. One is written in proper reading order and records the dedication of the bench. The second one we do not yet understand, but we know it is related to the dynastic history of the kingdom. This new analysis does solve one problem in the previous interpretation—there are sixteen successors in the dynasty, including Yax-Pac, but twenty figures on the bench. With the separation of four of these figures and their glyphs into a separate clause, the number of dynasts depicted now becomes the correct one, sixteen.

[511] The ambitious size of the building exceeded the technological capabilities of the Copanecs and caused problems almost immediately. The east-west gallery was simply too wide for the capability of a corbeled vault, especially with the weight of a second story above it. The new walls built by the architects to support the failing vault narrowed the interior corridor to half its former width and severely constricted the readability of the inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions appear to have been covered over, especially those on the west door.

[512] Ricardo Argurcia (personal communication, 1989), co-director of the Copan Acropolis Project, informed us that the building immediately under the final phase of Temple 16 faced east instead of west. He suspects that the entire West Court was not formulated architecturally until Yax-Pac built Temple 11 and 16. If his assessment is correct, then Yax-Pac deliberately created the primordial sea and the Underworld in this West Court as a part of his political strategy.

[513] Williamson, Stone, and Morales (1989) have connected the iconography of Temple 16 to the Tlaloc-war imagery we have discussed throughout this book. Ricardo Ar- gurcia’s (personal communication, 1989) excavations of Temple 16 have proved beyond doubt that the last phase was built during Yax-Pac’s reign. This new dating clearly connects Temples 11 and Temple 16 as part of a unified project, very probably conceived and executed together. The iconography of the West Court with its death and Underwater imagery was intentionally created as a single statement, rather than accumulated through several reigns.

[514] William Fash (1983a:31O-314) first proposed that Yax-Pac used this kind of strategy in dealing with the factionalism evident in the archaeology associated with the latest phrase of Copan life. The epigraphic information upon which he based his ideas has changed drastically since his initial presentation, but our analysis of Yax-Pac’s strategy grows from his initial insights.

The houses we talk about are the principal structures in large, multiple-court residential compounds. These particular structures have benches in them, as do a large number of buildings in the residential compounds, but in general they are large and more elaborately decorated than adjacent buildings. The function of these benches is debated, with some researchers asserting they were simply beds. Clearly, some functioned as sleeping platforms, but the Maya themselves called them chumib, “seat.” From pottery scenes, we deduced that the benches served a number of purposes, including sleeping, working, the conducting of business, audiences with subordinates, and a variety of rituals. The structures with these inscribed “seats” were very probably the rooms from which the lineage heads conducted the business critical to their peoples. They were called otot, “house,” by the Maya, but they are houses in the sense that modern people sometimes have offices in their homes. These structures were more than residential.

[515] For a description of this group under its older designation CV-43, see Leventhal (1983).

[516] This bench text begins with a date corresponding to the dedication of the building in which it is housed. The chronology leads to a future (at the time of the inscribing) enactment of the scattering rite by Yax-Pac on 9.17.10.0.0. The date of the dedication is difficult to decipher but 9.17.3.16.15 is one of the more likely possibilities. The event is the God N dedication event of a house by an offering which had something to do with Smoke-Shell. Since that ruler was long dead at the time of the dedication, we presume this was a offering “to” rather than “from” Smoke-Shell (Schele 1989a). The alternative explanation is that the date of the dedication fell within the reign of Smoke-Shell, but that it was not commemorated by the installation of this bench until shortly before 9.17.10.0.0. In this scenario, both kings would have been active participants.

[517] Altar W’ was set in this same group. Dated at 9.17.5.9.4, the text celebrated the dedication of that altar and names the lineage head as the “third successor” of a person named Skull, who was a ballplayer. Presuming this person was the founder of this particular lineage, he may have been the lord who built the structure with the monkey/God N scribe in the time of 18-Rabbit.

[518] Berthold Riese (in Webster, W. Fash, and Abrams 1986:184) had originally dated this monument to 9.17.16.13.10 11 Oc 3 Yax. Grube and Schele (1987b) proposed a different reading of the day as 11 Ahau and placed the Long Count at 9.19.3.2.0. Stuart, Grube, and Schele (1989) have proposed a new reading of the haab as 3 Ch’en rather than 3 Yax. This new combination gives 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Chen, a placement that is far more in keeping with the style of the carving and with the notation that Yax-Pac was in his first katun of reign when the house dedication occurred.

[519] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first identified the name phrase of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This man’s relationship to the king can be deduced from two monuments (Schele and Grube 1987a). The parentage statements of the king, given on Stela 8, and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s, given on Altar U, name the same woman of Palenque as their mother. Yax-Pac’s father is never given, but we deduce he was Smoke-Shell’s son, based on his position as the sixteenth successor. The younger half brother was, however, not the son of Smoke-Shell. Since Yax-Pac was under twenty at the time of his accession, and since his father reigned for less that fifteen years, we speculate that Smoke-Shell died while his wife was still young. She produced his heir in Yax-Pac, but after his death she remarried and produced another son by a different father, making Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac a half brother. On Altar U (Fig. 8:19), her name includes her status as the mother of the king.

[520] Venus was 46.35° from the sun on the anniversary and 46.21° on the bloodletting five days later.

[521] There are some important differences between the Altar ‘ figures and those on Altar Q, Altar L, and the bench from Temple 11. The latter three monuments depict human figures all wearing a particular kind of breast ornament which appears to be associated with ruling lords at Copán and, interestingly enough, with the noble whose portrait was carved on Stela 1 from Los Higos, one of the largest sites in the La Venta Valley to the north at the edge of Copán’s hegemony. The Altar T figures were a mixture of fully human representations and fantastic beasties on the sides. We do not know whether these figures are to be interpreted as a glyphic text or as beings called from Xibalba, but they are clearly not meant to be understood as ancestors. Furthermore, the four fully human figures on the front surface are not identified by names. We do not know which represents Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, or whether to interpret the four figures as ancestors or contemporary patriarchs. Regardless of our confusion, the imagery on the altar clearly evokes Altar Q and the Temple 11 bench, both of which were in place when Altar T was carved.

[522] Stuart (1986a) first identified the proper name of Altar U. See Schele and Stuart (1986b, 1986c) for analysis of the chronology and inscription on Altar U.

[523] The name is written Yax.k’a:ma:la.ya or Yax K’amlay. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1988) brought to our attention that the root k’atn in Yucatec means “to serve another,” as well as “obligation, offering of the first fruits, and offering.” K’amtesah is “administrator or he who serves” (Barrera Vasquez 1980:371). Chorti (Wisdom n.d.:607) has k’am as “use, service, value” and k’amp’ah as “be of use or value, serve, be occupied with.” If, as Grube suggests, -lay is a derivational suffix, then this man may have been known by the office he fulfilled—“First Steward (or Administrator).”

In earlier analyses, we had taken this Yax-Kamlay glyph to be a title taken by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac upon his seating. However, in the summer of 1989, David Stuart found this same name on Stela 29, on the new altar from Temple 22a, and on a house model located near a residential building just south of the Acropolis. He convinced us that Yax-Kamlay and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac were, in fact, two different individuals. The relationship of Yax-Kamlay to Yax-Pac is less clear than that between the king and Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac. Nikolai Grube and Schele speculate that a glyph in his name on Altar U reading i.tz’Lta is an unpossessed form of “younger brother.” If this reading is correct, then he would have been a younger full brother of the king. At present, however, this reading is only a possibility. Confirmation of the proposed relationship must wait until incontrovertible evidence is found.

[524] On the eastern side of Stela 5, the Serpent Bar holds two tiny ancestral figures in its gaping mouths. On the northern, left side of the king, the ancestor holds a stingray spine, while on the southern, right side, another holds the bowl full of the blood that has brought him forth from the Otherworld.

[525] We refer here to Stela 6, which was mounted in a small, unexcavated compound about a hundred meters west of Stela 5. From a point fifty meters to the south and equidistant from each, both tree-stones can be seen.

[526] Here we have Yax-Pac pausing after he has left the causeway that led west from the Acropolis to a large complex on the slope above and to the east of Stela 5. From his position, he would have seen the cast face of Stela 5, and after walking fifty meters to the west, he would have seen the west face of Stela 5 and the front of its nearby companion, Stela 6. The latter monument celebrated 9.12.10.0.0, a date which corresponded to a stationary point ending the retrograde motion of Venus after its heliacal rising as Morningstar. The same monument has the first historical record of a ritual action by 18-Rabbit, who was to become king after the death of Smoke-Imix.

[527] This was the glyphic name of Temple 11 recorded on the west panel of the south door (Stuart, personal communication, 1988).

[528] We are supposing Yax-Pac was standing on the west causeway due south of Stelae 5 and 6. On that day, January 25, 793, the sun would have risen above the far mountainous rim o’ the valley (about 8 of altitude) at 112° azimuth. From the vantage point we have taken, the sun would appear in a line directly between Temple 16 and Temple 11, but Temple 11 would have dominated the scene.

[529] The identification of Temple 22a is the result of brilliant work by Barbara Fash (1989 and B. Fash et al. n.d.). In working with the sculpture excavated in the fallen debris around Temple 22a, Fash associated the pop, “mat,” signs that were built into the entablatures of all four sides of the building with the ethnohistorical term for “council houses” documented in post-Conquest sources. Known as Popol Nah, these buildings were specifically designed for meetings of community councils. Fash points out that Temple 22a is the only major public building in the Acropolis that has a large front patio attached to the building. Since it provides more floor space than the interior, she suggests that the major lords of the Copán kingdom came here to counsel with the king in meetings that must have resembled the conciliar assemblage of lords that we have seen on Piedras Negras Lintel 3 (see Fig. 7.21).

In the summer of 1989, she found even more remarkable evidence by asking Tom and Carolyn Jones to work with the fragments of huge glyphs that had been found around Temple 22a in recent excavations. They managed to reassemble enough of these glyphs to identify them as a series of locations. Later work by Fash confirmed the likelihood that beautifully carved figures sat in niches above these locations. Given the combination of richly dressed figures with a toponymic, it seems likely that the figures simply read “ahau of that location.” The Popol Nah then may have been graced not only by mat signs marking its function as a council house, but with representations of the ahauob who ruled subdivisions of the kingdoms (or principal locations within it) for the kings. It is not unlike a modern meeting of state governors who come to counsel the president.

The dating of Temple 22a is more complicated. Barbara Fash and David Stuart managed to put together a series of glyphs that also went around the building above the mat signs. They are clearly day signs reading 9 Ahau, which should in this context and without any additional calendric information refer to an important period-ending date. The only 9 Ahau that falls on a hotun (5-tun) ending within the time that is archaeologi- cally and stylistically feasible is 9.15.15.0.0 9 Ahau 18 Xul (June 4, 746). This falls shortly before Smoke-Monkey’s death, so that the Popol Nah may be the only surviving construction from his reign. The sculptural style and the figures deliberately emulate Temple 22, the magnificent temple built by 18-Rabbit, but Smoke-Monkey seems to have elevated conciliar rule to new status at Copan by placing this building in such a prominent place. Perhaps he found such a change in the long-standing practice of governance to be prudent after 18-Rabbit’s ignominious end.

[530] This oddly shaped altar-bench was found in the rear chamber of Temple 22a during the 1988 field season. Four important dates are featured in its chronology. These include 9.18.5.0.0 4 Ahau 13 Ceh (September 15, 795, a day recorded with Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac here and on Altar U); 9.17.9.2.12 3 Eb 0 Pop (January 29, 780, the date Yax- Kamlay was seated); 9.17.10.0.0 (December 2, 789, an important period ending and anchor for the chronology); and 9.17.12.5.17 4 Caban 10 Zip (March 19, 783, the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s own accession). All three major actors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, Yax-Kamlay, and Yax-Pac are mentioned. It is interesting that the undated Stela 29 (Altar O’ under Morley’s designations), which is almost exactly the same size and style as this altar, also mentions Yax-Kamlay and Yax-Pac. It was found in the East Court and may originally have been paired with the Temple 22a stone (Scheie et al. 1989). W. Fash (personal communication, 1989) believes the wear pattern, the position, and the shape of the stone suggest it was part of a seat, perhaps the backrest.

[531] The use of large zoomorphic altars at Copan was initiated by 18-Rabbit, but these altars were usually associated with stelae. Other altars, usually all glyphic, had been known since Smoke-Imix-God K’s reign, but those rarely combined inscriptions and figures. The first experiment utilizing this combined format was Yax-Pac’s Altar Q, but Altars U and T represent innovative experiments in both style and size. Since Quirigua rulers were experimenting with large boulder sculpture during the same period, Copan’s abandonment of the stela format may signify synergy between both the artists and rulers of the two sites.

[532] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that bone, jade, and alabaster fragments were found inside the tomb, so it had definitely been occupied. Who occupied it, we don’t know. The stela commemorating Yax-Pac’s death was set in the corner formed by the west wall of the substructure and the wall that formed an entry gate to the East Court. It was juxtaposed to Temple 18 in a way that would be expected if Yax-Pac was buried there twenty years after the dates inscribed on the building. The tomb was constructed so that it could be entered after the building of the temple was completed. However, without inscriptions to identify the occupant, his identity will remain a matter of speculation.

[533] While it is true that kings are shown holding weapons on the Temple 26 stairs, there they are sitting on thrones in the passive mode. They are not actively going to or returning from battle.

[534] Two other monuments can be dated to the twelve years between the end of Katun 18 and the king’s anniversary. Altar R, which was found on the platform in front of Temple 18, commemorates Yax-Pac’s accession and another event which took place on 9.18.2.8.0 7 Ahau 3 Zip (March 9, 793). The other monument, Altar F’, was found behind Structure 32 (Morley 1920:373) in a residential compound just south of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:11). This square altar has binding ribbons engraved around its perimeter and a text of sixteen glyphic blocks. It is a difficult text, which records the accession of yet another lineage head to an office which we do not yet understand (Scheie 1988a). All we can say about this office is that it was not the office of ahau. The accession took place on 9.17.4.1.11 2 Chuen 4 Pop (775 February 3, 775) and its twenty-fourth tun anniversary on 9.18.8.1.11 10 Chuen 9 Mac (September 30, 798). The text records that the anniversary ritual occurred in the company of Yax-Pac, who was in his second katun of reign.

[535] We have already discussed a royal visit from Bird-Jaguar to Piedras Negras, but in general, the kings preferred to send ahauob as their representatives. See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of these visits and other patterns of interaction between Classic period kingdoms.

[536] See Baudez and Dowd (1983:491–493) for the analysis of the iconography and inscriptions in Temple 18. Just below that building, the latest date associated with Yax-Pac was on Stela 11. Riese argues that the opening date in that text, which is written as 6, 7, or 8 Ahau, must be later than 9.18.0.0.0 based on the “3-katun ahau ’ title in Yax-Pac’s name. Since naked ahau dates are usually associated with period endings, the following Long Count positions are possible:

9.16.15.0.0 7 Ahau 18 Pop
9.17.5.0.0 6 Ahau 13 Kayab
9.19.10.0.0 8 Ahau 8 Xul

Since Yax-Pac’s numbered katun titles refer to katuns of reign, rather than to katuns of life as at most other sites (Scheie 1989b), they cannot be used to estimate his age. However, they do confirm the placement of the Stela 11 date. He was a 1-katun ahau between 9.16.12.5.17 and 9.17.12.5.17; a 2-katun ahau between 9.17.12.5.17 and 9.18.12.5.17; and, a 3-katun ahau between 9.18.12.5.17 and 9.19.12.5.17. Since the first dates fall before his accession, and the second within his second katun of reign, only the third date, 9.19.10.0.0, is a possibility.

[537] Stuart (1984, 1988c) has made a direct connection between the imagery of Vision Serpents and the Double-headed Serpent Bar.

[538] On the sarcophagus of Palenque, the king Pacal falls into Xibalba with the same smoking image in his forehead as a sign of his transformation in death (Scheie 1976.17). Several people have noted the same smoking shapes with the figures on Altar L, but in that scene, the devices penetrate the turban headdresses. On the Palenque sarcophagus and Stela 11, the celts penetrate the flesh of the head itself.

[539] There is also a possibility that the text refers to a branch of the lineage deriving from 18-Rabbit-Scrpent, a name also recorded on Stela 6. The glyph between this 18- Rabbit’s name and Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is u loch, a term for “fork (as of a tree)” in Yucatec and “to fold or bend” in Chorti. We are presuming, for the present, that 18-Rabbit-Serpent is the same person as 18-Rabbit-God K, for this former name appears on Stela 6, dated just eight years before 18-Rabbit-God K’s accession. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has expressed doubts, however, that the two 18-Rabbits are the same person, and that possibility must remain open. In late 1989, another alternative occurred to us—that the I8-Rabbit-Serpcnt name phrase refers to the special Tlaloc-war Vision Serpent on the front of Stela 6 and presumably also on Stela 11. In this interpretation, the “fish-in-hand” verb in the Stela 6 text refers to the appearance of this particular Vision Serpent, while u loch, the phrase on Stela 11, also means “to hold something crosswise in the arms”—exactly the position of the Vision Serpent on both stelae.

[540] Grube and Scheie (1987a) identified this ruler and read his name glyph as U-Cit- Tok’, “the patron of flint.” The Calendar Round of his accession, 3 Chicchan 3 Uo, can fit into the dynastic sequence at Copan only at this Long Count position.

[541] The office into which U-Cit-Tok was seated does not appear in the text, but this may be the result of a historical accident. If we assume that the original intention was to carve all four sides of the monument, as is the case with most other altars at Copan, then the inscription would probably have continued onto one of the other sides. Since the carving was never finished, the text ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence.

[542] Morley (1920:289) first suggested that Altar L is in an unfinished state, a conclusion Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1987) also made when she drew the altar. She was the individual who brought this to our attention.

[543] Both William Fash and Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1986–1987) have described this incident to us.

[544] This estimate comes from Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1987), the physical anthropologist who is investigating the skeletal remains from the burials of Copan.

9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichén Itzá

[545] The Great Collapse of the ninth century is one of the major social disasters of Precolumbian history (see Culbert 1973). E. W. Andrews IV (1965; 1973) underscored the fact that the northern lowland states of the ninth and tenth centuries were enjoying prosperity and expansion in the wake of the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms. Recent discussion and analysis of the relative destinies of northern and southern lowland Maya (Sabloffand E. W. Andrews V 1986) points to a significant overlap in timing between the fall of the southern kingdoms, the rise of the northern kingdoms, and ultimately, the rise of the conquest state of Chichén Itzá.

[546] The most famous architectural style of the northern lowlands is the exquisite Puuc veneer stone masonry (Pollock 1980), regarded by many scholars as the epitome of Maya engineering and masonry skill. This style emerges in the Late Classic and persists through the Early Postclassic period (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986). The north central peninsular region also displays a style called Rio Bec (Potter 1977); and between the central peninsular Rio Bec sites and the concentration of Puuc-style cities in the hills to the north and west, there are communities with architecture of another, related style called Chenes (Pollock 1970). The northern tradition includes the temple-pyramid complex of the southern kingdoms, but there is also an emphasis on constructing many-roomed structures atop large solid pyramids. This change in emphasis may reflect a particular focus upon activities and events involving assemblies of leaders as opposed to the cultic focus upon rulers expressed in temple pyramids (Freidel 1986a) seen in the Late Classic southern lowlands.

[547] The Maya of the time of the Conquest were still literate in their own system of writing. The most famous aboriginal treatises are the Books of Chilam Balam (Edmonson 1982, 1986), which are principally records of the katuns and their prophecies. These books are named after the last great Maya prophet: chilam. “interpreter [of the gods],” and balam. “jaguar,” which was probably his family name. Roys (1967:3 and 182–187) suggested that Chilam Balam lived during the last decades of the fifteen century or perhaps during the first part of the sixteenth century and that his lasting fame came from his foretelling the appearance of strangers from the east who would establish a new religion. Roys (1967:3) says, “The prompt fulfilment of this prediction so enhanced his reputation as a seer that in later times he was considered the authority for many other prophecies which had been uttered long before his time. Inasmuch as prophecies were the most prominent feature of many of the older books of this sort, it was natural to name them after the famous sooth sayer.”

The Books of Chilam Balam were recorded in the Yucatec Maya language, but written in Spanish script. The “prophecies” offered do have components that resemble the Western idea of fortune-telling, but the foretelling is based on detailed accounts of the major historical events and political struggles between competing communities and families from the late Precolumbian through the Colonial periods. Dennis Puleston (1979) argued that the fatalistic beliefs of the Maya and their acceptance of the essential cyclicality of time transformed such records of the past into rigid predictions of the future. We have tried to show in previous chapters that the Maya implementation of history as a guide to the future was subtle and politically imaginative. Bricker (n.d.) provides an elegant proof that some passages in the Books of Chilam Balam are direct transliterations of the glyphic originals. Archaeologists have been wrestling with these fragmentary historical accounts from the vantage of the record from excavation and survey for many years (Tozzer 1957; Pollock, Roys, Proskouriakoff, and Smith 1962; Ball 1974a; Robles and A. Andrews 1986; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).

[548] As noted in Chapter 1, evidence from linguistic reconstructions and particular spellings in the Classic inscriptions indicate that Yucatec was spoken by the peoples occupying the northern and eastern sections of the Yucatán Peninsula. This zone included at least the modern regions of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Belize, and the eastern third of the Petén. Northern and southern lowlands were linked in the Preclassic period by means of shared ceramic styles and by trade materials such as greenstone and chert brought through the southern lowlands or from them. In return, the northern lowland peoples may have traded sea salt (Freidel 1978; E. W. Andrews V 1981) from beds along their northern and western coasts. The northern lowland Maya participated in the early establishment of the institution of kingship, as seen in the famous bas-relief carved into the mouth of the cave of Loltún, which depicts a striding ahau wearing the Jester God diadem and the severed jaguar head with triple plaques on his girdle (Freidel and A. Andrews n.d.). Stylistically, this image dates to the Late Preclassic period.

[549] Our story of Chichón Itzá is based on less secure data than the stories we have offered about the southern kings. The northern Maya cities, with the notable exception of Dzibilchaltún on the northwestern plain, have not enjoyed the extensive and systematic investigations aimed at cultural interpretation that have been carried out at several of the southern cities we have written about. At Dzibilchaltún, E. Wyllys Andrews IV conducted long-term and systematic research (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980). The settlement-pattern work at this site (Kurjack 1974) first alerted Maya scholars to the enormous size of some of these cities, a fact which took a long time to be accepted. Work of this quality and detail is only now in progress at sites like Cobá, Isla Cerritos, Sayil, Ek Balam, and Yaxuná.

Furthermore, in spite of the efforts of many epigraphers over more than sixty years, the hieroglyphic texts of the north are not as well understood as those of the south, partly because they have a higher percentage of phonetic signs and their calligraphy is far more difficult to read. The first date to be deciphered in the Chichen inscriptions was the Initial Series date 10.2.9.1.9 9 Muluc 7 Zac (Morley 1915). During the following two decades, the Carnegie Institution of Washington conducted the excavations that uncovered the remainder of the presently known hieroglyphic monuments of the Chichón Itzá corpus (Martin 1928; Morley 1925, 1926, 1927, 1935; Ricketson 1925; Ruppert 1935). Hermann Beyer’s (1937) structural analysis laid the foundation for later epigraphic research on this body of texts, while Thompson (1937) was the first to explain the tun-ahau system of dating used at Chichón Itzá. Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) raised difficult questions about the presence of Maya inscriptions on “Toltec” architecture at the site.

David Kelley (1968; 1976; 1982) has been working with the texts of Chichón Itzá and Uxmal for many years, and he must be credited with the identification of several key relationship terms in the complex and partially understood network of family ties among nobles of the Chichón community. His structural analyses and interpretations have pushed far beyond the work of previous researchers. He also identified the inscriptional name, Kakupacal (Kelley 1968), an Itzá warrior mentioned in the Books of Chilam Balam, as an ancient ruler of Chichón Itzá. His important work inspired Michel Davoust (1977, 1980), who vigorously pursued the hypothesis that Chichón Itzá was ruled by a dynasty whose names are preserved in the texts.

James Fox (1984a, 1984b, n.d.) has made several major contributions to the unraveling of the Chichón Itzá texts; most notably, he correctly identified the Emblem Glyph of this capital. Jeff Kowalski (1985a, 1985b, 1989; Kowalski and Krochock, n.d.) has made substantial headway in the analysis of texts from Uxmal and other Terminal Classic communities of the north, including Chichón Itzá. Ian Graham, master of the Corpus of Hieroglyphic Writing Project at Harvard University, has generously allowed scholars to work with his drawings of northern lowland texts. David Stuart has contributed fundamentally to the interpretation of the political organization of Chichón Itzá, both in his publications (Stuart 1988a; Grube and Stuart 1987) and in his generous sharing of work in progress through personal communications. Stuart’s decipherment of the sibling relationship at Chichón is the cornerstone of an epigraphic interpretation of conciliar rule there.

Finally, we draw heavily upon the work in progress of Ruth Krochock (1988) whose master’s thesis on the lintels of the Temple of the Four Lintels is a tour de force of method. It is a programmatic breakthrough in the interpretation of the political rhetoric of Chichón Itzá as focused upon the simultaneous participation of contemporary leaders in dedication rituals. Our attempts to push beyond Krochock’s interpretation are based upon intensive consultation with her and with Richard Johnson, Marisela Ayala, and Constance Cortez at the 1988 Advanced Seminar in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Austin and with Ruth, Jeff Kowalski, John Carlson, and others at the 1989 workshop. They are further based upon continued correspondence with Ruth Krochock. We appreciate her helpful advice and words of sensible caution. We also note that Virginia Miller (1989) has independently made many of the same associations between the Tlaloc-warrior of Classic period iconography and the Toltec warriors of Chichón Itzá.

[550] The actual extent of Chichón Itzá has never been documented, since only the central core of the city has been mapped. The description of the city’s limits we use here is an estimate attributed to Peter Schmidt by Fernando Robles and Anthony Andrews (1986). In the Atlas oj ) ucatán, Silvia Garza T. and Edward Kurjack provide an estimate of thirty square kilometers (Garza T. and Kurjack 1980).

The traditional interpretation of the history of Chichen Itzá (Tozzer 1957) holds that the city was occupied several times by different groups of people, generally moving from a Maya “old” Chichen to a Toltec Mexican “new” Chichen represented in the great northern center of the city. We support the view, as recently argued by Charles Lincoln (1986), that Chichón Itzá was a single city continuously occupied through its history. As Lincoln points out, the notion of an early Maya Chichón makes little sense, for it would leave the city without a discernible spatial center. The Maya were quite flexible in their city planning, but no Maya capital lacks an easily identified center.

Viewed as a single city, Chichón Itzá is strikingly diverse and cosmopolitan in its public and elite architecture, registering styles from both Maya country and from México. Traditionally, Chichón Itzá’s Mexican cultural expression has been attributed to a conquest of the northern lowlands by Toltec Mexicans operating out of their capital in Tula Hidalgo, México (see Diehl 1981 on Tula). George Kubler (1975) argued that Tula displays only a fraction of the political program and architectural design found at Chichón Itzá, and it is more likely that Chichón was the dominant community in the acknowledged relationship with Tula. To be sure, Maya groups collaborated with Gulf Coast and Mexican peoples, probably merchant-warrior brotherhoods of a kind that later facilitated the economy of the Aztec Empire; but the Maya civilization was the fundamental source of ideas and imagery in this new government. We believe that Kubler is correct and that Chichón Itzá developed into a truly Mesoamcrican capital, like Teotihuacán before it. This was perhaps the only time in Maya history that their culture stood center stage in the Mesoamerican world. Because we regard the great period of Chichón Itzá to be Mesoamerican and Maya, and not the product of a Toltec invasion, we use the traditional attribution of “Toltec” Chichón Itzá in quotations.

[551] We will generally avoid as much as possible any references to the histories and chronicles, collectively termed the Chilam Balams, passed down to the time of the Europeans. No doubt there is significant historical information in these texts, but despite the brilliant efforts of Joseph Ball (1974a; 1986) and other scholars who worked before the Chichón texts had been even partially deciphered, it will take much future work to coordinate, in any useful way, the evidence of archaeology and epigraphy with that of ethnohistory. These histories are fraught with metaphorical allusions and political manipulations. Some essential assertions of the chronicles are confirmed by archaeology, principally the fact that foreigners entered the northern lowlands and, in alliance with native nobility, established new states such as Chichón Itzá. Some key figures in the historical narratives can also be found in the ancient texts, figures such as Kakupacal of Chichón Itzá (Kelley 1968). Eventually, there will be an historical framework that accounts for all of these forms of evidence.

[552] The timing of the rise of the Puuc cities relative to the southern kingdoms is still a matter of controversy. Most specialists feel comfortable in dating the beginning of the Puuc florescence at about 800 A.D. or a half century earlier (Robles and A. Andrews, 1986:77). This date would establish contemporaneity of at least half a century between the kings of the Puuc and those of the south.

[553] Jeff K. Kowalski (1985a; 1985b; 1987) in his study of Uxmal has carried out the most extensive investigation of the political organization of the Puuc cities as revealed in iconography and epigraphy.

[554] These terms were popularized by J.E.S. Thompson (1970), who proposed that these were barbarian “Mexicanized Maya” who, through energetic trade, warfare, and diplomacy, penetrated the lowlands from their homeland in the swampy river country bordering the Maya domains on the west and established a new hegemony in the period of the Great Collapse. While the details are controversial, most scholars presently adhere to the general notion of a Putún or Chontai movement into the lowlands in Terminal Classic times (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986).

At some point in their peregrinations, the Itzá, often regarded as one group of Putún Maya, established cities along the western coast of the Yucatán peninsula, at Chanpotón— Chan Putún—and elsewhere in Campeche. Edmonson (1986), in his translations of the Chilam Balam books, would place this Itzá settlement prior to their incursions into the center of the peninsula to establish Chichón Itzá. The archaeology of this western coastal region is intriguing, but poorly known. On the one hand, there is the city of Xcalumkin (Pollock 1980) with its veneer mosaic architecture; Late Classic hieroglyphic dates on texts; and use of the ahau-cahal relationship, an innovation which originated in the Western Rivers district of the south at kingdoms such as Yaxchilán. On the other hand, there is Chunchucmil, situated to the north and very close to the rich salt beds of the western coast (Vlchek, Garza, and Kurjack 1978; Kurjack and Garza 1981). This Classic period city covers some six or more square kilometers and has densely packed house lots, temples, and pyramids. Until we have better archaeological control over this region, we will be required to treat the garbled history of its occupation with great caution.

[555] Robles and A. Andrews’s (1986) review of the evidence for the settlement size and organization of Coba. See also Folan, Kintz, and Fletcher (1983) and Folan and Stuart (1977) for discussion of the settlement patterns at Coba.

[556] Stone roads, sacbe, were built by Maya from the Preclassic period onward. Although these roads no doubt could have served prosaic functions, such as commerce and rapid mobilization of troops, all of our descriptions from observers after the Conquest (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) show that such roads functioned principally as pathways for ceremonial processions and pilgrimages among related nobilities. Such rituals were, in all the cases we have come across, political statements of obligation and responsibility. Kurjack and E. W. Andrews V (1976) establish the archaeological case for such an interpretation of settlement hierarchy linked by intersite roads. The roadways of Cobá have been extensively reported on by Antonio Benavides C. (1981).

[557] The original homeland of the Itzá is a matter of continuing dispute. They may have been speakers of a Maya language, probably Chontai, and the best guess places their original communities in the Chontalpa, a stretch of flat, swampy land to the east of the mighty Usumacinta and north of the Peten. The garbled histories of the Chilam Balam books give some reason to suspect that the Itzá established sizable communities along the western coast of the peninsula (perhaps even some of the Puuc-style communities on this coast were Itzá) before making their bid for hegemony in Yucatán by controlling the coastlands. The Maya of the Tabasco-Campeche coastlands were multilingual at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Many of them spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and they were astute, opportunistic merchants and warriors (Thompson 1970). Archaeological survey of the western and northern coasts by Anthony Andrews (1978) confirms the presence of coastal enclaves with pottery diagnostic of the Sotuta Ceramic Sphere associated with Chichén Itzá and the Itzá incursions. Certainly, the people who established Chichón Itzá as a great capital had adopted many ideas of governance from Mexico (Wren n.d.). Hence it is likely that they had Mexican allies in their adventures on the peninsula.

[558] The pottery associated with Chichén Itzá, and its “Itzá” occupation, is called Sotuta Sphere. This survey work along the coast has been carried out primarily by Anthony Andrews (1978). Much of what follows is based upon the syntheses of Andrews and Fernando Robles (A. Andrews and Robles 1985; Robles and A. Andrews 1986). The wide range of Mexican sources of obsidian traded by the Itzá is documented at Isla Cerritos (A. Andrews, Asaro, and Cervera R. n.d.).

[559] This important site is undergoing long-term investigation by Anthony Andrews and Fernando Robles and their colleagues.

[560] Izamal boasts one of the largest pyramids in the northern lowlands. Surface remains of monumental stucco masks which decorated the pyramid, along with the cutstone monolithic-block facading on its terraces, indicate that its major period of construction dates to the Early Classic, long before the Terminal Classic incursions of the Itzá (Lincoln 1980). In the absence of further field investigation, we cannot say how substantial the community may have been at the time of the incursion. Clearly, however, the great pyramid on this otherwise flat plain constituted a famous geographic marker which the Itzá could refurbish as a capital with little additional labor investment.

David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has alerted us to the fact that ethnohis- torical documents (Lizana 1892: Chapter 2) describe Izamal as the capital of a lord named Hun-Pik-Tok, warrior captain of an army of “8.000 flints.” He also identified the same name, Hun-Pik-Tok, in the inscription of the Casa Colorada and on the lintel from Halakal. Hence there is both ethnohistorical and epigraphic evidence to support the hypothesis that Izamal was an established capital of the Itzá at the time of the temple dedications at Chichén Itzá. These dedications occurred during Katun 2 of the tenth baktun, the likely time of Chichén Itzá’s founding as the principal city of the Itzá. Hun-Pik-Tok and Kakupacal, a famous lord of Chichén Itzá mentioned several times in these dedication events throughout that city, are both mentioned on the Casa Colorada, so we can surmise they were contemporaries.

Hun-Pik-Tok reappears on a monument from Halakal, a small satellite community of Chichén Itzá to the east of that city. Most interesting is the fact that Hun-Pik-Tok and another lord named on a lintel from the Akab Tzib from Chichén Itzá are both named as vassal lords of Jawbone-Fan, who was a K’ul Cocom (Grube and Stuart 1987:8–10).

Archaeologically, Lincoln (1986) has noted the presence of Sotuta ceramics at Izamal.

It may well prove significant that both Chichén Itzá and Yaxuná, the frontier community of the Coba state, are both roughly halfway between Izamal and Cobá. This is the zone of struggle between the Itzá and the kings of Cobá. As we have seen in the case of the great wars between Caracol, Tikal, and Naranjo, struggle between hegemonic Maya states could focus on the border communities between them—in their case Yaxha and Ucanal, which sat roughly halfway between Tikal and Caracol.

[561] Calculation of the size of southern lowland kingdoms is still a tricky business (see Chapter 1). Peter Mathews (1985a and 1985b) posits that emblem-bearing polities constituted the principal states which claimed territorial domain over the smaller communities ruled by second-and third-rank nobility. On this basis, and taking into account exceptional conquest events such as Tikal’s incorporation of Uaxactún, the largest southern lowland hegemonies were on the order of 2,500 square kilometers in size. Recently (April 1989), Arthur Demarest and Stephen Houston have suggested in oral reports that the kingdom of Dos Pilas may have encompassed 3,700 square kilometers. This remains to be confirmed though field investigation. Calculation of the size of the Cobá state at the time when the great causeway linking it to Yaxuná was built is based upon Robles and A. Andrews’s map (1986: Fig. 3:4) and the following premises. First, Cobá controlled the coastlands directly fronting the kingdom on the east, some 25 kilometers distant from the capital. This information is based upon study of the distribution of distinctive ceramics of the Cobá Western Cepech Sphere relative to the distribution of Chichén-related Sotuta Sphere ceramics along that coast. Chichén Itzá evidently skirted the coast in front of Cobá when it established communities on the Island of Cozumel (see Freidel and Sabloff 1984; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).

Second, this estimate of kingdom size is calculated by allowing for a corridor of 25 kilometers surrounding the great causeway along its entire route. This figure provides us with a minimal support population for labor, sustenance, and defense during the construction. The timing of the construction of the causeway is equally tricky relative to the war between Chichén Itzá and Cobá. Robles (1980) places its construction at the beginning of the Terminal Classic period, about A.D. 800. We believe that the war between Cobá and Chichén Itzá was under way in earnest by the middle of the ninth century, for the spate of dedications defining Chichén Itzá’s first major temples occurs between A.D. 860 and 880. Present evidence does not allow final resolution of the two possibilities: Either Cobá built the causeway in response to the incursion of the Itzá, as we have postulated in this chapter, or, alternatively, they built the causeway to declare a hegemonic kingdom prior to the Itzá threat. The latter possibility opens the intriguing prospect that the Itzá were posing as “liberators” of the central north, appealing to peoples already subjugated by Cobá. This was a tactic used frequently by conquerors in the ancient world. Sargon of Akkad “liberated” Sumer from rival indigenous hegemonic states in Mesopotamia.

[562] The regalia of some lords of the Yaxuná polity shows a striking resemblance to that of lords in tribute procession at Chichén Itzá.

[563] Research at Dzibilchaltún (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980) documents a dramatic decline and eventual cessation of public construction with the arrival of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the city. E. W. Andrews and E. W. Andrews (1980:274) place that arrival at about A.D. 1000, but since these diagnostic ceramics occur in above-floor deposits of earlier buildings, they warn that the A.D. 1000 date may be too late for the change. Our own scenario would place the collapse of Dzibilchaltún about 100 years earlier.

[564] Recent excavations by the Centro Regional de Yucatán (of the Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México) show the presence of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the main plaza areas of Uxmal (Tomas Gallareta N., personal communication, 1987).

[565] The interpretation of events at Yaxuná and, through the Yaxuná record, of Chichén Itzá’s wars with the Puuc cities and Cobá, is based upon ongoing research by Southern Methodist University, sponsored by the National Endowment lor the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and private donors (Freidel 1987).

[566] The Advanced Seminar on the Maya Postclassic at the School of American Research, Santa Fe (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986), concentrated attention on this problem. See especially the contribution by Charles Lincoln (1986).

[567] Tatiana ProskouriakofF (1970) firmly pointed out the fact that “Toltec” art was found in direct association with Maya hieroglyphic texts and questioned the then popular interpretation that the people who dominated Chichén Itzá at the time of the creation of this art were illiterate foreigners. There is no reason to suppose that any rulers of the Maya before the European Conquest were illiterate, for all of the Maya kings used the calendrics predicated upon literacy as a political tool (Edmonson 1986). Further, the gold disks dredged from the sacred cenote, clearly pertaining to the late or ‘ Toltec” period as identified by the iconography, have glyphic inscriptions (S. K. Lothrop 1952). A goldhandled bone bloodletter from the cenote (Coggins and Shane 1984) also carries a glyphic inscription. The fact that these objects are made from gold (a medium ignored by or unknown to Classic period kings) identifies them as late. Finally, Linca Wren (n.d.) and Ruth Krochock (1988) have reported the discovery of a portable hemispherical sacrificial stone from Chichón Itzá that carries a glyphic inscription. This stone also depicts a duplicate of the decapitation scenes that decorate the playing-wall panels of the Great Ballcourt, a clearly late Chichón building.

But the matter of the literacy of the audience of late Chichón Itzá, the city that built the final temples and courts of the great platform, is far from secure. As Chariot pointed out (Morris, Chariot, and Morris 1931), processional figures in the great assemblies of the northern center often have glyphlike emblems floating above their heads. For the most part, these are not identifiable as Maya glyphs. Some look like Mexican glyphs and others are indecipherable. Were these portrayed peoples truly illiterate, or were they simply complying with the current customs of Mesoamerican elite public display, in which literacy played no part? We can pose the question, but we cannot answer it yet.

[568] Ruth Krochock (n.d.) must be credited with the fundamental identification of the simultaneity of participants in dedication rituals at Chichón, with particular reference to the lintels in the Temple of the Four Lintels. The family relationships posited in the following discussion are predicated principally upon the syllabic identification ofyitah, the “sibling” relationship glyph linking protagonists into single generations (Stuart 1988a: Fig. 54g-i; personal communication, 1988), and upon “child of mother” and “mother of” relationships discussed by Krochock (1988).

[569] The technical name for this building is Structure 3C1 in the nomenclature of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Ruppert 1952:34).

[570] This rather stunning insight was first presented in a graduate seminar on “Caching Rituals and Their Material Remains” held at the University of Texas at Austin, spring semester, 1989. Using the caches of the city as her clues and examining the archaeology of the High Priest’s Grave, Annabeth Headrick proposed that this temple and the seven- lobed cave under it are early in Chichen’s history and functioned as the prototype of later buildings to the north, such as the Castillo and the captive procession in front of the Temple of the Warriors.

The inscription on one of the inner columns (Lincoln 1986:Fig. 5:1) of the temple accompanies the image of a captive rendered in the style of the Temple of the Warriors columns. The Long Count for the 2 Ahau 18 Mol Calendar Round has been interpreted as 10.8.10.11.0 because that date falls within a katun ending on 2 Ahau, the last glyph in the text. However, the 2 Ahau does not occur within the expected formula phrase for Yucatec-style dates. We think it may simply refer to the opening Calendar Round date and not Io the katun within which that date fell. In this alternative interpretation, the date of the column could as easily be 10.0.12.8.0 (July 3, 842) or 10.3.5.3.0 (June 7, 894). Furthermore, the earliest placement, 10.0.12.8.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, has the virtue of making the date of the High Priest’s Grave the earliest known date at Chichón Itzá. Headrick associated the cave under this temple with Chicomoztoc, the origin cave of seven lobes famous from Aztec myth. The presence of this cave points to the High Priest’s Grave as an “origin” building in the cosmic landscape of Chichón Itzá, exactly as the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán marks it as an “origin” temple (Heyden 1981).

[571] This new fire, called suhuy kak, “virgin fire,” was described by Landa in his Relación de Yucatan (Tozzcr 1941:153 155, 158) in association with a number of different ritual occasions, including the New Year ceremonies and the Festival of Kukulcan at Mani.

[572] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes a persuasive case for the association of such sacrifice with the images on the Four Lintels. In the Chilam Balam books (Edmonson 1986), a great serpent deity at Chichón Itzá, named hapay can, “sucking snake,” is said to have demanded many nobles from other communities as sacrificial victims.

[573] James Fox (n.d.) recently identified this date as an important Jupiter date. In fact it is also a Saturn date, for Jupiter (253.81 + ) and Saturn (259.97 + ) had just begun to move after they had hung frozen against the star fields at their second stationary points for about forty days. This is the same hierophany recorded at Palenque on the 2 Cib 14 Mol house dedication and on Lady Xoc’s bloodletting (Lintel 24) at Yaxchilán. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) noticed that the glyph appearing with the 2 Cib 14 Mol event (pil or pul) also recurs in the Casa Colorada text. Unfortunately, there it is recorded with the 7 Akbal event, which has no obvious astronomical associations.

[574] Karl Ruppert (1952) has described the architecture at Chichón Itzá and provides a map showing the survey squares that are the basis for this nomenclature.

[575] The Maya used stone axes in battle, but there are also abundant images documenting that the ax was also specifically a sacrificial instrument (Schele and M. Miller 1986).

[576] These knives are especially evident in the sacrificial scenes of the gold battle disks (S. K. Lothrop 1952).

[577] The final three glyphs in the names of the three persons to the left of the drawing are uinic titles. These titles declare that these men are ulnic, that is to say, “men (in the sense of humans)” of a particular rank or location. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to read that rank.

[578] Patio Quad structures, also called Gallery Patio Structures, have several diagnostic features which can occur in varying combinations: (1) sunken central patios; (2) masonry shrines built against the back wall; (3) colonnaded front rooms; and (4) colonnades bordering the central patio. Generally, the plan of the building is square and the walls are of masonry. Based upon settlement location and associated excavated debris at Chichón Itzá, Freidel (1981b) proposed that these buildings are elite residences. These buildings occur rarely in the Maya area outside of Chichón Itzá. Examples are known at Nohmul in Belize (D. Chase and A. Chase 1982) and on Cozumel Island (Freidel and Sabloff 1984: Fig. 26a), but they also occur in the contemporary highland communities of Mexico (e.g.. in the Coxcatlan area, Sisson 1973).

[579] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) pointed out some time ago that the association of glyphic texts with typical “Toltec” images in the case of this building suggests that the patrons of the latest artistic and architectural programs of the city were not illiterate foreigners.

[580] David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) pointed out to us a reference in Landa to a set of brothers who ruled at Chichón Itzá. They purportedly came from the west and built many beautiful temples in the city (Tozzer 1941:19, 177).

[581] Ralph Roys (in Pollock et al. 1962) extensively discusses the political organization of the Mayapán Confederacy, which was ruled by this principle. Edmonson (1986) translates multepal as “crowd rule.” Barrera Vasquez (1980:539–540, 785) glosses multepal as “united government (or confederation) that was prevalent during the dominion of Mayapán until the middle of the fifteenth century when a great revolution resulted in the destruction of that city.” Mui is listed as “in combination, to do something communally or between many...” and “in a group.” Tepal is “to reign and to govern.”

[582] Mayapán, although a relatively unspectacular ruin by Maya standards (J. Eric Thompson called it “a flash in the Maya pan”), has exceptionally well-preserved remains of buildings made with stone foundations and wooden superstructures. The Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pollock et al. 1962) carried out long-term work at the site, so we have a lot of information on its organization. Essentially, both Chichón Itzá and Mayapán show a central focus upon a four-sided pyramid associated with colonnaded halls. Although the halls at Mayapán are organized in a circle around the pyramid, while the halls at Chichón Itzá are to one side of its great northern central platform, neither of these arrangements is comparable to the vaulted masonry buildings found in Puuc cities and in the southern cities described in previous chapters. Contact-period colonnaded halls (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) functioned as assembly halls for men in public service, as schools for boys being trained in the arts of war and in the essentials of the sacred life, as dormitories for men fasting in preparation for festivals, and as quarters for militia. These halls were not the public residences of important people. Noble residences (Smith in Pollock et al. 1962) were to be found throughout the city of Mayapán. We have seen that the buildings which were equivalent to the colonnaded halls found in southern kingdoms, such as the Palace of Pacal at Palenque, were the public lineage houses of dynasties. Multepal, then, has its material expressions in the organization of the communities in which this form of government prevailed.

[583] Ralph Roys (1962:78) gives the fall of Mayapán as occurring in a Katun 8 Ahau, ca. A.D. 1451.

[584] The cocom reading was first identified in the texts of Chichón Itzá by Grube and Stuart (1987:10).

[585] James Fox (1984b) identified this combination of signs as the Chichen Itza Emblem Glyph.

[586] Our interpretation of the architectural and artistic program of the Temple of the Warriors complex draws heavily upon the skill and brilliance of Jean Chariot, an artist and iconographer. Chariot, along with Ann Axtel Morris and Earl Morris (Morris et al. 1931), published articles on the bold and comprehensive architectural excavations and restorations carried out in these buildings by the Carnegie Institution of Washington earlier in this century. Chariot proposed the hypothesis that the reliefs are attempts at public portraiture. He based this evaluation upon the fact that the artists depicted individualistic detail both in the warriors’ regalia and in their faces, where preserved. Chariot also noted the intriguing presence of glyphlike elements floating above a number of the individuals. These symbols are not recognizable as true Maya glyphs, but they do seem to distinguish these people one from another. It is perplexing that the artisans did not use known glyphs to convey such information, for the elite of Chichón Itzá were certainly aware of glyphic writing throughout the history of the city. Such late and diagnostic media as the gold battle disks and other gold artifacts from the cenote (S. K. Lothrop 1952) carry glyphic inscriptions.

[587] Actual specimens of the throwing spears and the parry sticks were cast into the cenote at Chichón Itzá and were retrieved by modern scholars. They are housed in the museum in Merida.

[588] The Itzá Maya especially favored the goddess Ix-Chel, Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. The island of Cozumel was sacred to Ix-Chel at the time of the Conquest and was also a strategic sanctuary of an oracle of the goddess. Cozumel Island was controlled by the Itzá during the height of their power and the oracle may have originated during that time. The depictions of old women at Chichén include some with skull heads who are dancing with old Pauahtunob. These may well represent the goddess. The woman in this procession, however, is no doubt a real person just like the other portraits. Either she is a representative of the goddess, or possibly she is the matriarch of the principal sodality. Recall that the genealogies of Chichén Itzá describe the descent of the principal group of brothers from their mother and grandmother. In that case, the procession would have occurred in the time of the great captains who dedicated the lintels throughout the city.

[589] Tozzer (1941:121) describes the binding of limbs with cotton-cloth armor in preparation for war.

[590] This is the High Priest’s Grave. The seven-lobed cave was reached by an artificial shaft, sealed by seven graves filled with bones and a wealth of sacred objects, such as rock crystals, jade, shell, clay vessels, and more (see Thompson 1938; Marquina 1964:895–896).

[591] Landa in Tozzer (1941:93–94) describes this form of mock battle in the following way: “One is a game of reeds, and so they call it Colomche, which has that meaning. For playing it, a large circle of dancers is formed with their music, which gives them the rhythm, and two of them leap to the center of the wheel in time to it, one with a bundle of reeds [the shafts of throwing spears and arrows are so termed in this text], and he dances with these perfectly upright; while the other dances crouching down but both keeping within the limits of the circle. And he who has the sticks flings them with all his force at the second, who by the help of a little stick catches them with a great deal of skill.”

[592] This scenario is highly speculative, but it is also commensurate with the fact that the bound prisoners in processions at Chichén Itzá are usually displayed in full regalia and not stripped for sacrifice as in southern Classic depictions. One way to account for this iconography is to propose that there were ritual events that combined mock battle and formal sacrifice. The Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest practiced arrow sacrifice which indeed did combine elements of battle and sacrifice (Tozzer 1941:118), but here the victim was stripped naked in Classic Maya fashion before being tied to a post.

The closest example of what we envision here is found at the Late Classic site of Cacaxtla in highland México (Foncerrada de Molina 1978; Kubler 1980). Here beautifully preserved polychrome-painted murals depict a sacrificial slaughter of battle captives. Some of the victims in this scenes are stripped, but others, including the leader of the losing side, wear full regalia and still carry shields. They are shown with gaping wounds in their flesh from knife and dart wounds and one is depicted dismembered at the waist. There is a sense of a dramatic public slaughter of captives taken in battle.

Although the Cacaxtla murals are a long way from the Maya lowlands, their iconography and style show clear connections to the Maya and they are roughly contemporary to or slightly earlier than Chichen Itzá. Badly ruined murals from the Puuc site of Mulchic (Barrera Rubio 1980:Fig. 3) include not only battle scenes, but also sacrificial scenes in which knife-wielding lords bend over a victim who is wearing an elaborate headdress. The body of the victim is eroded, but this headdress suggests that he was in full regalia at the time of sacrifice. This example is close enough in space and time to the Chichén Itzá context to ofler encouragement that future discoveries of mural scenes in the northern lowlands will either confirm or disconfirm the existence of mock-battle sacrifice in the region. Meanwhile, we hold that the transformation of highborn captives from sacrificial victims to members of the confederacy is the most promising political hypothesis for the success of Chichén Itzá.

[593] Arthur Miller (1977) coined these terms for the two major images in the murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars, one of the three buildings attached to the Great Ballcourt complex containing political imagery.

[594] We are accepting that the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá is equivalent to the “ancestor cartouche“ of Classic period iconography to the south. The conjunction of images that leads us to this conclusion is found especially in the upper registers of stela imagery in the Late Classic period. At Yaxchilán, figures identified glyphically and by image as the mother and father of the protagonist sit in cartouches (Proskouriakoff 1961a:18, 1963- 1964:163; Schele 1979:68; Stuart 1988:218–219) often shown wdth snaggle-toothed dragons in the four corners (see Fig. 10:2). In contrast to the Yaxchilán pattern, Caracol monuments show Vision Serpents emerging from bowls and sky bands in the upper register. Some of the people emerging from the open maw of these serpents are identified glyphically as the parents of the protagonists (Stone, Reents, and Coffman 1985:267–268). In Terminal Classic renditions, the serpent and the cartouche are replaced by dotted scrolls David Stuart (1984) identified as the blood from which the vision materializes. At Jimbal and Ucanal, the characters floating in these blood scrolls are the Paddler Gods and warriors carrying the regalia of Tlaloc war. At Chichén Itzá, the same spearthrower-wielding warriors emerge from Vision Serpents on the gold disks from the Cenote and from sun disks in the upper register of the Temple of the Warriors columns. To us, this consistent association of Vision Serpents, the Ancestor Cartouches, Blood/Vision Scrolls, and Warriors with spearthrower and darts form a cluster of ancestor-vision imagery, which includes Captain Sun Disk of the Chichén Itzá representations.

Several other scholars have also dealt with this imagery, but none have proposed the argument we present here. In a discussion of Yaxchilán Stela 1, David Stuart (1988:181) noted the correspondence between the ancestor cartouches of the Classic period and the Central Mexican sun disk. However, Stuart did not associate those ancestral images with the sun disk and Tlaloc-warrior presentations at Chichén Itzá. Charles Lincoln (n.d.) noted the correspondence between the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá and the cartouches at Yaxchilán, but he argued that the disks at Yaxchilán are specifically dualistic and pertain to the sun and moon. Actually, Spindin (1913:91–92) got closest by associating the sun imagery of the Classic period ancestor cartouches with these sun disk icons from Chichén Itzá and suggested a Maya origin for both.

[595] See Kelley (1982, 1983:205, and 1984) and Lincoln (1986:158) for arguments concerning these characters.

[596] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes the persuasive case that the feathered serpent is, in fact, the Blood Vision Serpent of traditional Maya royal ritual. She suggests that the bird image connected with it might be related to the Principal Bird Deity, who is, in turn, linked with the World Tree. At the same time, there are strong associations between the eagle and heart sacrifice in Mexican religion.

[597] Mary Miller and Stephen Houston (1987) have documented the fact that ballgame sacrifice took place on grand stairways outside of ballcourts.

[598] This link between the bailgame and war was discussed in the context of Preclassic ballcourts at Cerros in Chapter 3. The people of Chichén Itzá and their enemies all used the bailgame as a metaphor for the wars they were fighting. At Chichén Itzá, a small ballcourt directly west of the Mercado Patio Quad hall has a bas-relief procession of warriors pushing captives before them (Ruppert 1952). This composition is nearly identical to a relief procession at the site ofX’telhu, one of the satellites ofYaxuná, which shows the warriors wearing the skin apron and tight leather belt of the ballgame in one of its forms. At Yaxuná, the Ballcourt Complex is the only original construction dating to the Terminal Classic period when the war was waged. The severed head of the victim of sacrifice in the ballcourt or in ballgame ritual was closely associated by all of the contenders with the image of a skull from which waterlilies emerge. This skull with emerging waterlilies was a symbol of fertility and renewal (Freidel 1987). This head is at the center of the baseline in the battle scene illustrated here.

[599] The skull-rack platform at Chichón liza has the standard form of such structures, but its walls are carved with the images of skulls set in rows. 1 ozzer (1957:218–219) associated this gruesome imagery with the practice of taking heads as trophies of war and relics of the dead, both of famous lords who died naturally and captives who died in sacrifice. The trophies from sacrificial rituals and battle were preserved on great wooden racks called tzompantli by the Aztec (Tozzer 1957:130–131) that were contrueted in the most important sacred spaces at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, and at Chichón Itzá, the capital of the Itzá Maya.

[600] These relationships, evidently linking three male individuals, arc found on a monument from Uxmal described by Jeff Kowalski (1985b). He identified the glyph as a relationship, although Stuart’s itah decipherment was not then known.

10. The End of A Literate World and Its Legacy to the Future

[601] Tozzer (1941:28) quotes from Gaspar Antonio Chi, Landa’s Yucatec informant: “They had written records of important things which had occurred in the past ... the prognostications of their prophets and the lives of their lords; and for the common people, of certain songs in meter ... according to the history they contained.

[602] The Maya of the Postclassic period did enjoy commercial prosperity and brisk trade with peoples beyond their borders. Their homes were well built and their technology was generally on a par with that of their ancestors, although, unlike the Classic period peoples, they used metal. The lords of the Late Postclassic Maya, however, simply did not have the command of the social energy of their people that the lords of the Classic period could bring to bear on public works, especially central monumental architecture. It is not that these people were less devout than their ancestors: They built many shrines and temples, but these were as frequently dedicated to gods as to ancestors and as frequently found in homes as in centers. Some Mayanists regard this change not as a dissipation of energy so much as a reorientation to other goals, particularly the material well-being of the rising mercantile cadres, the p’olomob. Be that as it may, the Postclassic Maya who greeted the Spaniards were at best between eras of greatness.

[603] The first systematic study of the collapse was conducted as a School of American Research seminar (Culbert 1973). Several recent books have concentrated on the problem of the collapse from the viewpoint of Teotíhuacán’s collapse in the eighth century (Diehl and Berio 1989); from the viewpoint of Postclassic archaeology in northern Yucatán and the Petón (Sabloff and Andrews V 1986a); and as a worldwide phenomenon (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988).

[604] The only such system to be excavated in the immediate vicinity of a center which rose and then collapsed, Cerros in Belize (Scarborough 1983), shows that the canals silted in beyond use within a century of the political abandonment.

[605] This inscription includes the earliest known usage of a calendric name in a Classic Maya name phrase. This tradition of naming a child for the day in the tzolkin on which he was born was prominent among peoples of western Mesoamerica, such as the Zapotee, the Mixtec, the Cacaxtlanos, the Huastecs of El Tajin, and presumably, the Teotihuacanos, but the Classic Maya used an entirely different system. Since the clay in the pot came from the plain in front of Palenque, we suggest that the man whose accession is recorded in the text or perhaps the person who gave the vase to the Palencano lord in whose grave it was found was one of the Putún Maya.

[606] Robert Rands (personal communication, 1975) discovered that the clay has chemical traces produced by the grasses out on the plain. It was manufactured in the region where the Putún Maya are thought to have lived.

[607] Lauro José Zavala (1949) reported finding this skeleton in the rubble of the west end of south gallery of the House AD in the Palace. He speculated that the man was accidentally caught in the collapse of the vault and never dug out.

[608] The portrayal of the captive lords of Pomoná in their anguish is intensely personal and intimate, among the finest portraits ever achieved by Maya artists. The artists’s concentration on the victims leads Mary Miller to believe that they were vassals from the defeated town who were forced to carve this monument in tribute to their conquerors. If this was the case, then Pomoná at least survived as a place of skilled artisans until the opening of the ninth century A.D.

[609] We met this Calakmul king in Chapter 4. He installed the first ruler of Naranjo on his throne and he apparently sent a visitor to participate in rituals conducted by the contemporary king at Yaxchilán, who may have been an ally.

[610] Demarest, Houston, and Johnson (1989) report that this log palisade was built around the central plaza of Dos Pilas during the last years of its occupation. They also report that Punta de Chamino, a site built on the end of a peninsula jutting into Lake Petexbatún, has massive fortifications across the neck of the peninsula. Warfare was endemic and highly destructive during the last years of the Petexbatun confederacy.

[611] Jeff Kowalski (1989) has traced the Itzá style up the Usumacinta to Seibal and this set of late sites in the highlands of Chiapas.

[612] The Classic diaspora into the adjacent highlands is subject to continued interest and interpretation. See John Fox (1980, 1989) and David Freidel (1985a) for some consideration of the issues.

[613] The notable community here is Lamanai (Pendergast 1986), an ancient center and community which not only survived the collapse but continued to flourish up to the Spanish Conquest. Although clearly participants in the Maya elite world of the Classic period, Lamanai rulers raised few stelae during their history. But there is no certain correlation of historical kingship and the success or failure of government in Belize: Altun Ha, another center of great antiquity and wealth, never raised stelae and yet it succumbed in the time of the collapse. The Belizean situation underscores the fact that historical kingship was a major strategy of Maya governance, but not the only one. Maya centers rose and fell throughout the lowlands without raising stelae or declaring other public inscriptions. Yet at the same time, the correlation between the collapse of lowland society and the failure of historical kingship demonstrates the centrality of this institution, despite the examples of survival beyond the silencing of the historical record. Nevertheless, there are many and complex relationships between historical kings and their nonhistorical counterparts to be worked out in the future (see Freidel 1983).

[614] Sabloff and Willey (1969) first suggested that Seibal’s late florescence resulted from the intrusion and takeover by non-Petén foreigners. Rands (1973) suggested that the ceramics associated with that intruding group are related to the Fine Paste wares from the Palenque-Tabasco region. These foreigners appear to have been Thompson’s Putún Maya (see note 18) who gave rise both to the Itzá of Yucatán and the invaders who took Fine Orange ceramics with them as they went up the Usumacinta River.

[615] The four-sided pyramid is a very old architectural design among the Maya, going back into the Preclassic period at such sites as Tikal and Uaxactún. Although it occurs periodically throughout the Classic period, it seems to have enjoyed resurgence to a position of special prominence in the Terminal Classic period. See Fox (1989) for a discussion of the quadripartite principle in the consolidation of segmentary lineages into new states in the Postclassic period.

[616] David Stuart (1987:25–26) first read the verb in this passage as yilah. “he saw it,” and realized that the Seibal passage record a visit by foreign lords to participate in the period-ending rites conducted by Ah-Bolon-Tun.

[617] See Jeff Kowalski’s (1989) very useful comparison of the Seibal iconography to that of Chichén Itzá. In particular, Kowalski identifies an element called the “knife-wing” in the headdress of one of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s stelae. This element is important in the serpent-bird of prophecy iconography of lintels at Chichén Itzá (Krochock 1988). This complex, in turn, ties into the Vision Serpent-ancestor iconography of Captain Sun Disk, described in this chapter.

[618] Sabloff and Willey (1967) proposed that the southern lowlands might have experienced invasion by barbarians moving up the Western Rivers district at the time of the Collapse. One impressive pattern was the introduction of fine-paste wares from the Tabasco region in conjunction with the barbarian Maya stelae at Seibal. Ihompson (1970:3–47) called these invaders Putún and proposed they were Chontal-speaking Maya who had lived in Tabasco for most of the Classic period. He suggested that they expanded upriver in the chaos at the end of the Classic period. Kowalski (1989) and Ball and Taschek (1989) accept Thompson’s scenario and have added new support to the hypothesis.

[619] Don Rice (1986:332) argued from ceramic, stylistic, and architectural evidence that the late occupants of Ixlú were intruders. Because the shape of the benches built inside the buildings at Ixlú resembles those of late Seibal, he (1986:336) suggested they migrated to Lake Petén-Itzá from Seibal.

[620] Peter Mathews (1976) long ago showed the affinity of this Ixlú altar to a text on Stela 8 at Dos Pilas. This parallelism suggests that the Ixlú lords might have been refugees from the collapse of the Petexbatún state.

[621] A column from Bonampak now in the St. Louis Art Museum names its Bonampak protagonist as the yahau, “subordinate lord,” of the king of Tonina.

[622] Mary Pohl (1983) has reviewed the archaeological evidence for the ceremonial caching of owls, noting that pygmy owls were favored by the Maya. 1 he iconography of owls is not so specific as to require identification of the carved images as pygmy owls, but these are what the Maya deposited. Pygmy owls, according to Pohl, frequent the mouths of caves and hence inspire denotation as messengers from the Otherworld. These pygmy owls may refer to the bird of omen called cu/i in Yucatec, Choi, and Tzeltal and the owl of the spearthrower-shield-owl title we first encountered with Jaguar-Paw, the conqueror of Uaxactun.

[623] The Feathered Serpent could also be represented as a raptorial bird that tore out the hearts of sacrificial victims. The taloned-Kukulcan images that decorated the Temple of the Warriors display an ancestral head peering out from between its open beak, in an analog to Classic-period depictions of ancestors peering out of the mouth of the Vision Serpent.

[624] See the discussions by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Samuel K. Lothrop of these disks and their correspondences to southern lowland imagery and texts (Lothrop 1952).

[625] Scholars have long recognized the significant impact of Maya influence on sites like Xochicalco and Cacaxtla. Now that we have recognized the place of Tlaloc warfare in Classic Maya imagery, we see that Chichcn Itza’s representation of war is clearly not inspired by the Toltec, but by the Maya past. Tlaloc warfare as it is represented at Cacaxtla seems also to be inspired by the Maya model rather than that of Teotihuacan. Furthermore, as George Kubler suggested, Tula, Hidalgo, the capital of the Toltec, may well have emulated the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza rather the reverse. Mary Miller (1985) has shown that the famous Chae Mool figure of Postclassic Mesoamerica derives from Maya imagery of captives and sacrificial victims.

[626] The word can also means “four” and “sky,” so that the name also might have meant “four-star” or “sky-star.” Avendano (Stuart and Jones n.d.) said that the name meant “the star twenty serpent.”

[627] The accounts of the Conquest of the Itza of Lake Peten-Itza were published by Philip A. Means (1917). Dennis Puleston (1979) was the first to connect the prophesies of the Books of the Chilam Balam with Can-Ek’s reaction and the newly recovered histories of the Classic period.

[628] The trip we describe here is a new entrada recorded in a manuscript George Stuart discovered in 1989. He provided us with a copy of the transcription, translations, and the commentary written by Grant Jones (Stuart and Jones n.d.) and has very graciously allowed us to use the events of the entrada and the description of Can-Ek contained in this document.

[629] The size difference between the elite and commoners is one that is documented from Preclassic times onward. Can-Ek’s light complexion may have resulted from a life-style that kept him out of the fierce tropical sun far more than his subordinates.

[630] The cloth of costumes in the Bonampak murals also have glyphs drawn on them, and the ahaus in the first room wear ankle-long white capes amazingly like Avendano’s description.

[631] Avendano (Means 1917:128) says, “We had to observe and wonder on some rocks or buildings on some high places—so high that they were almost lost to sight. And when we caught sight of them clearly, the sun shining on them in full, we took pleasure in seeing them; and we wondered at their height, since without any exaggeration it seemed impossible that work could have been done by hand, unless it was with the aid of the devil, whom they say they adore there in the form of a noted idol.”

[632] This and all other direct quotations come from Avendano’s own description of this entrada as they were translated by Means (1917).

[633] Avendano’s description (Means 1917:137) is full of the irritation the Spanish felt at the uninvited and intimate attention.

[634] This episode (Means 1917:140) recalls the threats presented by the Chacans in Avendano’s first visit.

[635] This episode is recorded in Means (1917:140).

[636] This 12.3.19.11.14 I lx 17 Kankin date is March 13, 1697, in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, this day fell on 12.3.19.11.4 4 Kan 7 Kankin.

[637] Dennis Puleston (1979) first connected this particular prophecy to Can-Ek’s surrender and tried to show that the katun prophecies of the Books of the Chilam Balam were derived at least partially from Classic and Postclassic history. He suggested that Can-Ek’s fatalism was characteristic of Prehispamc Maya historical thought also. The imminent arrival of Katun 8 Ahau was just as likely to have been the stimulus. 8 Ahau is repeatedly associated with the collapse of kingdoms and the change of governments.

[638] See Tozzer (1941, 77–78) for discussion of the suppression of Maya native literature.

[639] Martin was the director of the Proyecto Lingiiistico “Francisco Marroquin,” an organization started in the 1960s to train native speakers in linguistics so that they could record and study their own languages.

[640] Nicholas Hopkins and Kathryn Josserand also helped give the workshop. Nora England of the University of Iowa translated the English version of the workbook into Spanish with the help of Lola Spillari de López. Steve Eliot of CIRMA printed and reproduced the Spanish-version workbook and CIRMA provided support and a room for workshop sessions.

[641] In 1989, Linda Scheie returned to Antigua to give a second workshop. An extra day added to the workshop gave time to finish the full analysis of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs. The final session heard a translation of that inscription read in all the languages of participants—English. Spanish, Classical Maya, Chorti, Pocoman, Cakchiquel, Quiche, Achi, Ixil, Mam, Jalcaltec, and Kanhobal.

[642] The correlation we have used throughout this book set 594,285 days between the zero date in the Maya calendar and the zero date in the Julian calendar, January 1, —4712. Although we believe this is the correct correlation, it is two days out of agreement with the calendars that are still maintained by the Maya of the Guatemala highlands. The correlation that brings the ancient and modern calendars into agreement sets 584,283 days between the two zero dates. In this second correlation, July 23, 1987, falls on 12.18.14.3.17 3 Caban 5 Xul.

Glossary of Gods and Icons

[643] See Cortez (1986) for a full discussion of the Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic contexts.

[644] In this scene, Chac-Xib-Chac rises from the waters of the Underworld in a visual representation of the first appearance of the Eveningstar (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: Pl. 122). GI of the Palenque Triad, who shares many features with Chac-Xib-Chac, is also associated with Venus, principally through his birth date, 9 Ik, a day associated with Venus throughout Mesoamerican mythology. Hun-Ahau of the Headband Twins is yet another aspect of Venus for he shows up in the Dresden Codex as a manifestation of Morningstar. All three of these gods are thus associated with one or another apparition of Venus and may represent different aspects of the same divine being.

[645] Thompson (1934 and 1970b) thoroughly discussed these directional sets of gods and their associations. M.D. Coe (1965) associated this directional organization of gods with the functions and layouts of Yucatecan villages. He (Coe 1973:14–15) also demonstrated that the gods identified by Thompson as bacabs arc the Pauahtuns of the codices and ethnohistorical sources.

[646] This palace scene with the Young Goddesses of Two and the rabbit scribe is painted on a pot now in the Princeton University Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:115a). The creation on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku is depicted on the Pot of the Seven Gods (M.D. Coe 1973:106–109).

[647] See Taube (1985) for a full discussion of the Maize God and his place in Classic Maya iconography.

[648] Examples of the Paddlers in the inscriptions of Copán represent the Old Stingray God with kin signs on his cheeks and the Old Jaguar God with akbal signs (Scheie 1987f).

[649] The alphabetic designations of god images derive from a distributional study of gods and their name glyphs in the Dresden Codex. Not wishing to presume the meaning of the names, Schellhas (1904) used the alphabet as a neutral designation system.

[650] See David Stuart (1987b:15–16).

[651] David Stuart (1988c and 1984) outlined much of the evidence linking the Serpent Bar to the symbolism of the vision rites.

[652] David Stuart (1988c) first outlined how this merging of images and functions is distributed in Maya images.

References

<biblio> 1971 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1. Oxford University. Aberle, David F.

1987 Distinguished Lecture: What Kind of Science Is Anthropology? American Anthropologist 89(3):551–566.

Adams, Richard E. W., Walter E. Brown, and T. Patrick Culbert

1981 Radar Mapping, Archaeology, and Ancient Maya Land Use. Science 213:1457- 1463.

Andrews, Anthony P.

1978 Puertos costeros del Postclásico Temprano en el norte de Yucatán. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1 1:75–93. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Andrews, Anthony P., Frank Asaro, and Pura Cervera Rivero

n.d. The Obsidian Trade at Isla Cerritos, Yucatán, México. Journal of Field Archaeology (in press).

Andrews, Anthony P., Tomás Gallareta N., Fernando Robles C., Rafael Cobos P.

1984 Isla Cerritos Archaeological Project: A Report of the 1984 Field Season, Report submitted to the Committee for Research and Exploration, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.

Andrews, Anthony P., and Fernando Robles C.

1985 Chichón Itzá and Cobá: An Itzá-Maya Standoff in Early Postclassic Yucatán. In The Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 62–72. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV

1965 Archaeology and Prehistory in the Northern Maya Lowlands: An Introduction. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 2, edited by Robert Wauchope and Gordon R. Willey, 288–330. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1973 The Development of Maya Civilization After Abandonment of the Southern Cities. In The Classic Maya Collapse, edited by T. Patrick Culbert, 243–265. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, and E. Wyllys Andrews V

1980 Excavations at Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, México. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 48. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Andrews, E. Wyllys, V

1981 Dzibilchaltún. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians 1, edited by Victoria Bricker and Jeremy A. Sabloff with the assistance of Patricia Andrews, 313–344. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Andrews, E. Wyllys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff

1986 Classic to Postclassic: A Summary Discussion. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 433–456. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Andrews, E.Wyi lys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, editors

1986a Late Lowland Maya Civilization. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Ashmore, Wendy

1981 Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by W. Ashmore. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Aulie, H. Wilbur, and Evelyn W. de Aulie

1978 Diccionario Ch’ol-Español: Español-Ch’ol. Serie de Vocabulario y Diccionarios Indígenas ‘Mariano Silva y Aceves” 21. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Ayala Falcón, Marisela

n.d. El bulto ritual de Mundo Perdido, Tikal, y los bultos mayas. A MS in the possession of the authors.

Ball, Joseph

1974a A Coordinate Approach to Northern Maya Prehistory: A.D. 700–1000. American Antiquity 39 (l):85–93.

1974b A Teotihuacán-style Cache from the Maya Lowlands. Archaeology 27:2–9.

1979 Southeastern Campeche and the Mexican Plateau: Early Classic Contact Situation. Actes du XXII Congrés International de Americanistes 8:271–280. Paris.

1983 Teotihuacán, the Maya, and Ceramic Interchange: A Contextual Perspective. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 125–146. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1986 Campeche, the Itzá, and the Postclassic: A Study in Ethnohistorical Archaeology. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 379–408. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1989 Ceramics of the Lowlands. A paper presented at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, “At the Eve of the Collapse: Ancient Maya Societies in the Eighth Century A.D.,” held on October 7–8, 1989.

Ball, Joseph, and Jennifer Taschek

1989 Teotihuacán’s Fall and the Rise of the Itzá: Realignments and Role Changes in the Terminal Classic Maya Lowlands. In Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacan: A.D. 700–900, edited by Richard Diehl and Janet Berio, 187–200. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Barrera Rubio, Alfredo

1980 Mural Paintings of the Puuc Region in Yucatán. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 173–182. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo

1980 Diccionario Maya Cordemex, Maya-Español, Español-Maya. Mérida: Ediciones Cordemex.

Baudez, Claude F., and Anne S. Dowd

1983 La decoración de Templo 18. In Introducción a la arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 447–500. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Baudez, Claude F., and Peter Mathews

1979 Capture and Sacrifice at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 31–40. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

Benavides C., Antonio

1981 Los Caminos de Coba y sus implicaciones sociales. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Berlin, Heinrich

1958 El glifo “emblema” en las inscripciones mayas. Journal de la Société des América- nistes, n.s. 47:111–119. Paris.

1959 Glifos nominales en el sarcófago de Palenque. Humanidades 2(10); 1–8. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.

1963 The Palenque Triad. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, n.s. 52:91–99. Paris.

1968. Estudios Epigraphicos II. Antropología e Historia de Guatemala, vol. xx, no. I, 13–24. Guatemala: Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala.

1970 Miscelánea palencano. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, LIX:107–135.

1973 Contribution to the Understanding of the Inscriptions of Naranjo. Bulletin de la Société Suisse des Américanistes 37:7–14. Translated by Christopher Jones.

1977 Signos y significados en las inscripciones mayas. Guatemala: Instituto Nacional del Patrimonia Cultural de Guatemala.

Berlo, Janet

1976 The Teotihuacán Trapeze and Ray Sign: A Study of the Diffusion of Symbols. M.A. thesis. Department of the History of Art, Yale University.

Bernal, Ignacio

1969 100 Masterpieces of the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Beyer, Hermann

1937 Studies of the Inscriptions of Chichón Itzá. In Contributions to American Archaeology No. 21. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 483. Washington, D.C.

Bricker, Victoria

1986 A Grammar of Mayan Hieroglyphs. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 56. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University.

n.d. The Last Gasp of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Chan Kan. In Word and Image in Maya Culture, edited by William Hanks and Don Rice. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (in press).

Brown, Kenneth L.

1977 The Valley of Guatemala: A Highland Port of Trade. In Teotihuacán and Kami- naljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact, edited by William T. Sanders and Joseph W. Michels, 1–204. The Pennsylvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Cabrera Castro. Rubén, Saburo Sugiyama, and George Cowgill

1988 Summer 1988 Discoveries at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. A paper presented at the 1988 Dumbarton Oaks Conference on “Art, Polity, and the City of Teotihuacán.”

Carlson, John

1977 Copán Altar Q: the Maya Astronomical Conference of A.D. 763? In Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony Aveni, 100–109. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Carr, H. S.

1986a Faunal Utilization in a Late Preclassic Maya Community at Cerros, Belize. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University.

1986b Preliminary Results of Analysis of Fauna. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Tol. 1, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel. 127–146. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Chase, Arlen F.

n.d. Cycles of Time: Caracol and the Maya Realm. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986, Vol. VII, edited by Merle Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase

1987a Investigations at the Classic Maya City of Caracol, Belize: 1985–1987. Pre- Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 3. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1987b Glimmers of a Forgotten Realm: Maya Archaeology at Caracol, Belize. Orlando: University of Central Florida.

Chase, Diane Z., and Arlen F. Chase

1982 Yucatec Influence in Terminal Classic Northern Belize. American Antiquity 47:- 596–614.

1986 Offerings to the Gods: Maya Archaeology at Santa Rita, Corozal. Orlando: University of Central Florida.

1989 Caracol Update: Recent Work at Caracol, Belize. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, held in Palenque, Chiapas, México, in June 1989.

Cheek, Charles

1977 Excavations at the Palangana and the Acropolis, Kaminaljuyu. Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact, edited by William 1. Sanders and Joseph W. Michels. The Pennsylvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

1983 Excavaciones el la Plaza Principal. Introducción a la Arqueología de Copón, Honduras. Tomo II, 191–290. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Cliff, Maynard B.

1986 Excavations in the Late Preclassic Nucleated Village. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 45–63. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Closs, Michael

1979 Venus in the Maya World: Glyphs, Gods and Associated Phenomena. In Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 147–172. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research Center.

1985 The Dynastic History of Naranjo: The Middle Period. In The Palenque Round Table Series, Vol. VII, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 65–78. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Coe, Michael D.

1960 Archaeological Linkages with North and South America at La Victoria, Guatemala. American Anthropologist 62:363–393.

1965 A Model of Ancient Community Structure in the Maya Lowlands. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:97–114.

1973 The Maya Scribe and His World. New York: The Grolier Club.

1978 Lords of the Underworld: Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University.

1982 Old Godsand Young Heroes: The Pearlman Collection of Maya Ceramics. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum.

Coe, William R.

1959 Piedras Negras Archaeology: Artifacts, Caches, and Burials. University Museum Monograph 18. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

1965a Tikal, Guatemala, and Emergent Maya Civilization. Science. 147:1401–1419.

1965b Tikal: Ten Years of Study of a Maya Ruin in the Lowlands of Guatemala. Expedition 8:5–56.

1967 Tikal: A Handbook of Ancient Maya Ruins. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.

Coggins, Clemency

1976 Painting and Drawing Styles at Tikal: An Historical and Iconographic Reconstruction. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

1979a A New Order and the Role of the Calendar: Some Characteristics of the Middle Classic Period at Tikal. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 38–50. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1979b Teotihuacán at Tikal in the Early Classic Period. Actes de XLI1 Congrés International des Américanistes 8:251–269. Paris.

1983 An Instrument of Expansion: Monte Alban, Teotihuacán, and Tikal. In Highland- Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 49–68. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

n.d. There’s No Place Like Hom. A paper presented at “Elite Interaction Among the Classic Maya,” a seminar held at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, October 1986.

Coggins, Clemency C., and Orrin C. Shane HI

1984 Cenote of Sacrifice: Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichén Itzá. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cortez, Constance

1986 The Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic Maya Art. M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

Cowgill, George L.

1979 Teotihuacán, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R Willey, 51–62. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Crane, C. J.

1986 Late Preelassic Maya Agriculture, Wiki Plant Utilization, and Land-Use Practices. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1. An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 147–166. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Crocker-Delataille, Lin

1985 The Maya. In Rediscovered Masterpieces of Precolumbian Art. Boulogne, France: Editions Arts 135.

Cui bert, T. Patrick

1973 The Classic Maya Collapse, edited by T. Patrick Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1977 Early Maya Development at Tikal, Guatemala. In The Origins of Maya Civilization. edited by Richard E. W. Adams, 27–43. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press.

1988 The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization. In The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, 69–101. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Davoust, M.

1977 Les chefs mayas de Chichón Itzá. A manuscript circulated by the author. Angiers, France.

1980 Les premiers chefs mayas de Chichén Itzá. Mexicon 11(2), May. Demarest, Arthur A.

1986 The Archaeology of Santa Leticia and the Rise of Maya Civilization. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 52. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Diehl, Richard A.

1981 Tula. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, gen. editor, Victoria R. Bricker; vol. editor, Jeremy A. Sabloff, with the assistance of Patricia A. Andrews, 277–295. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Diehl, Richard A., and Janet C. Berlo, editors

1989 Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacán: A.D. 700–900. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Dillon, Brian

1982 Bound Prisoners in Maya Art. Journal of New World Archaeology 5(l):24—45. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles.

Drane, John W.

1983 The Old Testament Story: An Illustrated Documentary. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Dütting, Dieter, and Anthony F. Aveni

1982 The 2 Cib 14 Mol Event in the Palenque Inscriptions. Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologic 107. Branschweig.

Edmonson, Munro

1965 Quiche-English Dictionary. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, Pub. 30. New Orleans.

1971 The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, Pub. 35. New Orleans.

1982 The Ancient Future of the Itzá: The Book of Chilam Balam ofTizimin. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1986 Heaven Born Mérida and Its Destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Eliade. Mircea

1970 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fahsen, Federico

1987 A Glyph for Self-Sacrifice in Several Maya Inscriptions. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 11. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1988a A New Early Classic Text from Tikal. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 17. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1988b Los personajes de Tikal en el Clásico Temprano: la evidencia epigráfica. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 47–60. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.

Farris, Nancy M.

1984 Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fash, Barbara

n.d. Temple 20 and the House of Bats. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, México, June 1989.

Fash, Barbara, William Fash, Sheree Lane, Rudy Larios, Linda Schele, and David Stuart

n.d. Classic Maya Community Houses and Political Evolution: Investigations of Copán Structure 22A. A paper submitted to the Journal of Eield Archaeology. September 1989.

Fash, William

1983a Classic Maya State Formation: A Case Study and Its Implications. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

1983b Deducing Social Organization from Classic Maya Settlement Patterns: A Case Study from the Copán Valley. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 261–288. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

1983c Reconocimiento y excavaciones en el valle. Introducción a la arqueología de Copán, Honduras, 229–470. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1985 La secuencia de ocupación del Grupo 9N-8, Las Sepulturas, Copán, y sus implicaciones teóricas. Yaxkin VIII:135–149. Honduras: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1986 La fachada de la Estructura 9N-82: composición, forma e iconografía. In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1989 The Sculpture Facade of Structure 9N-82: Content, Form, and Meaning. In The House of the Bacabs, edited by David Webster. Washington, D.C.; Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

n.d. A Middle Formative Cemetery from Copán, Honduras. A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 1982. Copy in possession of the authors.

Fash, William, and Linda Schele

1986 The Inscriptions of Copán and the Dissolution of Centralized Rule. A paper given at the symposium on “The Maya Collapse: The Copán Case” at the Fifty-first Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, New Orleans.

Fash, William, and David Stuart

n.d. Interaction and Historical Process in Copán. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Fialko, Vilma

1988 El Marcador de Juego de Pelota de Tikal: nuevas referencias epigráficas para el Clásico Temprano. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 61–80. Guatemala City: Asociatión Tikal.

Fields, Virginia

n.d. Political Symbolism Among the Olmecs. An unpublished paper on file, Department of Art History, University of Texas, Austin, dated 1982.

Folan, William J., Ellen R. Kintz, and Loraine A. Fletcher

1983 Cobá: A Classic Maya Metropolis. New York: Academic Press.

Folan, William J., and George E. Stuart

1977 El Proyecto Cartográfico Arqueológico de Cobá, Quintana Roo: Informes Interinos Números 1,2, y 3, Boletín de la Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán 4(22–23): 15–71.

Follett, Prescott H. F.

1932 War and Weapons of the Maya. In Middle American Papers. Middle American Research Series 4, edited by Maurice Ries, 373–410. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Foncerrada de Molina, Marta

1978 La pintura mural de Cacaxtla. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 46. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Fox, James

1984a Polyvalance in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 17–76. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.

1984b The Hieroglyphic Band in the Casa Colorada. A paper presented at the American Anthropological Association, November 17, 1984, Denver, Colorado.

n.d. Some Readings Involving Dates at Chichón Itzá. A paper presented at “The Language of the Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.

Fox, John W.

1980 Lowland to Highland Mexicanization Processes in Southern Mesoamerica. American Antiquity 45(l):43–54.

1987 Maya Postclassic State Formation: Segmentary Lineage Migration in Advancing Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1989 On the Rise and Fall of Tuldns and Maya Segmentary States. American Anthropologist 91(3):656–681.

Freidel, David A.

1978 Maritime Adaptation and the Rise of Maya Civilization: The View from Cerros, Belize. In Prehistoric Coastal Adaptations, edited by B. Stark and B. Voorhies, 239–265. New York: Academic Press.

1979 Cultural Areas and Interaction Spheres: Contrasting Approaches to the Emergence of Civilization in the Maya Lowlands. American Antiquity 44:6–54.

1981a Civilization as a State of Mind: The Cultural Evolution of the Lowland Maya. In The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by Grant D. Jones and Robert Kautz, 188–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1981b Continuity and Disjunction: Late Postclassic Settlement Patterns in Northern Yucatán. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 311- 332. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1981c The Political Economics of Residential Dispersion Among the Lowland Maya. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 371–382. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1983 Political Systems in Lowland Yucatán: Dynamics and Structure in Maya Settlement. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, 375–386. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

1985 Polychrome Facades of the Lowland Maya Preclassic. In Painted Architecture and Polychrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, edited by E. Boone, 5–30. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1985s New Light on the Dark Age: A Summary of Major Themes. In Ike Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 285–309. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1986a Terminal Classic Lowland Maya: Successes, Failures, and Aftermaths. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 409–430. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1986b Introduction. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, xiii-xxii. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

1986c The Monumental Architecture. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, 1–22. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

1987 Yaxuna Archaeological Survey: A Report of the 1986 Field Season. Dallas: Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University.

n.d. The Monumental Architecture: Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 5. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (in preparation).

Freidel, David A., and Anthony P. Andrews

n.d. The Loltun Bas-relief and the Origins of Maya Kingship. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in press).

Freidel, David A., Maria Masucci, Susan Jaeger, Robin A. Robertson

n.d. The Bearer, the Burden, and the Burnt: The Stacking Principle in the Iconography of the Late Preclassic Maya Lowlands. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, Vol. VII, edited by Merle Greene Robertson. Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press (in press).

Freidel David A., and Jeremy A. Sabloff

1984 Cozumel: Late Maya Settlement Patterns. New York: Academic Press.

Freidel, David A., and Vernon L. Scarborough

1982 Subsistence, Trade and Development of the Coastal Maya. In Maya Agriculture: Essays in Honor of Dennis E. Puleston, edited by K. V. Flannery, 131–155. New York: Academic Press.

Freidel, David A., and Linda Schele

1988a Kingship in the Late Preclassic Lowlands: The Instruments and Places of Ritual Power. American Anthropologist 90(3):547–567.

1988b Symbol and Power: A History of the Lowland Maya Cosmogram. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 44—93. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

n.d. Dead Kings and Living Mountains: Dedication and Termination Rituals of the Lowland Maya. In Word and Image in Maya Culture, edited by William Hanks and Don Rice. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (in press).

Furst, Peter T.

1976 Fertility, Vision Quest and Auto-Sacrifice: Some Thoughts on Ritual Blood-letting Among the Maya. In The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part HI: Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 211–224. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

Garber, James F.

1983 Patterns of Jade Consumption and Disposal at Cerros, Northern Belize. American Antiquity 48(4):800–807.

1986 The Artifacts. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 117–126. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Garza Tarazona de Gonzalez, Silvia, and Edward B. Kurjack

1980 Atlas arqueológico del estado de Yucatan, Tomo 1. Merida: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Gibson, Eric C., Leslie C. Shaw, and Daniel R. Finamore

1986 Early Evidence of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Kichpanha, Belize. Working Papers in Archaeology, No. 2. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Gordon, George Byron

1898 Caverns of Copán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. I (5). Cambridge.

Graham, Ian

1971 Ihe Art of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, and New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc.

1975–1986 Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Grove, David

1981 Olmec Monuments: Mutilation as a Clue to Meaning. In The Olmec and Their Neighbors: Essays in Memory of Matthew W. Stirling. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.

1986 Ancient Chalcatzingo. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Grube, Nikolai

1988 Städtegriinder und “Erste Herrscher” in Hieroglyphentexten der Klassischen Mayakultur. Archiv für Völkerkunde, 69–90. Wien: Museum für Völkerkunde.

Grube, Nikolai, and Linda Schele

1^873 U-Cit-Tok , the Last King of Copan. Copán Note 21. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1987b The Date on the Bench from Structure 9N-82, Sepulturas, Copán, Honduras. Copán Note 23. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hon- dureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988 Cu-Ix, the Fourth Ruler of Copán and His Monuments. Copán Note 40. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Grube, Nikolai, and David Stuart

1987 Observations on T110 at the Syllable ko. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing No. 8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Hamilton, Rachel

n.d. The Archaeological Mollusca of Cerros, Belize. Manuscript to be included in the final reports of the Cerros Project, dated 1988.

Hammond, Norman

1982 Unearthing the Oldest Maya. National Geographic Magazine 162:126–140.

n.d. Excavation and Survey at Nohntul, Belize, 1986. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.

Hammond, N., D. Pring, R. Wilk, S. Donaghey, F. P. Saul, E. S. Wing, A. G. Miller, and L. H. Feldman

1979 The Earliest Lowland Maya? Definition of the Swazy Phase. American Antiquity 44:92–110.

Hansen, Richard

1984 Excavations on Structure 34 and the Tigre Area, El Mirador, Petén, Guatemala: A New Look at the Preclassic Lowland Maya. A master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University.

1989 Las investigaciones del sitio Nakbe, Peten, Guatemala: Temporada 1989. A paper delivered at the Tercer Simposio del Arqueología Guatemalteca, Guatemala City, July 1989.

Harrison, Peter

1970 The Central Acropolis, Tikal, Guatemala: A Preliminary Study of the Functions of Its Structural Components During the Late Classic Period. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

1989 Architecture and Geometry in the Central Acropolis at Tikal. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, held in Palenque, Chiapas, México, in June 1989.

Haviland, William A.

1967 Stature at Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Ancient Maya Demography and Social Organization. American Antiquity 32:316–325.

1968 Ancient Lowland Maya Social Organization. In Archaeological Studies in Middle America. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 26, 93–117. New Orleans.

1977 Dynastic Genealogies from Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Descent and Political Organization. American Antiquity 42:61–67.

Healy, P. F., J. D. H. Lambert, J. T. Arnason, and R. J. Hebda

1983 Caracol, Belize: Evidence of Ancient Maya Agricultural Terraces. Journal of Field Archaeology 10:773–796.

Heyden, Doris

1981 Caves, Gods, and Myths: World-View and Planning in Teotihuacán. In Mesoamerican Sites and World-Views, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 1–37. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.

Hirth, Kenneth

1988 Beyond the Maya Frontier: Cultural Interaction and Syncretism Along the Central Honduran Corridor. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 297–334. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Hopkins, Nicholas

n.d. Classic-Area Maya Kinship Systems: The Evidence for Patrilineality. A paper presented at the Taller Maya VI, San Cristóbal, July 1982.

Hopkins, Nicholas, J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausensio Cruz Guzman

1985 Notes on the Choi Dugout Canoe. Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Vol. VI, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 325–329. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Houston, Stephen

1983 Warfare Between Naranjo and Ucanal. Contribution to Maya Hieroglyphic Decipherment I, 31–39. New Haven: HRAflex Books, Human Relations Area Files, Inc.

1984 An Example of Homophony in Maya Script. American Antiquity 49:790–805.

Houston, Stephen, and Peter Mathews

1985 The Dynastic Sequence of Dos Pilas. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 1. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart

1989 The Way Glyph: Evidence for “Co-essences” Among the Classic Maya. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 30. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Joesink-Mandevjlle, Leroy R. V., and Sylvia Meluzin

1976 Olmec-Maya Relationships: Olmec Influence in Yucatán. In Origins of Religious Art and Iconography in Preclassic Mesoamerica, edited by H. B. Nicholson, 89–105. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications and Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles.

Jones, Christopher

1969 The Twin Pyramid Group Pattern: A Classic Maya Architectural Assemblage at Tikal, Guatemala. Ph.D dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

1988 The Life and Times of Ah Cacaw, Ruler of Tikal. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphia Maya, 107–120. Guatemala: Asociación Tikal.

n.d. Patterns of Growth at Tikal. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Jones, Christopher, and Linton Satterthwaite

1982 The Monuments and Inscriptions of Tikal: The Carved Monuments. Tikal Report No. 33: Part A. University Museum Monograph 44. Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.

Jones, Tom

1985 The Xoc, the Sharke, and the Sea Dogs: An Historical Encounter. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, Vol. VII, gen. editor. Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 211–222. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Joralemon, David

1974 Ritual Blood-Sacrifice Among the Ancient Maya: Part I. Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part II, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 59–76. Pebble Beach, Calif: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

Justeson, John, and Peter Mathews

1983 The Seating of the Tun: Further Evidence Concerning a Late Preclassic Lowland Maya Stela Cult. American Antiquity 48:586–593.

Kaufman, Terrence S., and William M. Norman

1984 An Outline of Proto-Cholan Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary. In Phoneti- cism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by Lyle Campbell and John S. Justeson, 77–167. Albany: Center for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

Kelley, David

1962 Glyphic Evidence for a Dynastic Sequence at Quiriguá, Guatemala. American Antiquity 27:323–335.

1965 The Birth of the Gods at Palenque. In Estudios de Cultura Maya 5, 93–134. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

1968 Kakupacal and the Itzás. Estudios de Cultura Maya 7:255–268. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

1975 Planetary Data on Caracol Stela 3. In Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, edited by Anthony Aveni, 257–262. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1976 Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1977a A Possible Maya Eclipse Record. In Social Processes in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson. New York: Academic Press.

1977b Maya Astronomical Tables and Inscriptions. In Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony Aveni, 57–74. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1982 Notes on Puuc Inscriptions and History. In The Puuc: New Perspectives: Papers Presented at the Puuc Symposium, Central College, May 1977, Supplement, edited by Lawrence Mills. Pella, Iowa: Central College.

1983 The Maya Calendar Correlation Problem. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in the Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard Leventhal and Alan Kolata, 157–208. Albuquerque; University of New Mexico Press.

1984 The Toltec Empire in Yucatán. Quarterly Review of Archaeology 5:12–13.

Kidder, Alfred, Jesse D. Jennings, and Edwin M. Shook

1946 Excavations at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub.

561. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Kirchhoff, Paul

1943 Mesoamerica. Acta Americana 1, no. 1, 92–107.

Knorozov, Yuri

1952 Ancient Writing of Central America. An unauthorized translation from Soviet- skaya Etnografiya 3:100–118.

Kowalski, Jeff K.

1985a Lords of the Northern Maya: Dynastic History in the Inscriptions. Expedition 27(3):5O-6O.

1985b An Historical Interpretation of the Inscriptions of Uxmal. In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Vol. VI, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Elizabeth P. Benson, 235–248. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1987 The House of the Governor: A Maya Palace at Uxmal, Yucatán, México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1989 Who Am I Among the Itzá?: Links between Northern Yucatán and the Western Maya Lowlands and Highlands. In Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacán: A.D. 700–900, edited by Richard Diehl and Janet Berio, 173–186. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Kowalski, Jeff K., and Ruth Krochock

n.d. Puuc Hieroglyphs and History: A Review of Current Data. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Meetings, Chicago, November 1987.

Krochock, Ruth

1988 The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Iconography of Temple of the Four Lintels and Related Monuments, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

n.d. Dedication Ceremonies at Chichén Itzá: The Glyphic Evidence. The Sixth Round Table of Palenque. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).

Kubler, George

1969 Studies in Classic Maya Iconography. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences XVIII. Hamden: Archon Books.

1975 The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples, 2^nd ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

1976 The Double-Portrait Lintels at Tikal. Aetas del XXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia del Arte España Entre el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico. Granada.

1980 Electicism at Cacaxtla. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978. Part 2, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 163–172. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Kudlek, Manfred

1978 Solar Eclipses Visible at Tikal, -1014 to +2038. A copy of tables run in Hamburg on December 14, 1978. Copy in possession of author.

Kurjack, Edward B.

1974 Prehistoric Lowland Maya Community and Social Organization: A Case Study at Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, México. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 38. New Orleans.

Kurjack, Edward B., and E. Wyllys Andrews V

1976 Early Boundary Maintenance in Northwest Yucatán, México. American Antiquity 41:318–325.

Kurjack, Edward B., and Silvia Garza T.

1981 Pre-Columbian Community Form and Distribution in the Northern Maya Area. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by W. Ashmore, 287–309. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro

1988 Alternativas del Clásico Temprano en la relación Tikal-Teotihuacán: Grupo 6C- XVI, Tikal, Petén, Guatemala. A Dissertation for a Doctoral en Antropología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro, and Lillian Vega de Zea

1988 Aspectos dinásticos para el Clásico Temprano de Mundo Perdido, 1 ikal. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 127–141. Guatemala: Asociación Tikal. Larios, Rudy, and William Fash

1985 Excavación y restauración de un palacio de la nobleza maya de Copán. Yaxkin VIII, 11–134. Honduras: Instituto Hondereño de Antropología e Historia.

n.d. Architectural History and Political Symbolism of Temple 22, Copan. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.

Leventhal, Richard

1983 Household Groups and Classic Maya Religion. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns:. Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, 55–76. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Leyenaar, Ted J. J.

1978 Ulama: The Perpetuation in México of the Pre-Spanish Ball Game Ullamaliztli. Leiden, The Netherlands: Rijkmuseum voor Volkenkunde.

Lincoln, Charles

1980 A Preliminary Assessment of Izamal, Yucatán, Mexico. B.A. thesis, Tulane University.

1986 The Chronology of Chichón Itzá: A Review of the Literature. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 141–196. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

n.d. Dual Kingship at Chichón Itzá. A paper presented at “Chichón Itzá: Recent Advances in Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Art History,” a symposium held at the 53^rd annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, in Phoenix, Arisona, April 1988.

Linne, S.

1934 Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacán, México. The Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New Series No. 1. Stockholm.

1942 Mexican Highland Cultures. Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New Series No. 7. Stockholm.

Lizana, Fr. Bernardo de

1892 Historia Conquista Espiritual de Yucatan. El Museo Nacional de México. México: Imprenta del Museo Nacional.

Lothrop, Samuel K.

1952 Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichón Itzá, Yucatán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. X, No. 2. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Lounsbury, Floyd G.

1974 The Inscription of the Sarcophagus Lid at Palenque. Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part H, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 5–20. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

1976 A Rationale for the Initial Date of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. In The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part HI: Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 211–224. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

1978 Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy. In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulson Gillispie, XV:759–818. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

1980 Some Problems in the Interpretation of the Mythological Portion of the Hieroglyphic Text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. In Third Palenque Round ¡able, 1978, Part 2, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 99–115. Palenque Round Table Series Vol. 5. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1982 Astronomical Knowledge and Its Uses at Bonampak, México. In Archaeoastronomy in the New World, edited by A. F. Aveni, 143–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1984 Glyphic Substitutions: Homophonic and Synonymic. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 167–184. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.

1985 The Identities of the Mythological Figures in the “Cross Group” of Inscriptions at I alenque. In Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Vol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 45–58. San Francisco: Pre- Columbian Art Research Institute.

Lounsbury, Floyd G., and Michael D. Coe

1968 Linguistic and Ethnographic Data Pertinent to the “Cage” Glyph of Dresden 36c. Estudios de Cultura Maya 7:269–284. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Love, Bruce

1987 Glyph T93 and Maya “Hand-scattering” Events. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 5. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Lowe, Gareth W.

1977 The Mixe-Zoque as Competing Neighbors of the Early Lowland Maya. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 197–248. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

MacLeod, Barbara, and Dennis Puleston

1979 Pathways into Darkness: The Search for the Road to Xibalba. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Green Robertson, 71–79. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

MacNeish, Richard S.

1981 Second Annual Report of the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance. Andover, Mass.: Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.

1982 Third Annual Report of the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance. Andover, Mass.: Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.

Maler, Teobert

1901–1903 Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumasintla Valley. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University II. Cambridge.

1908–1910 Explorations of the Upper Usumasintla and Adjacent Region. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University IV. Cambridge.

Marcus, Joyce

1973 Territorial Organization of the Lowland Maya. Science 180:911–916.

1976 Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands: An Epigraphic Approach to ‘Territorial Organization. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1980 Zapotee Writing. Scientific American 242:50–64.

Marquina, Ignacio

1964 Arquitectura prehispánica. México: Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México. Martin, Paul S.

1928 Report on the Temple of the Two Lintels. In Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 2 7, 302–305. Washington, D.C.

Matheny, Ray T.

1986 Early States in the Maya Lowlands During the Late Preclassic Period: Edzna and El Mirador. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 1–44. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Precolumbian Studies.

1987 El Mirador: An Early Maya Metropolis Uncovered. National Geographic Magazine, September 1987, 317–339.

Mathews, Peter

1975 The Lintels of Structure 12, Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Northeastern Anthropological Association, Wesleyan University, October 1975.

1976 The Inscription on the Back of Stela 8, Dos Pilas, Guatemala. A paper prepared for a seminar at Yale University. Copy provided by author.

1977 Naranjo: The Altar of Stela 38. An unpublished manuscript dated August 3, 1977, in the possession of the authors.

1979 Notes on the Inscriptions of “Site Q.” Unpublished manuscript in the possession of the authors.

1980 The Stucco Text Above the Piers of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque. Maya Glyph Notes, No. 10. A manuscript circulated by the author.

1985a Maya Early Classic Monuments and Inscriptions. In A Consideration of the Early Classic Period in the Maya Lowlands, edited by Gordon R. Willey and Peter Mathews, 5–54. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

1985b Emblem Glyphs in Classic Maya Inscriptions. A paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, Denver, 1985.

1986 Late Classic Maya Site Interaction. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

1988 The Sculptures of Yaxchilán. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Yale University.

Mathews, Peter, and John S. Justeson

1984 Patterns of Sign Substitution in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing: “The Affix Cluster.” In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 212–213. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

Mathews, Peter, and Gordon Wieley

n.d. Prehistoric Polities in the Pasión Region: Hieroglyphic Texts and Their Archaeological Settings. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Maudslay, Alfred P.

1889–1902 Archaeology: Biologia Centrali-Americana. Vol. 1. London: Dulau and Co. Reprint edition, 1974, Milparton Publishing Corp.

Means, Philip Ainsworth

1917 History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzás. Papers of Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 7. Cambridge, Mass.

Miller, Arthur G.

1977 Captains of the Itzá: Unpublished Mural Evidence from Chichón Itzá. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, edited by Norman Hammond, 197–225. London: Academic Press.

1986 Maya Rulers of Time: A Study of Architectural Sculpture at Tikal, Guatemala. Los Soberanos Mayas del Tiempo: Un Estudio de la Escultura Arquitectónica de Tikal, Guatemala. Philadelphia: the University Museum.

Miller, Jeffrey

1974 Notes on a Stelae Pair Probably from Calakmul, Campeche, México. In Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part I, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 149–162. Pebble Beach, Calif: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

Miller, Mary E.

1985 A Re-examination of Mesoamerican Chacmool. The Art Bulletin LXVII:7–17.

1986a Copán: Conference with a Perished City. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by E. Benson, 72–109. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.

1986b The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1988 The Meaning and Function of the Main Acropolis, Copan. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 149–195. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Miller, Mary E., and Stephen D. Houston

1987 The Classic Maya Ballgame and Its Architectural Setting: A Study in Relations Between Text and Image. RES 14, 47–66.

Miller, Virginia

1989 Star Warriors at Chichón Itzá. In Word and Image in Maya Culture: Explorations in Language, Writing, and Representation, edited by William F. Hanks and Don S. Rice, 287–305. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Millon, René

1981 Teotihuacán: City, State, and Civilization. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, Supplement 1, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff with the assistance of P. A. Andrews, 198–243. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1988 The Last Years of Teotihuacán Dominance. In The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, 102–175. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Mitchum, B.

1986 Chipped Stone Artifacts. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Tol. I, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 105–115. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Moholy-Nagy, Hattula

1976 Spatial Distribution of Flint and Obsidian Artifacts at Tikal, Guatemala. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 91–108. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Molloy, John P., and W. L. Rathje

1974 Sexploitation Among the Late Classic Maya. In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 430–444. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Morley, Syl vanus Griswol d

1915 An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphics. New York: Dover Publications. 1975 reprint.

1920 The Inscriptions at Copan. The Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 219. Washington, D.C.

1926 The Chichén Itzá Project. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 259–273. Washington, D.C.

1927 Archaeology. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 231–240. Washington, D.C.

1935 Inscriptions at the Caracol. In The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454, edited by Karl Ruppert. Washington, D.C.

Morris, Earl H., Jean Chari ot, and Ann Axtell Morris

1931 The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Vols. 1 and 2. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 406. Washington, D.C.

Nakamura, Seiichi

1987 Proyecto Arqueológico La Entrada, Temporada 1986–1987: resultados preliminares e interacción interregional. A paper presented at IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondurena, held in La Ceiba, Altántida, Honduras, June 22–26.

Oakland, Amy

1982 Teotihuacán: The Blood Complex at Atetelco. A paper prepared for a seminar on the transition from Preclassic to Classic times, held at the University of Texas, 1982. Copy in possession of author.

Orejel, Jorge

n.d. An Analysis of the Inscriptions of the Petex Batun Region. A paper prepared for the graduate seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, University of Texas, 1988.

Pahl, Gary

1976 Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Copán: A Catalogue and Historical Commentary. Ph.D dissertation, University of California. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

Parsons, Mark

1985 Three Thematic Complexes in the Art of Teotihuacán. A paper prepared at the University of Texas. Copy in possession of author.

Pasztory, Esther

1974 The Iconography of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 15. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1976 The Murals of Tepantitla, Teotihuacán. New York: Garland Publishing. Pendergast, David M.

1971 Evidence of Early Teotihuacán-Lowland Maya Contact at Altun Ha. American Antiquity 35:455–460.

1981 Lamanai, Belize: Summary of Excavation Results 1987–1980. Journal of Field Archaeology 8(l):29–53.

1986 Stability Through Change: Lamanai, Belize, from the Ninth to the Seventeenth Century. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic. Edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 223—249. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Pohl, Mary

1983 Maya Ritual Faunas: Vertebrate Remains from Burials, Caches, Caves and Cenotes in the Maya Lowlands. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 55–103. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Pollock, H.E.D.

1970 Architectural Notes on Some Chenes Ruins. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61, edited by William R. Ballard, Jr., 1–87. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

1980 The Puuc: An Architectural Survey of the Hill Country of Yucatán and Northern Campeche, Mexico. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 19. Cambridge.

Pollock, H.E.D., Ralph L. Roys, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and A. Ledyard Smith

1962 Mayapán, Yucatán, Mexico. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 619. Washington, D.C.

Potter, David F.

1977 Maya Architecture of the Central Yucatán Peninsula. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 44. New Orleans.

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana

1950 A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 593. Washington, D.C.

1960 Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American Antiquity 25:454–475.

1961a Lords of the Maya Realm. Expedition 4(1):14—21.

1961b Portraits of Women in Maya Art. Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, edited by Samuel K. Lothrop and others, 81–99. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1963–1964 Historical Data in the Inscriptions of Yaxchilán, Parts I and II. Estudios de Cultura Maya 3:149–167 and 4:177–201. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1970 On Two Inscriptions at Chichón Itzá. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 67, edited by William R. Ballard, Jr., 459—467. Cambridge.

1973 The Hand-Grasping-Fish and Associated Glyphs on Classic Maya Monuments. In Mesoamerican Writing Systems, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 165–178. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Puleston, Dennis

1976 The People of the Cayman/Crocodile: Riparian Agriculture and the Origins of Aquatic Motifs in Ancient Maya Iconography. \n Aspects of Ancient Maya Civilization, edited by François-Auguste de Montequin, 1–26. Saint Paul: Hamline University.

1977 The Art and Archaeology of Hydraulic Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, edited by Norman Hammond, 449–469. London: Academic Press.

1979 An Epistemological Pathology and the Collapse, or Why the Maya Kept the Short Count. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 63–71. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rathje, William L.

1971 The Origin and Development of Lowland Classic Maya Civilization. American Antiquity 36(3):275–85.

Rattray, Evelyn

1986 A Gulf Coast-Maya Enclave at Teotihuacán. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.

Recinos, Adrian

1950 Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya. Translated by Delia Goetz and S. G. Morley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rice, Don S.

1986 The Peten Postclassic: A Settlement Perspective. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 301–344. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Ricketson, Oliver G., Jr.

1925 Report on the Temple of the Four Lintels. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 24, 267–69. Washington, D.C.

Ricketson, Oí iver G., and Edith B. Ricketson

1937 Uaxactún, Guatemala: Group E 1926–1931. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 477. Washington, D.C.

Riese, Berthold

1984 Hei hieroglyphs. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 263–286. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

1988 Epigraphy of the Southeast Zone in Relation to Other Parts of Mesoamerica. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 67–94. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

n.d. Notes on the Copan Inscriptions. On file in the archives of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan, Copán, Honduras.

Riese, Ber thold, and Claude F. Baudez

1983 Esculturas del las Estructuras 10L-2 y 4. In Introducción a la Arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 143–190. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Robertson, Merle Greene

1972 The Ritual Bundles of Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the symposium on “The Art of Latin America,” Tulane University, New Orleans. Copy in possession of author.

1979 An Iconographic Approach to the Identity of the Figures on the Piers of the Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IT edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 129–138. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

1983 The Temple of the Inscriptions. The Sculpture of Palenque, Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Robertson, Robin

1983 Functional Analysis and Social Process in Ceramics: The Pottery from Cerros, Belize. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 105–142. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

n.d. Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, The Ceramics. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (forthcoming).

Robertson, Robin A., and David A. Freidel, editors

1986 Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I, An Interim Report. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Robiscek, Francis, and Donald Hales

1981 The Maya Book of the Dead. The Ceramic Codex. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Museum. Distributed by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Robles C., Fernando

1980 La secuencia cerámica de la región de Cobá, Quintana Roo. M.A. thesis, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, D.F.

Robles C., Fernando, and Anthony P. Andrews

1986 A Review and Synthesis of Recent Postclassic Archaeology in Northern Yucatán. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 53–98. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Rovner, Irwin

1976 Pre-Columbian Maya Development of Utilitarian Lithic Industries: The Broad Perspective from Yucatán. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 41–53. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Roys, Ralph L.

1943 The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatán. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 548. Washington, D.C.

1957 The Political Geography of the Yucatán Maya. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 613. Washington, D.C.

1962 Literary Sources for the History of Mayapán. In Mayapán, Yucatan, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 619. Washington, D.C.

1965 Ritual of the Bacabs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1967 The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Ruppert, Karl

1935 The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454. Washington, D.C.

1952 Chichén Itzá, Architectural Notes and Plans. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub. 595. Washington, D.C.

Ruz Lhuillier, Alberto

1955 Exploraciones en Palenque 1952. In Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia VT.82–110. México; Secretaria de Pública.

1973 El Templo de las Inscripciones. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Colección Científica, Arqueología 7. México.

Sabloff, Jeremy A., and E. Wyllys Andrews V

1986 Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Sabloff, Jeremy A., and Gordon R. Willey

1967 The Collapse of Maya Civilization in the Southern Lowlands: A Consideration of History and Process. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 23(4):311–336.

Sanders, William T., and Joseph W. Michels, eds.

1977 Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact. The Penn- svlvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Santley, Robert S.

1983 Obsidian Trade and Teotihuacán Influence in Mesoamerica. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 69–124. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Sato, Etsuo

1987 Resultados preliminares del análisis de la cerámica en el Valle de La Venta, La Entrada. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

Scarborough, Vernon L.

1983 A Late Preclassic Water System. American Antiquity 48:720–744.

1986 Drainage Canal and Raised Field Excavations. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 75–87. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Scarborough, V. L., B. Mitchum, H. S. Carr, and D. A. Freidel

1982 Two Late Preclassic Ballcourts at the Lowland Maya Center of Cerros, Northern Belize. Journal of Field Archaeology 9:21–34.

Schele, Linda

1976 Accession Iconography of Chan-Bahlum in the Group of the Cross at Palenque. The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part III. Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 9–34. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

1979 Genealogical Documentation in the Tri-Figure Panels at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 41–70. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

1981 Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1982 Maya Glyphs: The Verbs. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1983a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by E. P. Benson, 7–48. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1983b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1984a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by Elizabeth Boone, 7–49. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1984b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1985a Balan-Ahau: A Possible Reading of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a Title at Palenque. Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Tol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 59–65. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1985b Some Suggested Readings of the Event and Office of Heir-Designate at Palenque. Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, 287–307. Albany: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

1985c The Hauberg Stela: Bloodletting and the Mythos of Classic Maya Rulership. In Fifth Palenque Round Table 1983, Fol. VII. gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 135–151. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1986a Architectural Development and Political History at Palenque. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 110–138. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.

1986b The Founders of Lineages at Copan and Other Maya Sites. Copán Note 8. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies. University of Texas.

1986d Yax-K’uk’-Mo’ at Copán: Lineage Founders and Dynasty at Ancient Maya Cities. Copón Note 8. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987a A Possible Death Date for Smoke-Imix-God K. Copón Note 26. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987b Stela I and the Founding of the City of Copán. Copón Note 30. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987c The Reviewing Stand of Temple 11. Copón Note 32. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987d Notes on the Rio Amarillo Altars. Copón Note 37. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987e Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1987f New Data on the Paddlers from Copán Stela 7. Copón Note 29. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988a Altar F’ and the Structure 32. Copón Note 46. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988b The Xibalba Shuffle: A Dance After Death. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 294—317. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1989a A House Dedication on the Harvard Bench at Copán. Copón Note 51. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1989b The Numbered-Katun Titles of Yax-Pac. Copón Note 65. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1989c Some Further Thoughts on the Copán-Quiriguá Connection. Copón Note 67. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

n.d.a House Names and Dedication Rituals at Palenque. In Visions and Revisions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (in press).

n.d.b The Demotion of Chac-Zutz’: Lineage Compounds and Subsidiary Lords at Palenque. In the Sixth Round Table of Palenque, gen. ed., Merle Green Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).

n.d.c The Tlaloc Heresy: Cultural Interaction and Social History. A paper given at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

n.d.d Blood-letting: A Metaphor for “Child” in the Classic Maya Writing System. A manuscript prepared in 1980 for an anthology in honor of Floyd G. Lounsbury.

n.d.e Brotherhood in Ancient Maya Kingship. A paper presented at the SUNY, Albany, conference on “New Interpretation of Maya Writing and Iconography,” held October 21–22, 1989.

Schele, Linda, and David Freidel

n.d. The Courts of Creation: Ballcourts, Ballgames, and Portals to the Maya Other- world. In The Mesoamerican Ballgame, edited by David Wilcox and Vernon Scarborough. Tucson: University of Arizona Press (in press).

Schele, Linda, and Nikolai Grube

1987a The Brother of Yax-Pac. Copan Note 20. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988 The Father of Smoke-Shell. Copón Note 39. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Schele, Linda, Nikolai Grube, and David Stuart

1989 The Date of Dedication of Ballcourt III at Copán. Copán Note 59. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Schei e, Linda, and Peter Mathews

n.d. Royal Visits Along the Usumacinta. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Schele, Linda, Peter Mathews, and Floyd Lounsbury

n.d. Parentage Expressions from Classic Maya Inscriptions. Manuscript dated 1983.

Schele, Linda, and Jeffrey H. Miller

1983 The Mirror, the Rabbit, and the Bundle: Accession Expressions from the Classic Maya Inscriptions. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller

1986 The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Schele, Linda, and David Stuart

1986a Te-tun as the Glyph for “Stela.” Copón Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986b The Chronology of Altar U. Copón Note 3. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c Paraphrase of the Text of Altar U. Copón Note 5. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Schele, Linda, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, and Floyd Lounsbury

1989 A New Inscription from Temple 22a at Copán. Copán Note 57. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Schellhas, Paul

1904 Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 4(1). Cambridge.

Seler, Eduard

1911 Die Stuckfassade von Acanceh in Yucatán. In Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 47:1011–1025.

Service, Ei man R.

1975 Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Sharer, Robert J.

1988 Early Maya Kingship and Polities. A paper presented a the IV Texas Symposium, “Early Maya Hieroglyphic Writing and Symbols of Rulership: The Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence for Maya Kingship and Polities,” March 10, 1988. Austin: the University of Texas.

Sheets, Payson D.

1976 The Terminal Preclassic Lithic Industry of the Southeast Maya Highlands: A Component of the Proto-Classic Site-Unit Intrusions in the Lowlands? In Mava Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 55–69. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Shook, Edwin M.

1958 The Temple of the Red Stela. Expedition l(l):26–33.

Sisson, Edward B.

1973 First Annual Report of the Coxcatlan Project. Tehuacán Project Report No 3. Andover, Mass.: R. S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.

Smith, A. Ledyard

1950 Uaxactún, Guatemala: Excavations of 1931—1937. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 588. Washington, D.C.

Sosa, John, and Dorie Reents

1980 Glyphic Evidence for Classic Maya Militarism. Belizean Studies 8(3):2-ll. Spjnden, Herbert J.

1913 A Study of Maya Art, Its Subject Matter and Historical Development. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, EL Cambridge.

Spuhler, James N.

1985 Anthropology, Evolution, and “Scientific Creationism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 14:103–133.

Stephens, John L., and Frederick Catherwood

1841 Incidents of Travels in Central American, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Harper and Brothers, New York. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Stone, Andrea, Dorie Reents, and Robert Coeiman

1985 Genealogical Documentation of the Middle Classic Dynasty of Caracol, El Cayo, Belize. In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. FI, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 267–276. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Storey, Rebecca

1987 Mortalidad durante el Clásico Tardío en Copán y El Cajón. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

Strómsvik, Gustav

1952 The Ball Courts at Copan. Contributions to American Anthropology and History 55:185–222. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Stuart, David

1984a Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. RES 7/8, 6–20.

1984b Epigraphic Evidence of Political Organization in the Usumacinta Drainage. Unpublished manuscript in possession of the authors.

1985a The Inscription on Four Shell Plaques from Piedras Negras, Guatemala. In The Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 175–184. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1985b A New Child-Father Relationship Glyph. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, 1 & 2, 7–8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1986a The Hieroglyphic Name of Altar U. Copan Note 4. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986b The Chronology of Stela 4 at Copán. Copán Note 12. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c The Classic Maya Social Structure: Titles, Rank, and Professions as Seen from the Inscriptions. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

1986d The “Lu-bat” Glyph and its Bearing on the Primary Standard Sequence. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya,” a conference held in Guatemala City in August 1986.

1986e A Glyph for “Stone Incensario.” Copán Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987a Nuevas interpretaciones de la historia dinástica de Copán. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureño, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

1987b Ten Phonetic Syllables. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 14. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1988a Letter dated February 10, 1988, circulated to epigraphers on the ihtah and itz’in readings.

1988b Letter to author dated March 8, 1988, on the iknal/ichnal reading.

1988c Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 175–221. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

n.d. Kinship Terms in Mayan Inscriptions. A paper prepared for “The Language of Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.

Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, and Linda Schele

1989 A New Alternative for the Date of the Sepulturas Bench. Copan Note 61. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, Linda Schele, and Floyd Lounsbury

1989 Stela 63: A New Monument from Copán. Copán Note 56. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, David, and Stephen Houston

n.d. Classic Maya Place Names. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Stuart, David, and Linda Schele

1986a Yax-K’uk’-Mo’, the Founder of the Lineage of Copán. Copán Note 6. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1986b Interim Report on the Hieroglyphic Stair of Structure 26. Copán Note 17. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, George

n.d. Search and Research: An Historical and Bibliographic Survey. In Ancient Maya Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press (in preparation).

Stuart, George, and Grant Jones

n.d. Can Ek and the Itzas: New Discovered Documentary Evidence. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in preparation).

Sugiyama, Saburo

1989 Burials Dedicated to the Old Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacán, México. American Antiquity 54(l):85–106.

Taladoire, Eric

1981 Les terrains de jeu de balle (mesoamérique et sud-oest des Etats-Unis). Etudes Mesoaméricaines Série 11:4, Mission Archaeologique et Ethnologique Française au Mexique.

Tambiah, Stanley J.

1977 The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 293:69–97.

Tate, Carolyn

1985 Las mujeres de la nobleza de Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Internacional de Mayistes,” a conference held in Mexico, D.F.

1986a The Language of Symbols in the Ritual Environment at Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

1986b Summer Solstice Ceremonies Performed by Bird Jaguar III of Yaxchilán, Chiapas, Mexico. Estudios de Cultura Maya XVI:85–112. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

Taube, Karl

1985 The Classic Maya Maize God: A Reappraisal. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, Vol. VII, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 171–181. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1988a A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel. Journal of Anthropomorphic Research 44-- 183–203.

1988b A Study of Classic Maya Scaffold Sacrifice. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 331–351. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

n.d. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Cult of Sacred War at Teotihuacán. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.

Tedlock, Dennis

1985 Popo! Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of God and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Thompson, J. Eric S.

1934 Sky Bearers, Colors and Directions in Maya and Mexican religion. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 436, Contribution 10. Washington, D.C.

1937 A New System for Deciphering Yucatecan Dates with Special Reference to Chichón Itzá. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 483, Contribution 22 Washington, D.C.

1938 The High Priest’s Grave. Chicago: Field Museum of Chicago.

1944 The Fish as a Maya Symbol for Counting. Theoretical Approaches to Problems No.2. Cambridge, Mass.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Division of Historical Research.

1950 Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 589. Washington, D.C.

1961 A Blood-Drawing Ceremony Painted on a Maya Vase. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1:13–20. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1962 A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1970a Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1970b The Bacabs: Their Portraits and Glyphs. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61 edited by William R. Bullard, Jr. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

1971 Maya Hieroglyhic Writing: An Introduction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1977 The Hieroglyphic Texts of Las Monjas and Their Bearing on Building Activities. In Las Monjas by John Bolles. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Thompson, J. E. S., H. E. D. Pollock, and J. Charlot

1932 A Preliminary Study of the Ruins of Coba, Quintana Roo. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 424. Washington, D.C.

Tozzer, Al fred M.

1941 Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. XVIII. Reprinted with permission of the original publishers by Kraus Reprint Corporation. New York, 1966.

1957 Chichón Itzá and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporaneous Maya and Toltec. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, XI and XII. Cambridge.

Turner, B. L., II

1983 Comparison of Agrotechnologies in the Basin of Mexico and Central Maya Lowlands: Formative to the Classic Maya Collapse. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G.Miller, 13–47. Washington, D C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Turner, B. L., II, and Peter D. Harrison

1981 Prehistoric Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Pulltrouser Swamp, Northern Belize. Science 213:399–405.

Valdés, Juan Antonio

1987 Uaxactún: recientes investigaciones. Mexican 8(6):125–128.

1988 Los mascarones Preclássicos de Uaxactún: el caso del Grupo H. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphía Maya, 165–181. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.

Vlchek, David T., Silvia Garza de Gonzál ez, and Edward B. Kurjack

1978 Contemporary Farming and Ancient Maya Settlements: Some Disconcerting Evidence. In Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, edited by Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, 211–223. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Vogt, Evon Z.

1964 The Genetic Model and Maya Cultural Development. In Desarollo Cultural de los Mayas, edited by E. Z. Vogt and A. Ruz, 9–48. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1976 Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

n.d. Indian Crosses and Scepters: The Results of Circumscribed Spanish-Indian Interactions in Mesoamerica. A paper presented at “Word and Deed: Interethnic Images and Responses in the New World,” a conference held in Trujillo, Spain, December 12–16, 1988.

Walker, Debra S.

n.d. A Context for Maya Ritual at Cerros, Belize. A paper presented at the Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Austin, Texas, March 21, 1986.

Wauchope, Robert

1938 Modern Maya Houses: A Study of Their Significance. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 502. Washington, D.C.

Webster, David

1976 Defensive Earthworks at Becan, Campeche, Mexico: Implications for Maya Warfare. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 41. New Orleans.

1977 Warfare and the Evolution of Maya Civilization. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 335–371. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

1979 Cuca, Chacchob, Dzonot Ake: Three Walled Northern Maya Centers. Occasional Papers in Anthropology Number 11. Department of Anthropology. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University.

1985 Recent Settlement Survey in the Copán Valley, Copán, Honduras. Journal of New World Archaeology V(4):39–63.

Webster, David L., William L. Fash, and Elliot M. Abrams

1986 Excavaciones en el Conjunto 9N8: Patio A (Operación VIII). In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Willey, Gordon R.

1972 The Artifacts of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Tol. 64(1). Cambridge.

1974 The Classic Maya Hiatus: A Rehearsal for the Collapse? In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 417—130. London: Duckworth.

1978 Excavations at Scibal, Department of Peten, Guatemala, Number 1, Artifacts. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Vol. 14. Cambridge.

Willey, Gordon, and Richard Leventhal

1979 Prehistoric Settlement at Copán. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 75–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Williamson, Richard, Donna Stone, and Alfonso Morales

1989 Sacrifice and War Iconography in the Main Group, Copán, Honduras. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.

Wisdom, Charles

1940 The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

n.d. Materials on the Chorti Languages. Collection of Manuscripts of the Middle American Cultural Anthropology, Fifth Series, No. 20. Microfilm, University of Chicago.

Wren, Linea

n.d. Elite Interaction During the Terminal Classic Period of the Northern Maya Lowlands: Evidence from the Reliefs of the North Temple of the Great Ballcourt at Chichón Itzá. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, editors

1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Zavala, Lauro José

1951 Informe personal de exploraciones arqueológicas: segunda temporada 1950. An unpublished report provided by Alberto Ruz Lhull. </biblio>

Index

<biblio> agriculture. 39–40, 56, 62, 93–94, 255. 433–434. 439

at Copan, 321–322. 336, 488 raised-field, 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433

swidden, 39

ahau, 17, 20, 21, 45, 53–54, 57, 58,

115. 419, 423, 436 ahauob, see kings; nobility Ah-Bolon-Tun, king of Seibal. 387–389, 393, 505

Ah-Cacaw, king of Tikal. 184,

195–212, 413, 451. 461, 462–466 accession of, 208 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 202 Calakmul vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213 costumes worn by, 209–211 in dedication rituals, 197 203, 205, 206–211. 462–465

height of, 195. 198, 462 name glyph of, 462

ritual performances of, 202–203, 209 son of, 214. 466

stelae of, 204–205, 213, 486 tomb of, 205. 214. 466 war captives of, 205–206, 211, 212, 215, 457

altars, 386, 389, 506

at Caracol, 171, 173, 456, 464 at Copan, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337, 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 491–492, 493–194

Altun Ha, 159, 505

ancestor cartouches, 372, 393, 479, 503 ancestors, 26, 39, 57, 84, 153, 202–203, 207. 275, 307, 394, 395, 506 founding, 85, 87, 116, 140–141, 159–160, 222, 256–257, 271, 310–313, 431, 432, 470 as orchards, 217, 221 relics of, 135, 463 on stelae, 141, 441

Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–76, 101, 114–116, 124, 125. 142. 226, 243, 245, 425, 429, 434, 436, 454, 473

bailgame of, 74–75, 76. 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488

as kingship prototypes, 115–116, 211. 239, 316, 376, 488

symbols of, 114–115, 125, 245

Andrews, Anthony P., 498

Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, 495, 496

Argurcia, Ricardo. 490

armor, cotton, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502

astronomy, 73, 76, 78. 81, 98, 276. 425, 480

Difference between revisions of "User talk:NonZeroSum"

Latest revision as of 10:30, 26 October 2025

Navigation menu

Personal tools

Namespaces

Variants

Views

More

Search

Navigation

Tools

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-#title The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought
+#title A Forest of Kings
-#author Gary Chartier & Chad Van Schoelandt
+#subtitle The untold story of the ancient Maya
-#date August 1, 2022
+#author Linda Schele
-#source <[[https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Anarchy-and-Anarchist-Thought/Chartier-VanSchoelandt/p/book/9780367645786 2021][routledge.com]]>
+#date 1990
-#isbn 9780367645786
+#source <[[https://archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche][www.archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche]]>
 #lang en
-#pubdate 2024-09-02T14:00:33
+#pubdate 2025-10-25T12:03:08
-#topics anarchism, politics, philosophy
+#topics Mayas, history, kings, rulers, half-finished error-correcting, anthropology, ritual, religion,
-#cover g-c-gary-chartier-chad-van-schoelandt-the-routledg-1.jpg
+#cover l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-1.jpg
+#notes Half the images still need cropping and adding, and there are likely some machine errors that still need fixing.
-** [Front Matter]
+ Also by Linda Schele
-*** [Praise for this book]
+<center>
+Maya Glyphs: The Verbs (1982)
-<quote>
+<br>
-This splendid collection invites us to look at the idea of anarchy and anarchism from a remarkable range of perspectives: historical, anthropological, and economic, as well as political and philosophical. The individual essays are invariably insightful, often provocative, and sometimes surprising for what they tell us about how people have managed to order their collective lives without turning to political authority. The volume as a whole has as much to offer those familiar with anarchist traditions as others coming to these ideas for the first time.
-<right>
+The Blood of Kings:
-Chandran Kukathas, Singapore Management University
-</right>
-</quote>
-<quote>
+Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986)
-This Handbook surveys the history of anti-authoritarian answers to the basic questions of political philosophy. But the introduction and selections—notable for their clarity, precision, and expertise— also apply various forms of liberatory politics to concrete matters in the contemporary world, including climate change, mass incarceration, military technologies, and even transhumanism. The Handbook embodies a coherent, unified account of its subject-matter, demonstrating the continued relevance of a fundamentally challenging tradition. The provocations this potentially controversial volume offers, especially when protesters around the world are chanting ‘abolish the police,’ could not be more timely.
-<right>
+with Mary Ellen Miller
-Crispin Sartwell, Dickinson College
+</center>
-</right>
-</quote>
-<quote>
+ Title Page | ~~
-The history and prospects of anarchism are misunderstood—and often misrepresented. There is a renewed interest in questioning the size and function of the coercive state, and mistrust of attempts at reform is growing. Surprisingly, there have been very few attempts to take stock of this broad, and sometimes contradictory, body of thought. The Handbook is the right book at the right time. Scholarly enough to be used by philosophers and political theorists, it is also a delightful and intellectually challenging resource for anyone who wants to understand anarchism as a movement.
-<right>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-37.jpg 70f]]
-Michael Munger, Duke University
-</right>
-</quote>
-<quote>
+<center>
-This Handbook is an important and timely contribution to a vitally necessary discussion. New pressures on our inherited political institutions are distorting them in undesirable ways, whether these pressures come from climate change, from the growth of international corporate power, from truly global pandemics, or from globe-spanning terror networks. How can we arrange our political and social affairs such that they enhance human life while simultaneously avoiding or containing the horrific effects of inappropriate modes of organization? This volume offers a wide range of suggestions for our careful consideration.
+A
-<right>
+Forest
-John T. Sanders, Rochester Institute of Technology
-</right>
-</quote>
-<quote>
+of
-Too much contemporary political philosophy still pays too little attention to anarchist thought. That neglect has always been surprising, not least because no other body of literature so comprehensively explores and challenges the theoretical and empirical foundations of coercive forms of hierarchy and their associated conceptions of justice and authority. Nowhere is the breadth and analytical depth of the anarchist tradition better represented than in the contributions to this Handbook.
-<right>
+Kings
-Hillel Steiner, University of Manchester
-</right>
-</quote>
-*** [Synopsis]
+------
-<center>
+The Untold Story of
-THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
-<br>ANARCHY AND ANARCHIST THOUGHT
-</center>
-This Handbook offers an authoritative, up-to-date introduction to the rich scholarly conversation about anarchy—about the possibility, dynamics, and appeal of social order without the state. Drawing on resources from philosophy, economics, law, history, politics, and religious studies, it is designed to deepen understanding of anarchy and the development of anarchist ideas at a time when those ideas have attracted increasing attention.
+the Ancient Maya
-The popular identification of anarchy with chaos makes sophisticated interpretations—which recognize anarchy as a kind of social order rather than an alternative to it—especially interesting. Strong, centralized governments have struggled to quell popular frustration even as doubts have continued to percolate about their legitimacy and long-term financial stability. Since the emergence of the modern state, concerns like these have driven scholars to wonder whether societies could flourish while abandoning monopolistic governance entirely.
+-------
-Standard treatments of political philosophy frequently assume the justifiability and desirability of states, focusing on such questions as What is the best kind of state? and What laws and policies should states adopt?, without considering whether it is just or prudent for states to do anything at all. This Handbook encourages engagement with a provocative alternative that casts more conventional views in stark relief.
+Linda Schele
-Its 30 chapters, written specifically for this volume by an international team of leading scholars, are organized into four main parts:
+and
-     I. Concept and Significance
+David Freidel
-     II. Figures and Traditions
+<br>
-     III. Legitimacy and Order
+Color photographs
-     IV. Critique and Alternatives
+by Justin Kerr
-In addition, a comprehensive index makes the volume easy to navigate and an annotated bibliography points readers to the most promising avenues of future research.
+<br>
-Gary Chartier is Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of seventeen books, including Anarchy and Legal Order (2013), Flourishing Lives: Exploring Natural Law Liberalism (2019), and The Logic of Commitment (2018).
+WILLIAM MORROW
-Chad Van Schoelandt is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. His work has been published in Ethics, Analysis, Philosophical Studies, the Philosophical Quarterly, and Law and Philosophy.
+AND COMPANY, INC.
-<br>
+New York
+</center>
-*** [Title Page]
+ Copyright | ~~
 <center>
-THE ROUTLEDGE
+Copyright © 1990 by Linda Scheie and David Freidel
-<br>HANDBOOK OF ANARCHY
-<br>AND ANARCHIST
-<br>THOUGHT
-Edited by Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt
+<br>
-Routledge
+All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any<br> form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,<br> recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without<br> permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to<br> Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue<br> of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.
-</center>
-Taylor & Francis Croup
+<br>
-*** [Copyright]
+It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and<br> affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to<br> print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end.
-<center>
+<br>
-NEW YORK AND LONDON
-</center>
-First published 2021
-<br>by Routledge
-<br>52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
-and by Routledge
+Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data<br> Scheie. Linda.
-<br>2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
-<center>
+A forest of kings : the untold story of the ancient Maya / Linda Scheie and<br> David Freidel.
-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
-</center>
-© 2021 Taylor & Francis
+p. cm.
-The right of Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
+Includes bibliograpical references (p. ).<br> ISBN 0-688-07456-1
-<br>the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
-<br>Designs and Patents Act 1988.
-All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
+. Mayas—Kings and rulers. 2. Mayas—History. I. Freidel.<br> David A. II. Title
-<br>mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
-<br>information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
-Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
+F1435.3.K55S34 1990 90–5809
-<br>identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
-Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
+.01—dc20 CIP
-<br>A catalog record for this title has been requested
-ISBN: 978-1-138-73758-7 (hbk)
+Printed in the United States of America
-ISBN: 978-1-315-18525-5 (ebk)
+First Edition
-Typeset in Bembo
+5 6 7 8 9 10
-<br>by River Editorial Ltd, Devon, UK
-*** [Dedication]
+<sub>BOOK DESIGN BY RICHARD ORIOLO</sub>
-<center>
-For
-<br>Alicia Homer
-<br>and
-<br>Wendy Cobb
 </center>
-<br>
+ Credits for Illustrations
-*** Contents
+<biblio>
+FIGS. 5:12, 5:13, 5:14, 5:15, 5:16, 5:17, 5:18 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions.</em> Volume 2, Part 1, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1675 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Contributors xii
+FIGS. 5:8b-e, 5:11 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 2, Part 2, Naranjo, Chunhuitz, Xunantunich. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Acknowledgments xviii
+FIG. 4:5 Eric Von Euw and Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 2, Xultún, La Honradez, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Introduction 1
+FIGS. 4:13, 4:15, 4:20 Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 3, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt
+FIGS. 7:1, 7:2, 7:9b-c, 7:10, 7:11, 7:12, 7:13 (map only), 7:14, 7:15, 7:16, 7:20 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw. <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 1, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-PART I
+FIGS. 2:14, 7:5b,d,f, 7:6a,c-d. 7:13a-c, 7:15, 7:17, 7:18 Ian Graham. <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 2, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Concept and Significance 13
+FIGS. 7:4 (Lintel 23 only), 7:7, 7:9a Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 3, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Anarchism, Anarchists, and Anarchy 15
+FIG. 10:5 Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 2, Part 3, Ixkún, Ucanal, Ixtutz, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Paul McLaughlin
+FIG. 10:8b Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 1, Xultún. Peabodx Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-The Anarchist Landscape 28
+FIG. 10:12a Samuel Lothrop, Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itza, Yucatán. <em>Memoirs of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.</em> Volume 10, Number 2. Copyright © 1952 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-Roderick T. Long
+FIGS. 10:5, 10:6b Ian Graham. Archaeological Explorations in El Petén, Guatemala. <em>Middle American Research Institution, Tulane University,</em> Publication 33
-On the Distinction Between State and Anarchy 39
+FIG. 5:4 (Caracol Altar 21) Courtesy of Arlen and Diane Chase; and Stephen Houston
-Christopher W. Morris
+FIG. 5:21 Courtesy of Peter Harrison
-Methodological Anarchism 53
+FIGS. 6:3, 6:5. 6:8, 10:7a Courtesy of Merle Greene Robertson
-Jason Lee Byas and Billy Christmas
+FIG. 7:6 Courtesy of Carolyn Tate
-What Is the Point of Anarchism? 76
+FIGS. 9:2, 9:3 Courtesy of Justin Kerr
-Aeon J. Skoble
+FIG. 10:9 Courtesy of Peter Mathews
-PART II
+FIG. 10:11 Courtesy of Ruth Krochock
-Figures and Traditions 81
+All drawings in Chapter 8 are published courtesy of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia
+</biblio>
-Anarchism against Anarchy: The Classical Roots of Anarchism 83
+ This Book is Dedicated to
-Stephen R. L. Clark
+<center>
+Floyd Lounsbury
-Kant on Anarchy 99
+<em>and</em>
-Oliver Sensen
+Gordon Willey
+</center>
-Barbarians in the Agora: American Market Anarchism, 1945—2011 112
+ Acknowledgments
-J. Martin Vest
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-38.jpg 70f]]
-Rights, Morality, and Egoism in Individualist Anarchism 126
+We wish to acknowledge the many people who helped us with the ideas presented in <em>A Forest of Kings</em> and contributed to its writing and production. First and foremost is Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor and vice-president of William Morrow and Company. When she called Linda Scheie in the spring of 1986 about writing a book on the Maya for Morrow, she opened a world to us we never imagined we would or could know. She saw potential in our ideas and believed we could learn how to write for a larger audience. Throughout the process of writing, she has always been sensitive to our fears and trepidations, enthusiastic about how the work was going, merciless in breaking through the limits in our imagination, and encouraging in all things. In short, she saw something in us we did not know was there, and without her exuberant encouragement and support, we might not have tried a book of this scope or ambition. We wish to thank her also for finding Joy Parker, the third and unseen hand in this book. Much of its eloquence and readability comes from her subtle touch.
-Eric Mack
+The manuscript was written using <em>Nota Bene</em> by Dragonfly Software as the primary word processor. For those interested in how collaborative writing and research worked between us, it varied from chapter to chapter, but it always required goodwill and respect from all the participants. A few of the chapters, in their first draft versions, were written sitting together in front of the computer; but most of the time, one of us structured the first draft alone and then mailed it on disk to the other, who rewrote, adapted, added, or deleted material at will in a process we called “massaging the text.” The text went back and forth between both authors until each chapter became a true fusion of our different viewpoints and specialities.
-Transcending Leftist Politics: Situating Egoism within the Anarchist Project 139
+Joy Parker, a professional writer who knew nothing about the Maya before she began, was commissioned to help us make the thick academese of the first version readable to a nonacademic audience. To begin her task, she flew to Austin to meet us and to tape three days of questions, answers, and just talking about the Maya world. Using these tapes, she tore into our text, learning <em>Note Bene</em> and how to use a computer as she went. She reworked each chapter in turn, clarifying the prose, cutting redundancy, and to our surprise, often asking for more detail to the text.
-David S. D’Amato
+The idea of including vignettes in the book was inspired by Gordon Willey. At a School of American Research seminar on Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya civilization held in Santa Fe in 1982, Professor Willey entertained the group with a wonderful fictional account of the last days of the royal court at Seibal. The vignette was taken by Jeremy A. Sabloff and David Freidel and prepared as a little in-house publication for distribution at Professor Willey’s retirement celebration. Neither Professor Willey’s career nor the idea of vignettes stopped there. Jeremy Sabloff has pursued the vignette concept in subsequent publications and so have we. The original draft of <em>A Forest of Kings</em> had one vignette in it—and Joy asked for more ... and more ... and more. To our astonishment, they worked and we became as enthusiastic about them as she.
-De Facto Monopolies and the Justification of the State 152
+When she was done with her version of the text, she sent it to Freidel, who answered her questions, made his corrections, and then passed it on to Scheie. Having a nonspecialist as a writing partner is a wonderful barometer of clarity: When the text came back to us scrambled, we knew we hadn’t explained things right in the first place. When necessary, a chapter was passed through the loop several times. <em>Nota Bene’s</em> redlining feature proved an invaluable tool in this process.
-Ralf M. Bader
+A special thanks to Joan Amico for her meticulous and informed copy editing. Were it not for Richard Oriolo’s skill and imagination, we would not have been able to incorporate such complex visual material in the book. Additional thanks to Bruce Hattendorf, Maria’s capable and hardworking assistant, for his intelligent help; to Debbie Weiss for her professional care; to Harvey Hoffman for his patience and expertise; to Tom Nau for his commitment and skill; and to Nick Mazzella for his able guidance.
-Two Cheers for Rothbardianism 163
+Many of the ideas in this book come from years of interchange with friends, colleagues, collaborators, and our students. We wish to acknowledge in particular the contributions to this process made by Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, William Fash, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Elizabeth Benson, Robert Rands, David Kelley, Christopher Jones, Juan Pedro LaPorte, Juan Antonio Valdes, Gordon Willey, Evon Vogt, Brian Stross, Barbara MacLeod, and the many participants in the Texas Meetings on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In addition, we have sent chapters to various colleagues who have offered suggestions and criticisms that have been invaluable. These people include Patrick Culbert, Robert Sharer, William and Barbara Fash, Ruth Krochock, Kent Reilly, Marisela Ayala, Anthony Andrews, Peter Harrison, Linea Wren, and E. Wyllys Andrews IV. We particularly wish to thank Peter Harrison, who provided photographs of Tikal we could obtain from no other source, and McDuff Everton, who offered us his extraordinary wraparound photographs of Palenque. Finally, Justin and Barbara Kerr gave us access to their photographic archives, including roll-outs of pottery as well as photographs of the art and architecture of the major Maya sites that they have taken during their long love affair with the Maya. As valuable to us was the haven—complete with bed and breakfast—they provided each time we went to New York.
-Cory Massimino
+Research by Linda Scheie, as it is presented in various chapters, was supported over the years by the Research Committee of the University of South Alabama, the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Dumbarton Oaks of Washington, D.C. Linda’s research on the inscriptions of Copán has been conducted under the Copán Mosaics Project, which is under the direction of Dr. William Fash and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Part of this research was completed as a Fullbright Research Scholar in Honduras from June to December 1987. Support for the CMP came from National Science Foundation (1986–1988), the National Geographic Society (1986–1989), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986–1987), the Center for Field Research (EARTHWATCH, 1985–1988), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1987; 1989), the H. J. Heinz Charitable Fund (1986), and Council for International Exchange of Scholars (1987).
-Christian Anarchism 187
+Research on Cerros presented in Chapter 3 was carried out under the auspices of the office of the Archaeological Commissioner of Belize. Joseph Palacio, Jaime Awe, Elizabeth Graham Pendergast, and Harriot Topsey served in that office and greatly facilitated our research. The Cerros work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BNS-77-07959; BNS-78-2470; BNS-78-15905; BNS-82-17620) and by private donations by citizens of Dallas to the Cerros Maya Foundation. T. Tim Cullum and Richard Sandow served as officers of this foundation and effectively launched the research despite numerous difficulties. Their friendship, enthusiasm, and patience are greatly appreciated. Stanley Marcus, and through Mr. Marcus many other individuals, supported the work throughout its duration. Mr. Marcus has been a special mentor and friend to David Freidel throughout his career in Dallas. The research at Cerros was originally directed by Dr. Ira Abrams; without his energy and initiative, Chapter 3 would never have been written.
-Sam Underwood and Kevin Vallier
+Research at Yaxuná presented in Chapter 10 is being carried out under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. The Directors of the INAH in Merida, Ruben Maldonado and Alfredo Barrera, have greatly facilitated our work at Yaxuná. Dr. Fernando Robles, senior investigator of the INAH, and Dr. Anthony Andrews first took David Freidel to Yaxuna and have strongly encouraged the work at the site. The Yaxuna research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-21699-88), the National Geographic Society, the Provost’s Office of Southern Methodist University, and private benefactors in Dallas through Mr. Stanley Marcus.
-PART III
+ Prologue: Personal Notes
-Legitimacy and Order 205
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-39.jpg 70f]]
-Anarchism and Political Obligation: An Introduction 207
+I remember vividly the first time I walked down the gravel path that led into the ruins of Palenque. Surrounded by vine-shrouded bushes filled with the sounds of playing children, barking dogs, and the chest-deep thumps of tom turkeys, I walked down that path past broken buildings shaded under vine-draped trees until I came to the grass-filled plaza in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Inspired by the curiosity of my architect husband, this was the first time I had ever visited México. I had never before seen the rich web of life in a tropical forest nor heard the cicadas sing in twelve-tone harmony. As I walked through the lichen-painted ruins of that magic place, I felt my imagination stirred by the pathos of a lost world. The enchantment of the forest with its emerald green light and towering trees shrouded in a rich world of orchids, bromeliads, and liana vines produced a kind of exotic beauty I had never imagined. The mystery of calcium-heavy water, tumbling down the rocky streams to the plain below Palenque’s escarpment, to encase rock, leaf, branch, and broken temple alike, spoke to my mind in metaphors of creation and destruction.
-Magda Egoumenides
+We were there quite by accident, for we had planned in that December of 1970 to follow the standard tourist pilgrimage to Yucatán to see the famous ruins of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Kabah. Going to Palenque was a last-minute side trip. It looked close to the main highway on the map and the Sanborns Travelguide said it was worth at least a couple of hours of our time. When we left twelve days later, the direction and passion of my life was changed forever.
-The Positive Political Economy of Analytical Anarchism 222
+At the time I was a professional painter teaching art at a small university in Mobile, Alabama. Like most of my contemporaries, I lived in frustration because I knew what I did in my art was irrelevant to the society around me. No matter the rhetoric I threw at the world, I recognized in my deepest heart that the irrelevancy was real and unchangeable. Yet while teaching our “Introduction to Art” course to nonmajors (the token fine-arts class that is supposed to make modern university graduates cultured), I had built an image in my head of what art could be like if it were critical to the society that produced it. When I walked among the tumbled rocks and broken plaster of Palenque’s wonderland, I knew I had found the dream made real. I had to understand how, why, when, and who had made these things.
-Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela
+It took three years to answer the last question: who? and, strangely enough, finding this answer was an accident also. On the last afternoon of the <em>Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque,</em>[1] held in December 1973, Peter Mathews and I pored over the texts in the ruins of Palenque, looking for the names and dates of kings. After three hours’ work, we had managed to identify five rulers, as well as the dates of major events in their lives.[2] That magic of discovery has not diminished during the intervening fifteen years. I have been an enraptured passenger on a wondrous voyage into the past and a participant in the rediscovery of something very special: the history of a people whose story had been lost in the obscurity of the past.
-Moral Parity between State and Non-state Actors 235
+This time of excitement and discovery comes at the end of 150 years of inspired work by hundreds of people who built the foundation that make this time possible. Yet, even acknowledging the debt all of us owe to the scholars who went before us, this is a special time that will never come again. Only once will someone read Pacal’s name for the first time or realize who built the Temple of the Cross at Palenque or Temple 22 at Copan.[3]
-Jason Brennan
+And know that this time of discovery is not yet over, for the decipherment of the Maya writing system, the study of their religion and politics, the excavations and analyses of the remains of their lives are not yet finished. In truth, they are barely begun. What we share in this book is but one stage in the journey, and the product of many different people and approaches. No one person is, or ever can be, responsible for the sum of discovery.
-Economic Pathologies of the State 247
+The way I have always studied the ancient Maya is to try to understand the patterns intrinsic to their art, writing, architecture, and other cultural remains. The interpretations of events the two of us offer in this book represent the way we understand those patterns now. As more decipherments are made and new data comes out of the ground, as fresh minds bring their insights to bear upon the patterns we have inherited from our predecessors and expanded in our own work, the connections that we see between these patterns will change. Interpretation in our work is an ephemeral thing that continually adapts to the changing nature of these underlying patterns. It is like the reassessment and reinterpretation of history we experience in our own lives, as we look back on events great and small that have shaped the way we see the world. Those of us in our middle years know this kind of reevaluation in how we see and understand the Vietnam War and all that surrounded it. To me, the truly magical thing is that the ancient Maya now have a history that can enter into this process of reevaluation.
-Christopher Coyne and Nathan P. Goodman
+<right>
+—Linda Schele
+<br><em>Austin, Texas</em>
+<br><em>May 1989</em>
+</right>
-Hunting for Unicorns 262
+I passed through Palenque for the first time just after Linda, in the summer of 1971 on my way to begin an exploration of Cozumel Island for the Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project.[4] Although I was just starting graduate school, I had been a working “dirt” archaeologist for eight years, gaining experience at projects in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. I looked forward to seeing the ruins on Cozumel, even though they were humble compared to Palenque, because I enjoy the craft of field work; but I dreamed of another kind of study among the Maya.
-Peter T. Leeson
+I wanted to find a way to reveal the nature of Maya shamanism archaeologically. I wanted to know what the relationship was between political power and religious belief among the ancient Maya. My aspirations were fueled by a thorough and intensive training in social anthropology and in Maya ethnography by my mentors in college. I knew that the Maya institutions of power recorded and observed since the coming of the Europeans were imbued with the sacred and enveloped in the cosmic. The challenge was to discover a way to use archaeology to help penetrate the Christian veil and contribute to a discovery of the Precolumbian institutions of central authority.
-Social Norms and Social Order 271
+Because Cozumel island had been a sacred pilgrimage center just before the Conquest, I did get to investigate Maya politics and religion within the context of ruins and artifacts. I found I could bridge across from the relatively rich eyewitness descriptions of Maya buildings and their functions left by the sixteenth-century explorers to the archaeological remains without great problem. Still, even though I had passed through the veil, the penetration was only beyond the historical era of Spanish chronicles. The great span of the Precolumbian past remained beyond my focus.
-Ryan Muldoon
+My next project, at Cerros in Belize, took me from the demise of Maya civilization to its Preclassic beginnings, deep into the archaeological record and far from the historical observations of the Europeans. When I first laid eyes on the great Sun mask of Structure 5C in the summer of 1977,1 knew that I was going to have to train myself in Maya iconography and attempt to interpret this building in terms of its political and religious functions. I had basic training in symbolic analysis from college, but I was pretty ignorant of Maya art and knew virtually nothing of text translation. Linda was among the several specialists in Maya art who kindly responded to my request for feedback on my first substantive article on the Cerros materials. She called me up from Austin and said, “David, you’re right for all the wrong reasons. We have to talk.”
-Anarchy and Law 281
+That was in the fall of 1979; we have been talking ever since. Collaboration comes easily to us. The nature of archaeological research requires teamwork; general interpretation is always the product of many people pooling their insight. It is the nature of epigraphic and iconographic research among the Maya as well. Linda and I have different perceptions of the ancient Maya that draw upon different experience and training. We think together in ways that we find occasionally opaque, regularly surprising, usually stimulating, and always worthwhile. I am now an iconographer with a rudimentary command of epigraphy. She is now an advocate of structural analysis and an evolutionist. Most important, we are both something we could not have been in 1971: we are historians of the ancient Maya.
-Jonathan Crowe
+This book is a unique product of our collaboration. It draws heavily upon our personal scholarly experience with the Maya field. Of the six regions and communities anchoring our histories, we have extensively worked at, and published technical studies on, four of them (Cerros, Palenque, Copan, Yaxuna). We wrote the manuscript on personal computers, rewriting over each other’s prose several times so that the initial expertise of each one of us was repeatedly leavened by the ongoing dialogue between us. Ultimately, our partner in this writing effort, Joy Parker, joined in the process. Joy’s clear prose, fresh perspective, and respect for our subject smoothed the flow of our narrative and enhanced the accessibility of our often intricate concepts.
-Anarchism, State, and Violence 295
+I am changed by this book. I cannot look at a Maya ruin now and think of the people who built it and lived with it as abstractions, an aggregate social force shaping the material world and coping with the process of living. Now I see Maya faces, recall Maya names, look for clues to their intentional acts, their decisions, and the events of their daily existence. History has its many limitations to be sure. Ancient Maya history was the privilege of the elite and powerful; at best it gives an accurate reflection of their views on what happened. It is mute about the lives of the ordinary people. We must look to the archaeological record for knowledge of the humble and numerous commoners whose experiences also shaped the Maya destiny. But I now feel better prepared to continue the collaborative enterprise conjoining the insight of the “dirt” archaeological record with the story left by the kings and their nobles. It will yield, I hope, something of the dialogue between the populace, the source of power, and the elite who wielded that power. The long-term history and evolution of this kind of dialogue is, for me, an important source of insight into the current human condition.
-Andy Alexis-Baker
+<right>
+—David Freidel
+<br><em>Dallas, Texas</em>
+<br><em>May 1989</em>
+</right>
-The Forecast for Anarchy 309
+ Foreword
-Tom W. Bell
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-40.jpg 70f]]
-PART IV
+Early in this century the word pharaoh burst upon the imagination of the West and transported the modern mind into the ancient and alien world of Egypt’s living gods. Today, in the tropical lowlands of Central America, another anthropological revolution is uncovering a new intellectual and spiritual legacy for the civilized world: an ancient American civilization ruled by living gods who called themselves <em>ahau</em>.[5]
-Critique and Alternatives 325
+Flourishing for over a thousand years (200 B.C. to A.D. 900), the Classic Maya world was organized at its apogee into fifty or more independent states encompassing more than 100,000 square miles of forest and plain. The divine ahauob ruled millions of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, warriors, and nobility and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples, palaces, and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations numbering in the tens of thousands. Outside of their realm, the Maya engaged in war, trade, and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains of Central México. Theirs was a civilized world: a world of big government, big business, big problems, and big decisions by the people in power. The problems they faced sound familiar to us today: war, drought, famine, trade, food production, the legitimate transition of political power. It was a world which mirrors our own as we wrestle with the present in search of a future.
-Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property 327
+Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, hieroglyphic texts and scenes carved on buildings, stone monuments, jade, bone, and other materials impervious to decay in the tropics remain as records of their innovative political solutions to the social crises that dominated life in ancient America. These political chronicles speak in the language of a great philosophical, scientific, and religious vision—a charter for power as eternal and as flexible as the American Constitution.
-Jesse Spafford
+The Maya conception of time, however, was very different from our own. Our old adage “He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it” might have been expressed by the Maya as “He who does not know history cannot predict his own destiny.” The Maya believed in a past which always returned, in historical symmetries—endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space. By understanding and manipulating this eternal, cyclic framework of possibility, divine rulers hoped to create a favorable destiny for their people. But while the Maya ahauob could know only the immediate results of the events they put into motion, we are gradually reclaiming the full scope of their historical accomplishments from the obscurity of the past.
-The Right Anarchy: Capitalist or Socialist? 342
+Our challenge then is to interpret this history, recorded in their words, images, and ruins, in a manner comprehensible to the modern mind yet true to the Maya’s perceptions of themselves. What we can offer here is not quite biography, for the Maya ahauob did not intend their history to be a record of personal glory so much as a cosmic affirmation of their actions. Nor can we offer a comprehensive social history, for the vagaries of time have left us with only the story of the great and victorious. Nevertheless, we can offer a history unique in the Precolumbian Americas, populated with real people, replete with the drama of battle, palace intrigue, heroic tragedy, and magnificent personal artistic and intellectual expression. History unlocks the humanity of the Maya in a way not possible by any other means, for it reveals not only what they did, but how they thought and felt about the nature of reality.
-Michael Huemer
+It is important that we acknowledge this history, because only then will a true picture of the Americas emerge. The American chronicle does not begin with the landing of Columbus or the arrival of the Pilgrims, but with the lives of Maya kings in the second century B.C. We who live in this part of the world inherit a written history two millennia old and as important to us as the history of the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese, a history equal in longevity to that of Europe or Asia.
-Anarchist Approaches to Education 360
+Understanding the complexity of the ancient American civilizations does not come easily to us. From childhood on we have been taught in our schools that the Mediterranean is the only “cradle of civilization”; but, in fact, human beings developed the civilized state also in Northern India, China, Middle America, and Peru. The Maya are one of those societies that transformed themselves from villagers and agriculturists into a great civilization. To accomplish this transformation, they developed a high religion and extraordinary statecraft that produced a stable society for over a thousand years. More than a collection of quaint mythology and exotic rituals, their religion was an effective definition of the nature of the world, answering questions about the origin of humanity, the purpose of human life on earth, and the relationship of the individual to his family, his society, and his gods. It is a religion which speaks to central and enduring problems of the civilized human condition: power, justice, equality, individual purpose, and social destiny.
-Kevin Currie-Knight
+The world of that vision was informed by the power of the supernatural. Our concepts of animate and inanimate matter would not have made sense to the Maya, for to them everything was alive. The Maya cosmos was peopled with exotic creatures of all sorts and the objects and places in their physical world acquired dangerous power as they interacted with the supernatural Otherworld. Order in the cosmos was not accidental or distant from human affairs. Like the great metaphor of Maya life—the life cycle of maize—the continued well-being of the universe required the active participation of the human community through ritual. As maize cannot seed itself without the intervention of human beings, so the cosmos required sacrificial blood to maintain life. Maya life was filled with endless rituals which seem to us bizarre and shocking, but which to them embodied the highest concepts of their spiritual devotion.
-An Anarchist Critique of Power Relations within Institutions 365
+With the decipherment of their writing system, the Maya joined the world’s great pristine civilizations—Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China—on the stage of world history. A picture has emerged, not only of a civilization, but of a world view and the individuals who cherished that view. All of the great events in the lives of rulers—their births, accessions, marriages, conquests and defeats, their deaths, and the births of their children—were recorded on public monuments. Not only kings, but their wives and courtiers, sought a place in history through commissioning monuments of their own. Kings and their nobles marked objects of all types with their names, and artists and sculptors signed their works so that future generations could honor them. The architecture and stone monuments, the pottery, jewelry, and ritual implements found buried in the earth, speak to us of the personal histories of the people who made them. This new American history resounds with the names of heroes, kings, princes, warriors, queens, priests, artists, and scribes and the deeds and accomplishments of their lives. Ancient America created its own vision of the world, its own form of civilization, its own high religion: But it also had its Alexanders, its Myrons, its Sargons, its Ramseses.
-Kevin A. Carson
+The story we construct here is one of drama, pathos, humor, and heroics. We approach this story not as if we were examining a long-dead religion and a history of little contemporary relevance but as scholars unearthing the dynamic actions of real people. If human beings find immortality after death by the memories they leave the generations who follow them, then the Maya have been reborn through our growing awareness of the history they memorialized throughout their cities.
-Anarchism for an Ecological Crisis? 381
+Come, then, and join us on a journey into the American past and meet some of the great and victorious people of Maya history.
-Dan C. Shahar
+ How to Pronounce Mayan Words
-States, Incarceration, and Organizational Structure: Towards a General Theory of Imprisonment 393
+Many of the words in this book will look strange to English-speaking readers because of the way Mayan words are written. Soon after the conquest, the Spanish began to convert Mayan languages from their own written forms into the Roman alphabet. To do so, they used the spelling conventions of the sixteenth century. Since the characters of the alphabet are pronounced differently in Spanish from the way they are in English, and since the Spanish system of pronunciation itself has changed over the intervening centuries, the conventions used for Maya place names and their hieroglyphic writing should be explained. The alphabet we use here, with a few moderations, is identical to that of the colonial Yucatec sources.
-Daniel J. D’Amico
+Mayan languages use five vowels, or, as in the case of modern Choi, six. Using the Spanish convention, these vowels are pronounced as follows:
-The Problems of Central Planning in Military Technology 406
+<verse>
+<em>a</em> is like the <em>a</em> in “far” or “father.”
+<em>e</em> is like the <em>e</em> in “obey” or “prey.”
+<em>i</em> is like the double <em>e</em> in “see” or “bee.”
+<em>o</em> is like the <em>o</em> in “hello” or “open.”
+<em>u</em> is like the double <em>o</em> in “zoo” or “boo.”
+<em>a</em> is like the final <em>e</em> in “title” or “handle.”
+</verse>
-Abigail R. Hall
+The letter <em>u</em> becomes a special case when it falls at the end of a word or is combined with another vowel. Then it functions like the consonant <em>w.</em> The word <em>ahau</em> is pronounced <em>“a-haw”</em> and <em>Uolantun</em> is <em>“wo-lan-toon.”</em> Normally, each individual vowel in a word is pronounced separately as an independent syllable, so that the place name El Baul is pronounced <em>“el ba-ool. ”</em>
-Anarchy and Transhumanism 416
+Since the Mayan languages have several consonants not found in Spanish, the friars who first tried to write the languages had to improvise. They used <em>x</em> to record the consonant that sounds like the English <em>sh.</em> The color term yax is pronounced <em>“yash,,</em> and the place name <em>Uaxactun</em> is pronounced <em>“wa-shak-tun.</em> ” When the <em>x</em> is at the front of a word, it is still <em>sh,</em> even when it precedes other consonants, as in <em>Xphuhil (“sh-poo-hil”)</em> and <em>Xcalumkin (“sh-kal-loom-kin”).</em> In Mayan words, <em>c</em> is always pronounced like <em>k,</em> regardless of what vowel it precedes. The month <em>Ceh</em> is <em>— “keh”</em> and the day <em>Cimi</em> is <em>“kee-mee.”</em>
-William Gillis
+In Mayan languages, there is also a contrast between the glottalized and nonglottahzed forms of many consonants. Since this contrast is not used in European languages, English speakers find it hard to pronounce or even to hear the difference. Glottalized consonants are pronounced like the regular consonant, but with the glottis or “voice box” closed. You can hear the unvoiced glottal stop in the way New Yorkers and Englishmen pronounce words with a double <em>t,</em> such as “bottle.” Glottalized consonants sound like very hard and explosive forms of the regular consonants. In this book, the unglottalized <em>k</em> sound is written with <em>c</em> while the glottalized <em>k</em> is represented by the letter <em>k.</em> For example, the word for “earth” is written <em>cab,</em> while the word for “hand” is <em>kab.</em> While these words would be pronounced the same way in English, they sound as different to the Maya as <em>volt</em> and <em>bolt</em> sound to us.
-Annotated Bibliography 429
+There are other pairs of glottalized and plain consonants also, but in all these cases, the glottalized member of the pair is written with an apostrophe after the regular letter, as in <em>b’, ch’, p’,</em> and <em>t’.</em> A glottal stop is written with a simple apostophe, as in <em>ca’an.</em>
-Index 445
+Mayan languages do not have some of the consonants that are native to English, such as the <em>d</em> sound. Conversely, Mayan has a pair of consonants unknown in English. Written as <em>tz</em> in its plain form and <em>tz’</em> in its glottalized form, the consonant is pronounced somewhat like the English <em>z,</em> but with the blade of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth and with a sharp expulsion of breath.
-*** Contributors
+The Spanish letter <em>j</em> also causes problems for English-speaking people. In Spanish, <em>j</em> is pronounced like the hard <em>h</em> in English, while their letter <em>h</em> is essentially silent. Since the Mayan consonant is more like the English <em>h</em> than the silent Spanish <em>h,</em> the letter <em>j</em> is frequently used to represent it. English speakers often make the mistake of pronouncing it like the English <em>j</em> in “jet.” Our consonant <em>j</em> does not exist in the Mayan languages and thus the English pronunciation is never used. The place name <em>Abaj Takalik</em> is <em>“a-bah tak-a-leek” and Kaminaljuyu</em> is <em>“ka-mee-nal-hoo-yoo. ”</em>
-Andy Alexis-Baker is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago. He has published numerous articles and books on issues of violence and nonviolence and humans’ treatment of other animals. As an anarchist and antiwar activist, he has been involved in work for peace and justice, including, for example, antimilitarist work in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where he was placed in a federal prison with many other activists for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience designed to remove the United States’ military from the island.
+In Mayan words, the accent usually falls on the last syllable, as in the following names used in this book.
-Ralf M. Bader is Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland. His research concerns ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy, and decision theory. He was formerly a fellow of Merton College and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, as well as a Bersoff Assistant Professor and faculty fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
+| Tikal | “tee-kal” |
+| Yaxchilan | “yash-chee-lan” |
+| Pacal | “pa-kal” |
+| Chan-Bahlum | “chan bah-loom” |
+| Yax-Pac | “yash pak” |
+| Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac | “ya-haw chan ah bak” |
+| Uaxactun | “wa-shak-toon” |
+| Kakupacal | “ka-ku-pa-kal” |
-Tom W. Bell is Professor of Law at Chapman University. He is the author of Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations (2017) and Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good (2014). He has appeared on or been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, and many other news sources.
+In this book we will use the word <em>Mayan</em> to refer only to the languages spoken. The name of the people, used either as a noun or an adjective, will <em>be Maya.</em> We will pluralize Mayan words such as <em>ahau</em> with the pluralizing suffix <em>-ob</em> taken from the Yucatec and Choi. More than one <em>ahau,</em> therefore, is <em>ahauob,</em> which is pronounced <em>a-ha-wob.</em>
-Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University and Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason. Before joining the faculty at George Mason in 1998, he taught at New York University. In addition, Boettke was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University during the 1992—1993 academic years and the F. A. Hayek fellow in 2004 and 2006 at the London School of Economics, as well as a visiting professor or scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow; the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena, Germany; the Stockholm School of Economics; the Central European University in Prague; and the Charles University in Prague. In March 2011, he was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic. He served as the President of the Southern Economic Association from 2015–2017, the Mont Pelerin Society from 2016–2018, the Association of Private Enterprise Education from 2013–2014, and the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics from 1999—2001. In 2013, he became Founding Honorary President and Honorary President of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research. He currently serves as a co-editorin-chief of the Review of Austrian Economics and associate editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-41.jpg 70f][Map 1: the Southern Lowlands Contour intervals at 1000 feet]]
-Jason Brennan is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. His focus is on politics, philosophy, and economics. As of August 2020, he is the author of thirteen books, including most relevantly to this present volume Injustice for All (2019), When All Else Fails (2018), and Why Not Capitalism? (2014). He specializes in democratic theory, philosophical problems arising from perverse incentives, and the moral foundations of market society.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-42.jpg 70f][Map of the Western Region of the Southern Lowlands<br>Contour intervals at 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 feet<br>drawings of these three maps by Karim Sadr]]
-Jason Lee Byas is a fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society and a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Michigan. His primary interests are in rights theory, punishment, and moral repair.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-43.jpg 70f][Map of the Eastern Region of the Maya Region<br>Contour intervals 2,000, 5,000, 7,000]]
-Rosolino A. Candela is Associate Director of Academic and Student Programs and a senior fellow of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before coming to George Mason University, Candela taught in the Department of Economics at Brown University, where he was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Political Theory Project. He was also a visiting professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquin, and a visiting fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-44.jpg 70f][The Yucatán Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands<br><sub>Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet</sub>]]
-Kevin A. Carson is Karl Hess Distinguished Research Scholar at the Center for a Stateless Society. He is the author of books including Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007), Organization Theory (2008), and The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks (2016).
+| 1100 B.C. | First settlers in the Copan Valley |
+| 1000 B.c. | Florescence of Gulf Coast Olmec; early villagers and beginnings of hierarchical social organization in the Pacific zone; the Copan Valley has permanent settlements |
-Gary Chartier is Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University. His scholarship focuses on issues in law and legal theory (particularly natural law theory), political philosophy (especially anarchism), and ethics (for instance, personal formation, personal relationships, and the ethics of production and consumption). He is the author of books including Flourishing Lives: Exploring Natural Law Liberalism (2019), An Ecological Theory of Free Expression (2018), The Logic of Commitment (Routledge 2017), and Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (2013).
+<strong>MIDDLE PRECLASSIC</strong>
-Billy Christmas is Lecturer in Political Theory and the PPE Programme Director at King’s College London, in the Department of Political Economy. He also has affiliations with the Classical Liberal Institute at the New York University School of Law and the Center for a Stateless Society. His primary interests are in political philosophy concern rights, property, and political authority. He is currently completing a book manuscript on property and justice, and he has published articles in journals including The Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy, and the Philosophical Quarterly.
+| 900 B.C. | Rich tombs in the Copan Valley |
+| 600 B.C. | Tikal settled by early villagers |
+| 500 B.C. | Large towns and long-distance trading |
-Stephen R. L. Clark is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, and an honorary research fellow in the Department of Theology at the University of Bristol. His books include The Nature of the Beast (1982), Civil Peace and Sacred Order (1989), The Political Animal (Routledge 1999), Biology and Christian Ethics (2000), Understanding Faith: Religious Belief and its Place in Society (2009), Philosophical Futures (2011), Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy (2013), and Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (2016). His chief current interests are in the philosophy of Plotinus, the understanding and treatment of non-human animals, the philosophy of religion, and science fiction.
+<strong>LATE PRECLASSIC</strong>
-Christopher Coyne is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Associate Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the university’s Mercatus Center. He is the author of After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (2007); Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (2013); Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, with Abigail R. Hall (2018); and Defense, Peace, and War Economics (2020). He is a co-editor of volumes including (with Peter J. Boettke) The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics (2015) and (with Rachel Mathers) The Handbook on the Political Economy of War (2012). He co-edits the Review of Austrian Economics and The Independent Review. He serves as the book review editor of Public Choice.
+| 300 B.C. | Late Preclassic period begins |
+| 200 B.C. | Early Izapa monuments with Popol Vuh mythology in the south; activity in the Copan Valley diminishes |
+| 100 B.C. | Sculpted temples begin to appear throughout the northern lowlands; carved and dated monuments and large towns in the southern zone; appearance of writing in the Maya zone; formulation of the institution of kingship |
+| 50 B.C. | Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros; North Acropolis and stelae at Tikal; Group H at Uaxactun; El Mirador the dominant lowland center; green obsidian from Teotihuacan region at Nohmul |
+| 50 A.D. | El Mirador, Cerros, and other centers abandoned |
-Jonathan Crowe is Professor of Law at Bond University. His research examines the philosophical relationship between law and ethics. He has also produced significant bodies of work on constitutional law, rape and sexual assault law, international humanitarian law, and dispute resolution. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than ninety peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles. His work has appeared in periodicals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review, and Jurisprudence. His recent books include Mediation Ethics: From Theory to Practice (2020), Natural Law and the Nature of Law (2019), and the Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory (2019). He co-edits the Journal of Legal Philosophy with Hillary Nye. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Australasian Society of Legal Philosophy, of which he served as president from 2014 to 2018.
+<strong>EARLY CLASSIC</strong>
-Kevin Currie-Knight is a teaching associate professor in East Carolina University’s College of Education. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of (American K—12) education and informal and self-directed learning. He is the author of Education in the Marketplace: An Intellectual History of Pro-Market Libertarian Visions for Education in Twentieth-Century America (2019).
+| 120 | 8.4.0.0.0 | First object with deciphered date (DO celt) |
+| 150 | 8.6.0.0.0 | The kingdom of Copan established |
+| 199 | 8.8.0.4.0 | First dated stela (Hauberg) |
+| 219 | 8.9.0.0.0 | Reign of Yax-Moch-Xoc and founding of the Tikal dynasty |
+| 292 | 8.12.14.8.15 | Stela 29, earliest monument at Tikal |
+| 320 | 8.14.2.17.6 | Yat-Balam of Yaxchilan accedes and founds the lineage |
+| 328 | 8.14.10.13.15 | Stela 9, earliest monument at Uaxactun |
+| 376 | 8.17.0.0.0 | Great-Jaguar-Paw ends the katun at Tikal |
+| 378 | 8.17.1.4.12 | Tikal conquers Uaxactun; first appearance of Tlaloc-war complex in Maya imagery |
+| 379 | 8.17.2.16.17 | Curl-Snout accedes at Tikal under Smoking-Frog |
+| 396 | 8.18.0.0.0 | Smoking-Frog ends katun at Uaxactun; Curl-Snout ends it at Tikal |
+| 411 | 8.18.15.11.0 | Astronomically timed “accession” event at Tikal |
+| 426 | 8.19.10.0.0 | Probable accession of Stormy-Sky of Tikal |
+| 426 | 8.19.10.11.17 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ of Copan enacts a God K-scepter rite and establishes the dynasty |
+| 431 | 8.19.15.3.4 | Bahlum-Kuk accedes and founds the dynasty of Palenque |
+| 439 | 9.0.3.9.18 | Last event on Stela 31 at Tikal: Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting |
+| 445 | 9.0.10.0.0 | Tikal Stela 31 dedicated |
+| 475 | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar rules at Tikal |
+| 488 | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw Skull, the 14<sup>th</sup> king, rules at Tikal |
+| 504 | 9.3.16.18.4 | New ruler (name unknown) accedes at Tikal |
+| 514 | 9.4.0.0.0 | Summit of North Acropolis reworked at Tikal |
+| 527 | 9.4.13.0.0 | The 19<sup>th</sup> king of Tikal rules |
+| 537 | 9.5.3.19.15 | Double-Bird, the 21<sup>st</sup> king, accedes(?) |
+| 553 | 9.5.19.1.2 | Lord Water of Caracol accedes |
+| 556 | 9.6.2.1.11 | Caracol conducts “ax-war” action against Tikal |
+| 557 | 9.6.3.9.15 | Last date at Tikal before the conquest |
+| 562 | 9.6.8.4.2 | Caracol conducts “star war” against Tikal |
-David S. D’Amato is a lawyer, businessman, and former legal writing instructor who is currently a columnist for the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org project and a policy advisor at the Future of Freedom Foundation and the Heartland Institute. He is an opinion contributor at The Hill, and his writing has also appeared in Newsweek, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, the Washington Examiner, RealClearPolicy, Townhall, The Daily Caller, The American Spectator, CounterPunch, and many other publications. He is frequently published by nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research organizations such as the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, among others. He earned a JD from the New England School of Law and an LLM in Global Law and Technology from Suffolk University Law School. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
+<strong>LATE CLASSIC</strong>
-Daniel J. D’Amico is Associate Director of the Political Theory Project and a Lecturer in Economics at Brown University,. where he teaches and coordinates student programs dedicated to the study of institutions and ideas that make societies free, prosperous, and fair. His current research examines the political economy of punishment and incarceration throughout history and around the world. He has been published in a variety of scholarly outlets, including the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, and the Journal of Comparative Economics. He serves as a co-editor of the Advances in Austrian Economics book series. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; an affiliated scholar associated with the workshop in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University; and a co-founder of the Carl Menger Essay Contest sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education.
+| 599 | 9.8.5.16.12 | Oldest son of Lord Water becomes the king of Caracol |
+| 603 | 9.8.9.13.0 | Pacal the Great is born at Palenque during the reign of Ac-Kan |
+| 612 | 9.8.19.7.18 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, accedes at Palenque |
+| 693 | 9.13.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo, grandson of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, accedes at age five |
+| 695 | 9.13.2.16.0 | Naranjo’s second attack on Ucanal |
+| 615 | 9.9.2.4.8 | Pacal of Palenque accedes |
+| 618 | 9.9.4.16.2 | Lord Kan II, younger son of Lord Water, becomes the king of Caracol |
+| 619 | 9.9.5.13.8 | Lord Kan II of Caracol interacts with Calakmul’s king (Site Q?) |
+| 626 | 9.9.13.4.4 | Caracol’s first attack against Naranjo |
+| 627 | 9.9.14.3.5 | Caracol’s second attack against Naranjo |
+| 628 | 9.9.14.17.5 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan accedes |
+| 630 | 9.9.17.11.14 | A lord of Naranjo dies |
+| 631 | 9.9.18.16.3 | Star war against Naranjo by Caracol |
+| 635 | 9.10.2.6.6 | Chan-Bahlum, son of Pacal of Palenque, is born |
+| 636 | 9.10.3.2.12 | Second star war against Naranjo by Caracol |
+| 640 | 9.10.7.13.5 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, dies at Palenque |
+| 641 | 9.10.8.9.3 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque is designated heir to the throne |
+| 642 | 9.10.10.0.0 | Caracol victory stair dedicated at Naranjo |
+| 643 | 9.10.10.1.6 | Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, Pacal’s father, dies at Palenque |
+| 644 | 9.10.11.17.0 | Kan-Xul, brother of Chan-Bahlum, is born at Palenque |
+| 645 | 9.10.12.11.2 | Flint-Sky-God K accedes at Dos Pilas |
+| 647 | 9.10.14.5 10 | Pacal dedicates his first temple at Palenque |
+| 647 | 9.10.15.0.0 | Shield-Jaguar, son of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 649 | 9.10.16.16.19 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) born |
+| 652 | 9.11.0.0.0 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan celebrates the period ending with a monument at Quirigua and with the pattern of outlying stelae in the Copan Valley; Pacal celebrates the period ending at Palenque. |
+| 664 | 9.11.11.9.17 | Flint-Sky-God K captures Tah-Mo’ during his long military campaign in the Petexbatun |
+| 675 | 9.12.3.6.6 | Pacal begins construction of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque |
+| 681 | 9.12.9.8.1 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes |
+| 682 | 9.12.9.17.16 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal accedes as king |
+| 682 | 9.12.10.5.12 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, daughter of the Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, arrives at Naranjo and reestablishes its royal house |
+| 683 | 9.12.11.5.18 | Pacal of Palenque dies |
+| 684 | 9.12.11.12.10 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque accedes in a ten-day-long ceremony |
+| 686 | 9.12.13.17.7 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) accedes with Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas witnessing the ritual |
+| 688 | 9.12.15.13.7 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo born |
+| 690 | 9.12.18.5.16+ | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dedicates the Group of the Cross in a three-day-long ceremony |
+| 692 | 9.12.19.14.12 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque activates the <em>pib na</em> in the temples of the Group of the Cross |
+| 692 | 9.13.0.0.0 | Ah-Cacaw plants the first stela and builds the first twin-pyramid group after the defeat by Caracol |
+| | 9.13.1.4.19 | Naranjo’s first attack on Ucanal: Kinichil-Cab captured under the authority of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan accedes |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.7.18 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.9.18 | Ah-Cacaw dedicates Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rites 260 tuns (13 katuns) after the last date on Stela 31, the stela celebrating Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun |
+| 695 | 9.13 3.13.15 | Tikal captures a noble of Calakmul (Site Q) |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.2.0 | Shield-God K, son of Flint-Sky-God K, becomes king of Dos Pilas |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.4.17 | Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal in a sacrificial ritual at Naranjo |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.10.4 | Sacrificial ritual at Naranjo with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal |
+| 699 | 9.13.7.3.8 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo stands atop her captive, Kinich-Cab of Ucanal |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.0.0 | Stela dedication and period-ending rites at Naranjo in which Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal is bled |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.1.5 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dies |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.6.8 | Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, accedes to the throne of Palenque |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.12.10 | Bird-Jaguar, the son of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.15.12 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar, lets blood from her tongue |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.15.13 | Lady Eveningstar, mother of Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, does a bundle rite with Shield-Jaguar |
+| 710 | 9.13.18.4.18 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Yaxha |
+| 711 | 9.13.19.6.3 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Sacnab |
+| 711 | 9.14.0.0.0 | Smoking-Squirrel erects stela at Naranjo; Ah-Cacaw erects a stela and his second twin-pyramid group at Tikal |
+| 712 | 9.14.0.10.0 | Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal undergoes a sacrificial rite at Naranjo |
+| 713 | 9.14.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo celebrates his first katun as king by erecting Stelae 2 and 3 |
+| 715 | 9.14.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan dedicates Temple 22 to celebrate his first katun as king |
+| 723 | 9.14.11.15.1 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, dedicates the sculpture of Temple 23 |
+| 726 | 9.14.14.8.1 | Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participate in the dedication rites of Temple 23 |
+| 734 | 9.15.3.6.8 | Ah-Cacaw’s son become the king of Tikal |
+| 736 | 9.15.4.16.11 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event |
+| 738 | 9.15.6.14.6 | 18-Rabbit of Copan taken captive and sacrificed by Cauac-Sky of Quirigua |
+| 738 | 9.15.6.16.5 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan accedes |
+| 741 | 9.15.9.17.16 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event with his son, Bird-Jaguar |
+| 741 | 9.15.10.0.1 | Bird-Jaguar (the son of Shield-Jaguar), Lady Eveningstar (the mother of Bird-Jaguar), Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the wife of Bird-Jaguar), and Great-Skull-Zero (her patriarch) let blood |
+| 742 | 9.15.10.17.14 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan dies |
+| 744 | 9.15.13.6.9 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participates in a bailgame |
+| 746 | 9.15.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending in his father’s name |
+| 747 | 9.15.16.1.6 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts his own flapstaff ritual |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.12.16 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan dies |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.12.10 | Smoke-Shell, the son of Smoke-Monkey of Copan, accedes |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.15.14 | Lady Xoc, the wife of Shield-Jaguar, dies |
+| 749 | 9.15.18.3.13 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to celebrate the first katun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession |
+| 750 | 9.15.19.1.1 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan sacrifices captives as Chac-Xib-Chac |
+| 751 | 9.15.19.15.3 | Lady Eveningstar, the mother of Bird-Jaguar, dies |
+| 752 | 9.16.0.13.17 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan takes Yax-Cib-Tok captive |
+| 752 | 9.16.0.14.5 | Chel-Te, the son of Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes in a nine-day-long ritual that ends with the dedication of Temple 22 |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.2.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts the tree-scepter rite with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau and a God K-scepter rite with his cahal, Kan-Toc |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.8.6 | Bird-Jaguar enacts a God K-staff event with Kan-Toc and blood-letting rite with Lady Balam-Ix |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.8.8 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan captures Jeweled-Skull |
+| 756 | 9.16.5.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his first period ending in three different ceremonies: one with a cahal in attendance; a second with his wife; and a third with her patriarch and his own son, Chel-Te |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his five-year anniversary with his son, Chel-Te |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.9.16 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to confirm his support of Ruler 4’s heir |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.11.14 | Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras dies |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.17.17 | Ruler 5 of Piedras Negras accedes |
+| 763 | 9.16.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac of Copan, son of the woman of Palenque, accedes |
+| 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending with his wife, his son, and his cahals, Great-Skull-Zero and Tilot |
+| 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan sets up Altar G3 in the Great Plaza |
+| 768 | 9.16.17.6.12 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates a flapstaff event with his brother-in-law Great-Skull-Zero |
+| 769 | 9.16.18.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan begins remodeling Temple 11 |
+| 771 | 9.17.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 21a to celebrate the period ending |
+| 773 | 9.17.2.12.16 | Yax-Pac dedicates the upper temple of Structure 11 |
+| 775 | 9.17.5.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Altar Q |
+| 780 | 9.17.9.2.12 | Yax-Pac’s younger brother become “First Servitor” of the kingdom |
+| 780 | 9.17.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s scattering rite recorded in Group 9M-18 |
+| 781 | 9.17.10.11.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates the bench in Group 9N-8 |
+| 783 | 9.17.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his first katun as king by dedicating Temple 22a; by erecting Stela 8 in the area under the modern village; and by erecting Altar T with his younger brother in the same region |
+| 790 | 9.18.0.0.0 | Last date at Pomona, Tabasco; last date at Aguateca |
+| 793 | 9.18.2.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his 30-tun anniversary of accession on the same day his younger brother celebrates his 13<sup>th</sup> haab as the “First Servitor” |
+| 793 | 9.18.3.0.0 | Last date at Yaxha |
+| 795 | 9.18.5.0.0 | Last date at Bonampak; Yax-Pac places an altar in the Temple 22a council house |
+| 799 | 9.18.9.4.4 | Accession of 6-Cimi-Pacal at Palenque; the last date at Palenque |
+| 800 | 9.18.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac and his brother erect Altar G1 in the Great Plaza |
+| 801 | 9.18.10.17.18 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 18 |
+| 802 | 9.18.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his two-katun anniversary |
+| 807 | 9.18.17.1.13 | Ballgame event on La Amelia Stela 1; last date associated with the Petexbatun state |
+| 808 | 9.18.17.13.4 | Last date at Yaxchilan |
-Magda Egoumenides studied philosophy in Athens and in London. She has collaborated with the Department of Philosophy at University College London and with the Department of Methodology of History and the Theory of Science at the University of Athens. Since 2009, she has been teaching philosophy at the University of Cyprus. She specializes in moral and political philosophy and has published various articles and two books on philosophical anarchism and political authority, including Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation (2014). She also writes books for children and has acted non-professionally for more than two decades.
+<strong>TERMINAL CLASSIC</strong>
-William Gillis is a second-generation anarchist who has been involved in a wide array of activist work since the Battle in Seattle. He holds an undergraduate degree in physics and serves as the Coordinating Director of the Center for a Stateless Society. His writing can be found in a number of compilations, including Markets Not Capitalism and Abolish Work.
+| 810 | 9.19.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac goes to Quiriguá to celebrate the katun ending; last date at Piedras Negras; last monument erected at Chinkultic; last date at Calakmul; last date at Naranjo; last date at Quiriguá |
+| 820 | 9.19.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s apotheosis as an ancestor is celebrated on Stela 11 at Copán |
+| 822 | 9.19.11.14.5 | U-Cit-Tok of Copán accedes and within five years the central government collapses |
+| 830 | 10.0.0.0.0 | The baktun-ending celebrated at Oxpemul and Uaxactún |
+| 841 | 10.0.10.17.15 | Last date at Machaquilá |
+| 842 | 10.0.12.8.0 | Capture on a column on the High Priest’s Grave |
+| 849 | 10.1.0.0.0 | Bol on-Tun, a Putun-type lord, dominates Seibal and builds a katun-ending complex with five stelae; last date at Altar de Sacrificios; last date at Xunantunich; last date at Ucanal |
+| 859 | 10.1.10.0.0 | Last date at Caracol |
+| 862 | 10.1.13.0.0 | Dedication date of the Palace at Labná |
+| 867 | 10.1.17.15.13 | The earliest date at Chichón Itzá (the Watering Trough) |
+| 879 | 10.2.0.0.0 | The last ruler of Tikal scattered; last date at Tikal |
+| 869 | 10.2.0.1.9 | Fire ceremony by Yax-Uk-Kauil and another lord of Chichón Itzá; bloodletting by Kakupacal recorded in the Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá |
+| 870 | 10.2.0.15.3 | Dedication of Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá |
+| 874 | 10.2.5.0.0 | Monument erected at Comitán |
+| 879 | 10.2.10.0.0 | Last date at Ixlú; monument erected at Quen Santo |
+| 881 | 10.2.12.1.8 | Dedication of the Temple of the Four Lintels at Chichón Itzá by Yax-T’ul and other lords |
+| 889 | 10.3.0.0.0 | Last date at La Muñeca; last date at Xultún; last date at Uaxactún; last date at Jimbal; last date at Seibal |
+| 898 | 10.3.8.14.4 | Last date recorded at Chichón Itzá |
+| 901 | 10.3.11.15.14 | Date on the Ballcourt Marker at Uxmal |
+| 907 | 10.3.17.12.1 | Date on a capstone in the Monjas at Uxmal |
+| 909 | 10.4.0.0.0 | Late monument with a Long Count date (Tonina) |
+| 1200 | 10.19.0.0.0 | Chichón Itzá abandoned |
+| 1250 | 11.1.10.0.0 | Founding of Mayapán |
-Nathan P. Goodman is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a PhD fellow at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. His research focuses on institutions, defense and peace economics, public choice, and self-governance. He is particularly interested in how alternative institutional arrangements shape the production of security. His research has been published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, the Journal of Private Enterprise, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, and Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy.
+<strong>POSTCLASSIC</strong>
-Abigail R. Hall is an Associate Professor in Economics at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an affiliated scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education. Her research interests include political economy and public choice, defense and peace economics, and institutions and economic development. She is the co-author, with Christopher Coyne, of Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (2018).
+| 1451 | 11.11.10.0.0 | Fall of Mayapán |
+| 1502 | 11.14.2.0.0 | A Maya trading canoe contacted in the bay of Honduras during the fourth voyage of Columbus |
+| 1511 | 11.14.11.0.0 | Aguilar and Guerrero shipwrecked on the coast of Yucatán |
+| 1519 | 11.14.18.17.16 | Cortes lands on Cozumel Island and meets Naum-Pat |
+| 1521 | 11.15.1.8.13 | Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, falls |
+| 1524 | 11.15.4.8.9 | Alvarado founds Guatemala City |
+| 1525 | 11.15.5.2.1 | Cortés meets King Can-Ek at the Itzá capital of Tayasal during his trip across Maya country to Honduras |
+| 1542 | 11.16.2.3.4 | The city of Mérida founded by the Spanish |
+| 1618 | 11.19.19.9.1 | Fuensalida and Orbita visit King Can-Ek of the Itzá in Katun 3 Ahau |
+| 1695 | 12.3.17.10 0 | Avendano’s first visit to King Can-Ek of the Itzá |
+| 1696 | 12.3.18.8.1 | King Can-Ek of the Itzá accepts Avendano’s invitation to become a Christian |
+| 1697 | 12.3.19.11.14 | The Itzá are conquered by the Spanish and the last independent Maya kingdom falls |
-Michael Huemer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of more than seventy academic articles in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics, as well as six amazing books that you should immediately buy, including Ethical Intu- itionism (2005), The Problem of Political Authority (2013), and Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (2019).
+ A Forest of Kings
-Peter T. Leeson is the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. He is author of the award-winning The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better than You Think, and WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird. Leeson was a visiting professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, visiting fellow in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, and the F.A. Hayek fellow at the London School of Economics. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
+. Time Travel in the Jungle
-Roderick T. Long is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. He serves as President of the Molinari Institute and a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society. He is the author of Reason and Value: Aristotle Versus Rand (2000), Rituals of Freedom: Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism (2016), and Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (forthcoming). He is editor of the Molinari Review and a co-editor of Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (2008), Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition (2018), and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He has published articles in journals including Social Philosophy and Policy, Utilitas, the Griffith Law Review, and the Review of Metaphysics.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-45.jpg 70f]]
-Eric Mack is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Tulane University. His primary scholarly project has been the refinement and extension of libertarian-oriented natural rights theory. He has published over 100 scholarly essays on the moral foundations of natural rights, the basis and nature of property rights, economic justice, the nature of law and of spontaneous economic and social order, the scope of legitimate coercive institutions, and the exploration of these topics by seventeenth- and nineteenth-century classical liberal and libertarian theorists. He is the editor of Auberon Herbert’s The Rights and Wrongs of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays (1978) and Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State (1982). He is also the author of John Locke (2013), Libertarianism (2018), and The Essential John Locke (2019).
+Once, many years ago, when we were just beginning our adventure with the Maya, a friend observed that to cross the Texas border into Mexico was to enter a different world where time and reality dance to a different rhythm. After twenty years of moving in and out of that world, both of us have confirmed the truth of that observation for ourselves.
-Cory Massimino is an independent scholar. He is a fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society. His research focuses on virtue ethics, market process economics, and anarchist political theory. His writings have appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Independent, and Playboy. He lives in Florida with his wife and their four cats.
+While the experiences of our first journey to that “otherworld” were distinctly our own, they have much in common with the thousands of other pilgrims who go to Yucatán out of curiosity and admiration. For Linda Scheie that first journey came in 1970 when she followed the great arching curve of the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, around to the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. With three students and a husband in tow, she followed the narrow, potholed highway south from Matamoros through the vast, cactus-filled deserts of northern México, skirting the majestic Sierra Madre mountains. At the Gulf port of Tampico, she rode a dilapidated ferry across the Río Pánuco and with the gawking wonder of a first-time tourist entered a world that has known civilization for 5,000 years. The Huastecs, long-lost cousins of the Maya,[6] dwell in the mountains and the dry northern edge of this enormous region. Now we call this world Mesoamerica, a term which refers not only to geography, but to a Precolumbian cultural tradition that shared a 260-day calendar, religious beliefs including definitions of gods and bloodletting as the central act of piety, the cultivation of maize, the use of cacao as a drink and as money, a bailgame played with a rubber ball, screen-fold books, pyramids and plazas, and a sense of common cultural identity.[7] The world view that was forged by the ancient peoples of that land is still a living and vibrant heritage for the millions of their descendants.
-Paul McLaughlin is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Bath Spa University. He previously held positions in philosophy and education at the University of Limerick, Adam Mickiewicz University, and the University of Tartu. He is the author of Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Routledge 2016), Radicalism: A Philosophical Study (2012), and Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism (2002). His byline has appeared in publications including the Journal of Moral Philosophy, the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, and Anarchist Studies, and in edited books including Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (2018), the Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (2013), and Anarchism and Moral Philosophy (2012).
+The first time you cross the boundary into that world, you may not have an intellectual definition for what is happening to you, but you will sense a change. If nothing else, this region is greener than the desert, and evidence of people and their communities thickens around you. As you drive south, the narrow band of land next to the sea gets squeezed against the waters of the Gulf of Mexico by the huge Sierra Madre mountains and you see for the first time the dramatic contrast between the cool, dry highlands towering above and the hot, humid, forest-covered lowlands. This central opposition is the force that molded life in ancient Mesoamerica into a dynamic interaction between the peoples who lived in these two very different environments.
-Christopher W. Morris is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. His research interests concern political philosophy, political economy, legal theory, and ethics. He is the author of An Essay on the Modern State (1998), and is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled Social Order, Liberty, and Prosperity.
+Moving through the green, hilly land of the Totonacs, another great people of this ancient world, you pass around the modern port city of Veracruz where Cortes’s motley band of adventurers first established a foothold during the time of the Conquest. There you enter the flat, swampy homeland of the primordial Olmec, whose dominions lined the southernmost arc of the Gulf of Mexico. Here amid the twisted courses of sluggish, tide-driven rivers (while carefully dodging the speeding juggernauts of modern tanker trucks that frequent this stretch of road), you see where the first civilization in North America was built. The road rises out of the swamp into a small cluster of black and mottled green volcanic mountains, the Tuxtlas, the natural pyramidal heart of this land, and you can see the flat waterworld of levees and bayous stretching to the horizon in all directions. This was the land of the Olmec, who began building cities at places like San Lorenzo and La Venta by 1200 B.C. They were the people who forged the template of world view and governance that the Maya would inherit a thousand years later when they began to build their own cities.
-Ryan Muldoon is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at the University at Buffalo. Previously, he was a senior research fellow in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a core author of the 2015 World Development Report at the World Bank. His primary research investigates how we can turn the challenge of increasing diversity into a resource to be tapped for our mutual benefit. Specifically, he investigates how diversity can lead to more just societies, to an increase in the amount and quality of scientific production, and greater wealth. His scholarship also examines the social and behavioral aspects of development policy. He is the author of Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance (Routledge 2016) and articles in journals including Philosophical Studies, Utilitas, and Synthese and (with Cristina Biccheri) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
+Southern Veracruz and Tabasco finally give way to the land of the Maya as the coast bends eastward to swing north into the Yucatán Peninsula. The narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, which had widened out briefly into the flat expanse of the ancient Olmec kingdoms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, narrows again as you approach the westernmost Maya city, Palenque. It has always seemed to us that this swampy place could not make up its mind whether it wanted to be land or sea. Patches of dry land peek forlornly up through the flowering hyacinths that have replaced waterlilies to form the floating surface of the dark, still waters the Maya saw as the source of creation. Here is the gateway to the lowlands of the Maya, who developed one of the most fascinating civilizations in the annals of the ancient world.
-Oliver Sensen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University and Vice President of the North American Kant Society. He is the author of Human Dignity (forthcoming) and Kant on Human Dignity (2011) and the editor of Kant on Moral Autonomy (2012) and of four other current or forthcoming essay collections. He has published over sixty articles on Kant’s philosophy.
+While our first visits to the hauntingly beautiful ruins that dot the landscape of the Yucatán peninsula were different, we both learned that the Maya are not just a people of the past. Today, they live in their millions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, still speaking one of the thirty-five Mayan languages as their native tongue. They continue to cultivate their fields and commune with their living world in spite of the fact that they are encapsulated within a larger modern civilization whose vision of reality is often alien to their own.
-Dan C. Shahar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy (Research) and a member of the Urban Entrepreneurship and Policy Institute at the University of New Orleans. His research focuses on the implications of environmental challenges for liberal societies and their members. With David Schmidtz, he is a co-editor of the latest edition of the popular textbook Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (2018).
+Encounters between the modern Maya and those who visit their lands can also be startling. Linda Scheie remembers vividly the first Maya who truly made a lasting impression on her. As an incredibly naive gringa tourist, she was walking through the market in Merida, when she found herself followed around by a Yucatec woman whose aged, wrinkle-creased face barely came to her shoulder. The old woman’s black eyes gazed upon that foreigner—Ix-tz’ul in Yucatec Mayan—with disbelief, and who could blame her? At five feet eleven and dressed in heavy boots and jeans, Linda was truly an apparition from another world. That tall gringa and the tiny Yucatec shared a moment of contact, but they were from different realities indeed.
-Aeon J. Skoble is Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Deleting the State: An Argument about Government (2008) and The Essential Nozick (2020); the editor of Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty (2008); and co-editor of Political Philosophy: Essential Selections (1999); Reality, Reason, and Rights (2011); the best-selling The Simpsons and Philosophy (2000); and three other books on film and television. He has frequently lectured and written for the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute. His principal research foci include theories of rights, the nature and justification of authority, and virtue ethics. He also writes widely on the intersection of philosophy and popular culture.
+That old woman, like millions of other modern Maya, is the inheritor of a cultural tradition that began with the hunter-gatherers who settled the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands to the south eleven thousand years ago. The land her ancestors found was vast and environmentally diverse, covering nearly half a million square kilometers and ranging from high volcanic mountain ranges with narrow cool valleys to dense rain forest interspersed with swamps and rivers to the dry forest plains of the north (Fig. 1:1). This diversity meant that when the Maya became farmers around three thousand years ago,[8] they had to devise many different agricultural techniques, including the terracing of slopes, the raising of fields in swamps and rivers, and the slashing and burning of forest cover. This last technique, swidden agriculture—burning and then planting in the fertile ashes left behind—is both the most ancient and the most common farming method used in the region today.
-Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He was previously a Mellon/ American Council of Learned Societies fellow and a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research focuses on assessing debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. His work has appeared in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, the Journal of Value Inquiry, and Public Affairs Quarterly.
+The archaeological record from those ancient villagers, as well as the description of the Maya by their Spanish conquerors, biased though it was, speaks to us of a cultural heritage which still lives on in Maya farming communities today. Granted that much has changed in the intervening centuries, there is still a basic connection between the ancient Maya and their descendants, just as there is between the ancient Saxons and the modern British. By examining modern village life, we can recover at least a partial picture of what life in those ancient villages was like.
-Sam Underwood is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is specializing in phenomenology and hermeneutics, with particular interest in the thought of Paul Ricoeur.
+Just as they did in ancient times, modern Maya villagers live in household compounds occupied by extended families. Each family is made up of a group of related adults, including one or more mature couples with growing children; several unmarried adolescents; and, more often than not, a senior couple or grandparents. Such extended families provide the large number of people needed in farming, a labor-intensive way of life. Maya farmers and their families work hard. The yearly cycle of preparing the fields, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing the fruits of their labor leaves only intermittent periods of unoccupied time.
-Kevin Vallier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. His primary research foci are political philosophy and ethics, with interests in political economy and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge 2014) and Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society (2019).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-46.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:1 Topographical map of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Maya Region<br><sub>drawing by Karim Sadr</sub>]]
-Chad Van Schoelandt is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. His byline has appeared in journals including Ethics, Analysis, Philosophical Studies, the Philosophical Quarterly, and Law and Philosophy.
+Extended family organization not only provides a means of ensuring that several farmers are available during the peak periods of work, it also ensures that there are extra hands available to carry out the other necessary activities of the household. Such activities include routine tasks, such as the building and refurbishment of houses, kitchens, and storerooms, the collection of firewood, the preparation of food, and the repair and maintenance of tools. They also include more specialized craftwork, such as the weaving and decorating of cloth, the manufacture of clothing, and the making of pottery. These crafts can be either used by their makers or exchanged for other goods and services needed by the household.
-J. Martin Vest is an adjunct professor of history at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan, an historical consultant with Proquest LLC, and a research associate in the University of Michigan Department of History.
+Households live in compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings. The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbors. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.
-*** Acknowledgments
+Despite the diversity in the ways that contemporary Maya communities organize their living space, they cling stubbornly and proudly to local traditions. David Freidel remembers visiting the home of a young Tzotzil Maya farmer in Chiapas. He was very pleased to regard himself as a modern man, and to prove the point he showed David a fine pocket watch that he had acquired. His house had been built by the government as part of a project to improve the living conditions of his people. It was a particularly sturdy structure, but it didn’t fit with the ideals of Tzotzil Maya houses, it had windows, which he had boarded up to avoid drafts. It had a fireplace and chimney, which his wife was using as a store cupboard. His fire was directly on the cement floor with the proper three stones and its smoke was properly blackening the rafters above. No longer a house, now it was a home. Such conservatism in daily practice is vital to the bridges we build between the living Maya and the ruined remains left by their ancestors.
-We welcome the occasion the publication of this book affords to say “thank you” to many people.
+There is a clear division of labor in a Maya family: men farm and women prepare the food in the home. Among the people of Yucatan these role definitions are bestowed upon children in infancy, on the day when they are first carried on their mother’s hip rather than bundled in her shawl. In this ceremony children attain both gender identity and personhood: boys are given little toy field tools, while girls are given toy household utensils.
-We owe an obvious debt of gratitude to Andrew Beck at Routledge for patiently supporting the publication of the Handbook and to Marc Stratton, production editor Christopher Taylor, Andrew Melvin, and Julie Willis at River Editorial for help at various stages of its production.
+Participation in this ceremony by adults who are not kinsmen of the child is one of many small ritual ways of forging social ties among different families and even with people from outside the Maya world. As an archaeologist working with Maya from the village of Yaxuná in Yucatán, David Freidel was asked to put a little boy on his hip in just such a ceremony. As it happened the child wasn’t wearing any diapers and, much to the amusement of David’s staff and Maya friends, he reciprocated the honor by making water on his sponsor.
-We thoroughly appreciate the willingness of the Handbook’s many authors to contribute, David Gordon’s thoughtful and detailed comments on the Introduction, Chandran Kukathas’s identification of a footnote error, and John T. Sanders’s improvement of the Handbook’s bibliography. We are also thankful for the willingness of Hillel Steiner, Chandran Kukathas, Michael Munger, John T. Sanders, and Crispin Sartwell to endorse the book; for the able assistance rendered by Chelsea Jackson and Matthew Reeves when work on the Handbook began; and for the opportunity to incorporate in the Annotated Bibliography some entries and annotations that first appeared in Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist (Apple Valley, CA: Cobden 2011).
+The roles bestowed in this ceremony extend throughout the lifetime of the child. In modern Maya communities, men predominate in the public affairs of the village, while women carry substantial authority within the household and make many economic and social decisions concerning the family in conjunction with the senior men. Women are expert in crafts, especially the making of cloth and clothes.
-In addition to students in his Tulane course on anarchy, Chad Van Schoelandt thanks Trevor Griffith, Jerry Gaus, Kevin Vallier, Nathan P. Goodman, Virgil Storr, and Pete Boettke. Gary Chartier is grateful to the usual suspects—A. Ligia Radoias, Aena Prakash, Alicia Homer, Annette Bryson, Alexander Lian, Andrew Howe, Carole Pateman, Charles Teel, Jr., Christopher C. Reeves, Coco Owen, Craig R. Kinzer, David B. Hoppe, David Gordon, David R. Larson, Deborah K. Dunn, Donna L. Carlson, Elaine Claire von Keudell, Elenor L. Webb, Eva Pascal, Fritz Guy, Gen Mensale, Jeffrey D. Cassidy, Jesse Leamon, John Thomas, Kenneth A. Dickey, Kirsten Rasmussen, Lawrence T. Geraty, Maria Zlateva, Michael Orlando, Nabil Abu-Assal, Nicole Regina, Patricia M. Cabrera, Roderick T. Long, Roger E. Rustad, Jr., Ronel S. Harvey, Sheldon Richman, Stephanie Burns, Trisha Famisaran, Varsha Pravinsih, W. Kent Rogers, Wonil Kim, and Xavier Alasdhair Kenneth Doran—for the usual reasons.
+The public authorities in Maya villages derive from three sources: offices surviving from Precolumbian institutions, those introduced by the Spanish, and those needed for working with the modern national governments presiding over Maya country. In the Maya highlands, the primary hierarchy is made up of cargo officials, adult men who take on the cargo, or burden, of responsibility for organizing the festivals of the saints through the cycle of the year. In many highland communities, there are dual cargo hierarchies. One is responsible for public festivals, and the other for civil matters such as arbitrating disputes which cannot be handled by family patriarchs and matriarchs. Such disputes include unpaid loans, damaged property, sexual improprieties, and other infractions which the national authorities consider too minor to bother with. The cargo officials who try these cases possess an admirable philosophy of justice, one aimed at reconciliation rather than a forcibly imposed verdict from the bench. The civil hierarchy presides over these matters at the cabildo, a municipal building usually found on the square facing the church in the center of the community. Cargo positions are sought after years in advance, and men go to the major festivals to have their names inscribed on waiting lists up to fifteen years long.
-La Sierra University served as the context for Gary Chartier’s editorial work on this book. Thanks are thus due to John Thomas, Joy Fehr, Cindy Parkhurst, and Elias Rizkallah, among others, for enabling Chartier to work on this book during his time at La Sierra.
+To hold a cargo in the public lite of a village is very expensive, often requiring most of the disposable income of a family and its relatives for many years. These officials have to pay for the festivals, and for the many ritual meals, flowers, incense, rockets, and other paraphernalia they use during the performance of their office. They must also live in the population center, away from their households and their fields. In this way, the accumulated wealth of families is put at the disposal of the entire community, and the men buy prestige and authority through their devotion.
-** Introduction
+The way modern Maya think about cargo officials offers us insight into the ancient attitude toward kings and nobility. Robert Laughlin, a friend of ours and a famous expert on the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, commented at a national meeting where we were presenting our views on Maya divine kingship that modern Maya cargo holders may be saints for a year, but they are still men subject to the same pleasures and needs as the rest of the community. David Freidel remembers spending the night in the home of such a cargo official, Saint John, in the ceremonial center of Zinacantan, a Tzotzil Maya community. After a rough night on the dirt floor, covered not only with warm blankets but with an abundance of fleas, David was awakened before dawn by calls from without: “Saint John, are you dead? Wake up!” To which his host replied: “No, I’m not dead, I’m a little bit alive, wait a minute, come in, come in.” While the wife of Saint John busied herself with the fire, Saint Lawrence and Saint Sabastian strolled in, decked out in wide, flat beribboned sombreros and black ponchos, and everyone huddled on little stools around the growing fire. Someone produced a bottle of homemade cane liquor, a spicy and formidable potion accompanying most ritual business in the town, and a single shot glass. Drinks were poured in proper order, each shot downed in a single gulp after polite bowing to all Saints present; each gulp was followed by spitting on the earth in libation to the unseen but ever-present spiritual beings. With David’s second shot, the memories of fleas faded, replaced by the delicious aroma of coffee laced with cinnamon, fresh thick corn tortillas, and meat jerky broiling on the fire. The Saints proceeded to discuss the preparation of flower arrangements in the church for the upcoming festival of Saint Lawrence: business breakfast, Maya style. Divine kings, like their saintly descendants, no doubt wove their sacred work around the daily pleasures of human life. The beautifully painted crockery from their own official meals, buried in tombs and offerings, is tangible testimony to this tradition.
-Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt
+Unlike its uses in our culture, hierarchy for the modern Maya is an institutional means of maintaining an egalitarian way of life in which everyone has similar material means and no one stands out as wealthy. Wealth is something intrinsically to be feared, as seen in the stories about pacts with the spirits in which people trade integrity for money. People who accumulate wealth or display it in private space are likely to be accused of witchcraft and killed or driven from the village. Unlike us, the Maya are uncomfortable with nonconformity, and such behavior only causes tension within the community.
-*** I. The Point and Context of the Handbook
+Shamans also fulfill an important role in the public domain. They cure disease and carry out a wide range of rituals in the fields and homes of a village, and they too have their responsibilities in the public festivals. In contrast with the cargo hierarchies and modern officials, shamans are fundamentally self-selecting and egalitarian in organization. Through their prayers to the age-old divinities of their people, the shamans maintain the link with the past and help modern villagers preserve their language and their most cherished understandings of the world in the face of pressing alternatives from the national cultures.
-Anarchy is a social condition free not of rules but of rulers—and so especially, but not only, of states.[1] Anarchism is the project of doing without rulers.[2] And anarchist thought, in the broad sense, is concerned with the possibility, desirability, and potential shape of anarchy.[3] The purpose of the Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought is to introduce you to a broad and diverse range of topics related to the contemporary resurgence of critical reflection on anarchy. It does this by exploring relevant historical figures and movements and by examining contemporary issues in a range of disciplines, including philosophy, economics, and religious studies.
+Although in the ancient world the pressures were different, the shamanistic function has always been to conserve tradition within the community. The shamans were and are public explainers, repositories of the stories and morals of thousands of years of village experience. Their power is intimate and personal, and in the ecstasy of prayer their charisma is unquestionable. They are the keepers of a very complicated world view encoded in special poetic language. We call such knowledge oral history, but in fact it is much more than history. It is an ongoing interpretation of daily life. An example of this way of thinking can be seen in the shaman’s attitude toward disease. Instead of seeing illness as an isolated, purely physical phenomenon, the shaman treats it within the context of the tensions and anxieties of interfamilial and social relationships. The curing of an individual is more than a healing of the physical being. It is a healing of the emotional being, the social being, and the social web holding the community together.
-The popular identification of anarchy with chaos makes sophisticated interpretations of the topic—interpretations that see anarchy as kind of social order rather than as an alternative to it— especially interesting. It is increasingly obvious that existing political arrangements confront serious, and perhaps insurmountable, challenges. Strong, centralized governments have struggled to quell popular frustration and resentment, and doubts have continued to percolate about their moral legitimacy and long-term financial stability. Since the emergence of the modern state itself, concerns like these have driven scholars to wonder whether societies could flourish while abandoning monopolistic states entirely. Moreover, many political philosophers have been concerned with understanding problems that individuals within anarchic arrangements would face in order to understand the role, justification, and appropriate limits of the state. This book is designed to deepen understanding of anarchy—among both scholars and thoughtful non-academic readers— at a time when anarchist ideas have attracted considerable attention.
+The public rituals of the shamans are occasions for the affirmation of the overarching experience of existence, the cycles of life and death and of the agricultural year, and of the community as the true center of everything important. The poetic form of the shaman’s expression allows him not only to learn and remember encyclopedias of communal knowledge but to express himself effectively in ecstatic states, when he is within the true reality which all of his people know exists behind their common, daily understanding of the world.[9]
-Discussions of anarchy as an analytical model in economics, political science, and international relations theory and as a normative model in legal and political philosophy have been matched by growing interest in anarchist ideas in the political sphere. In the United States, for instance, the Ron Paul movement propelled many of those who originally embraced it beyond electoral politics and into support for anarchy. Opposition to corporate-led globalization during the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization embraced anarchist symbols and values. The Occupy movement embraced a self-consciously anarchist flavor, drawing inspiration from anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and praise, indeed, from Ron Paul. And less dramatic antiauthoritarian attitudes find expression in increasingly vocal challenges to the drug war and to state policing.
+The moral and emotional burdens of being a shaman are great, but there are rewards as well. The terrible drought of 1989 finally broke in Yaxuná, Yucatán, only a few days after the village shaman, Don Pablo, had conducted a three-day-long ritual called a Cha-Chae ceremony to summon the storm gods who would bring rain to the parched lands. Having participated in the earlier ceremony, an astounded David Friedel stood in his archaeological field camp watching the rains Don Pablo had called sweep in from the northeast over the pyramids of the ancient city next to the village. With his triumph written across his face in a huge grin, Don Pablo came running over the crest of a nearby hill, clutching his hat in the gusting winds as he fled inches ahead of a gray wall of rain. A great rainbow arched over him in the brilliant orange light of the setting sun in a magnificent display that affirmed the success of his performance as shaman.
-Globally, the policies embraced by many governments to the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic have prompted theoretical anarchist critiques and practical anarchist responses—involving the development of alternatives to state service provision and push-backs against restraints on civil and economic liberties.[4] In the United States, the renewed attention to police violence prompted by the murder of George Floyd has also led to on-the-ground activism and critiques of state provision of security services, both with anarchist undertones or explicit anarchist content.
+Although contemporary villages interact through modern national institutions such as the market economy, the land-tenure system, the school system, and the legal authorities, they also participate in networks °f pilgrimage that come from a far older experience. Villagers attend festivals at other villages and brotherhoods of shamans gather periodically to discuss their craft. These festivals reinforce the local culture and provide opportunities for the arrangement of marriages and the choosing of godparents, acts which link families in real or fictive kinship relationships.
-At the same time, libertarian ideas of various sorts are gaining increasing exposure in academe. Where some academics might once have thought only of nineteenth-century Russian anarchists or of Nozick’s (anti-anarchist) discussion in Anarchy, State, and Utopia when anarchy was mentioned, the work of scholars across a range of disciplines has generated a robust literature concerned with anarchism as a provocative contender among practitioners of social and political philosophy.
+The Spanish overlay of Christianity and the adaptation of village life to the growing impact of modern technological life have produced changes in the Maya village. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable continuity to be seen between modern villagers and their predecessors as described by the Spanish chroniclers. Although the Maya festivals are now arranged according to the Christian calendar, the modern Maya have only switched the timing from the regularities of the katun and the Calendar Round, the ancient way of tracking time. Furthermore, household compounds both of the exalted and the humble, from Preclassic times on, have the same basic identity: small houses arranged around a plaza space. Whether the houses were made of stone and decorated with ornate sculpture, or were the simple wood and thatch constructions of the lowly farmer, the spaces inside them were the same. And both the powerful and the humble buried their dead under the stones of their courtyards so that their ancestors could remain with them and hear the sounds of their descendants’ children playing over their heads.
-The Handbook offers students of philosophy at multiple levels an opportunity to engage with serious objections and alternatives to state authority. Standard political philosophy frequently assumes the legitimacy and desirability of states, frequently focusing on such questions as What is the best kind of state? and What laws and policies should states adopt?, without considering whether it is just or prudent for states to do anything at all. The Handbook is designed to enable scholars and students to grapple with a radical and provocative alternative that will cast more familiar views in stark relief.
+A vivid reminder of just how strong the continuity is between the ancient and modern ways of life made itself forcefully known to us as we were in the final stages of preparing this book. From the first moment we had turned on the computer to start writing, we knew that shamanism was a fundamental part of Maya life, both ancient and modern. Yet we had only been able to deduce its importance to the older Maya civilization by comparing ancient imagery and the archaeological remains of ritual to the practices of modern Maya shamanism. We had no direct written evidence from the ancient Maya themselves. At the 1989 Dumbarton Oaks conference, David Stuart whispered a miracle into David Freidel’s ear. He and Stephen Houston had deciphered a glyph composed of an ahau face half covered with jaguar pelt as way, the word for “to sleep,” “to dream,” “to metamorphize or transform,” “sorcerer,” and “animal (or spirit) companion.” Here in their writing was the glyph for “shaman,” identifying for all who wanted to see Maya shamans engaged in their Otherworld journeys or manifesting as their spirit companions. Perhaps the most startling coincidence of all was that less than two weeks later, we got a letter from Nikolai Grube of Germany. He had independently found the way reading and recognized what it meant.[10]
-The Handbook features a range of original essays on crucial issues related to the nature, appeal, and viability (or non-viability) of anarchy. It is intended to offer an authoritative, up-to-date introduction that will make it distinctively valuable both in classrooms and in individual and institutional libraries.
+This continuity and many others tell us that the villagers of today are the inheritors of more than exotic ruins hidden among vine-draped forests. Moreover, their heritage is not just a collection of myths and half-remembered stories, because their ancestors carved words and images on slabs of stone, on temple walls, and on the objects they used in their ritual lives. These silent monuments hold the names and deeds of kings and nobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity and a place in history. That history was obscured until recently, but those ancient kings now speak again through our new understanding of the words they wrote. It is the decipherment of this writing system that has given us a window into the Maya world. This book is about history as they wrote it and the world as they saw it.
-*** II. Background to the Handbook
+How we came to know about this history is one of the great stories of archaeology. The adventure began with an eccentric nineteenth-century naturalist of dubious renown named Constantine Rafinesque. A man who seemed to just miss fame throughout his lifetime (he almost went on the Lewis and Clark expedition), Rafinesque became interested in the strange writing from Mexico that had been published in the reports of Humboldt’s and Antonio del Rio’s[11] journeys through the region now known as Chiapas. After deciding this odd writing was Maya and deducing how to read the numbers, he published the first modern decipherments in the Saturday Evening Post of January 13, 1827, and June 21, 1828. In a wonderful historical irony, Rafinesque sent letters describing his discoveries about Maya writing to Champolion, who was already famous for his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.[12]
-Anarchism is arguably a radical strand within the liberal tradition.[5] But modern political philosophy arguably begins with thinkers, many of them liberals—notably Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant—who take it as a crucial task to explain and justify the authority of the state in the wake of the demise of theories of divine right.
+Ancient Maya writing became an abiding part of the public imagination with the publication in 1841 of Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. With carefully detailed illustrations of the ruined cities and vine-covered stone monuments accompanying the authors’ lucid and exciting accounts of their adventures, the Travels became a much-reprinted best seller throughout the United States and Europe. Since then, Europeans and Americans have never lost their fascination with this lost American civilization.
-Writing in a period of profound social upheaval, Hobbes maintains that life without a robust state would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We need a ruler with potentially absolute power to keep us safe from mutual predation. It is therefore rational—very much in our own interests—to agree with each other to accept the dominance of such a ruler. (We do not, for Hobbes, make any sort of agreement with the ruler, which means that the ruler can’t, per se, violate any agreement with us in a way that merits withdrawal of consent and, perhaps, revolution.)
+During the ensuing century and a half, many inspired scholars and aficionados contributed to the growing body of knowledge about the Maya and their writing system. The great German scholars Eduard Seler and Ernst Förstemann, along with the American J. T. Goodman, worked out the fundamentals of the calendar and basic questions of reading order by the turn of the century. Just as important as their discoveries was the amazing set of drawings and photographs published by the Englishman Alfred Maudslay in Archaeology: Biología Centrali-Americana and by Teobert Maier in the Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University .
-While the social contract seems for Hobbes to be an intellectual device, Locke appears to take it at least perhaps to be genuinely historical. Locke supposes that humans without the state might be able to interact peacefully, but he clearly believes that security of persons and property is substantially enhanced by agreeing to the rule of a limited state. He also believes, however, that consent to such a state can be withdrawn when it is ineffectual or predatory.
+We have often marveled at the hardships these two men and other early explorers endured to complete their work in the hot, forest-covered ruins. Their huge, bulky cameras and the glass-plate technology available to them required gargantuan strength, superhuman patience, and obsessive dedication, but these men left us a priceless heritage[13] that has been basic to the decipherment process. Those glass plates they so laboriously exposed and developed still provide the most detailed records of monuments that have either eroded into near illegibility or been destroyed by looters during the intervening century.
-Hume is (rightly) skeptical about the idea of any sort of social contract, as either an historical reality or a useful thought experiment. Emphasizing human sociality, Hume sees state authority as rooted in the practical need to maintain order and resolve what we would today characterize as “public goods” problems. We should accept the rule of existing states, for Hume, presuming they’re tolerably good at meeting this need.
+As the early efforts at decipherment progressed, a few people played with the idea that the texts recorded history. One of the most famous near misses was m Herbert Spinden’s[14] 1913 description of the Yaxchilân Lintel 12.
-For Rousseau, state authority emerged from a commitment to collective self-government. Joining together, people form and express the general will through democratic politics, ideally in something like small city-states.
+<quote>
+Upon the bodies of these captives are glyphs which may record their names and the dates of their capture. At the upper part of the stone are two bands of glyphs ... which possibly contain the narrative of the victory or other information of historical interest.
-Kant explicitly denies that the idea of a deliberate exit from the state of nature is anything but a thought experiment. But he uses it to make clear why he believes that accepting the authority of a state governed by and enforcing just laws is not merely advisable but morally required. Maintaining justice requires the institutions of the state, he believes, and we act wrongly if we fail to endorse and support these institutions.
+(Spinden 1913:23)
+</quote>
-Though each of these thinkers defends the state, the approach each takes can be seen as depending on his analysis of what might be expected under anarchic conditions. For instance, the disagreement between Hobbes and Locke regarding the legitimate extent of state power arguably reflects their disagreement about the prospects for life in anarchy. The greater the degree of peaceful cooperation possible without the state, the more restraints on the state are reasonable. An absolute state may thus appear acceptable if violent death is likely for many or most people in a stateless society. A proper analysis of the prospects for and challenges associated with anarchy— at least as a means of discerning (some of) the proper limits of state power—is thus necessary even for many accounts that defend the state.
+Two years later in his Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Sylvanus Morley also assumed that history was to be found in the inscriptions. He suggested it was recorded in what he called the “textual residue” left when all the calendric information was accounted for. “It is here, if anywhere, that fragments of Maya history will be found recorded, and precisely here is the richest field for future research, since the successful interpretation of the ‘textual residue’ will alone disclose the true meaning of the Maya writings.”[15]
-These thinkers very much represented an increasingly dominant trend in political philosophy in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. But the roots of a counter-tradition were also increasingly evident. For instance: Locke had maintained that consent was at the root of state authority, and had recognized that this consent could be withdrawn. But one could easily ask why an individual who did not wish to endorse the state should be understood to be obligated because others had consented. As a result, Locke’s consent-based approach could readily be radicalized.
+Ironically, these early suggestions were overwhelmed by the proposition that Maya writing concerned only the stately passage of time. J. Eric Thompson, one of the greatest Maya scholars of this century, was the leading proponent of this viewpoint. It was unfortunate for the field that he was so elegant in expressing his ideas, for the few who argued with him never matched the persuasiveness of his rhetoric. This is the way he put it:
-Similarly: Scottish Enlightenment thinkers including Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith articulated an essentially evolutionary account of social institutions, of these institutions as produced on a bottom-up basis as products “of human action but not of human design.”[6] All of these thinkers assumed that these institutions would function while embedded within societies governed by robust, if limited, states. But one could easily ask whether those institutions needed to ensure social order—notably laws, courts, and police agencies—could not themselves be produced in the same bottom-up fashion as other institutions. Why couldn’t the evolutionary account of markets, language, and other institutions be applied to those institutions within which families, markets, and other institutions functioned?
+<quote>
+It has been held by some that Maya dates recorded on stelae may refer to historical events or even recount the deeds of individuals; to me such a possibility is well-nigh inconceivable. The dates on stelae surely narrate the stages of the journey of time with a reverence befitting such a solemn theme. I conceive the endless progress of time as the supreme mystery of Maya religion, a subject which pervaded Maya thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind. In such a setting there was no place for personal records, for, in relation to the vastness of time, man and his doings shrink to insignificance. To add details of war or peace, of marriage or giving in marriage, to the solemn roll call of the periods of time is as though a tourist were to carve his initials on Donatello’s David.
-While, as contributions to the Handbook make clear, relevant ideas were in circulation much earlier, what we might readily recognize as anarchism emerges in the nineteenth century. In France, the first thinker to call himself an anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, developed a dialectical approach to thinking about society that included the unequivocal rejection of being governed. In Belgium, Gustave de Molinari elaborated a model for the provision of security without the operation of an entity exercising a monopoly over the use of force in a given geographic area. In England, William Godwin advanced a version of anarchism rooted in something like utilitarianism, Thomas Hodgskin demonstrated the radical potential of anti-statist economics, and the young Herbert Spencer called the authority and necessity of the state into question. In Russia, Peter Kropotkin envisioned a world of peaceful cooperation without dominance, and Mikhail Bakunin highlighted the similarities between authoritarian politics and authoritarian religion: why, he wondered, retain belief in the state after having rejected belief in God? In the United States, Josiah Warren carefully delineated the characteristics of, and sought to model, a society rooted in what he characterized as “individual sovereignty.”[7] Warren’s successors, including Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, developed a more elaborate array of normative and analytical social-theoretic ideas about a society without monopolistic rulers.
+(J. Eric Thompson 1950:155)
+</quote>
-From the latter part of the nineteenth century through the early part of the twentieth, anarchism’s rejection of coercive rule was obscured, replaced in the public mind with an image of anarchists as promoters of revolutionary violence. Anarchy came to be treated as synonymous with chaos. And while thinkers outside the mainstream, like Albert Jay Nock and Dwight Macdonald, might have thought of themselves as anarchists, anarchist ideas were frequently and reflexively dismissed. The expression of anarchist ideas by some participants in the summer 1968 protests in Europe did little to focus attention on anarchism as a viable socio-political program. Economist Murray Rothbard’s elaboration of an account of the economics of law and justice without the state received little attention.
+To his everlasting credit, Thompson admitted before he died that he had been utterly wrong. We’ll let him speak the retraction in his own words.
-Beginning in the 1970s, the conversation shifted. While the most influential English-language work of political philosophy, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, comfortably endorsed state authority, questions about theoretical and practical alternatives were increasingly evident.[8] In philosophy, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia put the discussion of the viability of anarchy back on the map, and the incisive arguments of John Simmons, Robert Paul Wolff, Joseph Raz, and others raised important critical questions about political obligation. (Nozick himself treated anarchy as a foil, using his critique of anarchism to ground his defense of a minimal state.) In economics, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock began to explore the viability of anarchy as an analytical device designed to clarify the maintenance of social order. In addition, their development of public choice theory as an approach to the study of politics “without romance” laid the groundwork for a skeptical view of state action rooted in a recognition of the incentives facing state functionaries. Also in economics, Anthony de Jasay highlighted state pathologies and emphasized the possibility that public goods could be provided without the state, and David Friedman sketched out a set of microeconomic arguments designed to show how social organization could be created and maintained without the state. In normative political theory, Carole Pateman, while defending radical democracy, powerfully highlighted problems with conventional defenses of state authority. In formal political theory, Michael Taylor challenged Hobbesian models of social interaction in favor of ones emphasizing genuine cooperation and argued that communities could maintain order without states. Historian James J. Martin sought to revive understanding of the nineteenth-century American anarchists. Religious thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Vernard Eller employed anarchist language to critique what they saw as idolatrous state pretentions. In law, Randy Barnett worked simultaneously to rehabilitate a Lockean version of natural law theory and to put that theory to work grounding a polycentric, stateless legal order, while Henc van Maarseveen and Thom Holterman called attention to a variety of links between primarily European anarchist thought and issues in legal theory. In international relations theory, Hedley Bull underscored the importance of talking about the world’s states as existing in a state of anarchy—given the absence of a global Leviathan (a reality to which anarchists have appealed in arguing that no Leviathan is needed at the domestic level). And, in anthropology, James C. Scott and, latterly, David Graeber analyzed anarchic practices and state alternatives on the ground while also reflecting on them theoretically.
+<quote>
+Touching on the inscriptions of the Classic period, the most significant achievement has been the demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff that texts on stone monuments treat of individual rulers with dates which probably mark birth, accession to power, conquests, and so on. Name glyphs of rulers or dynasties are given, and hints at political events such as alliances.
-Across a range of disciplines, then, anarchy and anarchism became increasingly interesting and, arguably, more respectable as foci of inquiry. Even for those who were disinclined to regard anarchy as viable or desirable, it became increasingly important to examine the reasons it wasn’t viable or desirable. The resurgence of thought about anarchism meant, at minimum, that the state wasn’t complacently taken for granted in philosophy, the social sciences, and elsewhere.
+(J. Eric Thompson 1971:v)
+</quote>
-*** III. The Range and Fruitfulness of Inquiry into Anarchism and Anarchist Thought
+Proskouriakoff’s accomplishment was truly monumental. Her carefully constructed logic convinced the field instantly and irrevocably that the contents of the inscriptions concerned the deeds of rulers and nobles. Retrospectively, we can’t help but wonder why it took so long to recognize something that is so self-evident today. The answer seems to be that in a barrage of papers published between 1960 and 1964, Proskouriakoff, affectionately known as Tania to her friends, changed the filters before our eyes and altered forever the way we think about the Maya and who they were. Before her work the conclusion was not self-evident.
-Anarchist proposals regarding social organization and anarchist criticisms of existing social institutions directly and indirectly raise a diverse array of normative and positive questions. These questions concern the merits and dynamics of existing institutions; the analysis and evaluation of rationales offered for those institutions; and the potential capacities of alternatives to current institutional arrangements.
+David Freidel’s first encounter with Tania Proskouriakoff reveals a lot about the character of this great scholar. In the fall of 1971, sensing David’s interest in Maya art, his mentor, Gordon Willey, invited him and Tania to lunch at Young Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, just behind the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge. A brash first-year graduate student, and a long-haired hippie to boot, David arrived sporting a flowing Indian-silk headband. His extravagance raised no eyebrows—great teachers speak to the mind and not to outward appearances—and the conversation ranged over everything from shamanism to Darwinian evolution.
-We highlight some of these questions in Part III. Some are addressed or implicated by the chapters of this Handbook. Others are explored elsewhere (as, for instance, in texts mentioned in the Annotated Bibliography). We include them here for several reasons.
+David took what he thought would be a reading course from Tania the following spring, but found that what she taught was actually a “looking” course. He sat in her laboratory in the cluttered, dreary basement of the Peabody Museum for hours on end staring at Maier’s exquisite photographs of stelae, while under a small bright lamp set on a nearby desk, Tania worked away on the beautiful jades that had been dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. She decided that he should work on realistic animal figures in the art on the principle that these are easiest to discern. Like all of the great Mayanists, she was a master typologist who believed that useful insight could come only through painstaking and systematic inventory of empirical patterns revealed as categories in data. She hoped David would follow this sensible approach and she shared her voluminous card catalogs with him to show her own inventory of every motif and element to be found on the known carved monuments, each accurately sketched on a separate card. This inventory undergirds her famous chronological seriation of Maya stelae. Having directed David to the proper methodological path, she did not tell him what to look for. She wanted him to come to his own conclusions about what was conveyed in the art. Periodically she and David would sit by her desk and talk, her clear, intelligent eyes, her quiet, concise words, and her warm wit contrasting sharply with her small, frail appearance and nervous chainsmoking.
-Perhaps most fundamentally, they help to clarify what the study of anarchy and anarchist ideas looks like—the range and diversity of the conversation we seek to introduce here. In addition, they help to make evident why something like this Handbook is valuable. These questions make the stakes of reflection on state and anarchic alternatives more apparent: attending on them should help you to understand what would be needed for a defense of anarchy or of state authority to succeed. They serve to emphasize the fruitfulness of the topic of anarchism and anarchist thought for philosophy, economics, and other disciplines, and so to underscore why the introduction to these topics afforded by the Handbook deserves to be followed by focused inquiries in multiple areas. The fact that reflection on anarchy occasions these questions explains why, apart from their individual significance, the Handbook’s topics of anarchy and anarchist thought matter as spurs to further inquiry.
+Despite her patience, David perplexed and frustrated her. He wanted to interpret whole stela scenes as compositional structures and to establish the patterns of substitution that existed in the objects held or worn as helmets, girdles, and other apparel. Most of all, he wanted to go beyond the first obvious set of patterns to generate more inclusive categories that would let him understand the historical development from natural to grotesque forms. At the end of the course, she said, “David, you have some good ideas, but you need to learn discipline before you can usefully pursue them.” She regarded his deductive leaps as incautious and impossible to prove. She told David that it had taken her many years of careful compilation and study before she was prepared to publicly present her “historical hypothesis.” She believed that one should not publish an argument concerning Maya art, even in article form, until it was incontrovertibly proven.
-**** A. Consent and Related Strategies for State Legitimation
+While no single researcher has ever equaled Proskouriakoff’s central and revolutionary contribution, there were other players[16] in the new historical approach she so elegantly propounded. In 1962, David Kelley published the first history of Quirigua’s dynasty and in 1958 and 1959, Heinrich Berlin identified the name glyphs of historical portraits at Palenque as well as glyphs referring to various Maya cities.
-Medieval political arrangements often featured overlapping jurisdictions, with the existence of each serving to limit the power of the others.[9] And medieval political theory, frequently rooted in the thought of Aristotle, often treated governmental powers as limited. In subsequent centuries, however, states were frequently assumed to be authoritative because monarchs were assumed to be imbued with divinely delegated rights to rule. The state apparatus was transparently and unapologetically understood as an extension of the monarch’s will, so it needed no justification if the monarch’s position itself was divinely approved. The assumption of monarchical legitimacy dissolved under critical scrutiny: the doctrine of divine right proved harder to defend on the basis of traditional religious sources than its proponents had supposed, and historical, philosophical, and literary challenges forced a careful rethinking of the nature and status of those sources themselves.
+Yet knowing that the contents of the inscriptions concerned history did not help the historical epigraphers figure out how the Maya spelled their words. That discovery belongs to a young Russian named Yuri Knorozov, who in 1952 proposed that the Maya system was not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform in that it was a mixed system composed of full word signs combined with signs representing the sounds of syllables. None of the big three, Thompson, Proskouriakoff, or Berlin, was ever able to accept Knorozov’s ideas. Partly it was because the Russian bureaucracy couched his discovery in the political rhetoric of the day, but just as important was the fact that they never saw the promise of “phoneticism” fulfilled. In one of his many damning criticisms of phoneticism, Thompson[17] said it this way: “A point of some importance, I feel, is that with a phonetic system, as with breaking a code, the rate of decipherment accelerates with each newly established reading .... The first flow of alleged decipherments has not swollen to a river; it has long since dried up.”
-As we noted above, new rationales for state power emerged in the wake of the decline of the doctrine of divine right. Some focused on consent, some on perceived pragmatic necessity. (While many of these were initially understood as new defenses of monarchical power, the putative legitimacy of monarchs’ authority came increasingly to be transferred to, broadly speaking, democratic institutions, with parliaments and presidents and premiers stepping into the places of princes and kings.)
+In retrospect, the reason the river of decipherment dried up was because only a few hearty souls were ready to ride the current of phoneticism. David Kelley, Michael Coe, and Floyd Lounsbury were the only Western scholars to give Knorozov a fair hearing until the dam broke open at the First Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a tiny little conference held in the village near the ruins in December 1973. At that conference, a new generation of epigraphers, including Linda Scheie and Peter Mathews, were initiated into the mysteries of glyphic decipherment. They joined Kelley and Lounsbury in blending Knorozov’s phoneticism with ProskouriakofTs “historical approach.” During the next five years, in a series of mini-conferences sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks,[18] this group of epigraphers developed a highly successful collaborative approach and forged the last key—the axiom that the writing reflected spoken language and thus had word order that could be used to determine the function of glyphs, even when we could not read them. Thus, while we might not know what a particular glyph meant, we could figure out whether it was a verb or noun by where it fell in a sentence. That simple assumption let us begin paraphrasing inscriptions and dealing with them as whole texts. It was a breakthrough as important as phoneticism and the historical hypothesis because it gave us a larger framework in which to test readings and reconstruct history.
-Modern theories emphasized the importance of consent in grounding state authority—consider, for instance, the assertion in the US Declaration of Independence that states acquire their legitimate authority from “the consent of the governed.” Appeals to consent continue to play important roles in validating state claims. But anarchist challenges embody, and prompt consideration of, critical questions including:
+The conjunction of these three approaches—phoneticism, the historical approach, and syntactical analysis—began the acceleration that Thompson evoked as proof that the right system had been found. Now each new discovery ripples outward to trigger other discoveries, which in turn trigger still others. The number of glyphs deciphered and the interpretative fallout is growing exponentially. As the results of epigraphic research have been published, more and more archaeologists have realized that the Maya inscriptions and imagery offer a primary source of data about how the Maya thought about themselves. They are merging epigraphic and iconographic studies with archaeological projects designed to find out how this “history” epigraphers recover looks in the ground. This is a time of marvelous adventure and unprecedented discovery. The process is ongoing and unbelievably exhilarating to those of us privileged to participate in it.
- - Is consent necessary or sufficient to confer legitimacy on a state?
+The Maya writing system used to record this ancient history was a rich and expressive script, capable of faithfully recording every nuance of sound, meaning, and grammatical structure in the writers’ language. Calligraphically, it has an unsurpassed elegance, deriving its form from the beauty of freely flowing painted line. Maya scribes, whether carving limestone, engraving jade, inscribing shell, or incising bone, never lost the eloquence of their writing’s original painterly grace. And throughout their history the Maya continued to use the original medium in which writing developed—accordion-folded books made from beaten bark paper that was surfaced with a thin layer of plaster. Four of their books[19] survived the ravages of time and Spanish intervention, but they are but a pitiful remnant of the thousands of books that once formed the basis of Maya knowledge. The four we have are calendar almanacs for the timing of ritual, but we may deduce from other Mesoamerican texts we have in our possession[20] that the Maya also recorded all the details of their lives in their books: genealogy, history, learning, prescriptions for ritual, tribute, trade, mythology, views of the world and history, and perhaps poetry and personal thoughts, ambitions, and dreams. Much information has been lost in the dampness of jungle tombs, but we retain a precious and revealing fragment of this heritage in the public and personal texts they wrote on things of stone and clay.
- - If consent is necessary or sufficient, must it be individual consent or is some sort of collective consent sufficient? Must it be explicit, or may it be inferred—and, if so, in what ways?
+Millions of Maya today speak languages that descend from the two languages we know were written in the ancient texts—Yucatecan, which was spoken by people living in the northern third and on the eastern edge of the peninsula, and Cholan,[21] which was spoken along the base of the southern lowlands from Palenque in the west to Copan in the east (Fig. 1:2).[22] The area between these two regions was probably occupied by both groups, with Yucatecans concentrated toward the east and Cholans to the west. Like the modern Swiss or Belgians, many of these people were and are culturally bilingual.
- - Can individual subjects be bound in ways interestingly similar to consent—as, for instance, when they accept certain benefits from states?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-47.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:2 Distribution for Yucatecan and Cholan during the Classic period]]
-**** B. Public Goods
+Speaking two languages that were as similar in vocabulary and grammar as Spanish and Italian gave the people occupying the lowlands an enormous advantage in creating a regional civilization. People living in kingdoms at opposite sides of the Maya region—Palenque on the western edge and Copan on the eastern frontier—spoke the same Cholan language, while people at Dzibilchaltun in the north spoke the same Yucatecan language as people living near Nah Tunich, a cave in the central Peten near the Belizean border. This uniformity of language was one of the factors that facilitated trade and cultural exchange between the kingdoms and gave the people of this region a sense of common identity as Maya. Although fiercely competitive, the Maya, like the ancient Greek city-states, presented a unified ethnic identity to outsiders—especially those who spoke other languages.
-While consent figured centrally in, for instance, Locke’s account of state authority, attention came increasingly to be paid to the potential role of states in producing what today we commonly label public goods—goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Roughly speaking, in economic terms, a good is excludable if it can be offered just to specific people while others can be kept effectively from obtaining it. Thus, if, for instance, the good is offered on the market, it can be provided only to those willing to pay for it. By contrast, delivering a non-excludable good to one member of a population ordinarily means unavoidably delivering it to all members of the population, with the resulting temptation to be a free-rider—to take advantage of the good’s availability without helping to defray its cost. A good has the property of non-rivalrous consumption if adding new consumers of the good (including free-riders) to an array of existing consumers does not significantly detract from the enjoyment of the existing consumers.
+Even when speakers could not understand one another, the writing system acted as intermediary, much as the Chinese writing system has functioned for millennia. The wordplays that were so important in the Maya writing system and in the symbolism of their imagery usually worked equally in both Yucatecan and Cholan. Language as the source of visual metaphor provided a common base for the innovation of the symbolic expression of the Classic Maya world view and the institution of kingship. For example, in Cholan and Yucatecan, the words for “snake,” “sky,” and the number “four” are all pronounced in a nearly identical fashion (can in Yucatecan and chan in Cholan).[23] It made good sense to Maya artisans reaching for images to convey the sky arching overhead to portray it as a great snake. They also freely exchanged the glyphs for “sky” and “snake” in titles and names. Since both glyphs were read in the same way, it did not matter which form they used. The fact that only two languages were spoken in such a large geographic area, as much as anything, may account for the remarkable coherency of Classic Maya cultural production during the thousand years of its existence.
-A standard argument holds that, given the temptation to be a free-rider, large numbers of people won’t contribute to the production of public goods, and these goods will be produced at sub-optimal levels. A state with the ability to force contributions to the production of public goods is therefore necessary. Anarchist objections to the necessity of states as sources of public goods have prompted the consideration of questions including:
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-48.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3a]]
- - Are there goods that are unavoidably public, or is publicness really just a function of the costs of excluding those unwilling to pay from access to particular goods?
+The writing system itself worked much like the other great hieroglyphic systems in the world, Egyptian and cuneiform—although it came from an entirely indigenous development. Scribes could spell words with signs representing individual sounds as well as signs representing whole words. We call these “word signs” logographs.[24] For example, the word for “jaguar” (balam in Mayan) could be written simply as a picture of the head of the big cat (Fig. 1:3a). Yet in the Maya world there was more than one spotted cat—for example, there were ocelots and margays. Since confusion could arise concerning this pictorial sign, as with many others, the Maya added syllabary signs to either the front or rear of logographs in order to specify how to pronounce the initial or final consonant. For example, they could attach the syllable sign for ba to the front of the jaguar head or ma to its rear, giving the spelling ba-balam or balam-ma. Since no other word for a cat began with ba or ended in ma, readers knew that here they should pronounce balam, instead of any of the other possible words for “cat.” This type of sign is called a phonetic complement, because it helps to specify the phonetic or sound value of the main glyph it accompanies.
- - Are we confident which goods are, in fact, public in the relevant technical sense? Can we tell which goods really are public, and so likely to be (arguably) underproduced, and which goods are genuinely private while conferring spillover benefits on others?
+Since these phonetic complements represented the sounds of syllables, the Maya could spell the word using only these phonetic signs, thus eliminating the logograph altogether. The system they devised used two syllable signs to spell a word composed of a consonant-vowel-consonant.[25] For example, cab, “earth,” was spelled with the sign for ca combined with ba to form ca-b(a) (Fig. 1:3b). The final vowel in this kind of spelling was not pronounced. In this phonetic system, the word for “jaguar” used three signs, ba, la, and ma to spell balam(a), again without pronouncing the final a.
- - Given people’s heterogeneous preferences, how could state officials accurately determine an efficient level for the production of any public good? When should we expect the inefficiencies of public good production in anarchy to be greater or lesser than those inefficiencies in a state-governed society?
+The scribes also used other types of signs, called semantic determinatives, which specified that a word should be read with a particular meaning. The most widely distributed sign of this sort was the cartouche that was put around the names of the days in the 260-day calendar. Composed of a hollow circle standing on three scrolled feet, the cartouche told the reader he was looking at the name of a day. When that same sign appeared outside the cartouche, its values were entirely different. For example, the sign that recorded the day Imix became ba outside this cartouche and the day sign Muluc became the syllable u in its naked form (Fig. 1:3c).
- - How might we compare (i) the costs of not obtaining particular public goods against (ii) the costs of maintaining the extractive institutions needed to supply such goods?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-50.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3B]]
- - Given the importance of supplying particular public goods, are there reliable non-coercive mechanisms for delivering them? What public goods currently provided by a state could be left to voluntary production?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-51.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3C]]
- - What considerations related to class membership and ordinary self-interest might complicate appeals to the state to address dispute-resolution and public-goods problems?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-52.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3D]]
-**** C. Sharing Responsibility
+To the despair and sometimes the bemusement of the modern epigrapher, glyphs also had many different graphic forms as well as different phonetic and semantic values. For example, the Imix graph has its regular form, a human form, a zoomorphic form, and a full-bodied form (Fig. 1:3d). The scribe chose the form that fit the space or the elaborateness of his text in the best possible way, and artistry was judged on how elegantly these various forms were combined and used, much like the ornate capital letters used in medieval manuscripts.
-Careful economic scrutiny reveals that very few goods qualify as public in the technical sense. But people often, and understandably, regard it as important that responsibility for the provision of some private goods—education, for instance, and income support for the economically vulner- able—be shared.[10] It is often reflexively supposed that sharing responsibility for delivery of these goods means endorsing (i) their funding by taxation and (ii) the organization of their delivery by the state. Anarchist objections to the assumption that the provision of these goods must be state- delivered and state-funded naturally give rise to questions including:
+Syllables or words (such as u, the third person pronoun, “he/his, she/hers, it/its”) that were frequently used soon developed many different forms, almost as if the scribes got bored writing the same word too many times in the same way. Since each of these alternative signs had its own set of plain, head, and full-bodied forms, the end product was an enormously complex system of writing in which the same word could be written in many different ways. An example of this is the word ahau, which could function both as a day sign and as the rank of the king (Fig. 1:4). The more important parts of a text were often rendered in the more elaborate forms and were larger in scale.
- - What do historical examples of mutual aid teach us about the possibility of sharing responsibility for the delivery of these goods without coercive organization or funding?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-53.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:4]]
-Is it crucial that these goods be delivered in uniform patterns? Or is diversity in this context a useful occasion for discovery and experimentation? If uniformity matters, can non-state institutions offer it?
+The glyphs in all their various forms were combined into phrases, sentences, and finally the larger texts that have survived into modern times. In the Maya inscriptions, the standard sentence normally began with the time of the action, followed by the action itself, the thing acted upon, and finally the actor. These sentences join with other sentences to become texts, relating sequences of times, actions, and actors, and finally to create a literature with its own style and judgments of what was good and bad writing. Today many of these conventions still survive in the oral traditions of living Maya.[26]
-Might non-state provision of these goods involve dignitary injuries (say, the encouragement of servility or shame on the part of those receiving assistance)? If so, how might the risk that such harms will occur be minimized?
+We have found that the surviving Maya literature falls into several genres: the ritual almanacs of the codices; texts marking the ownership of objects from earflares to houses; texts recording the formal dedication of objects, their patronage, and their artists and scribes; and finally, narrative texts. This last category has at least two subdivisions: narratives embedded into pictorial scenes which illustrate the action, and narratives which stand on their own without pictorial illustration. By combining the information recorded in these various kinds of texts, we can reconstruct the history, beliefs, and institutions of the ancient Maya.
-Can non-state institutions effectively deliver assistance to children whose parents are unconcerned about or hostile to their welfare? Is state coercion needed to ensure good behavior by such parents? When do states themselves create dangers to child welfare?
+The hieroglyphic texts are more than just a history. They constitute a literature, the only written one surviving from the Precolumbian world. The art of writing for the ancient Maya was not only the sequence and structure of words, but included making the image of the word itself. Their writing was one of the most elegant scripts of the ancient world, partially because more than any other writing system, it stayed close to its pictorial and artistic origin. Yet the art of the scribe turned not only on the beauty of the calligraphy but also on how creatively and innovatively he exploited the potential of the writing system and the conventions of text presentation themselves. To the Maya, it was not only what the text said that counted, but also how the scribe chose to say it: and not only how it was said, but also where and on what it was said.
-**** D. Security, Dispute Resolution, and Other Aspects of Social Order
+The complexity of the system is often bewildering to the modern reader, just as it must have been to the ancient Maya who was not an expert in its use. But we must recognize that the goal of the writing system was not mass communication, in the modern sense. Few of the ancient Maya population were literate and there were no paperbacks and weekly news journals. Writing was a sacred proposition that had the capacity to capture the order of the cosmos, to inform history, to give form to ritual, and to transform the profane material of everyday life into the supernatural.
-Defense of individuals against identifiable predators is a private rather than a public good, though its deterrent effects clearly yield benefits to many others. The same is true of reliable dispute resolution. But these order-maintenance functions are often viewed as among the most crucial tasks of the state. The picture of the state as a source of social order seems quite straightforward and simple at first glance: the state enacts uniform laws, adjudicates conflicts regarding these laws using its court system, and enforces them using its police agencies. States’ contributions to order maintenance have often seemed intuitively to be among their most appealing characteristics. Anarchists have, unsurprisingly, challenged the assumption that states are essential guarantors of social order, encouraging reflection on such questions as:
+History is as much a construction of those writing it as the events it proposes to record, and this is as true of the Maya as of any other civilization. Surviving Maya texts give us, almost exclusively, only the side of the winners—those who were victorious in war, who had the power to commission the great public monuments and buildings, those wealthy enough to fill their tombs with inscribed objects, and those who could afford to buy or commission precious objects as offerings to the gods. In the best of worlds, we would also have more examples of the losers’ stories, as well as the daily records of transactions, taxes, and trade, and the personal thoughts of the humans who lived that history. Time almost never gives us such a complete record. What we have lost of the Maya are the things they wrote in their books and on other perishable material. What we have is history as the kings and nobles wanted their constituents to understand it, the things of faith people wanted to take with them into death, and the words of worth they put on offerings and on the objects they used in ritual and daily life.
- - What role do social norms play in maintaining social order—in restraining predation and unreasonable opportunism, ensuring the performance of agreements, and facilitating cooperation with adjudicatory and law-enforcement institutions? If social norms enable the effective functioning of state order-maintenance institutions, could they not do the same where nonstate order-maintenance institutions are concerned?
+Given that the public histories the Maya left behind them are not necessarily the truth, we must use archaeology to provide complementary information of all sorts—some confirming the written record, some qualifying it. It is upon the pattern of conjunction and disjunction between these two records that we base our interpretations of history.
- - While self-regulating spontaneous orders serve many valuable functions, it is often thought that they rely on exogenous legal institutions and would collapse absent such institutions. Is this correct, or can law itself be generated in a manner that is endogenous to spontaneous social orders?
+Combining the two streams of information also gives the archaeologist the chronological framework into which we put Maya history. That archaeological history begins with evidence of the first people moving into the Yucatán Peninsula about eleven thousand years ago. For thousands of years, these hunter-gatherers lived quiet lives, leaving behind the chipped stone tools they used as knives, scrapers, and projectile points for hunting game as mute witness of their existence, but by 1000 B.c., they had learned agriculture and begun to build villages.[27] This first phase of settled life is called the Preclassic period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 200). By its end, the Maya had developed a civilized way of life: the social and political institutions, centering on the institution of divine kingship, that would guide the Maya for the next thousand years.
- - Real-world legal systems have often been more complex than the simple model of state-based legal uniformity might suggest, with overlapping and sometimes competing mechanisms for making laws, adjudicating conflict, and enforcing laws; we can refer to systems featuring such mechanisms as polycentric. Do history or theory suggest that law must be uniform in content or source, or can polycentric legal institutions function effectively? Are there psychic, social, cultural, economic, or normative dynamics in virtue of which legal systems with different sources might be expected to exhibit important overlaps in content?
+The first subdivision of this long period, the Early Preclassic (1500–900 B.C.), was the time when the first great civilization arose in Mesoamerica. Called the Olmec by modern researchers, this remarkable people built the first kingdoms and established the template of world view and political symbolism the Maya would inherit. Occupying the swampy lowlands of southern Veracruz and parts of highland Guerrero, the Olmec were the first people to create an artistic style and symbolic expression that united different ethnic groups throughout Mesoamerica into a single cultural system.
- - Are polycentric legal systems inherently unstable? Can predatory states be expected to emerge inevitably from such systems?
+By the Middle Preclassic (900–300 B.C.), Olmec imagery was used from Costa Rica to the Valley of Mexico and different groups throughout the region were building large population centers and buying into the ideas of kingship and hierarchical society. The reaction of the southernmost Maya peoples to the rise of the Olmec can be seen in their rapid adoption of Olmec innovation in symbolic imagery and social institutions. The Maya in the mountain valleys of western Honduras,[28] Guatemala, and El Salvador began, like the Olmec, to organize their society along more hierarchical lines, a fact which can be extrapolated from the contents of graves from several sites. Some members of society were buried humbly in the floors of their houses, while others were sent to the afterlife accompanied by precious objects such as jade. Throughout the Middle Preclassic period the southern Maya also began raising public buildings—mounds with plazas of earth and stone. On the mountain slopes and foothills above the hot and swampy Pacific coast, other groups[29] began carving stone monuments in styles emulating the Olmec and displaying symbols that presaged the royal iconography of the Maya kings who emerged by the time of Christ. Early rulers were carved in stone along with imagery depicting the symbols of gods and the cosmos of the Middle Preclassic vision. These power images would eventually become the stelae of the lowland tradition, showing the lord frozen at the moment of communication with the Otherworld.
- - Are polycentric legal systems inherently unreasonable? Is there something normatively suspect about the operation of multiple legal rules in proximity to each other? Is the idea of deterritorialized law oxymoronic?
+Although surrounded to the west and south by peoples who had elected to unite under the authority of high chieftains and kings, most of the Middle Preclassic villagers of the lowlands chose a different path of social development: tribal confederacies that could convene in the thousands to repel an enemy, but whose members recognized no power above their village patriarchs.[30] Segmentary tribal organization of this type could sustain essentially egalitarian societies of very large size, in spite of the proximity of neighboring hierarchical states. From this type of organization came the template of a kingship replicated in numerous small states, an institution that arose with great rapidity throughout the lowland country in the first century B.C. Early kings were exalted patriarchs, heads of lineages who viewed themselves as brothers because they had all descended from the same mythical ancestors.[31] Segmentary tribal organization was gradually amplified into segmentary state organization.[32]
- - To what extent can state institutions that are at present highly centralized be replaced with decentralized state institutions? To what extent can the competition, decentralization, and experimentation characteristic of anarchy be realized within a state?
+The Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D. 100) witnessed the emergence of the rank called ahau and the rise of kingdoms throughout the Maya country. From this exalted rank of lords came the person who was the high king, the ahau of the ahauob. From the Pacific slopes of the southern highlands[33] to the northern plains of Yucatán,[34] these lords displayed themselves and their royal regalia on monuments carved with narrative pictures recording their ritual actions. For the first time texts accompanied these scenes, describing who acted, where, and when. It was the beginning of history for the Maya. It was also the beginning of the great political strategies utilized by kings in their creation of public art; for, to the Maya, the cornerstone of historical reality was what could be seen on the temples and public buildings of the city. More powerfully than we can imagine, their art created their reality. It is in this period that the lowland Maya first created decorated temples and the highland peoples[35] raised stone stelae inscribed with texts, and the principles of kingship were firmly established for the next thousand years.
- - How could a non-state legal system provide satisfactory protection to those—children, the frail, the elderly, the seriously ill, non-human animals—not able to take responsibility for asserting their own interests? How would the likely performance of non-state legal system compare to the performance of actual or realistically conceivable state legal systems as regards the protection of vulnerable populations?
+Our story begins in this last phase of the Preclassic period and continues into the florescence of Maya civilization during the Classic period, a phase which traditionally begins with the earliest deciphered date on a stela—now A.D. 199.[36] This time of extraordinary accomplishment falls into two subdivisions: the Early Classic (A.D. 200–600) and the Late Classic (A.D. 600–900).[37] The Classic period ended with a general collapse in most of the Maya region, although in some areas, such as northern Belize and Yucatán, the Classic way of life continued unbroken into the final phase of Precolumbian history, the Postclassic. The Postclassic period lasted from A.D. 900 until the conquest of Yucatán by the Spaniards in 1541, although Maya resistance to Spanish domination continued until the Itzá, Maya Indians who lived around Lake Peten Itzá, were overwhelmed in 1697.
-Under what circumstances, if any, would the success of an existing state at maintaining social order be a decisive reason to treat it as authoritative?
+The inscriptions and archaeology also give us information on the world that the Maya inhabited during the Classic period, for it was very different from what we find as tourists. At the height of Classic civilization in the eighth century, the Maya landscape in all its variety supported millions of people. Although the inscriptions from that period tell us the largest domain was Tikal, a kingdom of around 500,000 souls,[38] the average dominion was much smaller, holding jurisdiction over only 30,000 to 50,000 subjects. Maya kings had to cope with a political geography of enormous complexity (Fig. 1:5), resembling the bewildering variety of kingdoms, dukedoms, baronies, and other titled lands of the European Middle Ages. A closer parallel might be the city-states of Classical Greece: little countries that were politically autonomous, yet culturally, socially, and economically interdependent.[39]
-Even if ordinarily unwarranted, would the exercise of monopolistic coercive power be justified in an otherwise polycentric legal order when a widespread emergency occurs? If so, how might the relevant emergencies be identified? How might the appropriate limits of emergency powers be limned? How might emergency institutions be constrained in fact? How could it be rendered likely that such institutions would surrender their powers after the emergencies they were designed to address have subsided?
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-54.jpg 70f]]
-**** E. Economic Activity
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-55.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:5 Distribution of Emblem Glyph Polities in the Classic Period as suggested by Peter Mathews]]
-States are deeply enmeshed in economic life. And it is often supposed that they are crucial enablers of economic stability and economic equity. However, anarchists of all stripes have frequently seen the state as the agent and enabler of economic groups on whom it confers unjust privileges and not as a defender against but rather as a source of economic instability. At the same time, anarchists who have agreed about the state’s mischief-making role have disagreed radically about the optimal shapes of stateless societies’ economic arrangements. Anarchist challenges to the necessity and value of state involvement in the economy and anarchists’ own disputes about justice and expediency in economic life encourage reflection on such questions as:
+The first clues about the way the Classic Maya organized themselves came with Heinrich Berlin’s discovery of Emblem Glyphs.[40] Today we । know that these glyphs are titles signifying that people who have them in their names are either a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”), ahau (“lord”), or na ahau (“noble lady”) of a particular kingdom. We also know that these kingdoms were hierarchically organized and included people of many different ranks among their populations. Most of them had a main center or capital, but they also included subsidiary sites ranging from sizable towns up to very large palace compounds and eventually down to hamlets and individual farms.[41]
- - What rules regarding the acquisition, use, exchange, and abandonment of property are defensible?
+The glyphic inscriptions give us other kinds of information about the governing hierarchies in these kingdoms, although there was apparently some variation in organization from region to region. The main king was often referred to as the ch’ul ahau. He was always of the rank ahau, but there were also lesser ahauob within the same kingdom who had different responsibilities. Ahauob ruled subordinate population centers within the larger polity and they held important offices, such as war chief, within the main center. The subordinate town of Tortuguero, for example, was ruled by a man named Ahpo-Balam, who was a member of the royal family and an ahau of Palenque. At Copan, the half brother of the last great king ruled a portion of that city. An ahau who was also the son of a king of Naranjo achieved fame as a scribe—not a political office, yet a highly valued specialist rank. In brief, the title of ahau indicated nobility of the highest degree. It was the rank to which the king must belong, but there were many more ahauob than there were kings. This is the typical pattern for a rank that is inherited by several offspring at each generation, as ahau certainly was during the Late Classic period. Obviously, it was in the interests of the kings to find useful work in the government of the realm for their siblings and other ahauob.
- - Is individual property in the means of production a creation of the state that would disappear without state support? Or is it a robust source of defense against coercion?
+Within the kingdoms along the Usumacinta and in the forest to the west of that region,[42] secondary centers might be ruled by a cahal. a noble with less prestige than the ahauob, yet still intimately associated with their kings. The rank of cahal carried many of the ritual prerogatives of the ahauob and produced both provincial governors and officials at the capitals.[43] Both cahalob and ahauob were, therefore, part of the courts that administered the polities, and kings could marry women of either rank to secure political alliances.
- - What is the relationship between private and state hierarchies? To what extent, if at all, are private hierarchies—in businesses, associations, and other institutions—objectionable? Is the resemblance between these hierarchies and state hierarchies largely superficial, or are they subject to similar normative and pragmatic challenges?
+Nobles of both ranks were sent to other capitals as emissaries of their high kings,[44] and people of both ahau and cahal rank were important witnesses to the designations of heirs and the accessions of high kings. The powerful and dangerous ritual requirements of accession, along with the preference that the king be ideally the eldest male offspring of his royal sire, suggest that kingship was not elective. Nevertheless, the many exceptions to the ideal of inheritance, including descent of the throne from older to younger brothers,[45] also show how critical the support of the nobility was to the succession.
- - From an anarchist standpoint, should social class be understood as a function of people’s relationships with the means of production? Or is class membership better seen as constituted by people’s relationships with the state (and perhaps other coercive institutions)?
+The number of kingdoms ruled by kings grew from perhaps a dozen in the first century B.C. to as many as sixty at the height of the lowland civilization in the eighth century (Fig. 1:5d).[46] Not all polities survived this span of history, even when they were well established. There were many hazards to challenge kings—wars, intrigues, and natural catastrophes. A king was literally at risk all his life; and more than one king ended his rule, not by dying of peaceful old age but by being taken captive in a war he was too old to fight.[47] It was also true that prosperous and probably autonomous towns always existed within the political geography without ever erecting a royal stela or establishing themselves as an Emblem Glyph polity. Polities both with and without an Emblem Glyph appeared, matured, and disappeared throughout Maya history.
-*** IV. The Shape of the Handbook
+Political coherence and integration characterized life within the dominion of a king, but in the borderlands between these kingdoms, the opportunity must have existed for adventuresome people to maintain independent chiefdoms, or even for whole villages of unallied farmers to exist. Many civilizations tolerate such marginal folk because they service the civilized in a variety of ways, not the least of which is as a human buffer against organized enemies. In the Maya world of the forest, these inbetween people likely gathered many wild plant and tree products—from which they made medicines, poisons, dyes, and incense—and trapped and hunted game for meat and hides. They then sold all these valued commodities to their brethren within the kingdoms. Keeping the border towns under control and assessing tribute were the responsibility of court nobles, and disputed jurisdiction over borderlands was likely one of the causes of wars.
-In this Handbook, scholars from a range of disciplines and with a range of ideological perspectives address questions about the possibility and desirability of anarchy.
+The political geography of the Maya consisted of island cities of royal power in a sea of townspeople and village folk. Kings worked hard to establish firm control over the countryside and to expand their authority as far as possible in the direction of other polities. From the beginning of the institution of kingship, military confrontation was not only a fact of life but a necessary and inevitable royal responsibility. With the proliferation of polities, the civilized territories expanded at the expense of the freeholders. By the Late Classic period, kings looked out at a landscape peopled with brother lords, both enemies and allies, and at escalating conditions of war and strife.
-We have included contributions in multiple disciplines and standpoints and ones from both academics and independent scholars in the body of the Handbook and in the Annotated Bibliography—well aware of the importance of not limiting consideration of vital issues of social organization to those from a single intellectual perspective or from conventional institutional settings.
+There are certain things about the Maya landscape, about life in the tropics, and about the kind of “technology” available to the ancient Maya that help people of the twentieth century to understand a little better what their lives were really like. They were, first of all, a stone age people, without metal of any kind until several centuries before the Conquest. All they accomplished was done by means of stone tools, utilizing human beings as their beasts of burden: No animals large enough to carry cargo lived in Mesoamerica before the coming of the Spanish. Although the Maya built wide roads to link parts of their kingdoms together, they did not build highway systems. Within the jungle and the rugged mountain landscape, where the wheel was not used, highways did not make a lot of sense. The ancient Maya traveled along paths winding through the deep iorests and cultivated areas, but the major arteries of their transportation were the many rivers and swamps that crisscrossed the landscape. Until very recently,[48] the canoe was the most important form of travel into the interior of the Maya region.
-While the contributors represent and examine a range of perspectives, this Handbook devotes what is arguably an unusual amount of attention to the nineteenth-century individualist anarchists. We suspect that these figures have received too little attention in recent discussions of anarchism. But it’s also worth noting both that (i) their views are inherently interesting, not least because those views don’t map easily onto standard political spectra and (ii) precisely for this reason, they can be seen as offering options capable of building bridges among proponents of diverse anarchist tendencies (as Roderick T. Long stresses in Chapter 2).
+Carved as a single piece from a huge hardwood tree, dugout canoes plied the slow-moving lowland rivers. These rivers drained huge swamps ted by rains that could, and still do, average 150 inches a year in the southern lowlands. Some of this water flows north into the mighty Usumacinta River and its tributaries to empty into the Gulf of México. The rest of it flows east down a network of streams and rivers, large and small, emptying eventually into the Caribbean Sea. Spreading like the veins of a forest leaf, these waterways provided the natural avenues of travel and trade from the southern to the northern lowlands. When we think of lords visiting one another or items being traded between areas, we must remember that these people and trade goods were carried on the backs of bearers in litters or in tumplines[49] or in canoes paddled across the network of waterways that was the superhighway system of the ancient Maya.
-Bottom-up social organization obtains on a continuum—or, indeed, on a set of continua. While anarchy lies at one end of that continuum, it’s important to think about anarchy on the margins. Between anarchy and totalitarianism lie innumerable possibilities as regards the scope of non-consensual order maintenance and of voluntary activities and institutions. As a number of the Handbook’s authors emphasize, various societies and patterns of social organization lie closer to or further from anarchy, featuring wider or narrower scopes for anarchic organization.
+These rivers were are not always gentle pathways. At the height of the rainy season, especially when the great thunderstorms and the hurricanes of summer and fall sweep in from the Gulf, these slow-moving rivers can turn into raging torrents of destruction. Conversely, in the dry season they can become too shallow to navigate. Although water, overall, is abundant in the tropics, there is usually too little of it during the dry times, and too much during the torrential rains of summer and fall. Because of these conditions, much of Maya social innovation w’as centered around two great problems: how to store excess water for the times it would be needed, and how to free wet, fertile swampland for farming. The building of reservoirs and massive, complicated canal systems took the labor of thousands and helped develop the concepts of community and central authority. For instance, the Maya of Tikal excavated reservoirs as they quarried stone to build the great houses of the central acropolis. In areas now in the state of Campeche, the lack of permanent water sources forced the Maya to build great rainwater cisterns under their buildings, and at Edzna, to dig kilometers of shallow canals to hold water throughout the dry season.
-Part I, “Concept and Significance,” attempts to help readers understand anarchism and anarchist claims and the broad significance of arguments about anarchism.
+Further to the north, rainwater collects seasonally in low sinks, but most surface water seeps quickly into the soil and runs underground to the sea. The Maya could reach this underground water only through caves which riddled the limestone. When water dissolved the ceilings of these limestone caves, deep natural wells called cenotes were formed. In the northwestern corner of Yucatán, the water in these wells is close to the surface, but in other regions, for example, at Chichen Itzá, the water table is twenty meters below the surface. Such water is accessible only by long and dangerous climbing down wooden ladders or stone steps carved in the wall of the well itself. The cenotes are a major geographic feature of the northern lowlands, and for a people focused on entrances into the “Other-world” beneath the earth, these caves and water holes became centers of social gathering and the enactment of ritual.
- - Chapter 1, “Anarchism, Anarchists, and Anarchy” (Paul McLaughlin), emphasizes that anarchism itself is an essentially contested concept, considers different accounts of what anarchism amounts to in light of different definitional strategies and foci, and argues for an understanding of anarchism as skepticism about domination and hierarchy.
+The other great fact of Maya life was the magnificent rain forest, full of towering, liana-draped hardwoods, such as the mahogany, chico zapote, and the most sacred tree of all, the great ceiba. The forest supports a rich web of life, but because the soil under it is thin, nutrients that seep below the surface are captured by the subsoil, which locks them away from the roots of plants. The forest has adapted to this by developing a spectacular factory of insects and fungi which live on its dank and shady floor and digest the fall of leaves, limbs, and trees, returning these precious nutrients to the great spreading roots of the trees. This cycle of life is in full view of humanity, a litany of green blossoming out of death and decay.
- - Chapter 2, “The Anarchist Landscape” (Roderick T. Long) clarifies distinctions among anarchist tendencies and uses left-wing market anarchism to highlight relationships among these tendencies.
+The rhythms of the tropical world are not the same as those of the temperate zone in which we live. For us, the central metaphor of death and rebirth derives from the change of winter to spring, but in the Maya tropics spring is the time of drought and the burning of the forest to open the fields for planting. There, the heat of the spring is unending and inescapable as the skies darken with the gritty pall of burning trees, filling lungs with soot and dimming the light of the sun.[50] The forest turns completely white as the trees dry out and many of them lose their leaves. The world becomes the color of bone and the forest smells of death.
- - Chapter 3, “On the Distinction between State and Anarchy” (Christopher W. Morris), makes clear that, just as there is no unambiguous and uncontroversial understanding of anarchism, so, also, the boundaries between anarchy and state are fluid and imprecise.
+The dry season was also the time for wars, for the muddy land dried out then and people could move to and from the battlefield with greater ease. Since planting could not be done until the rains came, there was time for war without endangering the work of farmers. Almost all the battles discussed in this book were fought between late January and early May.
- - Chapter 4, “Methodological Anarchism” (Jason Lee Byas and Billy Christmas), underscores the importance of not assuming the existence or necessity of the state in political philosophy.
+When the rains finally come in late May or early June, the world awakens, literally changing overnight. Thirsty leaves and stems swell with the water of life, and the forest is transformed within hours from the colorlessness of death into a vibrant, unbelievably deep green—the color the Maya called jgx These rains do not bring the riotous color of northern spring, but a sudden change that even more surely emphasizes the transformation of death into life.
- - Chapter 5, “What Is the Point of Anarchism?” (Aeon J. Skoble), suggests that arguments about anarchism have immediate practical significance even if articulating them doesn’t immediately lead to an anarchic society.
+In the summer, the rains come in torrential tropical thunderstorms that break across the land with awesome power. In good times, they release their heavy loads of life-giving water with predictable regularity in the late afternoon or early evening, but they can inundate the land as surely as they can bring it life. Eventually, the storms of summer give way in late July and August to a short dry season called the canícula, letting the muddy, saturated earth dry out a little before the fall rains come in their gentle, all-day drizzle. The cold winter storms, today called nortes. can go on for days, chilling the normally warm climate to a bone-deep, shivering, wet cold.
-Part II, “Figures and Traditions,” examines issues raised by or in relation to individual anarchist thinkers and schools of thought. The focus of this part is on the roots and significance of ideas related to anarchy—positively or critically. While it does not aim to examine every significant figure or tradition significantly related to discussions of anarchy, it is intended to expose you to an intriguing and provocative range of thinkers and ideas.
+There is a rhythm to tropical life that flows through the experience of all beings living there. In the rich abundance of life that thrives in the forest, in the coming of the rains, and in the terrible consequences of drought, there is a contrast of life and death, of abundance and deprivation, that teaches the lessons of life and cyclic time in metaphors of undeniable power and elegance. Their metaphor is not ours—a spring rebirth timed by the equinox. It is instead the coming of the life-giving rains timed by the summer solstice. This metaphor, however, is just as powerful and penetrating as the temperate cycle upon which the great myths of the Western world are built, and just as effective.
- - Chapter 6, “Anarchism against Anarchy: The Classical Roots of Anarchism” (Stephen R. L. Clark), examines the roots of skepticism about top-down social order in the ancient Mediterranean world.
+The institution of kingship, and the understanding of the world that fueled Maya civilization welled up out of the experience of the ancient villager. The plants and animals of the forest, the alternation of dry season with the time of rains, the rhythms of planting and burning, were the stuff from which the kings molded the symbols of their power. We are just beginning to understand the patterns of the Maya world and how they used them in the material expression of their culture.
- - Chapter 7, “Kant on Anarchy” (Oliver Sensen), explains why Kant believed it was not only prudent but necessary that we endorse state authority.
+The connections the Maya put into their public history between things spiritual and things human, between things ancestral and things current, between things of the king and things of the community, were not a matter of accident or personal taste. The Maya put them in the public forum of life because they were the things they saw as important. The inscriptions and imagery we have are the propaganda the kings thought their people would believe. They represent the strategies everyone thought gave them a chance to live beyond dying.
- - Chapter 8, “Barbarians in the Agora: American Market Anarchism, 1945—2011” (J. Martin Vest), explores the nineteenth-century individualist anarchists and their twentieth- and twenty-first-century heirs.
+These texts and images are a map of the ancient Maya mind and history, of the world as they understood it. Through the words and images they inscribed upon the objects of their lives, they live again in our time. We can remember their deeds, contemplate the power and beauty of their world, and recognize that they accomplished things we honor as civilized, and in the context of human events, as great. The writing of the Maya preserves not only the history of their kings but also their sense of power and sacredness. It lets us utter their names once again—and for a moment see the world as they saw it.
-  - Chapter 9, “Rights, Morality, and Egoism in Individualist Anarchism” (Eric Mack) focuses on a vibrant debate among nineteenth-century anarchists over the relationship of morality to anarchism and the relative merits of egoism and alternative moral positions.
+. Sacred Space, Holy Time, And The Maya World
- - Chapter 10, “Transcending Leftist Politics: Situating Egoism within the Anarchist Project” (David S. D’Amato), provides an alternative perspective on the place of egoism in nineteenth-century anarchism and its successors.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-56.jpg 70f]]
- - Chapter 11, “De Facto Monopolies and the Justification of the State” (Ralf M. Bader), makes clear how Robert Nozick can acknowledge the failure of consent-based defenses of state authority while still regarding such authority as legitimate.
+As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon “culture,” and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.
- - Chapter 12, “Two Cheers for Rothbardianism” (Cory Massimino), offers an appreciative but critical perspective on the work of the twentieth-century anarchist economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard, seeking to show that the positions of Rothbard and those of other anarchists might prove mutually enriching.
+The idea that there are as many “realities” as there are societies may be novel to many of us. Yet whether or not we are aware that we see our world through a filter, our own version of reality guides our actions just as surely as other, different versions have guided other societies around the world in both the present and the past. We in the West live as we do in part because our cultural reality constrains our ability to imagine different ways of doing things. In our world, for example, we could not imagine letting blood from our bodies, as the Maya did, in order to communicate with our ancestors. Such violence seems crazy and “uncivilized” to us. On the other hand, the ancient Maya would find our wartime custom of drafting young men to go and fight in the place of the leaders of our nation both barbaric and cowardly. Maya lords fought their own battles and a king often paid tor defeat in the coin of his own capture and sacrifice.
- - Chapter 13, “Christian Anarchism” (Sam Underwood and Kevin Vallier), calls attention to a long-lived tradition of deep skepticism about state power in Christian thought while questioning the versions of this kind of skepticism voiced by some contemporary Christians.
+The principal language of our reality here in the West is economics. Important issues in our lives, such as progress and social justice, war and peace, and the hope for prosperity and security, are expressed in material metaphors. Struggles, both moral and military, between the haves and have-nots of our world pervade our public media and our thoughts of the future. The Maya codified their shared model of reality through religion and ritual rather than economics. The language of Maya religion explained the place of human beings in nature, the workings of the sacred world, and the mysteries of life and death, just as our religion still does for us in special circumstances like marriages and funerals. But their religious system also encompassed practical matters of political and economic power, such as how the ordered world of the community worked.
-The chapters that make up Part III, “Legitimacy and Order,” consider and develop normative and analytical arguments related to the authority of the state and its value as a source of social order.
+While we live in a model of the world that vests our definitions of physical reality in science and spiritual reality in religious principles, the Maya lived in a world that defined the physical world as the material manifestation of the spiritual and the spiritual as the essence of the material. For them the world of experience manifested itself in two complementary dimensions. One dimension was the world in which they lived out their lives and the other was the abode of the gods, ancestors, and other supernatural beings. This manner of understanding reality is still true for many of the contemporary descendants of the ancient Maya.
- - Chapter 14, “Anarchism and Political Obligation: An Introduction” (Magda Egoumenides), explains why conventional accounts of state authority fail to show that such authority is morally binding and how this conclusion sheds light on the indispensable contribution of the anarchist perspective to the debate.
+These two planes of existence were inextricably locked together. The actions and interactions of Otherworld beings influenced the fate of this world, bringing disease or health, disaster or victory, life or death, prosperity or misfortune into the lives of human beings. But the denizens of the Otherworld were also dependent upon the deeds of the living for their continued well-being. Only the living could provide the nourishment required by both the inhabitants of the Otherworld and the souls who would be reborn there as the ancestors.[51] To the Maya, the idea of dividing the responsibility for human welfare between politicians and priests would have been incomprehensible. The kings were, above all, divine shamans who operated in both dimensions and through the power of their ritual performance kept both in balance, thus bringing prosperity to their domains.
- - Chapter 15, “The Positive Political Economy of Analytical Anarchism” (Peter Boettke and Rosolino Candela), engages with a range of economic arguments related to the possibility that social order can be maintained without the involvement of a Weberian monopolist; while not offering a normative argument for anarchism, their insights provide obvious resources for anyone developing such an argument.
+Because the king lived in the same community as the villager, his explanations of political institutions and rituals had to be voiced in the common language of this shared reality, for the villagers were as much his constituents as were the nobles.[52] For us to understand the actions of Maya kings and their people as rational and necessary for their successful functioning in their world, we must understand how the shared reality of the ancient Maya defined the world for them.
- - Chapter 16, “Moral Parity between State and Non-State Actors” (Jason Brennan), provides reason to think that state actors’ claims to be entitled to do things it would be wrong for others to do are unsustainable.
+The high art that has so fascinated the modern visitor is the public and private expression of that world view through writing and narrative imagery. This narrative representation of the actions of kings and nobles served a twofold purpose. On the most fundamental level it placed them within the framework of history. Most important, however, it underlined the cyclicality of the cosmic time in which that history unfolded. The Maya were preoccupied with demonstrating historical action as the inevitable result of cosmic and ancestral necessities. It was within this great matrix of belief that the Maya enacted the triumphs, defeats, drama, humor, and pathos of their history and strove to create the greatest and most lasting memorials to their lives.
-  - Chapter 17, “Economic Pathologies of the State” (Christopher J. Coyne and Nathan Goodman), indicates why states might be expected consistently to distort economic life and to underperform non-state alternatives.
+  The World They Conceived
- - Chapter 18, “Hunting for Unicorns” (Peter T. Leeson), provides historical evidence that supports the contention that social order can be effectively maintained in the state’s absence.
+The Maya world was made up of three layered domains: the starry arch of heaven, the stony Middleworld of earth made to flower and bear fruit by the blood of kings, and the dark waters of the Underworld below.[53] To say that the Maya considered these to be three distinct regions, however, is to give a false impression, for they believed all dimensions of existence were interrelated. Furthermore, all three domains were thought to be alive and imbued with sacred power, including the sky, which was represented by a great crocodilian monster. This Cosmic Monster made the rains when it shed its blood in supernatural counterpoint to the royal sacrifices on the earth below.
- - Chapter 19, “Social Norms and Social Order” (Ryan Muldoon), reflects critically on the potential of social norms to serve as sources of order alternative to state-made laws, highlighting both the difficulties associated with such norms in some social environments and the characteristics of the kind of social setting in which norms might be most appealing as bases of order.
+Ihe Underworld was sometimes called Xibalba,[54] but it is perhaps closer to the original Maya understanding to think of Xibalba as the parallel unseen Otherworld into which the Maya kings and other shamans could pass in ecstatic trance. Like the world of human beings, Xibalba[55] had animals, plants, inhabitants of various kinds, and a landscape with both natural and constructed features. At sundown Xibalba rotated above the earth to become the night sky.
- - Chapter 20, “Anarchy and Law” (Jonathan Crowe), explains why law can exist in the absence of the state and what forms it might be expected take.
+The human plane of existence, like the Otherworld, was a sacred place. The Maya conceived of the human world as a region floating in the primordial sea. Sometimes they represented the earth as the back of a caiman and sometimes as the back of a turtle.[56] The four cardinal directions provided the fundamental grid for the Maya community and for the surface of the world. But for the Maya, the principal axis of the Middleworld was the path of the sun as it moved from east to west on its daily journey. Each direction of the compass had a special tree, a bird, a color, gods associated with its domain, and rituals associated with those gods. East was red and the most important direction since it was where the sun was born. North, sometimes called the “side of heaven,” was white and the direction from which the cooling rains of winter came. It was also the direction of the north star around which the sky pivots. West, the leaving or dying place of the sun, was black. South was yellow and was considered to be the right-hand or great side of the sun.[57] In the Maya conception east, not north, should always be at the top of maps.
- - Chapter 21, “Anarchy, State, and Violence” (Andy Alexis-Baker), emphasizes that states undermine and attack peaceful social order, offering a critique of state violence as an idolatrous religious phenomenon reflecting a tendency to sacralize brutality and domination.
+This model of the world, however, was concentric as well as quadrangular. The four cardinal directions were also seen in relationship to the center, which also had its color (blue-green), its gods, its bird, and its tree (Fig. 2:1). Running through this center, the Maya envisioned an axis vailed Hocoh Chon (“six sky” or “raised up sky”).[58] The tree which symbolized this axis coexisted in all three vertical domains. Its trunk went through the Middleworld; its roots plunged to the nadir in the watery Underworld region of the Otherworld, and its branches soared to the zenith in the highest layer of the heavenly region of the Otherworld.
- - Chapter 22, “The Forecast for Anarchy” (Tom W. Bell) examines the social forces that are rendering hope for peaceful anarchy more reasonable.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-57.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:1]]
-Part IV, “Critique and Alternatives,” focuses on anarchist positions regarding particular sociopolitical issues, addressing contemporary policy questions and considering the envisioned characteristics of anarchic societies.
+The geography of the human world included plains, mountains, caves, cenotes, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and the places and buildings made by people—cities and towns with their houses, palaces, temples, and ballcourts (Fig. 2:2). To the Maya, this world was alive and imbued with a sacredness that was especially concentrated at special points, like caves and mountains. The principal pattern of power points had been established by the gods when the cosmos was created. Within this matrix of sacred landscape, human beings built communities that both merged with t the god-generated patterns and created a second human-made matrix of power points. These two systems were perceived to be complementary, not separate.
-Chapter 23, “Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property” (Jesse Spafford), focuses on a key debate among anarchists: it explores the links between the denial of legitimacy to state power by all anarchists and the denial of legitimacy to private property by some, explaining the worries voiced by these anarchists concerning the potentially oppressive nature of such property.
+As we mentioned above, the world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the wacah chan axis which ran through the center of existence. This axis was not located in any one earthly place, but could be materialized though ritual at any point in the natural and human-made landscape. Most important, it was materialized in.the person of the king, who brought it into existence as he stood enthralled in ecstatic visions atop his pyramid-mountain.
-Chapter 24, “The Right Anarchy: Capitalist or Socialist?” (Michael Huemer), continues the anarchist debate about property begun in the preceding chapter, arguing that forms of anarchism incorporating respect for markets and robust property rights are strongly preferable to available alternatives.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-58.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:2]]
-Chapter 25, “Anarchist Approaches to Education” (Kevin Currie-Knight), considers historical and normative questions related to educational practice as these might appear from an anarchist perspective.
+There were two great symbolic representations of this center axis: the king himself, who brought it into being, and his natural analog, the World Tree. The act of communication between the human world and the Other-world was represented by the most profound symbols of Maya kingship: the Vision Serpent and the Double-headed Serpent Bar[59] (Fig. 2:3). In the rapture of bloodletting rituals, the king brought the great World Tree into existence through the middle of the temple and opened the awesome doorway into the Otherworld.[60] During both public and private bloodletting rituals, the Vision Serpent, which symbolized the path of communication between the two worlds, was seen rising in the clouds of incense and smoke above the temples housing the sculptured sanctums. The earthly sides of the portals were within these sanctums.
-Chapter 26, “An Anarchist Critique of Power Relations within Institutions” (Kevin A. Carson), highlights a range of pathologies inherent in hierarchical institutions and links between state power and the occurrence of these pathologies.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-59.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:3 Vision Serpents]]
-Chapter 27, “Anarchism for an Ecological Crisis?” (Dan C. Shahar), asks how anarchists might respond effectively to large-scale environmental challenges.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-60.jpg 70f][Double-headed Serpent]]
-Chapter 28, “States, Incarceration, and Organizational Structure: Towards a General Theory of Imprisonment” (Daniel J. D’Amico), highlights evidence that strongly suggests a link between the predictable incentives faced by state actors and the growth of the carceral state.
+Fortunately for us, one of the greatest of Maya painters[61] 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 (Fig. 2:4). 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.
-Chapter 29, “The Problems of Central Planning in Military Technology” (Abigail R. Hall), indirectly notes the significance of anarchy by emphasizing the ways in which the inherent liabilities associated with state decision-making renders states more likely than non-state decision-makers to reach poor decisions with respect to military hardware.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-61.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:4 The Maya Cosmos Venus as Eveningstar rising from the Underworld in its first appearance after superior conjunction]]
-Chapter 30, “Anarchy and Transhumanism” (William Gillis), underscores the inherent links between anarchism and a range of social, cultural, political, and technological proposals designed to help people move beyond the limits currently imposed on human action and interaction by their biological natures.
+Once brought into the world of humanity, these Otherworld beings could be materialized in ritual objects, in features of the landscape, or in the actual body of a human performer.[62] Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument of this materialization.[63] The ritual of communication was performed on the pyramids and in the plazas of the Maya cities, which replicated in symbolic form the sacred landscape generated by the gods at creation.
-*** V. Engaging with the Handbook
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-62.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:5 A forest of tree-stones at Copan]]
-The chapters of the Handbook have been written independently, and you can read them profitably in any order. We hope that the range of disciplines, approaches, and historical foci represented, in whatever fashion you choose to adopt, reflect on, or critically engage with them, will give you a better sense of the richness and diversity of anarchist thought and of the range of important issues anarchist criticisms of existing institutions and practices place on the table. We hope, too, that the Annotated Bibliography will point you toward a range of texts that will enrich your understanding of anarchism from a variety of perspectives. We also hope that you will discover that anarchy need not be a condition of chaotic violence—that its proponents, of all stripes, are advocates of peace and voluntary cooperation and that they see the state as precisely not a source of peace but rather as the preeminent perpetrator and abettor of violence. We hope, in addition, that you will treat the questions we noted in Part III as prompts for reflection—prompts that, along with the Handbook’s chapters and the Annotated Bibliography, will lead you to explore the significance of anarchism and anarchist thought for yourself and to extend understanding of these stimulating topics. And we hope, finally, that you will find yourself encouraged, whatever your ultimate response to anarchist proposals, to think more clearly and carefully about the challenges to frequently unquestioned contemporary assumptions that anarchism so pointedly raises.
+The names for various parts of the Maya cityscape reinforced this symbolism. The slab-shaped monuments they carved with the images of kings were called te-tun, “tree-stone.” Plazas filled with these tree-stones I then represented the earth covered by a tropical forest (Fig. 2:5). The Maya word for temple was yotot (“his house”[64]) or ch’ul na, “holy edifice.” The doors of such buildings were formed to represent the mouth of a monster (Fig. 2:6) in echo of the Maya phrase for door—“mouth of the house” (ti yotot).
+Pyramids and temples were often decorated with images of Witz Monsters[65] (Fig. 2:7) to define them as sacred mountains (witz[66] is the Mayan word for “mountain” or “hill). In this metaphor, the door of the temple is also the cave leading into the heart of the mountain. Inside the sanctum of the cave sat the portal, depicted as the skeletal Maw of the Otherworld. The royal mountain thus contained the cave that formed part of the path that led to the supernatural world. Within this cave grew the Tree of the World marking the center, the place of the portal,[67] in replication of the great ceiba trees that often grow from the entrances of caves in the natural world. A group of temples set together on a platform represented a mountain range towering over the forest of tree-stones in the plazas below. The architecture of ritual space thus replicated the features of sacred geography—the forest, the mountain, and the cave.
-[1] Rulers exert dominance through the use or threat of physical force. Freedom from rulers thus also means (at least) freedom from (i) criminal gangs and others employing large-scale violence to dominate, even if they don’t (a) claim legitimacy in the ways in which states do or (b) succeed in establishing dominance over particular territories or groups, and (ii) non-state actors empowered by states through the receipt of special privileges or statuses dependent on state endorsement and support.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-63.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:6 Doorway Sculpture from Temple 1 at Tabasquena, Campeche]]
-[2] When we refer here to anarchism simpliciter, we have in mind anarchism understood in this way, as at least endorsement of, and perhaps participation in, a socio-political project. Sometimes, but not always, references to specifically philosophical anarchism have in mind simply the rejection of the view that states necessarily or automatically possess any capacity to create moral duties for their subjects.
+These same metaphors were also used by patriarchs and shamans in the humble settings of the village. Today, Yucatecan village shamans make their models of the natural world out of green saplings and corn stalks and set them up in the middle of fields, at the mouths of caves, or at the bases of natural hills.[68] Maya peasants throughout the region similarly decorate their altars and images with flowers, leaves, pine boughs, and other living links to surrounding nature. The remarkable correspondences between modern peasant shamanistic practices and ancient royal practices suggest that the ancestral shamans of the peasants, presumably also villagers, carried out modest versions of the noble ceremonies. Nevertheless, these humble rituals activated the sacred energies just as effectively as their counterparts in the great urban centers.[69]
-[3] It hardly needs to be said that these definitions are themselves thoroughly contestable, and would not necessarily be endorsed without qualification by all of the contributors to the Handbook, much less by all theorists of anarchy and anarchism.
+So powerful were the effects of these rituals that the objects, people, buildings, and places in the landscape in which the supernatural materialized accumulated energy and became more sacred with repeated use.[70] Thus, as kings built and rebuilt temples on the same spot over centuries, the sanctums within them became ever more sacred. The devotion and ecstasy of successive divine ahauob sacrificing within those sanctums rendered the membrane between this world and the Otherworld ever more thin and pliable. The ancestors and the gods passed through such portals into the living monarch with increasing facility. To enhance this effect, generations of kings replicated the iconography and sculptural programs of early buildings through successive temples built over the same nexus.[71]
-[4] Cp. William Gillis, “Anarchism and Pandemics,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, April 4, 2020), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/52761 ]](June 10, 2020).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-64.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:7 Witz Monster Masks on the Southwest Corner of Temple 22 at Copan]]
-[5] Noam Chomsky, for instance, plausibly connects anarchism and liberalism. See Anthony Arnove, “Foreword,” The Essential Chomsky, by Noam Chomsky, ed. Arnove (New York: New 2008) vii; Matthew Robare, “American Anarchist,” The American Conservative (American Ideas Institute, Nov. 22, 2013) [[http://www.theamericanconservative.com][www.]] [[http://www.theamericanconservative.com][theamericanconservative.com/articles/american-anarchist]] (June 16, 2020). This is, of course, another issue regarding which anarchists, including contributors to this volume, disagree.
+The result was a layered pattern of power points particular to each Maya royal capital, a dynamic pattern that was both conserved and elaborated upon by successive rulers. On the larger scale, dynastic histories affected the sacred geography that had been created by the gods. As kings and nobles built temples to consolidate their power, and as king and commoner buried their dead in the houses they built, human action both added to and shifted the great magnetic centers of supernatural power that dotted the landscape. Sacred geography was affected as much by the unfolding of human history as by the intrinsic structure of the cosmos. But of course, for the Maya these were connected aspects of the same basic forces of nature.
-[6] Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5<sup>th</sup> ed. (London: Cadell 1782) 205.
+The strategies of political competition were conceived and executed within this matrix of sacred power. Ritual, war, trade, marriage, accession, and other social activities were more likely to succeed if they were conducted at the proper place and time. Specialists in the complex patterns of time and in the movements of the heavens, like Western astrologers, kept track of the movements of the stars and planets to discover when it was favorable to proceed. As the Maya exploited the patterns of power in time and space, they used ritual to control the dangerous and powerful energies they released. There were also rituals which contained the accumulated power of objects, people, and places when they were no longer in active use.[72] And conversely, when the community became convinced that the power was gone from their city and ruling dynasts, they just walked away.
-[7] See, for example, Josiah Warren, “Manifesto,” Libertarian Labyrinth (Libertarian Labyrinth, Sep. 23, 2016) [1841] [[http://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org][www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/josiah-warren-manifesto-1841/ ]](Aug. 16, 2020); Rodion Belkovich, Equitable Commerce: The Mediaeval Origins of American Anarchism, WP BRP 18/LAW/ 2013 ([Moscow, Russia:] National Research University, Higher School of Economics) 4,[[http://www.hse.ru/][www.hse.ru/]] [[http://www.hse.ru/][data/2013/05/14/1299898751/18LAW2013.pdf ]](Aug. 16, 2020).
+The Maya described the inhabitants of their world, both human and superhuman, in elaborate and powerful stories. These myths, like those in the Bible, not only described but also explained the nature of those beings and their relationships. Because the Maya wrote primarily upon perishable paper, our understanding of their literature and of the many forms such stories must have taken is severely limited. There is one example, however, of a Maya Bible,[73] a compilation of stories that explains the essence of living experience. It is called the Book of Council or the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya[74] people.
-[8] For more details regarding the texts to which we allude below, see the Annotated Bibliography.
+Fragmentary versions of these stories and others were written down by Maya literate both in their own script and that of their new masters, the Spanish. Many of these accounts were requested by the Spanish and incorporated into their official documents, but some made their way into carefully guarded caches of books saved by the Maya from the great burning. Other versions were transferred orally from generation to generation of living Maya, making it possible for modern scholars to record them. In fact, one version or another of the creation stories related in the Popol Vuh are found in all periods of Maya history: on the monuments of Preclassic cities like Izapa and Cerros,[75] on Classic period pottery and public art, in documents from the Colonial period, and in the modern oral tradition. There can be no doubt that the creation mythology of the ancient Maya later inspired the genesis stories of the Popol Vuh and that the Precolumbian versions of these stories described the shared world view which linked farmer and king together into a unified society.
-[9] Cp. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1983).
+The Heroes of Maya myth were twins. In the seventeenth-century Popol Vuh myth, they were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The names most securely associated with them in the Classic period are Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In the version of the myth preserved in the Popol Vuh, these twins were the offspring of an older set of twins who had been called to Xibalba for making too much noise playing the ballgame. Named Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu,[76] these older twins were tricked by the Lords of Death, defeated, and sacrificed. The Lords of Death buried one twin under the ballcourt in Xibalba and hung the skull of the other in a gourd tree as a warning to others so ill advised as to offend the powerful Xibalbans. Found by the daughter of a Lord of Death, the skull impregnated her by spitting in her hand. Frightened by her enraged father, the girl fled Xibalba to the Middleworld, where she wandered until she found the grandmother of the dead twins. The grandmother sheltered her and eventually she gave birth to a new set of twins, named Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
-[10] Both of the goods we offer as examples obviously yield spillover benefits to others, as is true of most goods.
+After many adventures, these twins found the ballgame gear their grandmother had hidden after the death of their forebears. The two became great ballplayers and in their turn disturbed the Xibalbans who lived in the Underworld just under the ballcourt. They too were called to Xibalba to account from their unseemly behavior, but unlike the first set of twins, they outwitted the Lords of Death and survived a series of trials designed to defeat them. On the first night they were put in the Dark House and given a torch and two cigars and told to keep them lit all night. They tricked the Lords of Death by putting fireflies at the tips of their cigars and passing a macaw’s tail off as the glow of the torch.
-<br>
+The following day the twins played ball with the lords and allowed themselves to lose. They had till morning to come up with the four bowls of flowers that were bet on the outcome. Thinking to distract Hunahpu and Xbalanque from finding a solution to this problem, the lords had put the twins in Razor House, a place full of stone blades which were constantly looking for something to cut. The twins got the blades to stop moving by promising them the flesh of animals. This accomplished, they sent leaf-cutting ants to the gardens of the Lords of Death to bring back the bowls of flowers. In the morning the lords were enraged to find that they had been paid with their own blossoms.
-* Part I: Concept and Significance
+The twins continued to play ball with the Lords of Death by day and allow themselves to be tested by night. They survived the Cold House, which was full of freezing wind and hail; Jaguar House, a place filled with hungry jaguars; Fire House, a place filled with raging flames; and a house filled with shrieking bats which they escaped by spending the night curled up inside their blowguns.
-** 1. Anarchism, Anarchists, and Anarchy
+They did not escape the Bat House completely unscathed, however. As morning approached and the bats grew quiet, Hunahpu peeked out of the muzzle of his blowgun for a look around. Just at that moment a large bat swooped down and knocked off his head, which rolled onto the Xibalban ballcourt. Xbalanque, however, managed to replace the head with a squash, which he carved to resemble his brother’s face.
-Paul McLaughlin
+In the ballgame the next day, the Xibalbans used the brother’s severed head as the ball, but Xbalanque was ready for their tricks. He kicked his brother’s head into the high grass at the side of the court. Out of the grass jumped a rabbit who bounced away like a ball, taking the Xibalbans with him. Xbalanque retrieved his brother’s head, replaced it on his body, and put the squash in its place. He yelled at the Xibalbans that he had found the lost ball and, when play resumed, the squash splattered into bits on the court. The Lords of Death were furious when they realized they had been outsmarted once again.
-*** I. Introduction
+As a last resort the Lords of Death decided to burn Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Learning of this, the twins instructed two seers, Xulu and Pacam, telling them what they should say when the lords asked for advice in disposing of their remains. The twins cheerfully accepted an invitation to see the great stone fire pit where the Xibalbans were brewing an alcoholic beverage. When challenged to a game of jumping over the pit, they simply jumped in.
-What is the social philosophy of anarchism? What is its relationship to the social action of anarchists? And what is its relationship to the social vision of anarchy? These are the three questions I address conceptually in this chapter. Depending on one’s point of view, one might regard it as necessary (or not) to address some of these questions simultaneously. In particular, one might hold that answering the anarchism question requires that we address the anarchists question or the anarchy question. Or, if one is minded as I am, one might regard these questions as independent affairs and the anarchism question as answerable in itself. In this chapter, I will attempt to justify the latter point of view in large part by demonstrating what is wrong with the former. In effect, I will attempt at a conceptual level to divorce “anarchism” from “anarchists” and “anarchy.”
+Thinking they had won, the lords followed the advice of the two seers and ground the twins’ bones, casting the powder into the river. After five days Hunahpu and Xbalanque were resurrected with the faces of catfish. On the following day they took on human form again, put on the guise of vagabond actors, and began to perform miraculous dances. Hearing of these remarkable new performers, the Lords of Death invited them to demonstrate their skills at court.
-What motivates this attempt is original doubt about two prominent conceptions of anarchism. The first is a political conception that conflates “anarchism” with what might more accurately be termed “anarchist-ism.” The second is a philosophical conception that conflates “anarchism” with what might more accurately be termed “anarchy-ism.” I will analyze and critique both of these conceptions below. But the original doubt here concerns not just possible intellectual error—or misconception of anarchism—but also a certain undesirable practical and theoretical sectarianism that is grounded on the apprehension of, for example, supposedly defining anarchist practices or values. The worry, in other words, is unjustified or even arbitrary exclusion by some (“true anarchists”) of others (“false anarchists”) from the political and/or philosophical community of anarchism. Needless to say, any account of anarchism will be exclusive. The point here is that exclusion requires justification on non-arbitrary grounds (other than, for example, a particular individual’s preferred tactics or personal ethics).
+The lords were most anxious to see the remarkable dance of sacrifice in which one twin decapitated and dismembered the other. Commanded to perform, Xbalanque dismembered his brother and then brought him back to life. The Lords of Death were overwhelmed and begged to have it done to themselves. The Hero Twins gladly acquiesced, but then they did not bring the lords back to life. Thus was death outwitted and hope brought to humankind. A soul called to Xibalba in death goes with the hope that it too will outwit the Lords of Death, to emerge, like the Hero Twins, in triumph and become venerated as an ancestor.
-In undertaking such work, one is invariably challenged—at least within this community— over the possibility and/or desirability of conceptual analysis as such, or the conceptual analysis of political terms more particularly, or even the conceptual analysis of anarchism itself. For example, Noam Chomsky maintains:
+Xibalba, like the world of humanity, contained many kinds of beings, some of which were found in both worlds and some of which were unique to one or the other.[77] The myth of the Heroes suggests, however, that while people could enter Xibalba, the Lords of Death could not visit the Middleworld except in their nonphysical manifestations—rot, disease, and death. They could not rule as sentient beings here. It was thus the human form of godhood that spanned the worlds, rather than the supernatural form, and that human form was ultimately the king. He was the earthly manifestation of the Hero Twins and he reenacted their triumph over death through ritual.
-<quote>
+Maya artists often represented Xibalba as being underground,[78] but they also pictured it underwater with its denizens upside down relative to the human world. In at least one version (Fig. 2:4), Xibalbans lived foot to foot with humans, exactly as if they were mirror people. Xibalba was, furthermore, not always underfoot, for at night it circulated to take its place above in the night sky. The Maya saw stars and constellations, the planets and the moon, as living beings who interacted with the cycles, natural and social, of the Middleworld. To the ancient Maya the world of the stars was as alive as the world of humankind. Astronomical observation was not a matter of simple scientific curiosity, but a source of vital knowledge about Xibalba and its powers. Sky patterns reflected the actions and interactions of those gods, spirits, and ancestors with the living beings of the Middleworld. Both king and commoner adjusted their living to those patterns or suffered the consequences.
-The terms of political discourse are hardly models of precision. Considering the way terms are used, it is next to impossible to give meaningful answers to such questions as ‘what is socialism?’ Or capitalism, or free markets, or others in common usage. That is even truer of the term ‘anarchism.’ It has been subject to widely varied use, and outright abuse both by bitter enemies and those who hold its banner high, so much so that it resists any straightforward characterization.[11]
-</quote>
-This is no denial of the possibility or desirability of conceptual analysis as such. Nor is it a denial of the desirability of the conceptual analysis of political terms including “anarchism.” But it is a denial of the possibility of the conceptual analysis of anarchism in particular among political terms, of analysis that might yield a “straightforward characterization” or definition of the term.
+From the myth of the Hero Twins came three great axioms that appear repeatedly in the imagery of Classic Maya religion and politics. First, the Hero of the Maya vision did not overpower his enemies: He outwitted them. In the myth, the Twins tricked the Lords of Death into submitting to sacrifice. Secondly, resurrection and rebirth came through sacrifice—especially death by decapitation. The Hero Twins were conceived when the severed head of their father spit into the hand of their mother. They defeated death by submitting to decapitation and sacrifice. Finally, the place of confrontation and communication was the ballcourt. The ballgame, as we shall see in later chapters, was the arena in which life and death, victory and defeat, rebirth and triumph played out their consequences.
-A stronger claim is made by Benjamin Franks, who insists that “it is misguided to attempt to find ahistorical and universal, decontested concepts [or to fix] the meaning[s] of terms [by identifying] necessary and sufficient conditions” for their application.[12] I take this assertion of misguidedness to be a denial of possibility. In other words, I take Franks to deny the possibility of conceptual analysis of political terms at the very least, if not conceptual analysis as such. Moreover, I also take him to deny the desirability of conceptual analysis—not merely because it is impossible (which may also be Chomsky’s position with respect to political terms), but also because “fixing” meaning would be objectionable—or objectionable from an anarchist perspective—even if it were possible. To fix meaning is an act of linguistic authoritarianism, an act whereby one party (the analytic philosopher) imposes “necessary and sufficient conditions” on all others (including anarchist activists).
+The rules and scoring of the bailgame remain elusive to us, but we have images of Classic people in play.[79] The ball was made of solid latex rubber shaped into a sphere slightly larger than a modern basketball. Players wore heavy padding called yokes around their waist to protect them from the bruising hardness of the ball. They also wore heavy padding on one knee and forearm to protect themselves from injury as they hit the ball or threw themselves under the flight of the ball. In bailgame scenes, players are often shown on one knee as they prepare to return the ball, and there are several examples where they have thrown themselves to the ground to prevent it from hitting the floor.
-Let us grant for present purposes the impossibility and undesirability of conceptual analysis understood in Franks’s narrow sense. Let us admit that it is impossible to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of (at least political) terms and that it is undesirable to fix and impose (at least political) meaning. However, we may still defend conceptual analysis in quite a different, explicative, sense, borrowing from and going beyond Rudolf Carnap (in a normative direction) in doing so.[13] “Explication” involves the tightening up of “everyday” (say, political) language for “scientific” (say, evaluative) purposes:
+The floor of the ballcourt was usually I-shaped, but the side walls could vary considerably, although the Classic Maya generally preferred slanted walls. Markers of various sorts—stone circles at Chichen Itza, macaw heads at Copan—were mounted high on the side walls, although we do not know if they were used in scoring the play. The center ally of the I-shape usually had three round markers about a meter in diameter distributed down its center line. These markers depict one of three kinds of scenes: bound captives, play between historical people, or play between the Hero Twins and the Lords of Death. While we do not know the rules, the iconography and archaeology associated with ballcourts clearly associate them with captive sacrifice and political pomp and circumstance.
-<quote>
+ The Shape of Time
-The task of explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one ... The [inexact concept] may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The [exact one] must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logico-mathematical or empirical concepts.[14]
-</quote>
-The explicative process of “tightening up” is not intended to reveal essential conceptual truths but to yield more precise and theoretically fruitful concepts that are still familiar from ordinary use within given linguistic communities. These concepts may be specified in terms of seemingly necessary and other more contentious conditions for their use. The former are measures of everyday familiarity; the latter, possible additional requirements for scientific fruitfulness. What result from this explicative process are non-arbitrary stipulative definitions of terms. These definitions are “auditable” as such, to test their non-arbitrariness.
+As this page is written, our world approaches what we conceive of as two great benchmarks in time—great chronological nodes when we contemplate the symmetries of history and evaluate the progress of our species as a social organism. The year 1992 will mark the five-hundredth year since Columbus “discovered” the Americas and began the process of making us into a global community aware of who and what we are. The second great anniversary will be celebrated in the Christian world, where most of us alive now will see the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, known among non-Christian peoples as the “common era.” The first millennium brought expectations of Christ’s return—the second sees us as a species standing on the edge of what could be a great adventure into the cosmos or the extinction of all people everywhere.
-The task of a concept audit is . to see to it that the conceptual resources put at a philosopher’s disposal by.pre-established usage have been adequately employed and the prevailing distinctions and connections duly acknowledged.[15]
+On both of these days, we will pause to consider where we have been, what we have done, and what the future may have in store for us. Yet neither of these days has any intrinsic magic of its own. The millennium, for example, will turn on the first day of the month January, which happens to fall on a Sunday. The moon will be in its last quarter, Venus will be sixty days after its maximum distance from the sun as Morningstar, and we will be eleven days past the winter solstice. It will also be seven days after Christmas and twenty-live days after the 58<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Pearl Harbor. That year will see the 224<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
-In other words, anything and everything does not go with conceptual analysis understood in this sense. Ordinary use is to be respected to the greatest possible degree compatible with theoretical employment.
+We give meaning to days like this because they are the benchmarks we use to perceive that linear time has passed. By observing them we give form to the flow of time and shape to the conceptions of origins and happenings that we call history.
-To return to Chomsky’s remarks that “terms of political discourse are hardly models of precision” and that “it is next to impossible to give meaningful answers” to questions of political definition: the point of explicative analysis here is to make the imprecisions of ordinary political discourse more precise and ideally (as a regulative ideal) to render them as “models of precision”; and it is possible to provide a meaningful analysis of political discourse by such means, as I hope to demonstrate. That is to say, whatever might be said of conceptual analysis in Franks’s narrow sense, I wish to assert: first, the possibility of conceptual analysis qua explication, or the possibility of pinning down political meaning in given linguistic contexts; and, second, the desirability of conceptual analysis qua explication, or the desirability of doing this for particular theoretical (if not other political and practical) purposes. (One might even go further here and assert the necessity of conceptual analysis qua explication for the achievement of such purposes.) A minimal theoretical purpose of conceptual analysis, as I understand it here, is to prevent semantic confusion in the investigation of political phenomena (such that, for example, philosophers may be talking past one another in attempting to evaluate them).
+Time for the Maya was no different. They too devised ways of recording the passage of time. Like us, they named days in many different ways and acknowledged linkages between days and events. In this way they attempted to understand the order underlying human affairs and the cycles of the living cosmos. We count with our fingers and base our numbers on units of ten. The Maya counted with the full person, both fingers and toes, and based their system on units of twenty. The symmetries generated by these two number systems are different, but their purposes are the same. We mark the passage of decades, centuries, and millennia; they marked the passage of 20-year cycles, which they called katuns, and 400-year cycles (20x20 years), called baktuns.
-*** II. On “Anarchist-ism”
+In our reckoning of the solar year, we use fractions, calculating that a full year is 365.25 days. Yet how is it possible to make a quarter day? It can’t be done—so instead we accumulate these quarters until we have a full day and add that day every four years to make a leap year. The Maya did not make life so complicated. Their fundamental unit was the whole day with its two halves—night and day.[80] They never altered the endless replacement of one day by the next and any fractions of years left over were simply ignored.
-Conceptual analysis is not, of course, universally rejected, even by anarchists. There are scholars who have sought to define “anarchism” in very different ways. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt have argued that conceptual analysis can and should be undertaken for the internal purpose of “identify[ing] the common features of the subject under definition”—thereby “enabling effective analysis and research”—and for the external purpose of “clearly delineat[ing] the category being defined from other categories.”[16] Thus, conceptual analysis can disclose the shared and distinguishing features of anarchism for theoretical purposes. However, they are insistent that the resulting definition should not be too inclusive. Conceptually, their worry is that “a range of quite different and often contradictory ideas and movements [might] get conflated,” which would lead to the view that there is “something necessarily incoherent about anarchism.” They also worry that anarchism might be regarded as “a movement existing throughout history,” rather than “a relatively recent phenomenon” (of a specific communist and revolutionary character).[17] This historical point is central to their analysis, as van der Walt underscores:
+This endless succession of time was given order by grouping days into ever-repeating cycles ranging from the small to the inconceivably huge. Some of these cycles came from the observation of the natural world, for example, the cyclic movements of the moon, the planets, and the constellations. Others derived from the symmetries intrinsic to the numbers themselves, for example, the practice of counting in twenties. Other numbers and their repetitions were sacred and had magical properties.
-<quote>
+This succession of days, like locations in space, were conceived as falling within a structure divided into quadrants, each with its appropriate direction and color. When the Spanish arrived, the Maya used this directional structure in their New Year’s ceremonies. Their ancient forebears used this four-part structure differently: They divided the progression of time into quadrants of 819 days each. In the inscriptions recording this cycle, they said that God K,[81] a small manikin-like god who was called Kawil (see the Glossary of Gods), ruled the appropriate direction during that quadrant of time. There were four such gods, each characterized by a long-nosed face, a mirror in the forehead, a smoking celt piercing the mirror, and often a serpent foot. In this context, each of the four was distinguished by his color: the red Kawil of the east, the white Kawil of the north, the black Kawil of the west, and the yellow Kawil of the south. The exact reason for choosing 819 days as the base of this cycle is not known, but the sum is the result of 7x9X 13, all numbers sacred to the Maya.[82]
-It is a matter of record ... that the anarchist movement appeared as something new to its contemporaries, rivals, and adherents; with this appearance, anarchism first became the topic of scholarly enquiry, police investigation, and media attention. Even writers favouring exceedingly loose definitions of ‘anarchism’ concede that ‘anarchism’ did not previously exist as a ‘political force’.. The very question of whether there were earlier or ‘different schools, currents and tendencies’ of anarchism, or an anarchist ‘orientation’ ‘throughout human history’ could not even be posed before this moment.[18]
-</quote>
-Schmidt and van der Walt claim that anarchism only came into existence once it was recognized as a new political force in the 1860s. Curiously, it did not exist when it was first proclaimed and expounded as a social philosophy in the 1840s or when this philosophy was developed under other names prior to the 1840s (by the end of eighteenth century, if not earlier). Thus, anarchism is strictly identifiable with the recognized anarchist movement, or the collective socio-political action of anarchists, from the late nineteenth century onward.
+These quadrants provided one kind of structure to time—one that directly reflected their directional and color organization of space. Yet each whole day also fell into many other cycles, both smaller and larger. The name and character of a day were derived from the combination of positions it occupied in these many different calendric cycles. The most important of these was the 260-day cycle, called a sacred round or tzolkin by modern scholars (Fig. 2:8). Composed of thirteen numbers consecutively combining with twenty day names, this cycle was shared by all the peoples of Mesoamerica. The tzolkin begins with the number 1 combined with the day name Imix, and proceeds to 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and 4 Kan. After thirteen days the number cycle returns back to one. At this point, because there are more names than numbers, 13 Ben is followed by 1 lx and so on. When we pass the 260<sup>th</sup> permutation of number and day name, 13 Ahau, we have once again arrived at the first day, 1 Imix. One easy way to visualize how the tzolkin works is to use letters for the day names so that the first twenty-five days fall in the following pattern: 1 A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6F, 7G, 8H, 91, 10J, UK, 12L, 13M, IN, 20, 3P, 4Q, 5R, 6S, 7T, 8A, 9B, IOC, 1 ID, 12E. It takes 260 days for the combination 1A to recur. The tzolkin continues to repeat throughout eternity—one day following the other just as for us Monday follows Sunday every seven days forever.
-Like Schmidt and van der Walt, Uri Gordon accepts the possibility and desirability of conceptual analysis. He endorses what he calls “Anglo-American. methods and conventions” such that his study of anarchism “chiefly takes the form of analyzing concepts and arguments, making distinctions and giving examples, all with the intention of driving home some point.”[19] The account he offers of anarchism is less historically rooted and more contemporary and evolving than that of Schmidt and van der Walt. Nevertheless, like them he identifies anarchism with a “social movement” that is animated by a particular “political culture” and generative of a “collection of ideas.”[20] Whatever may be said about anarchism as a theory, it is one that is “grounded in practice.”[21] Anarchism is therefore ultimately about what anarchists continue to do collectively as a movement.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-65.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:8]]
-Many other scholars have emphasized socio-political action in their analyses of anarchism. For example, David Morland, while skeptical about the conceptual analysis of anarchism (which appears to constitute “an essentially contested concept”[22]), claims that it is possible to say at least one thing about “the very nature of anarchism”: as “an ideology it is an active creed” and anarchists “have been, by their very nature, inclined towards activism.”[23] What Schmidt and van der Walt and Gordon add to this activist condition is a collective condition. Anarchism is not just about the activism of certain individuals, but such activism at a collective level. This is what yielded an anarchist movement, or anarchism in the proper sense, at a given moment in social history.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-66.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:9 The Calendar Round and How It Worked (after National Geographic, December 1975)]]
-On this kind of analysis, collective discourse may be added as a seemingly necessary condition to (or included within) collective action. What counts is not just the collective action (narrowly construed) of anarchists, but also the ways in which anarchists talk, theorize, and strategize about such action. David Graeber observes that (i) “[a]narchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it” and (ii) “this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about.” As a result, “[a]narchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.”[24]
+A second cycle used by the ancient Maya consists of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days, with five days left over at the end of the year. This short five-day month is called Uayeb, “the resting or sleep”[83] of the year (Fig. 2:9). Called both a haab and a vague year by modern scholars, this cycle mimics the solar year, but like the 260-day cycle, it is a count of whole days, one following the other in endless progression without any adjustment to the fractional remainder of the true solar year.
-It would appear, on the account that emerges above, that anarchism is reducible to the collective socio-political action and discourse of anarchists. Put bluntly, anarchism is what anarchists as a whole do and say (about what they do). So, while one might have supposed that anarchists are defined as such by their anarchism(s), on the contrary, anarchism is properly defined by its anarchists. This anarchist-centered outlook may be termed “anarchist-ism”—the view, again, that anarchism is to be defined in terms of the collective action (perhaps including discursive action) of anarchists; that is, in terms of what anarchists do or have done (perhaps including what they talk about or have talked about). In order to understand anarchism, then, we need to examine what anarchists do (and the way in which this gains theoretical expression), not what they think (and the way in which this gains practical expression).
+Each of these months had a name as do our own. Any day was named by a combination of its numerical position within the month and the name of the month itself; so, for example, the fifth day of the first month was called 5 Pop. The Maya conceived, however, that the last day of any month could also be thought of as the time that the following month was set in place. They could record this last day as the “end of” the current month, but the ancient Maya preferred to call it the “seating” (chum) of the upcoming month. In this haab cycle, the last day of the year would tall on “the seating of Pop” (0 Pop) and New Year’s would be on 1 Pop. Conventionally, modern scholars transcribe this seating day into Arabic notation as 0, giving the impression to many beginners that the days of a Maya month were numbered 0 to 19. This impression is incorrect: they were numbered 1 to 19 or (during five-day months) 1 to 4, making the final day the seating of the following month.
-There are quite obvious problems—both historical and logical—with the “anarchist-ist” conception of anarchism. Historically, it is problematic for this conception that (as I noted above) anarchism was pronounced, elucidated, and defended by individual anarchist intellectuals prior to the existence of anything like a collective anarchist movement. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is the major case in point.[25] It is also problematic that (at the very least) similar, unnamed views had been expressed by others previously. William Godwin is a noted example;[26] but there are many other strands in the pre-Proudhonian (pre-)history of anarchism.[27] Of course, one may argue against the characterization of such ideas and individuals as anarchist. But it is unjustified to do so on the mere basis that they were not products or parts of a movement that emerged subsequently, inspired by some of these very ideas and individuals (even if the ideas were later modified and the individuals fell out of favour). (Incidentally, the anarchist ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, for example, pre-date and motivate his foundational role in the recognized anarchist movement; and he demonstrably declared himself an anarchist some time before entering the First International.[28]) The anarchist movement is an expression of such ideas—an expression that continues to develop and refine these ideas over time through further reflection (including reflection on associated action). (That said, there is no reason to suppose that anarchist ideas should only continue to develop within this collective and activist context.) At any rate, to deny the complex pre-history of the anarchist movement renders inescapable the question of how or why this movement came into existence in the first place.
+The famous 52-year cycle of the Mesoamerican calendric system reflects the combination of the name of a day in the 260-day tzolkin with its name in the 365-day haab—for example, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. The combination of these two names recurs every 18,980 (52x365) days. In the Maya system, this 52-year cycle is called a Calendar Round.
-Logically, the anarchist-ist conception of anarchism is equally problematic. If anarchism is to be defined in terms of what anarchists collectively do (and perhaps say), we are left with obvious problems pertaining to the identification of relevant actors and actions. How are we to pick out the relevant actors here (without reference to what defines them as such; i.e., their anarchism)? The answer is usually one of self-identification (since other-identification is typically regarded as ignorant and/or oppressive): the relevant actors are those who identify themselves as anarchists or as part of a collective movement of such self-identifying anarchists. Actors are anarchists if they say they are anarchists, and anarchism is what these self-identifying anarchists do (and perhaps say). However, most (if not all) who identify themselves as anarchists deny this identity to (at least some) others who also identify themselves as anarchists. So simple self-identification would appear to be inadequate. In any event, even if this problem could be set aside, how are we to pick out the relevant actions of these actors, that is, anarchist actions as opposed to actions of anarchists (again, without reference to what defines them as such; i.e., their anarchism)? It is the actions of anarchists that are claimed to define anarchism; but presumably not all acts of anarchists are anarchist actions. Arguably, actions are anarchist actions if they are identified as such by people who identify as anarchists. But most (if not all) who identify their actions as anarchist deny this identity to the actions of (at least some) others who do the same. Self-identification would appear to be inadequate once again.
+In addition to the three cycles discussed above, each day was also ruled by one of the Nine Lords of the Night, who succeeded each other in endless progression like our days of the week. The Maya also kept track of the age of the moon on each particular day and of where each day fell in the cycles of Venus and the other planets. All of these factors provided the detailed combination of cyclic information that gave each day its personality in time.
-The point I am indirectly attempting to establish here is twofold: first, that anarchism is factually anterior to the anarchist movement; and second, that “anarchism” is logically prior to “anarchist.” Anarchist ideas existed before the anarchist movement; and it would be surprising, to put it mildly, if this were not the case. And anarchists (and their anarchist actions) can only be identified with reference to anarchism as a philosophical idea. The nature of this idea will be taken up in the next section. But my bluntly stated response to those who endorse the anarchist- ist conception of anarchism is as follows: anarchism is not what anarchists do any more than liberalism is what liberals do, socialism is what socialists do, conservatism is what conservatives do, and so on. This remains the case even if activism is especially important and informative to anarchists—or, for that matter, proponents of other ostensibly revolutionary outlooks.
+The Maya also reckoned each day in an era-based calendar that counted whole days accumulated since day zero, which they apparently conceived of as the beginning of the current manifestation of the cosmos, the fourth version of creation to exist.[84] Modern scholars call this era-based calendar the Long Count. Its basic unit was a 360-day year, which the Maya called a tun or “stone” because they marked the end of each of these years by setting a stone in the ground.[85] Each of these tuns consisted of eighteen months of twenty days. The months were called uinic (after the Maya word for “human being,” since humans had twenty fingers and toes)[86] and the days kin. Twenty tuns composed a katun, 400 made a baktun, 8,000 made a pictun, and 160,000 made a calabtun—and so on, in multiples of twenty, toward infinity. Since we have no equivalent cycles in our own calendar, we use the Maya words as the English names for the various periods in this calendar.[87]
-If one accepts the above, one may speculate in Adlerian terms about why some anarchists—per- haps uniquely among the politically committed—define their position in such a “back-to-front” way. Two complexes—perhaps independent of one other but more likely connected—may be suggested in this purely speculative explanatory context. One is an intellectual inferiority complex among anarchists: the diminishing sense that they lack the intellectual weaponry of classical Marxists and contemporary liberals, for example.[29] This lack can be and has been dramatically overstated (from Karl Marx himself onward[30]). In any event, there are many legitimate criticisms of this weaponry (some of them introduced by Bakunin in response to Marx[31]). Whatever the causes of this complex, one way of compensating for it may be to develop an activist superiority complex: the flattering sense that anarchists are uniquely and virtuously predisposed towards properly political and even revolutionary action. While classical Marxists and contemporary liberals indulge in ever more complex and arcane theorizing, anarchists set about righting real wrongs (often contrary to the understanding and wishes of the apparently ignorant majority on whose behalf some claim to act). One may respond that there are indeed well-conceived and virtuous forms of activism; but there are mindless and vicious forms, too—some of them arguably evidenced within the anarchist tradition.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-67.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:10 Maya Numbers and How They Work in the Calendar]]
-The points made in this section about factual anteriority and logical priority may appear obvious and unworthy of protracted analysis. Nevertheless, the anarchist-ist conception of anarchism remains prevalent—if difficult for serious scholars of anarchism to maintain consistently. It is therefore unsurprising that the scholars discussed above all advance alternative conceptions of anarchism which are (issues of origins aside) consistent with the more plausible candidates discussed in the next section. Schmidt and van der Walt define anarchism (quite conventionally from a traditional left-wing perspective) as a revolutionary and libertarian brand of socialism.[32] Gordon defines it most fundamentally (in more contemporary terms) as opposition to domination in all forms.[33] David Morland defines it (in broad and recognizable terms) as opposition to the state.[34] And, finally, David Graeber defines anarchism (in quite complex terms) as “a rejection of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.”[35] What, then, are we to make of conceptions of anarchism of this general philosophical kind?
+To write the number of years that had accumulated since the base date, the Maya used a place-notation system much like ours. Instead of placing their highest numbers on the left and their lowest numbers on the right, however, they placed their highest numbers at the top of a column and their lowest at the bottom, and read them in that order. While we need ten signs to write our numbers, the Maya needed only three: a dot for one, a bar for five, and one of a number of signs for zero (Fig. 2:10). A single day was written with a dot, four days with four dots, six with a dot and bar, nineteen with three bars and four dots, and so on. To write the number twenty, they put a zero sign in the lowest position and a dot in the next one above it. Since there are only 360 days in this kind of year, there could never be a number larger than seventeen in the month position. Eighteen months was written as one year, no months, no days.
-*** III. On “Anarchy-ism”
+In the Maya conception, the zero day of this era-based calendar fell on 13.0.0.0.0[88] of the Long Count, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku of the Calendar Round, and on a day when the ninth Lord of the Night was ruling (Fig. 2:11). Once these day names had been juxtaposed in this way, the calendar was set for all eternity. All the simultaneous cycles that constituted time would now simply click forward one day at a time. The next day was 13.0.0.0.1 5 Imix 9 Cumku, with the first Lord of the Night ruling; followed by 13.0.0.0.2 6 Ik 10 Cumku, second Lord of the Night; and 13.0.0.0.3 7 Akbal 11 Cumku, third Lord of the Night. In our calendar, their zero day corresponds to August 11, 3114 b.C.[89]
-If “anarchism” is not to be defined in terms of what anarchists do, it might instead be defined in terms of what anarchists want: an internally shared and externally distinguishing social vision—or imagined form of social alterity—known as “anarchy.” This conception is neatly encapsulated by Bob Black:
+Above we talked of the turning of the millennium as one of our own milestones in time. In the near future Maya time also approaches one of its great benchmarks. December 23, 2012, will be 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, the day when the 13 baktuns will end and the Long Count cycles return to the symmetry of the beginning. The Maya, however, did not conceive this to be the end of this creation, as many have suggested. Pacal, the great king of Palenque, predicted in his inscriptions that the eightieth Calendar Round anniversary of his accession will be celebrated eight days after the first eight-thousand-year cycle in the Maya calendar ends. In our time system, this cycle will end on October 15, 4772.
-<quote>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-68.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:11]]
-Anarchism is an idea about what’s the best way to live. Anarchy is the name for that way of living ... Anarchists are people who believe in anarchism and desire for us all to live in anarchy.[36]
-</quote>
-The social vision of anarchy is characterized by an alternative absence and/or presence—negation and/or realization—of specific social phenomena and values.[37] This vision is traditionally held to be premised upon a certain philosophical ethic and anthropology. Systematically, then, anarchism has been understood to constitute a vision of a good society resting on certain moral principles and understandings of human nature. (“Post-anarchism” I take to represent a sympathetic challenge to anarchism so conceived on anti-foundational, anti-universalist, or anti-essentialist grounds.[38]) Differences over the nuts and bolts of exactly what this society might look like—and how we could or should reach it—account for much of the variety in anarchism so understood; but they do not define it as such.
+Just as we can transcribe the great milestones of their time into our system, so can we express the day on which our second millennium falls in their calendar system. January 1, 2000, will fall on 9 Ahau in the 260-day Sacred Round and on the eighth day of Kankin in the 365-day haab. The Calendar Round designation is 9 Ahau 8 Kankin, which will be ruled by the third Lord of the Night. On that day, the moon will be 25 days old. Venus will be 133 days after inferior conjunction; and Jupiter will be 69 days, and Saturn 51 days, after opposition to the sun. It will be 2 years, 50 days after the beginning of the 2,282<sup>nd</sup> quadrant of the 819-day count in which the white God K will rule the north sky. And finally, that day will fall on the 1,867,260<sup>th</sup> day since the Maya zero date, expressed in the Maya Long Count as 12.19.6.15.0.
-Anarchism, then, is often thought of as the belief in the desirability (if not the possibility) of anarchy, where “anarchy” consists in the alternative negation and/or realization of specific social norms, practices, relations, institutions, and structures. Such a belief may be more or less explicitly stated. And the social vision involved may be more or less elaborate. But holding this belief in itself does not make one a member of a historically recognizable anarchist movement. Nor does it commit one to activism.[39] Of course, there may be compelling additional moral and political reasons to establish or join such a social movement and/or to take action. But these reasons are not built into the definition of anarchism as such.
+Our millennium day, of course, had no particular importance to the ancient Maya: Yet they had many such central and transitional days in their own cycles of time and they celebrated them with no less enthusiasm than we celebrate Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July. For the Maya, however, what happened on such days was not merely a remembrance of days past. It was an actual reiteration of the essential events that had happened, continued to happen, and would always happen on those days. Just as we will contemplate both our past and our hopes for the future on January 1, A.D. 2000, so the Maya regularly contemplated their own history and future potential on the important days of their calendar. For the Maya, history affected the structure of time just as ritual affected the nature of matter.
-This anarchy-centered (as opposed to anarchist-centered) conception of anarchism essentially conflates it with what we might term “anarchy-ism.” The “anarchy-ist” conception of anarchism is, I think, significantly more common and plausible than the anarchist-ist conception. However, I will argue that it too is ultimately unsustainable. This can be demonstrated by more closely analyzing what is involved in the conception at its bare minimum (underpinning the least elaborate visions of anarchy). Two principal conditions seem to be necessary here: a particular kind of disposition (on the part of the anarchist); and a particular kind of object (to which the anarchist is so disposed). The kind or rather kinds of disposition are relatively clear in the case of anarchism so understood: they are (i) oppositional or (ii) supportive or (iii) both. The object or often objects in question are much more contentious, and I will consider precise examples below; but they include particular kinds of social phenomena (x below) and values (y below). Accordingly, anarchism on this conception can be understood as the belief that society should be arranged (i) without some undesirable x, or (ii) in the name of some desirable y, or (iii) without some undesirable x in the name of some desirable y. This social arrangement constitutes anarchy.
+Political strategies and social events had to be calculated within a complex geography of sacred time, just as they were in sacred space. It was vitally important to know not just the character of a day in the major cycles of the tzolkin and haab, but its position in all of the permutations of cyclical time they measured. Certain days were important because of their relationship to Xibalba and the cosmos. The Maya reckoned this kind of importance with their own form of numerology.[90] The four surviving Maya books[91] describe which gods do what actions on different days in the many permutations of the Maya calendar. These patterns of divine action are far more complex than the relatively simple patterns we ascribe to the planets in Western astrology. For the Maya, on any given day hundreds of gods were acting and the pattern of their actions and interactions affected and were effected by the shape of sacred time and space.[92]
-The object of anarchy-ism is often represented in singular terms and I will examine it on this basis. However, it is important to note that, on some accounts, a plurality of objects is either enumerated or subsumed under a single potentially confusing (if not conceptually confused) label. Nathan Jun, for example, catalogues varieties of coercion, domination, oppression, authority, and inequality as objects of anarchist opposition[40] (on libertarian and egalitarian grounds[41]). For Jun, therefore, anarchism is the belief that society should be arranged without specific kinds of coercion, domination, oppression, authority, and inequality for the sake of liberty and equality. Uri Gordon, on the other hand, subsumes varieties of control, coercion, exploitation, humiliation, discrimination, “etc.,” under the single object-label “domination”[42] (which appears to be opposed by anarchists on a plurality of moral grounds[43]). For Gordon, therefore, anarchism is the belief that society should be arranged without control, coercion, exploitation, humiliation, discrimination, and other unspecified forms of (what he regards as) domination.
+Yet the relationship of the kings to this timescape was not passive. While it was true that some social events, like planting and harvesting, were regular and cyclic, the actions of important humans, their births and deaths, triumphs and defeats, their records as builders and leaders, did leave their individual marks on time. Days in the history of each kingdom took on sacredness derived from the dynasts who ruled. Kings legitimized their current actions by asserting that they reiterated ancestral history. Kingly actions were likened to godly actions and exceptions to the norms of legitimate descent were explained as the reenactment of mythological or legendary history. The Maya linked their actions to gods before, during, and after the present creation and to the history of the legendary first civilization of their world—the Olmec.[93] As history accumulated for each kingdom, particular dates were remembered and celebrated for their local importance, much as different independence days are celebrated by different countries in North America. Thus, the patterns of time, like those of the physical world, had form both on the cosmic and the human scale.
-We turn now to some of the recurrent singular objects of anarchist opposition (x above) and/or support (y above)—or to the most common (anarchy-ist) definitions of anarchism proposed by anarchist theorists and scholars of anarchism. The objects of opposition traditionally include (non- exhaustively) government,[44] state,[45] law,[46] violence,[47] social power,[48] domination,[49] authority,[50] and hierarchy.[51] Traditional objects of support (on which such opposition may rest) include liberty,[52] autonomy,[53] equality,[54] happiness,[55] virtue,[56] flourishing,[57] and other more complex goods.[58] Anarchism (in the anarchy-ist sense) may therefore be defined as the belief that society should be arranged (i) without government/state/law/violence/social power/domination/authority/hierarchy, or (ii) in the name of liberty/autonomy/equality/happiness/virtue/flourishing/some complex good, or (iii) without government/state/law/violence/social power/domination/authority/hierarchy in the name of liberty/autonomy/equality/happiness/virtue/flourishing/some complex good.
+ The Community of Human Beings
-In evaluating the anarchy-ist conception in this general form, one may immediately and easily establish that there is no shared anarchist value (distinguishing or otherwise). Whatever it is that anarchists purportedly oppose (or see as desirably absent from anarchy), they oppose for all manner of reasons (deontological, consequentialist, aretaic, etc.) drawn from across the traditional ethical spectrum (and perhaps beyond).[59] This diversity of ethical outlook is sometimes seen as a strength of anarchism, but I will not examine that issue here.[60] (Incidentally, it is likewise easy to establish that there is no shared anarchist conception of human nature.[61]) A similar observation may be made with respect to object x: on the face of it, there would appear to be no shared anarchist object of opposition (distinguishing or otherwise), either. If this is all so—if there is no shared object of concern that anarchists envision as absent or present in the ideal social order called anarchy—then anarchism might appear incoherent or even non-existent. However, I believe that it is possible to establish after some further analysis that there is a shared anarchist object of concern. The question remains whether anarchists share an oppositional disposition towards it and therefore whether an anarchy-ist conception of anarchism is ultimately defensible.
+The Maya community was embedded in the matrix of this sacred space and time. Socially, the Maya people organized themselves into families that reckoned blood membership through males and marriage membership through females. This method of organizing kinship relationships is known as patrilineal descent. The principle of selecting a single inheritor of supreme authority in the family from each successive generation usually focused on the eldest male child. This is called primogeniture[94] and it is a principle underlying hierarchical family organization from ancient China to medieval Europe. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Maya families were large, and included several generations of people under one roof or within one household compound.
-Let us return to the individual candidates for (opposed object) x. I assume for present purposes that any of these candidates would distinguish anarchism from non-anarchism. That is to say, I accept here (without endorsing the view) that opposition (on whatever moral basis) to government or state or law or violence or social power or domination or authority or hierarchy would distinguish anarchists from non-anarchists. But are any of these candidates shared by anarchists themselves? Do all anarchists oppose (on whatever moral basis) government or state or law or violence or social power or domination or authority or hierarchy? If so, we have arrived at a true definition—or possibly more than one true definition—of “anarchism.” But what we ideally wish to arrive at is an adequate as well as a true definition: a definition which picks out not only a token or tokens of the type of object that anarchists oppose, but also this very type of object. The real definitional question here is therefore the following: is government/state/law/ violence/social power/domination/authority/hierarchy the type of object that all anarchists oppose (on whatever moral basis)?
+The principle of reckoning through the male line made it possible for extended families to combine into larger groups, called lineages, which acknowledged a common ancestor. The Maya further combined lineages sharing an even more distant common ancestor into clans. These clans could function as very big families as circumstances warranted, often crosscutting differences in wealth, prestige, and occupation.[95] Maya families still have such clan structure in some communities today.
-In some cases, the answer is negative because the objects in question are unshared. It is simply untrue to say that all anarchists oppose government[62] or law[63] or violence[64] or social power[65] as such. Opposition to social power (or any effective capacity in social relations), in particular, would be absurd from almost any perspective. In other cases, the answer is less straightforward. Anarchists do appear to share a concern—indeed a highly critical concern—with the state,[66] domination,[67] authority,[68] and hierarchy.[69] However, it is mistaken in my view to characterize their concern with domination, authority, and hierarchy in simple oppositional terms. There are forms of domination (of the controlling capacity in social relations), of authority (of the capacity to require action or the acceptance of belief in social relations), and of hierarchy (of the structured inequality that emerges from relations of social power, domination, and authority) that at least some anarchists regard as justified in revolutionary if not post-revolutionary circumstances. Violent resistance, expert leadership, and the stratified organization of social forces are morally problematic from an anarchist point of view; but some anarchists have certainly regarded them as consequentially justifiable (in the name of social transformation into anarchy).[70] Some have also foreseen justifiable forms of dominative, authoritative, and hierarchical relations—and even regulation, administration, or government—under anarchy.[71] This demonstrable non-opposition to domination, authority, and hierarchy in fact may seem at odds with stated opposition in principle—or to exemplify a certain inconsistency on the part of some anarchists. However, I believe that it evinces a more nuanced anarchist position with respect to domination, authority, and hierarchy than is generally recognized both inside and outside anarchist circles.[72] I will outline this position in Section IV, but we are not quite ready to move on.
+Some patrilineal systems regarded families within clans to be equal in status, but the structure also lent itself to hierarchical organization. One particular family could successfully claim a higher status if it could prove that it was on the direct line of descent from the founding ancestor. This was done by demonstrating that direct descent had passed through only one member of each generation. Once primogeniture designated a single inheritor of the line in each generation, it was possible to claim that there was a single line of males stretching back to the beginning of the clan, and that all other member families were descendants of a second rank. Internal ranking could be quite complicated, depending as it did on the reckoning of relative distance or closeness to the central lines of males. The principle was essentially open-ended in this respect, and the logical extreme was the ranking of each individual in each family in a pyramid of people stretching back to the beginning. While most societies, including the Maya, quit far short of this extreme, our point is that family ties were a flexible and powerful means of establishing social hierarchy.
-An outstanding candidate for the shared (and distinguishing[73]) oppositional object (x) of anarchism remains, one which may yet support the anarchy-ist conception of anarchism. Anarchism is plausibly the belief in the desirability of anarchy understood as a social order without a state of any kind. Anarchism may fundamentally be about opposition to the state. It is certainly unusual for an anarchist to defend the state in current non-ideal conditions,[74] and unheard of for an anarchist to defend the state in the ideal conditions of anarchy. Indeed, state and anarchy are generally seen by anarchists as revolutionary antitheses. However, an a posteriori anarchist case for the justification of some form of the state—while yet unknown—is arguably conceivable.[75] In any case, this anarchy-ist definition suggests a degree of state-obsessiveness that is difficult to reconcile with the variety of classical and especially contemporary anarchist concerns. The state is not, I contend, the type of object towards which anarchists are somehow disposed, but a notable token of that type; nor is the disposition of anarchists towards this token necessarily oppositional, as I have just suggested, though I concede that it almost always is as a matter of fact.[76]
+The Maya institution of kingship was also based on the principle of inheritance of the line by a single male individual within any one generation leading back to a founding ancestor.[96] Furthermore, families and clans were ranked by their distance or nearness to the central descent line manifested in the king. Political power based on family allegiance may appear to be relatively simple compared to our own social-classes system, but it effectively integrated states composed of tens of thousands of people.[97]
-In summary, the anarchy-ist conception of anarchism identifies anarchism with a belief in the desirability of a society called anarchy in which certain social phenomena (objects of anarchist opposition x) are negated and/or certain social values (objects of anarchist support y) are realized. However, there is no such shared and distinguishing object of anarchist support (y); and if there is a shared and distinguishing object of anarchist opposition (x), it is a token of the relevant type of object of anarchist concern rather than that type itself; all anarchy-ist definitions of anarchism in oppositional terms are therefore inadequate even if true. As I will argue in Section IV, the correct (shared and distinguishing type of) object is picked out by an anarchy-ist definition (and tokens of this type are picked out by other such definitions, too); but the disposition towards this object is misrepresented by the anarchy-ist conception (as oppositional). Before explaining this position in greater detail, however, I want to conclude Section III by noting an important implication of the rejection of the anarchy-ist conception: anarchism is logically independent of anarchy, of the social ideal in terms of which it is so often defined. An anarchist may embrace all manner of social ideals or none at all. This is not to say that an anarchist should not have a social vision or that any social vision is defensible on anarchist grounds. But such matters go well beyond the analysis of “anarchism.”
+Not surprisingly, the Maya applied the principle of primogeniture and the reckoning of the central line to other important social statuses in addition to the kingship. At Copan, for example, a lineage house was excavated whose patriarchs specialized in the arts of writing.[98] Their status as scribes gave the family sufficient prestige to warrant their special acknowledgment by the royal house of Copan. In the west along the Usumacinta river, members of another noble rank, cahalob,[99] provided administrators for the king and shared many of the prerogatives of the ahauob. The cahal rank was also inherited through family lines. Archaeology, text translation, and art historical interpretation give us glimmerings of many other types of kinship-based statuses. This principle of inherited status permeated the entire society and affirmed the legitimacy and prerogatives of the most exalted, as well as the most humble, of society’s F members.
-*** IV. On “Anarchism”
+Recent archaeology at Copan gives us a good example of the way in which the humble and the well-off maintained their integrity, even when living side by side. The residential compounds of kin groups have been classified by size and complexity into four ranks, ranging from Type 1, the lowest, to Type 4, the highest. Group 9N-8, also known as the Scribe’s Compound, is a Type 4 site—a great sprawling compound with multiple courtyards and many residential buildings. Next to it sits a Type 1, the lowest rank—the residence of a family we would call, in our system, low-middle or upper-lower class. Compared to its high-status neighbor, the Type 1 compound is humble, consisting of only a single, small courtyard, surrounded by two houses and kitchen buildings. The houses have stone walls, but the interior rooms are small, even by comparison to Copan’s tradition of tiny interiors. As humble as the Type 1 site was, excavations show that the lineage living there held its own against the neighboring lineage, even as the higher-ranked group expanded into more and more plaza compounds built as the family grew in size. Throughout its history, the lower-ranked compound remained spatially and, we deduce, socially independent. Within the social system of the Maya, the rights and independence of the lower-ranked lineages were protected as vigorously as those of the exalted.[100]
-I have defined “anarchism” previously—in relation to “anarchy-ism”—as a distinct disposition towards a familiar object. The disposition as I saw it then was neither oppositional nor supportive, but skeptical. The object was the specific variety of social power known as authority. Hence, I concluded that anarchism was to be defined as skepticism about authority.[77] I now believe that I was right with respect to the disposition but wrong with respect to the (type of) object.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-69.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 10]]
-Anarchism is—I still maintain—a form of socio-political skepticism: of authentic doubt rather than blanket opposition. Anarchists of various ethical persuasions share a suspicious and inquiring disposition towards the desirability of all forms and instances of their socio-political object of concern.[78] They are distinguished from non-anarchists in this respect. None of these instances is accepted as self-evidently desirable. Many of them—even those accepted by most people in most places most of the time—are treated as undesirable. And some of them that anarchists are thought to oppose are understood as desirable after all. Anarchists typically seek to undermine undesirable forms in one way or another: by individually or collectively giving voice to their opposition and/or taking counter-actions of various kinds.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-70.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 11<br>Fig. 2:12]]
-It is true to say—as I maintained previously—that anarchists are skeptical about authority. But it is also true to say that anarchists are skeptical about the state, for example. I argued previously that the state—for all the attention it receives in anarchist literature—is merely a token of the type of thing about which anarchists are skeptical, so that it would be mistaken (or inadequate) to define anarchism as skepticism about the state.[79] I argued then that the type of thing about which anarchists are skeptical is authority, and defined anarchism accordingly. I now believe this is mistaken and that authority too is a token—albeit a more general token—of the relevant type of thing. This type of thing is domination. I had previously resisted this conclusion on the grounds that it would make anarchism indistinguishable from liberalism.[80] But I now think this was an error—which was inconsistent with my overall analysis—and that I was giving liberalism too much critical credit at the time. Liberalism is not skepticism towards domination or the broad token of this type called authority or the narrow token known as (the political authority of) the state. Liberals exhibit certain skeptical delusions in these regards (as I have witnessed repeatedly in academic discussions of these matters over the years). But these need to be exposed.
+Public monuments erected by the Maya king during the Classic period emphasize not only his role as shaman, but also his role as family patriarch. A large percentage of the texts on stelae focus on his genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. Not only were statements of his parentage regularly included in his name phrase, but pictorial records of all sorts show the parents of the king observing the actions of their offspring, even after these parents had died (Fig. 2:12).
-Two prominent dispositions—quite at odds with anarchist skepticism—stand out in the history of liberal thought about domination, authority, and the state. One of these is resolutely non- skeptical—indeed dogmatic. The other is only strategically skeptical—or arguably pseudo- skeptical. Liberal dogmatism is most famously expressed by John Stuart Mill:
+The titles of kings also included their numerical position in a line of succession reckoned from the founders of their lineages. These founders were usually real historical persons, but they could also be supernaturals.[101] In the realm of Copan, however, we see another type of situation. There the small population center of Rid Amarillo was governed by a group of lords belonging to a lineage who claimed descent not from the founding ancestor of the high king but from a local founder.[102] The existence of this state of affairs confirms that many subordinate lineages did not bear a real kinship status to the royal line and hence constituted allied vassals rather than relatives of inferior status. Nevertheless, the overriding metaphor of kingly authority was kinship. Kings at Copan and elsewhere used the regalia and ritual of their office to claim identity with the mythical ancestral gods of the Maya. In this way they asserted ultimate kinship authority over all of their subjects, including such subordinates as the Rio Amarillo lords.
-<quote>
+Problems with legitimate descent, such as the lack of a male heir or the death of one in war, were solved in extraordinarily creative ways. Some of the most innovative programs in the sculpture and architecture at Yaxchilan and Palenque were erected to rationalize such divergences from the prescribed pattern of descent, problems that are discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. So critical was the undisputed passage of authority at the death of a king that the designation of the heir became an important public festival cycle, with magical rituals spreading over a period of a year or more. At the royal capital of Bonampak on the great Usumacinta River, exquisite polychrome murals show that these rites included both the public display of the heir and his transformation into a special person through the sacrifice of captives taken for that purpose.[103]
-All that makes existence valuable to anyone, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be is the principal question in human affairs.[81]
-</quote>
-This is no argument for “social control” (by various means). It is a simple dogmatic statement of its necessity. And the “principal question” of social theory as anarchists see it is not about the nature and limits of (obviously necessary) social control; rather, it is about its justifiability in its many and varied forms (authoritative and otherwise). The arguably pseudo-skeptical element in liberal thought is represented by the contractarian tradition. Liberal contractarians as I understand them—as effective socio-political counterparts to Descartes—do not doubt the desirability of “social control”; they set out to construct a secure normative foundation for it. “The whole point of the thought-experiment of the social contract is justificatory, namely, to normatively ground the authority of the state [and, I would add, other forms of domination] retrospectively.”[82] The defining liberal disposition is not skeptical but supportive; and its defining object is not domination but individual liberty (which it assumes is or tries to establish as compatible with domination of at least some kinds.) Liberalism and anarchism are fundamentally distinct.
+The sculptural record also shows the shamanistic nature of Maya / kingship, central to the Classic conception of the cosmos, by depicting the divine ahau as a conductor of ritual. From the very beginning, royal monuments, such as the miniature Hauberg Stela and the San Diego cliff carving looming high above some forgotten kingdom, have depicted kings as manipulators of the supernatural domain (Fig. 2:13). Both these sculptures show a king with the supernaturals he has materialized by the ritual of shedding his blood. In the case of the Hauberg depiction, we know that this bloodletting preceded the protagonist’s accession to kingly office by fifty-two days.[104] This ritual was most likely a public affirmation of his ability to open a portal to the supernatural realm. Although the verb in both these monuments is “he let blood,” the Maya of these earlier times preferred to depict the materialization of the ancestor or god rather than the actual act of taking blood. There was a logical reason for this preference. By featuring the vision, rather than the sacrifice, the successful performance of the king as shaman could be documented publicly. Throughout the Classic period, Maya public art remained focused on the ritual performances of the king, whether these rituals were part of the regular festivals that punctuated Maya life, such as the calendrically timed ritual of period endings, or special celebrations triggered by dynastic events, such as marriages, births, or deaths.
-Anarchism I now define as skepticism about domination (including authority in general and the authority of the state in particular). Within the history of anarchist thought, particular emphasis has been placed on authority and especially the state for contextual reasons that are easy to explain. These emphases—and especially the apparently universal anarchist rejection of the state—have led many scholars to define anarchism in terms of the wrong disposition and/or the wrong (type of) object. I believe that my definition as it now stands is both true and adequate. It is admittedly thin: stripped of a social vision, ethic, and metaphysic. If it seems so thin as to include ideas and individuals that some anarchists dislike, this is a price I am willing to pay. My view of anarchism is rather ecumenical, which is not to deny that I too dislike certain anarchist ideas and individuals. But definitions should not be matters of taste—a point that many anarchists tend to ignore.[83] In any event, I am satisfied that my definition is not so thin as to render anarchism indistinguishable from liberalism in particular.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-71.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:13]]
-There is an alternative perspective on anarchism—already hinted at in the previous section— that gives rise to a related but distinct definition that may also be true and adequate. This perspective appears more prevalent in the social sciences than the humanities: among those inclined and equipped to describe and explain social structures rather than to analyze and evaluate social relations. From this perspective, the (type of) object of skeptical anarchist concern is hierarchy rather than domination. Anarchism, then, may be defined as skepticism about hierarchy. Thus, two conceptions of anarchism emerge: a philosophical conception of agential anarchism (defined as skepticism about domination) and a scientific conception of structural anarchism (defined as skepticism about hierarchy). As a social philosopher, I tend to focus on the analysis and evaluation of social relations. But I also maintain that social structures are the products of social relations and I argue for the priority (though not the absolute priority) of the philosophical over the scientific line of investigation (of domination before hierarchy) here.
+While the ritual lives of villagers and farmers were not portrayed on the public art of the ancient Maya, high-ranking nobles did have the privilege of erecting monuments. Some of these nobles erected monuments at the subsidiary sites they ruled on behalf of high kings, while others placed monuments within the courts or buildings of their own lineage compounds. These depictions take two forms: the noble acting with his king, and the noble acting alone as the protagonist. In the first type of composition, the noble can be easily distinguished from the king by his smaller size, his characteristic clothing, and his name phrases. In the second type, however, we would never know the actor was a noble, instead of a king, without being able to read the text (Fig. 2:14).
-*** V. Conclusion
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-72.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:14 Yaxchilan Lintel 39]]
-In this chapter, after defending the possibility and desirability of explicative conceptual analysis of “anarchism,” I have argued for (1) the logical priority of “anarchism” to “anarchist”; (2) the logical independence of anarchism and anarchy; and (3) skepticism about domination as a true and adequate definition of (agential) “anarchism.” I am conscious that my basic analysis does not constitute an argument for the social philosophy of anarchism or any social vision of anarchy or any roadmap to anarchy or any anarchist ethic or any anarchist conception of human nature or engagement in any form of anarchist activism or membership in any anarchist movement. A comprehensive anarchist philosophy would range over all of this and perhaps more besides. Here, however, I have only attempted to scratch the conceptual surface of anarchism. I hope that this facilitates the ongoing quest for greater understanding.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-73.jpg 70f][Lacanja Lintel 1]]
+During the Classic period, the heart of Maya life was the ritual of bloodletting.[105] Giving the gift of blood from the body was an act of piety used in all of their rituals, from the births of children to the burial of the dead. This act could be as simple as an offering of a few drops of one’s blood, or as extreme as the mutilation of the different parts of the body to generate large flows of this precious fluid. Blood could be drawn from any part of the body, but the most sacred sources were the tongue for males and females, and the penis for males. Representations of the act carved on stelae depict participants drawing finger-thick ropes through the wounds to guide the flow of blood down onto paper. Men with perforated genitals would whirl in a kind of dervish dance that drew the blood out onto long paper and cloth streamers tied to their wounded members. The aim of these great cathartic rituals was the vision quest, the opening of a portal into the Otherworld through which gods and the ancestors could be enticed so that the beings of this world could commune with them. The Maya thought of this process as giving “birth” to the god or ancestor, enabling it to take physical form in this plane of existence. The vision quest was the central act of the Maya world.
-[11] Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We? (New York, NY: Columbia UP 2016) 62—3.
+The practice of personal bloodletting took place not only in the temples of the mighty but at altars in the humble village as well. This fact is witnessed to by the presence of obsidian, one of the main implements of the ritual, at many ancient village sites. Obsidian is volcanic glass spewed forth from the towering fire mountains in highland regions of the Maya country. Skilled craftsmen made long thin, razor-sharp blades of the black glass, and such blades are found in virtually every lowland community context of the Maya—albeit in small quantities outside of great cities or the manufacturing towns near the natural sources of the stone. Obsidian was prized for many reasons—not only for its rarity, but for its unsurpassed ability to make clean, quick wounds. No doubt obsidian blades were used for a wide variety of cutting tasks once their main function as bloodletters was at an end, but for this primary ritual use, obsidian was to Maya propitiation of the divine what wine and wafers are to the Christian communion. What the great kings did with obsidian on behalf of all, the farmer did on behalf of his family. To be sure, the gift of obsidian from a king to his subject in return for labor, tribute, and devotion was a kind of subtle coercion. We can say this in light of the fact that the king held a virtual monopoly over the supply of obsidian and chose who was to receive it and who not. But this gift was also an affirmation of a common covenant with the divine and a common means of sustaining this covenant.[106]
-[12] Benjamin Franks, “Between Anarchism and Marxism: The Beginnings and Ends of the Schism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 17.2 (2012): 209, 210, 212.
+The king upheld his part in this divine covenant through his enactment of many rituals of power performed for his people. Indeed he was power, power made material, its primary instrument. On public monuments, the oldest and most frequent manner in which the king was displayed was in the guise of the World Tree. Its trunk and branches were depicted on the apron covering his loins, and the Doubled-headed Serpent Bar that entwined in its branches was held in his arms. The Principal Bird Deity (see the Glossary of Gods) at its summit was rendered as his headdress (Fig. 2:15). This Tree was the conduit of communication between the supernatural world and the human world: The souls of the dead fell into Xibalba along its path; the daily journeys of the sun, moon, planets, and stars followed its trunk. The Vision Serpent symbolizing communion with the world of the ancestors and the gods emerged into our world along it. The king was this axis and pivot made flesh. He was the Tree of Life.
-[13] This “going beyond” is clearly explained in the context of experimental philosophy in Joshua Shepherd and James Justus, “X-Phi and Carnapian Explication,” Erkenntnis 80.2 (2015): 381—402.
+For the Maya, trees constituted the ambient living environment, the material from which they fashioned homes and tools, the source of many foods, medicines, dyes, and vital commodities such as paper. They provided the fuel for cooking fires and the soil-enriching ash that came from the cutting and burning of the forest. Trees were the source of shade in the courtyards and public places of villages and cities, and the home of the teeming life of the forest. It was natural that the Maya would choose this central metaphor for human power. Like other trees, the king was at once the ambient source of life and the material from which humans constructed it. Together, the kings of the Maya realms comprised a forest of sustaining human World Trees within the natural forested landscape of the Maya world.
-[14] Rudolf Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, 2d ed. (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P) 3. Original emphasis.
+The king sustained his people, but he also required much from them in the way of service. The regularities of the Maya calendar and the celebration of local history generated endless rounds of feasts and festivals.[107] The rich ceremonial life of the great public centers, reflected in the smaller towns and villages surrounding them, drew deeply upon the natural and human resources of the Maya. The king and his court commanded the skilled and unskilled labor of many craftsmen and commoners, whose basic needs had to be met by an even larger population of farmers, hunters, and fishermen. It is hard for us to imagine just how much patience, skill, and effort went into the creation of the elaborately decorated objects and buildings used by the king in his performance of ritual. A single small jade F carving must have taken a craftsman months to complete, and we can document the fact[108] that great temples took many years of skilled work by construction specialists, carvers, plasterers, and painters as well as common laborers.
-[15] Nicholas Rescher, Concept Audits: A Philosophical Method (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2016) 3.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-74.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:15 The Maya King dressed as the World Tree]]
-[16] Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland, CA: AK 2009) 41, 43.
+The tribute which the community gave to the royal court to finance such work was no doubt a real burden, but not necessarily a severe hardship. In times of general prosperity, which existed for most of Classical Maya history, the common folk enjoyed ready access to the basic necessities of life, both practical and spiritual. In times of hardship and privation, the commoners and nobles all suffered alike. The ancient Maya view of the world mandated serious and contractual obligations binding the king and his nobility to the common people. Incompetence or exploitation of villagers by the king invited catastrophic shifts in allegiance to neighboring kings, or simple migration into friendlier territory.[109] Such severe exploitation was a ruler’s last desperate resort, not a routine policy. The king and his elite lived well, they enjoyed the most favored loods, the most pleasant home sites, the finer quality of clothing.[110] But the great public displays of the Maya were not designed just to exhibit the personal wealth of the king. They also exhibited the community’s property entrusted to the king, fashioned by the hard work and inspiration of many people, and ignited into luminous power by their most prized possession, the king himself.
-[17] Schmidt and van der Walt 33, 34, 40.
+The practical arrangements of economic matters were never documented in the public record of ancient Maya communities. However, we can surmise that the major economic institution was the public fair[111] that accompanied every major festival in centers great and small. 1 hese public fairs were, along with daily markets in the major towns and cities, the context in which the Maya carried out their business transactions. Even as late as this century, the yearly festival of the Señor de Escupu/as, Christ in the Sepulcher, turns a sleepy little town near the ancient center of Copán into a teeming bazaar of tens of thousands of Maya from all over that part of their country. In a single week at that festival, British merchants from neighboring Belize carried out the better part of their annual indigo trade with the Maya.
-[18] Lucien van der Walt, “(Re)Constructing a Global Anarchist and Syndicalist Canon: A Response to Robert Graham and Nathan Jun on Black Flame,” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2013.1: Blasting the Canon, ed. Duane Rousselle and Sureyyya Evren (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum 2013) 195. Original emphasis.
+These festivals were a major part of Maya public life throughout their history. They had the practical advantage of being held on days in the calendar cycles known to everyone in the region, and were advertised far and wide by royal invitation. Many of them were occasions for visits by nobles and royalty of one kingdom to the other.[112] In the fairs which accompanied the festivals, and in the market towns in border areas between kingdoms, the Maya merchants and craftsmen transacted business under the watchful eyes of local magistrates and lords who judged contractual disputes and kept the peace of the market.[113] Family patriarchs also kept watch over merchants within their kin group and had to report directly to the king if something was amiss. Merchants calculated exchange contracts in the dirt, using pebbles and sticks to write out their numbers,[114] and honored such agreements verbally—without legal documents.[115]
-[19] Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto 2008)
+The ancient Maya used various precious commodities for money— carved and polished greenstone beads, beads of red spiny oyster shell, cacao beans, lengths of cotton cloth, and measures of sea salt.[116] Such currencies were in wide demand throughout the Mesoamerican world.[117] Although currencies were probably fixed in value by the king and court within particular realms, merchants working in the uncontrolled lands between kingdoms could speculate on marginal differences in value and scarcities.[118] Even the Maya had their arbitragers.
-[20] Gordon 3—4.
+Everyone used such money, and everyone participated in the markets and tairs. Farmers had the option of bartering for goods or turning part of their maize crop into currency for important social transactions,[119] such as marriages, christenings, funerals, and house-building parties. All such activities were expensive and required feasts and gifts. Maya men and women wore the hard currencies, jade and shell, as jewelry to display the hard work and enterprise of their families. Farmers might use money to pay tribute to their rulers, but usually they preferred to provide labor on building projects in the urban centers or service on the farms of their kings and lords. These activities enabled them to participate directly in sustaining the lives of those who sustained the prosperity of the community at large. The economy of every kingdom was administered strategically by the king and court, through both the control of the prices of Maya currencies and commodities and the management of contractual disputes and fraud in the fairs and markets.
-[21] Gordon 48.
+Merchants operating beyond the borders of the kingdom were thought of euphemistically as state ambassadors bearing “gifts” to royal neighbors who acknowledged these with reciprocal “gifts.”[120] Such royal business was so economically vital that the merchants involved in it were high nobles and even members of the royal household. Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, high merchants traveled to the great festivals of neighbors and distant states that controlled especially strategic goods.
-[22] David Morland, Demanding the Impossible? Human Nature and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Social Anarchism (London: Cassell 1997) 3.
+The currencies used by the Maya—jade, obsidian, red spiny oyster shell, cloth, salt, and especially chocolate beans (cacao)—were prized beyond their territories and traded to all of the civilized peoples of the Mesoamerican world. In turn, different peoples produced and controlled different commodities, and traded regularly over long distances to obtain those that were outside their political domains. International relations thus were of central importance to the economic well-being of every state. The Maya king carried the burden of gathering the goods within his realm, exchanging them over long distances, and distributing the cherished goods received in return to his lords and allies. These in turn distributed the goods to their constituents in the form of gifts or exchanges. In this way, a portion of these commodities eventually filtered down into the general everyday transactions of the common folk.
-[23] Morland 19.
+In addition to managing the distribution of goods produced by his people, a Maya king also implemented agricultural work programs in the low-lying swamplands and river margins found in many parts of Maya country. In these regions, the land was not easily worked by individuals and families in a village farming community. Excavating the muck at the I bottom of the swamps to create a system of raised fields and canals took organization of time and labor. The result was worth the effort: Fields were adjacent to steady supplies of water, and the canals became home to teeming schools of fish sustained by waterlilies and other evaporationretarding plants.[121] The bottom mud became loaded with nutrients from fish excretions, thus providing rich fertilizer for the fields. It was a delicate and difficult system to maintain, but one with the prospect of enormous productivity, resulting in two or three crops a year.
-[24] David Graeber, “Anarchism, Academia, and the Avant-garde,” Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy, ed. Randall Amster et al. (Abingdon: Routledge 2009) 106.
+So important was such swamp and river-edge agriculture to the Maya state that the kings adopted waterlilies as a primary metaphor of royal power. Nobles were, literally, Ah Nab “Waterlily People.” The heartland of Maya country is swampland, and it is more than likely that the kingdoms of the high forest, as well as the wetlands of the Peten, of the Lacandon Forest, and of northern Belize, were the greatest producers of the strategic agricultural commodities, cacao and cotton, in all of the Mesoamerican world. In these regions, the vast swamps surrounding Maya centers supported large systems of raised fields. Most of these were owned and maintained by patrilineages, but a proportion (perhaps significant in size) were maintained as royal farms through tribute labor. Both these farmers and their communities benefited in turn from the resulting prosperity of the realms. Maya kings were not only central to the economic well-being of their own constituencies. They were essential to the economic well-being of their trade partners in other parts of Mesoamerica, who depended upon them for the reliable supply of their currencies.
-[25] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: CUP 1994) 205: “I am an anarchist .... I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am, in every sense of the term, an anarchist.”
+The understanding of currency in Mesoamerica did not parallel ours in every sense. Currency had value as a unit of economic exchange, it is true; but it also symbolized other values, far removed from the world of economics. A piece of red spondylus shell could buy something, but the same shell bead worn over the loins of a girl child represented her childhood and, when cut off in her baptism, displayed her newfound social maturity. Whole, the shell carried hematite in a dedication offering that brought the gods and sacred energy to reside in a newly built temple. A jade bead could be exchanged for some other commodity, but when placed in the mouth of a beloved grandparent who had passed on into death, it gave sustenance for the journey to Xibalba. Smeared with blue bitumen and human blood, it was cast by a shaman to divine the patterns of the sacred world and time. Carved with imagery, both the spondylus shell and the jade could be worn by a king to convey his wealth or to focus supernatural power in ritual. For the Maya things did not have an intrinsic meaning in themselves. Rather, meaning was acquired through the context of use and the way people shaped materials to function in their everyday lives and in the public life of the community.
-[26] William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols. (London: Robinson 1793) 2: 578—579: “With what delight must every well informed friend of mankind look forward to the auspicious period, the dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which, as has abundantly appeared in the progress of the present work, has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its substance, and no otherwise to be removed than by its utter annihilation!”
+For the Maya all things were alive and had meaning, but not everyone in Maya society was fully literate in all the levels of meaning. The farmer offering a gourd bowl of water and white corn gruel to the spirits of his field was less knowledgeable about the intricacies of royal symbolism and religion than the king who, standing in one of the great plazas of his city, offered his blood in a painted clay plate to the ancestors of all Maya. Yet the farmer knew that what he did was essentially the same. When he attended the great ceremonies in the king’s plaza, the farmer could not have read the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tree stones around him, any more than he could have expounded on the subtleties of meaning in the state religion and mythology. But then, neither can most of us expound on the principles of nuclear physics. The point is that we do not have to in order to live in our world and know it is affected by such knowledge.
-[27] See chapters 1 and 2 of James Joll, *The Anarchists*, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1979); and Part Two of Peter Marshall, *Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism* (Oakland, CA: PM 2010). chapters 1 and 2 of James Joll, The Anarchists, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1979); and Part Two of Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM 2010).
+The king and the farmer inhabited the same world. Even though they understood the symbology of that world on different levels, their lives in it were dynamically interconnected. The successful performance of the king as the state shaman enriched the farmer’s life in spiritual and ceremonial ways. His performance in economic affairs brought wealth to his kingdom and gave his constituents access to goods from far places. Royal celebrations and rituals generated festivals that touched all parts of the community emotionally and materially. The great public works commissioned by the kings created the spaces in which these festivals and rituals took on meaning. The histories written and pictured by the kings on the tree stones standing before human-made mountains gave form to time and space in both the material and spiritual worlds.
-[28] T.R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP 1988) 65 and 257n44.
+. Cerros: The Coming of Kings
-[29] Much of the anarchist scholarship encourages this complex. See, for example, April Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (Abingdon: Routledge 2010) 1: anarchism has “not received much attention from political theorists. There are a number of reasons for this neglect. One is ... the lack of any outstanding theoretical exponent of anarchism. There are important, interesting and attractive anarchist writers, but none comparable as social theorists with, for example, Marx. Within the corpus of ‘great political thinkers’ only Rousseau comes close occasionally to being an anarchist.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-75.jpg 70f]]
-[30] See Karl Marx’s notes on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy: The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, NY: Norton 1978) 542—8.
+In an age when the word invention has become synonymous with technological progress, it is difficult for us to imagine any other kind of invention. One of the great myths of our culture, the Myth of the Industrial Age, teaches us that the capture of fire and the invention of the wheel led inevitably to the combustion engine, flight, and atomic energy. In this myth of progress, only the energy harnessed by technology drives cultural advancement. In turn, we believe that civilized people have the responsibility to perpetuate technological progress and to invent a viable future through such means. We in the West see ourselves as the inheritors of a great hope—the tradition that technology and scientific discovery will be the salvation of humankind. However, another and more fundamental form of invention exists.
-[31] See Mikhail Bakunin’s general critique of “scientism”: Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Cape 1973) 159—165.
+If we judge the Maya only by our own definition of progress, they had few technological wonders.[122] By our standards, they were a Stone Age people lacking even such rudimentary developments as the uses of metal[123] and the domestication of beasts of burden.[124] Yet few people today would deny that they possessed a high civilization and a complex social order. If the Maya did not invent an advanced scientific technology that harnessed natural energy, what then did they invent? The answer to this question is simple: They invented ideas that harnessed social energy. The genius of the Maya was expressed through the creation of new visions of power. They invented political symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized life.
-[32] Schmidt and van der Walt 33.
+It would be untrue to say that there were no technologies associated with these transformations. The writing and pictorial imagery used to interpret and record these social institutions comprised a particular type of technology—similar in nature to what in our time we call the media. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Maya kingship and Maya writing emerged simultaneously in the century before the Common Era, for the technology of writing served the hierarchical institutions of Maya life.
-[33] Gordon 30.
+Our own social institutions seem so basic and intrinsic to daily activity that we do not often realize that, like the technological side of our lives, they too are inventions. The same is true for the Maya. Their hierarchical institutions, which we recognize as the hallmarks of civilization, were invented as problem-solving tools during times of cultural strife.
-[34] Morland 183.
+Many of the great inventions of antiquity were social inventions. Just as the Athenian Greeks, whom we revere as spiritual forebears, invented democracy, so the Maya invented the ideas which cemented their survival as a civilization. The most powerful of these social innovations, and the cultural adaptation which instituted their great Classical florescence, was the invention of the institution of kingship. In the brief space of a century, the Maya translated the politics of village life into the politics of governance by the great ahauob, the high kings.[125]
-[35] Graeber 105.
+It would be misleading for us to say that they invented this new institution whole-cloth from their own experience, because kings had been around in Meosamerica for a long time—at least a thousand years. As technological invention in our world is born of old knowledge and known technology, so the Maya transformed ancient ideas into something new and uniquely their own. Our own form of government is no different—we see it as an invention and a great experiment in human experience. Yet it is a transformation of ideas from Greece, Rome, and twenty-five hundred years of social experience inherited from our forebears.
-[36] Bob Black, Defacing the Currency: Selected Writings 1992—2012 (Berkeley, CA: LBC 2012) 37.
+At the time when the institution of kingship was invented, the Maya were faced with cultural tensions so great they threatened to tear their society apart. Outside forces were upsetting the heretofore carefully maintained system of social egalitarianism. Trade, both between Maya communities and between the Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors, such as Mije-speaking peoples of the Pacific Coast, the post-Olmec people of the Gulf Coast, the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Teotihuacanos T of the central Valley of Mexico, was generating a flow of wealth that was unequally distributed among the people. In a culture which regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration, this turn of events created unease and social strife. At the same time, the development of raised-field agriculture and extensive water-management systems created prosperity in regions which had the means to organize the labor pool necessary to maintain these systems. As contacts with trading partners already organized into kingdoms intensified, ideas of rank and privilege further exacerbated the differences in wealth and status that had grown with the success of these commercial and agricultural enterprises. A new leadership appeared within many Maya communities—one that was hierarchical in its nature.
-[37] Ruth Kinna, Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005) 5: “Anarchy is the goal of anarchists: the society variously described to be without government or without authority; a condition of statelessness, of free federation, of ‘complete’ freedom and equality based either on rational self-interest, co-operation or reciprocity.”
+We know that the problem the Maya were trying to resolve was one of social inequality because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the cosmos.[126] The development of a high civilization always creates problems of social inequality, but such differences between people need not be manifested negatively. For the Maya, kingship became the primary symbol of and rationale for the noble class, the ahauob. Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself. The rituals of the ahauob declared that the magical person of the king was the pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, the summit of a ranking of families that extended out to incorporate everyone in the kingdom—from highest to lowest. His person was the conduit of the sacred, the path of communication to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead, and indeed of surviving death itself. He was the clarifier of the mysteries of everyday life, of planting and harvesting, of illness and health. He wielded his knowledge and influence to create advantageous trade agreements for his people. He could read in the heavens the signs which told him when to war and when to maintain the peace. The farmer, the stonemason, and the craftsperson might have to pay tribute to the king, but the king compensated them for their service by giving them a richer, more enjoyable, more cohesive existence. The people reaped the spiritual benefits of the king’s intercession with the supernatural world and shared in the material wealth his successful performance brought to the community.
-[38] For an anthology that demonstrates the variety evident within post-anarchist thought, see Duane Rousselle and Sureyyya Evren, eds., Post-Anarchism: A Reader (London: Pluto 2011).
+The Late Preclassic town of Cerros (Fig. 3:1) was one of the Maya communities to experience the advent of kingship during the period of its invention.[127] This village of fisherfolk, farmers, and traders was strategically situated to command the mouth of the New River where it emptied into Chetumal Bay on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The people of Cerros built the early community of clustered households, and the later public center which buried it, directly on the water’s edge. Edges for the Maya, whether between the surface of the earth and the underground as in a cave, between night and day, or between the sea and the shore, were intrinsically powerful and ambiguous. Cerros was at such an edge, not only physically but also culturally, for the people of this village were seafarers[128] and traders familiar with distant peoples.[129]
-[39] Kinna is therefore wrong to assert in that “[a]narchists are those who work to further the cause of anarchism [or to realise ‘anarchy’]. [They are] activists [in] a number of categories ranging from educationalists and propagandists to combatants in armed struggle” (4). This is a definition of “anarchist activists” not “anarchists.”
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[40] Nathan Jun, “Rethinking the Anarchist Canon: History, Philosophy, and Interpretation,” Rousselle and Evren 88—89.
+Let us imagine a day in the lives of the Cerros people at the time they had decided to adopt the institution of kingship. It is late afternoon and the heat of the day has begun to yield its brilliance to the shadows cast by the tall thatched roofs of the white one-roomed houses. Each dwelling is grouped around an open paved patio space filled with the cacophony of playing children. Dogs nap in the shadows and villagers busy themselves with a hundred different tasks. The women toil over large red and T brown coarsely made bowls, full of maize soaking in lime, which they will grind into dough on the pink granite stones sitting before them on the plaza floor. Engrossed in quiet conversation, people are working in the shade of the house walls, weaving cotton cloth on backstrap looms, repairing nets for the fishermen, and fashioning tools of hardwood, using chipped-stone adzes made from the honey-brown chert which is abundant a few miles to the south.
-[41] Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (London: Continuum 2012) 116.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-76.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:1]]
-[42] Gordon 32.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-77.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:2 Structure 2A-Sub 4-1<sup>st</sup>]]
-[43] Gordon 43.
+Suddenly, from farther up the coast, comes the sound of the conchshell trumpets and wooden drums of the lookouts announcing the arrival of a trading party. Some of the elder men, who have been expecting this event by their day counts, move with dignity to the white stone and lime plaster docking area. This dock, which fronts the community’s public square, creates a sharp, human-made shore for the mottled green water of the bay. The elders in their painted and dyed cotton cloaks, colorful hip cloths and turbans, jade earrings, and strings of bright orange shell beads, are unspoken testimony to the wealth and power of the community. The dignity they project is dampened somewhat by the noisy gathering of excited villagers and farmers coming in from the fields and orchards and filling the plaza behind them.
-[44] Peter Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings by Peter Kropotkin, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York, NY: Dover 1970) 284: “Anarchism [is] the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.”
+The vanguard canoes of the visitors round the point of the turbulent outer bay and enter the calmer waters close to shore. These seagoing canoes are over forty feet long, hewn from single trunks of massive trees, and propelled by multiple paddlers who both stand and sit. The paddlers attack the water in unison and with special energy as they come within sight of the community, where bonfires and billowing incense rise in greeting. From the bay, the village is a slash of white against the uniform green of fallow fields within the young forest which stretches indefinitely in both directions. While some of the boats separate from the main group to land next to the homes of trading partners, the principal voyagers disembark directly onto the dock. They are followed by a crew heavily laden with gifts for their partners and friends and for the patriarchs of the village. The leaders of each party greet each other as equals, formally and briefly, saving the speeches and conversations for the evening banquet.
-[45] Kinna 38: “anarchism should be considered as an ideology defined by the rejection of the state.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-78.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:3 Reconstructed by Robin Robertson]]
-[46] Gerald Runkle, Anarchism: Old and New (New York, NY: Delacorte 1972) 118: “In the absence of law and formal punishment, how are men to live together [in an anarchist society]?”
+The visiting traders are themselves patriarchs, wise in the ways of the neighboring Maya cities and the foreign peoples beyond. They are knowledgeable in magical power and its instruments, which they have brought to trade or to give as gifts, and they are warriors capable of defending themselves both at home and abroad. Amid loud music, noise, excitement, and confusion, the group moves slowly across the plaza to a low red platform which has been built to look like a stone model of a house (Fig. 3:2).[130] Sloping panels above the platform resemble thatched roofing and lower inset panels resemble the walls of the house. Instead of a doorway leading inside, however, there is a stairway leading up to an unobstructed summit. In solemn dignity, the leaders ascend the platform and spatter strips of paper with blood drawn from their ears and arms. They then burn these papers with pellets of tree-gum incense in open bowls resting upon clay, drum-shaped stands bearing the masks of the Ancestral Twins (Fig. 3:3).[131] This ritual is an act of thanksgiving to the gods and the ancestral dead for a safe and successful trip. Several curers and sorcerers of the village pray over the patriarchs and bless them on behalf of the spirits of this place.
-[47] Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eugene, OR: Wipf 2011) 11: “By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.”
+At the moment when the sun plunges into the sea to begin its daily journey through the Underworld, the elders sit down to a lavish feast consisting of red-fleshed deep-water fish, young sea turtle, pit-roasted deer, endless varieties of steamed maize and vegetable dishes, and fresh fruits from nearby orchards.[132] The last toasts of honey mead, quaffed from ritual red-clay cups,[133] won’t be sworn until the sun and his brother Venus, the Morningstar, end their journey through the Underworld and rise from the eastern sea.
-[48] Saul Newman, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event 4.3 (2000) [[https://muse.jhu.edu][https://muse.]] [[https://muse.jhu.edu][jhu.edu/article/32594]]: “It is ... senseless and indeed impossible to try to construct, as anarchists do, a world outside power.”
+Through the night the firelight flickers on the angular, bright-eyed faces of the leaders, who have painted images over their features to encourage the illusion of their resemblance to the gods. The conversation drifts from accounts of past glories in shared battles, to raids against enemies, to gossip on the planned alliances of neighbors. There are practical reports to be made on how the cotton and cacao crops are faring at home and abroad.[134] There is also speculation about the current reliability of the kings of the southern highlands who jealously trade from their sources of the black volcanic glass, obsidian, and the precious greenstones needed in the rituals that materialize the gods and insure that the earth and sea yield up their harvest.
-[49] Sal Restivo, Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism (London: Routledge 2016) 203: “The defining focus of anarchism is domination, oppressive power relations.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-79.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:4 The Jewels of Kingship Found in an Offering at the Summit of the Second Temple]]
-[50] Randall Amster, Anarchism Today (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger 2012) 6: “The rejection of authority is the sine qua non of anarchism.”
+Finally, deep into the night, the gray-haired leader of the visitors broaches the subject everyone has been waiting for. He pulls a small, soft deerskin bundle from within the folds of his cloak and opens it carefully onto his palm, revealing five stones of glowing green jade carved in the images of gods. Four of these stones are sewn onto a band of the finest cotton, ready to be tied around the head of an ahau. The fifth, a larger image that looks like the head of a frowning child, will ride on the king’s chest suspended from a leather band around his neck. The trader has brought the jewels of an ahau to the patriarchs of Cerros (Fig. 3:4).[135]
-[51] Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (London: Routledge 2006) 62: “the anarchist stance is, above all, not anti-state or anti-authority, but anti-hierarchy.”
+The dark eyes of the principal patriarch glitter in the light of the fire. He sees before him the tools he needs to sanctify his rank among his own people. These kingly jewels assert the inherent superiority of their wearer within the community of human beings, transforming a person of merely noble rank into a being who can test and control the divine forces of the world. To have ahauob and an ahau of the ahauob will establish the Cerros community as a presence among the kingdoms of the mighty and the wealthy who rule the wetlands of the interior. Now that the people of Cerros have the means to declare themselves a place of kings, they will be able to deal with the new and changing world of kingdoms and divine power.
-[52] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, NY: Dover 1969) 56: “Anarchism [is the] philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law.”
+Slowly and deliberately, the principal patriarch lakes the bundle from the visitor and puts it into a small jar, with four nubbin feet, covered with red wavy scrolls. Placing the jar at his side in the momentary quiet, he stares into the fire as if to seek his destiny. His companions silently raise their right arms across their chests and clasp their left shoulders in a reverent salute. The Cerros patriarch is in his prime. He has already proven himself in battle and he knows the rituals which call forth the gods and the ancestors from Xibalba. His family is ancient and respected in the community, and wealthy in land and water-going vessels. His gesture of acceptance is the culmination of careful discussion among the families of the village; and it carries with it the blessings of the sorcerers and curers who have prayed, sacrificed, and cast their divination stones. Some unhappy rivals and their followers will leave as enemies, but many new families will join the village as the word spreads of the new king. Cerros is too wealthy a prize to exist for long without a king, and too important a link in the trade network to pretend obscurity. The people of the community also need the resolution that kingship will bring to their own ambiguous feelings toward the wealthy and powerful among them.
-[53] Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: U of California P 1998) 18: “The primary obligation of man is autonomy [and] it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy.”
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[54] Alan Carter, “Analytical Anarchism: Some Conceptual Foundations,” Political Theory 28.2 (2000): 231: “Anarchism could be viewed as containing a normative opposition to certain substantive political inequalities, along with the empirical belief that political equality (in the sense of an absence of specific, substantive political inequalities) is inevitably undermined by state power.”
+While it is true that we have told a tale, we have tried to be faithful to the thoughts and motivations of the individuals involved. The people of Cerros did decide consciously to embrace kingship as an institution and the consequences of that decision were profound for all. In the space of two generations, this small fishing village transformed itself into a mighty acropolis. Every living soul in Cerros participated in that transformation, from the lowliest fishermen and farmers who provided food for the laborers, to the most gifted stonemasons who carved the building facades, to the shamans who gave the temples their blessing. It is difficult for us to imagine such complete and rapid social metamorphosis, but what happened at Cerros constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift.
-[55] Derry Novak, “The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought,” Review of Politics 20.3 (1958): 313: “The search for individual happiness [is] derived from the same intellectual roots from which the anarchists.draw their concept of the aim of life.”
+We will never know the names of the individuals who participated in the decision to embrace kingship or of those who bore the rank and responsibilities of ahau. Because the kings of Cerros did not write the details of their lives on stone or clay, they must remain forever anonymous, but their deeds and those of their devout followers clearly declare their commitment to the vision of ahau. In the temples and buildings which remain, we have proof of the awesome energy with which they executed that vision.
-[56] Benjamin Franks, “Anarchism and the Virtues,” Anarchism and Moral Philosophy, ed. Franks and Matthew Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2010) 145: “an account of anarchism based on virtue ethics is.more consistent [than deontological or consequentialist accounts] with the broad stretch of anarchist writings and tactics.”
+Around 50 B.C., the community of Cerros began the revolutionary program of “urban renewal” which buried their village completely under broad plastered plazas and massive temples. Families conducted sacrifices over the foundations of their old homes, acknowledging for one last time the ancestors who lay buried below the floors and patios. They then smashed the vessels of their leavetaking feast, broke jade jewelry with great rocks, and scattered the bits and pieces over the homes they would never see again. Finished with one way of life, they walked outward and began building new homes in a halo some 160 acres in breadth around the new center. To confirm their participation and approval of this new way of life, some patriarchs built their front doorways facing the site of the new temple rather than the sun path. Cerros had begun the transformation that would turn it from village to kingdom.
-[57] Samuel Clark, “Kicking Against the Pricks: Anarchist Perfectionism and the Conditions of Independence,” Franks and Wilson 33: “The crude thing I want to say is that a free, non-dominating society [i.e., anarchy] cultivates flourishing, independent individuals; that such individuals in turn support a free, non-dominating society; and that this is the best reason for advocating such a society.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-80.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:5 The Sacred Precinct and the Ballcourt Group]]
-[58] See, for example, Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: CUP 1980) 38: “[Anarchists promote freedom], not as a pre-eminent good, but as a concomitant of the communal individuality that is their first concern.”
+These elders also participated in the rituals that prepared the site of the new temple. Various ceremonies, the breaking of dishes from ritual meals and the burying of water lilies and flowers in the white earth of the temple’s foundation, all helped to thin the membrane between the human world and the Otherworld at this spot and establish it as a place of power. This temple, called Structure 5C by archaeologists, was built directly at the water’s edge, the source of the community’s livelihood. Facing south (Fig. 3:5), it constituted the northern apex of an axis that ran southward through the new urban center. This axis would end eventually in a great ballcourt built just within the reservoir canal the inhabitants had dug to define the limits of their royal capital (Fig. 3:5). Thus, while the king mandated the burial of the old village, he planned the new town that would replace it. The first temple was also in the center of the vertical axis that penetrated the earth and pierced the sky, linking the supernatural and natural worlds into a whole. This plan set the temple between the land and the sea on the horizontal axis and between the heavens and the Underworld on the vertical axis. It materialized the paths of power the king traveled through during ecstatic performance.
-[59] I agree here with Suissa: “I believe that.philosophical exercises in establishing the theoretical priority of any one goal or value within anarchist thought are misconceived” (106).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-81.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:6 The First Temple at Cerros (reconstructed projection)]]
-[60] See Benjamin Franks, “Anarchism and Moral Philosophy,” Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy, ed. Nathan Jun (Leiden: Brill 2018) 189.
+Since this first temple functioned as the instrument that would convey the king as shaman on his sacred journeys, the builders designed it as a public stage. The rituals that enabled the king’s journey into the sacred world would be enacted in public space so that the full community could witness and affirm their successful performance. That first temple at Cerros was a masterly expression of the Maya vision, one whose effectiveness is equally impressive today. It represented not an experimental beginning, but a complete and resolved statement of a new social and cosmic order (Fig. 3:6).
-[61] See Peter Marshall, “Human Nature and Anarchism,” For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice, ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge 1989) 128: “while classic anarchist thinkers, such as William Godwin, Max Stirner, and Peter Kropotkin, share common assumptions about the possibility of a free society, they do not have a common view of human nature.” Kropotkin does not even share a view of human nature with fellow “social anarchists” like Proudhon and Bakunin, as I have argued elsewhere. (See Paul McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism [London: Routledge 2016] 17—22.) In any case, many contemporary anarchists and post-anarchists (following Marshall [138—44], albeit for different reasons) argue for “the rejection of essentialism about human nature” (Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP 1994] 118).
+How did a people who had heretofore built only houses and small buildings obtain the know-how to build temples on such a grand and architecturally complex scale? No one can be certain of the answer, but it is likely that this knowledge came from many sources. The Maya were not the first people in Mesoamerica to build pyramids. The Olmec had raised artificial “mountains” a thousand years earlier and passed the architectural form on to their successors. The pyramidal form developed primarily from the way Mesoamericans built tall buildings by piling up dirt and rock to create a mound on which they could construct a summit temple. The resulting shape emulated the shape of a mountain and created a symbolic landscape in which religious activity took place. Like the cathedrals in Europe, the pyramid temples in Maya country emerged from a long cultural tradition shared by all the peoples of the region. The lowland Maya, however, invented a new way of using the pyramid-temple: They made it a carrier of political messages by adding elaborately modeled and painted plaster facades to both the pyramid below and the temple above. These great sculptural programs became a primary expression of the political and religious doctrines underlying their form of kingship.[136]
-[62] Terry Eagleton, “[The Rise of Anarchism],” rev. of The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism, by Ruth Kinna, The Guardian (Guardian Media, Aug. 22, 2019) [[http://www.theguardian.com][www.theguardian.com/books/]] [[http://www.theguardian.com][2019/aug/22/the-government-of-no-one-by-ruth-kinna-review-anarchism]] (June 16, 2020): “Anarchism isn’t opposed to government as such, just to any form of it that isn’t self-government.”
+The people of Cerros very probably also had the help of master builders,[137] stonemasons, and artisans from already established royal capitals to help them in their first building projects. It is also possible that local artists and builders had sojourned in other communities to learn necessary skills. One thing is certain: The people of Cerros did not invent the royal pyramid, but rather were part of a large number of Maya people who developed and refined its construction.
-[63] David Osterfeld, “Anarchism and the Public Goods Issue: Law, Courts, and the Police,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 9.1 (1989): 49: “It is clear from any careful reading of anarchist literature that what anarchists [including Kropotkin] oppose is not law but legislation.”
+To begin their task, the builders at Cerros laid the foundation of the new temple and its plaza in layer upon layer of white earth, the soft lime marl underlying the hard capstone of this area. It was the common stuff the people used to build the platforms and patios of their houses. Then they and the elders of the community shattered precious pottery vessels, both the local work of their own craftspeople and pots obtained from trade with the south, and mixed the sherds into the white earth. To the earth and pottery, they added the flowers of fruit trees from their orchards which surrounded the new town.[138] From the foundation upward, the people made this building not only for, but with, devout and sacred action.
-[64] April Carter, “Anarchism and Violence,” Nomos 19 (1978): 320: “The attitudes to violence within the anarchist tradition are complex and contradictory, and the issue remains contentious among anarchists today.”
+The ritual of beginning ended, the builders then laid down a pavement of flat hard stones upon the layers of white earth. They raised a broad platform that would hold both the temple and its plaza. Within this platform masons built a lattice of internal walls that would buttress the internal fill to keep it from spreading as the upper structures were built upon it. The spaces between these walls were filled in with vast quantities of coarse, broken limestone which laborers hauled up from nearby pits that had been driven down to excavate the white earth. When they finally finished this platform, the laborers capped the top of it with soft white lime earth into which they mixed more pottery broken in rituals of devotion and dedication. Upon this surface, the master builders then drew the outline of the temple,[139] a great T shape. The stem of this T represented a long stairway beginning at the bottom of the pyramid and extending southward onto the raised plaza, which constituted the arms of the T (Fig. 3:7). Following this outline, the builders would raise the temple and its stairway simultaneously, an effort of master builders, masons, and laborers drawn from the community, coordinated by the ruler and his counselors.
-[65] Gordon 49: “Anarchists are hardly ‘against power.’ This common misconception is easily shown untrue by anarchist political language, in which ‘empowerment’ is mentioned as a positive goal.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-82.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:7 Cerros: Plan of the First Temple (Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>)]]
-[66] Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge: CUP 1990) 135: “We revolutionary anarchists ... are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood.”
+The temple platform rose in the form of a steep pyramid with smooth outer walls made of small loaf-shaped blocks. The master builders carefully calculated the proportions of the pyramid in advance in order to accommodate the long stairway and the dimensions of the four elaborately decorated panels which would be mounted on the main, southern side of the building, facing the new plaza. While laborers built up the rubble core of the pyramid, masons fashioned four deep well-like holes which were placed symmetrically to the left and the right of the north-south axis (Fig. 3:7). These holes would contain the great trees of the four directions that T would soar above the thatched roof of the temple.[140]
-[67] Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose 1986) 20: “the coming [anarchist] revolution and the utopia it creates [i.e., anarchy] must be conceived of as wholes. They can leave no area of life untouched that has been contaminated by domination.”
+When the front face of the pyramid approached its full height, master masons were called in to cut and lay the special stones that would function as the armatures of the great masks and ear ornaments which would be modeled on the two upper panels (Fig. 3:8). While some masons worked on these upper panels, others supervised the construction of the stairway which linked the temple at the summit to the plaza below. Much more than a simple means of access, this stairway was the central focus of the whole design, the place where the king would perform his public rituals. This stairway had to be much longer than simple practicality required, for it contained two broad landings, one in the middle of the stairway and one at the threshold of the summit temple. During ritual, the king would pause on the middle and the top landings to perform his ecstatic dance and carry out sacrifice in view of his followers gathered on the plaza below (Fig. 3:9). Four stairs led to the first landing, and nine stairs to the summit threshold. These sacred numbers dictated the length of the whole.
-[68] Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (New York, NY: Dover 1970) 35: “[Anarchists] reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can tum only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.”
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-83.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:8]]
-[69] Murray Bookchin, “Anarchism: Past and Present,” Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. Howard J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: AK 1996) 26: “Whatever else Anarchism meant in the past . contemporary Anarchism must address itself in the most sophisticated and radical terms to.hierarchical society, in its advanced and. terminal forms.”
+At this point in the construction, it was necessary for the master builder to pause and consult with the king, the patriarchs, and the shamans. The king had a particular decorative program in mind for this building and it was important to follow this program in every respect. The tricky part of the design was about to commence: the building of the front walls of the lower terraces. These walls, like the panels already established on the pyramid face above, would carry great masks. The builders had to establish where to construct the retaining walls of the lower terraces so that the king, when standing on the middle landing, would appear to be in the center of these four great masks. Obviously, this presented a knotty problem in optics. To create this visual impression, they had to set the lower terrace far out in front of the pyramid core, an architecturally awkward solution. The builders had no real choice in this matter, for the ritual function of the facade was more important than its architectural perfection.
-[70] See G.P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (London: Free 1953) 372ff.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-84.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:9 Stations designed for the king to perform ritual in his processional ascent and descent of the temple]]
-[71] Maximoff 253ff.
+Once they had agreed upon the position of the lower terrace walls, the masons began laying a second set of armatures into the retaining wall to support the lower pair of masks. These masks had to be of the same scale and proportion as the upper ones. The Maya used strings, plumb lines, and water levels to measure the new mask armatures, but in the end the highly skilled masons adjusted the final proportions by sight. While the building designers worked out the details of each panel, masons built a lattice of walls between the outer retaining wall and the inner pyramid core. The spaces within this lattice would later be filled with loose rock and earth, and the entire terrace capped with smooth plaster.
-[72] Scholars of anarchism have acknowledged some nuance with respect to authority, at least. See, for example, Samuel Clark, Living without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist Utopia (London: Routledge 2016) 69–70; Suissa 57–61.
+During the construction of the pyramid and its terrace, woodcutters prepared the massive tree trunks that would be set in the four sockets in the floor of the summit temple. These would represent the trees of the four directions. After floating them as close to the construction site as possible, T the people hauled and rolled these gigantic logs up into the temple where they were shaped and dropped into the floor sockets. Once anchored securely, these trees were ready for the woodcarvers and painters who would transform them into the supernatural trees at the four corners of the cosmos. The king presided over the raising of the world trees, a ceremony commemorating events that occurred at the beginning of creation.[141] Once the building was partially sanctified and activated, it had to be completed rapidly, for the raw power within it was potent and needed the containment that only ritual use by the king could provide. Within this sacred space the king, as shaman, could commune with the supernatural forces of the cosmos.
-[73] I think Samuel Clark is wrong to claim (Living 9–10) that the anti-statist definition is non-distinguishing, but right to claim that it is “incomplete.” An even more extreme claim for the non-distinguishing nature of this definition is made by Schmidt and van der Walt 42–3. None of the examples cited by Clark or by Schmidt and van der Walt is properly anti-statist.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-85.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:10 The Parallelism Between the Path of the Sun and the Path of the King]]
-[74] But cp. Roderick T. Long, “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Jan. 7, 2010) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/1659]] (June 16, 2020).
+The masons working at the summit of the pyramid constructed the floor of the temple proper in two levels by raising the rear half of the floor a step above the front half. These two halves were separated by a wall. This design followed that of the fancy homes of prominent people within the community, who preferred a “public” space at the front of the house and a raised, more “private” back area. Unlike the homes of patriarchs at Cerros, however, the temple had walls of stone rather than walls of wood and white earth.
-[75] A. John Simmons, “The Anarchist Position: A Reply to Klosko and Senor,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16.3 (1987): 269–70. Suissa notes this possibility in her critical analysis of the anti-statist definition of anarchism (54–7).
+It was ritual need more than prosaic convenience that ultimately dictated the plan of the rooms within the pyramid. The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.
-[76] The disposition of anarchists towards another, revised candidate for object x—authoritarianism as opposed to authority—is indeed oppositional, I think. (See Richard T. DeGeorge, The Nature and Limits of Authority [Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas 1985] 133: “[Anarchists decry] not authority as such, but authoritarianism.”) However, authoritarianism (and arguably authority as a whole) is also a token of the relevant type of object, less notable in anarchist thought than the state.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-86.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:11 The Jaguar Sun mask from the east side of Temple 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>]]
-[77] McLaughlin ch. 1.
+The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery of the temple (Fig. 3:10). To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled into the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction— thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west.
-[78] Their concern is, I think, founded on a particular kind of intuition that I examine in “Considérations méthodologiques sur la théorie anarchiste,” Philosophie de l’anarchie: Théories libertaires, pratiques quotidiennes et ontologie, ed. Jean-Christophe Angaut et al. (Lyon: Atelier de création libertaire 2012) 327–53.
+This little room, then, was the heart of the temple, the place where the king carried out in solitude and darkness the most intimate phases of his personal bloodletting and the most terrifying phases of his communion with the Otherworld.[142] Here he would prepare himself to meet the ancestors and the gods, fasting and practicing other kinds of trance-inducing physical mortifications. It was here also that the ritual perforation of his genitals took place and that he experienced the first shock of blood loss and the first flood of religious ecstasy. From this little room, he would travel like the sun rising from the earth to appear on the stairway before his people (Fig. 3:6). Dressed in bleached white cotton cloth that clearly showed the stains of his bloodletting, the king would speak to the ancestors on behalf of all.
-[79] McLaughlin, Anarchism 97.
+With the completion of the stone construction of the pyramid, the plasterers set to work covering the walls and the stones of the stairway j with the fine creamy white plaster that produced the softly modeled contours of early Maya architecture. While the plaster was still damp, they painted these surfaces bright red to provide a dramatic contrast to the dominant green of the surrounding forest.
-[80] McLaughlin, Anarchism 52.
+The final work on this temple can only be described as a magnificent performance of consummate skill and cooperative effort. The panels of stone on the terraces of the pyramid base stood ready to be adorned with divine images. The artisans who applied the wet plaster and modeled the elaborate details of these four masks and their complex earflare[143] assemblages and sky frames had to work rapidly and surely (Fig. 3:11). These artisans used a few previously prepared appliqué elements that could be stuck on with plaster glue, but for the most part they had to know what the final images would look like even before they started. It was vital to shape the plaster before it cured. Even with retardants added to the plaster, the sculptors had about thirty minutes in which to apply and work the material before it hardened under their hands.
-[81] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London: Dent 1984) 73–4.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-87.jpg 70f]]
-[82] David Heyd, “Justice and Solidarity: The Contractarian Case against Global Justice,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38.1 (2007): 113.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-88.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:12]]
-[83] See Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, 2 vols. (Chico, CA: AK 2008–12) which, while comprehensive and informative, exhibits a tendency to define anarchism to activist, revolutionary, and socialist taste. I happen to share much of this taste, but I do not try to define “anarchism” accordingly.
+The artisans inherited some unexpected challenges from the master builders and masons: For example, the panels on the western side of the pyramid were more narrow than those on the eastern side.[144] The sculptors compensated by compressing the composition to fit the western panels. They accomplished this primarily by reducing the size of the earflares and then directing the painters to put in any details lost in the places where the plaster could not be modeled.
-** 2. The Anarchist Landscape
+While the plaster was still damp, the painters began their work, adding red, pink, black, and yellow line to highlight the natural cream color of the raw plaster and to render even finer details in the images. As we saw above, the painters often put in necessary design elements that the plaster modelers left out in their haste. To finish their work before the plaster dried, the artists had to work frantically, dripping and throwing paint with the force of their strokes. Yet even these drip patterns were incorporated as part of the imagery.
-Roderick T. Long
+The mastery of their craft is evident in the sureness of their drawing and the confidence of their swirling lines. The painters and sculptors knew exactly what the finished panels should look like because, just as with the written word, the panels were designed to be read as symbolic statements about the nature of the kingship and its relationship to the cosmos. And if the artisans were literate in the images of this new, revolutionary religion, then how much more so must their patron the king and his principal followers have been.
-*** I. Introduction
+We know that the images on this temple were designed to be read because we can read them ourselves. As for actual written text, however, there is very little. While the lowland Maya of those times were literate and wrote brief, rudimentary texts on small objects,[145] they did not write full texts on any of the Late Preclassic buildings discovered so far. Instead, they used isolated glyphs as labeling devices, <verbatim>“tagging"</verbatim> objects and images to clarify and amplify their meaning.[146] Our interpretation of the art on the temple at Cerros is enhanced by such strategic glyphic clues.
-The anarchist landscape, like many landscapes, looks different from different vantage points within it. In particular, how one is disposed to draw the boundaries of anarchism often depends on where one is located.
+The huge masks in the center of each of the four panels of the temple at Cerros derive their meaning from both the glyphic tags and the complex imagery that surrounds them. The lower masks are snarling jaguars emerging totem-pole fashion from the heads of long-snouted creatures whose lower faces merge with the pyramid. These jaguars are marked with the four-petaled glyphs denoting the sun, kin, identifying these beings as the Jaguar Sun God (Fig. 3:12).[147]
-Anarchists agree on rejecting the state, whatever else they disagree about. They do not necessarily agree as to what counts as rejecting the state, however. The federated workers’ associations favored by anarcho-syndicalists,[84] the independent democratic communities hailed by libertarian municipalists,[85] and the private security systems advocated by many market anarchists,[86] each strike one anarchist camp or another as states in anarchist guise. My present concern, however, is primarily with anarchist disagreements as to what, if anything, anarchism involves, or should involve, beyond opposition to the state.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-89.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:13 Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and the Cosmos]]
-*** II. Varieties of Individualism
+Like a puzzle with one key piece, the whole message of the temple comes into focus with these Sun Jaguars. Since this building faces to the south, a person gazing at its colorful facade would see the sun in its jaguar aspect “emerging” from the sea on the eastern side of the building and “setting” into the sea on the western side. Thus, these terrace panels symbolize the sun at the two most spectacular moments of the tropical day: dawn and dusk. Together, these sun masks display both linear time in the duration of time through the day and year and cyclical time in the return of the cycle to its beginning point over and over again; and it is significant that this path encircles the stairway along which the king must travel on his ritual journeys (Fig. 3:10). Indeed, as we shall see in the passage that follows, these masks made a special statement about kingship.
-The terms “social anarchism” and “individualist anarchism” are often used to distinguish two major branches within anarchism. But matters are immediately more complicated. By one accounting, the two groups differ over the role of markets, economic competition, and private ownership in an anarchist society: social anarchists (whether communistic, collectivistic, or syndicalist) tend either to oppose these outright or else to regard their role as properly marginal, seeing them as potential tools of domination and exploitation; for individualist anarchists, by contrast, private ownership is the embodied form that liberty takes, and market competition plays a crucial role in maintaining social cooperation.[87]
+We know that, for the Maya, the Sun Jaguar represented more than a celestial body. In Classical theology, Yax-Balam, the younger of the Ancestral Hero Twins, is symbolized by the sun.[148] The older brother, Hun-Ahau, in turn, was similarly linked to the planet Venus, that bright celestial body that dances with the sun as Morningstar and Eveningstar. The logic of reading the masks that hover above the Sun Jaguars on the temple as Morningstar and Eveningstar is compelling: (1) if the lower masks denote a celestial body, so then should the upper masks in order to complete the pattern; (2) the upper image should then correspond to some celestial phenomenon hovering above the sun at dawn and dusk; (3) in astronomical terms, the heavenly body associated with the sun in exactly this relationship is the Morningstar which rises in the hours before sunrise and the Eveningstar which follows the path of the sun into the earth in the hours after sunset (Fig. 3:13).
-But the term “individualist anarchism” is also used quite differently, to refer to forms of anarchism centered on an amoralist egoism based on or in the same vein as the ideas of Max Stirner.[88] While social anarchists, in characterizing their rivals, have often taken Stirnerism and support for markets together as defining features of individualist anarchism, most of the major nineteenth-century thinkers usually identified as individualist anarchists (including Thomas Hodgskin,[89] Josiah Warren,[90] Stephen Pearl Andrews,[91] Ezra and Angela Heywood,[92] Lysander Spooner,[93] William B. Greene,[94] Moses and Lillian Harman,[95] Dyer Lum,[96] and Voltairine de Cleyre[97]) either predated Stirner, ignored him, or explicitly rejected him, and embraced a moralistic orientation Stirner would have found uncongenial.
+There is other evidence to support a reading of the upper masks of the temple as Venus. Both upper masks have the long snouts that became characteristic of the Cosmic Monster, a being that was especially associated with Venus and the sun as they moved through the heavens.[149] The crowns worn by these masks consisted of three jewels mounted on a headband in the same distinctive pattern as that found on the diadems of early Maya kings (Fig. 3:11). The central symbol of the kingly crown during the Classic period was the three-pointed shape in the center of this band. In its personified form, known as the Jester God,[150] it has a long-nosed head below the three-pointed shape and was worn mounted on a cloth headband by both gods and humans (see the Glossary of Gods). Since it occurs in the writing system as a glyph for ahau, “lord” (Fig. 3:14),[151] we can be reasonably sure that it has the same meaning as a I costume element. We believe that the upper masks of this temple wore these Jester God headbands to mark them as ahau, and therefore, symbolic representations of the first king of Cerros. The Ancestral Twins, of course, are the prototypes of kingship; and in Classic imagery the Jester God headband is a diagnostic feature of the elder twin, named, not surprisingly, Hun-Ahau.[152] This headband marks the upper masks as Hun-Ahau, while the kin sign marks the lower as Yax-Balam, his brother.
-Even the best-known Stirner enthusiast, Benjamin Tucker,[98] had already become an anarchist before reading a word of Stirner;[99] and after reading him, Tucker seems to have simply picked up his existing system of anarchistic thought and plopped it down onto its new Stirnerist foundations, with only the slightest resulting shifts in the overall structure. Indeed, the contractarian version of Stirnerism that Tucker developed lays such heavy emphasis on Stirner’s cooperative dimension (such as the idea of a “Union of Egoists”) and so little emphasis on Stirner’s moral nihilism (his regarding other people as “food,” for example) that Tucker’s fellow Stirnerist Dora Marsden, in her debate with Tucker in the pages of her journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist (1913–1914), could fairly charge him with being a moralist in Stirnerist guise.[100] Tucker often seems to be more an ethical egoist after the model of Epicurus[101] or Ayn Rand[102]—one who seeks to ground morality, including a commitment to mutual respect for rights, on egoistic foundations—than the kind of moral nihilist that at least some of Stirner’s pages seem to license. (Similar remarks would apply to many thinkers influenced by Tucker, such as Francis Tandy,[103] as well as to more independent anarchist theorists like Anselme Bellegarrigue.[104])
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-90.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:14 The Jester God]]
-Just as individualism in the market sense need not entail individualism in the Stirnerist sense, so the entailment does not run in the other direction either. There are Stirnerist egoist communists, such as the authors of the 1974 pamphlet The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything;[105] and there are currents, often labelled “individualist,” ranging from the “post-left anarchism” of such thinkers as Bob Black[106] and Wolfi Landstreicher[107] to the views of the eco-terrorist group ITS (Individualists Tending Toward Savagery, aka Individualists Tending toward the Wild),[108] which embrace the moral nihilist strand in Stirner but show no particular affinity for markets. Indeed Stirner himself, while clearly rejecting communism, gives little clear indication as to what economic arrangements he favors; he uses the language of private property, but only to say that the true egoist regards everything in the world, including other people, as his own property—which is not the kind of commitment to property that represents a recognition of other people’s property rights.
+The temple decoration was, therefore, more than just a model of the sun’s daily path. It was a depiction of the Ancestral Twins, and was designed to be read in that manner by the king’s constituents. When the king stood upon the stairway landing between the four great masks (Fig. 3:6), he represented the cosmic cycle of the day,[153] but he was simultaneously at the center of a four-part pattern,[154] representing the lineage cycle of the Hero Twins as his founding ancestors—the first ahauob (Fig. 3:15). The lowland Maya established kingship by first crowning their gods[155] and then by proclaiming their living counterparts, the kings, as the direct descendants and spiritual manifestations of these gods.[156] The Maya manipulated their reality through art, and they did so on many levels. The images on this temple were meant to be read not only as eternal, transcendent messages, but also as political statements to be affirmed by congregations who saw them and witnessed the human performances within them. The king of Cerros as the primary ahau could exist, ultimately, because the gods of his community were also ahauob.[157]
-To complicate matters still further, there are thinkers routinely identified as individualist anarchists who neither express much enthusiasm for markets nor embrace Stirner-style amoralism; examples include Leda Rafanelli, Émile Armand, Han Ryner, and André Lorulot.[109] These thinkers seem to be counted as individualist anarchists simply because they advocated an individualist ethics; but by that standard Emma Goldman, undisputedly a communist anarchist, would have to be reckoned an individualist too, for her ethical views were certainly staunchly individualist.[110] It’s not clear that the category is being employed with any great consistency or precision.
+As mentioned above, not all of the king’s constituents were equally literate in the new imagery. A farmer, a noble, or a shaman reading the temple would all differ in the depth of their understanding. The point we wish to make, however, is that, on some level, the imagery was recognized and understood by everyone in the community and was an intrinsic part of their reality. We have examples in our own culture of symbols that are universally recognized. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who has not heard of Einstein’s famous equation E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc<sup>2</sup>. The levels of understanding of that formula, however, would differ from person to person. One individual might simply recognize it as Einstein’s equation. Others, because they had taken a physics course, might even know what the letters stood for and what, on a rudimentary level, the Theory of Relativity means. The highest level of understanding, corresponding to that of a Maya ahau or shaman, would be that of a practicing physicist. Regardless of how well we can talk about E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc<sup>2</sup>, it affects our reality. In a very real sense we live in Einstein’s universe, just as the Maya of the Classic period lived in a reality defined by the presence of divine kings.
-Even leaving aside the latter group, it seems safe to say that the label “individualist anarchism” in fact applies to, at the very least, two distinct groups, only barely overlapping—a market- focused one and a Stirner-focused one. Let’s leave the Stirner-focused one aside in turn, and consider the market-focused one.
+When the Maya of Cerros built their first royal temple, they gathered the strength of the entire community, the simple hard work of fisherfolk and farmers, the food prepared and served by their women, the leadership of their patriarchs, elders, and shamans. These individuals joined forces with the master builders, masons, and artisans (some local, some probably from other realms) to perform as an act of community the building of a sacred mountain, a portal to the Otherworld. This partnership of effort laid down in rock and white earth shows the people of Cerros as a whole acknowledging and accepting the arrival of kingship in their midst. Throughout the history of the Maya, this phenomenal cooperation was evident anytime a community embraced the institution of kingship.
-While some anarchists have taken a “let a hundred flowers bloom” approach, seeing marketbased and communal forms of anarchism as compatible,[111] for the most part social anarchists and individualist anarchists have regarded each other’s positions as misguided. Communist anarchists like Pëtr Kropotkin, for example, argued that individualist anarchism was an unstable combination, and that its proponents would eventually be driven to give up either their anarchism or their individualism.[112] Conversely, individualist anarchists like John Henry Mackay argued that it was communist anarchism that was unstable and that its proponents would eventually be driven to give up either their anarchism or their communism.[113] Nevertheless, with some exceptions, each camp has regarded the adherents of the other as heretics rather than infidels—that is, as deviationists within the anarchist fold rather than as anarchists in name only.
+However unsettling the advent of kingship might have been to the rivals of Cerros, or even to some of its inhabitants, a new social paradigm had taken root in the community. This little royal temple was only the beginning of an enormous release of social enthusiasm and energy. Within a few years, a generation at most,[158] a new and very much more ambitious construction effort eclipsed the original temple and greatly amplified the royal focus of the community. This new building, called Structure 6 by TI the archaeologists, can truly be called an acropolis (Fig. 3:16). Measuring sixty meters long by sixty meters wide, its basal dimensions were more than three times those of the first temple. Its raised plaza stood sixteen meters above the level of the surrounding surface and was well out of view of the populace below. The function of this plaza was clearly different from that of the original temple, which was low enough to allow events upon it to be visible to anyone standing at ground level. Here, at the summit of the new acropolis, the king could carry out actions of the most intimate nature on an open surface rather than inside the walls of the temple (Fig. 3:17).
-The nineteenth-century thinkers I’ve mentioned above, in the market-focused individualist anarchist group, while supporting free markets, economic competition, and private ownership, generally opposed what they called “capitalism,” meaning the concentration of ownership of the means of production in a small number of hands, thereby requiring most people outside this privileged group to perform wage labour for them on pain of starvation. But, in the twentieth century, a movement arose within the free-market libertarian movement calling itself “anarcho-capitalist,” and claiming to be continuing the legacy of individualist anarchism; Murray Rothbard[114] and David Friedman[115] are among the most prominent writers in this group.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-91.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:15]]
-*** III. “Libertarian” Clarifications
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-92.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:16 The Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros]]
-Before considering the place, if any, of anarcho-capitalism on the anarchist landscape, let’s turn aside briefly to discuss the term “libertarian.” Originally this was a generic term for an advocate of freedom of any sort (including not just political freedom but also, for example, metaphysical free will—a meaning it still bears in the free will literature today). Starting around the 1970s, the term came to be generally understood as referring specifically to a radical free-market philosophy (chosen as a replacement for “liberal,” which in the twentieth century had lost its earlier free-market associations, especially in the U.S.). But “libertarian” had long been used (and to some degree continues to be used) in the anarchist movement either as a synonym for “anarchist”—and in particular for “social anarchist” (although its use by individualist anarchists is also quite early)[116]—or else for a range of positions only slightly broader than anarchism.[117] The first use of “libertarian”—or rather its French equivalent, libertaire—to refer to an adherent of a specific political position rather than to an advocate of freedom more generally, was by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in 1857.[118] (Nowadays, French has two different equivalents of “libertarian”: libertaire, meaning an anarchist, and the hideously un-French-looking libertarien, meaning a free-market radical.)
+It was now possible for the king to enter the Otherworld through bloodletting and sacrifice in full view of those few privileged enough to climb the grand stairway at the front of the pyramid, pass through the doorways of the portal temple, and stand with him on the sacred ground of the upper plaza. This change of architectural strategy was a logical development, for it took the guesswork out of the witnessing and legitimizing roles of the emergent nobility as they played their part in the establishment of royal power. Now they too could see the awesome visions of the supernatural conjured up by the magical performances of their king.[159]
-In the 1970s, in response to the wider usage of “libertarian” in the free-market sense, many social anarchists started referring to themselves as left-libertarians, and categorizing the free-market variety as right-libertarians. However, in the very same period, many free-market libertarians (such as Samuel Konkin[119] and Roy Childs[120]) had independently started using the term “leftlibertarian” differently, to refer to the left wing of the free-market libertarian movement (essentially, those who saw the New Left student movement more as allies than as opponents). Thus the very same thinkers might well count as right-libertarians by the first criterion and as leftlibertarians by the second. To add to the confusion, in the 1990s and early 2000s, many analytic philosophers, apparently unaware of the two earlier meanings, began using “left-libertarian” with yet a third meaning, to refer to a position that combined individual self-ownership with common ownership of resources, without necessarily endorsing anarchism (though some left-libertarians in this sense are also anarchists).[121]
+Below this upper plaza was an even larger platform similar in principle to the one underlying the original temple to the north. Not so exclusive as the upper plaza, this space was still not physically or visually accessible to all, for it was partially closed off along its front edge by long buildings. This platform plaza, in turn, gave way by means of a broad grand stairway to a final lower plaza that extended 120 by 125 meters, a huge and fully accessible plaster-covered expanse capable of accommodating festival crowds numbering in the hundreds with room to spare. The new temple precinct thus had a much more complex arrangement of ritual space: three different kinds of space, all interconnected by broad stairways upon which the king could perform. Such complexity of space reflects the growing complexity of ritual activity surrounding the king and the social status attached to participation in such activity. When the king came dancing down the stairs in an ecstatic trance following a bloodletting ritual, supported on either side by his elite nobles, the first people to see him were those standing on the middle platform. These people could then join his procession and follow him down into the immense lower plaza where the general populace awaited.
-*** IV. Anarchists and Markets
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-93.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:17 Reconstruction of the Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros. Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and Chetumal Bay are in the background drawing by Karim Sadr]]
-In any case, anarcho-capitalists, as I said, are free-market libertarians who identify with the individualist anarchist heritage; but this identification is controversial, as the main line of individualist anarchism has historically rejected capitalism. But anarcho-capitalists (or “ancaps”) can point to a number of more-or-less capitalist thinkers in the nineteenth century who are clear precursors of the anarcho-capitalist position, such as Herbert Spencer, Gustave de Molinari, Auberon Herbert, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe; and while these thinkers generally did not apply the anarchist label to themselves, it must be borne in mind that a number of anti-capitalist individualists (such as Warren, Andrews, Greene, and Spooner) did not use the label either.
+The very existence of this pyramid with its carefully differentiated viewing spaces indicates the high degree of social stratification that was present at Cerros. For as long as the kingship at Cerros lasted, these social differences worked to the advantage of the government. The organization necessary to coordinate the construction of the new royal precinct required many times the effort put into the first temple. A large labor pool was required, as well as the civil machinery to guide and control it. As mentioned above, however, the coercion of local labor was alien to the Maya. This new project, like the one before it, was done by and for every member of the community, regardless of their social status.
-But social anarchists, for the most part, grant heretic status to anti-capitalists like Tucker and Spooner, regarding them as misguided fellow anarchists, while treating ancaps as outsiders—fake anarchists and fake libertarians. And ancaps have largely returned the favor—not denying social anarchists’ status as anarchists (social anarchists are far too well embedded in anarchist history for that to be a plausible move) but denying social anarchists’ status as libertarians. For most social anarchists, capitalism is inherently a system of domination and exploitation, opposition to which is an essential part of any libertarian or anarchist project worthy of those names; for ancaps, by contrast, capitalism properly understood is a system of liberty, to which no true libertarian, surely, could be opposed.
+For the people of Cerros. becoming a kingdom created liabilities as well as benefits. The new building program buried much of the original village under its immense plastered plaza. Albeit willingly, the people living in the old village proper were forced to relocate to the lands surrounding the emerging urban center. That land, however, was also being extensively quarried for the thousands of tons of rock and white earth required by the construction workers. In the course of building the temples at Cerros, its inhabitants effectively lowered the surrounding land so significantly it became necessary to build a complicated system of drainage ditches, reservoirs, and canals to keep their homes and patios from becoming flooded during the rainy season (Fig. 3:18).[160]
-Is this dispute over “capitalism” terminological or substantive? As is often the case with these sorts of disputes, it is some of each. By “capitalism,” most ancaps mean not the concentration of ownership of the means of production in the hands of an employing class, but simply free markets and private property. By that definition, individualist anarchists like Tucker and Spooner count as pro-capitalist. (Tucker’s views on land ownership differ from those that prevail among ancaps, but Spooner’s don’t, especially.[122] And Spencer is generally treated as a proto-ancap even though his views of land are even more “socialistic” than Tucker’s[123] and he also favored replacing wage labour with workers’ cooperatives[124]—whereas the “socialistic” Tucker, unlike both Spooner and Spencer, had no objection to wage labour so long as the labour market was properly flat and competitive.)[125] Notably, Voltairine de Cleyre was willing to call her own position, albeit with tongue half in cheek, “capitalistic anarchism” in her 1891 critique of communism.[126] In Thomas Hobbes’s words: “Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”[127]
+Another problem people faced, as they moved out from the old village, was the shortage of building materials. The amount of wealth and rank a family possessed suddenly became strikingly apparent in the type of new home they could afford to construct. Some individuals were able to build their new houses on raised platforms of considerable size, while other families lived on small platforms, and still others had homes at ground level. Control of all available construction materials reinforced the power of the king, for he could then dispense them as rewards for loyalty and support.
-But the disagreement is more than merely terminological. While ancaps do not make economic concentration and the wage system a definitional part of the capitalism they defend, most of them do regard such features as likely, and acceptable, consequences of a free market; whereas the anti-capitalist individualists reject them. Should this disagreement exclude ancaps from being part of the individualist anarchist tradition? Most social anarchists think it should; most ancaps think it shouldn’t.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-94.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:18 Topographic Map and Drainage System at Cerros]]
-Historically, most individualist anarchists—meaning those recognized by social anarchists as genuine if misguided anarchists—have thought it shouldn’t either. Tucker, for example, although he believed and hoped that anarchism would bring about a more economically egalitarian society, took this as an empirical prediction rather than as a matter of definition, and moreover insisted that he would still be committed to anarchism, albeit less enthusiastically so, should the prediction prove mistaken;[128] moreover, proto-ancaps Molinari, Herbert, and Donisthorpe were hailed in the pages of Tucker’s journal Liberty, the foremost individualist anarchist periodical, as fellow individualist anarchists or nearly so, despite their capitalist tendencies.[129] Indeed, social anarchists undertaking to tell individualist anarchists who counts as a true individualist anarchist can seem a bit presumptuous, like Catholics undertaking to tell Episcopalians whether Mormons count as Protestants.
+The political message of the second temple is harder to read than that of the first. The decorations on the uppermost facade, the only one excavated so far,[161] were badly damaged by natural erosion and the fires banked against them in the termination rituals conducted by the Maya when kingship at Cerros failed and the temple was abandoned. Even though only fragments of the imagery survived, we can still tell it was the same as that of the first temple: four great masks, probably of the Ancestral Heroes, flanking a stairway. The fine quality of the modeled stucco elements that were preserved, and their rich, more elaborate painted detail, demonstrate the high level of artistry involved in the decoration of this pyramid. The beauty and complexity of this building is concrete testimony to the charismatic power of the Cerros king, a ruler strong enough to attract and retain the services of skilled artisans literate in the complex theology and imagery of the new religion.
-But since the boundaries of individualist anarchism are in fact disputed, let’s substitute the term “market anarchism,” meaning any version of anarchism that gives free markets and private property an essential coordinating role in an anarchist society. (“Essential” need not mean “exclusive”; many versions of market anarchism also make room for communal property.)[130] Contemporary continuators of the nineteenth-century individualist anarchist movement (such as Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, Gary Chartier, William Gillis, and others associated with the Center for a Stateless Society) have made use of the label “left-wing market anarchist” (or “LWMA”), so we can treat the LWMAs as one wing of the market anarchist movement (applying the term retroactively to the Spooner—Tucker group as well), and assign the anarcho-capitalists to the other wing—while reserving debate as to whether all market anarchists, or only the LWMA wing thereof, count as genuine anarchists. (LWMAs can also be seen as the anarchist wing of left-libertarianism, in the second of the three senses of “left-libertarian” distinguished above.)
+By this time in the history of Cerros, the first king had died and been replaced by a successor. We know this because of a special political message placed in the second temple. Below the summit where the new king stood for public rituals, he buried a set of royal jewels, including the jades of a royal headband and the chest pectoral of a king.[162] Laid carefully face downward in the bottom of a large clay bucket, the four headband jewels were deliberately arranged in the same fourfold pattern we saw in the great masks of the first temple (Fig. 3:19). In the middle of this pattern, the king set the larger greenstone pectoral, face upward. This particular positioning was both deliberate and symbolic. This ahau pectoral rested within a fourfold pattern, just as the first king had stood within the fourfold pattern of the masks on the first temple. These powerful and magical objects were then covered (Fig. 3:20) with layers of mosaic mirrors made of bright blue hematite crystals glued to mother-of-pearl cutouts,[163] and with red-orange spiny oyster shells of the kind worn by later Maya nobles on their robes. A large red pottery plate served as the lid for the bucket, and surrounding it were four of the small pottery cups used for drinking and a jug for pouring beverages.[164]
-Let me note in passing a further complication: social anarchists and LWMAs share not only an opposition to capitalism but also an opposition to various other forms of oppression, including hierarchies of race, gender, and the like; such opposition is often seen as a crucial part of the “left” in “left-wing market anarchism” (as well as in “left-libertarian”).[131] Some anarcho-capitalists share this opposition as well, but others see such issues as irrelevant to their concerns, while still others see hierarchies of race and/or gender as “natural” and worthy of defense; and this has sometimes served as another basis for excluding anarcho-capitalists (all or some) from the anarchist ranks. To be sure, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first thinker to use the “anarchist” label himself, has been claimed for both the social and individualist anarchist traditions (as has the mutualist tradition he inaugurated), despite Proudhon’s own intense antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobia. Presumably he is given a pass because he lived in the nineteenth century; but his own anarchist contemporaries were not always so obliging. In fact, the term “libertarian” (or libertaire) in its anarchist use was coined by Dejacque as part of a polemic against Proudhon, arguing that Proudhon could be no true libertarian so long as he denied women equal status with men. (Dejacque would go on, in the following year, to use Le Libertaire as the title of his journal.)
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-95.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:19 The Arrangement of the King’s Jewels in the Offering Bucket of Structure 6B]]
-Returning specifically to the issue of “capitalism,” the social anarchist basis for excluding ancaps from the anarchist ranks is not always clear. Precisely what features of ancaps’ support for capitalism renders them ineligible for the status of genuine anarchists? It’s hard to find any criterion that won’t also rule out some LWMAs whom social anarchists want to rule in. For example, social anarchists sometimes point to ancaps’ support for private security firms as evidence of crypto-statism; yet LWMAs Tucker, Spooner, and Bellegarrigue, acknowledged by social anarchists to be genuine if misguided anarchists, also supported private security firms. Again, social anarchists will point to ancaps’ support for rent and wage labour as incompatible with anarchism. Well, Tucker opposed rent but not wage labour, regarding the latter as no longer exploitative once the wage system—the necessity to work for others, or starve—had been eliminated; Spooner, by contrast, opposed wage labour but not rent. And not only will these criteria rule out some LWMAs whom social anarchists want to rule in, but they also run the risk of ruling in some ancaps that social anarchists want to rule out; for example, at the time that ancap David Friedman wrote the second edition of his most famous book, The Machinery of Freedom, he was also opposed to the wage system;[132] but I’m not aware that any social anarchist has seen this as a reason to welcome The Machinery of Freedom into the anarchist canon.
+This cache was more than a simple offering of precious materials to the gods. We believe these jewels were valued because they were the very ones owned and used by the first king of Cerros (the kingly jewels of our story). The pattern in which the precious materials were arranged echoed the pattern of power we have already seen in the first temple and established it within the summit of the second one. The second king buried them in his own temple to invoke this power and to link himself with the former king, who was presumably his ancestor. These jewels would aid T him in his communication with the sacred world of the supernatural.
-*** V. Distinguishable Tendencies
+Later Maya kings, like the great Pacal of Palenque, would define their temples as sacred mountains and have themselves buried therein. At the beginnings of the institution of ahau, however, power lay not in the physical remains of the first king, but in the performance and settings of ritual, and in the objects of power themselves. Instead of focusing on the burial of the first king, his successor manipulated the power objects left by him in order to ensure the act of linkage between their reigns. All of those who worked on the new acropolis, thereby affirming the legitimacy of the succession, understood that symbolism. Just as the people of the community gave their most precious possessions in the form of labor to raise the new building, so the new king sacrificed his most precious heirlooms to its construction.[165]
-But if the criteria for inclusion or exclusion are not completely precise, they are not completely arbitrary either. If we think of political groupings as picked out by family-resemblance concepts rather than by specifications of necessary and sufficient conditions, then it seems reasonable to take social anarchists, LWMAs, and ancaps as forming three camps within which, whatever deviations toward one camp some individuals in another camp may have with respect to this or that specific issue, it will still be the case that members of each camp share a greater ideological resemblance to one another than to those in either of the other two camps.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-96.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:20 The Dedicatory Offering from the Summit of Structure 6B]]
-It will also be the case, though, that LWMAs share more affiliations with each of the other two camps than those two camps share with each other. This is seen, for example, in the fact that while it is rare to find social anarchists favorably citing Rothbard, or ancaps favorably citing Kropotkin, LWMAs are frequently to be found citing both favorably (albeit not uncritically). Social anarchists’ greater affinity with LWMAs than with ancaps explains why social anarchists have found it easy to think of themselves and LWMAs as belonging to a common “anarchist” tradition from which ancaps are excluded. And, by the same token, ancaps’ greater affinity with LWMAs than with social anarchists explains why ancaps have found it correspondingly easy to think of themselves and LWMAs as belonging to a common “individualist anarchist” tradition from which social anarchists are excluded. And those affinities also explain why LWMAs have historically been friendlier toward both the social anarchist and the ancap camps than those camps have been toward each other.
+Following the triumphant completion of the new royal temple, the community of Cerros began its most ambitious construction project to date: the establishment of an east-west axis to complement the north-south axis laid down by the first king. The rapidity with which the new construction project followed that of the second temple suggests that they were both part of the program of the second king of Cerros. If this is the case, then the ruler of this early kingdom truly enjoyed extraordinary power.
-I don’t mean to give the impression that LWMAs can always be counted on to welcome both social anarchists and ancaps as fellow anarchists, or that social anarchists and ancaps can always be counted on to exclude each other while welcoming LWMAs as fellow anarchists. There are always cases of individuals either more or less accepting than this stereotype would suggest. At one point in his career, for example, social anarchist Murray Bookchin was enthusiastic about having right-wing libertarians as allies.[133] (In later and grumpier life he rejected them as fake libertarians;[134] but then again, in later and grumpier life Bookchin rejected most participants in the anarchist movement in general as fake libertarians.[135]) Tucker,[136] while (as noted above) accepting capitalist antistatists as genuine albeit misguided anarchists or near-anarchists, grew increasingly inclined over the course of his career to write anarcho-communists like Kropotkin, Johann Most, and the Haymarket martyrs out of the movement. And neither social anarchist nor ancap acceptance of LWMAs should be exaggerated.
+Directly east of the second temple (Fig 3.1), the king erected the largest of the temples at Cerros, an eastward acropolis called Structure 4. We know that the king rebuilt this structure at least once because the foundation of an earlier temple lies almost directly beneath the present structure. This practice of building one structure on top of the razed foundation of another was not uncommon with the Maya, for they believed that a location accumulated power with time. Once the portal to the Otherworld was opened, once the points of power were set in place, the membrane between the worlds was made thinner with subsequent use.
-One thing that (many) social anarchists and (many) ancaps have in common is that they recognise anticapitalist individualist market anarchists as valuable comrades (albeit erring ones) as long as they’re dead 19<sup>th</sup>-century figures like Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and Voltairine de Cleyre, and even include them in their favourite anthologies, but as soon as they encounter actual living 21<sup>st</sup>-century examples of anticapitalist individualist market anarchists, they cringe in horror and shriek either ‘capitalist!’ or ‘commie!’ depending on the direction of deviation.[137]
+Whereas the old temple had faced the village, the new temple faced the rising sun and towered over a broad plaza of gleaming white plaster. At sixty meters along each side and twenty-two meters high, this was a building of respectable proportions by any Maya standards. This new acropolis, like the earlier two, buried homes and shrines that were the last S vestiges of the old village and the way of life that went with it.
-Nevertheless, it remains true on the whole that social anarchists and ancaps are readier to recognize LWMAs as deviationists within the fold, while anathematizing each other, and that LWMAs are readier to recognize both social anarchists and ancaps as deviationists within the fold.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-97.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:21 Construction Pens Inside Structure 4A, the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]
-If anarchism is concerned with opposition to domination, then social anarchism, which is highly sensitive to ways in which private property relations can enable domination, but relatively insensitive to ways in which interference with private property relations can do so—and anarcho-capitalism, which conversely is highly sensitive to ways in which interference with private property a relations can enable domination, but relatively insensitive to ways in which private property relations themselves can do so—each seem to be specializing in opposition to one aspect of domination while neglecting another aspect. From that perspective, the LWMA approach seems to represent a more systematic opposition to domination, in virtue of synthesizing the concerns of both of its main rivals without falling prey to the one-sidedness of either.
+As with the earlier temples at Cerros, the master builders, laborers, and masons raised the new acropolis in a single enormous effort. Because of its huge size, this building required an extensive honeycomb of internal buttressing walls. Once the masons had raised these walls, laborers hurried to fill the spaces between them with alternating layers of loose boulders, gravel, and white earth. The completion of these square “construction pens” (Fig. 3:21)[166] required a good deal of work, contributed by gangs of farmers and fishermen under the watchful supervision of their patriarchs. As was always the case with the Maya, work on the temple was an act of devotion. The laborers threw their maize grinding stones, fishnet weights, and some of their personal household objects into the rubble as offerings to the ancestral gods.
-*** VI. Left-Wing Market Anarchism as a Mediating Position
+Very little of the sculptural decoration of this building survived, but it was clearly meant to be the tomb of a king. Built with a steep-sided contour, it had a sepulcher at its summit. This mortuary chamber was long and rather wide as Maya tombs go, and at its northern end there was a plastered bench which would have served as the final resting place of the king (Fig. 3:22). The roof of the tomb was spanned with great stone slabs in an early example of corbel-arch construction. Strangely enough, the tomb was never occupied by its patron, a problem to which we will return.
-There is actually one affiliation that social anarchists and ancaps share with each other and not with LWMAs, and that is the tendency either to identify free markets with capitalism (in the sense of economic concentration and a wage system), or else to assume that the former naturally leads to the latter. The difference is one of evaluation; social anarchists take the case against capitalism (so understood) to constitute a case against free markets, whereas ancaps take the case for free markets to constitute a case for capitalism. For LWMAs, by contrast, free markets and capitalism are incompatible; competition is a natural levelling force, since if one person or group is raking in profits by providing some good or service, then others will imitate them if not prohibited from doing so—and so capitalism is a product of government intervention that could not survive on a free market.[138]
+Now that the east-west axis of the community was clearly defined, the current ruler went to work on the remaining axis. Built to the south, a westward-facing temple, Structure 29C (Fig. 3:23), complemented the eastward-facing tomb of the king and completed the north-south axis of Cerros. This last great structure was closely associated with the north and south ballcourts, which formed a triangle arrangement with the new acropolis (Fig. 3:1; 3:24).
-And this is why who counts as an anarchist, or as a libertarian, seems to depend on where on the anarchist landscape one is oneself located. It’s natural to take one’s own preferred form of anarchism as representing the core of anarchism; slight deviations from that core will still fall within the boundaries, while large deviations from it will fall outside. On economic issues, from the social anarchist perspective, LWMAs are at least half-right (laudably anti-capitalist, mistakenly pro-market) while ancaps are completely wrong (mistakenly pro-capitalist and pro-market). Conversely, from the ancap perspective, LWMAs are again at least half-right (laudably pro-market, mistakenly anti-capitalist) while social anarchists are completely wrong (mistakenly anti-market and anti-capitalist). But from the LWMA perspective, social anarchists (laudably anti-capitalist, mistakenly anti-market) and ancaps (laudably pro-market, mistakenly pro-capitalist) are each halfright. (Social anarchists like to put the “anarcho” in “anarcho-capitalist” in scare quotes; LWMA Anna Morgenstern has argued that instead it is the “capitalist” in “anarcho-capitalist” that should be put in scare quotes, since implementing ancaps’ preferred policies would in fact dismantle capitalism, whether or not ancaps realize this.)[139]
+The new pyramid was smaller than the eastward-facing acropolis discussed above, but its builders created a distinctive—and for Cerros, atypical—plan for the summit. They erected three separate temple platforms atop this pyramid, the center one facing toward the west (Fig. 3:23). Each of these platforms had a central stairway flanked by a special iconography. On the middle pyramid, the builders mounted carved jaguar heads with great flowing scrolls pouring out of their mouths, and small snarling human heads emerging from the stonework above them (Fig. 3:25). These bloody images were meant to depict the severed head of the Sun Jaguar— the ancestral brother who died in sacrifice and was reborn as the means of defeating the Lords of Xibalba.
-For social anarchists, social anarchism naturally represents the main line of anarchism; LWMAs are deviationists close enough to be within the fold, while ancaps are distant enough to be beyond the pale. For ancaps, it is anarcho-capitalism that represents the main line, if not of anarchism, then at least of libertarianism; LWMAs are deviationists close enough to be within the fold, but social anarchists are beyond the pale. For LWMAs, by contrast, it is the LWMA position that is the main line of anarchism and libertarianism—not in terms of numbers (LWMAs represent a tiny group compared to the other two, a mouse squeezed between the social anarchist elephant and the ancap bear) but in terms of the “objective tendency of the problematic”; and social anarchists and ancaps are both close enough to count as deviationists within the fold rather than outsiders.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-98.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:22 The Unused Tomb in the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]
-Does this mean that one must first decide which purported version of anarchism is most defensible in order to decide which positions are genuinely anarchist, or genuinely libertarian? That would be awkward; in particular, it would leave those who find all purported versions of anarchism or libertarianism equally unappealing with no way of determining any boundaries for the concept. I think we can do a bit better; more precisely, I think there are grounds for accepting the LWMAs’ more eclectic drawing of the boundaries even if one is not oneself an LWMA. Fair warning, though: since I am myself an LWMA, my argument might reasonably be taken as a product of LWMA bias. I hope not, but the danger should be kept in mind.
+The image of the severed head is a central symbol of royal power on stelae and panels of the Classic period. Kings during this period sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by decapitating them. The jaguar adorned with waterlily scrolls presided over such warfare and provided it with its central metaphor: battle as the royal hunt. Noble warriors were either prey or predator, depending on their luck; and kings would go into battle with ropes tied around their arms as if daring their adversaries to capture them. This war-sacrifice complex is the central imagery we will see in the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, the monument raised by king Chan-Bahlum to celebrate his designation as heir to the throne. The westward-facing temple of Cerros, adorned with jaguar heads, was the prototype of the later Classic period complex: it was meant as a war monument.
-(Note that while I’ll be defending an ecumenical view of the anarchist landscape, according to which social anarchists, LWMAs, and ancaps all count as anarchists and libertarians, I do not mean to give the impression that every self-described anarchist or libertarian thinker or group should be welcomed in as part of the fold. So-called “national anarchists,” for example, while sharing genuine points of affiliation with various forms of anarchism, share far more in common with fascism; and as I take fascism to be point-for-point the polar opposite of anarchism in any of its forms, being more closely affiliated with fascism than with anarchism necessarily means not being a genuine anarchist.)
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-99.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:24 The playing court from Complex 50 near the westward-facing acropolis]]
-There are good reasons to regard left-wing market anarchism as standing at the center of the libertarian and anarchist traditions, even if one does not regard it as the most defensible version of anarchism. Nicolas Walter, a social anarchist and historian of anarchism, has stressed anarchism’s historical dependence on both (state) socialism and (classical) liberalism.[140] If social anarchism and anarcho-capitalism represent the fullest anarchistic developments of each of these lineages respectively, left-wing market anarchism combines both lineages the most equally.
+The remaining two temple platforms faced inward toward the central temple.[167] The stairways of these flanking platforms sat between longsnouted masks, also surmounted by snarling human faces (Fig. 3:26). The jaguar images on the middle temple correspond to the lower jaguar masks of the first temple built at Cerros; and the long-snouted masks of the flanking temples echo the masks on the first temple’s upper terraces. We can conclude then that the long-snouted characters on the flanking platforms represent Venus, the elder brother of the Ancestral Twins. This elder brother, as we mentioned above, sacrificed his brother, the Jaguar Sun, and then brought him back to life in order to defeat the Lords of Death in Xibalba. In the Classic Period, whenever jaguar imagery appeared, flanked on either side by Venus, the elder brother, it represented the king flanked by his kinsmen. These kinsmen were usually his father, or his mother and father, from whom he received his right to the throne.[168]
-To be sure, if one focuses solely on the social anarchist and ancap positions (which is easy to do, since they are both more prominent than the LWMA position), the two seem so different that it’s easy to come to the conclusion that there’s no wider tradition to which both belong. But once the LWMA position is brought clearly into view, its web of affiliation with the other two positions makes it easier to see how all three are part of a common conversation, with LWMAs as the chief mediator. Historically, the conversation can be seen in such phenomena as the mutual influence between Molinari and Proudhon;[141] Tucker’s engagement with Herbert and Donisthorpe in the pages of Liberty; Sophie Raffalovich’s treatment of the Boston Anarchists in Molinari’s journal;[142] Dyer Lum’s association first with Tucker and later with Albert and Lucy Parsons; de Cleyre’s association first with Tucker and then with Goldman and Berkman; the membership of Warren, Andrews, and Greene (and, according to one source,[143] Spooner, though this is doubtful) in the First International; and the influence of proto-ancap class theory on LWMA Hodgskin, and through him on ancaps, LWMAs, and social anarchists alike.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-100.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:25 Snarling Jaguars from the Central Platform on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]
-And once one recognizes those affiliations between social anarchists and ancaps that are mediated by LWMAs, it becomes easier to see the significance of those (admittedly fewer) affiliations between social anarchists and ancaps that are not so mediated, such as Kropotkin’s and Goldman’s admiration for proto-ancap Spencer; Spencer’s call (even in his more conservative later years) for replacing the wage system with workers’ cooperatives; Kropotkin’s singing the praises of private enterprise;[144] Rothbard’s call for the return of conquistador-stolen land to the peasants[145] and the takeover of government-privileged corporations by their workers;[146] and the enthusiasm for the free mercantile cities of the late medieval period that unites social anarchists like Kropotkin and Bookchin with protoancaps like Augustin Thierry (whom Kropotkin frequently cites) and Charles Dunoyer.[147]
+The ballcourts nearby were built in relationship to both the northsouth and the east-west axes of the city. Within these ballcourts rituals of war and sacrifice were played out as were rituals legitimizing the descent of the new royal line. The bailgame was played for many purposes. In a more ordinary setting it could be played between friends or professionals for sport or for wager; but it more often took on a ritual or sacred aspect. Highborn captives were frequently forced to play the bailgame as members of the community looked on. As in the Popol Vuh myth, the losers were sacrificed by decapitation. Often these sacrificial victims were bound into a ball-like form and hurled down the stairs of a temple. In its most elevated form the ballgame was played as a reenactment of the Ancestral Twins’ defeat of the Lords of Death in Xibalba, as related in the Popol Vuh.
-*** VII. Conclusion
+These games provided the metaphorical setting for the sacrificial events by which a king or heir promoted his legitimate authority.[169] Whether the king was taking the role of supreme athlete, acting out the role of one of the Ancestral Twins, or sacrificing a captive king or noble, the ballgame had deep religious significance.
-Seen from either the social anarchist or the anarcho-capitalist region of the anarchist landscape, the corresponding region can easily look so distant and so different that it’s easy to relegate it to an alien and hostile territory. But, I’ve argued, once one carefully surveys the intermediate, leftwing market anarchist region, the deep intertwining of root and branch among all three traditions comes more clearly into view.
+We do not know if the builder of the ballcourts and the westward-facing temple was the second or third ruler of Cerros, but that knowledge is not critical to our understanding of the development of kingship at Cerros. Expanded building programs indicate expanded ambition, if nothing else. ! he very existence of a war memorial and a ballcourt indicate that Cerros was looking outward, and that its new royalty was taking a growing part in the cosmopolitan and competitive world of lowland Maya kingdoms.
-Social anarchist John Clark offers an apposite observation in his article “Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm.” The purported chasm he has in mind is not the one between social anarchism and anarcho-capitalism, and I have no reason to think he would agree with my use of it here (in fact I have some reason to think he wouldn’t).[148] But I do think it applies:
+In the long run, however, the pressures from within and without upon this newborn kingdom were evidently more than it could withstand. The king who planned to bury himself in the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis never occupied his sepulcher—it was left open and empty. Why this happened we do not know. One possibility is that this unfortunate king may have died far from home, taken captive in battle. Regardless Sc of what the true story may have been, his successor ultimately failed to fulfill the promise inherent in the Maya vision of kingship.
-<quote>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-101.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:26 Long-snouted Monster from the NOrth and South (Side) Platforms on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]
-The idea that there is an ‘unbridgeable chasm’ between two viewpoints that share certain common presuppositions and goals, and whose practices are in some ways interrelated, is a bit suspect from the outset. It is particularly problematic when proposed by a thinker like Bookchin, who claims to hold a dialectical perspective. Whereas nondialectical thought merely opposes one reality to another in an abstract manner, or else places them inertly beside one another, a dialectical analysis examines the ways in which various realities presuppose one another, constitute one another, challenge the identity of one another, and push one another to the limits of their development. Accordingly, one important quality of such an analysis is that it helps those with divergent viewpoints see the ways in which their positions are not mutually exclusive but can instead be mutually realized in a further development of each.[149]
-</quote>
-This passage perfectly describes what I see as the relationship among social anarchism, anarchocapitalism, and left-wing market anarchism.[150]
+The failed attempt to bury a king at the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis marked the beginning of the end of the experiment with \ kingship at Cerros. The heir to that ruler did manage to rally the people temporarily and to launch the construction of another temple along the designs of the first and second ones. Situated directly south of the great eastward-facing acropolis, the final temple reiterated the north-south axis of the community. It faced southward like the original two temples. This new acropolis outwardly resembled the other temple complexes, but its construction work was shoddy and no offerings were deposited in the building’s summit.
+Shortly after this final effort, the Maya of Cerros gave up their brief embrace of kingship and systematically released the power from the sacred mountains which they had lifted up from their own earth. The kings were gone. The nobility, once attracted by the promise of a great kingdom, abandoned the city and returned to their estates in the surrounding countryside. The remaining people banked great fires against the masks of their ancestors and lords. They sprinkled layers of white marl over the fires and then reset them. They pulled out their jade earflares (the special ear ornaments that were shaped like the end of a trumpet) and smashed them into bits, sprinkling the pieces on the piles of debris accumulating at the TI bases of the decorated panels. They broke the pottery from their final ritual meals as they brought the termination ritual to an end. At the last, they went down to their homes and continued to live around the ruins of their greatness as fisherfolk and farmers once more.
-[84] See, for example, Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland, CA: AK 2004).
+Many years later, after the eastward-facing temple had begun to fall into ruin, devotees returned to the summit to carry out rituals of termination to release the power of the place. Their clay offering vessels stood in solitary stacks until the stone roof of the tomb collapsed and crushed them.
-[85] See, for example, Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, ed. Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor (London: Verso 2015).
+We will never know exactly why the ahauob of Cerros failed, but we can hypothesize. A major difficulty might have been a problem in the transference of power between the generations within the royal line. In a system that depended less on the rules of succession than on the personal charisma and power of a leader, a weak king would not have been tolerated for very long. Another problem the people of Cerros might have experienced was the difficulty of coping with the novelty of a large scale society. While it is true that this community enthusiastically embraced kingship, intention and execution are two different things. At this point in the history of the Maya, the institution of kingship was newly invented and its practitioners were still improvising as they went along. A society based on a great experiment is a potentially unstable society.
-[86] See, for example, Edward P. Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (Oakland, CA: Independent 2007).
+There are reasons to suspect that these problems were common to the times in the Maya lowlands, for other early kingdoms also failed precipitously. At Cerros, however, collapse of the institution was not a matter of sudden abandonment of the place by all of its people. Just as they had once opted for kingship, now they opted against it. Maya kingdoms never maintained a standing army or a police force, so there was no one to make the people obey the king. Without the willing cooperation of the people, nobles and commoners alike, the king could do nothing.
-[87] This disagreement is complicated, however, by the fact that the different camps do not all use the term “property” with the same meaning; see Kevin Carson, “Are We All Mutualists?” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Nov. 8, 2015) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/40929 ]](June 15, 2020).
+The ahauob of Cerros re-created their world, literally transforming the place in which they and their people lived from a village into a place of kings. They could do this because their people wanted to follow their vision and celebrate its power. As mentioned above, the charisma of the king was not absolute in the Maya vision. It was subject to critical testing in performance: the abundance of crops, the prosperity of trade, the health of the people, victory in battle. We will see in later chapters that Maya kings always faced the possibility of a failure of one sort or another that could cripple a dynasty or bring it down decisively. Much of the public art erected by Maya kings was political propaganda, responding to crises resulting from these kinds of failures.
-[88] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold, trans. Steven T. Byington and Leopold (Cambridge: CUP 1995).
+To some, this new form of Maya government might appear as a fragile sort of adaptation, subject as it was to the character and ability of a few central people and their close kin. Yet the vision of the ahau exploded into brilliant colored stucco clarity throughout the lowlands in the first century before the present era. The first Trees of Life propagated a forest of kings from the outset—in good tropical ecological adaptation, a dispersal of the species insuring that some would always survive any localized catastrophe. Individual kingdoms might fail, but the vision of the ahau as ruler endured, the most geographically extensive and long-lasting principle of governance in the history of ancient Mesoamerica.
-[89] David Stack, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787—1869) (Woodbridge: Boydell 1998).
+The ahauob of Cerros—and those of Lamanai, Tikal, El Mirador, and Uaxactun, among the known early kingdoms—were masked, anonymous rulers who left little record of their personal histories among the grand royal statements of their successes and victories. This would soon change, for in the first two centuries of the present era, the written script crystallized and kings began to emerge as the chronicled tigures of royal drama. In spite of their anonymity, the ancestral kings of the Preclassic period did leave a heritage to their successors in the form of their mute complexes of temple, pyramid, plaza, and plaster mask. They promoted the principle of hierarchy, focusing on architectural construction and reconstruction as the means of achieving their political objectives—principally, perpetuation of the dynasty. They created the first centers and, in the act of establishing them, also defined the notion of dominion. Like the trees of the four directions, which raise up the sky over the earth, the king was the central pillar—the Tree of Life who raised the sky that arched over his entire realm.
-[90] Crispin Sartwell, ed., The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren (New York, NY: Fordham UP 2018).
+. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun
-[91] Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin, TX: U of Texas P 1968).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-102.jpg 70f]]
-[92] Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Chicago, IL: U Illinois P 1989).
+During the explosive first flush of civilized life in the Maya world, cities, like Cerros, blossomed in the towering rain forests of the lowlands. El Mirador,[170] located in the swamps and low hills of Peten, the geographic heart of the Yucatan peninsula, was the greatest of these Preclassic cities. Yet even at the height of El Mirador’s glory, when its ahauob were reigning over vast temples, contenders for its greatness were growing to maturity forty miles to the south. These nascent rivals, Uaxactun and Tikal, grew steadily in power, population, and the ability to create magnificent public art throughout the Late Preclassic period, cultivating their ambition until they were ready to step into the political vacuum left by the decline of El Mirador at the outset of the Classic era.[171] Located less than twelve miles apart—not even a day’s walk—Tikal and Uaxactun were perhaps too closely situated for both of them to become kingdoms of the first rank. Their competition, which is the focus of our next story, was resolved violently in A.D. 378 by means of an innovative type of warfare we call Tlaloc-Venus war, or sometimes simply “star wars.”[172] The imagery and method of this new type of conflict was borrowed from the other great Mesoamerican civilization of this time, Teotihuacan, the huge city that had grown to maturity in the Valley of Mexico during the third and fourth centuries. With the advent of this new kind of warfare, a new concept was incorporated into the Maya culture: the idea of empire.
-[93] Steve J. Shone, Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2010).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-103.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:1]]
-[94] James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827—1908 (Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1970) 125–38.
+Like other great Maya capitals of the interior lowland, Tikal began as a village of farmers nestled on the high ground between vast swamps. By 600 B.C., the first small groups of people had settled on the hilltop that would become the central area of the city (Fig. 4:1). These people left the debris of their lives under what would, in future years, be the North Acropolis, sanctum of Tikal’s kings (Fig. 4:2), and in a chultun[173] located about a mile to the east of the Acropolis.[174] Even this early in their history, the villagers were using this site as a burial place. Amid the humble remains under the North Acropolis, the interred body of an adult villager was found. Lying nearby was a sacrificial offering in the form of a severed head.[175] This sacrificial practice, begun so humbly, would later be incorporated into the burial ceremonies of Tikal’s kings. The household debris surrounding this burial place contained the shells of freshwater snails, which were part of the diet of these pioneers, and obsidian and quartzite flakes, both imported goods—obsidian from the highlands and quartzite from northern Belize.
-[95] Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas 1977).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-104.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:2 Cross-section of the North Acropolis at Tikal with Preclassic Construction Marked]]
-[96] Frank H. Brooks, “Anarchism, Revolution, and Labor in the Thought of Dyer D. Lum: ‘Events Are the True Schoolmasters’” (PhD diss, Cornell U, 1988).
+We do not know much about the individual lives of these early inhabitants, but during the next four centuries they continued to multiply and prosper. By the second century B.C. they had already expanded into much of the “downtown” area of Tikal. At that time, they began to define a center for the community by building stone platforms displaying the sloping moldings and inset panels preferred by all the lowland Maya. These platforms were the harbinger of the North Acropolis and no doubt they facilitated the rites of patriarchs and shamans defining their emergent community in relation to their neighbors and the world at large.
-[97] Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, eds., Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Anarchist, Feminist, Genius (Albany, NY: SUNY 2012).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-105.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:3 The Painting on the Outer Walls of Structure 5D-Sub-10-1<sup>st</sup> at Tikal]]
-[98] Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Individualist Anarchism (New York, NY: Tucker 1893).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-106.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:4 Tikal Burial 85 and the Pectoral of a King]]
-[99] Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Life of Benjamin R. Tucker: Disclosed by Himself in the Principality of Monaco at the Age of 74,” unpublished ms., New York Public Library archives (Tucker collection) [transcribed by Wendy McElroy] [[http://www.wendymcelroy.com][www.wendymcelroy.com/plugins/content/content.php?content.57]].
+The first century B.C. witnessed expansion and elaboration of this Acropolis, via large public buildings and chambered burial vaults of kings and high-ranking nobles. These public buildings prefigured all the characteristics of later state architecture: large apron moldings, pyramidal platforms, steeply inclined stairs, and most important, terraces surmounted by large painted plaster masks depicting the gods fundamental to the newly emerged institution of kingship.
-[100] Sidney E. Parker, “The New Freewoman: Dora Marsden & Benjamin R. Tucker,” Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology, ed. Michael E. Coughlin, Charles H. Hamilton, and Mark A. Sullivan (St Paul, MN: Coughlin 1987) 149–57.
+The North Acropolis tombs from this era reveal a unique glimpse of the newly emergent Maya ruling elite,[176] who had themselves buried in vaulted chambers set under shrinelike buildings. We find, interred in these chambers, not only the physical remains of these people and the objects they considered of value, but even some pictorial representations of them. In one of these tombs, images of Maya nobles were drawn in black line on the red-painted walls. These figures were perhaps the ancestors or kinsmen of the woman[177] buried inside the chamber. The paintings, along with the rich burial goods laid around the woman’s body, mark the tomb as the “earliest interment of someone of patent consequence”[178] at Tikal. It is interesting that the deceased person in this tomb was a woman, for the Maya of Tikal, like other Maya, gave primacy to males in the reckoning of social status through the principle of patrilineal descent. This tomb, however, shows that status had transcended gender and was now ascribed to both the men and women of noble families. The foundations were laid for a hereditary elite, the clans of the ahauob.
-[101] Phillip Mitsis, Epicurus’ Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1988).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-108.jpg 70f]]
-[102] Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, eds., The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P 1986).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-109.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:5]]
-[103] Francis Dashwood Tandy, Voluntary Socialism: A Sketch (Denver, CO: Tandy 1896).
+Other burials from the same century also featured vaulted chambers with shrines and rich offerings of pottery, food, stingray spines, and human sacrifices (if the disarticulated skeletons of an adult and an infant can be so identified). Among the buildings constructed during this time was 5D-Sub-10-lst, a small temple blackened inside by the smoke of sacrificial fires. Outside, artists decorated the shrine with elegant polychromatic paintings that were later piously defaced during the termination rituals of this phase of the Acropolis. These paintings are of people or, perhaps, of gods in the guise of people; but because the North Acropolis is the royal sanctum throughout its later history, we think these paintings depict the Tikal ruler and other nobles,[179] suspended in the red-painted blood scrolls of the Vision Rite (Fig. 4:3).
-[104] Michel Perraudeau, Anselme Bellegarrigue: Le Premier des Libertaires (Saint-Georges-d’Oleron: Libertaires 2012).
+Finally, a very rich tomb, called Burial 85 by the archaeologists (Fig. 4:4), contained a headless, thighless corpse tied up in a cinnabar-impregnated bundle along with a spondylus shell and a stingray spine (both instruments of bloodletting rituals).[180] Sewn to the top of the bundle was a green fuchsite portrait head that once served as the chest pectoral of the ruler buried therein.[181] The human face on this pectoral wears the Jester God headdress that would be the crown of kings for the next thousand years.[182] We do not know why some of the king’s bones were missing. The Maya are known to have retained bones of important relatives for relics, so that the skull and thighbones may have resided in the house of his descendants for many generations. Without further evidence the answer must remain a mystery.
-[105] For Ourselves: The Council for Generalized Self-Management, The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything [1974], ed. Bob Black (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics 1983).
+The noble status of the individuals we find in these tombs is demonstrated not only by the wealth they took with them to the Otherworld, but by the physical condition of their bones. They are larger and more robust than the common people of the kingdom who were buried in other parts of the city.[183] They had a better diet than the people they ruled and were generally taller.
-[106] Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics 1986); Bob Black, Anarchy After Leftism (Oakland, CA: CAL 1997).
+This new, ambitious elite commissioned more than just one or two buildings. During the first century B.C., the lords called upon their people to remodel the entire central area of Tikal—no doubt with an eye to the works of their rivals at El Mirador and Uaxactun. This construction proceeded in three stages. The first stage[184] involved both the renovation of the North Acropolis and the initial leveling and paving of both the Great Plaza and the West Plaza. During the second stage, the huge East Plaza was leveled and paved. The North Acropolis in the city’s center was now flanked on the east and the west by two huge paved areas.[185] In the third phase, the same three areas were repaved once again, perhaps under the direction of the ruler found in Burial 85 or perhaps shortly after his interment.[186] These large plazas were the gathering places from which the common people witnessed the ritual performances of the king. The labor costs in quarrying stone, burning limestone to yield plaster, and finally building the structures, must have been enormous. If the elite of Tikal were constantly expanding this public space, we can assume that the prosperity and prestige of this kingdom were attracting a steady influx of new people whose participation in the ritual life of the kingdom had to be accommodated.[187]
-[107] Wolfi Landstreicher, The Network of Domination: Anarchist Analyses of the Institutions, Structures and Systems of Domination and Exploitation to be Debated, Developed and Acted Upon (Olympia, WA: Last Word); Wolfi Landstreicher, Willful Disobedience (San Francisco: Ardent 2009).
+During the same six centuries, Uaxactun to the north underwent a florescence as substantial and dramatic as that of its neighbor Tikal. Late Preclassic platforms in Uaxactun underlying Groups A, E, and H (Fig. 4:5) bear some of the most remarkable Late Preclassic sculpture to have survived into modern times. Temple E-VII-Sub, with its elaborately decorated platform and great plaster masks, was the first of the great Late Preclassic temples to be excavated by archaeologists.[188] At that time it was believed that, up until about A.D. 300, the Maya had possessed only the most simplistic type of farming culture. That vision of Maya history could not accommodate such an elaborate building, so for fifty years that temple stood as an oddity in Maya archaeology. Since then, excavations at Tikal, Cerros, Lamanai, El Mirador, and other sites have uncovered similar structures and shown that Temple E-VII-Sub is a typical expression of Late Preclassic kingship.
-[108] Individualists Tending toward the Wild, The Collected Communiques of Individualists Tending toward the Wild (n.p.: Plain Words 2012).
+E-VII-Sub is no longer an oddity even at Uaxactun itself. Deep within and beneath the complex of the South Plaza of Group H[189] (Fig. 4:6) lies a remarkable assemblage of buildings displaying the largest program of Late Preclassic monumental masks yet discovered. This group, composed of six temples mounted on a small acropolis, was superficially buried by an Early Classic acropolis built at a later date. The largest of the masks on this buried complex can be found on the main eastern building (Sub-3) (Fig. 4:7). These massive stucco sculptures decorate the panels of the upper and lower terraces in typical Maya architectural fashion, similar to the decorative programs we have seen at Cerros. Here, however, the visual “stack” of masks does not display the celestial cycle of the sun and Venus, as found on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros (and also on Structure E-VII-Sub at Uaxactun).[190] Instead the masks featured here are models of the sacred living mountain (Witz) rising through the layers of the cosmos.[191] The lower panel displays a great Witz Monster sitting in fish-laden primordial waters with vegetation growing from the sides of its head. Above, on the upper panel, sits an identical Monster (probably the mountain peak above the waters)[192] with a Vision Serpent penetrating its head from side to side.
-[109] For the first, see Andrea Pakieser, ed., I Belong Only to Myself: The Life and Writings of Leda Rafanelli (Oakland, CA: AK 2014); for the latter three, see Down with the Law: Anarchist Individualist Writings from Early Twentieth-Century France, ed. and trans. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK 2019).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-110.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:6 Uaxactun, Group H, the South Plaza after Valdes 1988]]
-[110] See, for example, Emma Goldman, The Individual, Society and the State (Chicago, IL: Free Society 1940).
+It is important to realize that the facade of Uaxactun Structure H-Sub-3 is simply another version of the sacred cosmos, parallel in function to the sun/Venus iconography of the kings at Cerros. In this particular representation of the cosmos, we see the sacred mountain rising from the primordial sea to form the land, just as the land of Peten rose above its swamps. As always, the Vision Serpent is the symbol of the path of communication between the sacred world and the human world. Here, the Vision Serpent’s body penetrates the mountain just as the spiritual path the king must take penetrates down through the rock floor of the pyramid and reaches into the heart., of the earth itself. Like his counterparts at Cerros and Tikal, the ahau of Uaxactun materialized that path through the rituals he conducted on the temple stairway, the physical representation of the path to the Otherworld. Behind him stood his living sacred mountains, signaling and amplifying his actions.
-[111] For example, Fred Woodworth explains: “I have no prefix or adjective for my anarchism. I think syndicalism can work, as can free-market anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, even anarcho-hermits, depending on the situation.” Qtd. Paul Avrich, ed., Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: AK 2005) 475.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-111.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:7 The Cosmos as Rendered on Uaxactun Structure H-X-Sub-3 after Valdes 1988]]
-[112] Peter Kropotkin, “A Few Thoughts About the Essence of Anarchism,” Direct Struggle against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK 2014) 201–4.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-112.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:8 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Sculptures from the Portal Building Leading to the Inner Plaza of the Acropolis pop , “mat,” sign after Valdes 1987]]
-[113] John Henry Mackay, The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. George Schumm (Boston, MA: Tucker 1894) 145—7.
+The ahau who commissioned this group portrayed himself on a gateway building situated in the center of the acropolis’s western edge.[193] Designed to create a formal processional entrance along the east-west axis of the complex, this small Sub-10 temple has both eastern and western doors. The king and his retainers could enter through this gateway in ceremony, and at certain times of the year the light of the setting sun would shine through it as well. The stairways leading to each of the gateway doors were flanked by stucco jaguar ahau masks[194] surmounted by panels set into the walls of the temple itself. These panels carried modeled-stucco with oven-mat patterns, one of the main symbols of kingship (Fig. 4:8). Stucco portraits of the king (Fig. 4:9) stood in vertical panels between these mats.
-[114] Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York, NY: New York UP 1998); Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 2d ed. (Auburn, AL: Mises 2006).
+We know this is the king for several reasons. First of all, the figure represented here wears the royal costume—an elaborate ahau head and celt assemblage on a belt above a bifurcated loin apron. This apparel would become the most sacred and orthodox costume of the Classic king. This figure also stands atop a throne mat. Most important, he is encircled by the same scroll signs we saw surrounding his contemporary, the ruler of Tikal (Fig. 4:3). Here, and in the comparable shrine 5D-Sub-10-lst at Tikal, we see Late Preclassic kings memorializing themselves for the first time. They do so at the front of their principal temples, on the main axis of their sacred precincts. This practice is a prototype of what is to come, for the kings of the Classic period will also raise their stelae portraits in such a place and in such a manner.
-[115] David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 3d ed. (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 2015).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-113.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:9 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Figures of the King Standing amid Blood Scrolls after Valdes 1987]]
-[116] See, for example, Benjamin R. Tucker, “A Want Supplied,” Liberty 3.13 (Aug. 15, 1885): 4.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-114.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]
-[117] See, for example, Charles T. Sprading, ed., Liberty and the Great Libertarians: An Anthology of Liberty, a Hand-book of Freedom (Los Angeles, CA: Sprading 1913).
+Throughout the first century A.D., neither Tikal nor Uaxactun managed to outproduce or dominate the other, but both cities continued to support the institution of kingship. We can see this by the elaborate public architecture and other, smaller ritual objects that have come into our knowledge through archaeological excavation. The imagery each city used to define its kings and to demonstrate the sacred foundations of kingly authority partook of the same fundamental understanding of the world and how it worked. Though Uaxactun may perhaps have had a slight edge, the public constructions of the two kingdoms were relatively equal in scale and elaboration.[195] Tikal and Uaxactun moved into the Classic period as full equals, both ready and able to assume the role of El Mirador when that kingdom disintegrated.[196]
-[118] Joseph Déjacque, De l’être-humain mâle et femelle: Lettre à P.J. Proudhon (New Orleans, LA: Lamarre 1857).
+Tikal’s inscriptions tell us of a single dynasty which ruled the kingdom from Early Classic times until its demise in the ninth century, a dynasty that could boast of at least thirty-nine successors in its long history. The historical founder of this extraordinary dynasty was a character (Fig. 4:10) known as Yax-Moch-Xoc.[197] We have no monuments from his reign, but we can reconstruct that he ruled sometime between A.D. 219 and A.D. 238[198]—that is, at least a century and a half later than the ahau who commemorated himself on Structure 5D-Sub-10—1 st in the North Acropolis. This founder, then, was not the first ruler of Tikal, but he must have performed in such an outstanding fashion that later descendants acknowledged him as the leader who established their dynasty as a power to be reckoned with. The recognition of Yax-Moch-Xoc as founder by later Tikal kings is important for another reason. It constitutes the earliest example yet recognized in ancient texts of the principle of the anchoring ancestor. From this man would descend the noble families that would comprise the inner community of the court, the royal clan of Tikal.
-[119] Samuel Edward Konkin III, “SEK3’s History of the Libertarian Movement,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Dec. 7, 2012) [[http://c4ss.org][http://c4ss.org/content/13240]] (June 15, 2020).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-115.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]
-[120] Roy A. Childs, Jr., “How Bad is the U.S. Government?” The Abolitionist 2.2 (May 1971): 2—3, [[http://www.unz.org][www.unz.]] [[http://www.unz.org][org/Pub/Abolitionist-1971may-00002]].
+The earliest historical Tikal king we have in portraiture is the man i depicted on Stela 29, dated at 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Zip (July 8, A.D. 292).[199] This king, Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar[200] (Fig. 4:11), appears surrounded by a complicated system of emblems which designate his rank and power. The twisted rope that hangs in front of his earflare transforms his head into the living embodiment of the glyphic name of the city. He is the kingdom made flesh.[201] Floating above him is an apparition of the dynastic ancestor from whom he received his right to rule.[202] The king’s “divine” right to the throne is manifested in another kind of imagery: In his right arm, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar from which the sun emerges in its human-headed form. This human-headed manifestation of the sun is none other than GUI of the Triad Gods, one of the offspring of the first mother who existed before the present creation. GUI is also the prototype of the second born of the Ancestral Heroes, whose Classic name was Yax-Balam (“First Jaguar”). The Serpent Bar demonstrates the ability of the king to materialize gods and ancestors in the world of his people.
-[121] Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds., Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (London: Palgrave 2000); Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: OUP 2005); Eric Roark, Removing the Commons: A Lockean Left-Libertarian Approach to the Just Use and Appropriation of Natural Resources (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2013).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-116.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:11 Stela 29, the Earliest Dated Monument at Tikal and the King Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar]]
-[122] Roderick T. Long, “Spooner on Rent,” Austro-Athenian Empire (n.p., Feb. 21, 2006) [[http://praxeology.net][http://praxeology.]] [[http://praxeology.net][net/unblog02-06.htm#12 ]](June 15, 2020). For arguments that the difference between Tuckerite occu- pancy-and-use views and Lockean absentee-ownership views is in large part one of degree more than of kind, see Carson, “Mutualists,” and Jason Lee Byas, “How Rothbardians Occupy Part of the Occupancy and Use Spectrum,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Nov. 23, 2015) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/con]] [[https://c4ss.org][tent/41581 ]](June 15, 2020).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-117.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:12 The Leiden Plaque and Zero-Moon-Bird]]
-[123] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: Chapman 1851) chs 9—10.
+Another image of the Yax-Balam head adorns the chest of the king and a third stares out from his uplifted left hand. The imagery of the disembodied head as a symbol of kingship descends directly from Preclassic times in Mesoamerica. The Olmec, for example, were one of the first cultures to use this symbol, portraying their shaman kings in the form of enormous heads the height of a man. The bundle glyph that signified the kingdom of Tikal appears, surmounting the head attached to the king’s belt and the one he materializes in the mouth of the Serpent Bar, while the king’s own name glyph, a miniature jaguar with a scroll-ahau sign, rides upon the head in his left hand. This is the type of complex imagery the Maya used to designate their rulers and the reason their artistic vision was so powerful and potent.
-[124] Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Appleton 1896) 3: 535—74 (§§825–39).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-118.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:13 Pre-conquest Stelae from Uaxactun<br>drawing by Ian Graham]]
-[125] Benjamin R. Tucker, “Should Labor Be Paid or Not?” Liberty 5.19 (April 28, 1888): 4; Benjamin R. Tucker, “Solutions of the Labor Problem,” Liberty 8.14 (Sep. 12, 1891): 2—3.
+The next Tikal ruler we can identify, Moon-Zero-Bird,[203] is portrayed on a royal belt ornament called the Leiden Plaque (Fig. 4:12). The inscribed text on the reverse side of this ornament records Moon-Zero-Bird’s seating as king on September 17, A.D. 320. Like his predecessor, he stands holding a Serpent Bar. This time, however, we see emerging from the serpent’s mouth not only the sun, but God K, the deity of lineages. This king also wears an elaborate royal belt. Hanging from this, behind his knees, is a chain with a god suspended from it. The ruler wears a massive headdress, combining the imagery of the Jester God and the jaguar, thus declaring his affiliation with both and his rank as ahau. At his feet a noble captive struggles against his impending fate as sacrificial victim.[204]
-[126] Rosa Slobodinsky [Rachelle Yarros] and Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Individualist and the Communist: A Dialogue,” Twentieth Century 6.25 (June 18, 1891): 3—6.
+The presence of this captive documents the crucial role played by war and captive taking in early Maya kingship. The Maya fought not to kill their enemies but to capture them. Kings did not take their captives easily, but in aggressive hand-to-hand combat. A defeated ruler or lord was stripped of his finery, bound, and carried back to the victorious city to be tortured and sacrificed in public rituals. The prestige value a royal captive held for a king was high, and often a king would link the names of his important captives to his own throughout his life. Captives were symbols of the prowess and potency of a ruler and his ability to subjugate his enemies.[205]
-[127] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Crooke 1651) 1.4.
+Uaxactun, like Tikal, entered the Classic period with a powerful dynasty and, as with Tikal, the first public records of this royal family are fragmentary and incomplete. Uaxactun’s earliest surviving monument, Stela 9, is dated at 8.14.10.13.15 (April 11, A.D. 328). The ruler depicted on it is anonymous because the glyphs containing his name are eroded beyond recall. The ritual event being recorded here is dated thirty-six years later than Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar’s Stela 29 and some eight years after Moon-Zero-Bird’s accession to the throne of Tikal. Although badly eroded, the scene (Fig. 4:13a) depicts essentially the same images as those found on contemporary stelae from Tikal: The elaborately dressed ruler holds a god head in the crook of his arm. We cannot identify the nature of the event taking place because that information did not survive the ravages of time and wear. But we do know, from the date, that this stela commemorated a historical occasion in the king’s life and not an important juncture in the sacred cycles of time, such as a katun ending. As on the Leiden Plaque, a sacrificial victim cowers at the feet of the king,[206] emphasizing war and captive taking as an activity of crucial public interest to the ruler.
-[128] Benjamin R. Tucker, “Why I Am an Anarchist,” Twentieth Century 4.22 (May 29, 1890): 5—6; cp. Benjamin R. Tucker, “Neglected Factors in the Rent Problem,” Liberty 10.16 (Dec. 15, 1894): 4. And compare, from the other side, social anarchist David Graeber’s affirmation that he would still endorse anarchism even if markets turned out to play a more central and crucial role in anarchist society than he predicts: Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (New York, NY: Spiegel 2013) 193.
+Uaxactun boasted the earliest surviving Maya monuments to record the public celebrations at the ending of a katun—Stelae 18 and 19 in Group E.[207] The image carved on Stela 18 has been lost to erosion, but Stela 19 (Fig. 4:13b) repeats the royal figure on Stela 9 and underscores the conventional nature of Uaxactun’s manner of presenting rulers. The king wears the royal belt with its god image suspended on a chain behind his legs, while he holds either a god head or a Serpent Bar in his arms. A captive of noble status kneels before him with bound wrists raised as if in a gesture of supplication. We can assume from the recurrence of this captive imagery that the festivals associated with regularities in the Maya calendar required the king of Uaxactun to undertake the royal hunt for captives, just as he was required to do for accession rituals and other dynastic events. The likely source of his victims: Tikal, his nearby neighbor to the south.
-[129] Benjamin R. Tucker, “Auberon Herbert and his Work,” Liberty 3.10 (May 23, 1885): 4—5; Benjamin R. Tucker, “A Prophecy in Course of Fulfillment,” Liberty 5.18 (April 14, 1888): 7—8; S. R. [S. H. Randall], “An Economist on the Future Society,” Liberty 14.23 (Sep. 1904): 2.
+The rivalry between these two cities comes into dramatic focus during the reign of an extraordinary king. Great-Jaguar-Paw, the ninth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, came to the throne sometime between A.D. 320 and 376. This ruler changed the destiny not only of Tikal and Uaxactun, but also the nature of Maya sacred warfare itself. Under his guidance, Tikal not only defeated Uaxactun, but emerged as the Early Classic successor to the glory and power of El Mirador as the dominant kingdom in the Central Peten region.
-[130] This is true not only of many anti-capitalist individualists (see, for example, James Tuttle, ed., The Anatomy of Escape: A Defense of the Commons [Tulsa, OK: Center for a Stateless Society 2019] but even of some procapitalist ones (see, for example, Randall G. Holcombe, “Common Property in Anarcho-Capitalism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 19.2 (2005): 3—29, [[https://cdn.mises.org][https://cdn.mises.org/19_2_1.pdf.]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-119.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:14 Tikal Stela 39 and Great-Jaguar-Paw]]
-[131] See, for example, Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge: CUP 2012) 378—86; Gary Chartier, “The Distinctiveness of Left-Libertarianism,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians (n.p., Nov. 5, 2012) [[http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com][http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/11/the-distinctiveness-of-left-libertarianism/]] (June 15, 2020); Kevin A. Carson, “Class vs. ‘Identity Politics,’ Intersectionality, Etc.: Some General Observations,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, March 26, 2013) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/]] [[https://c4ss.org][17886]]; Kevin A. Carson, “What is Left-Libertarianism?” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, June 15, 2014) [[http://c4ss.org][http://c4ss.org/content/28216]] (June 15, 2020); Charles W. Johnson, “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (Aidershot: Ashgate 2008) 155—88, [[http://radgeek.com][http://radgeek.com/gt/]] [[http://radgeek.com][2010/03/02/liberty-equality-solidarity-toward-a-dialectical-anarchism]]; Charles W. Johnson, “Women and the Invisible Fist: How Violence Against Women Enforces the Unwritten Law of Patriarchy” (unpublished essay 2013): [[http://charleswjohnson.name][http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/women-and-the-invisible-fist/women-and-the-invisible-]] [[http://charleswjohnson.name][fist-2013-0503-max.pdf]] (June 15, 2020); Roderick T. Long and Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” (unpublished essay, May 1, 2005) [[http://charleswjohnson.name][http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/]] [[http://charleswjohnson.name][libertarian-feminism/]]; Billy Christmas, “Libertarianism and Privilege,” Molinari Review 1.1 (Spring 2016): 24–46, [[http://praxeology.net][http://praxeology.net/MR1-1-S16-CHRISTMAS.pdf]].
+Despite the fact that he was such an important king, we know relatively little about Great-Jaguar-Paw’s life outside of the spectacular campaign he waged against Uaxactun. His reign must have been long, but the dates we have on him come only from his last three years. On one of these historical dates, October 21, A.D. 376, we see Great-Jaguar-Paw ending the seventeenth katun in a ritual depicted on Stela 39[208] (Fig. 4:14). This fragmentary monument[209] shows him only from the waist down, but he is dressed in the same regalia as his royal ancestors, with the god Chac-Xib-Chae dangling from his belt. His ankle cuffs display the sign of day on one leg and night on the other. Instead of a Serpent Bar, however, he holds an executioner’s ax, its flint blade knapped into the image of a jaguar paw. In this guise of warrior and giver of sacrifices, he stands atop a captive he has taken in battle. The unfortunate victim, a bearded noble still wearing part of the regalia that marks his noble station, struggles under the victor’s feet, his wrists bound together in front of his chest. He will die to sanctify the katun ending at Tikal.[210]
-[132] Friedman 144–5 (the text of the third edition is unchanged from that of the second in this regard, though the third edition does include a note in an appendix [334–5] indicating that he’s subsequently changed his mind).
+Warfare was not new to the Maya. Raiding for captives from one kingdom to another had been going on for centuries, for allusions to decapitation are present in even the earliest architectural decorations celebrating kingship. The hunt for sacrificial gifts to give to the gods and the testing of personal prowess in battle was part of the accepted social order, and captive sacrifice was something expected of nobles and kings in the performance of their ritual duties. Just as the gods were sustained by the bloodletting ceremonies of kings, so they were nourished as well by the blood of noble captives. Sacrificial victims like these had been buried as offerings in building terminations and dedications from Late Preclassic times on, and possibly even earlier. Furthermore, the portrayal of living captives is prominent not only at Uaxactun and Tikal, but also at Rio Azul, Xultun, and other Early Classic sites.
-[133] Jeff Riggenbach, “Interview with Murray Bookchin,” Reason, Oct. 1979, 34–38, [[https://reason.com][https://reason.com/]] [[https://reason.com][1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/]]; cp. Jesse Walker, “Murray Bookchin, RIP,” Reason, July 31, 2006, [[https://reason.com][https://reason.com/2006/07/31/murray-bookchin-rip/]].
+The war waged by Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal against Uaxactiin, however, was not the traditional hand-to-hand combat of proud nobles striving for personal glory and for captives to give to the gods. This was war on an entirely different scale, played by rules never before heard of and for stakes far higher than the reputations or lives of individuals. In this new warfare of death and conquest, the winner would gain the kingdom of the loser. Tikal won the prize on January 16, A.D. 378.
-[134] Murray Bookchin, “What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism,” Democracy and Nature 3.2 (1995): 1–17, [[http://www.democracynature.org][www.democracynature.org/vol3/bookchin_communalism.htm]].
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-120.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:15 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]
-[135] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: The Unbridgeable Chasm (San Francisco, CA: AK 1995); Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, ed. Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor (London: Verso 2015).
+The date of the victory, 8.17.1.4.12 11 Eb 15 Mac, is recorded twice at Uaxactun (on Stela 5 and retrospectively on Stela 22) and twice at Tikal (retrospectively on Stela 31 and on a Ballcourt Marker found in Group 6C-XVI). This is one of the few non-period-ending dates ever recorded by the Maya at more than one site. As we shall see, it was a date of legendary importance for both cities. The two primary characters in this historical drama were the high king of Tikal, Great-Jaguar-Paw’, and a character named Smoking-Frog.[211]
-[136] Benjamin R. Tucker, “General Walker and the Anarchists,” Liberty 5.8 (Nov. 19, 1887): 4–5, 8.
+The single visual representation of this event occurs at Uaxactun on Stela 5 (Fig. 4:15), which depicts Smoking-Frog as the triumphant leader of the Tikal forces. On the rear of the monument, he proudly names himself as an ahau of Tikal, while on the front he wears the full regalia of a warrior. He grips an obsidian-bladed club, while a bird, perhaps a quetzal, flutters beside his turban. A cluster of long tails arches from the back of his belt and he stands in front of a censer much like the one that appears with Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39 at Tikal (Fig. 4:16).[212]
-[137] Roderick T. Long, “They Love Us When We’re Dead,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Dec. 11, 2016) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/47199]] (June 15, 2020).
+Aside from the fact that it commemorates the war between Tikal and Uaxactun, this stela is important for another reason. On it we see depicted the first visual representation of the Tlaloc-Venus cpstyme. This costume, with its balloon-shaped headdress and its spearthrower, is profoundly different from that which we have seen adorning Maya ahauob celebrating war and sacrifice at both Tikal and Uaxactun in earlier times. We know that this kind of regalia marks the occasion of a new type of war— conquest war. Smoking-Frog’s celebration of this conquest on Stela 5 may mark the first known display of this complex in the imagery of public monuments, but the costume in several variations (Fig. 4:17) became one of the standard uniforms of the king as conqueror and warrior.[213]
-[138] For defense of the LWMA position, see Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson, eds., Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (New York, NY: Minor Compositions-Autonomedia 2011) [[http://radgeek.com][http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Char]] [[http://radgeek.com][tier-and-Johnson.pdf]]; Cory Massimino and James Tuttle, eds., Free Markets and Capitalism? Do Free Markets Always Produce a Corporate Economy? (Tulsa, OK: Center for a Stateless Society 2016); Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2007) [[https://kevinacarson.org][https://kevinacarson.org/pdf/mpe.pdf]]; Kevin A. Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2008) [[https://kevinacarson.org][https://kevi]] [[https://kevinacarson.org][nacarson.org/pdf/ot.pdf]]; Kevin A. Carson, Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model, Center for a Stateless Society Paper 10 ([Tulsa, OK: Center for a Stateless Society] 2010) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/]] [[https://c4ss.org][C4SS-Labor.pdf]]; Roderick T. Long, “Left-Libertarianism, Market Anarchism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice,” Griffith Law Review 21.2 (2012): 413–31.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-121.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:16 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]
-[139] Anna Morgenstern, “Anarcho-‘Capitalism’ is Impossible,” Center for a Stateless Society (Molinari Institute, Sep. 19, 2010) [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/4043 ]](June 15, 2020).
+The Maya borrowed the costume, and probably the rituals that went with it, from the great central Mexican city, Teotihuacan, whose emissaries appeared in the lowlands at about this time. Although initially adopted as a rationale for conquest, the Maya quickly made these symbols and rituals their own. This imagery held firm at the heart of Maya culture for the next thousand years. For the Maya, among many other peoples in Mesoamerica, this particular costume came to have an overwhelming association with war and sacrifice.[214] Soon after they adopted this kind of war, which we shall call Tlaloc-Venus war,[215] the Maya began timing their battles to particular points in the Venus cycle (especially the first appearance of Eveningstar) and to the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn.[216]
-[140] Nicolas Walter, The Anarchist Past and Other Essays (Nottingham: Five Leaves 2009); Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM 2019).
+We do not know why the Maya saw this association with the planets, especially Venus, as important to their concepts of war. However, the fact that later groups, such as the Aztec and Mixtec, also had such associations, which they may have inherited from either the Teotihuacanos or the Maya or both, suggests they were part of the wider Mesoamerican tradition. The date of the Uaxactun conquest, January 16, A.D. 378, has no astronomical significance that we can detect, but this event is also the earliest known appearance of the international war ritual. The astronomical associations may have come later and then spread to other societies using this type of warfare. Certainly, the association clearly had been made within forty years of the conquest because two related events in the reigns of the next two Tikal kings, Curl-Snout and Stormy-Sky, were timed by astronomical alignments (see Notes 57 and 58–5).
-[141] Roderick T. Long, “Molinari and Proudhon: Mutual(ist) Influence?” Austro Athenian Empire (n.p., June 15, 2020) [[https://aaeblog.com][https://aaeblog.com/2020/06/15/molinari-and-proudhon-mutualist-influence/ ]](June 15, 2020).
+The subjugation of Uaxactun by Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog, which precipitated this new kind of war and its rituals, survives in the inscriptional record almost entirely in the retrospective histories carved by later rulers at Tikal. The fact that these rulers kept commemorating this event shows both its historical importance and its propaganda value for the descendants of these conquerors. Stela 31, the first of these texts, tells us that the conquest took place twelve days, four uinals, and one tun after the end of the seventeenth katun (Fig. 4:18). The passage records two actors: Smoking-Frog, who “demolished and threw down (homy’ the buildings of Uaxactun,[217] and Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal, who let blood from his genitals[218] to sanctify the victory of his warriors.
-[142] Sophie Raffalovich, “Les Anarchistes de Boston,” Journal des Économistes 41.3 (March 1888): 375–88.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-122.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:17 Tlaloc War Costume in Late Classic]]
-[143] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Melbourne: Penguin 1962) 460.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-123.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:18 Tikal’s Record of the Conquest of Uaxactun drawing by John Montgomery]]
-[144] Kropotkin 122–3.
+The Ballcourt Marker, the second of these inscriptions, records the event (Fig. 4:19) using a glyph in the shape of the head of an old god. This god has a trifurcated blade over his eye and a four-petaled flower on the side of his head. This same god appears as a full-figured effigy in Burial 10 at Tikal. There he sits on a stool made of human leg bones and holds a severed human head on a plate. We do not know the precise word value intended by this glyph, but the god is clearly a deity of human sacrifice, probably by decapitation. In this conquest text, the portrait of his head is used to record one of the actions taking place on that particular day, very probably to the unfortunate captives taken at Uaxactun. These captives were very likely sacrificed by decapitation, perhaps in honor of this gruesome deity. For all of the distinctiveness of the international regalia marking this war and its political consequences, the ultimate ritual of decapitation sacrifice was the same as that which had been practiced by ahauob since time began. We shall see, however, how this international symbolism, grafted onto orthodox Maya practices, functioned as part of the propaganda that enabled Smoking-Frog to be installed as usurper king at Uaxactun.
-[145] Rothbard, Ethics chs 10–11.
+Pictorial representations of the battle for Uaxactun have not survived, but we know enough about the way the Maya conducted warfare to reconstruct what this struggle might have been like.[219] One thing is clear: This battle would have been unlike anything the seasoned warriors on either side had ever experienced. And for the people of Uaxactun, it would be more devastating than their wildest imaginings.
-[146] Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” Libertarian Forum I.6 (June 15, 1969): 3–4.
+<br>Imagine the growing sense of horror felt by the people of Uaxactun as they watched their vanquished nobility straggle into the central, dazzling white plazas of their city. The clear, hard winter light of the yax-colored sky was the backdrop to a world changing before their frightened eyes. High above them on the bloodred flank of his living mountain, their king struggled to calm himself so that he might enter into the darkness of his portal with a mind clear and purposeful, to challenge his ancestors. Why this violation of all rules of the way men fight? Where was the path to escape this disaster?
-[147] For more on the relationships among social anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, and left-wing market anarchism, see Roderick T. Long, “Anarchism and Libertarianism,” Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy, ed. Nathan Jun (Leiden: Brill 2018) 285–317; cp. Roderick T. Long, “Anarchism,” The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Gerald Gaus and Fred D’Agostino (New York, NY: Routledge 2013) 217–230; Roderick T. Long, “Against Anarchist Apartheid,” Austro-Athenian Empire (n.p., April 1, 2007) [[https://aaeblog.com][https://aaeblog.com/2007/04/01/against-anarchist-apartheid/ ]](June 15, 2020).
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-124.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:19]]
-[148] John P. Clark, The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power (Montreal: Black Rose 1983) 70, 128.
+It had begun well enough. He had led his warriors through the days of tasting, the rites of purification and sacrifice. Deep in the night, with his own hands he painted the strong faces of his kinsmen. In the flickering torchlight of the many-chambered men’s hall, he adorned them with the black and red patterns that would terrify any who dared come against them. How proud he had been when their wives handed them the great honey-colored knives of stone and the shields which they rolled up and hung across their backs. Lastly, their wives gave them the great lances hafted with teeth of lightning, the great flint blades flaked to slice smoothly into the flesh of their enemies.
-[149] John P. Clark, “Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm: Personal Transformation and Social Acton in Anarchist Practice,” The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York, NY: Bloomsbury 2013) ch. 7. For a similar dialectical orientation in free-market libertarian thought, see Chris Matthew Scia- barra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (University Park, PA: Penn State UP 2000).
+The king’s principal wife, who was pregnant with their next child, had waited until the men of lesser status were prepared before she brought his battle gear.[220] His second wife stood nearby holding their infant child, and his firstborn child by his principal wife watched the proceedings with wide eyes. One day, he, like his father, would lead the men into battle in defense of the portals of the sacred mountains. Dressed in his full regalia, the king smiled at his son and led his family out into the darkness of the predawn morning.
-[150] An earlier version of this chapter benefited from comments at a Molinari Society Symposium held in conjunction with the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York, 8 January 2019.
+In the still darkness his warriors awaited him, already dressed, their battle jackets tied loosely closed across their muscled chests. When he appeared in the flickering torchlight, a low-throated shout greeted him and his army began their last stages of preparation. They strapped on their helmets emblazoned with the images of their animal protectors. His ahauob donned the fearsome god masks, made in the image of the ax-wielding executioner Chac-Xib-Chac and the other denizens of the Other-world. They draped the wizened, shrunken heads of now-dead captives around their necks to let the enemy know they faced seasoned men of high reputation and proven valor.
-** 3. On the Distinction Between State and Anarchy
+Then there had been the rush of fear and the anticipation of glory as the warriors of Uaxactun reached the open savanna south of the city. There the battle would be fought against the age-old rivals who lived among the swamps to the south, at the right-hand side of the sun. The warming light of the rising sun had burned away the ground mist to reveal the warriors arrayed in tension-filled stillness as they waited to join in battle.
-Christopher W. Morris
+It had begun in the old ways of battle, following twenty katuns or more of honorable precedent. Standing in the waist-high grass, the old men sounded the great wooden trumpets whose piercing song cut through the bass thunder of the great war drums, the tunkul, filling the forest with the sound of great deeds in progress. His people stood together like a c writhing vision of multicolored glory against the green of those trees, shouting insults about the ancestry of the Tikal enemy ranked in their hundreds across the sea of grass. One after another, singly or in groups, I his ahauob shouted their challenges toward their counterparts across the savanna. Charging out onto the battle ground, they screamed their insults, then retreated once again to the massed safety of their own side. Their bravado and rage rippled through the ranks, transforming them into a pulsing sea of hysterical faces and trembling bodies.
-*** I. Introduction
+Suddenly, the tension became unbearable. Ihe warriors’ rage exploded into frenzied release as the two armies charged across the grass, trampling it into a tight mat under their thudding feet. They merged in the middle of the field in a screaming discharge of released energy, lightning blade clashing against woven shield in the glorious and dangerous hunt for captives to give as gifts to the gods.
-The distinction between the state and anarchy is widely deployed in modern political philosophy. In a number of ways, it is problematic and will be challenged here. Most importantly, the distinction is often thought to be exhaustive, or virtually exhaustive, of the possibilities for political societies or for the political organization of a polity. Quite often the state is defended by arguing that anarchy is awful, and less often anarchy is defended by pointing to the abuse and horrors of states. These arguments tend to assume that state and anarchy exhaust the possibilities. They turn out to be false dilemma arguments. I shall argue that this way of understanding our choices is a mistake, one that blinds us to the variety of alternative forms of political society. The “state of nature” of modern political philosophy is usually thought to be anarchy, and I will suggest a more interesting understanding of our “natural condition”. This understanding may reveal some problems with much anarchist thinking.
+The lines struck and intermingled in crazed chaos, screams of pain punctuating the cries of challenge. There was a brief flare of victory as Uaxactun’s surging mass of men flowed across the field like a summer flood, sweeping first toward the clump of men who protected Great-Jaguar-Paw, Tikal’s high king, and then back northward toward the Uaxactun lines. The entangled horde of men finally separated, and bloodied, exhausted warriors fell back toward the safety of their own side in the glaring light of midmorning. They needed to wet their dry throats with water and bind up their oozing wounds with strips of paper. Some of the warriors had taken captives who had to be stripped naked and tied down before they escaped in the heat and confusion of the battle. With such great numbers present from each city, the battle would last all day.
-*** II. The State/Anarchy Distinction
+It was then that the treacherous enemy lord struck. Smoking-Frog, the war chief of Tikal’s army, flashed an unseen signal and from the forest came hundreds of hidden warriors. In eerie silence, never once issuing challenge, they hurled a cloud of spears into the thick ranks of the Uaxactun warriors. Shocked and horrified, the king realized the enemy was using spearthrowers, the hunter’s weapon, killing his people like food animals gathered for slaughter.[221]
-Some years ago, Robert Nozick challenged the complacency of political philosophers. He wrote:
+The surprise of the attack was too great and many of his very best warriors fell to the flying lances, unable to get to safety in time. Many died and even more were crippled by a weapon that the king had seen only foreigners use in war, the foreigners who had come into their lands from Teotihuacan, the giant capital to the far west. The hidden hundreds of Tikal’s militia advanced, all carrying bunches of light, obsidian-tipped darts and throwing-sticks. He heard one of his kinsmen scream as a spear drove through his cheek, turning his black-painted face red with blood.
-<quote>
+Shouting their hatred for the enemy, the king and his captains leaped toward the Tikal general, Smoking-Frog, where he stood on the far side of the field. Jamming a wedge of bloody spears through the twisting bodies of Tikal’s young men, the warriors’of Uaxactun tore a pathway through enemy ranks for their vengeful king. But it was too late. Above the blare of the long wooden trumpets and the moan of the conch-shell horns, the high chants of Tikal’s triumph sounded in the broken, corpse-strewn meadow. More spears rained down and the king of Uaxactun was forced to pull back to the forest with the shattered remnant of his army. The young men of the royal clan and many valiant men of the great families of Uaxactun lay dead or bound, resigned to suffer the torture that awaited them at the hands of Smoking-Frog and his ahauob.
-The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy? Since anarchist theory, if tenable, undercuts the whole subject of political philosophy, it is appropriate to begin with an examination of its major theoretical alternative.[151]
-</quote>
-Why then the state, why not anarchy? The question was timely in the early 1970s. Philosophers took for granted that we must live in states, and they focused on the question of how states should be organized and then mainly on questions of the distribution of resources.[152] Many have even understood the history of political thought as focusing primarily on these last questions. To some others, Nozick’s suggestion was a breath of fresh air.
+Now in the darkness of his sanctum, the king of Uaxactun heard again that awful chant of victory. The warriors of Tikal were entering his city and he could feel the ancestral gift of his world slipping from his grasp. An unthinkable disaster had befallen him and his people. He emerged into the blinding daylight; and as his vision cleared, he saw smoke billowing from the fires of destruction, which consumed the spacious homes and public halls of his city’s center. Screaming taunts of desperation, the lords of Uaxactun gathered on the sides of their living mountains, throwing their stabbing spears, rocks, and finally their bodies at the advancing and implacable Tikal forces.
-In some ways, that suggestion fits quite well with the main tradition of modern political philosophy, which would have us compare the state with the “state of nature” of social contract theory. This natural condition is the real or the hypothetical condition of humans in the absence of a state. The different seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists disagreed about the proper description of this “natural” state of affairs, but they took it as the starting point for reflection about the state. In the first part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia Nozick takes seriously the proposal that there may be anarchist solutions to the problems that humans encounter in the state of nature. Like most philosophers, he is particularly interested in normative questions about the state’s justification and legitimacy.
+In spite of all their efforts, Smoking-Frog and his company swirled around the base of the king’s pyramid, killing and capturing the valiant warriors of the Uaxactun royal clan. The king and his men fought to the last. At the moment of his capture, the king of Uaxactun reached furiously for Smoking-Frog’s throat. Laughing, the Tikal lord jerked him to his knees by his long bound hair. The defeated king glared up at the arrogant Smoking-Frog, costumed in the regalia of the new, barbarous warfare— the round helmet, the spearthrower, and the obsidian club. He cursed him as his captor’s minions stripped him bare and tied his elbows behind his back with rough sisal rope.
-The suggestion Nozick makes is that we examine anarchist theory, as it is the “major theoretical alternative” to political philosophy, at least in its current or possibly modern form. In his well-known account in Part One of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argues that something like a state can emerge without violating any of the basic rights of people, which he thinks refutes the claims of anarchists who say that states are necessarily illegitimate or unjust. This argument has been the subject of much commentary, and my interests here lie elsewhere. I wish instead to examine the claim that state and anarchy exhaust or virtually exhaust the alternatives. Nozick’s words—the state’s “major theoretical alternative”—allow for other alternatives, but he proceeds as most philosophers have in this tradition, by focusing on the disjunctive choice: state? Or anarchy?
+They would all die. There would be no ransom. Under the code of this new, foreign battle strategy, Smoking-Frog would be able to bring his own Tikal ancestors to the portal of Uaxactun. He and his descendants would rule not only the people of the city but their venerated ancestors as well. It was an act of audacity beyond imagination: war to take not only the king but also his portal—and if possible to hold that portal captive. For as long as Smoking-Frog and his kin reigned, the people of Uaxactun would be cut off from the loving guidance of their ancestors, a people stripped of their very gods.
-Is the distinction between state and anarchy exhaustive or virtually exhaustive? Discussions in the literature as well as the classroom proceed as if it were. There are some reasons for proceeding this way. Doing so simplifies matters, which can be helpful. And an exhaustive distinction between state and anarchy allows one to mount a simple argument for the state (or anarchy): a dilemma argument, in fact. This is, of course, what Hobbes and many others do. His is the most famous dilemma argument for the state: life in the natural condition of humankind is awful; therefore, we must have a state. The argument is very well known, and we need not linger on the omitted details. And many anarchists are also happy to embrace the dilemma structure of the argument and to challenge the picture of the state of nature. The essentially binary structure of the landscape in political philosophy is commonplace.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-The traditional justification of the state—best known to students of political philosophy from the writings of Hobbes and Locke—involved an attempt to demonstrate that the state (or that a certain kind of state) is preferable to that nonpolitical condition called ‘the state of nature’ (and, thus, that the state is both acceptable and best for us, relative to the state of nature.) The state of nature is often equated with the condition of ‘anarchy,’ which seems perfectly fair if we are using the word anarchy in one only of its familiar senses, where it means ‘absence of government.’[153]
+In time to come, this kind of war would require a novel alliance with the denizens of the Otherworld—an unleashing of the forces of Xibalba, particularly Venus, to conquer not only the living royal clan but also all of the apotheosized ancestors of that clan. Kings now had a policy and a strategy that would inspire dreams of conquest throughout the Maya world. Venus would prove a powerful, but treacherous ally in the realization of these dreams.
-A natural starting-point for thinking about the state is to ask: what would things be life without it? ... We imagine a ‘state of nature’; a situation where no state exists and no one possesses political power .... [S]ooner or later, among any fairly sizeable group of people, life in the state of nature will become intolerable. Reason enough, it may be said, to accept that the state is justified without the need for further argument. After all, what real alternative to the state do we have?[154]
+The most tantalizing mystery surrounding the conquest of Uaxactun is the identity of Smoking-Frog. Who was this warrior who appears in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal? We know he was an ahau of Tikal because he consistently included the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Second, we know he was the principal actor in the conquest of Uaxactun, despite the fact that the conquest took place under the authority of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal. All of this leads us to believe that he was most likely the war chief who led Tikal’s army against the rival kingdom, and as a result of his success, was installed as the ruling ahau of Uaxactun by the victorious Tikal king. We know that eighteen years after the conquest, Smoking-Frog was still at Uaxactun. On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396) he conducted a ritual to celebrate the katun ending, an event he depicted on Stela 4 (Fig. 4:20), which he planted next to his portrait as the conqueror (Fig. 4:5). The people of Tikal didn’t forget him on this occasion either. Back at his home city, Smoking-Frog was named on Stela 18 (Fig. 4:20) which recorded the celebration of the same katun ending. He was also prominently named in the retrospective histories recorded on Stela 31 and the Ballcourt Marker.
-This assumption, that the exclusive or virtually exclusive choice we face is “state or anarchy”, has had a bad effect on political philosophy. It blinds us to the variety of political alternatives, and it does this by simplifying the actual history of our world beyond recognition. If each political society must be either a state or an instance of anarchy—taking the latter to be a form of political society, if you will—then we lose sight of the many of the historical alternatives: the Roman Empire, late medieval Europe, the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the Islamic caliphates, Christendom, the Hanseatic League. We also fail to understand some of the more contemporary alternatives: British Hong Kong, Singapore, perhaps the European Union. As we shall see, a lot turns on how we think of states.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-125.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:20 Smoking-Frog at Tikal and Uaxactun]]
-Philosophers, perhaps especially in the Anglo-American tradition, are raised on a diet of great books from classical Greece and modern Europe and often assume that Hobbes and Locke are engaged in a continuous conversation with Plato and Aristotle about how best to organize political society, the polis and the state being thought of as more or less similar things. But the modern state did not immediately follow Athens and Rome; a millennium of different political institutions and frameworks lies between them and the modern world. The modern state displaced or destroyed a variety of different forms of political organization. The history of our Western polities alone suggests that the binary characterization of the alternatives is mistaken or at least misleading. Our choices are not simple as between “state” and “anarchy”; there is a considerable variety of forms of political organization, and these may be of great interest to us.
+Yet even considering his prominence in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal, we are reasonably sure that Smoking-Frog never ruled Tikal as its king. Instead, another ahau named Curl-Snout (Fig. 4:20) became high king of Tikal on September 13, 379, less than two years after the conquest. Curl-Snout apparently held his throne, however, under the sufferance of Smoking-Frog, who appears to have ruled the combined kingdom that was forged by the conquest. We would like to put forward the hypothesis that Smoking-Frog was the brother of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal at the time of the battle of Uaxactun, and that Curl-Snout was his nephew.
-Oddly, it shouldn’t take much to persuade that the anarchy/state distinction cannot be exhaustive, or even virtually exhaustive. Consider the case of medieval Europe—Europe from roughly the fifth to fifteenth centuries. During this time, Europe was not organized the way it increasingly was in later centuries, as a collection of states. And it was not a state of nature or anarchy. I shall first make a case for this claim and later consider more carefully what we might think of as states. As we shall see later, much turns on how we understand states. The forms of political society in medieval Europe cannot be easily summarized, even for Western Europe. So, let us think first of northern France and England around the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. We find there a complex social and political order quite unlike ours. “Government” consisted of complex hierarchies of lords and vassals. These allegiances were based on personal loyalties and land tenure (fiefs). The resulting order was decentralized and fragmented, one in which “public” functions of government were “privatized”, and in which rule was indirect, and it was not territorial—very different from what obtains under state rule. Here is Maitland’s characterization:
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-126.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:21 Stela 31: Curl-Snout in the Land of Smoking-Frog drawing by John Montgomery]]
-<quote>
+There are several clues leading to this conclusion. One of the ways we can infer the relationship between Curl-Snout and Smoking-Frog is from the inscriptions at Tikal, which always name Curl-Snout either as the yahau “the noble of” (in this case, “the vassal of”) Smoking-Frog (Stela 18) or as acting u cab “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (Stela 31). When Curl-Snout depicted himself acceding to Tikal’s kingship on Stela 4 and ending Katun 18 on Stela 18, he found it advisable to record publicly his relationship to Smoking-Frog. Perhaps the most important reference to their relationship occurs on Stela 31 where an important event in Curl-Snout’s life, possibly his accession, is said to have taken place “in the land of Smoking-Frog” (Fig. 4:21).[222] From these references we surmise that Curl-Snout ruled Tikal, but under the aegis of Smoking-Frog.[223]
-A state of society in which the main social bond is the relation between lord and man, a relation implying on the lord’s part protection and defense; on the man’s part protection, service and reverence, the service including service in arms. This personal relation is inseparably involved in a proprietary relation, the tenure of land—the man holds land of the lord, the man’s service is a burden on the land, and (we may say) the full ownership of the land is split up between man and lord. The lord has jurisdiction over his men, holds courts for them, to which they owe suit. Jurisdiction is regarded as property, as a private right which the lord has over his land. The national organization is a system of these relationships: at the head there stands the king as lord of all, below him are his immediate vassals, or tenants in chief, who again are lords of tenants, who again may be lords of tenants, and so on, down to the lowest possessor of land. Lastly, as every court consists of the lord’s tenants, so the king’s court consists of his tenants in chief, and so far as there is any constitutional control over the king it is exercised by the body of these tenants.[155]
-</quote>
-The social and political system summarized by Maitland is complex. Governance is largely decentralized, privatized, and indirect, and it is not territorial in the ways it is today. It is decentralized and fragmented, shared by multiple parties; indeed, there is no “center”. Power rests in the hands of distributed networks of lords and their vassals. The Church’s power and influence only compound the complexity of medieval governance arrangements. Importantly, political power—what we think of as belonging to the “public” realm—is privatized. Power is based on personal relations, “a complex hierarchy of patron—client relationships”.[156] A third important contrast with our states is that feudal rule is largely indirect. There is no single person or entity, the Church aside, that rules all persons in the realm. Rule is mediated and personal. A lord requests of a vassal that he fulfill his pledge, and that request obligates that vassal; no one else is thereby obligated. The vassal may need to call on his vassals, but the latter are not obligated to the (first) lord. In France fidelity was owed only to one’s immediate overlord: vassallus vassalli mei non est meus vassallus (“my vassal’s vassal is not my vassal”).[157]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-127.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:22 Kinship Relationships of Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal]]
-A consequence of the decentralized, privatized, and indirect nature of political power is that it was limited or constrained. The power of any one individual was limited. We have not mentioned the political power of serfs, if only because they had none (or virtually none); independent towns are mentioned below. Our focus is on the rulers, and the power of lords was limited. The foundation for their power was contractual and thus constrained. Duties and rights were conditional; if one of the parties failed in his duties, the other would be released from his. No single person or body possessed complete authority or what the moderns call sovereignty.[158] Moreover, the hierarchy of powers—the hierarchy of lord-vassal relationships—was complex in a further way: it need not constitute an ordering. The rule cited above meant that the lord-vassal relationship need not be transitive: if A was B’s lord and B was C’s lord, it did not follow that A was (also) C’s lord. Additionally, a vassal could serve several lords.[159]
+There are additional hints as to the identity of Smoking-Frog and his relationship to Curl-Snout. The text on the Ballcourt Marker names Smoking-Frog as the ihtan,[224] “sibling,” of a person named “Spearthrower-Owl.” It is interesting that Stela 31, erected many years later by Curl-Snout’s son and heir, Stormy-Sky, names Curl-Snout as the “child of” a person named by an almost identical glyph, “Spearthrower-Shield” (Fig. 4:22). We have now realized that these two seemingly different glyphs are merely different ways of writing the same thing—the shield-owl-spear-thrower substitution that would become Pacafs name at Palenque and the name of the third Lord of the Night.[225] If this substitution is correctly identified, then we can assert that Smoking-Frog was the brother and Curl-Snout the son of the same man. Our remaining task is to determine the identity of the person whom these “spearthrower” glyphs name.
-Lastly, in this system political authority was largely personal and not importantly territorial. Political allegiances were oath-based, referring to persons but not countries or national lands. What we think of as national borders did not exist in any case. The jurisdictions of our states are mostly territorial: laws apply to members (i.e., citizens) of course, but in the first instance they apply to all agents in the state’s territory. The obligations of medieval lords and vassals—the individuals who wield power—are mostly contractual. They are thus personal, even when allegiance is exchanged for land.
+The solution to this mystery involves some complicated detective work. The “spearthrower” name also occurs on Stela 31 in another context. It is the title on the headdress Stormy-Sky holds aloft, prior to donning it in the public ritual depicted on the front of the monument (Fig. 4:23). A medallion attached to the front of the headdress depicts an owl with a shield on its wing and a throwing dart piercing its breast. Stormy-Sky is about to become a “spearthrower-owl-shield” person by putting on this headdress.
-In late medieval times, in what is now France or England there were monarchs who claimed sweeping powers. Drawing their inspiration from Rome or ancient Israel, these monarchs claimed broad powers to make law and not to be overruled by others. But, at the same time, they were non sub homine sed sub Deo et lege (“not under man but under God and the law”).[160] And not without reason. Kings were constrained by the Church and its courts. The Church’s power was often a significant constraint on the powers of kings and other lords. It was also a center of literacy and wealth, often largely independent of kings and princes. And kings ruled directly only on their own personal lands and indirectly everywhere else. And by comparison to many early modern kings, they were weak, militarily dependent on vassals. Lastly, with the development of commerce (and of money), towns and cities, starting in the eleventh century, became increasingly important economically and politically. Many were independent centers of power, antagonists to much of the feudal order.
+The last readable clause of the text on this monument tells us that Stormy-Sky performed this ritual on June 11, A.D. 439, when Venus was near its eastern elongation.[226] The glyph that records this ritual action is the same as the one recording the bloodletting event (Fig. 4:23) that Great-Jaguar-Paw performed on the day Uaxactun was conquered. The use of the same verb in both contexts is to declare a “like-in-kindness” between the two actors. If Stormy-Sky became the “spearthrower-owl” person by performing this rite, we may assume that Great-Jaguar-Paw had taken on this identity in the same ritual context. The “spearthrowerowl” named as the brother of Smoking-Frog and the father of Curl-Snout was none other than the first great Tikal king to call himself by that title—Great-Jaguar-Paw, the king who made war with spearthrowers his own. Furthermore, it is this very equation between grandfather and grandson that Stormy-Sky intended to portray in the first place. It is not by accident that he designated himself the “spearthrower-shield” when he reenacted his ancestor’s bloodletting event. By doing so, he intended to remind his people that he was the grandson of this powerful and innovative man.
-What I have described is a period of late medieval European history which could not be characterized as anarchic, but which featured social systems or political societies that were clearly not states. Governance was fragmented and decentralized, privatized (not public), indirect and personal, and not essentially territorial. But the important point is that there was government in this time. There were controls on people, consisting of systems of law and other effective constraints. There were of course pockets of disorder or “anarchy”, either from the collapse of orders or merely in areas in which there were few controls. This is “anarchy” in the sense of disorder. In the classical sense relevant here, anarchia refers to social settings without rulers or centralized political authority. In this sense late medieval Europe was not anarchic. We need now to consider more carefully why late medieval Europe does not have states. Part of the answer lies in our description of feudal government as decentralized and fragmented, privatized, indirect, and not territorial, and largely personal systems of power. States are systems of centralized, public, direct, and, most importantly, impersonal and territorial rule. Let us then ask: what are states, more precisely?
+[[][Fig. 4:23 The Spearthrower Title and Stormy-Sky at Tikal<br>drawing of text and stela by John Montgomery]]
-*** III. What are States?
+In the scenario we have reconstructed, forces from Tikal under the military leadership of Smoking-Frog, the brother of the high king, attacked and defeated the forces of their neighboring kingdom, Uaxactiin, on January 16, 378. The victory placed Smoking-Frog on the throne of Uaxactun, where he oversaw the accession of his nephew, Curl-Snout, to Tikal’s throne on September 13, A.D. 379. For the next eighteen years, and perhaps as long as twenty-six years,[227] Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, possibly marrying into its ruling family as well. Even though Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, however, he remained extremely important at Tikal. It’s possible he was the overall ruler of the new combined kingdom that resulted from his victory in battle.
-There often appears to be considerable agreement about what states are. When in need of a “definition” of the state, political philosophers often cite Max Weber. In the first few paragraphs of a public address that Weber delivered at the University of Munich in 1918 on the subject of “Politics as a Vocation”, there is what appears to be a definition of the state.[161] In the third or fourth paragraph of his lecture (the third in the German text), Weber says that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”[162] This familiar definition is widely used.
+That the conquest of Uaxactun remained a glorious event of historical memory both at Uaxactun and Tikal is clear from the inscriptions at both sites. The descendants of Smoking-Frog continued to erect monuments at Uaxactun on a regular basis. One hundred and twenty-six years after the conquest, on 9.3.10.0.0 (December 9, 504), a Uaxactun ruler celebrated the conquest by erecting Stela 22. The day of the victory, 11 Eb, appears with the same conquest verb (hom, “to knock down or demolish buildings”) describing the action. Even at such a late date, the borrowed glory of the battle of Uaxactun could burnish the deeds of Smoking-Frog’s progeny.
-The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on “state” says that “[a] state is a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain geographical territory” and later that “[t]he most commonly used definition is Max Weber’s.”[163] It is noteworthy that no single entity in medieval Europe possessed such a monopoly and that, for the most part, none could be understood as claiming one, though this last is less clear.
+Another example of this “glory by association” can be seen on the above mentioned Stela 31, erected at Tikal. This monument was commissioned by Stormy-Sky, the grandson of the conqueror, and focused on the defeat of Uaxactun.[228] Stormy-Sky’s motivation in featuring this conquest was, of course, to remember the glories of his grandfather and the triumph of his kingdom against an old rival; but he also gained personal prestige by reminding his people of this event. By concentrating on retrospective historical events on this stela, Stormy-Sky was also able to emphasize the extraordinary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus on 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, A.D. 411, see Note 58–5) which occurred during his father’s, Curl-Snout’s, reign. He then used the conquest and the hierophany as a background to emphasize the importance of his own bloodletting on June 10, 439. So effective was this strategy that his own descendant, Ah-Cacaw, remembered and celebrated this same bloodletting event thirteen katuns later (9.13.3.9.18 or September 17, 695).[229]
-There are, however, a number of problems with this characterization or, rather, with the standard uses of it. In the lecture Weber qualifies it. And most importantly, elsewhere, in a work less cited for these purposes, Weber expresses a more subtle and complete characterization:
+The most extraordinary record of the conquest was inscribed on the Ballcourt Marker[230] that was recently discovered in a lineage compound south of the Lost World group. The bailgame with its decapitation and sacrificial associations had been a central component of Maya ritual since the Late Preclassic period, but the marker recording the Uaxactun conquest is not typical of the floor-mounted stone disk used in the Maya ballcourts. This Tikal marker, in the shape of a thin cylinder surmounted by a sphere and disk, is nearly identical to ballcourt markers pictured in the murals of the Tlalocan at Teotihuacan itself.[231] It rests on its own Teotihuacan-style platform and a two-paneled inscription wraps around the cylinder base (Fig. 4:19c). Its form emulates the style of Teotihuacan ballcourt markers as a reflection of the importance of the Tlaloc-Venus war in its records.[232]
-<quote>
+The inscription is as extraordinary as the object itself. One panel records the conquest of Uaxactun by Smoking-Frog (Fig. 4:19a), while the opposite side records the accession to office of the fourth lord to rule the lineage that occupied this compound.[233] This was presumably the lineage head who went to war under the leadership of Smoking-Frog. The Ballcourt Marker itself was planted in the altar on January 24, 414, some thirty-six years after the conquest of Uaxactun, but it was not commissioned by a king. It was erected by a lord who named himself “the ahau (in the sense of “vassal’) of Smoking-Frog of Tikal” (Fig. 4:19c).
-Since the concept of the state has only in modern times reached its full development, it is best to define it in terms appropriate to the modern type of state, but at the same time, in terms which abstract from the values of the present day, since these are particularly subject to change. The primary formal characteristics of the modern state are as follows: It possesses [<verbatim>1</verbatim>] an administrative and [<verbatim>2</verbatim>] legal order subject to change by legislation, to which the organized corporate activity of the administrative staff, which is also regulated by legislation, is oriented. This system of order [<verbatim>3</verbatim>] claims binding authority, not only over the members of the state, the citizens [...] but also to a very large extent, over all actions taking place in the area of its [<verbatim>4</verbatim>] jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory association with a [4a] territorial basis. Furthermore, today, the [<verbatim>5</verbatim>] use of force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by it.[164]
-</quote>
-The fuller characterization is superior to the oft-quoted one from “Politics as a Vocation”: “an administrative and legal order”, “claims binding authority.over all actions taking place in the area of its jurisdiction”, “a territorial basis”. For our purposes note that both characterizations are multi-attributive; the state is defined in terms of several attributes. I will make use of this fact. But first let me introduce a third characterization, a much more complex one. In my Essay on the Modern State, I said that
+The people who lived and worked in this ritual/residential complex were members of one of the important, nonroyal lineages of the kingdom. They were not themselves kings; but like their king and his descendants, they remembered the conquest of Uaxactun as the most glorious event in living memory. Like Stormy-Sky, they gained prestige by celebrating its memory in texts recording the history of their own lineage. This lineage presumably provided warriors, perhaps even leaders, for Smoking-Frog’s army and forever gained recognition and glory by their participation.
-<quote>
+The war and its aftermath affected more than just the two kingdoms and the people directly involved. Tikal’s victory gave the lords who ruled that kingdom the advantage they needed to dominate the central Peten for the next 180 years. However, this great victory also coincided with an intensified interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan, whose influence, as we have seen, appeared in Maya symbolism just about the time this war was fought. What did this interaction mean for the Maya culture and how far did their involvement with the civilization of Teotihuacan go? To answer this question, we must examine a little history.
-[t]he concept of the modern state, in my sense, then, as it emerges in medieval and early modern history, is that of a new and complex form of political organization. For the purposes of my inquiry, the state is to be characterized in terms of a number of interrelated features.
-</quote>
-These features are:
+During the same centuries that saw the development of lowland Maya kingdoms, the new state of Teotihuacan had simultaneously been growing to maturity in the valley of Mexico (Fig. 4:24). We know that the lowland Maya and the Teotihuacanos had been in contact with each other from at least the first century A.D. Offerings of the distinctive green obsidian mined by the Teotihuacanos have been discovered in Late Preclassic Maya sites at Nohmul and at Altun Ha in Belize.[234] Furthermore, the exchange of material goods was not just in one direction. Just as Teotihuacan-style objects occur at Tikal and elsewhere in the lowlands, Maya-style objects also occur at Teotihuacan. Yet even in light of this long-term exchange of exotic goods between the two regions, something very special and different, at least in scale, took place on the occasion of the war against Uaxactun. What was exchanged this time was not just goods, but a whole philosophy. The Maya borrowed the idea and the imagery of conquest war from the Teotihuacanos and made it their own.
-. Continuity in time and space. (a) The modern state is a form of political organization whose institutions endure over time; in particular, they survive changes in leadership or government. (b) It is the form of political organization of a definite and distinct territory.
+On Stela 5 at Uaxactun (Fig. 4:15), the conqueror, Smoking-Frog, chose to depict himself in ritual war regalia of the Teotihuacan style. On Stela 4 at Tikal (Fig. 4:20), Curl-Snout, the son of Great-Jaguar-Paw, ruler of Tikal at the time of the conquest, depicted himself wearing a shell necklace, also in the style of Teotihuacan, when he acceded as king. ^ Curl-Snout appears again on the sides of Stela 31 (Fig. 4:25), but this time in the same war regalia worn by Smoking-Frog at Uaxactun. If we recall that the Maya utilized their public art for purposes of propaganda, we can see the reasoning behind this costume. When Stormy-Sky acceded to the throne, he needed to present his father (the forebear upon whom his right to rule depended) in the most powerful light possible. What could be more prestigious than for Curl-Snout to appear in the costume worn by Smoking-Frog at the moment of his greatest triumph?
-. Transcendence. The modern state is a particular form of political organization that constitutes a unitary public order distinct from and superior to both ruled and rulers, one capable of agency. The institutions that are associated with modern states—in particular, the government, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, standing armies—do not themselves constitute the state; they are its agents.
+[[][Teotihuacan: the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun]]
-. Political organization. The institutions through which the state acts—in particular, the government, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the police, and the military—are differentiated from other political organizations and associations; they are formally coordinated one with another, and they are relatively centralized. Relations of authority are hierarchical. Rule is direct; it is territorial (see 1b); and it is relatively pervasive and penetrates society legally and administratively.
+[[][The Talud-tablero Style of Architecture Characteristic of Teotihuacan<br>Fig. 4:24]]
-. Authority. The state claims to be sovereign—that is, the ultimate source of political authority in its territory—and it claims a monopoly on the use of legitimate force within its territory. The jurisdiction of its institutions extends directly to all residents or members of that territory. In its relations to other public orders, the state is autonomous.
+To give the impression that we are seeing Curl-Snout standing behind his son, Stormy-Sky represented him twice, on opposite sides of the stela. On one side we see the inside of his shield and the outside of his spearthrower; on the other we see the inside of the spearthrower, and the outside of the shield. Upon his shield we see the image of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed deity that the Maya would come to associate with this particular kind of war and bloodletting ritual.[235]
-. Allegiance. Members of a state are the primary subjects of its laws and have a general obligation to obey by virtue of their membership. The state expects and receives the loyalty of its members and of the permanent inhabitants of its territory. The loyalty that it typically expects and receives assumes precedence over that loyalty formerly owed to family, clan, commune, lord, bishop, pope, or emperor.[165]
+Burials from this period at Tikal also give evidence of the Maya interaction with Teotihuacan. Two of our protagonists were buried in the North Acropolis at Tikal: Curl-Snout in Burial 10 and Stormy-Sky in Burial 48.[236] Both tombs include significant numbers of pots made in the style of Teotihuacan, emulating imagery particularly associated with that city. Even more to the point, a special cache at Tikal called Problematic Deposit 5O[237] included what may very well be the interred remains of resident Teotihuacanos of high rank. The most interesting object in this deposit is a vase that appears to depict the arrival of a group of Teotihuacanos at a Maya city (Fig. 4:26).
-This characterization is fuller than the Weberian ones. Item 1a is implicit in the second Weberian characterization, but item 2 needs to be stated explicitly so as to highlight the kind of corporate entity present here. The unitary and corporate nature of modern states is of importance.[166] Item 4 is quite important; states claim not only some kind of monopoly on “legitimate” uses of force and violence but also authority. It is not surprising that many social scientists do not want to include normative notions in a characterization of the state, but it is hard to understand what states are without referring to what powers and rights they claim.[167] And other items here— e.g., the allegiance demanded or expected by states (item 5)—are important.
+[[][Fig. 4:25 tails Curl-Snout as the Spearthrower Warrior on the Sides of Stela 31]]
-This third characterization was constructed to highlight the distinctive features of modern states and to contrast them with their late medieval alternatives. Modern states resemble Athens and especially Rome only in a few respects, and these latter were long gone when states emerged and replaced late medieval institutions and political systems. Prior to the emergence of modern states there were many alternative forms of political organization, several of which had to be defeated or subsumed for statehood in the modern sense to emerge as the dominant form. Modern states displaced kingdoms, principalities, duchies, independent cities, leagues of cities, empires, the Church (of Rome), and many other alternative political forms, including several of the institutions and practices left over from feudalism. Things might have gone differently, pace Hegel. Charles Tilly, arguing against the historian Joseph Strayer, claims that
+On this vase six Teotihuacanos, marked by their clothing, walk away from a place of talud-tablero-style architecture, the ethnic signal of Teotihuacan (Fig. 4:24), to arrive at a place that has both talud-tablero temples and stepped pyramids of Maya design. At the city of departure, they leave a child and a squatting figure, perhaps representing the family members who see them off on their long journey. Four of the <verbatim><</verbatim> Teotihuacano visitors wear the long-tailed costume we have seen at Uaxactun and Tikal. These same persons carry spearthrowers and appear to escort two other characters who carry lidded cylinders, a pottery shape particularly associated with Teotihuacan.[238] At the end of this “journey,” the arriving Teotihuacanos are greeted by a person dressed like a Maya.
-In the thirteenth century, then, five outcomes may still have been open: (1) the form of national state which actually emerged; (2) a political federation or empire controlled, if only loosely, from a single center; (3) a theocratic federation—a commonwealth—held together by the structure of the Catholic Church; (4) an intensive trading network without large-scale, central political organization; (5) the persistence of the “feudal” structure which prevailed in the thirteenth century.[168]
+We do not know for sure which cities the artist intended to represent on this vessel—although it would seem logical to identify Teotihuacan as the starting point and Tikal as the point of arrival.[239] The four Teotihuacanos carrying weapons constitute a warrior escort for the two vase-carrying individuals behind them. The rear figures are distinguished by tasseled headdresses of the type that also show up prominently at Kaminaljuyu and Monte Alban in contexts where Teotihuacan symbolism have merged with local traditions. The individuals who wear these headdresses are most likely special-status people who traveled as emissaries, or professional merchants representing their great city throughout western Mesoamerica.[240]
-That’s all history now, so to speak. Today the triumph of the modern state is universal; all but one bit of the landmass of the globe is the territory of a state. Even the European remnants of earlier forms of political organization—the principalities of Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the seat of the Church of Rome (Vatican City)— are dubbed states by political geographers and international lawyers. For us, there are only states (and “failed states”). The historical alternatives have been forgotten, and political philosophers often think that “the state of nature” and “the state” exhaust our options. We note, however, that by any of these three characterizations there were no states in medieval Europe, even if there were systems of governance and law; even when and where violence and force were controlled, there were no states.
+[[][Fig. 4:26 A Visit by Teotihuacanos Carved on a Black Cylindrical Vase from Problematic Deposit 50]]
-For some purposes, of course, Weber’s first definition may be sufficient. For others, his second or mine may be more useful. Characterizations are largely to be guided by the ends of inquiry and the phenomena that are illuminated thereby. Anarchists and many egalitarians are bound to be suspicious of states and especially of the monopolization of force highlighted by the first Weberian definition.[169] For them the initial centralization of power that occurred ten millennia or so ago gave birth to increasing specialization of functions, with some people or classes coming to monopolize various political functions or roles. They may find the roots of some of our political problems in the ways in which concentrations of power and political specialization make more egalitarian anarchist communities impossible. Michael Taylor is a good example of such a thinker. Other thinkers, including me, want to think about alternatives to our current system of (modern) states but do not think that the kinds of anarchist community that existed several thousand years ago are feasible or attractive alternatives for us. But, as we shall see in Section IV, there is another distinction which may be more useful to political philosophers.
+The appearance of this kind of imagery at Tikal has been explained in several ways, ranging from the military conquest of these sites by Teotihuacan to the usurpation of Tikal’s throne by lords from Teotihuacan or Kaminaljuyu.[241] The last alternative seems unlikely. The status of Curl-Snout as Stormy-Sky’s father is certain. If we are accurate in our analysis of the “spearthrower-shield” glyph, Great-Jaguar-Paw was Curl-Snout’s father and Smoking-Frog’s brother. If these relationships are correctly deciphered, then we can verify an unbroken descent in the Tikal royal line during the very time Teotihuacano imagery begins appearing in such prominence.
-*** IV. The Structure of the Argument: Many Attributes, Many Possibilities
+If we dismiss conquest and usurpation, then what does the presence of this imagery imply? There is little doubt that the Teotihuacanos were physically present at Tikal, at least in small numbers, just as small numbers of lowland Maya were also present at Teotihuacan. The reason for this was not military occupation. Rather, during the fifth and sixth centuries, Teotihuacan had established a network binding the individual societies in Mesoamerica together in a great web of trade and exchange.
-Note that characterizations of the state, as with any complex entity, are multi-attributive; something is a state insofar as it possesses several attributes. This is certainly the case with Weber’s second characterization and with those similar to mine. But it is also true of the simple, widely invoked Weberian definition: “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” This characterization is relatively simple, but note that the kind of human community in question is a territorial one. Territoriality is an attribute distinct from the monopolization of force. Further, note that the human community that claims the monopoly is an entity; that is, a single corporate entity. What sort of thing is it? It can’t be the king or “the sovereign”, understood as a single human being (“the ruler”); no one rules alone. The “ruler” is always a set of rulers—in fact, a coalition of coalitions of powerful people. More importantly, “the ruler” is a corporate being of some kind. It may be made of Many, but it is One. In the frontispiece of Leviathan, the Sovereign’s body is made up of those Many. Something like this may be suggested by Weber’s “human community”, as it is by many notions of “We, the People”. In addition, the important predicate “legitimate” in Weber’s simple definition is more complex than it seems to be, but we will leave this aside for now. We should just note that even this simple definition is multi-attributive; there are at least three distinct attributes of states in this oft-invoked definition. Weber’s complex definition distinguishes at least five important characteristics of states.
+When the Teotihuacanos departed their city to travel among the different areas participating in that trade network, they went as tasselheaded ambassador-traders, protected by warriors. Sacred war as they defined and practiced it is registered in the murals of Atetelco and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in their own great city.[242] The symbology in these images is clearly related, if not identical, to the Tlaloc warfare practiced by the Maya. As these Teotihuacanos spread out from their sacred city, which they believed to be the point on earth where the supernatural world was embodied,[243] they took their form of war and sacrificial rituals with them.
-Now why would this be significant? When political communities satisfy some but not all of the attributes essential to states, they will not be states, or not fully. But they may also not be anarchies. Unless the defining attributes can only be instantiated together, then polities can exist with some of the attributes but not others. We have mentioned the Principality of Monaco, the Vatican, the Principality of Andorra, and other remnants of medieval Europe. These are considered city-states or countries by some, but this is a bit of a fiction. The co-princes of Andorra, for instance, are the French President and the (Catholic) Bishop of Urgell of Spanish Catalunya. American Indian reservations and Canadian First Nation territories have some state-like features. On the classical view of sovereignty—item 4 in my long characterization of states—member countries of the
+The arrival of the Teotihuacan trader-ambassadors in the central Peten may have intensified the rivalry that already existed between Uaxactiin and Tikal. At the very least their presence inflated the stakes at risk—the wealth in material goods and ideas that came with controlling the trade network of the central Peten region. Certainly when Smoking-Frog depicted himself—and later on, his father—in the costume worn by the Teotihuacan warriors, it was because this costume was prestigious and important propaganda to his people. How much more impressive must the Teotihuacan symbolism have been to the people of the whole Peten region when its adoption by Tikal’s rulers coincided with their conquest of Uaxactun?
-European Union have given up their sovereignty or, if this is possible, part of their sovereignty. Classical Athens had some state-like features but not others. Classical empires like that of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire were not modern states and did not claim sovereignty.[170]
+Both the son and grandson of the triumphant Great-Jaguar-Paw knew the propaganda value of the Tlaloc complex. They enthusiastically adopted the imagery and its associated rituals, and then quite deliberately commemorated their ancestor’s great feat whenever possible on their own public monuments. By the time Stormy-Sky erected Stela 31, this war and sacrifice ritual was firmly associated with Venus or Venus-Jupiter-Saturn hierophanies, most probably a Maya adaptation.
-Depending on the period of the Middle Ages, Christendom is a political force, sharing some features with empires. And then there are the cluster of contemporary states lumped together as failed or fragile states or characterized using some other term. “Quasi-states”, such as many former European colonies, are recognized as states but lack governments with full control of their territories and many other features of developed states.[171] We can find the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Republic of South Sudan on maps, but they are not full states. Some of these places are anarchic in the sense of disorderly, but they are not anarchies. Coalitions exert control or rival groups seek to extend their control. In the next section we’ll call them “limited-access social orders”.
+With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, the Maya adopted this ritual and made it their own. It survived the collapse of the Classic period civilization and is prominent at Chichen Itza and other northern sites of the Postclassic period. It may even have traveled back to central Mexico via Cacaxtla and Xochicalco: For it is the Maya version of the Tlaloc complex that appears at those sites at the end of the Classic period.
-One could of course construct an exhaustive anarchy/state distinction, for instance, distinguishing states from non-states (or anarchic from non-anarchic societies). One could stipulate that anything that meets all of the conditions of one of the Weberian definitions would count as a state and that everything else is a non-state. Anarchy would then be the condition of nonstates. But, of course, that would be odd. Better would be to stipulate that anarchy is a condition in which people lack rulers and that everything else is a state. Anthropologists do something like that, but they also recognize the variety of “states”.[172] Students of the last two millennia of political societies would find either of these exhaustive distinctions useless; they hide the variety of forms of political organization. One cannot understand the modern state except against the background of late medieval Europe. Why did English and French monarchs need to become independent of the Church of Rome and to tame or reach agreements with their aristocrats? Simple definitions are of no use here.
+Why did the Maya take to this new ritual so readily and enthusiastically? Perhaps the best answer is that it helped Tikal win a staggering victory that made her kings the dominant ahauob of the central Peten. Intensified trade and political association with Teotihuacan were other likely results of this victory. As a ruler of empire, Tikal experienced an inflation of prestige perhaps unprecedented in Maya history and rarely replicated again. This conquest was the stuff of legends and the people of Tikal never let the story pass from memory. Thirteen katuns later another descendent memorialized this legendary conquest when he sought to rebuild the glory of Tikal after a disastrous defeat on the battlefield.
-Note as well that the stipulated, exhaustive definitions won’t allow for a dilemma argument of the kind favored by some defenders of state or anarchy. These arguments depend on being able to show that one of the two options is just awful or that one is decidedly better than the other. But if the stipulated distinction is such that one of the alternatives groups together a large variety of arrangements—e.g., ancient Egypt, Athens, the Iroquois, Singapore, Andorra, North Korea, Norway—then the choice won’t be easy, and the argument won’t go through. We shall see this more clearly with the distinction to be introduced in the section that follows.
+But there is more to this scenario than just the adoption of a new art of war. From early in their history, the Maya honored offerings of blood above all others as the most sacred gifts to the gods. Individuals were often sacrificed to sanctify the construction of a new building. Indeed, the people of Cuello killed and dismembered twenty-six individuals to place under the floor of a new platform they built around 400 B.C.[244] Bloodletting regalia and caches are consistently found at Late Preclassic sites. Some early communities were also fortified, suggesting that ritual war for the taking of sacrificial victims was an important part of Maya life from a very early time. The trifurcated scrolls representing blood, which flow from the mouth of the Tlaloc image, are found on the great plaster masks of Late Preclassic Maya architecture. The symbolism and ritual of the Teotihuacanos’ war imagery fell on fertile ground.
-*** V. Anarchy and Natural States
+The Maya did more than just borrow the imagery and ritual: They adapted it to their needs. To the Maya the Tlaloc complex with its associated jaguar, bird, spearthrower, and mosaic headdress imagery (see Note 45) meant war and sacrifice above all things. The association of this war/sacrifice complex with planetary conjunctions may have been present at Teotihuacan, but we can never test for that since the Teotihuacanos did not record dates in their art. We do not know when their rituals occurred or if the murals at Teotihuacan even represent specific historical acts. For the Maya, however, the Tlaloc complex became associated with war and sacrifice timed by the apparitions of Venus and Jupiter.[245]
-Anthropologists are (or were) traditionally concerned with the early, pre-modern societies not studied by historians. Consequently, many have studied acephalous or anarchist societies and have found special significance in the emergence of hierarchical forms of social organizations, sometimes dubbed chiefdoms. These are larger communities than bands or tribes, socially stratified, with chiefs with considerable authority over large areas. The important explanatory notion here may be that of “fissioning”:
+The prominence of Teotihuacan-style imagery in the tombs and on &’the stelae of Tikal lasted only through Stormy-Sky’s reign. By A.D. 475, the rulers of Tikal abandoned this way of representing themselves and concentrated on other aspects of kingship. The intensive interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan lasted for only a hundred years, shifting thereafter to the neutral ground at Kaminaljuyu.[246] Contact between the Teotihuacanos and the lowland Maya must have continued at least until the eighth century when Teotihuacan ceased to be a major intercultural power. The first flush of intense contact is what we have observed at Tikal and it brought prestige and wealth to both parties.
-<quote>
+From the Teotihuacanos the Maya gained a sacrificial ritual and a new kind of warfare that would remain central to their religion at least until the ninth century. We know less about what Teotihuacan gained from the interchange. The end result, however, was the establishment of an international network of trade along which moved material goods and ideas. This interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica resulted in a florescence of civilized life, a cultural brilliance and intensity that exceeded even the accomplishments of the Olmec, the first great civilization to arise in Mesoamerica.
-All political systems except true states break up into similar units as part of their normal process of political activity. Hunting bands, locally autonomous food producers, and chieftaincies each build up the polity to some critical point and then send off subordinate segments to found new units or split because of conflict over succession, land shortage, failure by one segment to support another in intergroup competition or hostilities, or for some other reason. These new units grow in their turn, then split again. The state is a system specifically designed to restrain such tendencies. And this capacity creates an entirely new society.[173]
-</quote>
-The “German tribes” that challenged Rome were large chiefdoms of some complexity. For many anthropologists the transitions from anarchist communities to chiefdoms and then to “states” in something like the first Weberian sense is important. The distinction between anarchist or acephalous communities and chiefdoms and states represents a significant difference in social organization. And the modern and contemporary interest in “the origins of inequality” accentuates this distinction, given that the small acephalous communities are quite egalitarian.[174] There is much interest today in these small communities. Michael Taylor refers to them in his argument that anarchy requires community. It is a mark of acephalous societies that “there is only a minimum concentration of force and scarcely any political specialization of at all.... The are no leadership positions with formal status.”[175]
+. Star Wars in the Seventh Century
-We have identified the philosopher’s “state of nature” with anarchy. Social contract thinkers as well as many anarchists use the anarchist state of nature as the baseline for arguments for or against the state. The state of nature is also a device used by early modern philosophers, as well as classical thinkers like Plato, to lay out their conceptions of human nature, of those aspects of the human untouched or influenced by society or the state. The quarrel between Hobbes and Rousseau in the latter’s Discourse on the Inequality of Man contrasts two views of human nature; on Rousseau’s view, humans uncorrupted by society are quite different from us. However, the notion of the state of nature that’s important in this discussion is that of an alternative to the state. It is thus a counter-factual notion, a notion of what would obtain in the absence of a state: “during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe”.[176] Hobbes did have the idea of a state with many features of the modern state characterized in Section II. But we may need to rethink the idea of anarchy as being not-a-state; it may be better to think of anarchists as opposed to governments and the resulting concentration of power.
+The kingdom of Tikal throve after the conquest of Uaxactun, fulfilling the promise of its victory by becoming the largest and most prosperous Early Classic kingdom in the Maya heartland. This prosperity can be seen in the astounding proliferation of temples and public art commissioned by the ahauob of ensuing generations. The descendants of the victorious king, Great-Jaguar-Paw, launched an ambitious building program that changed the face of the city and studded the terrace in front of the North Acropolis with a forest of tree-stones. These stelae tell us something about the changing emphasis of kingship in Tikal, for the kings who reigned after Great-Jaguar-Paw’s grandson, Stormy-Sky, chose a different style of representing themselves, one that emphasized their humanity by simplifying the cluster of symbolism surrounding them.[247] In place of the old-style portraits that depicted them in full royal regalia, these rulers depicted themselves (Fig. 5:1a and b) holding simple decorated staffs in rituals celebrating period endings in the Maya calendar.[248] In this manner they removed the focus of history from the arena of personal and dynastic events, like birth, accession, and conquest, and placed it instead upon the rhythms of time and the great festival cycles by which these rhythms were celebrated.
-The philosopher’s “state of nature”, as we have noted, serves as the baseline for many assessments of states. For some social contract thinkers—Rawls would be an important exception—the relevant state of nature is specifically counter-factual, the condition in which we would find ourselves absent the state or, rather, government. Political philosophers, then, might find anarchy less interesting than a particular understanding of the state of nature. This understanding is to be found in the recent work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, and I wish to describe their account here. In their Violence and Social Order,[177] they distinguish three social orders: the foraging order, the limited-access order (or natural state), and the more recent open-access order. Their focus is on the second and third, as the first occurred ten millennia ago and is not replicated significantly anywhere since. The choice of the label “natural state” may suggest that it should replace the typical interpretations of the “state of nature”.[178]
+[[][Fig. 5:1]]
-The natural state is natural because, for most of the last ten thousand years, it has been virtually the only form of society larger than a few hundred people that has been capable of securing physical order and managing violence.[179]
+After thirty years of depicting themselves in this style, the rulers of Tikal began experimenting again, encouraging their artisans to expand the frontiers of tradition into fresh and innovative areas. These artists created new styles by an imaginative combination of elements both old and new. Around 9.4.0.0.0 (A.D. 514), for example, the manner of depicting kings on stelae switched to a front view carved in a relief deep enough to model the king’s face three-quarters in the round. Sculptors also experimented with formats that placed the king’s parents on either side of the stela (Fig. 5:1c) in a modern echo of Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece, Stela 31. Old themes, like the bound captive lying at the feet of the king (Fig. 5:Id), returned to stelae compositions. Eventually the styles for representing kings took their inspiration from even earlier times, creating the Maya version of the adage “Everything old is new again.” In 557, the twenty-first successor, Double-Bird, commissioned a monument in a style that was popular during Tikal’s first flush of conquest glory, depicting himself in shallow relief, standing profile to the viewer (Fig. 5:5). Double-Bird’s monument, Stela 17, holds a unique place in the commemorative art of Tikal. It was the last monument erected before a 130-year period of silence fell upon the inscribed history of this great capital. The reason for this long silence was the conquest of the city by a new kingdom that had grown to maturity m the region to the southeast.
-Their theory is explanatory and focuses on the ways in which societies secure order, especially the control of violence. Their distinctions and conceptual framework are meant to help us understand the ways in which different forms of social organization work and how the prosperous and free open-access orders can come about and be maintained.
+Piecing together the true story of Tikal’s two centuries of cultural innovation is a difficult and painstaking task. Many of the existing stelae and art objects were deliberately effaced or smashed by the conquerors in the time following the erection of Stela 17. Even in such a shattered form, however, one can see the extraordinary beauty and power of Tikal’s artistic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the written history that has come to us from this period is as poor and spotty as the visual one. Many of the texts that survived the destructive frenzy of Tikal’s nemesis treat only of the period-ending celebrations that had become the focus of Tikal’s ritual life. Although the records of the actors who entered and left the stage of history during this period are sketchy, they still provide at least a partial account of the kings who held Tikal’s throne.[249] The kings we currently know from this period are as follows:
-Societies must secure order and specifically contain and limit violence. North, Wallis, and Weingast focus on the ways this is done:
+| <strong>Date</strong> | <strong>Name</strong> | # | <strong>Monuments</strong> | <strong>Date</strong> |
+| | <strong>Staff Stela</strong> | | | |
+| 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar | 12<sup>th</sup> | St. 9, 13 | 475 |
+| | Mah-Kina-Chan | 13<sup>th</sup> | Pot, St. 8? | |
+| 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw-Skull | 14<sup>th</sup> | St. 7 | 488 |
+| 9.3.O.O.O | | | St. 3,15,27 | 495 |
+| 9.4.0.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 6 | 514 |
+| | <strong>Frontal Style</strong> | | | |
+| 9.3.9.13.3 | birth, Lady of Tikal | ??? | St. 23 | 504 |
+| 9.3.16.18.4 | accession, ?? | .??? | St. 23 | 511 |
+| 9.4.3.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 25 | 517 |
+| 9.4.13.0.0 | Curl-Head | 19<sup>th</sup> | St. 10, 12 | 527 |
+| 9.5.O.O.O? | ??? | | St. 14 | 534 |
+| | <strong>Profile Style</strong> | | | |
+| 9.5.3.9.15 | Double-Bird | 21<sup>st</sup> | St. 17 | 537 |
-<quote>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-49.jpg 70f][The Sequence of the History of the Caracol-Tikal-Naranjo Wars]]
-In most societies, political, economic, religious, and military powers are created through institutions that structure human organizations and relationships. These institutions simultaneously give individuals control over resources and social functions and, by doing so, limit the use of violence by shaping the incentives faced by individuals and groups who have access to violence.[180]
-</quote>
-They distinguish “natural” or “limited-access” societies from “open-access” ones. “Natural states use the political system to regulate economic competition and create economic rents; the rents order social relations, control violence, and establish social cooperation.”[181] By contrast, beginning in early to mid-nineteenth century, a few open-access societies emerge. These “regulate economic and political competition in a way that uses the entry and competition to order social relations.”
+| Maya date | A.D. | Tikal | Naranjo | Dos Pilas | Caracol | Calakmul |
+| 9.5.3.9.15 | 12/31/537 | Double-Bird acts (accedes) | |
+| 9.5.12.0.4 | 5/7/546 | | Ruler I accedes |
+| 1Q1 7 | 4/1R/SS1 | | | | Lord Water accedes |
+| 9.6.2.1.11 | 4/11/556 | | | | ax-war against Tikal |
+| 9.6.3.9.15 | 9/17/557 | Double-Bird’s last date |
+| 9.Ó.8.4.2 | 5/1/562 | | | | star-war at Tikal |
+| 9.9.4.16.2 | 3/9/618 | | | | Lord K3” 11 accedes |
+| 9.95.13.8 | 1/9/619 | | | | | lord acts at Naranjo |
+| 9.9.13.4.4 | 5/28/626 | | | | sacrifice of “he of Naranjo” |
+| 9.9.14.3.5 | 5/4/627 | | | | bailgame and sacrifice |
+| 9.9.17.11.14 | 10/4/630 | | | | death of Naranjo lord |
+| 9.9.18.16.3 | 12/27/631 | | | | star war against Naranjo |
+| 9.10.3.2.12 | 3/4/636 | | | | star war against Naranjo |
+| 9.10.4.16.2 | 11/24/637 | | | | 1 katun of rule, Lord Kan II |
+| 9.10.10.0.0 | 12/6/642 | | victory stair dedicated by Caracol |
+| 9.10.12.11.2 | 7/5/645 | | | Flint-Sky-God K accedes |
+| 9.10.16.16.19 10/9/649 | | | | | | Jaguar-Paw born |
+| 9.11.11.9.17 | 3/2/664 | | | capture of Tah-Mo’ |
+| 9.12.9.17.16 | 5/6/682 | Ah Cacaw accedes |
+| 9.12.10.5.12 | 8/30/682 | | Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau arrives from Dos Pilas |
+| 9.12.13.17.7 | 4/6/686 | | | | Jaguar-Paw accedes |
+| 9.12.15.13.7 | 1/6/688 | | Smoking-Squirrel born |
+| 9.13.0.0.0 | 3/18/692 | katun ending and Stela 30 twin pyramid complex |
+| 9.13.1.3.19 | 5/31/693 | | Smoking-Squirrel accedes |
+| 9.13.1.4.19 | 6/20/693 | | Kinichil-Cab captured |
+| 9.13.1.9.5 | 9/14/693 | | smoke-shell event |
+| 9.13.1.13.14 | 12/12/693 | | smoke-shell event |
+| 9.13.2.16.0 | 2/1/695 | | war against Ucanal |
+| 9.13.3.7.18 | 8/8/695 | Ah-Cacaw captures Jaguar-Paw of El Perú | | | | Jaguar-Paw captured |
+| 9.13.3.8.11 | 8/21/695 | sacrifice of captives |
+| 9.13.3.9.18 | 9/17/695 | dedication of Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rituals |
+| 9.13.3.13.15 | 12/3/695 | sacrificial (war?) ritual with Ox-Ha-Te of El Peru |
+| 9.13.6.2.0 | 3/27/698 | | | Shield-God K accedes |
+| 9.13.6.4.17 | 5/23/698 | | smoke-shell event with Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal |
+| 9.13.6.10.4 | 9/7/698 | | smoke-shell event with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal |
+| 9.13.7.3.8 | 4/19/699 | | sacrificial rite with Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau |
+| 9.13.10.0.0 | 1/26/702 | | Smoking-Squirrel dedicates stela |
+| | | | and displays Shield-Jaguar in sacrificial rites |
+| 9.13.18.4.16 | 3/23/710 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Yaxha |
+| 9.13.18.9.15 | 6/28/710 | | sacrifice of Yaxha captive |
+| 9.13.19.6.3 | 4/12/711 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Sacnab |
+| 9.14.0.0.0 | 12/5/711 | | Venus and period-ending ceremonies |
+| | | Stela 16 twin-pyramid complex |
+| 9.14.0.10.0 | 6/18/711 | summer solstice and Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal in sacrificial rite |
-A natural state manages the problem of violence by forming a dominant coalition that limits access to valuable resources—land, labor, and capital—or access to and control of valuable activities—such as trade, worship, and education—to elite groups. The creation of rents[182] through limiting access provides the glue that holds the coalition together, enabling elite groups to make credible commitments to one another to support the regime, perform their functions, and refrain from violence.[183]
+While we know little of the personal history of these rulers, they did leave their permanent mark upon the city in the form of the magnificent buildings raised under their patronage. Much of this construction took place in the sacred precincts of the North Acropolis. One of the most extraordinary projects commissioned there was the new version of Temple 5D-33—2<sup>nd</sup> (Fig. 5:2), a temple that covered the tomb of the great ruler Stormy-Sky.[250] During the ensuing centuries, this magnificent new temple served as the central stage front of the face of the North Acropolis, which looked out onto the Great Plaza to the south. It was an important symbol of kingship during the middle period of Tikal’s history and the backdrop for all dynastic rituals conducted within the Great Plaza.
-Members of the dominant coalition benefit in different ways from these arrangements. They are able more easily to make credible commitments (e.g., agreements, contracts), as these will be enforced (if necessary) by the third-party agency of the coalition, enabling them to set up mutually advantageous organizations (e.g., businesses, associations, schools, churches) more easily. These natural states offer limited access to the capacity (or legal power) to form organizations. So doing creates rents for the members of the dominant coalition, and it also enhances the value of their privileges by making them more productive.[184]
+In contrast to the novelty of the stelae of this era, Temple 5D-33-2<sup>nd</sup> was a model of tradition. The great plaster masks that surmounted its pyramid and its temple walls restated the symbolism of the Late Preclassic period. This symbolic message was similar to the one we saw on Group H at Uaxactun, a cosmology based upon the Sacred Mountains rather than the arch of the sun and Venus.[251] The lowest masks on Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> are Witz-Mountain Monsters, whose mouths have been rendered as caves (Fig. 5:2). The middle masks represent more Witz Monsters. These have small, severed human heads and blood scrolls (or perhaps maize) emerging from their summits. The masks on the very top level of the temple depict dragons in the shape of what is probably Venus, representing the front head of the Cosmic Monster. Vines, representing the forests of the world, sprout from the top of these open-mouthed heads.[252] As the king performed his sacred rituals, this facade, like the great mask assemblages of Preclassic Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun discussed in earlier chapters, enveloped him in the ancient, orthodox, and transcendent cosmology of the Maya people.
-A key idea in the theory advanced by North, Wallis, and Weingast is that “how a social order structures organizations determines the pattern of social interaction with a society.”[185] We take for granted that an adult citizen may start a business, form a corporation, start a club or a church, and the like. In our societies, access to these forms of organization is open to all and not controlled by the ruling elites. Access is open in this sense. In natural states, (1) access to organizational form is limited. In addition, (2) trade is controlled (“Natural states always control who trades, and may also control the places they trade and the prices at which they trade.”).[186] The authors distinguish between fragile, basic, and mature natural states. Given that social orders of any size larger than a few hundred for the last two millennia have been natural states, there is great variety.
+Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> was but one building in a rash of construction (Fig. 5:3) that continued into the sixth century. This renovation took place over a period of seventy years under the direction of ten successive rulers, many of whom sat the throne for only a short time.[253] The reason for the brief length of their reigns is not known, but it is possible that what we see here is the passing of the kingship from sibling to sibling at the death of a brother.
-By contrast, open-access social orders allow access to all. And they are much wealthier—by historical standards remarkably wealthy—and much more peaceful and stable. Most readers of this essay will live in such societies. These social orders will have
+Beginning around 9.4.0.0.0, these rulers reworked the summit of the North Acropolis into a pattern of eight buildings, a unique pattern that all future Tikal kings would honor and maintain. One of the most lasting innovations of this time, however, was the twin-pyramid complex, whose prototype was erected in the center of the East Plaza.[254] This new type of architecture, with its uncarved pillars and lack of focus on personal history, facilitated the celebration of period-ending rites, a practice that had been initiated at Tikal by Curl-Snout on Stela 18. His successors sustained that practice, developing what would henceforth be an architectural hallmark of this city and a principal focus of Tikal’s festival cycle for the rest of its history.[255]
-open access for organizations of all types, market economies that create a comparative advantage that generate a major portion of the society’s wealth, and competitive elections with every citizen enfranchised. Other institutions support rights, such as free press, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and conscience, and the right to assemble. All open access orders have some form of division of powers and multiple veto points.... All open access orders also have judicial and bureaucratic mechanisms for enforcing citizen rights and contracts. And finally, they all have constitutions (whether official documents or small ‘c’ constitutions) that provide for the limit condition—limiting the stakes of power so that everything is not up for grabs in the next election.[187]
+Suddenly, amid the exuberant brilliance of sixth-century life, the fortunes of Tikal’s twenty-first king took a disastrous turn for the worse. He and his kingdom fell victim to a new and dangerous dynasty that had been on the rise throughout the fifth century in the forests to the southeast of Tikal. The bellicose rulers of this new kingdom, called Caracol by archaeologists, would take not only Tikal but the entire Petén region by storm, eventually controlling the politics of the Classic Maya heartland for more than a century.[256]
-Open-access orders provide unrestrained “entry into economic, political, religious, and educational activities”, and they provide support for these organizational form (e.g., contract enforcement). The rule of law is enforced impartially, and exchange is impersonal.[188] The last may be appreciated by contrast with limited-access orders, in which access is limited to some, or is partial and personal; rules are “identity rules”, the application and enforcement of which depend on the individual’s identity (e.g., membership of a class or of a ruling group).[189] The governments of open-access orders “provide services and benefits to citizens and organizations on an impersonal basis; that is without reference to the social standing of the citizens or the identity and political connections of an organization’s principals.”[190] Open-access orders also depend on shared beliefs and attitudes of members that emphasize equality of status, inclusion, and sharing.[191] The organizations of civil society help constitute and stabilize the social order.
+ Caracol Goes on the Rampage
-The account developed by North, Wallis, and Weingast is, as the subtitle indicates, “a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history”. They wish to understand how the different types of social orders maintain themselves and develop, and how our open-access orders emerge from natural states. I needed to outline major parts of the theory, but our interest here is primarily in the account of natural states incorporated in the theory. North, Wallis, and Weingast characterize these states as “natural”, as we noted earlier, because most social orders for the past two millennia have been of this kind.
+The portion of Caracol’s dynastic history that survives in its inscriptions begins in A.D. 495; but the protagonist of our story, a king named Lord Water, did not accede to the throne until April 18, A.D. 553 (9.5.19.1.2). Lord Water recorded part of his personal history on Stelae 6 and 14; but until archaeologists discovered a new altar in recent excavations at Caracol, we had no idea what a deadly and pivotal role this ruler played in the drama at Tikal.
-Too often, social scientists [and philosophers] in open access societies implicitly rely on the convenient assumption that the societies they live in are the historical norm. In contrast, we argue that the default social outcome is the natural state, not open access. Until two hundred years ago, there were no open access orders; even today, 85 percent of the world’s population live in limited access orders. The dominant pattern of social organization in recorded human history is the natural state. We use that appellation rather than the more literal limited access order to remind us that ... the natural state emerged at a durable form of larger social organization five to ten millennia ago. The natural state has lasted so long because it aligns the interests of powerful individuals to forge a dominant coalition in such a way that limits violence and makes sustained social interaction possible on a larger scale.[192]
+The impact of Lord W’ater upon the Maya world was of such proportions that even before the discovery and translation of the key texts, archaeologists and epigraphers had detected the presence of a cataclysmic pattern. The modern story of this history began in 1950 when the great Mayanist, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, published her seminal study of “style” in Maya sculpture.[257] Noting an absence of monuments between the years 9.5.0.0.0 (A.D. 534) and 9.8.0.0.0 (A.D. 593), she proposed that there must have been a hiatus[258] in Maya civilization during this time. She also noted that this hiatus corresponded to the change in ceramics styles, from the Early Classic period to the Late Classic. Another great Mayanist and a colleague of Proskouriakoff’s, Gordon Willey,[259] also suggested that the Maya experienced a regional crisis at this time—a crisis so great it foreshadowed in scale and impact the great final collapse that would come in the ninth century.
-This account of limited-access orders is important for our discussion of the distinction between anarchy and state and of their comparative values. I have identified anarchy, the condition of social life without rulers or concentrated political power, with the philosopher’s “state of nature”, the condition in which we find ourselves when there is no state. This condition serves as the baseline for evaluation of our current situation, whatever it is, very much as anarchy serves as a baseline for anarchists’ condemnation of states. But suppose the real alternative to our states, open-access orders, is not anarchy but limited-access orders. In the absence of the kind of state that exists in the US or France or Germany, that is the condition we’d find ourselves in absent our current political system. That is, were our state to crumble or vanish, we would find ourselves not in anarchy but in a limited-access society or natural state.[193]
+Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s second great contribution to Maya studies, the “historical hypothesis,”[260] contracted the time span of the hiatus somewhat. Up until the publication of this hypothesis in the 1960s, the prevailing view of the Classical Maya was that they were benign calendar priests, peacefully recording endless cycles of time on stelae whose written texts would never ultimately be translated. Proskouriakoff proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these texts not only could be read but were the history of kings and kingdoms. The retrospective histories made possible by her discovery filled in some of the gaps in time at various sites. Nevertheless, archaeologists working at Tikal still have found no stela to fill the gap between Stela 17 dated at 9.6.3.9.15 (September 17, 557) and Stela 30 dated at 9.13.0.0.0 (March 18, 692). Moreover, as we have pointed out earlier, stelae erected before this Tikal hiatus were deliberately effaced by abrading or shattering the stone.[261] Obviously, someone intentionally removed this history from the record. We suspect now that the culprit was none other than Lord Water, the rapacious king of Caracol, who opened a campaign of military conquest by attacking his huge neighbor Tikal.
-If one thinks of the philosopher’s state of nature counter-factually, as the condition we would find ourselves in in the absence of the institutional structures of present society, then it is not anarchy but some kind of limited-access society or natural state. The original anarchy/state distinction is not, we have argued, exhaustive or virtually exhaustive. Equally important, it is not all that useful. There are many alternatives to our kind of state; our modern states were preceded by independent cities (and leagues of cities), feudal social structures, empires, Christendom—“natural states” of various kinds. The distinction between limited- and open-access societies may be more useful for explaining and evaluating our liberal, republican states. The concept of anarchy is of course useful for understanding various forms of “spontaneous order”, but these forms depend on social order and the limitation of force and violence, the security of property and of contract, and thus the general frameworks offered by institutions and law.
+The first clue to his role as Tikal’s nemesis came in 1986 when archaeologists working at Caracol excavated a ballcourt.[262] On its central axis, they discovered a round marker (Fig. 5:4) with a long 128-glyph text circling its upper surface. The text on this “altar” begins with the birth of the king who commissioned the monument, Lord Kan II, and tells of the accession of his ancestor, Lord Water, on April 18, A.D. 553. From our point of view, however, the most important information on this marker is the text recording Lord Water’s aggression against Tikal. This text tells us that on April 11, 556 (9.6.2.1.11), following the end of Katun 6, Caracol conducted an “ax-war” action “in the land of” the ahau of Tikal.[263]
-Perhaps, as I have suggested, it may be more interesting to think of anarchy as the absence of all forms of government or concentration of power. Anarchy in this sense may be a utopian ideal, perhaps of a world which may be possible only in the future, when the “state withers away”.[194] If anarchy is the absence of all forms of government, then it becomes clear how utopian it is. Anarchist or semi-anarchist communities have existed only in certain contexts. Early human history featured relatively anarchic foraging societies. More recently, a variety of anarchic or semi-anarchic communities have existed, some for multiple generations or even centuries, inside modern states (e.g., kibbutzim in Israel, Amish communities in the US) or religious communities in the Middle Ages (e.g., monasteries), all dependent on protection or other support from larger political frameworks. Anarchist communities are vulnerable to conquest, of course, and need the protection of states or empires. Our world is much more populated than it was at earlier times. Anarchy as a social order does not work on a large scale. The fact that there has never been an anarchist society larger than several thousand is telling. Anarchy is not a serious alternative to our states and social systems; the attempt to build anarchist orders now would almost certainly lead to forms of limited-access social orders.
+We know, however, that this initial “ax war” wasn’t fatal to Tikal. Shortly thereafter, on September 17, 557, the city’s ruler, Double-Bird, raised his Stela 17 to commemorate a one-katun anniversary—perhaps of his own accession (Fig. 5:5). Those rituals, however, were the last recorded in the public history of Tikal for a very long time. As the scribe of Altar 21 at Caracol exults, a “star-at-Tikal” war event, usually lethal to the loser, took place five years later, on May 1, 562 (9.6.8.4.2).[264] The tables had been turned. Caracol had mastered the same Tlaloc-Venus war that had defeated Uaxactun two centuries earlier. The long darkness at Tikal had begun.
-*** VI. Conclusion
+The correspondence of Caracol’s claim of victory to the all-out destruction at Tikal shows us this claim was not a fabrication. Lord Water’s war had indeed broken the back of Tikal’s pride, independence, and prosperity. We are not sure, however, to what extent, or for how long, Caracol was able to maintain political dominance over its huge rival.
-I have argued against the assumption made by some that anarchy and state exhaust, or virtually exhaust, the alternatives. Defenses of state or anarchy that make this assumption turn out to rely on false assumptions. Exhaustive distinctions can be constructed—e.g., state vs non-state or everything else—but they merely sweep variety under the rug. There is no persuasive dilemma argument for the state or for anarchy. Modern states have many attributes, and there are many “not-a-state” or at least “not-quite-a-state” alternatives to them.
+Present archaeology does offer us certain clues to Caracol’s ubiquitous presence in the lives of Tikal’s citizens. For example, Tikal’s art and funerary practices exhibit influence from the region of Caracol[265] beginning with this period. We can also see, as we mentioned above, that DoubleBird and his dynasty ceased to erect stelae and other monuments, and that the building of temples and pyramids slowed down. We can speculate as to the reasons for this. Double-Bird had no doubt been captured and killed, his dynasty ended, and his remaining ahauob cut off from the vast trade routes that provided their wealth. We can vividly see the effects of this impoverishment in their burial practices. The well-stocked tombs of the Tikal nobility gave way to meager caricatures of their former glory, lacking both the quantity and quality of earlier grave goods. Tikal’s oppressors permitted only one tomb of wealth—Burial 195, the resting place of the twenty-second successor of the Tikal dynasty. Never permitted to erect public monuments, this man was at least allowed the privilege of a rich burial and a dignified exit to the Otherworld, perhaps to offset the humiliation of being denied his place in history.
-At the end of the quotation in the first section of this chapter, Jonathan Wolff asks, “After all, what real alternative to the state do we have?” We may agree with him here, even if we are quite critical of states. But there are various kinds of states. The ones in which most readers of this essay reside are open-access societies. If the real alternatives to our liberal societies are limited-access orders, then the best states look even better. This is not Hobbes’s argument, as he was in effect defending limited-access orders of a special kind, with rulers possessing classical sovereignty. But the argument is similar: limited-access orders are not very attractive, except to the few on top, and even these individuals are not secure—depending on the kind of natural state they inhabit.
+Lord Water enjoyed an unusually long and prosperous reign—prosperous for Caracol at least. After forty-six years as king, he died and left the throne to the eldest of two brothers, who were presumably his sons.[266] Born in 575, the older brother became king on June 26, 599, and reigned lor nineteen uneventful years. The younger brother, however, was a king in the mold of his father. After acceding on March 9, 618, this young ruler took his father’s name as his own and then set out to prove that the earlier victories of Lord Water had not been historical accidents. He launched a campaign that would eventually result in the defeat of Naranjo, a major kingdom located to the east of Tikal.
-Our open-access societies can be improved. Some improvements may involve protecting and strengthening the organizations of civil society where they may be vulnerable or weak. Or they may involve something new. It is hard, of course, to divine the latter. We can say, or at least I would say, that what is feasible depends on path-dependent features of the society in question: on the size of the population, on the history of the people and the culture, on a variety of geopolitical considerations, and on the shifting state of nature or “natural equilibrium”. What may work in Norway or Japan may not in the US or the United Kingdom. These path-dependent constraints are themes for another occasion.
+Lord Kan II recorded the history of his wars on Stela 3 in his own capital and on the Hieroglyphic Stairs erected in the capital of his defeated enemy, Naranjo. The earliest events of Kan H’s reign still resist decipherment, but we do have allusions to a strategic alliance he formed soon after becoming king. On 9.9.5.13.8 (January 9, 619), we read that Lord Kan II performed an important but unidentified action in “the land of” an ahau of Calakmul (Fig. 5:6a), a huge kingdom lying to the north of Tikal within sight of the abandoned mountain-temples of El Mirador.[267] Whatever this action may have been, its declaration marked the beginning of an bond between Kan II and the kings of Calakmul that would prove fateful for both Tikal and Naranjo in the katuns to come. Through this alliance, and others like it, the king of Caracol would surround his intended victims with a ring of deadly enemies.
-*** Acknowledgements
+Calakmul was not new to the stage of Maya history. The city had monuments dating from the Early Classic period and was still going stiong by the Late Classic. Calakmul was most probably the inheritor of El Mirador s power in the north and was a long term rival of Tikal.
-Talks on this topic were given at the Southern Economic Association meetings, Washington D.C., December 2017; the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Conference, New Orleans,
+he firs, major mention of a Calakmul king in the interkingdom politics of the times appears in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, a city to the west of Tikal. A passage found on Lintel 35 of the Early Classic Structure 12 records that a vassal lord of the king of Calakmul participated in a ritual at Yaxchilan on 9.5.2.10.6 (January 16, 537). The king of Calakmul is named with a Cauac-in-hand-Ix glyph, but we shall refer to him hereafter simply as “Cu-Ix.”[268]
-March 2018; and the Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland. I am grateful to the commentators and audiences, as well as to John Wallis, for helpful comments and discussions.
+The name Cu-Ix also appears on Stela 25 at Naranjo, accompanied by the date 9.5.12.0.4 (May 7, 546). This was the most important date in the life of Naranjo’s king, Ruler I, for he repeatedly celebrated anniversaries of it throughout his lifetime. We have presumed that the event was his accession, but whatever it was, the text on Stela 25 records that it took place a cab “in the territory” of Cu-Ix, the Ahau of Calakmul. This text suggests that the Calakmul king was important, if not instrumental, in the installation of Ruler I as the king of Naranjo. Certainly, these two references demonstrate the far-flung influence of the Calakmul king. They also suggests an envelopment strategy against Tikal involving Calakmul in the north, Caracol in the south, Naranjo in the east, and, perhaps, Yaxchilan in the west.[269]
+If Naranjo ever was allied with Calakmul, however, that alliance did not last long. We do not know what happened between Ruler 1 of Naranjo and his erstwhile ally at Calakmul; but we have evidence that in later years, the kings of Caracol felt free to skirmish with Naranjo without endangering their own alliance with Calakmul. Thus, on May 28, 626, Lord Water’s second son, the rapacious Lord Kan II, launched a full-scale campaign against Naranjo. He began his military aggression by committing what we can only broadly interpret as an aggressive or sacrificial action against a lord designated in the text of Caracol Stela 3 simply as “he of Naranjo” (Fig. 5:6b). On that day, Venus was at its stationary point as Morningstar,[270] a position believed to be favorable for victory in battle.
-[151] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic 1974) 4. Original emphasis.
+On May 4, 627, one year after the initial battle, Lord Kan II staged his second confrontation with Naranjo. The result was again a war or sacrificial ritual, but this time events took place in his own city (Fig. 5:6c). This event was also commemorated on the stairway text at Naranjo, but here it was clearly referred to as a ballgame (Fig. 5:6d).[271] Although we do not know exactly what was meant by “ballgame” in this context, we do know that the game was often used as a ritual for the disposition of captives. The person recorded here as the “player” (read “captive”) did not die, however, for another three years. His name can be found next to a glyph recording his death on October 4, 630 (Fig. 5:6e). We can’t be sure, but we think this person was Ruler I, the king who had been installed by the Calakmul king in A.D. 546 (9.5.12.0.4). Since the inscription of Naranjo Stela 27 describes Ruler I as “five-katun-ahau,”[272] we surmise that he was over eighty years old when he died.
-[152] John Rawls is representative of this tradition: “the basic structure of a society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies.... Now I assume that the boundaries of these schemes are given by the notion of a self-contained national community.” A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1971) 8, 457.
+Whether Lord Kan II was recording Ruler Ts death or that of some other powerful noble in his account of these events, the end result was the same. The death of this individual created a power imbalance at Naranjo which invited the next stage of Caracol’s war. In the following year, on December 27, 631, when Venus as the Eveningstar first appeared in the skies over Naranjo,[273] Lord Kan II attacked that kingdom and decisively defeated its hapless warriors (Fig. 5:7a-b).
-[153] A. John Simmons, Political Philosophy (New York, NY: OUP 2008) 18. In his own work, Simmons himself does not endorse the distinction we are examining here.
+Why did Lord Kan II of Caracol choose Naranjo as his next target after his victory over Tikal? Ironically, Ruler I of Naranjo may himself have been responsible for this state of affairs. After Tikal was defeated and its nobility stripped of their wealth and influence, the resulting power vacuum may have tempted the king of Naranjo to betray his former allies. He apparently reached out to Tikal in friendship and alliance, involving himself somehow in the politics of that kingdom.
-[154] Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Oxford: OUP 1996) 7, 37.
+Behind all these gestures of friendship, however, might linger something even more intriguing: a love story. Sometime in the early seventh century, nobles of Tikal mourned the death of a woman of high rank and special status. This Tikal noblewoman was buried with extraordinary pomp and honor. The Tikal ahauob cut her resting place into the living rock, down under the central axis of Structure 5G-8 in the suburbs of their benighted city. The masons then vaulted the chamber with stone in the manner of the great ancestors of the North Acropolis, the only other people of Tikal to have been honored with vaulted tombs. Their parting gift to the spirit of this woman was a single beautiful polychrome bowl with painted images of the Celestial Bird (Fig. 5:8). On its rim is a text recording that its original owner was Ruler I of Naranjo. How it came to Tikal we do not know, but its presence in the tomb of this woman suggests she had some special association with Naranjo, either through marriage or through the exchange of gifts. The occasion symbolized by this bowl may have called down the wrath of Caracol on the aged king of Naranjo.
-[155] F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: CUP 1909) 143—44. Maitland notes that “If we now speak of the feudal system, it should be with a full understanding that the feudalism of France differs radically from the feudalism of England, that the feudalism of the thirteenth is very different from that of the eleventh century.” Many historians today think this an understatement.
+Neither of the accounts of this “star-war” event found at Caracol and Naranjo actually records the name of the king of Naranjo as a captive. This deletion does not prove, however, that the victim was not the king. We know for certain that some Naranjo notable was eventually sacrificed in a rather gruesome victory celebration which took place in the city of Caracol’s ally, Calakmul. The Hieroglyphic Stairs the defeated Naran-janos were forced to build as a subjugation monument record that a nasty follow-up event spelled k’uxah[274] (“to torture” or perhaps “to eat”) was perpetrated upon this individual “in the land of” the king of Calakmul (Fig. 5:7c). For the time being, Calakmul would benefit from its alliance with the top dog, Lord Kan II; but in the end, as we shall see, it would pay dearly for its role in this deadly game of war and sacrifice.
-[156] The phrase is from S. E. Finer’s monumental The History of Government, 3 vols. (Oxford: OUP 1997) 2: 868.
+This victory seems to have temporarily sated the ambitions of Lord Kan II, for he neither attacked Naranjo nor took any more of its lords hostage for the next five years. Instead, he was content to watch and wait for Venus to once again reach an optimum battle position. On 9.10.3.2.12 (March 4, 636), such a favorable position occurred. When the Morningstar was fifteen days and .6° past its maximum elongation, he attacked Naranjo yet again. This time when he recorded his participation in the battle, he prominently featured his personal capture of a lord named 18-Rabbit (Fig. 5;7d). Ironically, 18-Rabbit gained his own kind of immortality by being the victim.
-[157] See F. L. Ganshof, Qu’est-ce que la féodalité? 5<sup>th</sup> ed. (Paris: Tallendier 1982) 155; Finer 2: 921.
+A little over a year later, on 9.10.4.16.2 (November 24, 637), Lord Kan II completed the final act in this long drama by celebrating the completion of his first katun of reign (Fig. 5:7e). Adding insult to injury, he recorded these rites not at his home city but at Naranjo on its subjugation monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs. This ceremony must have rubbed a great deal of salt into the wound of Naranjo’s defeat.
-[158] Finer 2: 869, quoting Joseph R. Strayer and Dana Carlton Munro: “The word that sums ups feudal concepts is dominium or lordship. Lordship was not sovereignty, though it gave the right to command; it was not ownership, though it gave the right to exploit. It may be best defined as the possession of incomplete and shared rights of government and ownership. No lord had complete control over his subjects or over his lands, his rights overlapped with those of other men. [.] This division of authority was inevitable, since feudal government was based on private relationships. [.] no feudal contract could give a lord a monopoly of political power.”
+Caracol’s rampage through the Peten changed the lives of noble individuals in many proud and ancient cities. Lord Kan II and his allies no doubt claimed many valuable goods from the losers as tribute. Defeated cities were forced to give up precious commodities like obsidian, shell currencies, heirlooms, craftsmen, handwoven cloth, and highly skilled artists. This tribute was the key to the domination Caracol held over this region. Because the Maya had no standing armies, conquering troops could not be garrisoned as watchdogs in a defeated city. But such policing was unnecessary. A city stripped of its wealth and its king could rarely strike back at its enemies. Loss of prestige resulted in far more than humiliation. It meant waning or destroyed political influence and the inability to recruit population and goods from the hinterlands. Without these people and goods, a city could not hope to prosper and grow.
-[159] See Marc Bloch, La société féodale, 2 vols. (Paris: Albert Michel 1939) 1: bk. 2, ch. 1.
+Perhaps one of the most devastating results of defeat, however, was the stripping away of all public art. When Caracol effaced the monuments of its enemies and impoverished them to the point where they could erect no others, it was taking away their most cherished possession—history. Both Tikal and Naranjo suffered terribly in this sense. In the 130 years after the defeat of Tikal, only one king, the twenty-second, left his name in the inscribed history of the kingdom, and this not in a public space. We would not have known of him at all but for the pottery and wood texts deposited in his tomb, Burial 195, perhaps in defiance of Caracol’s rule.
-[160] This principle can be, and was, interpreted in different ways. See Finer 1: 273, Finer 2: 833—88.
+The lords of the allied city of Uaxactun also suffered in the wake of Caracol’s victories, while no doubt appreciating the bitter irony of the situation. 1 ikal had been undone by the very same Tlaloc-Venus war that the brothers Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had waged against Uaxactun 180 years earlier: The victors of that conflict were hoisted by the same petard of warfare they had introduced among the Maya. Yet rather than being able to celebrate the irony of the situation, the Uaxactun nobility, as part of Tikal’s hegemony, found themselves deeply affected by this defeat as well. With the demise of the royal dynasty at Tikal, Uaxactun also lost the kingship, and the public ritual life of that city virtually stopped. Its leaders ceased erecting monuments in 9.6.0.0.0[275] and did not resume the practice for two hundred years.
-[161] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, NY: OUP 1946 [1919]) 78. Original emphasis.
+At Naranjo, the impact of defeat was shorter-lived, but no less dramatic. On December 6, 642 (9.10.10.0.0), the victorious Caracol ruler lorced the defeated people of Naranjo to dedicate the Hieroglyphic Stairs, a monument that glorified his triumph over them. This kind of stairway not only celebrated defeat and victory, but was used to dispose of captives, who were trussed into bundles and rolled down it after sacrifice in the ballgame. In their stairway, the surviving elite of Naranjo had a constant reminder of the hegemony of Caracol. That disgraceful monument was the last written record placed in public space for the next forty years.
-[162] See Wolff, Introduction 39; Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: CUP 1982) 4—5; Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York, NY: Harper 1970) 1—3; Crispin Sartwell, Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY 2008) 28—33; Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? (Farnham: Ashgate 2008) vii, 65, 133; Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge: CUP 2013) 1n3.
+As the katuns ground slowly by, new lords bent on revenge and on rebuilding the reputations of their cities lit sacred fires on the altars of the Peten to lighten the pall of disaster over Tikal and Naranjo. Unlike Smoking-Frog of Tikal, whose triumphs at Uaxactun inspired the admiration and imagination of an entire region, Lord Kan II and his Calakmul allies never succeeded in quelling the hatred and consolidating the submission of their enemies. In the short term, their failed experiment in empire building fired the ambitions of new challengers from the Petexbatun region to the south. These new lords from the kingdom of Dos Pilas would eventually pull Naranjo up from the ashes of defeat and jar Tikal into taking back its own. In wreaking vengeance against the former victors, however, the lords of Dos Pilas would seal the Maya doom even as they rejuvenated the dynasts of the defeated kingdoms. In the long run, the Maya struggle to forge a political unity powerful enough to match their shared vision of divine power would break on the pride of kings and their thirst for vengeance.
-[163] “State,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, Feb. 15, 2019) [[https://en.wikipedia.org][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)]] (Feb. 22, 2019).
+ Dos Pilas Joins the Party
-[164] Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization [Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft], trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York, NY: OUP 1947) 156 (bracketed section numbers added).
+In an era of great kings who strove to stretch their power beyond traditional boundaries, the long and illustrious career of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas stands out as one of most remarkable of his times. His home was a hilltop city located near Lake Petexbatún and the Pasión River in a region that had played a significant role in Maya cultural history since the Middle Preclassic Period. Here, in the middle of the seventh century. Flint-Sky-God K declared a new kingdom, perhaps carrying with it the hopes of the house of Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal. This new kingdom, Dos Pilas, shared its Emblem Glyph with that ancient kingdom; and it is possible that its ruling family was an offshoot of the Tikal royal lineage— highborn individuals who left Tikal sometime after its downfall and found their way to this new region.[276]
-[165] Christopher Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge: CUP 1998) 45—6. Some small changes have been made to the original text.
+Flint-Sky-God K was a master strategist in the game of politics and domination. He declared kingship at Dos Pilas on 9.10.12.11.2 (July 5, 645) and immediately began to consolidate his power with a series of marriage alliances with nearby kingdoms. He married a woman from the kingdom of Itzan, who bore him two sons. One son inherited both the kingship and his father’s military brilliance. The other son is mentioned in the inscriptional record but never acceded to the throne.[277] Flint-Sky-God K also sent women of his own house, perhaps sisters or daughters, to marry rulers from nearby El Chorro and El Pato.[278]
-[166] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: CUP 1992 [1651]) chs. 16—17.
+At the same time, Flint-Sky-God K began a dynastic tradition of rule by conquest. He and his nobles terrified their enemies in a campaign spanning twenty years, from A.D. 664 to 684. He began his glorious saga with the capture of a lord named Tah-Mo’ (“Torch-Macaw”) on March 2, 664 (Fig. 5:9a). In a fashion typical of Maya warriors, Flint-Sky-God K recorded the personal names of his captives, but not the names of their kingdoms, so we do not know what city this hapless man was from. Flint-Sky-God K followed up this victory with a whole series of wars, including several of the Tlaloc-Venus variety. His ambition led him ultimately to intervene in the affairs of the central Petén kingdoms under Caracol’s sway, but he did so in a cunning and circuitous way, as we shall later see.
-[167] Christopher Morris, “How (Not) to Define the State” (unpublished ms., nd).
+The power he gained through his successful campaigns eventually brought Flint-Sky-God K to the attention of the powerful kingdom of Calakmul, the erstwhile ally of Caracol and the deadly enemy of Tikal and Naranjo. Part of the story of the contemporary Calakmul king, Jaguar-Paw, is told on a series of panels looted from the region of Calakmul, and part in passages from the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas. One of these looted panels lists Jaguar-Paw’s birth date as October 9, 649 (Fig. 5:9c). Another tells us that around 9.11.10.0.0,[279] this young prince participated with Flint-Sky-God K in a ceremonial event at a place called Yaxhá (Fig. 5:9b), which was perhaps the lake region located near Naranjo. On February 25, 683, Jaguar-Paw returned to the Petexbatún region for another ritual’celebration held on Lake Petexbatún near Dos Pilas[280] (Fig. 5;9d). We are not sure of the nature of these ceremonies, because that part of the text is missing, but they imply some kind of significant connection, perhaps an alliance, between Jaguar-Paw and the vigorous Dos Pilas warlord.
-[168] Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making”, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1975) 26.
+Whatever the relationship between the two men, it was an important one that led to the participation of Flint-Sky-God K in Jaguar-Paw’s accession as king of Calakmul on April 6, 686 (Fig. 5:10a and b).[281] Jaguar-Paw’s accession was also recorded at the kingdom of El Perú, to the north of Dos Pilas. We find this passage on a pair of looted stelae, recorded in association with the period-ending rites conducted by the El Perú king Mah-Kina-Balam and his wife. On one of the monuments, the El Perú lord noted that he had displayed the God K scepter in the company of Jaguar-Paw. These texts suggest that the kings of the western kingdoms traveled to Calakmul to participate in the accession ritual of Jaguar-Paw, who in turn made reciprocal visits to their kingdoms.
-[169] I think the importance of coercion, force, and violence is overplayed in contemporary political philosophy, but this is a different topic. See Christopher Morris, “State Coercion and Force”, Social Philosophy and Policy 29.1 (Jan. 2012): 28–49.
+At Dos Pilas, Flint-Sky-God K commemorated his participation in Jaguar-Paw’s accession on his own Stela 13 (Fig. 5:10b), which he mounted on the platform supporting his great war monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs 2. The juxtaposition of Jaguar-Paw’s coronation text next to Flint-Sky-God K’s war memorial associates the founding of Dos Pilas with the accession at Calakmul. By doing so, Flint-Sky-God K was paying Jaguar-Paw a powerful compliment.
-[170] “[L]et us think of empires as particular forms of political organization different from classical poleis or modern states. They are typically large, composite and diverse, composed of different peoples and previously separate groups or societies, and usually created by conquest. And empires are constituted by a dominant core or center and a subordinate periphery.” Christopher Morris, “What’s Wrong with Imperialism?”, Social Philosophy and Policy 23.1 (Win. 2006): 157.
+This all-glyphic Stela 13 conveys first that Jaguar-Paw acceded on 9.12.13.17.7 (April 6, 686). Second, it says that this accession ritual “was seen (yilahy[282] by Flint-Sky-God K, captor of Tah-Mo’, at a place called Nab Tunich, the toponym designating a location somewhere within the kingdom of Calakmul.[283] Presumably, Flint-Sky-God K traveled to Nab Tunich to observe and to participate in the accession rites of Jaguar-Paw.
-[171] Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: CUP 1991).
+Regardless of the “friendliness” of this association, there is some evidence that Jaguar-Paw—perhaps before he became the king—was in a subservient position to Flint-Sky-God K, at least in some circumstances. In a scene on a looted pot,[284] Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul is painted kneeling in the position of subordination before a Dos Pilas Lord (Fig. 5:10c). We presume this Dos Pilas lord was Flint-Sky-God K or perhaps his heir.[285] The question that arises, however, is: How’ did a lord of Calakmul and ally of the powerful Caracol find himself in this position in the first place? Since the evidence does not exist to accurately answer that question, we can only suggest various scenarios. Perhaps Flint-Sky-God K was playing “godfather” to Jaguar-Paw, cultivating this young prince before he became the king to secure his support for the new Dos Pilas hegemony in the west. Or, in light of Flint-Sky-God K’s military campaign in the Peten at this time, it is just possible that he wished to establish his own alliance with Calakmul—or at least the promise from its king that he would not interfere with the ambitions of Dos Pilas. At any rate, somehow Flint-Sky-God K made the Calakmul lords an offer they couldn’t refuse.
-[172] “[E]quating all known political forms by lumping them under one term—‘the state’—does nothing to explain the differences among them.” Ronald Cohen, “Introduction”, Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, ed. Cohen and Elman R. Service (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues 1978) 2.
+Whatever the scenario might have been, by neutralizing the king of Calakmul, Flint-Sky-God K was able to extend his influence eastward toward the defeated city of Naranjo. It was a strategy that effectively removed Caracol as a major player in the events to come. Flint-Sky-God K’s command of the primary political instruments of his time, war and marriage, forged the foundation of a new pattern of power in the Peten.
-[173] Cohen 4. See also Lucy Mair, “Primitive States”, An Introduction to Social Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon- OUP 1965) ch. 8.
+Part of Flint-Sky-God K’s genius as a leader in this complex and interconnected arena of power politics was this very ability to implement different policies in different kingdoms as the situation warranted. While he was neutralizing Calakmul to the north, Flint-Sky-God K was also expanding eastward into the power vacuum left by the defeat of Tikal and Naranjo. Curiously enough, he concentrated his efforts on the lesser prize, Naranjo. This time he resorted to marriage, rather than war or political alliance, as his strategy. He sent a daughter[286] named Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau (“Six Celestial Lord”)[287] to Naranjo in order to reestablish a royal house at this ancient community after its destruction at the hands of Caracol. Although we do not know all the particulars, we can visualize s her pilgrimage.
-[174] See, for instance, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2012).
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[175] Taylor 33. Taylor stresses the phenomenon of “secondary state formation” for the formation of most states: “Societies without a state are subjugated, colonized or absorbed by states” or defensively become state-like (130).
+The journey to her new home was difficult and dangerous, for the route she had to take crossed the war-torn heart of the Peten region. In spite of the danger, the wedding party traveled in ceremonial splendor, braving the dangers hidden in the arching forest and the hot fields that lined the way to Naranjo. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau sat in her sedan chair of dark polished wood upon royal pillows of stuffed jaguar skin, veiled from the prying eyes of village spies by a canopy of fine cotton gossamer. A company of sturdy bearers surrounded the four sweating men who carried the long poles of the sedan chair on their shoulders, ready to relieve them in the work of relaying their precious burden to its final destination. Behind came more bearers with bundles of cotton and bark cloth laden with gifts of jade, painted pottery, embroidered textiles, perfumed wooden boxes, and carved-shell diadems.
-[176] Leviathan, ch. XIII, para. 8. See also the non-hypothetical examples in para. 11.
+At the head of this party, the bravest and most experienced of the noble warriors of Dos Pilas strode in full battle gear, resplendent and frightening in their helmets of stuffed deer, peccary, and jaguar. The bright plumage of forest birds and the shrunken heads of defeated enemies dangled from their chests and waists. They carried throwing darts and spearthrowers, stabbing spears tipped with long leaf-shaped points of stone, and clubs studded with razor-sharp imported obsidian blades. Takers of captives and sacrificers, these men would not negotiate if confronted on the trail: They would die to the last man before letting their lady fall into the hands of the enemy. Finally, the best woodsmen of the Dos Pilas household were deployed in a wide circle around the route, moving swiftly and cautiously, alert for treachery.
-[177] Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: CUP 2009).
+We can imagine the courage and resolution of the Dos Pilas princess, a living declaration of war against the most powerful enemies of her family, as she traveled to her new home. The first sacred rituals she performed after her arrival lasted three days, beginning on August 30, 682 (9.12.10.5.12), in the time of the beneficent rains of late summer. One hundred and sixteen days earlier, Ah-Cacaw had resurrected the kingship at Tikal. Four years would pass before her father’s journey to Calakmul to participate in Jaguar-Paw’s accession rituals. In this time of changing destinies, a young queen stood at the center of the Maya world. High on her pyramid she spilled her blood in rapture, calling forth the ancestors to witness and confirm the new destiny she brought to this place, while the gathered hosts of the city danced and sang in the broad plazas below, jeering the authors of the hated Hieroglyphic Stairs in their midst. The red towering temple mountains of Naranjo reverberated with the pulsing call of the drums and the deep moan of the shell trumpets reaching friend and foe alike across the vast green canopy of the forest: The royal ahauob of Naranjo were back. The lady from Dos Pilas and her new nobility would reckon their history from this joyous celebration for katuns to come; and under the leadership of her son, Smoking-Squirrel, they would bring back enemies to writhe and die before the monuments commemorating that fateful day.
-[178] I must credit Hartmut Kliemt for a remark that made me first think of North—Wallis—Weingast “natural states” as an interpretation of classical states of nature.
+There are four separate texts recording the events surrounding Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival in Naranjo, but only two of them are still legible today. In both of these texts (Fig. 5:1 la-b), the glyph describing her ritual actions resembles the hand (hom) glyph[288] that Stormy-Sky used to record the conquest of Uaxactun on Stela 31 at Tikal. Here, however, conquest in the sense of “the destruction of buildings” couldn’t possibly be the intended meaning. The action recorded on these stelae is one that led to the dedication of a pyramid three days later (Fig. 5:11c) and most likely the reestablishment of the royal house of Naranjo. As we have described in our historical reconstruction above, we believe both these events were direct results of the marriage of the daughter of the king of Dos Pilas to a noble of Naranjo. One meaning of horn is “borders or boundaries” and certainly these are essential qualities of a viable state. When Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau dedicated the pyramid three days after her marriage, she was reopening the portal to the Otherworld, reestablishing the sacred connection to the ancestors, which had been broken by Naranjo’s enemies so many years ago. This interpretation of events is further borne out by the fact that the pyramid used the Naranjo Emblem Glyph as part of its proper name, indicating that it was the Otherworld portal of this new dynasty. Naranjo had again become a place of kings, a power to be reckoned with once more.
-[179] North, Wallis, and Weingast 31.
+ Naranjo Strikes Back
-[180] North, Wallis, and Weingast xi.
+Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s efforts to found a new dynasty were not in vain. On January 6, 688, five years after the dedication of the Naranjo royal house, a male heir, named Smoking-Squirrel, was born to the royal family. This youngster was only five years old when, on May 31, 693, he became the king of Naranjo.[289] Never in all the historical texts of Naranjo do the scribes acknowledge the parentage of Smoking-Squirrel, so for many years his origins remained a mystery. It took the insight of the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff to realize that Smoking-Squirrel was most likely 5 the child of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.
-[181] North, Wallis, and Weingast xii.
+There are many clues leading to this assumption. Not only does Wac-Chanil-Ahau live long into Smoking-Squirrel’s reign, but every time he erected a monument to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, he paired it with a monument dedicated to this woman. These monuments always featured the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival at Naranjo and depicted her engaging in the exact same rituals of state as her son (Fig. 5:12).[290] Smoking-Squirrel constantly portrayed himself with his mother in this fashion for one very important reason: She was the source of his legitimacy and his link to the throne.
-[182] Footnote added: A rent in this technical sense is “a return to an economic asset that exceeds the return the asset can receive in its best alternative use” (19).
+Smoking-Squirrel did not, however, find it to his advantage to feature his father on any of his monuments. His male parent was probably a local man whose modest achievements and social rank did not lend prestige to his son. Instead, Smoking-Squirrel capitalized on the celebrity that came from his mother’s pedigree as the child of the illustrious Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas (Fig. 5:13), his maternal grandfather. The texts suggest that this pedigree from Dos Pilas was considered more historically important and politically significant than even his own status as son to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.
-[183] North, Wallis, and Weingast 30.
+The revival of the dynasty and the ascendancy of this child to the ancestral throne of his kingdom smashed the fragile peace of the central Peten. The revived Naranjo nobility launched a campaign to reestablish the power of their royal family, challenging their enemies to meet them on the battlefield. There under a relentless tropical sun, fortune delivered many sons of noble families into their hands.
-[184] North, Wallis, and Weingast 30.
+Naranjo’s first victim was not its enemy Caracol, but rather a strategic border community called Ucanal which stood between Naranjo, Tikal, and the city of Lord Kan II. The kingdom of Ucanal had a hilltop capital to the south of Lake Yaxha[291] on the west bank of the Mopan River. Probably an ally of Caracol, since it straddled the shortest route Lord Kan’s marauders could take on their forays into the Peten, Ucanal was targeted perhaps as much to humiliate the kings of Caracol as to gain military victories for Naranjo.
-[185] North, Wallis, and Weingast 35.
+The campaign began on June 20, 693, only twenty days after the five-year-old boy was placed on the throne. It was the day before the summer solstice, and the Eveningstar was gleaming its last before it would disappear into the glare of the sun on its journey to become the Morningstar. The warriors of Naranjo struck, taking captive a lord of Ucanal named Kinichil-Cab (Fig. 5:14). Doubtless the young king, Smoking-Squirrel, was still too tender in age to have led his army personally. Instead, it appears that Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau took credit for the capture of the unfortunate Kinichil-Cab, for on Stela 24, she stands upon his battered body (Fig. 5:15b).
-[186] North, Wallis, and Weingast 38, note 8. In addition, (3) “The origin of legal systems lies in the definition of elite privileges.” This interesting claim is difficult to explain quickly and isn’t crucial to our concerns. It might help just to think about the Magna Carta, widely cited and invoked to this day and originally an agreement between an unpopular King John and some rebellious barons (1215). This third thesis about natural states is that legal systems develop initially as means to stabilize elite privileges and to pacify conflicts over these privileges (ch. 2).
+This battle and the capture of a lord of Ucanal were but the opening blows against Caracol’s hold on the Peten. Naranjo continued to chip away at its enemy’s strength, harassing them at every turn. One hundred days after the first attack, on September 14, 693, the warriors of Naranjo engaged Ucanal in yet another battle, this one probably on the order of a skirmish. They attacked again on December 12 of the same year. This military campaign culminated on February 1, 695, when Naranjo once <verbatim></verbatim> again engaged the main forces of Ucanal in bloody combat, this time with a lord of Dos Pilas in attendance to participate in the victory. The major prize taken in this second full-scale battle of the war was the lord Shield-Jaguar, the unfortunate captive who is featured in the grim rites recorded on both Stela 22 (Fig. 5:15a) and Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17).[292]
-[187] North, Wallis, and Weingast 115.
+Now the star of war glinted brightly for Naranjo. Smoking-Squirrel, like his earlier counterpart at Caracol, timed his battles and war-related rituals according to the position of Venus. He declared his kingship as Venus hovered on the stationary point before inferior conjunction. His S first war event occurred at the helical setting of Eveningstar on the eve of the summer solstice. Finally, his second triumphant battle against Ucanal was waged when Venus rose helically as the Morningstar, exactly one cycle later.
-[188] North, Wallis, and Weingast 114.
+As we have mentioned before, prestigious captives taken in battle were often kept alive for years on end. They were displayed in public rituals and often participated in these rituals in gruesome, humiliating, and painful ways. Smoking-Squirrel and Wac-Chanil-Ahau were enthusiastic practitioners of this sacred tradition. Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal survived his capture to reappear four years later, on May 23, 698, in an event that was in all probability a sacrificial ritual of some sort (Fig. 5:14). Later in the same year, on September 23, Shield-Jaguar suffered through the same rite in “the land of Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo.” A year later, on April 19, 699, it was Lady Wac-Chanil’s turn. The hapless Kinichil-Cab appeared again in a public ritual she conducted. On Naranjo Stela 24 (Fig. 5:15b) we see her standing on the bound, nearly naked body of this unfortunate warrior. Finally, on 9.13.10.0.0 (January 26, 702), the day Smoking-Squirrel dedicated both Stela 22 and Stela 24, the young king displayed his famous captive, Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal, in a public blood-letting ritual (Fig. 5:15a). As depicted, the ill-fated captive is nearly naked, stripped of all his marks of rank and prestige, holding his bound wrists up toward the magnificently dressed fourteen-year-old king who sits high above him on a jaguar-pillow.
-[189] The term is introduced by John Wallis in a new manuscript, tentatively entitled Leviathan Denied: Rules, Organizations, and Governments.
+In spite of his achievements, this energetic young king was still far from the fulfillment of his military ambitions. When Katun 14 was nearing its end, he began yet another series of battles, which he later recorded on Stela 23 (Fig. 5:16). This time his target was a nearer kingdom, Yaxha, located to the south on the shores of a lake bearing the same name. It was perhaps there that his grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul had acted together in a ritual years before. On March 23, 710, just after the spring equinox, Smoking-Squirrel attacked Yaxha, accompanied by an individual who was the sibling of either his mother or his wife.[293] On this day, Venus was making its last appearance as Morningstar and Jupiter and Saturn hung in conjunction at their second stationary points.[294] Ninety-seven days later, on June 8, shortly after the summer solstice, there was an even more spectacular alignment in the heavens, this time among Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury.[295] On this occasion Smoking-Squirrel conducted a ritual with a prisoner from Yaxha. We have not yet deciphered the glyphs describing this ritual, but at least part of it included the scattering of blood. A year after this rite, on April 12, 711, when Venus again appeared as Morningstar, Smoking-Squirrel went to war once more, this time on the shore of a lake adjacent to Yaxha, a place known as Sacnab, or “Clear Lake.”[296]
-[190] North, Wallis, and Weingast 113.
+Stela 23’s history ends with the battle at Sacnab, but we can pick the story up again on Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17). There Smoking-Squirrel begins his account with the celebration of the period ending on 9.14.0.0.0 at the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar. This heavenly event was celebrated not only at Naranjo but at Copan and Tikal as well, showing how widespread these Venus rituals had become in the Maya world.[297] Two hundred days later, on the summer solstice (June 22, 712), Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal reappears in a rite which is enacted on the occasion of the maximum elongation of Eveningstar. Eighteen years of public humiliation had passed since his capture. We suspect this long-suffering prisoner did not survive this ritual, for with this date he disappears from the record.
-[191] North, Wallis, and Weingast 111.
+[[][Fig. 5:18 Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau at Her Son’s First Anniversary of Rule]]
-[192] North, Wallis, and Weingast 13.
+Smoking-Squirrel’s rampage through the central Peten finally ended, to the relief of neighboring kingdoms, on February 16, 713, with the first katun anniversary of his accession. As he had since the beginning of his reign, Smoking-Squirrel paired the stela commemorating this event with a stela depicting his mother, the founder of his line. Stela 2, which is essentially a war monument, stood adjacent (Fig. 5:12) to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 3 (Fig. 5:18), which shows her participating in her s son’s anniversary celebration. In this text, Smoking-Squirrel once again memorialized her arrival. He also created some useful political propaganda by linking the date of the first katun anniversary of his own accession to the same anniversary date of Naranjo’s Ruler I. Ruler I was, of course, the king who had fallen victim to Caracol’s victory eighty-one years earlier. With this pair of inscriptions, Smoking-Squirrel completed the circle of defeat and triumph for Naranjo. The glory of that city had been revived by a new and vital dynasty.
-[193] In his The Limits of Liberty, James Buchanan develops the notion of the “natural equilibrium”, borrowed from Winston Bush. It is the condition we would be in now were the political order to disappear. This equilibrium in a two-person model is the point where “neither person has an incentive to modify his behavior privately or independently .... [E]ach person may be expending some share of his efforts in defending his stock from the other, another part in taking stocks of the other, and another part in producing goods directly.” James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1975) 58, also 23—25. Buchanan thinks of this alternative as dynamic, changing at times, and suggests that this feature explains as well as justifies changes in the constitutional order of a society; people’s alternatives and bargaining power change along with shifts in the natural equilibrium. The positions of particular individuals or groups may change as their predicted positions in a new natural equilibrium evolve. “Such predictions may be based on imagined shifts in the natural distribution in anarchic equilibrium which always exists ‘underneath’ the observed social realities” (79).
+Smoking-Squirrel’s fame as a warrior was no doubt legend in the region of the Fetén. His successful military campaigns upset the destinies of cities as dramatically as the past victories of his hated enemy, Caracol; and his postconquest strategies were cleverly designed to keep his enemies powerless. For example, by keeping his high-ranked captives, Shield-Jaguar and Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal, alive for many years, Smoking-Squirrel most likely disrupted the succession within both their families and their kingdom. This elegant strategy created chaos in a social structure where these individuals could not be replaced until after they were dead. To display these captives in public rituals over many years confirmed the military prowess and the political power of the young king among his own constituency, and sowed fear and respect among Naranjo’s rivals. Smoking-Squirrel also made optimum use of the powerful allies that came to him through his mother’s line. He fought his wars with the support of his formidable and aggressive grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and most probably Shield-God K, his mother’s half brother, who became ruler of Dos Pilas on 9.13.6.2.0 (March 27, 698). These battles secured the region surrounding Lake Yaxhá, making the journey between Naranjo and the Petexbatún stronghold held by his mother’s people both easier and safer.
-[194] To borrow a phrase from a famous nineteenth-century Marxist, revealing some sympathies to utopian anarchism. “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out.” Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress 1947 [1894]), [[http://www.marxists.org][www.marx]] [[http://www.marxists.org][ists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm/]]. Original emphasis.
+The campaign of battles waged by Smoking-Squirrel and his people was not totally inspired by a spirit of revenge and conquest, however. This campaign was also imbued with a spiritual content, chartered by the now venerable mandates of Venus-Tlaloc warfare. Smoking-Squirrel planned his military actions according to the movements of Venus, calling upon the power of that god of conquest to sanction his aggression. The costume he wears on Stela 2, in fact (Fig. 5:17), is the Late Classic version of the same war costume we saw Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal wear in their first Venus war victories. Timing his attacks by Venus also gave Smoking-Squirrel the opportunity to re-create the same cosmic setting as that in which his own predecessor, Ruler I, had suffered ignominious defeat. Thus, Smoking-Squirrel’s successes worked to neutralize his ancestor’s defeat, proving that the god once again favored Naranjo and accepted the restoration of the dynasty.
-** 4. Methodological Anarchism
+There can be little doubt that Smoking-Squirrel’s ultimate goal had always been to redeem his city from its disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol. He accomplished this by systematically crushing Caracol’s allies, and bringing a resounding finish to Caracol as a force to be reckoned with in the Petén. Once he was certain that he had reestablished the flow of history in Naranjo’s favor, Smoking-Squirrel finally dismantled the hated stairs the victorious Caracol warlords had erected in his capital. Resetting it in illegible order, he created a nonsense chronicle, a fitting end for a monument erected by his enemies to rob his people of their own place in history.
-*Jason Lee Byas and Billy Christmas*
+One of his most telling acts of revenge was to have one of the stairs’ glyph blocks transported to Ucanal. There he placed it in the center alley of the ballcourt,[298] probably in conjunction with some very unpleasant sacrificial rituals involving the defeated lords of that kingdom. The fine irony of this ceremony was surely not lost on the king of Caracol, who was forced to sit passively and watch from afar the neutralization of the monument with which his ancestor had humiliated Naranjo. What more elegant revenge could Smoking-Squirrel have conceived of than the transfer of this block to the city of Caracol’s own ally?
-*** I. Introduction
+ The Giant Stirs
-Anarchists all share the same basic public policy proposal: abolish public policy. With regard to foreign policy, their position is to abolish the military. With regard to education policy, abolish state schools. With regard to law enforcement policy, abolish the police. And so on and so forth.[195]
+Almost simultaneous with Naranjo’s reemergence as a power in the Peten, Tikal began to reach out and regain its position in the Maya world. The strategy used by its new king exactly paralleled Smoking-Squirrel’s: a successful war waged against the alliance that had once defeated his ancestors.
-Given this total agreement on policy goals, it might seem like anarchists should be free from infighting. As anyone familiar with the anarchist movement knows, they aren’t. Each form of anarchism is vigorously opposed by at least one other form, with each often writing the other out of “anarchism” altogether. In anarcho-communist Alexander Berkman’s 1929 account of these differences,[196] they are in part disputes about justice. For communists like himself, private property and commerce drive domination and injustice, and so must be abolished. For individualists, private property and commerce are fundamental constituents of freedom and justice, and so must be unleashed. Even between marketfriendly anarchists, the contents of justice are controversial. For instance, Murray Rothbard puts justice purely in terms of self-ownership, whereas Gary Chartier argues for a much broader conception that includes distributive and relational concerns.[197] These differences are rendered unintelligible within a set of assumptions predominant within academic political philosophy. We refer to this discourse as “the policy framework”: it regards prescriptions of justice as little more than prescriptions of public policy.
+It’s puzzling that the two principal victims of Caracol’s military rampage, Tikal and Naranjo, make little mention of each other’s efforts to throw off the bonds of their mutual enemy. The reason for this rather deliberate silence is not certain. Perhaps the meddling of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas in Naranjo’s affairs sowed distrust between cities that should have been logical allies. In any event, we are not yet certain if the timing of Tikal’s revival was connected in any way to Naranjo’s; nor do we know to what extent these cities’ struggles to recoup themselves might have been mutually reinforcing.
-For instance, in “The Zig-Zag of Politics,” where Robert Nozick explained why he had greatly moderated his libertarianism, he wrote that “[t]he libertarian view looked solely at the purpose of government, not at its meaning.”[198] Taking questions of meaning seriously, he said, means that certain laws and programs must exist to voice “social solidarity and humane concern for others.”[199] Beyond that, “[j]oint political action [by which Nozick means state action] does not merely symbolically express our ties of concern, it also constitutes a relational tie itself.”[200] If true, this presents a considerable problem for anarchists. If the means by which a society not only communicates but constitutes certain social relations demanded by justice must involve the state, then justice—or at least part of justice— is conceptually impossible in a stateless society. Moreover, these intra-anarchist disputes look nonsensical, given that there is no institutional organ to institute their different conceptions of justice to begin with.
+We do know that Tikal’s liberation may have begun somewhat earlier than Naranjo’s. Although no stelae dated between the years A.D. 557 and 692 survived at Tikal, we know that a ruler named Shield-Skull began an ambitious remodeling project in the North Acropolis and East Plaza during the middle of the seventh century.[299] Even as the dynasty of Great-Jaguar-Paw was plotting its revenge, its kings had already begun the healing process by rebuilding the center of their city. By this act they began wiping out the evidence of Lord Water’s depredations and reaffirming their own cosmic greatness. The mere fact that they got away with this new, architectural program is telling evidence of Caracol’s weakening grip on the Peten in the waning decades of the seventh century.
-Anarchists and their critics, then, seem to be speaking different languages. There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally—both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks.
+On 9.12.9.17.16 (May 6, 682), just as Flint-Sky-God K was preparing to send his daughter Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau to Naranjo, a new vigorous ruler, named Ah-Cacaw,[300] ascended to the throne of Tikal and began a campaign to restore the honor of its ruling family. A large man for his times, Ah-Cacaw would live into his fourth katun, and be over sixty years old when he died. At 167 cm (5 feet 5 inches), he was a veritable giant,[301] standing ten centimeters above the average height of the men of his s kingdom.
-Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. First, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Second, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just—thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”
+No sooner had he claimed the throne than Ah-Cacaw began a tremendous new building program, rallying the pride and ingenuity of the entire metropolis with his enormous demands for both skilled and unskilled labor. He mobilized clans of masons, architects, painters, and sculptors and put them to work reshaping the most important ritual space in the city: the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza to the south of it. Embodying five hundred years of royal ritual and history, the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza were not merely the heart of the city, they were the enduring expression of the ruling house of Tikal. Significantly, these monuments also bore the marks of the ignominious desecration placed upon them by Tikal’s conquerors. Ah-Cacaw’s visionary plan was not only to reclaim these monuments, but to surround them with the largest buildings ever known in the Maya world, a group of temples that would ring the Great Plaza, the ceremonial center of his revived kingdom.
-*** II. The Poverty of the Policy Framework
+The first step in Ah-Cacaw’s plan was to deactivate the ritual spaces of the North Acropolis by cutting them off visually and physically from the Great Plaza. He then shifted the focus of dynastic celebration into the Great Plaza itself. To do this, he reworked the south side and ceremonial front of the North Acropolis. When he began this work, the south side of the Acropolis already held some of the finest pyramids ever built in the history of the kingdom. These “sacred mountains” stood in a row behind the tree-stone forest of stelae created by Tikal’s great kings (Fig. 5:19). On the right side of this magnificent temple group stood Temple 32–1 st,[302] the structure built over Burial 195, the tomb of the twenty-second ruler of Tikal. Ruling around A.D. 600, this fellow was the first king to endure the darkness of a reign without history under the heel of Caracol. On the opposite end towered Temple 34–1<sup>st</sup>, built over Burial 10, the tomb of Curl-Snout, the son of the conqueror of Uaxactun and the father of Stormy-Sky.
-The policy framework is a mode of engagement with principles or theories of justice that treats them as little more than prescriptions for state action. If there is injustice, it is because there is something that the state ought to do but does not (or ought not to do, but does). Once there is justice, it will be because the state has implemented a successful policy (or repealed a policy) associated with this concern. Politics, therefore, is always an exercise in attempting to change states or influencing their actions. Doing so might involve engagement at any number of levels, from directly lobbying legislative officials to acts of civil disobedience, but within the policy framework the end goal is always changing the state’s constitution or its laws.
+The centerpiece of the North Acropolis’s facade, however, was the magnificent Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> (Fig. 5:2) built before the disastrous defeat. Raised in the era of the staff kings, its exquisitely modeled and painted stucco masks displayed the original great architectural programs of the Late Preclassic period. This sacred mountain, above all others, had been the orthodox focus of royal ecstasy and the dramatic backdrop against which the stelae commemorating each king’s vision stood for all to witness. Throughout much of the sixth and seventh centuries this temple remained as the indomitable image of Tikal’s kingship. Under its sculptured pyramid lay Burial 48, the tomb of the great Stormy-Sky; and newly set into its base were Burial 24 and Burial 23, which was probably the tomb of Shield-Skull, Ah-Cacaw’s father. It is no wonder then that this s was the location Ah-Cacaw chose to raise his breathtaking Temple 33.
-An example of a philosophical argument reflecting the influence of the policy framework is the following:
+Ah-Cacaw’s first major political act was to honorably bury two of the desecrated stelae that had been left as trash in the Great Plaza by the victorious Caracol ahauob. We can reconstruct some of what happened during these rededication rites from the archaeological record. At least two of the rituals focused upon the shattered remains of the beautiful Stela 26 (Fig. 5:20) and Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece documenting the victory of Tikal over Uaxactun more than three hundred years earlier.
-. Theory entails that every person is entitled to J.
+Over a period of several days, Ah-Cacaw buried these stelae with great ceremony within Temples 33 and 34 (Fig. 5:21). He would have regarded this as a time of solemn ceremonial preparation, an initial, pivotal action in his campaign to repair the dishonor done to his ancestral kings by the blasphemous conquerors. In the following passage, we will visualize the events comprising this important historical occasion.
-. J is constituted by x, y, and z.
+Ah-Cacaw, a full head taller than his silent companions, halted the procession moving across the broad plaza in the slanting orange light of dawn. His long shadow thrust like a finger from a fist toward the forest of tree-stones standing before the looming temple-mountains. The crooked shadows of the stelae, in turn, fell back onto the steps which led up to the lineage houses holding the earthly remains of his holy ancestors. He raised his eyes to the central temple. The huge plaster faces of the gods, mounted upon this sacred mountain, shone as brightly as they had when first made by his ancestors long before the disastrous defeat of the twenty-first successor of his line. It had taken the entire lifetimes of the four kings before him to bring the kingdom back from that defeat. Now the day of rebirth had finally arrived. As the twenty-sixth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, he was determined that his brother kings would learn to respect Tikal once more, as they had when Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had won their victory over Uaxactun.
-. Therefore, the state ought to provide each citizen with x, y, and z.
+Two of those four intervening kings were now buried in the great mountain that held the tomb of Stormy-Sky. One of them was Ah-Cacaw’s father, Shield-Skull, who had begun the restoration of the city to its former glory[303] by commissioning monuments in the Central Acropolis and in the large plaza east of the ancestral mountains. Tikal’s twenty-second king lay within the pyramid on the eastern shoulder of Stormy-Sky’s burial temple, placing three of the kings who had suffered through the humiliation of a reign without history in the threshold zone of the ancient acropolis.[304]
-. Therefore, the state ought to enact policy XYZ.
+The silence of his reverie was broken by the grunts of struggling men. Ah-Cacaw turned to face the stelae platform before the westernmost of the three temples at the front of the range of sacred mountains. With a unified cry of effort, six of the men straightened their backs, lifting the enormous chunk of broken stela. The stone, cradled in a net of thick ropes suspended from the thick pole they carried on their shoulders, tore at their strength as they took trembling steps toward the steep stairs that rose toward the dark inner sanctum of the western temple. Here the revered Curl-Snout, father of Stormy-Sky, lay at rest under tons of quarried stone mortared with the sweat of the laboring hundreds who had shaped his tomb into its mountain form. As the first six lords staggered up the steps, a second team of men worked to fasten ropes around the other large fragment of tree-stone that lay broken on the plaza floor. This sacred monument was Tikal history incarnate. It carried the names of the ninth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Conqueror of Uaxactun; his grandson, Stormy-Sky, the eleventh successor; Kan-Boar, the twelfth successor; and the thirteenth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, who had been named for his illustrious forebear. Hoisting the carrying pole onto their shoulders, the second cluster of young lords staggered forward in the warming light of the rising sun.
-We might imagine J as some level of material wellbeing such as sufficiency or equality. Correspondingly x, y, and z could be shares of resources with a particular market value or particular goods such as education and health. XYZ basically stands in for some modification of the existing welfare state apparatus with the stated objective of giving each person x, y, and z.[201] Arguments often take this form even when they intend to support non-welfare-based conceptions of justice. For example, J might be a status of relational, social equality; x, y, and z could be elements of a democratic workplace, sources of equal opportunity for political office, or features of some derivatively valued level of material wellbeing;[202] and XYZ could be some extension of existing governmental discretion required for the state to intervene with the stated objective of giving people x, y, and z.[203]
+It took the young men, all sons of the royal clan and its high-ranking allies, the entire morning to complete their task. Only five or six of them could bring their strength to bear upon the carrying pole at one time. They had to work slowly and in turns, anxious to protect the exquisitely carved text fragments from the further desecration a careless movement might cause. For three hours the king and his closest companions stood upon the steps of the sacred mountain, watching the slow and halting upward progress of the men. A crowd of witnesses gradually formed on the plaza below as patriarchs and their entourages arrived from both the city and the regions beyond. It was a quiet, tense occasion. Finally, Ah-Cacaw’s lords eased the first large fragment of stone into a neat pit they had cut through the floor of the rear chamber. This pit lay just before the blank back wall of the temple, in the rear room that was the inner sanctum and the portal to the Otherworld.[305] Soon thereafter the second fragment of the broken stela was lowered into the pit.
-Much of the interesting philosophizing will take place between (1) and (2), but what is conspicuously left out is an argument for why it is the state that should be uniquely concerned or charged with fostering this aspect of justice, and why the proposed policy is the best way to realize this aspect of justice. The kind of argument required could be a conceptual argument that justice entails a state policy of this kind or an empirical argument that such a policy is the best method for achieving justice—but typically we are given neither.
+When the young men emerged from the temple, Ah-Cacaw went to the place where the tree-stone had lain and picked up a handful of fragments left in dusty disarray on the hard plaster surface of the plaza. Cradling the broken fragments reverently against his naked chest, he carried them up the stairs and into the cool darkness of the temple. There he laid them gently into the pit with the larger pieces. Kinsmen and men of high rank followed his lead, moving single file up the stairs until all that remained of the great tree-stone lay in the pit. Ah-Cacaw had ordered that one large chunk be kept back. This fragment would be placed in another offering pit along with the altar of Stormy-Sky’s tree-stone, soon to be deposited in the central temple. Burying the tree-stone fragment with the altar would link the two ritual burials so that his ancestral dead would understand his motivation. By this act, Ah-Cacaw hoped to erase the desecration visited upon their memory by the victors from the southeast and to summon their spirits to help him in the coming war.[306]
-In proposing the methodological anarchist alternative to the analytically and ideologically impoverished policy framework, we join a growing literature that is critical of political philosophy’s pre-occupation with, and simultaneous under-analysis of, the state. Tendencies relating to what we refer to as the policy framework have been identified by Jacob Levy, Jason Brennan,[204] Christopher Freiman, and Peter Jaworski, referring to “folk ideal theory,” “the Fallacy of Direct Governmentalism,” “ideal theories of the state,” and “the ought/state gap” respectively.[205] Levy notes that putatively “[p]ure normative theories concern themselves with what the state should do,” yet states are not mere “machines for dispensing justice, and we are poorly served when our theories imagine them to be.”[206] Brennan observes that “[t]heorists and philosophers tend to assume their job is to provide normative grounding for the construction of an ideal nation-state ... to determine what counts as a good or bad Leviathan.”[207] Freiman argues that injustices identified in the market and civil society are presumed to be soluble only by a state because of the unstated premise that the pathologies of economic and civil society do not affect political institutions.[208] The state is posited as an institution that, by definition, does not suffer the same information and incentive problems that individuals and private associations do. The notion that the state has magical powers that enable it to overcome institutional barriers that cannot be surmounted through any other means is pervasive.
+The king waited in silence until the solemn procession had ended. Then he led the shamans and the principal men of his lineage into the rear chamber where the fragments lay in their grave. In front of the pit that held the pieces of the tree-stone were three deep holes dug into the floor. These holes would hold the offerings that would both amplify the power emanating from the ancient stela and seal it into the threshold of the portal.
-The policy framework is a particular kind of discourse: it is a way of engaging with the theories and arguments of normative political philosophy. It might be instantiated in the inferences drawn from particular theories (as illustrated above), or it might be instantiated in the rhetorical ploys that escort such inferences, designed to make particular theories appear more or less favorable in virtue of their purported implications for policy. It might even play a role in the formulation of a full-blown theory of justice, where particular policy implications are the outcome the theory is constructed to legitimize.
+The mood of the crowd intensified as sounds of drumming echoed throughout the huge plaza. It seemed as if everyone in the city was present. The piercing cry of flutes and clay whistles rose from the children of Tikal. Rattles shivered on the dancing ankles of farmers, masons, and weavers, counterpointing the deep-throated rhythm of the chest-high drums arrayed along the stairs. The people—ahauob and common folk alike—sang and danced a plaintive dirge to rekindle the spirits of the desecrated tree-stones of the ancient kings.[307] At the culmination of this ritual of remembrance and burial, the gods and ancestors would turn their faces once more toward the great kingdom at the center of the world. The lineage of Tikal’s kings would reign once again with honor restored.
-A basic Hobbesianism underlies the policy framework: an assumption that any social order requires an orderer external to the agents being ordered. The problem with such assumptions is that this is not always true, and moreover that the state does not stand outside society in a way that insulates it from the former’s general social dynamics. Rather, it just provides a different theatre in which they play out. Thomas Hobbes asserted that each member of society lacks the incentives to comply with rules that reciprocally protect each member, and that only by empowering a monopoly state can each person’s security be ensured.[209] Where Hobbes took the state to be the solution to the most basic public goods problem—that of individual security—the policy framework takes it as the solution to other justice-related public goods problems.
+High nobles chosen for their rank and accomplishments moved from the council houses[308] through the swirling crowd. They bore into the sanctum large offering plates called zac lac.[309] The waists of these men were thickly encircled by the wrappings of their hipcloths and skirts, garments made of fine cotton cloth resplendent with painted and woven patterns rendered in the bright hues of forest dyes.[310] The lordly stewards sported turbans of fine fabric, tightly bound around their long black hair with jade-studded leather headbands. Elegant tail feathers arched from the headbands to bob in time with the graceful movements of the procession. Deep-green jade beads and bloodred spondylus shell ornaments gleamed in their earlobes and against their brown chests as they moved with studied dignity, bringing their gifts to the sacred tree-stone.
-In similar respect to Hobbes, the policy framework regards the state as transcending the social problems that call for it. Often this perspective is one where individuals do not have sufficient incentives to voluntarily contribute to various public goods, but without those conversations extending to state action. Little discussion is had about the incentives for those engaging with the state or the incentives of state actors themselves.[210] Unlike the messiness of human society, the state just does what we want it to, and the effects of what it does are what we want them to be. The problem with this view is that the state does not operate any more automatically than does any other social institution.[211] Insisting a priori on state guarantees no more guarantees the desired outcome than insisting on guarantees in the market or civil society.[212] In his Nobel address, James Buchanan echoed the message of Knut Wicksell: “[e]conomists should cease proffering policy advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot, and they should look to the structure within which political decisions are made.”[213] Methodological anarchism involves, inter alia, extending Buchanan and Wicksell’s lesson from economics to political philosophy.
+Ah-Cacaw was pleased with the richness of the offerings they carried in the great plates. There were shells and coral from the distant seas to the south, east, and west,[311] purchased from coastal traders and hoarded for this day. Even more precious were the seaweed, sponges, and other living creatures the young men had conveyed inland in saltwater-filled crocks to keep them from spoiling in the tropical heat. The shamans took each offering from its plate as it was presented to them. Beside each cache pit lay a square of beaten-bark cloth. Others were spread on the floor next to the base of the broken tree. With expert grace, the shamans placed each of the offerings in its turn onto the light-brown cloth, all the while singing the story of the dark seas before the gods made the world. When the fresh sea creatures, the shells, and the coral were carefully arranged, they laid the backbones of fish and the spines of stingrays onto the prepared stacks. The royal merchants had not been able to procure enough of the stingray spines, so effigy spines carved from bone were added to the offerings. Together these tokens established the primordial sea of creation around this tree of Tikal, nourishing its spirit just as the sea had nourished the first tree, the axis of the world, at the beginning of creation.
-A glaringly simple example of the policy framework is, as the title suggests, Ronald Dworkin’s book Sovereign Virtue.[214] There, he famously defends an abstract, egalitarian ideal, and immediately charges the sovereign with responsibility for implementing this ideal—not in light of any social scientific or normative considerations identifying public policy as the appropriate mechanism for ensuring each citizen receives her equal share of resources, but as if as much was plainly written into the principles themselves. The philosophical arguments for those principles are taken to be philosophical arguments for particular state policies. Similarly, David Miller asserts that normative political enquiry presumes
+Next, an old shaman of the royal court brought forward the divination stones—flakes of obsidian carefully incised with the images of eternal power. Eight of the flakes displayed the Jester God, that most ancient symbol of the kingship. The moon marked three others and two bore pictures of the bag of magical instruments carried by kings in rituals of state.
-that there is some agency capable of changing the institutional structure more or less the way our favored theory demands. It is no use setting out principles for reforming the basic structure if in fact we have no means to implement these reforms. The main agency here is obviously the state: theories of social justice propose legislative and policy changes that a well-intentioned state is supposed to introduce.[215]
+A warrior prince of the blood came forward next, bearing bundles of soft deer hide. The first was opened, revealing seven faceted flints, small in size but chipped by the finest knappers into irregular shapes resembling tiny amoebalike puddles of water. He unpacked other bundles and took out the blades of spears and spearthrower darts. Still more bundles contained the complex abstract shapes that decorated the wands and staves used during ecstatic ritual performance. The flints glittered in the torchlight, Tikal’s famed workmanship brought to honor the tree-stone and to arm the ancestors. Their shapes focused the power of the Otherworld: Flint and obsidian were the fingernails of the Lightning Bolt, the remnants of Chac-Xib-Chac striking the rock of earth.[312]
-Beyond the general case, there are a number of more peculiar ways in which this approach to political philosophy can manifest itself. John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and G. A. Cohen have each, at times, operated within the policy framework. We will briefly examine them in turn to see how this pattern of discourse can play out in different ways.
+From his own embroidered bag, the king removed a royal mosaic mirror made of jade and the silver-blue crystalline hematite forged in the southern fire mountains.[313] A precious heirloom of his dynasty, its delicate surface was mounted on a mother-of-pearl backing. He placed the mirror on top of the growing mound of offerings in the principal pit. Small balls of white stone and black obsidian were added to each offering pile. Finally, lineage patriarchs spilled precious red pigment, symbolizing their blood in enduring form, onto the carefully arranged objects. They pulled the jade and greenstone earflares and beads from their ears, smashed and ground them like maize on grinding stones, and sprinkled the fragments across the paint.[314]
-Rawls suggested that the state ought to own (or effectively control) the means of production, and that an allocation branch of government ought to be added to the traditional three branches of executive, judicial, and legislative.[216] Rawls’s principles of justice demanded that inequalities should not result from arbitrary socioeconomic factors, and should thus only be permissible when they serve the worst off. He argues that this entails that laissez-faire capitalism and welfare state capitalism are both incompatible with these principles since the goal of these economic systems was not to redistribute socioeconomic advantage in the way demanded by justice.[217] It is the goal, however, of a powerfully interventionist state—so-called property-owning democracy—to do so; therefore, the latter is a priori preferable to the former. Rawls privileged the state with being able to achieve the tasks of justice we give it the necessary power to achieve, but not other kinds of social institutions. He asserted that since it is not the goal of capitalism to satisfy the difference people, it cannot be relied upon to do so, and that it is the goal of a fiscally powerful democratic state to do so; therefore, it can be relied upon to do so. The actual functions of institutions are ignored, and their teleological justification privileged.[218]
+The assembled lords and shamans used additional stingray spines to draw blood from their ears and tongues in the ritual that would bring the offerings to life. Then, chanting prayers, they pulled up the corners of the bark wrapping cloths, being careful to preserve the pattern of the offerings within. Folding the cloths carefully, they formed bundles[315] which were decorated with red and blue on their outside surfaces. While one man held each bundle tightly closed, another placed a band of woven fibers around it, drawing these fibers into a tight knot at the top. Cautiously and reverently, they lowered one bundle into each pit. Others were laid against the base of the broken monument.
-Aside from moralizing the function of the state, the policy framework can also manifest itself in identifying the state as the voice of the people. We have already seen how Nozick makes this claim directly in “The Zig-Zag of Politics.” He moves immediately from the fact that we need something which expresses and constitutes our relational ties of concern to the need for particular sorts of state policies. It is worth noting that even before this shift, Nozick also accepted a form of expressive retributivism—the view that in order to socially convey the wrongness of a criminal offender’s act, we must punish the offender.[219] Nozick himself does not say that this punishment must be imposed by the state, and his discussion of protective associations in Anarchy, State, and Utopia grants the conceptual possibility of punishment carried out by non-state actors.[220] However, we can still see the beginnings of Nozick’s embrace of the policy framework on expressive grounds. The identification of public expression with a particular kind of legal act is already evident, and it is not far from this position to his later view that a collective voice must speak through the language of state policies.
+As the sun plunged westward toward dusk, Ah-Cacaw thrust an obsidian lancet into the loose skin of his penis, drawing his own blood to both nourish and activate the resanctified tree-stone. Singing a chant to call his ancestors’ attention to his offering, the king smeared his blood across the sides of the stela.[316] Satisfied that his dead had realized the honor he did them and their obligation to unleash the demons of conquest upon his enemies, the king rose, making a trail of his royal blood. Thus the divine ahau created a path for the ancestors to follow as they came out of the mountain and back to Tikal.
-In contrast to Nozick and Rawls, G. A. Cohen might seem free of the policy framework. When critiquing Rawls, Cohen argues that “the justice of a society is not exclusively a function of its legislative structure, of its legally imperative rules, but also of the choices people make within those rules.”[221] What matters for Cohen is not institutional structures per se, but the distribution of benefits and burdens, however that distribution comes about.[222] Taken at his word, Cohen here is expressing a version of methodological anarchism.[223] All the same, even Cohen slips into the policy framework in his discourse about justice by implicitly privileging the state. Notice that his expansion of justice beyond the state is to the choices people make within the state’s rules. This framing maintains state primacy, with it as the assumed source of socially operative rules. Our choices within those state-given rules also matter, but with emphases on the “within” and the “also.” This is to say, theorizing about justice is still primarily theorizing about how the state should operate, and then secondarily about how we as individuals should behave.
+As the king emerged into the hot glare of late afternoon, ready to dance for his people, master builders hurried into the temple chambers. One of Ah-Cacaw’s chief shamans had stayed behind to guide their work with quiet suggestions. Together, they sealed the pits with plaster so that the floor became even once again. Young men of the minor noble houses vied with one another for the honor of carrying prepared stones from the plaza up to the sanctum. Using these blocks, the master builders began to erect a wall around the broken stela, carefully and reverently placing the stones against it so that it would not be further damaged. They built up the masonry surface with mud and sand mortar until they had made a bench, a throne-altar that filled much of the rear chamber. When they were satisfied with its shape, they coated it with plaster, modeling the bench into a smooth, white surface—forever sealing the ancestral treasure deep inside. Tikal’s history was safe from further depredation and empowered as a living portal awaiting the king’s command. The call to war would soon come.
-One can most clearly see the policy framework haunt Cohen in the implicit, rather than explicit, premises of his work. For instance, he famously argues that equal shares of resources are demanded by justice, and that justice therefore demands redistributive taxation.[224] The principle of self-ownership, Cohen believes, is incompatible with the policy of redistributive taxation. He thus rejects self-ownership on those grounds. In this way, Cohen allows institutional prejudices about the necessity and probable success of particular policies shape his theorizing about the abstract content of justice. This same dynamic is present in Why Not Socialism?, where he locates justice in the non-state ideal of the camping trip. In asking if this ideal can be applied to society at large, he immediately shifts to statecraft, rather than assessing the feasibility of anarchist communism.[225] With Cohen’s subliminal acceptance of the policy framework, legislators, bureaucrats, and police creep back into the picture without argument.[226]
+Festival swirled and eddied across the plazas like the floodwaters of the great rivers. There were dancing processions, pageants, and feasts of special foods and drinks served in exquisite painted vessels crafted by artists of the city and the regions beyond. Members of the royal family drew blood from their bodies and spun in ecstasy across the terraces enclosing the Great Plaza.[317] The witnessing populace responded with great devotional outpourings of their own, emblazoning the plaza in bright red. Finally, when the last light of the sun was sinking behind the horizon and the plaster on the throne-altar had cured into a hard surface, Ah-Cacaw mounted the stairs and entered the temple once again. His shamans and the principal men of his lineage accompanied him for the solemn ceremony that would end this part of the ritual.
-**** A. What the Policy Framework Is Not
+The old shaman handed him a obsidian lancet struck free from the core only minutes earlier. Ah-Cacaw made his blood flow until the moment came when he could call forth the Vision Serpent that carried his ancestors to him. As the king sank deeply into the trance state, the shaman took the bark cloth saturated with the king’s blood and laid it in a shallow pit dug in front of the newly made altar. When the blood-stained paper of Ah-Cacaw’s kinsmen had swelled the pile to a respectable size, the shaman added rubber, copal, and wood to make a hot fire. Then he spun the fire drill with a bow, gradually creating enough heat to ignite the dried grass on top of the pile. The fire was slow to catch, but eventually the flames rose along the side of the altar, blackening its face with the mark of a sacrificial offering. In the smoke that swirled up into the vault high inside the roof comb, Ah-Cacaw saw the faces of his ancestors and understood that they crowned with triumph his efforts to restore their glory.
-The policy framework ought not be conflated with what some political philosophers call “nationalism”: roughly, the idea that relations of justice only exist between compatriots—members of the same nation.[227] This idea, combined with a view that the respective jurisdictions of existing states are sufficiently accurate divisions of nations, might lead one to the view that the state is the only or ultimate vehicle for realizing justice. Indeed, Sen is right to say that
+This ritual of communication with the ancestors reopened the portal that had been destroyed by their enemies in the war six katuns earlier. The burial of the tree-stone brought power back to the sacred mountains of the kingdom. In the coming days, as the celebration continued, Ah-Cacaw would also honor the desecrated tree-stone of Slormy-Sky and set it inside the great central temple-mountain. At the conclusion of these ceremonies, his people would begin work on the new mountain that would encompass and protect the repose of the ancestors. They would have to work fast, for the king intended to dedicate the new mountain on the thirteenth katun recurrence of Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting. It was the kind of symmetry of time and action that the ancestors and the gods would admire.
-[t]here is something of a tyranny of ideas in seeing the political divisions of states (primarily, national states) as being, in some way, fundamental, and in seeing them not only as practical constraints to be addressed, but as divisions of basic significance in ethics and political philosophy.[228]
+In a state of ecstasy, Ah-Cacaw emerged from the smoking inner sanctum to the roaring shouts of his people. Pillars of fire and incense rose from lineage houses throughout the darkened city below. They knew their king would lead them back to victory and the wealth they had lost. Victory and sacrifice would keep their enemies far from the borders of the kingdom. They understood that the determination of this vigorous new king and his ambition to restore the honor of his dynasty affected all their fates. The greatness of the royal past, now recaptured, would unfold into all their futures. They prayed for the ancient strength of the great kings, knowing that the demons of war had to be driven forward to the lands of their enemies. Once unleashed, they would devour all in their path.
-Yet even if this notion were right, it is still not obvious that all justice must be realized in or through the machinery of the state. Relations of justice only between compatriots can still subsist through other institutions which those compatriots participate in and are subject to.
+Shortly after entombing Stela 26, Ah-Cacaw buried Stela 31, utilizing the same sorts of dedication rituals. The most sacred memorial of Tikal’s glorious military history, Stela 31 was the tree-stone upon which Stormy-Sky himself had engraved the history of the Uaxactun conquest.[318] Enemies had violently torn this magnificent stela from its place in front of Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup>, the building next door to the temple in which Ah-Cacaw later interred Stela 26.
-Nor ought the policy framework be confused with “statism” in the particular sense used by some political philosophers[229] to refer to the view that being subject to coercion by one and the same state places such subjects into special justice-relevant relations which do not obtain between themselves and those subject to the coercion of other states.[230] On this view, though the coercive apparatus of the state may engender social relations that are subject to evaluation as to their justice, it need not entail that those relations can only be just via the enactment of particular policies by the state.
+Lifting Stela 31 from where it lay in disgrace, the lords of Tikal carried it in honor up the stairs to the old temple. There they replanted it in the shallow pit they had dug into the floor of the rear room of the temple, laid kindling around its base, and lit a fire to disperse the power accumulated in the stone—just as they had done in the rituals described above for Stela 26. This fire also seared away the dishonor that had been done to the stela’s spirit. Members of the court of Tikal, and those nobles from ancient vassal communities courageous enough to declare for the new king against Caracol, brought elaborate pottery censers in which they burned ritual offerings. After the ceremony, these censers were smashed in a termination ritual and the pieces left scattered on the floors of these soon-to-be-buried temple chambers.
-The policy framework might or might not be embraced by “nationalists” and “statists” of this kind, since it is a way of framing and articulating normative principles rather than something internal to normative theorizing. Even cosmopolitans—who believe duties of justice are owed to foreigner and compatriot alike—often analyze the nature of global justice and how to achieve it by thinking about what kind of policies ought to be implemented at the state or international level.[231] At the international level as well as the domestic, however, we ought not to presume from the armchair that any particular institution is the one that ought to be charged with realizing justice.[232] No particular set of institutional arrangements for realizing domestic or global justice is entailed by the purely normative content of justice.[233] “Nationalism” and “statism” are normative commitments which do not immediately imply any particular set of institutions.
+Once Stela 31 was cached in its place, work crews filled the chambers of the old temple, then collapsed its vaults and roof comb, sealing in its power forever. They then covered the old building with a flat-topped pyramid twelve meters tall, which would provide the construction base for a new sacred mountain which would reach 18.8 meters in height. The engineers and masons used the technique of rapid building, for no doubt Ah-Cacaw intended to strike quickly at his enemies once he had completed the reopening of his family’s sacred portal to the Otherworld. Each level of the rising pyramid was divided into rectangular stone construction pens, which were then filled with mud, mortar, and rubble. When the completed temple stood atop it, this towering pyramidal base provided an impressive new backdrop for the stela row in front of the North Acropolis (Fig. 5:21). The pyramid’s huge mass unified the many buildings of the North Acropolis into a range of living mountains with a single supernatural doorway on its northern horizon. Through this doorway the ancestors of Tikal would emerge once again to aid the new king as he strove to reestablish the glory they had forged before the disaster.[319]
-**** B. The Analytical Poverty of the Policy Framework
+We do not know exactly when the termination rituals for the old building, Temple 33—2<sup>nd</sup>, ended and the work on Temple 33—1<sup>st</sup> began. We can assume, however, that this building project was under way at the same time that Ah-Cacaw was raising his Twin Pyramid Complex. This complex would hold the first stela of his reign, Stela 30, and its altar (Fig. 5:22), both erected to celebrate the end of Katun 13. This Twin Pyramid Complex was the first to be built since the original complex, which had been buried under the East Plaza in Tikal’s old glory days. Ah-Cacaw no doubt chose this particular style of architecture because he wanted to confirm his continuity with the earlier traditions of his dynasty. He also revived the period-ending celebrations initiated by his ancestor Stormy-Sky, especially the staff ritual that had been so prominent in the golden years after Stormy-Sky’s reign. These rituals would remain central to Late Classic Tikal until its demise.
-Any analysis of justice that renders it the unique concern of state action is thoroughly impoverished. Looking only, or even chiefly, at the state as a default disables one from analyzing the plethora of other loci of justice and injustice in real societies.
+In spite of the fact that he was busily eradicating all remnants of the conqueror’s influence from his city, Ah-Cacaw did not completely reject Caracol’s stylistic influences in the art he created.[320] The round stone altar (Fig. 5:22) he set in front of his portrait, in fact, was carved in a style that was popular in the kingdom of Tikal’s conquerors (Fig. 5:4). This style utilized Caracol’s favorite device of putting the name of the katun in the center of the top surface of the altar and surrounding it with text. It is possible that Ah-Cacaw chose this style for the altar to be placed in front of his first monument precisely because he wished to neutralize the shame of Tikal’s ancient defeat. This conjecture finds further support when we examine his portrait: He chose to depict himself here in a style much like that of Stela 17, the last monument of the hapless twenty-first successor, who had fallen to Caracol so many years ago.
-Consider, for a moment, two different societies. Call the first one Iustitia, and the second Inius- titiam. The respective states governing Iustitia and Iniustitiam have virtually identical constitutions and virtually identical laws.[234] Moreover, they are made up of highly similar people—neither absolute saints nor absolute sinners. Iustitia—as its name suggests—is an admirably just society, whereas Iniustitiam is—also as its name suggests—rife with injustice.
+If we had only the archaeologically excavated construction record of Temple 33 and the deposition of Stela 31, there would be little more we could say about the events surrounding its dedication. But Ah-Cacaw rightfully regarded the rekindling of the spiritual fires of his dynasty, in Temple 33—1<sup>st</sup> and the Great Plaza, to have been the most important events of his life. These were the pivotal scenes he chose to feature when he memorialized his reign on the broad hardwood lintels spanning the doorways of his great funerary house, Temple 1, high atop the huge pyramid that was built over his tomb. On the dark polished surfaces of these lintels we find Temple 33’s history in wonderful detail.
-In Iniustitiam, large swaths of people starve in the streets, and race is a major factor in determining which members of the society find themselves in that number. Those able to find work are subject to the worst kinds of managerial pressures, with seemingly no reprieve. While women are legally allowed to do as they wish, almost all of them stay at home in rigidly patriarchal relationships. Crime rates are staggering, and the police are often complicit. All the while, a small, select class of people enjoy almost all the wealth, doing their best to blissfully ignore the cries of the proles as they drift from fine dining establishment to fine dining establishment. On sufficien- tarian, relational egalitarian, luck egalitarian, and libertarian standards, Iniustitiam is Hell.
+The construction of Temple 33-lst must have been finished shortly after 9.13.3.0.0 (March 3, 695), for Lintel 3 tells us that the dedication events began with this period ending (Fig. 5:23). One hundred and fiftyeight days afterward, Ah-Cacaw went to war and took captive King Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. The battle that won him this famous captive was in the same style as Caracol’s war against Naranjo (Fig. 5:6) sixty-eight years earlier, and Smoking-Squirrel’s recent war against Ucanal (Fig. 5:14).[321] It was Tlaloc-Venus war. There was one significant difference, however. Aside from the fact that Jaguar-Paw fell to Ah-Cacaw on August 8, 695, two days after the zenith passage of the sun, there was none of the usual astronomical significance we have come to expect in Maya warfare. Ah-Cacaw timed this victory not by the strict mandates of the heavens but by the history of his own people, marked by the thirteen katun anniversary of Stormy-Sky’s war event celebrated on Stela 31.
-Iustitia is a bit different. Almost no one goes hungry, aside from those who are fasting on religious grounds. Most businesses are worker cooperatives, and those that are not might as well be, given the respectful nature of the employer—employee relationships. Men and women enter the workforce at almost identical rates and share equally in household labor. Violent crime occurs mostly on television, not in reality. And benefits are widely shared: Iustitians’ limited differences in resources result only from robustly voluntary choices. On sufficientarian, relational egalitarian, luck egalitarian, and libertarian standards, Iustitia is Heaven.[235]
+Thirteen days after the battle in which Jaguar-Paw fell, Ah-Cacaw displayed his Calakmul captives in a ritual in which they were humiliated and probably tortured.[322] This dramatic scene, modeled in plaster, can be found on the upper facade of Structure 5D-57, one of the complex of council houses and temples called the Central Acropolis (Fig. 5:24). Here we see one of the captives, seated and with his wrists bound behind his back. He is held by a tether which stretches to the hand of the victorious king. Ah-Cacaw, standing behind the captive, is dressed in the Mosaic Monster garb of the Tlaloc complex associated with Venus war, the same costume worn by his ancestors during Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun. The captive pictured is not Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul himself, but someone named Ah-Bolon-Bakin, who was an ally or vassal of that captured king.
-As stated previously, the laws and constitutions of Iniustitiam and Iustitia are identical. Yet the differences between these two societies are not accidental. While Iustitia has a powerful labor movement to keep workplace authority in check, this does not exist in Iniustitiam. The Iustitian labor movement is also connected to a robust network of mutual aid societies, with nothing similar in Iniustitiam. While there are, formally-speaking, very serious anti-discrimination laws in both societies, cultural norms make them almost unnecessary in Iustitia, and unenforceable in Iniustitiam. Religious institutions in Iniustitiam spend most of their time reinforcing the low social status of women and racial minorities, whereas religious institutions in Iustitia spend most of their time voluntarily redistributing their wealth downward and holding informal restorative justice seminars.
+Twenty-seven days later, Ah-Cacaw sacrificed these unfortunate captives in the dedication ritual for Temple 33. He recorded this event in a triplet form, giving different types of information about the event with each repetition. This critical record was carved on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 (Fig. 5:23). First, Ah-Cacaw recorded the ritual as a dedication event in which he himself let blood from his tongue.[323] Aswe shall see in the chapter on Yaxchilan, this ritual involved the piercing of the tongue to create a wound-through which a cord was drawn. The blood loss and pain an individual experienced during this self-wounding process elicited a trance state in which the Vision Serpent could appear. This Vision Serpent was the conduit through which the ancestors came into the world and spoke to their descendants. We suspect that Ah-Cacaw called on Stormy-Sky, bringing him up through the sacred portal in Temple 33 to witness the dynastic renewal accomplished by his descendant.
-Iustitia is very obviously more just than Iniustitiam, even if their laws and constitutions are identical. To make the point here even clearer, imagine that they aren’t identical. Instead, Iustitia has no state-provided social safety net at all, while Iniustitiam’s is quite expensive. Iustitia has no formal anti-discrimination legislation, and Iniustitiam does. And so on and so forth. In that case, while some theorists might think this second version of Iustitia’s laws intuitively sound more out of whack with justice than Iniustitiam’s, Iustitia is still clearly more just.
+[[][Fig. 5:23 Texts recording the Dedication Rituals for Temple 33 on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 and Temple 5D-57]]
-That Iustitia can be basically just and Iniustitiam basically unjust counts against the policy framework, but there is still a way of talking about Iustitia and Iniustitiam’s differences from within the policy framework. One could say that Iustitia and Iniustitiam are faced with very different circumstances, meaning that the same principles of justice apply themselves very differently in Iustitia and Iniustitiam. Distributive justice could mean that the state does what’s necessary to secure that justice, and it may be that this does not require a welfare state for Iustitia, but does for Iniustitiam. Seeing justice as about the state does not mean its demands are not affected by factors beyond the state.
+The second passage in the triplet declares that the dedication ritual[324] took place in a location named with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph. This location was very likely the Great Plaza, the community’s spiritual center. In this passage, Ah-Cacaw asserts his legitimate right to open the portal to the Otherworld by declaring his royal pedigree as the child of Lady Jaguar-Throne and King Shield-Skull. The final description of the dedication of Temple 33 links the event to Ah-Cacaw’s accession.
-This response overlooks a much simpler solution, however. The circumstances that evoke wonder in Iustitia and horror in Iniustitiam are social circumstances. They are differences not in their public policies but in their social institutions more broadly. One way to bring Iniustitiam closer to Iustitia would be for the state to take over where other institutions have failed. Another option, though, is to simply reform those non-state institutions. An adherent of the policy framework might respond that this would just be a matter of adjusting the background circumstances in a way that makes justice much easier. Either way, the effect is the same—justice can be achieved through any number of ways that bypass public policy. It is more straightforward to say that justice can concern social institutions without any mediation whatsoever through the state’s express policies.
+[[][Fig. 5:24 Structure 5D-57 and the Rituals of Dedication]]
-A defender of the policy framework might protest that this loses sight of justice as a site of enforceable obligations. There are at least two reasons this reply fails. First, the contrast between Iustitia and Iniustitiam shows that even when claims of justice are equally “legally guaranteed” by those states at some formal level, they are only secure in Iustitia. Another way to put this is that only in Iustitia are they enforced in reality. Understanding why this is so requires going beyond the policy framework.
+How do we know that the events recorded in Temple 1 refer to the dedication of Temple 33 and the refurbished Great Plaza area? The answer is that we don’t, except by inference, but the evidence supporting our deduction is strong. The date of Ah-Cacaw’s dedication ceremony as recorded in Temple 1 is the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last date preserved on the broken Stela 31. We know that the date on the broken stela marked a bloodletting ceremony enacted by the ancient king Stormy-Sky on the occasion of a maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[325]
-The second and closely related reason is that “enforcement” need not be limited to violent acts of state institutions. When social norms develop and maintain dependable ground-level sanctions, this too is enforcement.[236] Far from stretching our understanding of “justice,” this better fits with ordinary language. For instance, consider how much of what is commonly called “social justice” activism is frequently directed at the reform of social norms, not just legal changes.[237]
+The fact that Ah-Cacaw timed his own dedication rites to this thirteenth katun anniversary date was not accidental. Unlike his royal contemporaries who timed their actions in war and peace by the cycles of Venus, Ah-Cacaw chose a cycle that would connect the rebirth of his dynasty to the old Tikal of the glory days. Stormy-Sky was the pivotal hero of the old dynasty from Ah-Cacaw’s point of view. We believe it was no accident that Ah-Cacaw built his magnificent Temple 33 over the tomb of this great king and there buried Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s beautifully carved war memorial, as part of the termination rites. As we have seen, Ah-Cacaw also timed his war against Calakmul by this thirteenth katun anniversary cycle. This 260-year anniversary was one of the most sacred cycles to the ancient Maya. It alone of the ancient cycles would survive the conquest to be preserved by the Maya in the katun wheel famous in the books of Chilam Balam in Yucatan.
-It is telling that strands of contemporary political philosophy that recognize the importance of social norms as sources of people’s compliance with putatively just state demands concern themselves primarily with questions about the state’s inculcation of social norms—they treat such norms simply as further targets of public policy.[238] What is strange about such a framing is that state-made laws themselves are just social norms of a particular kind. The ability of states to inculcate compliance with a set of norms is presumed by the possibility of legislation.[239] Where states have trouble obtaining the compliance that is necessary to the success of its policies, the instrumental variable appears to be endogenous. We have just as much reason to see people acting justly as a feature of other norms and institutions besides state-made law. State-made law ought not be regarded “as a largely autonomous tool for securing justice and fair cooperation,” but one set of norms among many—with no monopoly on justice.[240]
+More evidence for our claim can be found by comparing the imagery on Stela 31 with the scenes on the lintels of Temple 1. These scenes clearly portray the essential details of the king’s performance in the Great Plaza on the occasion of the dedication of Temple 33. On Lintel 2 (Fig. 5:25b) Ah-Cacaw sits astride a throne covered with a jaguar pelt, his feet resting on a stepped base marked with bands of waterlilies representing the dark and dangerous surface of Xibalba. He wears the balloon headdress of the Tlaloc war complex and a frightful deity mask, the last earthly thing his sacrificial victims were likely to see. In his hands he holds spearthrower darts and a shield. This is the same battle gear worn by his ancestors, Smoking-Frog on Uaxactun Stela 5 and Curl-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. The Mosaic Monster conjured up by the seated Ah-Cacaw looms above him, menacing the foes of Tikal. This monster is the same god of conquest worn by Curl-Snout as a headdress in his portrait on the left side of Stormy-Sky’s Stela 31 (Fig. 5:25a). The imagery of Lintel 2 refers to much more than the individual portraits of the ancestors on Stela 31. The royal house and the city of Tikal had suffered for katuns while the star of war shone for their enemies. Now their luck had changed. Ah-Cacaw once again commanded the monsters of Tlaloc war his forebears had unleashed with the conquest of Uaxactun.[326]
-**** C. The Ideological Danger of the Policy Framework
+<center>
+<verbatim>  </verbatim>
+</center>
-There is a danger that in fetishizing state policy as the pinnacle of our concerns about justice, we entrench or legitimize the very real injustices perpetuated by the state. The policy framework invites us to imagine the very best functions the state could perform, and then turn the potential performance of these functions into a kind of justification for the existence of the actual state, and with it, the things it actually does. The direct inference from principles of justice to state policies uncritically presupposes the notion that without a state, there is no justice. Therefore, as a minimal condition of creating a just society, or even mitigating some injustices at the margins, we need a state. The state is the tool and the focus of justice.
+The innermost lintel of Temple 1 depicts Ah-Cacaw in the other costume he wore during rituals of dedication (Fig. 5:26). Again, Stela 31 seems a likely source of inspiration for this lintel. On Stela 31, as you recall, Stormy-Sky stands holding the cruller-eyed GUI, the jaguar-featured member of the Hero Twins, in his arms. From Stormy-Sky’s belt hang two more versions of the Jaguar Sun, an anthropomorphic version in front and a zoomorphic version in back. This jaguar is the great patron deity of Tikal. He is also equated with the jaguar masks modeled on Late Preclassic temples at Cerros, Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Tikal. He is found in the hand of the king in the earliest known royal portrait at Tikal, Stela 29. We suspect “jaguar” may even be one of the names of the kingdom of Tikal itself.[327]
-The policy framework “overmoralizes” the state, in invoking what it could accomplish in accordance with justice, as an explanation for its existence or legitimacy.[241] Its constant invocation of a thoroughly idealized version of a real, historically shaped social institution obscures the very real injustices perpetuated by the state, in large part because of its particular institutional structure, and privileges the potential good functions it could, in principle, perform.[242] For example, by asserting that municipal police forces have the purpose of protecting people from crime, and that they therefore ought to be given generous leeway when they victimize innocent people in the process, actual police force’s actual injustices are entrenched.[243]
+On Lintel 3, we see the Gill-Jaguar God again, this time looming protectively over Ah-Cacaw. In this scene, the king again sits on a seat covered with jaguar pelts atop a stepped platform. In his right hand, he holds a God K scepter and in his left a round shield. He is heavily adorned with jewelry marking both his rank and his ritual role. His feathered headdress is mounted on a Roman-nosed profile of the sun god and a remnant of his huge backrack can be seen behind him. To announce his rank as ahau, a Jester God rides on his chest over a large pectoral composed of jade beads of varying sizes. Ah-Cacaw is seated on a palanquin which he has ridden into a ritual space, perhaps the Great Plaza itself, in order to conduct the public sacrifices that were part of the dedication celebrations.[328]
-If articulating principles or theories of justice in terms of state policies did not represent an implicit endorsement of the actual state, then there would be no reason for political philosophers to pick out this particular institution as their favored justice machine. One rarely if ever hears a political philosopher articulate some principle of justice and then say, “and therefore, the family ought to allocate everyone a sufficiently advantageous share of opportunities for welfare.” Or “and therefore, private associations must guarantee each agent her fair share of social and economic capital.” Firms, private associations, churches, cities, universities, or international nongovernmental organizations are never charged with being the institution that so obviously must be charged with guaranteeing everyone their just entitlements through policy.[244] When these institutions are invoked as vehicles for justice, it is usually government regulation of them that is the locus of the discussion.[245] Or else, it is expected that they provide some evidence that the selected institution is the most appropriately suited to the particular task at hand. The primary function of these institutions is, presumably, readily acknowledged by political philosophers to not be securing justice, yet the same is true of the state. States are not mere “machines for dispensing justice.”[246] An entity qualifies as a state if it asserts that it is entitled to serve as the final authority regarding the use of force within a geographical territory and if it exhibits the capacity effectively to maintain its dominance in that territory. It is not clear why we should assume that an institution with these features would necessarily seek to act justly or to foster justice. To expect it to as a matter of course results in the kind of moralization Levy rightly highlights.[247]
+Out of the ruins of Tikal’s broken history, Ah-Cacaw reshaped a formidable new place of power and sacrifice. Using the deeds of his ancestor Stormy-Sky as a bridge, he healed the breach in Tikal’s history caused by the long years of darkness. One question remains, however: Why did Ah-Cacaw attack Calakmul?
-It might be argued that the juridical finality of the state makes it the focus of justice. On such an account, when individuals and other social institutions fail to comply with justice, the state can use its coercive power to resolve whatever problem might follow from noncompliance. Once the state settles a matter, there is no further legal remedy, given that any lower-level legal remedies take place within the juridical space of the state’s authorization. That is why political philosophers talk about state policy rather than what the family, the firm, etc., should do, because ultimately the state has the legal capability to correct matters when those intermediary institutions fail to comply with justice.
+Calakmul’s alliance with Caracol in the war against Naranjo no doubt made its young king, Jaguar-Paw, a target for Tikal’s wrath. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the participation of Calakmul’s earlier kings in a strategy that had encircled Tikal with the enemies and allies of Calakmul. One of those erstwhile allies, the first king of Naranjo, had found himself the target of the same alliance in the waning years of his life. His descendants focused their wrathful vengeance to the south against Caracol’s neighbors, while Ah-Cacaw of Tikal turned north toward Calakmul itself.
-The compliance problem affects the state just as much as any other social institution, however. The monopoly on force being conditionally justified by its effective use of that force to ensure compliance with justice does not entail that that is how its monopoly is in fact used. We must ask: What happens when the entity with juridical finality does not comply with justice? How can that finality be justified when it is not itself operationalized to assure compliance with justice?
+What role did Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas play beyond taking advantage of the resulting power vacuum and setting his own descendants on the throne of Naranjo? We are not sure, for in his early years he had courted the young heir to Calakmul’s throne and attended his accession as a powerful friend. Flint-Sky-God K won a great strategic victory at Naranjo in the power politics of the time, but he must have lost prestige when his most prized ally died at the hands of the new I ikal ruler.
-The fact is that there is no metaphysically ultimate juridical finality, there is only what society happens to acquiesce to.[248] While the state has the power to intervene in intermediary social institutions, the state’s authority itself depends upon an array of other social norms ensuring compliance with the rules that constitute it. “[S]overeignty—where it exists— depends on rules, is constituted by rules, and so cannot intelligibly be regarded as the source of all the rules that make up the legal system.”[249] If noncompliance is a problem, then it is also a problem for state action.
+Flint-Sky-God K was the founder of a vigorous new dynasty which may have been an offshoot of the Tikal royal family, but considering his alliances, he was very likely the enemy of that kingdom during its recovery.
-The state has ultimate de facto authority over us; we therefore want it to use that authority justly. Unfortunately, this does not entail that it will do so, nor that we should justify the power on the basis that it might. The good intentions theorists have in supporting the state’s power for some particular end are not mechanically infused into the state’s actual operations. Institutions do not necessarily create the conditions for their own success;[250] they must be judged in accordance with how well they deal with difficult conditions within which they actually operate.[251]
+The tangle of elite obligations and vendettas we have outlined in this chapter rivals any in recorded history. Caracol conquered Tikal and later, in alliance with Calakmul, conquered Naranjo. A branch of the defeated Tikal family may well have moved into the Petexbatun region to establish the new kingdom of Dos Pilas. Flint-Sky-God K, the founder of the Dos Pilas dynasty, then began a campaign of battles that won him the friendship of the powerful heir and soon-to-be king of Calakmul. He also sent a daughter to Naranjo to reestablish the dynasty there, after the defeat of a king who had been installed in the presence of a former ruler of Calakmul. Tikal attacked Calakmul, the ally of Dos Pilas, while Naranjo rampaged southward toward Caracol, conquering Yaxha (which may have been subordinate to Tikal) and Ucanal. As far as we can tell, CaracoFs response was to duck and hide in the deepest cover it could find, and ride out the crisis. Certainly, its fortunes declined with the reemergence of Tikal and Naranjo as major powers.
-“Concentrated power,” as Milton Friedman reminds us, “is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”[252] The policy framework promotes support for the state, and hence its power, on the basis that this power could be used for justice. This risks lending legitimacy to the state’s many historical and ongoing injustices at the expense of underplaying or even tarnishing non-policy-based alleviations of injustice, particularly those that might simultaneously erode state power.
+ Some Thoughts and Questions
-The rhetoric of justice can sometimes foster injustice. This is particularly true when we use terms with obvious referents in the messy, real world to denote ideal, or idealized, states of affairs. For example, since most people use “capitalism” to refer to the economic system that obtains in the present in many parts of the world, riddled with privileges that render markets anything but free, when some libertarians use “capitalism” to refer to a system featuring genuinely unfettered markets, this can provide ideological cover for those rigged markets.[253] Similarly, when luck egalitarians emphasize that those who are responsible for their disadvantages have no claims of justice on the resources of others, they may be unwittingly supporting invasions of the private lives of the worst off in order to verify that they are “deserving” welfare recipients and not “scroungers.”[254] A similar thing is true of the state as it is of capitalism and notions of desert.
+These are some of the spare facts of the matter, and with any luck more will come to light in the future. Already, however, we can sense a more subtle and treacherous diplomatic landscape behind the facts we know. Did, for example, Flint-Sky-God K deliver Jaguar-Paw into the hands of Ah-Cacaw? One can envision the young monarch of Calakmul, trapped on the battlefield and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Dos Pilas warriors who never appear, raging in frustration as Ah-Cacaw draws steadily nearer with his fierce companions. Certainly the house of Dos Pilas benefited from the outcome of this battle. The alliance of Calakmul and Caracol had spanned the entire central Peten region, holding many great families hostage. With that axis broken, with Tikal in a celebratory mood, and with relatives ruling Naranjo to the east of Tikal, the kings of Dos Pilas could enjoy a free hand in the Petexbatun , spending the next eighty years consolidating a substantial conquest state of their own.
-While, when many political philosophers say “the state” they have in mind some perfect state that has never existed and may never exist, “the state” in fact refers to a very real thing to most people. The fact that philosophers envision states with all sorts of properties real states do not in fact have does not alter the rhetorical effect. Consider the following analogy, borrowed from Michael Munger, between theorizing about states and how someone might similarly theorize about unicorns.[255] In Munger’s hypothetical, there are no unicorns in the real world, yet they are constantly invoked to solve the real world’s problems. Through their magic, unicorns can move heavy loads quickly and efficiently around the world, so the unicorn-theorist argues we should use them to solve all our transportation needs. Of course, if you invoke a unicorn as a solution to real social problems, no one would imagine you were offering a serious proposal. But while, as far as we know, “unicorn” has no referent in the real world, “the state” does. Saying that unicorns can solve all our transit problems does not encourage outrageous expectations of, say, real-world horses. But talking about the mythical state—the one that exists only in the minds of political philosophers—does lead people to embrace certain attitudes toward real states. As Jacob Levy describes this process,
+The impact of these maneuvers on Caracol was profound. No inscriptions exist, as far as we know, from the period spanning the end of Lord Kan H’s reign up until the end of Katun 17. That silence lasted for seventy years. At Calakmul, the results were different, perhaps because that kingdom was so huge and so far to the north that it managed to survive the defeat of its king without major effect. By the next period ending following the death of Jaguar-Paw, the people of Calakmul had already begun to erect stelae once more.
-Political philosophers are prone to the following fallacy: If we knew precisely what justice demanded and had access to a government that would implement it, we would have a unified system of rights and responsibilities and authority; therefore we know that a disintegrated system is not part of what justice demands; therefore, we know that justice prohibits a disunited system.[256]
+Whatever effects Ah-Cacaw’s deeds may have had on the liberation of the Peten, his rituals of dedication and his family’s program of rebuilding seem to have accomplished their primary purpose. Tikal regained its position as one of the largest and wealthiest kingdoms in the central Peten.
-Indeed, the policy framework privileges the state in much the same way social contract theory often does: there is a presumption in favor of the state actually doing what we want it to, at least well enough to justify our allegiance. Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall spell out this problem:
+In spite of these very substantial gains, however, the king did not rest on his laurels. The architectural remodeling of downtown Tikal and the wars of Ah-Cacaw were far from over. Less than a year after the dedication of Temple 33, Ah-Cacaw attacked Calakmul again, this time taking captive a lord named Ox-Ha-Te Ixil Ahau, who was immortalized in one of the most elegant drawings left to us by the Maya (Fig. 5:27). The artist incised the image of this man on two carved bones deposited in Ah-Cacaw’s tomb. On these bones we see Ox-Ha-Te Ixil standing in public humiliation with his head bowed, stripped to his loincloth, his wrists, upper arms, and knees bound together. The battle in which he fell took place in the land of a person named Split-Earth, who was the king who apparently succeeded Jaguar-Paw at Calakmul.[329] This captive was one of his nobles. Ironically, both these Calakmul stalwarts enjoyed the privilege of history only because they accompanied a great enemy king to his grave.
-<quote>
+At the end of the katun, 9.14.0.0.0, just when Smoking-Squirrel was attacking Yaxha, Ah-Cacaw built his second Twin Pyramid Complex and placed Stela 14 and Altar 5 (Fig. 5:28) in the northern enclosure. On this stela, Ah-Cacaw stands front view with the staff favored by the Early Classic Tikal kings balanced on his forearms. The feathers of his backrack fan out in a torso-high circle behind him. In recognition of the first appearance of the Eveningstar, he wears the skeletal image of this celestial being as his headdress.
-Contractarians devote pages and pages of normative argument to support the apparently strong criteria that the state is only justified if it makes everyone better off than they would be in its absence. Yet, with little or no argument, they usually conclude that the criterion is fulfilled, and they seldom even address the question of what to do when the criterion is unfulfilled.[257]
-</quote>
-The policy framework imputes moral purpose to the state even though its actual function tends to go against that purpose. Employing the policy framework thus means providing rhetorical cover for state injustice. To avoid doing this and to undermine the deleterious influence of the policy framework, we should consciously resist use of it. We propose that resistance take the form of adopting methodological anarchism. Methodological anarchism draws a bright line between abstract principles of justice and concrete proposals for specific state policies—or even specific sorts of policies. It embodies a thoroughgoing institutional agnosticism about how we ought to enact justice. For example, imagine that we agree on some general sufficientarian principle, in accordance with which everyone is owed the ability to realize some minimal level of welfare. We cannot reason directly from this principle to the claim that the state must provide some sort of a social safety net. We can only reason to the claim that there ought to be a safety net. After comparative institutional analysis, we may conclude that this social safety net should take the form of a state-funded, state- delivered program. However, we might conclude instead that it demands a rebirth of something like pre-welfare state mutual aid societies. In either case, social institutions attempt to provide a safety net. The question is which method is successful, which one can be depended upon.
+Ah-Cacaw may have built one more twin pyramid complex, but this one, which celebrated 9.15.0.0.0, never had any carved monuments erected within it, so we are not sure of the identity of its originator. It was not the custom at Tikal in the Late Classic period to erect stelae recording the details of the kings’ lives. Instead, the kings vested public energy and historical memory into their personal twin pyramid complexes and the rites they conducted on period-endings. This new emphasis began after Stormy-Sky’s death in the fifth century and it was a custom that Ah-Cacaw reinforced. For that reason we have little information about the last twenty years of Ah-Cacaw’s life: A few dates with obscure events appear on the incised bones deposited in his tomb. One clear historical footnote recorded on these bones, however, is the death of Shield-God K, the son of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas.[330] Surely if Ah-Cacaw had strained good relations with the Dos Pilas family when he took Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul, he must have repaired the breach by the time of his demise.
-Importantly, this is not a consequentialist claim that perhaps the goals of justice could be better achieved beyond the state. It is a conceptual decoupling of justice and the state. The state is not a justice machine through which a society speaks and acts, as Nozick claims. It is just one among many institutions that might be thought capable of exhibiting or fostering justice. Its actions have particularly far-reaching effects—hence political anarchists’ focus on its abolition— but it is still just one institution among many. Methodological anarchism involves first acknowledging that it is analytically erroneous and morally dangerous to reify society as the state, and then refusing to do so.
+Ah-Cacaw’s son, Ruler B, succeeded him on 9.15.3.6.8 (December 12, 734). This son most likely built his famous father’s funerary mountain, Temple 1, because we have evidence that the pyramid was erected after the tomb was sealed. Still, the absence of any editorial comment by this young man in the hieroglyphic texts on the masterful lintels of this temple suggests that they were completed under the watchful eye of an aging Ah-Cacaw. The devout son, no doubt, merely installed them.[331]
-*** III. From Theory to Practice: The Promise of Methodological Anarchism
+We are less sure about the end of Smoking-Squirrel’s life at Naranjo. All we know is that his son Smoking-Batab succeeded him on November 22, 755.[332]
-Not only does methodological anarchism point to a new way of viewing justice, it opens up conceptual space for a different way of seeing political action. Within the policy framework, with concerns of justice tied to state’s regulations, laws, and constitutions, political action is naturally aimed at changing these regulations, laws, and constitutions. Political action can take the form of voting, running for office, lobbying for or against legislation, or campaigning for candidates or referenda. It may also come in the form of civil disobedience or educating the public, but the aim of that civil disobedience and education is still always to eventually effect a change in public policy. Political action as understood within the policy framework might even come in the form of revolution, where the aim is to entirely replace one constitution with another. What these forms of political action—which we will refer to broadly as “reform and revolution”— share is that the central, guiding aim is always to change the things states do.
+Many parallels can be drawn between the lives of Ah-Cacaw and Smoking-Squirrel. Both kings inherited polities that had suffered humiliating defeats at the hand of the same enemy—the kingdom of Caracol— and both kings spent their lives successfully reestablishing the prestige and central position of their kingdoms in the affairs of the Late Classic Maya world. Their strategies were essentially the same. Ah-Cacaw began his reign with the honorable deposition of desecrated monuments in the older buildings that fronted the North Acropolis, the ritual center of Tikal. Although his father, Shield Skull, had already begun the process of reawakening the state with a preliminary rejuvenation of the North Acropolis, it fell to Ah-Cacaw to complete the program. He erected the huge Temple 33 over the stela recording the history of his kingdom’s greatest conquest—the deeds of his mighty ancestors, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Curl-Snout, and Stormy-Sky. On the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last readable date on the desecrated monument, he went to war and took a captive high enough in rank and prestige to wipe away the dishonor on the spirit and history of his kingdom. With the building of Temple 33, he remade the ceremonial heart of the city into a new configuration on a scale and proportion worthy of the glory he had regained.
-**** A. Direct Action
+Smoking-Squirrel used the same tools of reclamation to reestablish his kingdom’s honor. His success in war demonstrated both Naranjo’s regained prowess as a military power and the renewed favor of the gods. His success as a charismatic ruler can be seen in his ability to gather the tremendous numbers of laborers and skilled craftsmen needed to remake the center of his kingdom on an even greater and more glorious scale. Smoking-Squirrel built Groups A15 and C (Fig. 5:12), both designed to reproduce the triadic arrangements of Late Preclassic buildings we have seen at Cerros and Uaxactun. His appeal was not only to size, but more important, to the ancient orthodoxy of Maya kingship. This was a pattern seized upon by Ah-Cacaw as well, for by sealing the interior courts of the old temple complex away from processional access, he turned the North Acropolis into the northern point of a new triadic group. Temple 1 formed the second point and Temple 2 the third. Thus, both kings reestablished the prestige of their defeated kingdoms by publicly and forcefully demonstrating their prow’ess as architects and warriors.
-It is in contrast to reform and revolution that we understand direct action. “Direct action” refers to attempts at directly addressing issues of justice without mediation through state channels.[258] A program of direct action can have as one of its many aims an eventual policy change, but it need not do so, and it is never limited to doing so. Within the policy framework, it can be difficult to see how direct action helps achieve justice. We might make do with direct action when putatively appropriate state policies look unlikely, but there is a sense that something is missing in terms of justice. Methodological anarchism makes possible more enthusiastic endorsements of direct action. It thus helps to build an important bridge between political philosophy and the real world, because many concerns of justice typically reified as policy programs have also been pursued through direct action. There is an entire world of human association that political philosophy has ignored in its reliance upon the policy framework.
+What we have tried to show in these histories of the Peten kingdoms is how the interrelationships of the many polities that inhabited this landscape together comprised what we call Maya civilization. In alliance, in war, and in marriage, the great families that ruled these kingdoms wove together a fabric of meaningful existence as intricate as any they wore on state occasions. The patterns of destruction and creation were shared. More important, the destiny of any kingdom hinged upon its successful performance not only within its own borders but also before the watchful eyes of its friends and foes. History was a matter of mutual interpretation and the mutual elaboration of innovative new ideas like Venus-Tlaloc s warfare. In later chapters, as we shift our focus to a close-up of the inner workings of specific kingdoms, we need to bear in mind that the Maya ahauob were always performing for the wider audience of their neighboring peers. Their deeds always required the validation of that larger congregation of true and resplendent people. For the nobility, as for all the people of the community, to be Maya was to be part of the patterns of history formed by the actions of kings within the framework of sacred space and time.
-This is not just the judgement of wild-eyed political anarchists; it is also the verdict of mainstream social science. For instance, the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has shown how sophisticated forms of social organization can use social capital to sustainably manage common ecological resources without reliance on the state.[259] Similarly, anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott shows how many forms of successful socioeconomic organization are illegible to states, and sustaining these forms of organization can often only be achieved through actively resisting attempts by states to force legibility onto a society.[260] Scholars like Ostrom and Scott show that reform and revolution’s fundamental assumption, that the state is necessarily the ultimate site of social change, is simply false. To make this general point clearer, we will now discuss its application to various specific domains. The following examples are meant only as a brief glance at what sorts of institutions beyond the state might enter conversations about justice between methodologically anarchist political philosophers.
+ Photo Gallery
-**** B. Direct Action: Social Safety Nets
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-2.jpg 70f][The magic of these waterfalls at Palenque enchanted Linda Scheie on her first visit to the ruins. The ancient Maya who built their city around their lifegiving pools must have seen these streams as meaningful symbols of the processes of destruction and creation, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1972)]]
-Several theories of distributive justice require the provision of a social safety net. It is often argued that the fact that this is a matter of distributive justice means that this social safety net should not be seen as a form of charity. Rather, it should be understood that those benefitting from this safety net are simply receiving benefits to which they are entitled. It is often further argued that that dependence on charity can place the poor in a position of subordination. If Person A’s continued existence depends on Person B’s benevolence, Person B is effectively in a position to interfere arbitrarily in Person A’s life. We therefore need institutions that dependably provide a social safety net without making those who need it dependent on the good graces of their neighbors. Historically, this has been achieved successfully through direct action.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-3.png][Tikal Temple 33 (A.D. 400–700), which was dismantled by archaeologists, was the first major building constructed by Ah-Cacaw. He placed Stela 31 inside the old temple before construction on this final version began. The enormous new temple was dedicated on September 17, A.D. 695, exactly 260 years after the last date on that early stela, (photo by Peter Harrison)]]
-Before the rise of the welfare state, a robust social safety net existed in the form of mutual aid societies.[261] These private associations were not providers of charity, and they were not viewed as if they were. Their funds came from the pooled resources of members, provided with the expectation that they would receive the societies’ benefits once they needed to do so.[262] Among the benefits that these societies provided were access to orphanages and old-age homes, life insurance, and health and accident insurance.[263] They were especially successful in insuring healthcare. At one point, members were able to secure a year’s worth of benefits for the price of a day’s wage.[264] Thirty percent of Americans over 20 belonged to mutual aid societies in 1920, with even higher numbers among minority ethnic and religious groups.[265]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-4.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Cerros shows Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> (100 B.C.-A.D. 100), the first temple built at that center, to the right peeking out of the forest next to the shore. The eastward-facing Acropolis of a later king sits at the end of the modern dock extending into Chetumal Bay. During the first century B.C., people of Cerros experimented with kingship and then abandoned it a hundred years later to return to their lives as villagers and farmers, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-**** C. Direct Action: Checks on Private Power
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-5.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Tikal shows the North Acropolis at the top, the Great Plaza in the center, and the Central Acropolis to the lower right. Temple 1 is on the right of the Great Plaza and Temple II on the left. Most of the visible architecture in the North Acropolis is Early Classic (A.D. 300–600), while the Great Plaza and most of the Central Acropolis is Late Classic (A.D. 600–800). (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-Another concern of justice, especially for neo-republicans and relational egalitarians, is ensuring checks on private power. Elizabeth Anderson makes this especially salient by framing powerful employers as “Communist dictatorships in our midst.”[266] Modern workplaces may not have the same powers of repression available to modern states, but they can still be the most sharply felt sites of oppression for many people.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-6.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph features many of 18-Rabbit’s greatest works. The Great Plaza and its forest of tree-stones (at the top) was built during the early eighth century. 18-Rabbit built the Ballcourt (lower right) six months before he was sacrificed by a rival at the nearby site of Quirigua. The stela on the end of the Ballcourt was commissioned by his father, while the tiny altar near it was placed there by the last tragic king of Copan, the Maya kingdom that dominated western Honduras and the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-That we need institutional checks on private power does not entail the conclusion that state regulation is required. For there is a ready and obvious case of a private institution meant to combat employer power: that of the labor union. When successful, labor unions provide institutional checks on private power by raising costs for employers who do not accept their demands. There is no conceptual reason to treat this check as any less dependable or real than the checks provided by state regulation.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-7.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the greatest work of King Chan-Bahlum—the Group of the Cross (A.D. 692) at Palenque, México. The view is from the door of the Temple of the Foliated Cross and includes the Temple of the Sun on the left, the Palace in the center, and the Temple of the Cross on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-In fact, political anarchists frequently argue that such private checks are more dependable than state regulation, and act accordingly. The histories of anarchism and radical labor politics are deeply intertwined, as is made most clear by wildcat unions like the Industrial Workers of the World. For a recent example of labor unions engaged in direct action completely unaided by state policy, we can look to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a union not certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).[267] That union, which represents immigrant farm workers without NLRB certification, has won better wages and work conditions without ever relying on state labor laws. Among the companies it has won victories over are Walmart, Taco Bell, Publix, and other large chains. CIW’s successes have not occurred despite its lack of NLRB certification, but because of it. Its primary tactics, focused on pressuring companies higher up the supply chain, almost entirely fall under the category “secondary action,” illegal for NLRB- certified unions. The CIW’s successes highlight the capacity of unions to check the private power of employers without any recourse to the state.[268]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-8.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the south end of the Palace at Palenque. House E, the building housing Pacal’s accession panel, is on the left with the Group of the Cross visible above its roof, while the Temple of Inscriptions, where Pacal is buried, nestles against the mountain on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-**** D. Direct Action: Protection from Violence
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-9.jpg 70f]]
-Whatever their disagreements regarding other matters, most theorists of justice share a concern with seeing people protected from violence. Virtually everyone who is not an anarchist, then, assumes that this is a job for the state and its police force. Those functions are often seen as the state’s most basic, as is implied by the phrasing in some libertarians’ endorsement of the “minimal state.” Here too, direct action has worked to supply justice beyond the state.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-10.jpg 70f]]
-One such case is Threat Management Center, which has helped defend people in the Detroit area from crime for nearly twenty years. According to its founder, as of 2013 it had served 1,000 homes and 500 businesses, and it uses that money to fund free protection for people in poorer areas that cannot afford it.[269] It is committed to de-escalating violence, embracing a hard rule that its personnel will only shoot second—doubtless in part because, unlike the police, they are legally equal with ordinary people.[270]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-11.jpg 70f][This brightly painted clay figurine (A.D. 600–800) depicts a Late Classic Maya ruler wearing the god Chac-Xib-Chac in his befeathered headdress. His ornate costume includes a royal belt around his waist, huge pendants on his chest, a decorated apron, and tasseled sandals. He wears a round shield on his left wrist and probably once had a tiny spear in his right hand. His mouth ornament is like one worn by Pacal into his grave. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-**** E. Direct Action: Remedies for Violence Done
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-12.jpg 70f][This painted vessel (A.D. 426) was found in Curl-Snout’s tomb (Burial 10) inside Temple 34 of Tikal, Guatemala. The vessel shape is Maya, but the images reflect contact with Teotihuacán, the great city near modern México City, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]
-Direct action has also been used in providing moral repair after violence has already occurred. In cases where violence occurs in communities skeptical of or averse to seeking aid from the state’s legal system, assorted organizations have engaged in direct action to offer more constructive responses than state institutions. Creative Interventions is one such example, formed in 2004 by organizers with ties to both the anti-violence and prison abolition movements.[271] Its approach emphasizes restorative justice, focusing on those most closely affected by instances of violence, but also putting them in a larger community context.[272] Creative Interventions seeks to discover the full context of the harm done—its causes, impact, and potential for redress—and out of that context, develop goals toward repair.[273] While the founders of Creative Interventions see the project in political terms, they make no assumptions about the politics of those they work with.[274]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-13.jpg 70f][Lintel 41 (A.D. 755) was once mounted over a doorway into Structure 16 at the ruins of Yaxchilán in México. The carved scene depicts Bird-Jaguar standing with a wife from Motul de San José as she helps him prepare for battle. He holds a battle spear in his hand and wears a Tlaloc-war headdress. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-**** F. Direct Action: Routing around Bad State Policies
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-14.jpg 70f][Lintel 24 (A.D. 700–725) was mounted over the left door of Structure 23 at Yaxchilán, México. The carved scenes depict a bloodletting rite celebrating the birth of a son to the sixty-two-year-old king, Shield-Jaguar. He holds a torch over Lady Xoc, his principal wife, as she pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue to sanctify the birth of a younger wife’s child. This child, Bird-Jaguar, became king after ten years of competition with rivals who may have been Lady Xoc’s offspring, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-When injustice is created by bad state policy, one way to fix the problem is to seek to change the relevant policy through reform or revolution. Another option is to route around the state or clean up its mess through direct action. Consider the United States’ war on drugs—often considered a paradigmatically unjust policy by many philosophers.[275] One case of direct action responding to the drug war and its consequences is the creation of the Silk Road, a now-defunct online marketplace for illegal drugs.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-15.jpg 70f][Dedicated in A.D. 715, Temple 22 of Copan, Honduras, was commissioned by 18-Rabbit to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of his accession. This extraordinary sculpted door leads to the inner sanctum where 18-Rabbit and his successors let blood and talked to their ancestors and the gods. The image represents the arch of the sky held away from the skeletal realm of the Underworld by gods called Pauahtun. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-In an interview with Forbes magazine, the Silk Road’s founder explicitly framed the project in political terms, emphasizing that it was “about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we’ve done no wrong.”[276] Importantly, the idea was not just civil disobedience against the war on drugs, but protection from it. By providing a platform allowing people to trade illegal drugs more openly, the Silk Road carved out a space in which drug laws had less power to restrict freedom. That space helped mitigate prohibition’s negative consequences, since it helped allow for features like a rating system that ensured product quality. The Silk Road itself was shut down in October 2013, and Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for being its alleged mastermind. However, various imitators still exist today.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-16.jpg 70f][This jade earflare (50 B.C.-A.D. 50) was once mounted on the side flanges of a headdress worn by a Late Preclassic king from Pomona, Belize. The glyphs are arranged to form a quincunx pattern with the central hole. The inscription evokes the Sun God and the Maize God and the rituals that celebrated their power. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-**** G. Beyond Reform and Revolution
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-17.jpg 70f][18-Rabbit, one of the greatest kings of Copan, as he was depicted on the east face of Stela C (A.D. 711), the first tree-stone he planted in the Great Plaza. The intense red color is the original paint. (photo by Linda Schele)]]
-Fully assessing the merits of direct action as an alternative to reform and revolution would take us too far from our present purposes. However, it is worth noting a few considerations that point in direct action’s favor.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-18.jpg 70f][These great masks (50 B.c.) were modeled from plaster on the eastern terraces of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, Belize. They represent the Sun God (lower mask) and Venus (the upper mask) as they rise from the horizon at dawn. (photo by James F. Garber)]]
-Compared to revolution, direct action involves much less blood and general chaos. It is also worth remembering that a new government born out of military violence will prove authoritarian. Even in the case of non-violent revolution, there are powerful knowledge problems associated with trying to build a new constitution from scratch and imposing it anew on people who were accustomed to its predecessor. Direct action does not pose the same problems as full-scale revolution because direct action works on a piecemeal basis: we need not change everything to change anything.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-19.jpg 70f][The tumbled colonnade attached to the Temple of the Warriors (A.D. 850–950) at Chichón Itzá in Yucatán, México. (photo Graph © Barbara Kerr 1975)]]
-Compared to reform, direct action avoids the hurdles inherent to dealing with governments. States are predictably resistant to positive change, and this can be seen from a variety of perspectives. Public choice economics predicts that state actors will tend toward exploitative policies with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, determined by the differential access to the political process potential beneficiaries have.[277] It also predicts that regulatory agencies won’t be particularly helpful in systematically restraining sources of predation and oppression because they will often be created or captured by the very interests they are intended to check.[278] Indeed, there is no a priori reason to think that, given the ends public office can be used for, they will not be sought for those very ends.[279] The regulatory state offers open-ended returns on any costs invested in capture. New Left Marxists[280] as well as radical libertarians[281] essentially agree that the state tends to act as the executive committee of the ruling class. Even when it looks like it is restraining the power of big business, this will usually function to benefit the corporate class as a whole.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-20.jpg 70f][Stela 31 (A.D. 447), the tree-stone of the great king Stormy-Sky, as it was found inside Temple 33 at Tikal. This side represents Stormy-Sky’s father, Curl-Snout, dressed as a Tlaloc warrior, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]
-Centralized power structures like the state will be used to entrench privilege—because people in society who are already privileged will almost necessarily have better access to the state due to that privilege. This means that when state actors face pressure from the oppressed, they will favor symbolic actions to quell that resistance over substantive changes that would challenge their power.[282] These problems with reform are avoided in direct action, where those with a clear interest in justice may pursue it directly, without having those pursuits frustrated or warped by opposing interests, nor having to convince a legislative coalition before action is taken.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-21.jpg 70f][These jade jewels (50 B.C.) were deposited in an offering in the summit of Structure 6, the second temple complex built at Cerros. The center head was worn as a pectoral, while the four smaller heads were mounted on a headband that functioned as the crown Of kings. (photo by Linda Schele)]]
-**** H. Practicing Safe Politics
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][Yucatec Maya conducting a primicia ritual at Yaxuná, Yucatán, in 1986. The boughs at the four corners of the table represent the trees at the corners of the world, while the food and drink are located on the central axis once symbolized by the Wacah Chan Tree. The symbolism of the altar and the ritual descend directly from Precolumbian belief and practice, (photo by Debra S. Walker)]]
-Another benefit of methodological anarchism is that, by turning our attention to direct action, it encourages us to practice safe politics. This point is best understood in light of recent arguments by philosophers Michael Huemer and Jason Brennan for political abstinence.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][The west gallery (dedicated in A.D. 654) of the building the people of ancient Palenque called the Zac Nuc Nah, the “White Big House.” The Oval Palace Tablet seen on the right shows Pacal receiving a headdress from his mother during his accession rites. Most of Pacal’s successors were inaugurated into the office of king while seated on a throne that once sat below this tablet, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-Huemer’s critique of political action is a suggestion that political actors join doctors in ensuring to “first, do no harm.”[283] Huemer finds it near-impossible to consistently follow this principle while also engaging in political action. This is because political actors essentially have no idea what they are doing, and are therefore much more likely to do harm than good. The first reason for this is widespread political ignorance—ignorance of the identities of political representatives, their policy positions and voting records, institutional facts about government, the details of particular policies under consideration, the social science and philosophy surrounding those policies, etc.[284] That ignorance is the predictable result of rational (whether or not altogether conscious) assessments of the costs and benefits associated with gaining the relevant information. The instrumental benefits of acquiring knowledge are exceedingly low, given that the average person has almost no chance in personally affecting public policy. The costs of obtaining that information are often very high, requiring extensive research into not only voting records and policy details, but also relevant social science and philosophy. Therefore, people remain ignorant.[285] Since obtaining information needed to determine what actions are just or will foster justice is costly, people pursue the easier goal of presenting themselves as pursuing justice.[286] This leads us to strong, yet ill-informed beliefs, which we treat as precious—since these beliefs are tied up with our self-perception, we resist threatening information.[287] Even experts are overconfident about political questions, with their predictive records only barely exceeding those that might be expected to occur by chance,[288] in part due to inherent difficulties with the predictive capacities of social theory.[289] Taking political action in the face of high levels of ignorance—on one’s own part and on the part of those who can be expected to participate in and respond to one’s efforts—is highly dangerous, so Huemer advises against it.[290]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-23.jpg 70f][This is a photo rollout of a bowl sent by Ruler 1 of Naranjo to a noble woman of Tikal as a gift. Buried with her in Structure 5G-8, the bowl (A.D. 590–630) was decorated with images of the Celestial Bird carrying snakes in its beak as it flies across the sacred world of the Maya, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]
-Jason Brennan outlines the ways in which democratic politics turns people into “civic enemies.” In the United States, strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans are less likely to hire opposing-party members independent of qualifications.[291] As with political ignorance, political enmity is a predictable product of incentives.[292] First, democratic politics presents us with constrained, suboptimal choices.[293] Second, victory is monopolistic—a victory for one means all others lose.[294] Third, that monopolistic political victory will be imposed using actual or threatened violence.[295] Thus, your political opponents in a democracy are people who wish to prevent the realization of your preferences by forcing you to accept the realization of their contrary preferences. This creates a zero-sum world, where disagreement is always a threat.[296]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-24.jpg 70f][This extraordinary statue of the God of Scribes and Artists (A.D. 725–750) once decorated Structure 9N-82, the house of a noble scribe at Copan, Honduras. The net headdress, paua, combines with the sign on his shoulder, tun, to spell his name, Pauahtun, while his face is that of a howler monkey, who was an artisan in Maya myth. Here, he holds scribal tools—a paintbrush and a shell paintpot—in his hands. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-The kinds of problems Huemer and Brennan highlight occur when politics is framed in terms of what we have called “reform.” Direct action eliminates these problems, and therefore allows us to participate in politics safely. The knowledge necessary for programs of direct action is easier to acquire than the knowledge needed successfully to implement programs of society-wide reform. For example, you don’t need to know how to successfully provide stable living arrangements for everyone in poverty; you only need to know how to provide for those in your chapter of a mutual aid society. Furthermore, a political actor implementing a program of direct action has a more intimate connection to and personal stake in the results of the direct action, and thus has an incentive to care more about getting things right. For instance, Creative Interventions participants found themselves continuously interrogating their politically formed assumptions about the dynamics of interpersonal violence, since those beliefs had more concrete and visible effects.[297]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-25.jpg 70f]]
-Direct action also heals many of the wounds left by reform’s politics of enmity. Our options for political improvement by means of direct action are constrained only by what we can imagine and get away with. Programs of direct action are obviously non-monopolistic—those who believe they can do better are always free to develop their own alternatives. Perhaps most importantly, direct action (unlike reform and revolution) has no necessary connection to violence.[298]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-26.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a vase painting (a.D. 600–800) shows warfare as it was practiced in ancient times. Warriors wearing short-sleeved battle jackets, elaborate headdresses, and the shrunken heads of past victims carry stabbing spears, battleaxes, and flexible shields. They seize captives, who are disarmed but still wearing their battle finery, by their hair to bring them under control. One grabs the leg of his captor as he looks back at his companion’s suffering, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-From within the policy framework, we are faced with a troubling dilemma. Humans are indeed political animals, but when politics means policy, acting on our natural political impulses is typically immoral. Methodological anarchism offers a way out, one that enables us to avoid harming and hating our neighbors without retreating into political abstinence.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-27.jpg 70f][A modern divination ceremony in progress before an ancient sculpture at La Democracia in Guatemala. Copal incense hovers in front of the head, while a shaman’s pouch with its rock crystals and maize seeds rests on the stone altar. Unseen in the photograph is a chocolate bar the shaman had placed in the mouth of the sculpture to bring it alive for the ritual. The same kinds of objects and rituals were used by the Precolumbian shamans two thousand years ago. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-*** IV. From Practice to Theory: What Direct Action Reveals
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-28.jpg 70f]]
-By opening up new paths to political goals, direct action offers escape from the stagnation and animosity of electoral politics. Something similar is true of how methodological anarchism reshapes conceptual territory. The lines between different theories fall differently when the questions our classifications consider go beyond state policy.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-29.jpg 70f]]
-For example, consider the claim that as a matter of justice, people ought to stand in relationships of equality, with no person or group of persons dominating any others. This is recognizably a statement of relational egalitarianism, as advocated by philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler.[299] Consider also the claim that each person is endowed with a set of natural rights acting as side-constraints on others’ actions, and that these include rights to appropriate, own, defend, and exchange property. This is recognizably a statement of Lockean libertarianism, as advocated by philosophers like Robert Nozick and Eric Mack.[300] These views are typically taken as obvious and unambiguous enemies. Relational egalitarians often defend redistributive taxation, robust state regulations of employer-employee relationships, and other policies clearly at odds with libertarian rights. If one group is right about which policies justice requires, the other is wrong. Libertarians, then, have reason to deny relational egalitarianism altogether, and relational egalitarians have reason to deny libertarianism altogether. Arguments for and against those total denials are well worn, and unlikely to sway theorists already committed one way or the other.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-30.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a corpulent lord from Motul de San Jose leaning back against his pillow as he admires himself in a mirror held by a dwarf. Lords surround him as another dwarf, a hunchback, and a flower-bearing lord sit on the floor in front of him. The local band of three musicians plays a conch-shell trumpet and two wooden horns just offstage behind the palace wall. Three enema pots sit on the floor outside the room along with a large round pot that apparently holds the liquid sipped by the dwarf, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]
-More interesting permutations can be advanced once we leave the policy framework. Suppose that we grant natural rights libertarianism. It does not follow from the strictures this puts on state policy that relational egalitarian demands must be discarded. Libertarian rights put strictures on the use of force and fraud, but they do not say much about forms of collective social pressure stopping short of violence. It may still be the case, then, that justice demands robust social norms of a kind that develop and maintain relationships of social equality, and that those norms may be enforced through various means of non-violent social coercion. For one such case: suppose that the aforementioned method of direct action against private power, stateindependent labor activism, is as effective as its proponents claim. Strikes, boycotts, and other pressure campaigns can then be seen as the social enforcement of relational egalitarian justice. On such a picture, relational egalitarianism would not be eliminated by the success of natural rights libertarianism, it would just be repositioned.[301] Similarly, the bare relational egalitarian requirement of non-domination would not rule out a libertarian conception of rights. It must be further argued that social enforcement is insufficient,[302] and that violence is an acceptable means of shoring up the difference.[303]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-31.jpg 70f][This is the northern vista of Palenque as seen from the Temple of the Inscriptions. The Palace, which was the main ceremonial and residential building of the king, sits in the center of the photograph, while the Group of the Cross, the accession group built by King Chan-Bahlum in the late seventh century, is seen on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-While we are sympathetic to this general picture, our point in raising it here is not to defend it. Rather, the foregoing is meant to show the sorts of conceptual space made available by clearing away the policy framework. When theories of justice are uniformly shoved into rough policy approximations, this creates brute incompatibilities not present in more abstract statements. Accordingly, the greater variation in practical implementation offered by methodological anarchism reveals greater variation in theoretical explanation. There is still significant disagreement, but it takes place on a terrain that affords more philosophical mobility. With access to subtler points of partial agreement, this reduces the risk of stalemate. Both practically and theoretically, methodological anarchism helps us break free from political stagnation.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-32.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a scene taking place inside a palace painted with images of jaguar gods and watery quadrifoils holding the skeletal visage of a death god. A lord from Dos Pilas sits on a bench bearing a pillow for his back and a set of bundles and boxes to his left. Four lords of high rank sit on the floor in front of him, while an attendant holds an object out to him. Two of the lords face him in rapt attention, while the other two lean toward each other as they converse, perhaps about the business at hand, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]
-*** V. Conclusion: The Policy Implications of Rejecting the Policy Framework
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-33.jpg 70f][This rollout of a vase painting (A.D. 600–800) shows a lord of Dos Pilas sitting on a bench in front of a large pillow. Two nobles bring him bouquets of flowers, perhaps to be used with the round-bottomed enema pot sitting on the floor between them. Other pots of various shapes sit on the bench and the floor around the principal lord. The three-glyph phrase behind his head names the artist of this vase, who may have depicted himself in the center of the scene with his paintbrush thrust into his headdress, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1989)]]
-Rejecting the policy framework does not make state policy irrelevant, nor do arguments for a politics of direct action conclusively rule out ever participating in efforts designed to foster reform—or, indeed, in extreme cases, in revolution. Methodological anarchism simply puts those efforts in context, offering a greater awareness of alternatives. Seeing the state as just one relevant institution in society among many doesn’t mean ignoring the fact that it is, indeed, a relevant institution. That the state’s laws cast a backdrop of violence over everything else renders it particularly important, even for the methodological anarchist.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-34.jpg 70f][This Early Classic vessel (A.D. 200450) depicts the Sun God paddling his canoe across the watery surface of the Otherworld. The nose-down peccary legs support not only the vessel but the waters of the world depicted on its sides and lid. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]
-Odd as it might sound, then, there are important policy implications of rejecting the policy framework. Though methodological anarchism does not directly entail political anarchism, it does present at least two important reasons to move closer in that direction.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-35.jpg 70f][A jade head (A.D. 350–500) representing the god of decapitation sacrifice that was used to record the conquest of Uaxactün on the Tikal Ballcourt Marker. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]
-One reason methodological anarchism points toward policy-negativity is that, with direct action on the table, justice will often most forcefully demand that the state to get out of the way. For example, among explanations given for why earlier mutual aid societies fell to the wayside is that licensure laws worked to combat mutual aid societies’ model of insurance and delivery of medical care.[304] We can therefore see how a case for liberalizing or even abolishing licensure laws could be made on distributive justice grounds, since such laws limit the range of available social safety nets.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-36.jpg 70f][This cylindrical vase (A.D. 600–800) was painted with a scene showing a woman from Dos Pilas dressed in a delicate, transparent lace huipil as she kneels before a lord of Motul de San José. While sitting cross-legged on a mat-covered bench inside a curtain-draped palace, he holds a small deity effigy against his chest as he extends a rattle (or perhaps an enema bag) toward her. Behind him rests a large pillow, while two large vessels sit on the floor below him. (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]
-Rejecting the policy framework should also lead us to reject particular policies because of the demystification of the state that comes with embracing methodological anarchism. It cautions against the naïve view in which state laws seem to bark from the heavens, “Fiat iustitia!” It is essentially this methodologically anarchist point that legal theorist and trans liberationist Dean Spade makes when he argues that LGBTQIA activists should “focus less on what the law says ... and more on what impact various legal regimes have on distressed populations.”[305] In that spirit, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a transgender legal advocacy group founded by Spade in 2002, argues against hate crimes legislation:
+. The Children of the First Mother: Family and Dynasty at Paleonque
-<quote>
+Like a white, shimmering jewel, Palenque perches above the misty, deep green of the forest shrouding the waterlogged lands that stretch northward from the base of the Chiapas mountains to the swampy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. To the south of the city, rugged, jungle-covered hills gradually rise to climax in cold, volcanic highlands. Temples, palaces, and noble homes, all built with the distinctive sloped roofs characteristic of Palenque’s architectural style, line the clear streams that bubble up from within the heart of these mountains to tumble down rocky slopes and into the rolling plain below. As if to instruct humanity in the ways of destruction and rebirth, these life-sustaining w’aters rise through the limestone strata to break onto the surface of the earth. Laden with calcium, the running water fashions a fantasy world of crystal lacework by encasing the decaying leaves and branches of the forest in what will become the fossilladen strata of floriforous limestone a million years hence. The pearly deposits shroud temple and tree alike, creating a mirror to the Otherworld, like a cave turned inside out. Even today, you know you stand on sacred ground here at the western gate of the sun’s journey across the world of the ancient Maya.
-[H]ate crime laws.expand and increase the power of the.criminal punishment system. Evidence demonstrates that hate crime legislation, like other criminal punishment legislation, is used unequally and improperly against communities that are already marginalized in our society. These laws increase the already staggering incarceration rates of people of color, poor people, queer people and transgender people based on a system that is inherently and deeply corrupt.[306]
-</quote>
-This point can be generalized. Because states are not justice machines, whose pronouncements can be taken as the pronouncements of society itself, state policies that express recognition for certain individuals are not the be-all-and-end-all of efforts designed to foster the social equality of those individuals. When we need not rely upon a particular state policy to express recognition, we can turn our attention to the concrete costs and benefits of that policy. Given the internal dynamics of state power, even expressively benign policies can work to re-entrench existing social problems and create others. With the state demystified, we can reject those policies and instead seek direct action alternatives.
+Palenque’s magic has fascinated the Western mind since the adventurers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first published accounts of their visits. The drawings and commentaries of intrepid travelers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood especially captured the imagination of nineteenth-century readers and created a special vision of Palenque as the lost city of an intelligent and civilized indigenous people.[333]
-This brings us back to where we were at the start of this chapter. For part of what makes political anarchism so absurd to its critics is that the policy framework renders government “just another word for the things we do together.” In those terms, the abolition of government sounds like the abolition of society and collective action, as shown by questions like “Who will feed the hungry? Who will keep us safe? Who will build the roads?” Because those asking these questions speak a different methodological language, they cannot understand the anarchist reply: “We will.”[307]
+Yet Palenque has done more than appeal to the romantic side of the Western imagination. This city has played a crucial role in the modern study of ancient Maya history and religion, as well as in the decipherment of their writing system. The kings of Palenque left a substantial record of texts carved on the fine-grained limestone monuments of their city. Many of their most outstanding monuments are preoccupied with one issue: the relationship between the legitimate inheritance of divine status through family descent and the personal charisma of the king. As we have seen in other kingdoms, the Palenque ahauob had practical reasons for their obsession with history.
-Anarchism’s critics might still find that answer lacking. Entering into a serious conversation about it, though, requires speaking the same language. Justice and politics cannot be definitionally to refer only to concerns of the state. They instead are features of social institutions and social norms broadly. It is implausible that solutions to injustice cannot be found beyond the state, or that the anarchists’ “We will” is never the right answer to their critics’ questions. Even for those who cannot accept the conclusions of political anarchism, methodological anarchism usefully expands the scope of political philosophy.
+Two Palenque kings, Pacal, whose name means “shield,” and his oldest son, Chan-Bahlum,[334] “snake-jaguar,” stand out as primary contributors to the history of their city. They are both members of that class of remarkable people who are responsible for creating what we call a civilization’s “golden age.” Not only did they make their kingdom into a power among the many Maya royal houses of the seventh century; they also inspired and nurtured the exceptional beauty of Palenque’s art, the innovative quality of its architecture, and the eloquence of the political and theological visions displayed in its inscriptions and imagery. The royal literature commanded by these men represents the most detailed dynastic history to survive from Classic times. Their vision wove it into the most beautiful and far-reaching expression of the religious and mythological rationale of Maya kingship left to modern contemplation.
-The policy framework is thoroughly lacking as a tool of analysis when its implicit premises are pushed to their limit. And employing this framework privileges an institution that has been an enormous source of injustice throughout its history, and thereby risks legitimizing such injustice. Political philosophers, then, should reason, write, teach, and speak within the terms of methodological anarchism. That is, they should come to see the restrictiveness of the policy framework itself, and liberate themselves from its confines.
+Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the essential details of their dynasty on four separate king lists. According to these family accounts, Palenque’s dynastic history began on March 11, A.D. 431, when a thirty-four-year-old ahau named Bahlum-Kuk (“Jaguar-Quetzal”) became the king. The descent of the royal line continued through subsequent generations of divine ahauob—with only a few minor sidesteps—into the glorious reigns of our two protagonists. Finally, the kingship failed in the hands of their progeny sometime after A.D. 799, the last date recorded in the inscriptions of Palenque. These “minor sidesteps” in the succession are the subject of our tale and the reason for the extraordinary detail of the record those ancient kings have left to us.
-*** Acknowledgements
+Pacal began his task of historical interpretation with the construction of his funerary building—the Temple of Inscriptions (Fig. 6:1). In the corridors of this magnificent temple, he mounted the first of his king lists on three huge stone slabs. These slabs comprise the second-longest[335] inscription left to posterity by the ancient Maya (Fig. 6:Id).[336] In his tomb deep under the temple, Pacal recorded the deaths of the same kings he named above. He also pictured them on the side of his coffin, as part of an ancestral orchard growing out of the cracked earth. His son, Chan-Bahlum, extended this ancestral list back to the founder of the dynasty— and beyond to the divinities who established the order of the cosmos at the beginning of this current manifestation of the universe.
-Earlier drafts of this chapter have been presented at the Manchester Centre for Political Theory seminar, February 2016; Association for Private Enterprise Education conference, April 2016; the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society inaugural meetings, March 2017; and the Loyola Chicago Graduate Philosophy Conference, October 2017. We are grateful to those audiences for their comments and feedback. We also thank Jason Brennan, Andrew I. Cohen, Alex W. Craig, Nathan Goodman, M. Scott King, Mark Pennington, Karl Widerquist, Liam Shields, Steven Zoeller, and the editors of this volume for useful discussions.
+Combined, these four great king lists overlap in time and recorded history to constitute the most detailed and complete dynastic history known from the Classic period (Fig. 6:2). When a Palenque ruler was recorded in all four lists, we have his dates of birth, accession, and death, as well as good information on his kinship relationships with other members of the dynasty. For those kings recorded only on Chan-Bahlum’s list, we have their births and accessions, and a reasonable estimate of their ages at death. We can surmise the latter since we know a new king usually acceded shortly after his predecessor’s death. For those kings whose I names occur only on the sarcophagus and panels of the Temple of Inscriptions, we have only their dates of accession and death, and thus w e cannot estimate length of life or their ages at various events. Still, these four lists taken together allow us to reconstruct the history of Palenque’s dynasty for the ten generations culminating with Chan-Bahlum.[337]
+[[][Generation 6 Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ LadyZac-Kuk]]
-[195] Anarchists do have some differences in policy preferences under the assumption that the state continues to exist, however. For example, see Long, Roderick T. 2010. “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism,” Center for a Stateless Society, January 7, [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/1659]], accessed 12/28/17; cf. Byas, Jason Lee. 2019. “The Political Is Interpersonal: An Interpretation and Defense of Libertarian Immediatism,” in Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington; Carson, Kevin A. 2019. “Formal vs. Substantive Statism: A Matter of Context,” in Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington. The point is just that even these anarchists ultimately agree on the ideal policy proposal of abolishing the state altogether.
+The very existence of these king lists raises questions about their context and the motivations of the men who made them. What so fascinated and troubled these men that they felt compelled to present such a comprehensive treatise on their dynasty on such important monumental spaces? Here, as in any true history, it is not so much a matter of the facts of the history as their interpretation that reveals the intentions of the chronicler. The royal preoccupation with these lists, and the parallel information that comes to us from other sources, hint of troubles in the very dynastic succession the two kings so obsessively recorded.
-[196] Berkman, Alexander. 1929. Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism. New York, NY: Vanguard Press. Ch. 23.
+The essential problem, as we surmise it from their public efforts to explain it away, was to extricate dynastic succession from the same principle of lineage that originally fostered and legitimated it. As we shall sec, Pacal inherited the throne of Palenque from his mother in violation of the normal patrilineal inheritance patterns that governed Maya succession. His most pressing concern, then, was to justify this departure from the normal rules. To prove his point, he and his son, who inherited the problem, made elegant and imaginative use of the Maya mythology that was the basis of social order and kingly rule.
-[197] Rothbard, Murray N. 1982. The Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Chartier, Gary. 2009. Economic Justice and Natural Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chartier, Gary. 2012. Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In addition, the preferred structure of property rights may differ significantly between market anarchists. Rothbard defends familiar Lockean arrangements sans the Lockean proviso, whereas Benjamin Tucker rejects absentee ownership in favor of an occupancy-and-use standard for the validity of an ongoing property right. There may also be a variety of views on the extent to whether the preponderance of property forms ought to be private property or common property. See Rothbard 1982; Tucker, Benjamin. 1897. Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One; Christmas, Billy. 2019a. “Ambidextrous Lockeanism,” Economics and Philosophy, online first.
+Pacal’s portrait gallery of his direct ancestors, carved on the sides of his sarcophagus, gives us his version of how each of his ancestors appeared (Fig. 6:3). Each rises with a fruit tree from a crack in the earth to create an orchard of the ancestral dead. Chaacal I in the southeast corner begins the progression through time and lineage that culminates with the mother and father of Pacal, who rise on both the north and south ends of the sarcophagus.
-[198] Nozick, Robert. 1989. The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Ch. 25; cf. Sanchez, Julian. 2001. “An Interview with Robert Nozick,” July 26, [[http://www.juliansanchez.com][www.juliansanchez.com/]] [[http://www.juliansanchez.com][an-interview-with-robert-nozick-july-26-2001/]], accessed 1/30/19.
+Within this ancestral orchard, Pacal depicted two women—his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, and his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal— and each is depicted twice. Why would Pacal have chosen to double the portraits of these women when he could just as easily have doubled a male ancestor or added portraits of even earlier ancestors to the portrait gallery? In the case of his mother, we might infer that he doubled her portrait precisely because she was his mother. After all, he did the same for his father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, in spite of the fact that his father never ruled. This line of reasoning, however, cannot explain why his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal, held an honored place on the sarcophagus. Some other factor must explain her special status.
-[199] Nozick Life 288.
+From our vantage at least, these two women were certainly deserving of special attention. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were very unusual individuals in that they are the only women we can be sure ruled as true kings. They were neither consorts nor, as in the case of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo, regents for young heirs. Yet by their very status as rulers, they created serious dilemmas for the government of their kingdom. When the throne of Palenque descended through Kanal-Ikal to her children, it became the prerogative of a different lineage, for the Maya nobility reckoned family membership through their males. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were legitimate rulers because they were the children of kings and, as such, members of the current royal lineage. The offspring of their marriages, however, belonged to the father’s lineage. Each time these women inherited the kingship and passed it on to their children, the throne automatically descended through another patriline. This kind of jump broke the link between lineage and dynasty in the succession.
-[200] Nozick Life 288.
+Because the line changed twice through these women rulers, Palenque’s dynasts did not belong to one patriline, but rather to three (Fig. 6:4). The first lineage to declare command of the high kingship descended from the founder Bahlum-Kuk through eight successors to Lady Kanal-Ikal. Even though they were of a different lineage, Pacal and his successors to the throne of Palenque claimed that they derived their right to rule from this man. In this respect, while they followed the traditional practice of other Maya dynasties, which also claimed descent from a founding king, they were declaring the dynastic succession to be a force transcending patrilineality.
-[201] For example, see Sher, George. 2014. Equality for Inegalitarians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 115, 157.
+[[][Fig. 6:4 The Three Descent Lines in Palenque’s Dynasty]]
-[202] Many relational or social egalitarians believe that distributional equality or sufficiency are derivatively valuable from the perspective of justice. For example, see Schemmel, Christian. 2011. “Why Relational Egalitarians Should Care About Distributions,” Social Theory and Practice, 37: 365—390.
+Lady Kanal-lkal must have been a charismatic and exceptional woman to have successfully ascended to the throne of a high kingship. What history she herself may have created lies deeply buried under later construction—if indeed she was even permitted the royal prerogative of recording personal history. In all likelihood, she would have based her legitimate claim to the kingship on her status as the child of an acknowledged ruler. Her progeny claimed the throne after her, although they belonged to the lineage of her husband—a man never mentioned by name in the Palenque chronicles. Notables in this second lineage included the king Ac-Kan and his brother Pacal, who died before he could become the high king.
-[203] As Emily McTernan, Martin O’Neill, Christian Schemmel, and Fabian Schuppert have argued, “[i]f you care about social equality, you want a big state.” McTernan, Emily, Martin O’Neill, Christian Schemmel, & Fabian Schuppert. 2016. “If You Care about Social Equality, You Want a Big State: Home, Work, Care and Social Egalitarianism,” Progressive Review, 23: 138—144.
+Even though he himself was never a king, this first Pacal appears in the royal grove carved on the side of the sarcophagus. There is a good reason for this. In each generation, the royal line could pass through only one sibling. In this case, the first Pacal was probably the father of Lady Zac-Kuk, the next ruler and last scion of this second royal lineage.[338] The presence of the first Pacal on the side of the great sarcophagus confirms that Pacal the Great was trying to make something more than a list of kings here. He was orchestrating a careful political manipulation of an orthodox belief. By placing his direct ancestors, both kings and nonkings, into a frame of reference that both honored the rules of lineage and transcended them, he worked to establish an unshakable claim to the throne.
-[204] Elsewhere Brennan analyzes this into three biases: the diffidence bias (pessimism about the possibilities of voluntary cooperation), the statism bias (overestimation of how much the state is required to secure social cooperation), and the guarantee bias (overestimation of the need for legal guarantees). Brennan, Jason. 2018. “Private Governance and the Three Biases of Political Philosophy,” Review of Austrian Economics, 31: 235–243.
+The third lineage began with Pacal the Great himself. As the son of a ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, he had the same legitimate claim to the throne as Lady Kanal-Ikal’s child, Ac-Kan. Difficulties arose, however, when Pacal’s own children, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul, followed their illustrious father to the throne. These men belonged to the lineage of their father and their paternal grandfather, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’. Hence the problems with their claim to the kingship were different from Pacal’s and analogous to those of the descendant kings of the second lineage, Ac-Kan and Zac-Kuk. They were the offspring of a lineage that had no legitimate claim to produce kings.
-[205] Levy, Jacob. T. 2015a. “Folk Ideal Theory in Action,” Bleeding Heart Libertarianism blog, April 28, [[http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com][http://]] [[http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com][bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/04/folk-ideal-theory-in-action/]], accessed 2/14/17; Brennan, J. 2016b. Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Washington DC: Cato Institute. Ch. 11]]; Freiman, Chris. 2017. Unequivocal Justice. New York, NY: Routledge. 2–4; Jaworski, Peter. 2018. “Privatization and the Ought/ State Gap,” Nomos, 60.
+We do not know what happened the first time one of these sidesteps in the royal dynasty occurred because we have no contemporary inscriptions from Lady Kanal-Ikal or her children.[339] The second time it happened, however, in the case of her granddaughter Zac-Kuk, the contradictory imperatives of lineage and dynasty precipitated a crisis. Lady Zac-Kuk’s offspring, Pacal, and his son, Chan-Bahlum, responded to the crisis with the two extraordinarily innovative projects under discussion—the Temple of Inscriptions and the Group of the Cross. These remarkable monuments were designed to interpret the dynastic history of Palenque in such a fashion as to make their legitimate rights to the throne undeniable.
-[206] Levy Rationalism 58. Original emphasis.
+In their presentations of the dynastic sequence at Palenque, both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the descent line as if it were historically unbroken. At the same time, they substantiated their claim of legitimacy by using the current mythology, explaining the historical breaks in the descent sequence as if they were preordained by the cosmos.
-[207] Brennan Governance.
+Their twofold strategy was brilliant. First they declared Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, to be like-in-kind to the first mother of gods and kings at the beginning of the present creation. This goddess was the mother of the three central gods of Maya religion—the deity complex known as the Palenque Triad. Secondly, Pacal and Chan-Bahlum asserted that Pacal was born on a day that exactly replicated the temporal symmetry of that goddess’s birth. In this way they were able to imply that the human king was made of the same divine substance as the goddess. Having thereby demonstrated that the mother and son were the stuff of the gods, they declared that their own inheritance of the throne from Pacal’s mother replicated the actions of the gods at the beginning of creation: the direct transmission of rule through females as well as males. Here was a radical new definition of dynastic succession that denied patrilineality as the sole fount of power. But who could possibly disagree with something that replayed creation?
-[208] Freiman Justice.
+Pacal’s overall strategy to hold the throne was more subtle than his son’s, perhaps because he acceded at age twelve while his mother was still alive and after she had been ruling for three years. Lady Zac-Kuk may have left no direct history of her reign; but like her grandmother, Kanal-Ikal, she stands out as a masterful politician, able to manipulate the rival interests of her paternal clansmen away from the succession and toward each other or outside enemies. No doubt her husband, the consort of a princess of the blood, figured prominently in her success through appeal to his own influential noble clan and his own deeds of valor. Just getting her young son on the throne was a triumph. Consolidating that victory required an acceptable historical and theological rationale for this audacious move, one that would calm the discontent of all the noble clans of the kingdom whose own high social status hinged upon lineage descent.
-[209] Hobbes, Thomas. 1642 [1983]. De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Hobbes, Thomas. 1651 [2012]. Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This is an empirical commitment that no political philosopher has ever been particularly bothered to prove, as argued in Wider- quist, Karl, & Grant McCall. 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies,” Analyse & Kritik, 37: 233–257; Widerquist, Karl, & Grant McCall. 2017. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Some contemporary Kantians have, however, framed their arguments for the state as implied by justice a priori—the state as a posit for natural right. For example, see Ripstein, Arthur 2009. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ch. 9; Stilz, Anna. 2011b. Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ch. 2; Varden, Helga. 2008. “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice Is Impossible in the State of Nature.” Kantian Review, 13: 1–45; Varden, Helga. 2010. “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right ‘Concludes’ Private Right in ‘The Doctrine of Right,’” Kant-Studien, 3: 331–51; Hodgson, Louise-Philippe. 2010. “Kant on Property Rights and the State,” Kantian Review, 15: 57–87. For reasons that require much more argument than can be given here, such accounts in fact depend upon practical accounts of the state’s ability to be the best provider of assurance of security, determinacy of rights, representing the omnilateral will, none of which conceptually depend upon it being a coercive territorial monopoly—that is, being a state at all. Part of the Kantian republican argument relies on the necessity of laws and a constitutional structure, but the possibility of laws and a constitutional structure without monopoly is precisely the thing posited by many market anarchists. See Long, Roderick T. 2008. “Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism,” in Roderick T. Long & Tibor R. Machan (eds) Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? Aldershot: Ashgate.
+Lady Zac-Kuk lived another twenty-five years after Pacal’s accession. While she lived, she and her husband, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, apparently sustained the alliances necessary to support her son’s rule; but she very probably kept the real power in her own hands. Not until after her death in 640 did Pacal commission works that left their mark in the archaeological record of Palenque. It is also likely that during the delicate transitional period, this resplendent lady helped to craft the ingenious political resolution to the succession celebrated by her son in subsequent katuns.
-[210] For example, see Hume, David. 1738 [1826]. Treatise of Human Nature, in his The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. 2. Edinburgh: Black & Tait. III.II.7; Mill, John Stuart. 1848 [1965]. “Principles of Political Economy,” in John M. Robson (ed.) The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 7<sup>th</sup> ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 342; Kavka, Gregory. 1986. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 246; Murphy, L., & T. Nagel. 2004. The Myth of Ownership. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 6. A trenchant critique of this assertion is Freiman Unequivocal chs 0–1.
+In 647, seven years after his mother’s death and four years after his father’s, Pacal celebrated his newfound independence by dedicating the Temple Olvidado (Fig. 6:5) in the western zone of the city.[340] On the ridge side above a residential zone spanning one of two permanent water sources that coursed through the city, Pacal’s architects built a new kind of temple that held the seeds of a revolution in architectural technology.[341] With its double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls, multiple doors, and trefoil vaults, this building foreshadowed the technology that would soon produce the largest interior volume and best lighting ever known in Maya architecture.
-[211] La Boétie, Étienne de. 1576. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. H. Kurz. Montreal: Black Rose; Hume, D. 1758 [1826]. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, in his The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. 3. Edinburgh: Black & Tait. I. IV.
+At the successful completion of his first construction project, Pacal began an extensive building campaign which included the Temple of the Count, the subterranean galleries of the Palace, House E, House B, and finally House C in the Palace which was dedicated in 659 when he was fifty-six years old.[342] With each new building, Pacal experimented with the new style and pushed the innovative technology further.
-[212] Schmidtz, David. 1997. “Guarantees,” Social Philosophy & Policy, 14: 1–19.
+When Pacal reached his early seventies, he must have begun feeling his mortality, for he began the last great project of his lifetime: the construction of the great mortuary Temple of the Inscriptions. This building, which housed his ultimate statement on dynasty, became one of the most famous monuments in the Mesoamerican world. Built in the stylistic tradition he established with the Temple Olvidado,[343] this spectacular pyramid was a labor of imagination and complex engineering. First, the work crews cleared and leveled a section of ground next to the Palace. This site was located at the foot of the sacred natural mountain which loomed over the great central plaza opening on to the northern horizon. Against the mountain face (Fig. 6:1), a pit was dug into which the laborers set a huge block of limestone that would become Pacal’s coffin when finished.
-[213] Buchanan, James. M. 1987. “The Constitution of Economic Policy,” American Economic Review, 77: 243–250.
+Consulting with the king, Palenque’s greatest artists designed an image (Fig. 6:3) that would represent his fall down the great trunk of the World Tree into the open jaws of the Otherworld. At the same time, they incorporated a sense of resurrection into this death image. As Pacal falls, he is accompanied by the image of a half-skeletal monster head carrying a bowl of sacrifice marked with the glyph of the sun. This particular glyph is a powerful symbol, representing the sun in transition between life and death, poised on the brink of the Otherworld. Like the sun, the king would rise again in the east after his journey through Xibalba. He was, after all, the living manifestation of the Hero Twins who had set the example of how to defeat the Lords of Death.
-[214] Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
+Around the hollowed coffin in which he would lie, the artists drew the images of his direct ancestors. These images were arranged in ascending generations, moving from south to north and from east to west, culminating with the central pivot—the king himself. When they were done with the drawings and Pacal had approved them, workmen moved in to construct a protective wall around their work. They then filled the chamber with sand and the masons and architects began to raise the pyramid. Into its center they built a vaulted stairway that would let the sculptors get to the coffin when it was no longer in danger from the construction. Down this dark stairway they would bring the body of the king when he died, setting it into the hollow at the center of the sarcophagus before they rolled the lid across the opening and sealed him in forever.
-[215] Miller, David. 2001. Principles of Social Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 6.
+Pacal’s death was still far off, however, as the great mass of rock and earth rose upward in the nine great terraces upon which the six-doored temple would rest. His masons built the foundation platform of the temple first and then raised the central and rear walls that would hold up the roof. While these walls stood unencumbered by the heavy stone vaulting of the roof, sculptors went to the special quarries where the finest sculptural stone was found. There they cut huge, thick slabs to mount within the bearing walls of the temple—two to fit into the front surfaces of the walls separating the front and back rooms, flanking the doorway into the rear sanctum; and a third to fit into the back wall of the temple in a position where the light from the doorways could still shine upon it. Pacal’s scribes then drew a grid to accommodate a total of 640 glyphs which would record Pacal’s katun history and the important events of his own reign. They reserved the last two columns of the text for his death. Then, as with the sarcophagus, they built a protective wall around the inscriptions until the construction of the vaults and the plastering work was completed.
-[216] Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. E Kelley. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 148–150; cf. O’Neill, Martin. 2012. “Free (and Fair) Markets without Capitalism: Political Values, Principles of Justice, and Property-Owning Democracy,” in Martin O’Neill & Thad Williamson (eds) Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. 83; Rawls, J. 1971 [1999]. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 242—251.
+The passages on these temple tablets give us our first glimpse of this family’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. Less than three years before his own accession, Pacal recorded the accession of a woman whom he named in a mysterious and unusual way (Fig. 6:6). This woman took the throne on October 22, 612, 202 days before the end of the ninth katun, when Pacal was nine years old. Her name is recorded with a glyph written in the form of a screaming bird: Its bulging beak lies back against its forehead, and its gaping mouth is filled with feathers. Since this strange bird is a variant of the Palenque Emblem Glyph, we can assume that Pacal meant to connect the woman in question with the sacred name of his kingdom. Even more important, this same glyph was also used to name the First Mother, affectionately dubbed Lady Beastie by scholars, who was born before the present creation. This goddess, as we have mentioned above, was the mother of the gods and the creatrix of Maya myth.
+Is Pacal telling us, then, that the person who held the throne before he became the king was the First Mother? In a way that is exactly what he intended to say, for this mysterious woman was indeed a mother, I although a human one. She was his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk,[344] who gave him life and then the crown when he acceded to power (Fig. 6:7). By using the name of the goddess to refer to his mother, Pacal declared her to be analogous to the mother of the gods. By logical extension, Pacal like-in-kind to the lords who were the three gods of the Palenque Triad, the Late Classic version of the gods the Late Preclassic ahauob fashioned on the temples of Cerros.
-[217] Rawls Theory 244—245.
+The great Pacal died in his eightieth year and was buried by his sons in rituals that involved the highest and lowest people in his realm. Opened again in 1952 by the great Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz, his tomb contains a record of his funerary rites frozen forever in time. We can visualize the rituals that, in the final hours, sent him on his lall into the realm of Xibalba to face the Lords of Death.
-[218] Freiman Unequivocal chs 0—1, 3.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[219] Nozick, R. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 363—398.
+Chan-Bahlum tasted the salty sweat that rolled into the corner of his mouth as he lowered himself to the last of the high, slippery steps that descended down through the rock of his father’s sacred mountain.[345] Nearby was the vaulted tomb where his father awaited the rites that would begin his fall into the Otherworld. Dizzy from three days of fasting, the hard climb up the outer stairs, and the descent down the inner ones, Chan-Bahlum reached out to the white plastered wall to steady himself. At last, he stepped down into the dank cloud of smoke that filled the corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Masking the sweet smell of death, the blessed incense hovered around a sphere of torchlight before vanishing upward, like the Vision Serpent, following the dark path upward to the human world.[346]
-[220] Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books.
+His brown chest heaving like a frightened deer, Chan-Bahlum paused once more, this time to catch his breath. Sixty-seven high steps led from the world of light above, down to the gate of Xibalba. As the senior son of the dead king, and the king-elect, it had been Chan-Bahlum’s obligation to descend deep into this most holy mountain to send his father on the journey only the few and the prepared survived: the journey to confront the Lords of Death and to trick them into relinquishing life once again.
-[221] Cohen, G. A. 1997. “Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 26: 3–33. 9.
+The long days of fasting and grief were taking their toll. Chan-Bahlum felt all his forty-eight years weighing on him like stones upon the backs of his father’s masons. Remembering his duty, he threw off his exhaustion and straightened his heavy jade pendant so that it lay squarely on his chest. His dignity restored, he turned to look into the black eyes of his younger brother. The thirty-eight-year-old Kan-Xul, by their father’s decree, would be king after him. The older man looked upon the more delicate features of his brother and saw in them the image of their father as he had been in his prime. Together they continued into the tomb.
-[222] Cohen Action 12.
+Startled from his concentrated effort, a sculptor saw the princes approaching through the swirling smoke and tore himself away from his last-minute work,[347] carving the great king’s death date on the south edge of the massive sarcophagus lid. He quickly gathered his tools and the debris from his work into a net bag and slung them over his naked, sweat-damp shoulder. Pushing past the princes in the narrow confines of the hall, he mumbled apologies and began his climb out of the tomb. Kan-Xul smiled briefly to reassure his nervous brother. Even with the final rush to transform the imagery of the dead and reborn kings on the sarcophagus from painted line to carved relief, the burial rites would go without mishap. Chan-Bahlum knew it fell to him, as patriarch of Pacal’s lineage, to bury his father properly and heal the wound his death had caused in the fabric of the kingdom. He was determined the ritual would go well and dispel the danger of this time.
-[223] That being said, the methodological anarchist can still see institutions as having a special role beyond that of mere choices without privileging the state in particular.
+Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to his brother and turned back toward the heavy stone door and the three steps that led up to the inner chamber. Xoc,[348] his father’s adviser and a respected member of the lineage, awaited them at the door. He, along with a cadre of shamans, would assist the brothers as they sent their father into the terrifying fall to the Otherworld. First, however, they would equip the dead king with the power to rise like the dawning sun. Chan-Bahlum stepped through the triangular opening in the upper part of the tomb vault and entered the stifling hot chamber filled with the shamans who would sing the king’s spirit on its way. They would contain the dangerous energies that would be left by the king’s departure.
-[224] Cohen, G. A. 1995. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Per Cohen’s luck egalitarianism, this is of course subject to qualification by the distributive effects of persons’ morally culpable choices.
+Standing on the threshold above the five stairs that led down into the tomb chamber, Chan-Bahlum paused to gaze at his father’s body. Nestled in an arm-deep cavity cut into the huge limestone block that served as the sarcophagus, Pacal lay on his back with his hands at his sides. His legs were extended and his feet relaxed to the sides as if he were sleeping. The dry, wrinkled skin of the eighty-year-old man seemed transparent in the flickering light of the torches held by the shamans. The jade collar that covered his chest and the cuffs on his wrists gleamed against the red walls of the coffin. The green headband with its Jester God lay on his forehead where it would tell the Lords of Xibalba that a great king had come among them.
-[225] Cohen, G. A. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
+Chan-Bahlum and his brother advanced down the steps with slow dignity, passing between the plaster portraits of their father modeled on either side of the entrance. Their horny feet rasped on the cold limestone of the steps as they moved to the platform that had been built so that they could stand level with the body, above the floor of the chamber. Together they stepped from the platform and onto the sarcophagus itself. Chan-Bahlum walked to the right side of the hollow that held his father’s body, while his brother went to the left side. Simultaneously they dropped to their knees and gazed for the last time upon their father’s face. Kan-Xul reached down into the coffin to straighten the ornament in Pacal’s left ear and to align the mica rectangle piece that enframed his mouth.
-[226] We thank Jesse Spafford and Chetan Cetty for pressing us on the applicability of the policy framework to Cohen.
+The two brothers locked eyes as Chan-Bahlum instructed the shamans to join them on the narrow surfaces surrounding the coffin depression and begin the final rites. Xoc stepped to his side and handed him a delicate mosaic mask of jade, shell, and obsidian formed into a likeness of his father’s face. Carefully balancing his weight, Chan-Bahlum leaned forward, reaching down into the coffin to lay the mask across his father’s features. The obsidian eyes of the dead Pacal stared heavenward from under the shining green brow. The visage of this great king would not be lost as his flesh decayed and left only bone.
-[227] Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Miller, David. 2000. Citizenship and National Identity. Oxford: Blackwell; Miller, D. 2013. Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy. Ch. 7.
+Satisfied with the positioning of the mask, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul slowly moved until they were kneeling by the dead man’s waist. A shaman gave Chan-Bahlum a cube of jade which he laid reverently in the open palm of the right hand, already adorned with five rings of deep green jade. Another shaman gave Kan-Xul a sphere of jade to be set in the ring-laden left hand to balance the cube in the right. Leaning forward again, Chan-Bahlum set a small jade statue on the rich embroidered cloth that covered his father’s genitals from whence had come the seed and the blood of the greatest of all beings in the kingdom.
-[228] Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 143.
-[229] It is often used by anarchists and libertarians to refer to the disposition of those who believe in the justice or necessity of the state very generally.
+Together, the brothers moved to their father’s feet, each of them laying a sphere next to the sole of the foot closest to him. Lastly, Chan-Bahlum took a large hunk of jade that had been reverently and skillfully carved into the image of the patron god of the month Pax. It was an image that read te, the word for the tree down which the dead king was falling in the image on his sarcophagus lid and which he had embodied in his person while alive. The high-pitched, droning voices of the shamans echoed off the walls of the vaulted chamber, as they sent prayers to accompany the falling soul of the king. Satisfied that the body was prepared in the honorable manner appropriate to a high king, Chan-Bahlum and his brother stood up and stepped off the sarcophagus and back onto the platform at its south end.
-[230] For variations of this view see Waldron, Jeremy. 1993. “Special Ties and Natural Duties,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 22: 3–30; Waldron, Jeremy. 2011b. “The Principle of Proximity,” NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper, No. 11–08. [[https://papers.ssrn.com][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1742413]], accessed 1/31/19; Nagel, Thomas. 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 33: 113–147; Ripstein Force; Stilz, Anna. 2011a. “Nations, States, and Territory,” Ethics, 121: 572–601; Stilz, Anna. 2009. “Why Do States Have Territorial Rights?” International Theory, 1: 185–213; Stilz Loyalty; Risse, Mathias. 2012. On Global Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Blake, Michael. 2013. Justice and Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
+Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to Xoc who disappeared through the door and called up the stairs. The sounds of the shamans’ prayers counterpointed the shuffling sounds of footsteps descending the high steps from the temple above. Finally, the frightened face of a young boy appeared in the doorway. It was Chac-Zutz’, scion of an important and honored cahal lineage which had served the high king for many generations. Chac-Zutz’ tugged gently on the arm of the four-year-old Chaacal who lagged behind him. The youngest male issue of Pacal’s line, this child might one day be the king if neither Chan-Bahlum nor his brother could produce an heir who lived long enough to inherit the throne.[349]
-[231] For example, see Ypi, Lea L. 2008. “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 16: 48–71.
+Chan-Bahlum stared at the two boys with dark-eyed intensity and spoke in a commanding voice, instructing them to look upon the great king who had transformed the face of the kingdom and made them all great. Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul stood in patient dignity while all the important men of the clan filed in behind the boys and then quickly ascended after taking this last opportunity to gaze upon the great Pacal before he was sealed forever into the Otherworld of the ancestors.
-[232] Pavel, Carmen E. 2015. Divided Sovereignty: International Institutions and the Limits of State Authority. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 5; cf. Pavel, C. 2010. “Alternative Agents for Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of Global Ethics, 6: 323–338.
+When it was done, the king-to-be gestured to the men of the royal lineage who had been chosen to help seal the coffin. After hushed consultation, two of them jumped down to the chamber floor. They handed the heavy stone lid, cut to fit inside the hollow holding the body, up to the four men standing on top of the sarcophagus. These men threaded ropes through holes drilled into each corner of the lid and then lowered it carefully onto the inset ledge around the coffin hollow. Once there, it formed a smooth stone surface across the top of the monolith. With the body now sealed in, they withdrew the ropes and dropped a stone plug into each of the drilled holes. The plug in the southwest corner had a notch cut in it so that the spirit tube, built into the stairway, could connect the chamber where the dead king lay to the world of his descendants above.
-[233] See, respectively, Miller Justice ch. 1 and Ronzoni, Miriam. 2017. “Republicanism and Global Institutions: Three Desiderata in Tension,” Social Philosophy & Policy, 34: 186–208.
+The time had finally come to pull the enormous carved lid over the top of the sarcophagus. This action would finish the sealing process and set the dead king amid the symbols that would insure success in his confrontation with the Lords of Death. Chan-Bahlum and his party stepped outside the tomb chamber to give the workers room to carry out this last difficult task. Strong young men of the ahau and cahal rank had been chosen to execute this dangerous and precise operation under the direction of the head mason who had overseen the construction of the tomb chamber. The prayers of the shamans were soon overwhelmed by the controlled pandemonium. The men whispered hoarsely to each other as they brought the equipment into the tomb. They set log rollers on top of the massive stone box that now held the king’s body and arranged themselves as best they could along the sides of the carved slab. Throaty grunts underscored the straining of their muscles as they heaved at the impossibly heavy lid. From the steps above, Chan-Bahlum watched as the great lid finally began to slide slowly forward onto the rollers. Struggling and sweating, the men worked in the close space of the chamber, urging the great lid into its place. Once this was accomplished, they labored to extricate the rollers and seat the lid with the help of ropes strung from the great stone beams in the upper vaulting of the tomb.
-[234] The only differences involve variations that have no obvious bearing on justice, like national symbols, geography, the names of various places, etc.
+Finally, however, it was done. The young men passed the rollers out of the chamber and up the stairs to the venting tunnels in the side of the sacred mountain. Then, more quickly than Chan-Bahlum had believed possible, they were gone, taking all the equipment and the debris of their effort with them. The urgent pandemonium diminished until suddenly only the steady chants of the shamans reverberated through the tomb. The brothers crossed the threshold and stepped down to the platform to gaze at the image of their father carved upon the lid. There they saw him poised in the first moment of his descent down the World Tree into the jaws of Xibalba—his forehead pierced by the smoking ax that marked him as the incarnation of the last born of the First Mother’s sons.
-[235] The identification of Iniustitiam as “Hell” and Iustitia as “Heaven” here need not imply that the former is perfectly unjust nor that the latter is perfectly just. The bare fact that Iniustitiami society continues to exist suggests it is not perfectly unjust. One could also find several defects in Iustitia in terms of various theories of justice—for instance, libertarians of a political anarchist stripe will find a grave injustice in the fact that Iustitians still live under a state. Anarchist communists might add to this the fact that Iustitia retains markets and private property. All Iustitia and Iniustitiam are meant to represent is extremes of justice and injustice relative to modern industrialized western nation-states.
+Without speaking, the younger brother lowered himself onto the floor of the tomb chamber to stand at the southwest corner of the great sarcophagus. His eyes were level with the portraits of the ancestors carved on its sides. Chan-Bahlum, who had jumped to the floor at the southeast corner, reached back up to take a plaster head from Xoc, who stood on the platform above. He waited until Xoc had given another head to Kan-Xul, and then the two of them knelt down. As older brother, it was Chan-Bahlum’s perogative to act first. Lying down on his belly, he crawled forward between the stone piers that supported the platform at the south end of his father’s sarcophagus. It was a tight fit but he managed to wriggle between the obstacles until he could reach far under the massive stone sarcophagus, which stood on six low stone blocks.[350] With a silent call to the ancestors of his line, he stretched his arm as far inward as he could reach and gently deposited a life-sized head made of plaster. Torn from another building as an offering to help Pacal’s soul in its journey, it represented his father as he had looked in his prime. Kan-Xul, in his turn, wriggled under the huge sarcophagus and placed his sculpture next to the first. The second sculpture depicted Pacal as he had looked at the age of twelve when he became king.[351]
-[236] Cf. Radzik, Linda. 2017. “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 34: 102–122; Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
+Sweating in the heat, the two of them extricated themselves and stood to take the ritual cup and plate Xoc handed down to them. The brothers then knelt in unison, carefully balancing the containers which were filled to the brim with food and drink to succor the dead king’s soul on his journey. They placed the offerings on the floor under the south side of the platform while the shamans chanted prayers asking that Pacal’s journey be swift and his defeat of the Lords of Death sure. Finished with the ritual, the two brothers accepted a hand from Xoc, who helped them up onto the platform again.
-[237] Cf. Long, Roderick T. 2019. “Why Libertarians Should Be Social Justice Warriors,” in Roger E. Bissell, Christopher Matthew Sciabarra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington; Wexler, Lesley, Robbennolt, Jennifer K., & Murphy, Colleen. 2019. “#MeToo, Time’s Up, and Theories of Justice,” University of Illinois Law Review, 2019: 45–111.
+Chan-Bahlum looked at the red-lidded sarcophagus once more— examining every detail of the preparations. The flickering torchlight played across the relief images of Pacal molded on the plaster walls of the chamber. In front of him, on the north end of the lid, was the carved image of his father. It almost seemed to him as if the dead king were present, sitting cross-legged on the stone platform that had supported the lid before it had been wrestled atop the sarcophagus. Chan-Bahlum stood still, lost in the memory of his father and in the anticipation of his own transformation into the high king. He was a three-katun lord in his forty-eighth year of life. To the people of his world, he was already an old man, and he wondered if the gods would give him time to leave as great a mark on the flow of history as his father had.
-[238] For example, see McTernan, Emily. 2014. “How to Make Citizens Behave: Social Psychology, Liberal Virtues, and Social Norms,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 22: 84–104.
+At his feet a plasterer worked, laying the spirit tube from the notch in the south end of the lid, across the platform, and up the five stairs to tie into the hollow pipe that ran up the vaulted stairs to the floor of the temple above. The kings of Palenque were practical men as well as people of faith. To help their ancestors ascend into the world of humankind, they created a physical path for the Vision Serpent to follow when a dead king wished to speak to his descendants.
-[239] Cf. Hayek, F.A. 1978. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Hasnas, John. 2004. “Hayek, The Common Law, and Fluid Drive,” NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, 1: 79–110.
+With the spirit tube ready, only one ritual remained. Chan-Bahlum turned to his brother, who handed him the great jade belt his father had worn to mark his status as a divine ahau. The flint pendants dangling under the jade ahau heads clanked together as Chan-Bahlum grasped the leather ties and stretched the heavy belt out between his extended hands. With reverence, he stepped up onto the red surface of the sarcophagus lid and knelt upon the image of his falling father. Leaning forward, he laid the belt down on the lid, stretching it out across the god image that marked the World Tree as a holy thing. The king’s belt rested above the center point of his human body, now hidden under the heavy lid. His soul could at last begin its journey, released from the case of worldly flesh, prepared for the fall to the Otherworld with food, images of his human form, and the belt that would signal his divinity and rank as he met the Lords of Death.
-[240] Barrett, Jacob, & Gerald Gaus. Forthcoming. “Laws, Norms, and Public Justification: The Limits of Law as an Instrument of Reform,” in Silje A. Langvatn, Wojciech Sadurski, & Mattias Kumm (eds) Public Reason and the Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2.
+The shamans’ song changed as Chan-Bahlum and his brother voiced their farewell, asking their father to help them when he emerged from Xibalba. Heavy with grief, they climbed the five short stairs leading out of the chamber and prepared themselves for the next stage of the ritual. Stepping down into the outer corridor, they watched as the shamans pushed the huge triangular door closed. Masons rushed down from the venting passages with baskets of wet plaster, which they threw onto the edges of the door with loud slapping noises. Using wooden spatulas and their hands, they smoothed the plaster until all evidence of the door was gone. One of them shouted an order and other men rushed down the long stairs with more plaster and stones. With the same efficient haste, they constructed a stone box at the end of the corridor setting one side of it against the now hidden door. Finishing in a rush, they cleaned up the debris, gathered their tools, and left in a silent hurry for they knew what was coming. A great king had died and it was time to sanctify his journey with a sacrifice so that he could be reborn.
-[241] Levy, Jacob T. 2017. “Contra Politanism,” European Journal of Political Theory, online first. DOI: 10.1177/ 14748851177183712: 15. For arguments that this has always been intrinsic, in one way or another, to liberal rhetoric, see Losurdo, Domenico. 2011. Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso Books; Mulholland, Marc. 2012. Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-Conservatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
+In the sudden silence that fell after the workers had departed, Chan-Bahlum could hear the scuffling descent of more people, this time from the temple above. He turned and saw five captives being dragged down the stairs by the honored kinsmen of the dead king. A woman and four men would go to Xibalba this day to accompany Pacal on his journey. Some of them moaned in terror, but one young man trod forward to meet his fate with insolent pride. He was an ahau taken in battle and chosen to go with Pacal because of his arrogant courage and reckless bravado.
-[242] Mills, Charles W. 2005. “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia, 20: 165—184.
+Chan-Bahlum grabbed the young ahau’s hair and wrenched his head up so that he could see the captive’s eyes. He closed his hand on the hilt of the flint knife he had brought with him for this act of sacrifice. In silence he plunged it into the captive’s chest and struck up into the heart. This was the signal. His kinsmen screamed in a cacophony which echoed in the waiting ears above and fell upon the victims, slaughtering them with furious slashes of their bloodstained knives. The limp bodies of the dead were tossed in tangled abandon into the box.
-[243] Levy Folk.
+With the sacrifice completed, Chan-Bahlum left the blood-splattered corridor and began to mount the stairs in slow dignity, conserving his strength for the final rite he must perform in the temple above. The muscles in his legs burned with exhaustion as he turned at the midway platform and began the climb up the second flight of stairs. His beblooded kinsmen followed him in a reverent silence broken only by their heavy breathing as they struggled with the hard climb and the residual emotions from the sacrificial ritual.
-[244] On the tendency to view the moral function of intermediary institutions as strictly subordinate to that of nation states, see Levy, Jacob T. 2015b. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Levy Politanism.
+Chan-Bahlum emerged through the floor of the temple, where the spirit tube from his father’s coffin ended in the head of the Vision Serpent. When he had made his careful way around the ledge beside the stairway entrance, shamans took him by the arms and stripped away his loincloth. One of them handed him a fresh blade of obsidian just struck from a core. He reached down and grasped his penis, holding it tightly as he pierced it three times with the point of the bright black razor. Handing back the blade, he pulled long strands of bark paper through the wounds and watched them turn red with the sacred blood of sacrifice. It was his first sacrificial act as patriarch of the royal clan, an act of symbolic birth in the midst of death.
-[245] For recent examples, on marriage, the workplace, and religion, see, respectively, Chambers, Clare. 2017. Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Laborde, Cécile. 2017. Liberalism’s Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. We do not mean to claim that these arguments engage in the policy framework in the sense of inferring deductively invalid conclusions about state policy from premises merely regarding abstract principle. Rather, we claim that they do so in the sense of problematizing public policy itself and its impact on the family, the workplace, or religion with political philosophy, and elevating the analysis of policy as the most important implications of their sophisticated theories of justice regarding the workings of these institutions.
+His brother performed his own act of sacrifice, as did the men who had helped them dispatch the captives. Stained crimson with the flow from his own body and the blood of the captives below, Chan-Bahlum stepped out of the back chamber. He passed through the great katun history his father had commissioned to appear between the central piers of the outer wall. A great roar of grief rose from the gathered multitude in the plaza below as they saw him emerge, the blood on his white loincloth clearly visible in the oblique light of the setting sun. The people of the kingdom in their thousands had come to witness the beginning of the great king’s journey. When Chan-Bahlum’s bloodstained body appeared and cast its shadows on the whitened walls of the temple piers, they knew it was done. Like the setting sun that lit the scene, the great king was falling toward Xibalba. Hundreds began their song of grief and cut their own flesh in pious prayers for the king. Drums beat a mind-numbing rhythm accompanied by the piercing notes of clay whistles blown by people exhausted by days of dancing and fasting in preparation for this moment.
-[246] Levy Rationalism 58; cf. Levy, Jacob T. 2016. “There is No Such Thing as Ideal Theory,” Social & Political Philosophy, 33: 312–333. 325.
+Chan-Bahlum stood above, swaying slightly, looking down on the seething mass of his people. The paper hanging down against his legs was now saturated with his blood, which dripped to stain the white plaster floor below his feet. His younger brother stood off behind his right shoulder, reddened by his own act of sacrifice. The corridor behind them was filled with the most important people of the royal clan. On the terrace just below the temple summit stood ahauob of other lineages and the cahalob who had governed the towns of the kingdoms for the king. They too had drawn blood that now stained the cloth bands tied to their wrists and hanging from their ears and loins.
-[247] Levy Politanism.
+Shamans stood beside hip-high braziers modeled in the image of the great Ancestral Twins, and watched Chan-Bahlum closely. He began to dance slowly in place, preparing to enter the trance of communication with the dead. When the shamans saw the trance state descend upon him, they threw handfuls of copal resin and rubber (the “blood of trees”) into the fire burning in the conical bowls sitting atop the clay cylinders. Others brought shallow plates filled with blood-saturated paper from the king-to-be and his brother. As great billows of black smoke rose from the braziers, cries of wonder rose with them from the plaza below. The last light of the sinking sun lit the rising columns of smoke to tell the thousands of watchers that the ancestors had arrived. The moaning wail of conch trumpets echoed off the mountain walls and spread over the great plain below. The dead king’s ancestors knew that he was coming to join them. They would go to help him in his conflict with the Lords of Death.
-[248] Long Anarchism.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[249] Waldron, Jeremy. 2008. “Hart and the Principles of Legality,” in Matthew H. Kramer, Claire Grant, Ben Colburn, & Antony Hatzistavrou (eds) The Legacy of H. L. A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 82; cf. Waldron, J. 2011a. “Are Sovereigns Entitled to the Benefit of International Rule of Law?” European Journal of International Law, 22: 315–343. 318–319; Hart, H. L. A. 1961 [1994]. The Concept of Law, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 51–61. In so-called nonideal theory, the feasibility of compliance with a particular principle of justice is explicitly problematized. However, it is always the feasibility of the state compelling the citizenry to comply with justice, rather than the feasibility of the state itself faithfully using its powers only to compel compliance with justice. As Jacob Levy says, “States are ... social institutions with organizational dynamics and tendencies of their own ... when we introduce the question ‘what will states do, when tasked with enacting and enforcing it?’ This is a kind of compliance problem, the kind pointed out by the second half of Madison’s dictum: ‘If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.’ It seems to me a strange feature of the ideal theory literature that is has focused so completely on the question of whether compliance among the citizenry is a valid modelling assumption, to the neglect of the tacit assumption of compliance by the state.” Levy Thing 325.
+The forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum waited 132 days after his father died to conduct his own rituals of accession. The responsibility of finishing his father’s funerary temple fell to him, and this task provided the first step in his own campaign to prove the legitimacy of his ascent to the throne. To do so, he asserted that he had received his power by direct transfer of authority from his dead father in an act replicating events that occurred at the time of creation. In this way, he redefined dynastic succession as a supernatural rite of ecstatic communion between the heir and the dead king, who was in the Otherworld.
-[250] Brennan, Jason. 2016a. “Do Markets Corrupt?” in Jennifer A. Baker & Mark D. White (eds) Economics and the Virtues: Building A New Moral Foundation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 243–247.
+The first project of Chan-Bahlum’s reign demonstrates his preoccupation with this new definition of dynasty: the direct ritual transmission of power in place of the traditional system of lineage succession. While finishing his father’s funerary monument, he usurped the outer piers of the temple at the summit. On these he depicted the rituals in which his father chose him as the legitimate heir and transformed him from a human child into a living god[352] (Fig. 6:8). In this scene, modeled in brightly painted stucco, Pacal and three other adults present the six-year-old Chan-Bah-lum from the edge of a pyramid. The height of this structure enabled the audience below, which consisted of the nobility and probably a large number of the commoners as well, to see and acknowledge that this child, of all Pacal’s offspring, was the one who would become the next ruler.[353] Chan-Bahlum, however, mixed the portrayal of the actual ritual with images conveying the supernatural sanction of the new status this ritual bestowed upon him.
-[251] Pennington, Mark. 2011. Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
+The child who is cradled in the arms of his predecessors has both divine and purely human features. His status as a divinity is emphasized by merging other parts of his anatomy with the signs of the god G1I, the third-born child of the First Mother (Fig. 6:8a). One of Chan-Bahlum’s legs, for example, transforms into a open-mouthed serpent in the fashion characteristic of the god. Moreover, penetrating the baby’s forehead is the smoking-ax blade that is so often depicted stuck through the forehead mirror of the god. The identical symbol impales the forehead of Pacal, his father, on the sarcophagus lid in the tomb deep below to bear witness to his divine status as he falls into the Otherworld. Yet to insure that the baby on the Temple of Inscriptions piers was not taken simply to be an image of the god, he was depicted with six toes on each foot (Fig. 6:9a), a physical deformity shown repeatedly in Chan-Bahlum’s adult portraits (Fig. 6:9b-d). The inclusion of this characteristic deformity affirmed the humanity of the baby figure and its personal identity as the six-toed heir Chan-Bahlum. Combining these contrasting features asserted the essential divinity of the human heir.
-[252] Friedman, Milton. 1962 [2002]. Capitalism and Freedom, 40<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 201.
+This ritual display of the child heir, then, constituted the public affirmation of Chan-Bahlum’s new identity as a “divine human.” This new identity was sanctified by the sacrifice of captives taken in battle by Pacal. Another proud father, King Chaan-Muan, depicted exactly this sequence of events explicitly and graphically in the murals of Bonampak, a contemporary Late Classic kingdom on the Usumacinta river.[354] Chan-Bahlum, like the Bonampak king, turned this ephemeral ritual of heir display into a permanent public declaration of his legitimate status by placing it on the facade of a temple which dominated the central public plaza of his city. The fact that the temple housed his father’s grave made the assertion all the more powerful.
-[253] Cf. Long, Roderick T. 2006. “Rothbard’s ‘Left and Right’: Forty Years Later,” Mises Daily, [[https://mises.org][https://]] [[https://mises.org][mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later]], accessed 1/31/19.
+During the time when he was finishing his father’s temple, Chan-Bahlum also began work on the Group of the Cross, the buildings that would house his own version of Palenque’s dynastic history—the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Sun. In pictures and texts of unsurpassed eloquence, the new king completed the presentation of his new doctrine of dynasty as an institution transcending lineage. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary for him to reach back to the fundamental and orthodox concepts of royal authority. Chan-Bahlum approached the nebulous and paradoxical nature of political power with the vision of a great theologian and statesman. He divided his pictorial and textual treatise into three temples, thus recalling the triadic arrangement of primordial Late Preclassic royal architecture.[355] In this way, his statement evoked “origins” to the Maya—just as we “borrow” from the architecture of the Parthenon and Pantheon in our own state and religious monuments to declare the Greek and Roman origins of our cultural heritage.
-[254] Axelsen, David V. 2015. “Political Philosophy and Political Change,” Justice Everywhere blog, Sept 28. [[http://justice-everywhere.org][http://justice-everywhere.org/education/political-theory-and-political-change/]], accessed 2/14/17; Axel- sen, David V. 2016. “Aktivistisk Politisk Teori,” in R. S. Hansen & S. Midtgaard (eds) Metoden i Politisk Teori. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur; Axelsen, David V. Unpublished. “Making the World Worse by Saying How It Could Be Better”; cf. Wolff, J. 1998. “Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 27: 97–122.
+The three temples of the Group of the Cross rise from the summits of pyramidal platforms. The tallest temple is in the north, the middle one in the east, and the lowest in the west (Fig. 6:10). The south side of the group is open, both to preserve the triadic form of the group and to accommodate a large audience for ritual performances. This arrangement was all part of Chan-Bahlum’s plan to assert the ancient and pristine quality of his legitimacy. Although this design violates the landscape of Palenque, which would logically dictate that the principal building face toward the broad plain below, not away from it, it does conform with the primarily southward orientation of the first royal temples built at Cerros and other Late Preclassic kingdoms.
-[255] Munger, Michael. 2014. “Unicorn Governance,” Foundation for Economic Education blog, Aug. 11. [[https://fee.org][https://]] [[https://fee.org][fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/]], accessed 2/16/17.
+Chan-Bahlum pursued the triadic theme further in the design of the buildings themselves. In each temple, three doors pierce the front wall of an interior which is divided into an antechamber and three rear sanctums (Fig. 6:11). In the central chamber of each temple his masons built the holy portals which opened into the Otherworld. These powerful foci of supernatural energy were set inside miniature houses—called by the Maya pib nau[356] or “underground buildings”—built within the back chamber of each temple. While these little houses were only symbolically underground, they replicated in principle the real underground buildings of Palenque: the tombs of Pacal and other kings in pyramids which dotted the sacred landscape of the city.
-[256] Levy Politanism 16.
+Artists decorated the outer facades of the temples with huge plaster reliefs modeled on the roof combs, the entablatures, and on the piers between the doors (Fig. 6:11). Unfortunately, only the sculptures of the Temple of the Cross entablature remain legible. These depicted frontal views of great Witz Monsters gazing out from all four sides of the roof. The Maya thought of this temple as a living mountain. Thus, its inner sanctuary was “underground” because it was in the mountain’s heart.
-[257] Widerquist Myths 224; cf. Widerquist State; Pateman, C., & C. W. Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. 54; Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 71; Long, Roderick T. 1995. “Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent,” Social Philosophy & Policy, 12: 1—31.
+Into these “underground houses in the hearts of the mountains” the king would tread, alone and stripped of earthly trappings, to meet his father and his ancestors in Xibalba. He would hazard the perils of hell, as the Hero Twins had before him, to bring back life and prosperity for his people. The plaster sculptures that adorned the outer entablatures of the pib na declared their supernatural purpose. Great slabs of stone brought from special quarries bore the words and images that would open these portals to the Otherworld. These stone panels were set into the rear walls of the interior, and into the outer, front walls on either side of the entry doorways. Another set of inscribed doorjamb panels lined the inside of that door (Fig. 6:11).
-[258] De Cleyre, Voltairine 1912. “Direct Action,” Mother Earth.
+The images used to represent the visions special to each pib na were all arranged in the same basic pattern. The resonances and contrasts designed into the three compositions provided a means of enriching the information they conveyed and emphasizing the unity of their spiritual source. The pictures in each temple were carved on the central axes of the main tablets set against the back wall of the pib na (Fig. 6:12). Each composition represented one of the three paths to Xibalba, as well as the three forms that supernatural power would take during the king’s ecstatic trances. In each temple, the central image was flanked on the one side by a short figure encased in a heavy cloth costume, and on the other by Chan-Bahlum wearing simple dress. From there the action moved to the two exterior panels, following the path of the king from the Otherworld to the natural one. On the outer panels the king is shown returning in triumph from his transformational journey: He has changed from heir to the reigning monarch of Palenque.
-[259] See Ostrom Commons; Ostrom, Elinor 2000. “Social Capital: A Fad or a Fundamental Concept?” in Partha Dasgupta & Ismail Serageldin (eds) Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective. Washington DC: World Bank Books; Ostrom, Elinor, James Walker, & Roy Gardner. 1992. “Covenants with and Without a Sword: SelfGovernance is Possible,” American Political Science Review, 86: 404—417; Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York, NY: Basic Books; Ellickson, Robert. 1992. Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Another relevant and important layer to Ostrom’s work is that she finds no a priori reason to think that the source of successful cooperation ought to be any one particular level of institutions, but can rather be a function of many interlocking sources of rules and social capital. Cf Buchanan, James M. 1965. “An Economic Theory of Clubs,” Economica, 32: 1—14.
+The texts embedded in these narrative scenes tell us exactly which historical events were critical to this transformational process. The text describing the heir-designation of Chan-Bahlum was extremely important. This information appears often, always near the small figure muffled in heavy clothing. This text tells us that the rituals surrounding the presentation of the boy from atop the pyramid took place on June 17, 641, and ended five days later on the summer solstice when he became the living manifestation of the sun.[357] Other significant texts relate that on January 10, 684, the forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum became king 132 days after his father’s death. The glyphs recording this celebration are next to his portrait. They appear on the inner panels of the Temples of the Cross and the Foliated Cross, and over the shield in the center of the Tablet of the Sun.
-[260] Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Scott, James C. 2014. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
+[[][Fig. 6:12]]
-[261] Cromwell, Lawrence, & David George Green. 1985. Mutual Aid or Welfare State? Australia’s Friendly Societies. New York, NY: Harper Collins; Beito, David. 1990. “Mutual Aid for Social Welfare: The Case of American Fraternal Societies.” Critical Review 4: 709—736; Beito, David. 1992. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890—1967. Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina Press; Green, David George. 1993. Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics. London: Civitas.
+When the scene moves to the outer panels, other important events are emphasized. In the Temple of the Foliated Cross and the Temple of the Sun,[358] we see two different scenes from Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites. In both these temples, the left panel shows him on the first day of these rites, and the right panel shows him at their conclusion, ten days later, when Venus was at its greatest elongation as Eveningstar. In the Temple of the Cross, only the culminating event of the succession rites is shown. In this version, we see Chan-Bahlum facing God L, one of the most important gods of Xibalba, who has evidently guided him out of the Otherworld and back into the light of life. Finally, the text behind Chan-Bahlum on the Tablet of the Cross puts a period to the historical proceedings by recording the three-day-long dedication rites for the completion of this monumental group on July 23, 690.
-[262] Beito Aid 723.
+If we have accurately identified these events—the designation of Chan-Bahlum as heir, his accession as king, and his dedication of the temples—who then is the mysterious personage shown in these final narrative scenes? The answer is simple: The small muffled figure is none other than the dead Pacal, the father of the king-to-be,[359] who stands facing his child in the ritual that will make him king. Chan-Bahlum designed the inner scenes of the temples to represent places in Xibalba where he would meet his father and receive the power of the kingship from him directly. Pacal is shown transferring the kingship to his son through a ritual of transformation paralleling the one he enacted for a frightened six-year-old boy forty-two years earlier. On each of the inner panels, the son is dressed simply in the Maya equivalent of underwear, his long hair wrapped in readiness to don the heavy headdress of kingship. His father stands nearby, his chest muffled in heavy cloth wrapping bands. His neck too is bound in a thick twisted cloth which hangs down his back. This apparel most likely represents the burial clothing he wore in his own final portal deep beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions. At any rate, the costume clearly portrays him in his role as denizen of Xibalba.
-[263] Beito Aid 712–717.
+On the inner panels, the dead Pacal still holds the insignia of royal power. Transformation and the passing on of authority occurred only during the ten days of the accession rites. At the end of these days and nights of fasting, sacrifice, and communion in the place of death, we finally see Chan-Bahlum coming forth from the<em>pib na</em> wielding those very power objects and wearing the age-old garb of kings. The royal belt, with Chac-Xib-Chac dangling behind his knees, girds his loins. The heavy elaborate feathered headdress adorns his brow with the responsibility of authority. On his back rests the burden of divinity symbolized by the backrack with its image of a god. This was the dress of kings when Tikal conquered Uaxactun. By donning this most ancient and powerful garb, Chan-Bahlum became the ahau of the ahauob—“the lord of lords.”
-[264] Long, Roderick T. 1993/1994. “How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis: Medical Insurance That Worked—Until Government ‘Fixed’ It,” Formulations, 1(2).
+The central icon at the portal of each of the three temples in the Group of the Cross specifies the nature of the cosmic power and community responsibility that defined kingship for that temple. At the portal of the Temple of the Cross, we see a variant of the World Tree (see the Glossary of Gods). This cross-shaped Tree, with the Serpent Bar of kingship entwined in its branches and the Celestial Bird standing on its crown, was the central axis of the cosmos (Fig. 6:12a).[360] Along this axis rose and descended the souls of the dead and the gods called from the Otherworld by the vision rite to talk to human beings. It was the path the Cosmic Monster took as the sun and Venus moved through its body on their daily journeys.[361] The king himself was the worldly manifestation of this axis, and this emphasized his role as the source of magical power. He was not only the primary practitioner of the rituals that contacted the Otherworld: He was the pathway itself (see Chapter 2, Fig. 2:11). In this portal the dead Pacal gives his son a scepter in the form of the monster that rests at the base of the World Tree—the same sun-marked monster that bore Pacal to Xibalba. Chan-Bahlum wields a disembodied head as an instrument of power, as had the Early Classic kings of Tikal and other kings before him.
-[265] Beito Aid 711–719. Related to this non-state provision of social safety nets: direct action from civil society has also crucially assisted in the wake of disasters. For a variety of cases following Hurricane Katrina, see the stories highlighted in Storr, Nona M., Chamblee-Wright, Emily, & Storr, Virgil H. 2015. How We Came Back: Voices from Post-Katrina New Orleans. Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University; Crow, Scott. 2011. Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
+The portal of the Temple of the Foliated Cross (Fig. 6:12b) bears a foliated variant of the World Tree formed by a maize plant rising from a band of water and Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, one of the symbols of the watery world of raised fields and swamps (see the Glossary of Gods). In the crown of this foliated tree sits a huge water bird wearing the mask of the Celestial Bird. The branches of the tree are ears of maize manifested as human heads, for, in the Maya vision, the flesh of human beings was made from maize dough. This Foliated Cross represented the cultivated world of the community through the symbol of a maize plant rising from the waters of the earth as the source of life. Maize was not only the substance of human flesh, but it was the major cultigen of the Maya farmer. As the sustainer of life, and as a plant that could not seed itself without the intervention of humans, maize was an ultimate symbol of Maya social existence in communion with nature. In this portal Pacal is shown giving his son the Personified Bloodletter. This was the instrument of the bloodletting rite and the vision quest. It drew the blood of the king and brought on the trance that opened the portal and brought forth the gods from the Otherworld.
-[266] Anderson Government 37
+Images of war and death sacrifice adorn the panel in the pib na of the Temple of the Sun. A Sun Jaguar shield and crossed spears dominate the central icon (Fig. 6:13). These images are sustained aloft by a throne with bleeding jaguar heads emerging from one axis, and bleeding dragons from the other. As at Cerros, these bleeding heads represent decapitation sacrifice. The throne and its burden of war rest on the shoulders of God L and another aged god from the Otherworld. Both are bent over like captives under the feet of victorious warrior kings.[362] This scene recalls the defeat of the Lords of Death at the beginning of time by the Hero Twins. Captive sacrifice was the source of life through the reenactment of the magical rebirth of these heroic ancestors of the Maya people. God L, who received the greetings of the new king in the Temple of the Cross, now holds up the burden of war and sacrifice. In both cases, ritual performance by the king involved Otherworld denizens in the human community.[363]
-[267] Johnson, Charles W. 2014. “Free Market Labor Wins Wage-Boost Victory.” Reason blog, Jan 28. [[http://reason.com][http://]] [[http://reason.com][reason.com/archives/2014/01/28/free-market-labor-wins-wage-boost-victor]], accessed 12/29/17.
+Here in the Temple of the Sun, the power object is not actually passed from the inside scene to the outside, as in the other temples; but the intent of the composition is still the same. On the inner panel, Pacal holds a full-bodied eccentric flint and a shield made of a flayed human face: symbols of war among the nobility of Palenque and other Maya kingdoms. If we move to the outer panels, on one we see Chan-Bahlum holding a bleeding jaguar on a small throne as the symbol of sacrificial death. On the opposite panel, he wears cotton battle armor with a rolled flexible shield hanging down his back. The tall staff he wields is probably a battle spear typical of the kind carried by warrior kings at other sites. The parallelism here is nicely rendered. On the one side, he is emerging from the pib na as a warrior prepared to capture the enemies of his kingdom; on the other, he comes forth as the giver of sacrifice, the result of victory.
-[268] On related topics, see Carson, Kevin A. 2008. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. Charleston, SC: BookSurge. On the topic of worker self-management, also see Prychitko, David. 2019. “Context Matters: Finding a Home for Labor-Managed Enterprise,” in Roger E. Bissell, Christopher Matthew Scia- barra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington.
+Once he had memorialized the scenes of his transformation within his living mountains, Chan-Bahlum framed the imagery with the finest examples of royal literature left to the modern world by the ancient Maya. We know that, on the one hand, his actions were politically motivated and designed to gain personal glory. That knowledge, however, cannot obscure our awareness that these texts constitute a magnificent poetic vision of the universe, a remarkable expression of the high level of philosophical and spiritual development within the civilization of the Maya. These texts comprise the only full statement of creation mythology and its relationship to the institution of ahau that we have from the Maya Classic period. They define the sacred origin and charismatic obligations of kingly power.
-[269] Brown, Dale 2013. Interview: “Dale Brown of Detroit-based Threat Management Center is On-Point,” video available at [[http://www.youtube.com][www.youtube.com/watch?v=onWC8nNpIco]], accessed 1/5/17.
+In these texts, Chan-Bahlum resolved the relationship between lineage and dynasty by evoking the origin myths of the Maya, declaring that his own claim of descent from his grandmother replicated the practices of the gods at the time of the genesis. He pursued and elaborated the same divine symmetries his father had asserted before him, symmetries between the First Mother, First Father, and their children, and the historical realities of Palenque’s dynastic succession. The First Mother was Lady Beastie, who we mentioned above as the mother of the gods and the Creatrix in the Maya vision of the cosmos. As we shall see the Palencanos saw her operate in their lives through her spirit counterpart, the moon. Her husband and the father of her children is called GT (G-one-prime) by modern scholars. He established the order of time and space just after the fourth version of the cosmos was created on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. Both the Creatrix and her husband were born during the previous manifestation of creation, but their children were born 754 years into this one.
-[270] Threat Management Center is a case where we can point to a particular organization providing services typically associated with the state, but the point here is much more expansive. No legal system can ever succeed with only the work of those on the state’s payroll. The success or failure of the state’s provision of deterrence requires “coproduction,” which is a series of activities that ordinary persons take to provide for their own security and assist in the security of others. For more on this, see Goodman, Nathan. 2017. “The Coproduction of Justice,” in Christopher W. Suprenant (ed.) Rethinking Punishment in an Era of Mass-Incarceration. New York, NY: Routledge. Changes at the level of coproduction of security can be just as important as changes in the state’s direct production of security in providing assurance that individuals’ rights will be respected. For a political anarchist discussion of legal and protective services provided outside the state, see Hasnas, John. 2008. “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? Aldershot: Ashgate.
+The three children are known as the Palenque Triad because Heinrich Berlin[364] first recognized them as a unit of related gods in Paienque’s inscriptions. He dubbed them GI, GII, and GUI for God I, God II, and God III. We now know that the firstborn child, GI, had the same name as his father, GI’, in exactly the same pattern as the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh where Hun-Hunahpu is the father of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. GI is a fish-barbled anthropomorphic god who wears a shell-earflare. He is associated with Venus and with decapitation sacrifice. GII, also known as God K, Bolon Tz’acab, and Kauil, is a serpent-footed god who wears a smoking-ax through his obsidian-mirrored forehead. He is the god of lineages and blood sacrifice. GUI is the cruller-eyed Jaguar God, who is also known as Ahau-Kin, “Lord Sun.” See the Glossary of Gods for full descriptions and pictures.
-[271] The “prison abolition” movement refers to a broad movement seeking to radically change the way we handle crime, often in ways that go beyond just abolishing prisons. The “anti-violence” movement refers to community organizations attempting to address domestic violence and interpersonal violence more generally.
+As the most ancient and sacred of all Maya dieties, these three gods played a crucial role in the earliest symbolism of kingship we saw at Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun. Chan-Bahlum makes them the crucial pivot of his own claim to legitimacy. On the right half of each text, he recounted their actions in the Maya story of the beginning of the current world. On the left he recorded the connections between those sacred events and Paienque’s history. Here is a chronology of the mythological events in the order they are presented. (See Fig. 6:14,15,16 for the full decipherment and drawings of these texts.)
-[272] Kim, Mimi E. 2011/2012. “Moving Beyond Critique: Creative Interventions and Reconstructions of Community Accountability,” Social Justice, 37: 14—35. 20—21. For an outline of the community-centric rather than state-centric model of restorative justice animating groups like Creative Interventions, see Christie, Nils. 1977. “Conflicts as Property.” British Journal of Criminology, 17.1: 1—15.
+<verse>
+On December 7, 3121 B.C.,
+when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled,
+five days after the moon was born
+and the 2<sup>nd</sup> moon had ended,
+X was the moon’s name and it had 29 days.
-[273] Kim Critique 21.
+It was 20 days after God K had set the south sky place
+on November 16, 3121 B.C.
-[274] Kim Critique 22.
+that Lady Beastie was born. [Al-Cl]
-[275] Husak, Douglas B. 1992. Drugs and Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Huemer, Michael. 2004. “America’s Unjust Drug War,” in Bill Masters (ed.) The New Prohibition. St Louis, MO: Accurate Press; Cohen, Andrew J., & William Glod. 2017. “Why Paternalists and Social Welfarists Should Oppose Criminal Drug Laws,” in Christopher W. Suprenant (ed.) Rethinking Punishment in an Era of MassIncarceration. London: Routledge.
+. years, 5 months,
+and no days after he was born and then the past epoch ended.
+On August 13, 3114 B.C.,
+. baktuns were completed.
-[276] Roberts quoted in Greenberg, Andy. 2013. “An Interview with a Digital Drug Lord: The Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts,” Forbes, Aug 14. [[http://www.forbes.com][www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-interview-]] [[http://www.forbes.com][with-a-digital-drug-lord-the-silk-roads-dread-pirate-roberts-qa/#5588e2c95732]], accessed 12/4/2017.
+year, 9 months, and 2 days after the new epoch began,
+GF entered the sky.
-[277] Olsen, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Tullock, G. 1980. “Efficient Rent-Seeking,” in James Buchanan, Robert Tollison, & Gordon Tullock (eds), Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society. College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press; Holcombe, Randall G. 2018. Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
+On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ dedicated it.
+“Wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” was its name.
+It was his house of the north. [DI —C13]
-[278] Stigler, George. 1971. “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2: 3—21; Winston, Clifford, Robert W. Crandall, William A. Niskanen, & Alvin Klevorick. 1994. “Explaining Regulatory Policy,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Microeconomics. 1994: 1—49; Lindsey, Brink, & Steven M. Teles. 2017. The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
+years and 12 months after GF had set the wac chan
+and then the matawil person was born.
+On October 21, 2360 B.C., the matawil,
+the blood of Lady Beastie, touched the earth.
+[D13-F4]
-[279] Buchanan, James M., & Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press.
+years, 11 months, and 2 days
+after she had been born,
+and then she crowned herself
+on August 13, 2305 B.C. [E5-F8]
-[280] Kolko, Gabriel. 1963. The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900—1916. New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe; Kolko, Gabriel. 1965. Railroads and Regulation, 1877—1916. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Weinstein, James. 1976. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900—1918. New York, NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux.
+,330 years, 12 months, 2 days after
+August 13<sup>th</sup> came to pass
+and then U-Kix-Chan, the Divine Palenque Lord,
+was born.
-[281] Shaffer, Butler. 1997. In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918—1938. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; Childs, Roy A., Jr. 1971a. “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism, Part One: A Revisionist History,” Reason, February, [[https://reason.com][https://reason.com/1971/02/01/big-busi]] [[https://reason.com][ness-and-the-rise-of-a-2/]], accessed 2/1/19; Childs, Roy A., Jr. 1971b. “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism, Part Two: A Revisionist History,” Reason, March, [[http://reason.com][http://reason.com/1971/02/01/big-]] [[http://reason.com][business-and-the-rise-of-a-2/]], accessed 2/1/19; Grinder, Walter E., & John Hagel III. 1977. “Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision-Making and Class Structure,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1: 59—79; Radosh, Ralph, & Murray N. Rothbard (eds). 1972. A New History of Leviathan. New York, NY: Dutton; Stromberg, Joseph R. 1972. “The Political Economy of Liberal Corporatism,” Individualist, May; Ruwart, Mary J. 2003. Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression. Kalamazoo, MI: SunStar Press; Johnson, Charles W. 2004. “Free the Unions (and All Political Prisoners),” Rad Geek People’s Daily blog, [[https://radgeek.com][https://radgeek.com/gt/2004/05/01/free_the/]], accessed 2/1/19; Hart, David M., Gary Chartier, Ross M. Kenyon, & Roderick T. Long (eds). 2018. Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; Hart Capitalism.
+years, 7 months, 13 days after
+U-Kix-Chan had been born ... [E10-F17]
+</verse>
-[282] These points are also relevant to other dimensions of social domination, not just economic power. For instance, similar reform-skeptical analysis is applied to LGBTQIA issues in Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Also see the essays compiled in Conrad, Ryan. 2014. Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Edinburgh: AK Press.
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
-[283] Huemer, Michael. 2012. “In Praise of Passivity,” Studia Humana, 1: 12—28. 26.
+<verse>
+On October 21,2360 B.C.,
+GI, the matawil, touched the earth.
+,094 years, 11 months, 10 days later
+On January 10, 692 ...
+</verse>
-[284] Huemer Passivity 13.
+ The Temple of the Cross
-[285] Huemer Passivity 17—18; cf. Somin, Ilya. 2013. Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books; Caplan, Bryan. 2007. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
+<verse>
+On December 7, 3121 B.C., Lady Beastie, the First Mother, was born.
+On June 16, 3122 B.C., GI’, the First Father, was born.
+On August 13, 3114 B.C., the 13<sup>th</sup> baktun ended and the new creation began.
+On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ entered into the sky and he dedicated the house named ‘wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (the “World Tree house of the north”).[365]
+</verse>
-[286] Huemer Passivity 19.
+<verse>
+... and then U-Kix-Chan crowned himself
+on March 28, 967 B.C.
+He was a Divine Palenque Lord. [P1-Q3]
-[287] Huemer Passivity 19.
+On March 31,397 Kuk was born.
+It was 22 years, 5 months, 14 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself on March 11,431.
+He was Divine ????? Lord. [P4—Q9]
+On August 9, 422, “Casper” was born.
+years, 3 months, 9 days after “Casper” had been born and then it was August 10, 435,
+days after “Casper” crowned himself and then December 11,435, came to pass, on that day 3,600 years (9 baktuns) ended. <verbatim>|Pl0—S2]</verbatim>
+years, 1 month, 18 days after “Manik” had been born and then he crowned himself on July 29,487. [R3-S7]
+years, 7 months, 17 days after he had been born
+on July 6,465,
+and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself
+on June 5, 501. [R8-R13]
+years, 6 months, 16 days after Kan-Xul had been born and then he crowned himself on February 25, 529.
+[S13-S18]
+years, 4 months, 17 days after he had been born and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself
+on May 4,565. [T1-T6]
+year, 1 month, 1 day after Chaacal-Ah-Nab had been
+born on September 5, 523
+and then Chan-Bahlum was born. [U6-T11]
-[288] Huemer Passivity 15.
+years, 4 months, 7 days after Chan-Bahlum had
+been born on September 20, 524
+and 18(?) years, 8 months, 2 days. [U11-U18]
+</verse>
-[289] Huemer Passivity 20—21.
+<verse>
+it was housed the wacah-chan (six-sky)
+it was the sanctuary of
+it was the holy thing of
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal
+and the child of Lady Ahpo-Hel.
+It happened at the Waterlily Place.
+</verse>
-[290] Huemer Passivity 21—26.
+On October 21, 2360 B.c., GI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.
-[291] Brennan, Jason. 2016. Against Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 223.
+On August 13, 2305 B.C., at age 815, Lady Beastie became the first being in this creation to be crowned as king.
-[292] Brennan Democracy 235—237.
+On March 1 1, 993 B.c., U-Kix-Chan was born.
-[293] Brennan Democracy 237—238.
+On March 28, 967 B.C., at age thirty-six, U-Kix-Chan, Divine Lord of Palenque, was crowned king of Palenque.
-[294] Brennan Democracy 238—240.
+On November 8, 2360 B.C.
+when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled,
+it was ten days after the moon was born,
+moons had ended,
+X was its name and it had 30 days.
-[295] Brennan Democracy 240—241.
+It was 14 months and 19 days
+after God K set the west quadrant.{1}
-[296] Brennan Democracy 236.
+It was the third birth and GII was born. [A1-D2]
-[297] Kim Critique 27—31.
+years, 14 months after GII, the matawil, had been born
+and then 2 baktuns (800 years) ended
+on February 16, 2325 B.C.
-[298] Admittedly, while it need not, direct action can also take the form of violence. Among other problems, direct action in the form of violence typically does not have the benefit of helping us practice safe politics.
+On that day Lady Beastie, Divine Lord of Matawil,
+manifested a divinity through bloodletting. [C3-D11]
-[299] Anderson, Elizabeth. 1999. “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics, 109: 287—337; Scheffler, Samuel. 2010. Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
+It had come to pass
+on Yax -Ha! Witznal
+in the shell place
+at the Na-Te-Kan{2}
+on November 8, 2360 B.C.
-[300] Nozick Anarchy; Mack, Eric. 2010. “The Natural Right of Property,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 27: 53–78.
+,947 years, 3 months, 16 days later{3} ... [C12-D17]
-[301] Something like this relational egalitarian libertarianism can be seen in Johnson, Charles W. 2008. “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? Aldershot: Ashgate; Chartier Anarchy; Chartier, Gary. 2019. “Radical Liberalism and Social Liberation,” in Roger E. Bissell, Christopher Matthew Scia- barra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington; Christmas, Billy. 2019b. “Social Equality and Liberty,” in Roger E. Bissell, Christopher M. Sciabarra, & Edward W. Younkins (eds), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. New York, NY: Lexington; Long Libertarians. It can perhaps also be seen many of the nineteenth-century individualist anarchists. It also has clear precedent in the market egalitarian currents of classical liberalism highlighted in the first chapter of Anderson Government.
+{1} The scribe made an error here by adding rather than subtracting the Distance Number. The correct station is 1.18.4.7.11 Imix 19 Pax with red and east.
-[302] The second chapter of Anderson Government can be seen as making this sort of argument, by appeal to greater economies of scale following the Industrial Revolution. A libertarian rejoinder might begin by challenging the attribution of workplace authoritarianism to the spontaneous workings of the market. What we mean to emphasize here is a further point: beyond the spontaneous workings of market exchange, we must also consider the merits of non-state actions intentionally taken towards the social enforcement of justice.
+{2} These three locations refer to the Mountain Monster under Chan-Bahlum’s feet, the shell under Pacal’s feet, and the Foliated Cross in the center of the panel (See Figure 6:12).
-[303] For instance, the nonlibertarian relational egalitarian could raise worries specific to the idea of natural property rights.
+{3} The Distance Number should be 7.14.13.1.16.
-[304] Long Government.
+<verse>
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
+On November 8, 2360 B.C..
+GII, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,050 years, 63 days later
+on January 10, 692 ...
+<verse>
-[305] Spade Life 17.
+ The Temple of the Foliated Cross
-[306] Sylvia Rivera Law Project. No date. “SRLP On Hate Crimes Laws.” Sylvia Rivera Law Project. [[https://srlp.org][https://]] [[https://srlp.org][srlp.org/action/hate-crimes/]], accessed 12/29/17.
+<verse>
+November 8, 2360 B.C., GII was born.
+Thirty-four years later, on February 17, 2325 B.C., Lady Beastie let her blood when two baktuns ended.
+... on July 23, 690, (III and Gill were in conjunction [L1-M4]
+On the next day,
+the Mah-Kina-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated in the house of Lord Chan-Bahlum,
+Divine Palenque Lord. <verbatim>|L6-L9]</verbatim>
+On the third day Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord, he let blood with an obsidian blade;
+he took the bundle
+after it had come to pass at the Waterlily Place.
+Wac-Chan-Chac Ox-Waxac-Chac acted there. [L10-L17]
+years, 6 months, 4 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself,
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord on January 10, 692. [M17-P5]
+years, 11 months, 6 days after he had been seated as ahau and then GI, GII, Gill and their companion gods came into conjunction.
+Lord Chan-Bahlum enacted a ritual.
+In 1 year, 12 months, 4 days it will happen, the end of the 13<sup>th</sup> katun on March 17, 692.
+And then it came to pass July 23, 690 and then they were in conjunction the gods, who are the chcrcished-ones of, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord.
+it was housed, the Na-Te-Kan (Foliated Cross)
+it was the pib nail of
+it was the divine-thing of
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal the child of Lady Ahpo-Hcl.
+It happened at the Waterlily Place.
+</verse>
-[307] Cf. Johnson, Charles W. 2009. “We Are Market Forces,” in Charles W. Johnson & Gary Chartier (eds) Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. New York, NY: Autonomedia.
+<verse>
+On October 25, 2360 B.C.
+the third Lord of the Night ruled,
+it was 26 days after the moon was born,
+four moons had ended,
+X was its name and it had 30 days ....
-<br>
+It was 1 year, 46 days after
+God K set the north quadrant
+on July 24, 2587 B.C.
-** 5. What is the Point of Anarchism?
+On that day he was born,
+Mah Kina Tah-Waybil-Ahau,
+Kin-tan “decapitated jaguar.”
+Ti Nah, Zac-Bac-Na-Chan, Atin Butz’, TITI,
+Mah Kina Ahau-Kin.. [A1-D6]
-*Aeon J. Skoble*
+years, 3 months, 6 days after the wac-chan
+had been set,
+and then the matawil, the child of Lady Beastie,
+Divine Palenquc Lord, was born. [C7—D13]
-*** I. Introduction
+,858 years, 5 months, 16 days ... [Cl—D16]
-Anarchism is the position in political philosophy which denies the authority or necessity of political authority. To oppose political authority is not to oppose authority. Dentists generally know more about teeth and tooth care than non-dentists; classical historians generally know more about the Peloponnesian War than non-historians. Unlike medical or historical authority, political authority is not a claim about knowledge, but a claim about power. The ruler does not necessarily claim to know more, but rather claims to be justified in exercising power over others.
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
-The suffix “archon” refers to rulers, so, just as monarchism recommends a single ruler, anarchism recommends no rulers. But rulers exist, so the word “anarchism” is not a metaphysical claim, but a normative one. “Atheism,” by contrast, uses a similar negation-implying prefix, but it is not a normative position. The atheist denies that God exists. Anarchism does not deny that rulers exist; rather, it denies claims that rulers are justified, that they are entitled to the authority they assert. Rulers are not likely to give up their power just because some philosophical argument says they should. So it’s reasonable to ask of the anarchist, What is the point of the arguments you are making? In this chapter, I intend to establish that the anarchist’s position is worth advancing and has very real consequences even in a world in which political authority is persistent.
+On October 25, 2360 B C.,
+GIII, the matawil, touched the earth.
+[3,894 years, 11 months, 6 days later
+on January 10, 692 ...]
+</verse>
-*** II. Some Clarifications
+ The Temple of the Sun
-Before proceeding, let me clarify a couple of additional terms. By “states” or “the state,” Iam not invoking the US-specific distinction between a state government and the federal government, but rather the idea of a “state” as a reasonably well-defined geographical area in which there is a centralized political authority. The authority could be monarchical, democratic, republican, or oligarchical; any kind of government that has authority in the relevant geographic area will qualify. In any kind of state, then, the concept of “ruler,” the thing the anarchist wants to do away with, is in play, whether there is one ruler, twelve, 535, or what have you.
+On October 25, 2360 B.c., 754 years after the era began, GUI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.
-The anarchist’s claim is not that one form of government is illegitimate and that another would be; it is that no rulers’ claims to power over others are legitimate. Sometimes, people who oppose a particular government are accused of being anarchists (indeed, sometimes they even self-describe that way), but, when their goal is to replace the state with a different sort of state, they are actually not anarchists, any more than opponents of one religion qualify as “atheists” for embracing one or more different religions. Hence the slogan “smash the state” might be an anarchist’s, but also might not be, depending on whether the sloganeer’s goal is to eliminate all centralized political authority, or to replace an existing state with another—to substitute democratic socialism, say, for oligarchy. If we’re speaking precisely, it’s only anarchism if the goal is no rulers at all.
+<verse>
+... after the present epoch began on August 13, 3114 B. C.,
+and then July 23,690, came to pass.
+GUI came into conjunction. 1016–06]
-In addition, to be an anarchist is not to oppose social order generally. “Anarchy” is often used to connote chaos or disorder, yet the anarchist’s argument is typically something to the effect that social order is possible without coercive, centralized authority. So the anarchist distinguishes “society” from “state” or “government.”
+One day later on July 24, 690,
+the Kinich-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated,
+in the house of the Bacel-Way
+Lord Chan-Bahlum. [N7-O12]
-Arguments for anarchism typically include one or more of the following points:
+Three days later he materialized the divinity
+through bloodletting.
+He did it at the Waterlily Place,
+the Old God of Kuk-Te-Witz.{4} (N13-N16]
-. Coercion is detrimental to human flourishing and so should be minimized if not eliminated.
+years, 12 months, 3 days after November 20,496,
+when Kan-Xul took office as the heir-designate.
+It had come to pass at the Toc-tan Place.
+and then June 17, 641, came to pass.
+He (Lord Chan-Bahlum) became the heir.
+And on the fifth day after (on June 22,641)
+Lord Chan-Bahlum became the sun
+in the company of GI. [O16-Q10]
-. People have rights, and states necessarily violate rights.
+years, 2 months. 17 days after he had been born
+on May 23, 635,
+and then he was designated heir. [P11-Q13]
-. The levels of cooperation necessary for social order emerge organically and do not require coercive imposition.
+It was 1 year, 167 days until December 6, 642,
+when 10 years ended (9.10.10.0.0),
+he warred{5} as heir. [P14-Q16]
+</verse>
-. Political actors are self-interested and seek their own advantage rather than the common good, so we should favor institutions that deny power to such actors.
+{4} Kuk-te-witz is the ancient name for the mountain behind the Temple of the Foliated Cross, known today as El Mirador.
-. Political institutions get captured by mechanisms that favor groups who receive concentrated benefits at the expense of the majority over which costs are dispersed.
+{5} This is the same war event Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo enacted against Ucanal (Stela 22) and Ah-Cacaw of Tikal enacted against Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul.
-. Putative rationales for state authority are unpersuasive, but the burden of proof rests with supporters of such authority.
+<verse>
+It was an action in the Mah Kina ???? Cab,
+it was the pib nail of
+he completed 13 katuns on March 18, 692,
+Lord [Chan-Bahlum ...]
+</verse>
-. Collective means cannot be morally superior to individual means if the ends are not themselves morally legitimate.
+This pattern of events reveals Chan-Bahlum’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. In the Temple of the Cross, the first event recorded is the birth of Lady Beastie, the First Mother. In the next passage, we are told that the First Father, GT, was born on an even earlier date.[366] Both these gods were born during the previous creation, indicating that the nature of their power comes from a time before the existence of our world. On 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the cosmos re-formed into the new pattern of creation which manifested the present world. As the text continues, it describes how GT, the First Father, established the order of the new world on 1.9.2, 542 days after the present creation began.
-. Political institutions erode our cooperative natures and make us worse people.
+Chan-Bahlum provided a lot of information about these primordial times, beyond their naked existence as dates and events. His real theological and political intentions, however, are revealed by the manner of his presentation. In the text of his accession monument, the Temple of the Cross, he recounted the birth of the First Mother as if it were the first, and not the second, chronological event in the historical sequence. Initially, when recording the birth of the First Father, he didn’t even identify him. The reader had to wait until a subsequent passage to discover that this mysterious person, born eight years before creation—and 540 days earlier than the goddess—was in fact the First Father, GT. Chan-Bahlum manipulated the focus of the text at the expense of the First Father specifically because the First Mother was the pivot of his strategy of legitimization.
-. The reality of human pluralism makes the existence of alternative arrangements for the maintenance of social order desirable.
+In his accession monument, therefore, Chan-Bahlum placed the focus entirely on Lady Beastie and her relationship to the three gods of the Palenque Triad. Pacal had already set the precedent for this association by linking Lady Beastie’s name to that of his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, implying by this reference that his mother was the human analog of the mother goddess of all Maya. Chan-Bahlum went further by contriving to make the birth date of the goddess like-in-kind to the birth date of his own father, Pacal.[367] With a little calendric manipulation, this was easily done. To the Maya, days that fell at the same point in a calender cycle shared the same characteristics in sacred time. Days that fell on the same point in many different cycles were very sacred indeed. By extension, events, such as births, which fell on days that were related cosmically, were also “like-in-kind.” Because of the symmetry of their birth dates, Chan-Bahlum could declare that his father, Pacal, and the mother of the gods, were beings made of the same sacred substance.
-This list is not intended to be exhaustive; these are merely some of the more common arguments offered in support of anarchist conclusions.
+The symmetry of sacredness between the First Mother and Pacal was vital for another reason. The mother of the gods was born in the world of the past creation; therefore, she carried into the new world the cumulative power of the previous existence.[368] The date 4 Ahau 8 Cumku represented a membrane, comprised of the horrific chaos of creation, separating the symmetry and order of the former world from that of the present one. The contrived relationship between Pacal’s birth and the goddess’s asserted that his birth held the same sacred destiny as hers and that this symmetry came from the time before the creation.
-*** III. The Limits of Arguments for Anarchism
+The parallel Chan-Bahlum wished his people to see is both elegant and effective. He focused their attention on the old and new creation, then demonstrated that Lady Zac-Kuk and her royal clan represented the old ruling lineage at Palenque, while her son Pacal represented the new order of another patrilineal clan—a “new creation,” so to speak. When his mother passed the sacred essence of the kingship on to Pacal, she successfully passed through the chaotic violation of kinship principles of succession to arrive at this new order. Chan-Bahlum’s legitimate claim to the throne rested on this principle: direct transmission of the sacred essence of royal power between kings, irrespective of their gender or family.
-Suppose for a moment that I have written a philosophical treatise demonstrating with sound reasoning that all arguments justifying state authority are flawed, that society could be expected to function and flourish in the absence of coercive political structures, that social order and dispute resolution would emerge from voluntary arrangements.[308] Would all political philosophers familiar with my devastating arguments likely embrace anarchism? The astute reader will have already noted that philosophy doesn’t work that way. There may be plenty of agreement with whatever you have argued, but agreement is virtually always accompanied by dissent. Some of the dissent is rooted in good pedagogical practice—effective teachers present both sides of a dispute and invite students to draw their own conclusions. But a large part of it is due to the very nature of philosophical arguments. Since they’re very complex, there are many avenues for disagreement. Any interesting argument will likely contain so many premises and so many inferences that a person looking for a way to disagree will surely have several options to choose from. This may be due to a perverse contrarianism or emotional attachment to a prior belief, or it may be sincere, rational disagreement with some presupposition or implication. In any case, it’s not uncommon for people to look at the conclusion of an argument, decide they disagree, and then review the argument looking for ways in which it (must have) gone wrong. After all, if the conclusion is false, some part of the argument must contain a flaw. Since for most people anarchism simply must be false, it wouldn’t matter (for them) whether an argument for anarchism were (actually) sound.
+Chan-Bahlum extended the similarity between the kings of Palenque and the gods even further by recording the births of the three gods of the Palenque Triad on the left sides of the tablets inside the pib na. There he emphasized their relationship to the First Mother by labeling GI (the namesake of the First Father) and GUI, who were the first and second born of her children, with the glyphic phrase “he is the child of Lady Beastie.” These gods were her children, exactly as Pacal was the child of Lady Zac-Kuk. GII, the god most closely related to Maya kings, was also her child, but Chan-Bahlum chose to relate him to the First Father by setting up contrived numerology between their births, exactly as he contrived to make Pacal’s birth “like-in-kind” to Lady Beastie’s.[369] The equation is, of course, his own claim to legitimacy: As GII was descended from the substance of First Father so was he the descendant of the divine Pacal.
-But people do sometimes change their minds on the basis of philosophical arguments. Taking the long view of the history of philosophy, we can see many examples—the most relevant for present purposes being arguments for anarchism itself. Every philosophical proponent of anarchism was raised in a society with rulers in which a narrative justifying state authority was widely embraced. So that there are any philosophical anarchists at all is evidence that it’s at least possible to make effective, persuasive arguments.[309]
+This declaration of parallelism might have been enough, but Chan- Bahlum, intent on proving his right to the throne beyond the shadow of any doubt, was not content to stop there. On the Tablet of the Cross he declared that after she brought the firstborn of the Palenque Triad into the world, Lady Beastie, at age 815, became the first living being to be crowned ruler in the new creation. The crown she wore is called glyph- ically zac uinic (“pure or resplendent person”) and it is visually represented as the Jester God headband we saw first at Cerros. This glyph is the key title taken by all the subsequent kings of Palenque who were recorded on the historical side of this panel. Once again, Chan-Bahlum did not say that the First Father became the king: It was the goddess that he chose to emphasize. The text itself reads: “2 days, 11 uinals, 7 tuns, 1 katuns, and 2 baktuns after she had been born and then she crowned herself the zac uinic, Beastie, on 9 Ik seating of Zac” (Fig. 6:17).
-Suppose again for a moment that I have indeed written a philosophical treatise demonstrating with sound reasoning that all arguments justifying state authority are flawed, that society would function and flourish in the absence of coercive political structures, and that social order and dispute resolution would emerge from voluntary arrangements. Suppose, too, that—amazingly—the vast majority of philosophers agreed that I was correct. What would happen? What would likely not happen is that the government would disband and all people holding power would renounce it. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons why that is not what would happen.
+At this point, Chan-Bahlum could certainly have rested from his labors. He had already created a simple and effective equation between the First Mother and the children of the gods on the one hand, and Lady Zac-Kuk and her descendants on the other. But instead he decided to bridge the temporal gap from the accession of the First Mother to the accession of the founder of his dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. He accomplished this by evoking the name of a legendary king, U-Kix-Chan. We know that this man was a figure of legend because Chan-Bahlum tells us he was born on March 11, 993 B.C., and crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. These dates fall during the florescence of the Olmec, the first great Mesoameri- can civilization. The Olmec were remembered by the Classic peoples as the great ancestral civilization in much the same way that the Romans evoked Troy from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as their source of their legitimacy. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec, like the Greeks of the Old XV orld, forged the template of state art and religion for their world by developing many of the symbols, the rituals, and the styles of artistic presentation that would be used by their successors for millennium.
-The first is that people who have power tend to like having power and will be reluctant to give it up. This happens so rarely that when it does, everyone knows about it and finds it remarkable. In general, people with power want to preserve, and if possible, expand their power.
+U-Kix-Chan may not have been a real person, but Chan-Bahlum deliberately set his birth date in Olmec times. In this way he could claim that the authority of Palenque’s dynasty had its roots in the beginnings of human civilization as well as in the time of the divine. The passages recording U-Kix-Chan’s name began on the mythological side of the Tablet of the Cross, with his birth, and bridged to the historical side with his accession. He was immediately recognizable as human, no matter how legendary his time, because of the scale of his life. He was twenty-six years old when he became the king of Palenque; the First Mother was 815 when she took the same throne. Since their ages were read with their accessions, their status as divine versus human would have been immediately and emphatically self-evident.
-The other reason is that most people think political authority is necessary. Even when they disapprove of some particular ruler or form of government, most people think the occurrence of the flaws to which they object just means they should support a different ruler or a different form of government. For example, most Democratic voters want to replace a Republican president with one from their own party, not to eliminate the presidency. Opponents of James II wanted to install a different monarch, not to eliminate the monarchy.
+From the legendary “Olmec,” U-Kix-Chan, Chan-Bahlum moved to the birth and accession of the founder of his own dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. The text then proceeded through each succeeding king, finally culminating with Chan-Bahlum I, the ancestor from whom Chanappears as the verb when the Vision Serpen-Bahlum, the author of this text, took his name. The Palenque dynasty envisioned by him descended from the original accession of the mother of the gods.
-As it happens, the second reason is much more important than the first. If people didn’t think states were necessary, they would likely wrest power from those seeking to retain it or persuade them to give it up. The robust persistence of the first factor is due to the prevalence of people’s belief in the necessity of the state; and indeed, this belief is why the use of violent means to deal with the authorities’ grip on power is certain to fail.
+Lady Beastie was depicted not only as the first ruler of Palenque. Chan-Bahlum also portrayed her as the first to shed her blood for the people of the community in the cathartic act which opened the path to Xibalba and allowed prosperity to flow into the human world. On the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, Chan-Bahlum recorded that thirty-four years after the birth of GH (her third-born child), Lady Beastie celebrated the end of the second baktun with a “fish-in-hand”[370] glyph (Fig. 6:18) that appears as the verb when the Vision Serpent is materialized through bloodletting. Chan-Bahlum’s decision to record this vision-bringing ritual in the Temple of the Foliated Cross was not accidental. If you remember, the Personified Perforator was the instrument that Pacal, on the inner tablet, passed to Chan-Bahlum, on the outer. When Chan-Bahlum spilled his own blood in the rituals that took place within this pib na, he was activating his own portal and generating the energies these images represented: agricultural abundance for the human community. In Chan-Bah- lum’s version of the genesis story, therefore, the First Mother was not only the first being to become a ruler in this creation; she also taught the people how to offer their blood to nourish life, to maintain the social order, and to converse with their ancestors in the Otherworld. The model for human and kingly behavior was again manifested through the actions of the First Mother rather than the First Father.
-*** IV. Rejecting Anti-state Violence
+[[][Fig. 6:18 The First Mother and the First Vision Rite in This Creation]]
-As long as most people think there should be some ruler, any violent action against the ruler will result in the installation of another ruler.[310] The death of the holder of a particular office represents a vacancy to be filled; it does not eliminate the office, or people’s perception that the office needs to be occupied. When anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley, it didn’t end the presidency, it just meant that Theodore Roosevelt became president. Removing current members of the government doesn’t remove the idea of government. The vacuum would be filled immediately, and no one’s beliefs about the ideas of spontaneous order and social rules, or the relationship between liberty and human flourishing, or the coercive nature of government would likely be changed.
+Chan-Bahlum did not entirely ignore the father of the gods, however. In the Temple of the Cross, he related the story in which the First Father, GT, as a boy of ten, established cosmic order a year and a half after the creation of the present world. The text calls this action “entering or becoming the sky (och chan).” We can see a beautiful rendering of these actions in a scene from an ornamental pot: GI’ has set up the World Tree which lifted the sky up from the primordial sea of creation. Now he crouches below it, ready to shoot his blowgun at the Celestial Bird sitting atop the Tree, imitating the glory of the sun. It was these actions, separating out the elements of the natural world and assigning them their proper roles, that brought chaotic nature into order[371] (Fig. 6:19).
-Besides that, I suspect the use of violence would be immoral under all but the most extreme circumstances. In dystopian fiction, in which the human spirit is crushed by a totalitarian state, heroic protagonists often use violent means that are portrayed as justified.[311] In the sort of scenario they’re confronting, perhaps it would be, but in the actual world we live in, the violence wouldn’t meet the threshold for legitimacy. Most people think the state is justified, and the state is so intertwined in everyday life that it’s hard to argue that every single participant is culpably participatory.
+In the expression of this great cosmic event at Palenque, we learn that this “entering the sky” also resulted in the dedication of a house called “wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (see Note 33). Phis is the name of the structure created by GI’ when he set up the World Tree. It is the dome of heaven and the movement of the constellations as they pivot around the great northern axis of the sky—the pole star. But Wacah-Chan was also the proper name of the pib na in the Temple of the Cross, which, in turn, was named for the central icon on the main tablet—the World free itself. When Chan-Bahlum dedicated his own temples in the Group of the Cross, he replicated the establishment of celestial order brought about by the First Father.
-If you go down to city hall, there’s a clerk in the water department’s office sorting through water meter readings and depositing people’s checks for overuse fees. It’s just not coherent to claim that this person is the moral equivalent of a concentration camp guard. So when, for example,
+Chan-Bahlum made records of the rituals in which he dedicated the Group of the Cross in all three temples, but he featured them especially in the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun. In both instances he created bridges between the mythological events in the left column of the tablets and the dedication rituals in the right. In this way he declared that the essential causality of these rites derived from the actions of the First Mother and Father (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for the paraphrases and arrangements of these texts).[372]
-Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was mistaken to think it was a morally legitimate target. Most of his victims were more like the water department clerk than the death camp guard, and a number of his victims were children in a day care facility. As McVeigh, and Leon Czolgosz before him, learned the hard way, violent action doesn’t change people’s minds the way they perhaps hoped it would. The violence is thus immoral in all but the most extreme cases, and largely ineffective in any event.
+The rituals themselves fell on three distinct days during a four-day span. On the first day (9.12.18.5.16 2 Cib 14 Mol, July 23, 690), Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the moon appeared in a spectacular conjunction with all four planets less than 5° apart in the constellation of Scorpio.[373] Chan- Bahlum and his people apparently envisioned this conjunction as the First Mother (the moon) rejoined by her three children (manifested as the three planets). Seen this way, this extraordinary alignment in the sky was an omen of enormous portent. On the next day (3 Caban 15 Mol), Chan- Bahlum dedicated his temples with exactly the same ritual that the First Father had enacted to establish the Wacah-Chan at the center of the cosmos. Chan-Bahlum’s own house was named Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Na, “Lord Bahlum-Kuk House” (Fig. 6:20), therefore making it the house of the founder of his dynasty.[374] By proclaiming that his new portals to the Otherworld were also those of his founding ancestor, Chan-Bahlum joined the three patrilineages of Palenque’s kingship into a coherent totality. At their completion, the three temples of the Group of the Cross housed the divine sanction for the dynasty as a whole and gave the rationale for its descent through females’as well as males.
-*** V. The Significance of Arguments for Anarchism
+Two days after the house dedication on 5 Cauac 17 Mol,[375] Chan- Bahlum consummated the ritual sequence with a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. The timing of this last bloodletting linked the dedication rites back to Pacal, occurring just three days short of the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of his accession (July 29, 615 to July 26, 690). Chan-Bahlum’s final sacrifice put the finishing touch to the extraordinary document he had created. Having begun these rituals when the First Mother reassembled in the sky with her children, he ended with her action of bloodletting, completing the symmetry he had forged between the creator gods and himself.
-So, the use of violent means directed against rulers doesn’t produce anarchism, and philosophical arguments demonstrating the soundness of anarchism don’t produce anarchism. So, the question stands, what is the point of anarchist argument? I think there are two sorts of answers to this, and while I intend to focus on one of them in the remainder of this chapter, I want to at least mention the other: that philosophical arguments need not have practical points—their aim is truth, and as long as an argument is logically pushing towards truth, it need not have any further practical value. However, I think there is a practical point to the anarchist’s argument, even given the persistence of statist thought amongst most people.
+The last event Chan-Bahlum recorded in the Group of the Cross was the activation of the pib na themselves on 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab, the eighth tropical year anniversary of his own accession (January 10, 684 to January 10, 692). He recorded this ritual on the jambs around the sanctuary doors, on the outer piers of the temples, and on the balustrade panels mounted on either side of the stairs rising up the pyramidal base of each temple. The most public parts of the dynastic festival were the dedication of the stairway panels and the piers. These events could be easily viewed by an audience standing in the court space in the middle of the temple group.
-That point is that anarchism is only possible when people’s ideas about government and authority change. This is why violent means are not only immoral, but certain to be ineffective. Changing minds requires persuasion, but, even if persuasion is unlikely to lead people to embrace anarchism, reiterating good anarchist arguments can be effective in another way: it can help people rethink the nature and justification of authority generally. A philosophical examination of the justification for government power will necessarily include a consideration of the scope of that power. This can have the salutary effect of getting more people to see that the more we rely on coercion to accomplish social goals, the more we erode civil society. The clearer it becomes that the state’s authority is limited, the clearer it should become that state power should be limited. The more thoroughly it is demonstrated that state power tends to be captured by special interests and used for the private benefit of rulers and their cronies, the more evident it will become that the rulers’ rhetoric doesn’t match their actions.
+On each set of balustrades (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for paraphrases), Chan-Bahlum began his text with the birth of the patron god of each temple: GI for the Temple of the Cross, GII for the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and GUI for the Temple of the Sun. On the left side of the stairs, he recorded the time elapsed between the birth of the god and the dedication of the temple. On the right he listed the actors in the dedication rituals and their actions. In this manner, he connected the birth of the god in mythological time to the dedication of the pib na in contemporary time.
-Consider another way to think about this point. Some people have said the state is a necessary evil, grudgingly accepting the idea that coercion is bad, state actors are frequently self-interested, and so on. The anarchist’s response to this position is typically to argue that the state is not, in fact, necessary. But, as is obvious, people resist this conclusion regardless of how cogent the arguments supporting it may be. However, there’s also a good deal of complacency in the way contemporary people view the state—many take it as axiomatic that we need the state, and that it’s natural for the state to perform this or that function, or even that the state helps to create society. Anarchist arguments can help such people think about the parameters of state power. If the state is at best a necessary evil, then we have good reason to limit its power even if anarchism is false; whereas if the state is a positive good, we have far less rationale for limiting its power. The anarchist’s ultimate preference is for others to agree that state coercion is unjustified. When they don’t, however, it is surely preferable for them to think that the state is a necessary evil than to regard it as an unalloyed good. So, even failing to persuade others of the truth of anarchism, the anarchist is nevertheless working towards creating a freer world by persuading others to see the state’s downside.
+Chan-Bahlum also used the four outer piers of each temple to record the dedication ceremonies. Here, once again, he depicted himself engaged in ritual. These more public displays of his political strategy were rendered in plaster relief, like the sculptures he had placed on the piers on the Temple of the Inscriptions. The inscription recording the date of the dedication festival and its events occupied the two outer piers, while the two inner ones illustrated the action. Unfortunately, only the two piers of the Temple of the Sun have survived into the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, given the temple’s focus on warfare, Chan-Bahlum was portrayed in the costume of a warrior. The particular regalia he chose is that which we have already seen at Tikal, Naranjo, and Dos Pilas. The king is shown holding a square, flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it,[376] declaring that he engaged in Tlaloc warfare. No doubt the object of his battles included those captives whose blood would sanctify the pib na as the gods came to reside in them.[377]
-Anarchist theory can therefore be seen as both aspirational and incremental. To say “We will never reach anarchism, so stop wasting your breath!” is to miss the point. Reframing the case for coercive authority structures as warranting skepticism and scrutiny rather than acquiescence and complacency serves a very real purpose even if it’s true that, at least for now, most people are likely to reject anarchism.
+Like the balustrades, the doorjambs inside the sanctuaries are all glyphic,[378] but they record no information aside from the pib na dedications. All three sets of inscriptions describe the action in the same manner.
-A person could ultimately reject anarchism while still learning something from the anarchist’s critique of the state. For example, rather than automatically assuming that state actors are exclusively or primarily motivated by concern for the common good, a person might come to recognize ways in which rulers’ actions preserve their own power and wealth. Coming to see factors like this more clearly has the potential to change someone’s default reaction from “This state activity must be good, albeit in some way I don’t see” to “I wonder if there is a non-coercive way to accomplish the worthwhile goal this activity is supposed to serve and, if there’s not, whether this really is a desirable goal.” A person might come to understand that regulations such as occupational licensure are rhetorically defended as serving the common good but they actually represent the use of the state’s coercive power to benefit a small group at the expense of the group’s competitors and the general public. A person might come to see ways in which state control of dispute resolution incentivizes mass incarceration. The anarchist should welcome such changes in public perception of state power even if the majority of people still do not accept anarchism.
+[[][The Mah Kina ???? Cab<br><sub>from the Tablet of the Sun</sub>]]
-It is thus worthwhile, not pointless, to continue to try to impress upon people the moral deficiencies of coercive authority structures. To make the case against the state is to undermine the idea that coercion is necessary for social order, or that it is beneficial to human society. It is to point the way towards the continual need to scale back the scope of state power. It is to affirm the priority of liberty and its necessary connection to human flourishing, and to keep us mindful of the ways in which the state, and our often unthinking obedience to it, hinders that flourishing.
+The verb <verbatim>‘to</verbatim> house” is followed by the proper name of each sanctuary, followed by the glyph u pib nail, “his underground house.” Each pib na was named for the central image on its inner tablet[379] (Fig. 6:21): Wacah Chan for the World Tree on the Tablet of the Cross, Na Te Kan for the maize tree on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, and Mah Kina ????-Cab for the shield stack on the Tablet of the Sun.
+Chan-Bahlum’s final message to his people was that the performers of the “house” events were none other the gods of the Palenque Triad themselves. On the doorjambs he referred to these deities as “the cher- ished-ones[380] of Chan-Bahlum,” while on the balustrades he called them the “divinities of Chan-Bahlum.” For this event, Chan-Bahlum depicted himself in the guise of a Tlaloc warrior; but in this instance the costume symbolized more than just warfare. Dressed thus, Chan-Bahlum also became the “nurturer” of the gods[381] through his role as the provider of their sustenance—the blood of sacrifice. He offered them both the blood of captives taken in battle and his own blood.
-[308] I’d like to think I have in fact done this: see my Deleting the State: An Argument About Government (Chicago, IL: Open Court 2008). But assume I have not: there are many others, notably Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order (New York, NY: CUP 2013); Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority (New York, NY: Palgrave 2013); Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy (New York, NY: Continuum 2012); John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free County?, ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor Machan (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008) 111—32.
+If he himself was the principal actor, however, why did Chan-Bahlum tell us that the actors were the gods? Perhaps we are meant to understand that they acted in the divine person of the king. Although we do not have the precise phonetic reading of the verb, we suggest that each of the Triad gods came into his pib na on this day and brought the temples of the Group of the Cross alive with the power of the Otherworld. They were witnesses, like the nobility on the plaza below, to the awesome might of the Palenque king.
-[309] Indeed, not just anarchists but minimal-state libertarians are also evidence of this, as none of them was raised in a libertarian society. They would have to have embraced their current positions in virtue of some encounters with philosophical or economic argumentation.
+In his attempt to disengage his dynastic kingship from the prerogatives of the patrilineal clans, Chan-Bahlum brought to bear every major principle in the religion that bound the Maya states into a coherent cultural totality. As the Jaguar Sun and the Tlaloc warrior, he protected the realm from enemies. In war he captured foreign kings and nobles to offer as sacrificial instruments for the glory of Palenque. He recalled the First Father, GT, who raised the sky and established the ancestral home of creation within which his people could dwell at peace on their verdant mountainside. He also recalled the namesake of the First Father, GI, who like his father was an avatar of Venus. Just as the First Mother had shed her blood, causing maize—the raw material of humanity—to sprout from the waters of the Otherworld, so also did Chan-Bahlum shed his blood to nurture and “give birth to” the gods. The metaphor of kingship in both its human and divine dimension stretched from the contemplation of genesis to the mundane lives of farmers who plucked dried ears of maize from the bent stalks of their milpas to grind the kernels into the stuff of life.
-[310] In the 2016—19 ABC television series Designated Survivor, terrorists kill all of the officers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches except three. The Constitution makes the title protagonist the new President, and he proceeds to appoint all new cabinet members and supervise the repopulation of Congress. Everyone’s first thought is not “Yay, anarchy!” It’s “Wow, with all the officeholders now murdered, we need to refill the vacant offices right away!” Similar events ensue in Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor (New York, NY: Putnam 1995).
+The three gods of the Triad were known and exalted by all lowland Maya ahauob, but Chan-Bahlum and Pacal evoked them in very special ways. They gave them birth in temples which celebrated both the creation of the cosmos and the founding of the dynasty by their anchoring ancestor, Bahlum-K.uk. Called forth into this world through the unique courage and charisma of the reigning king, these three gods, like the three historical lineages leading up to Chan-Bahlum, were manifested for all to witness. All the events of the past, both human and mythological, encircled Chan-Bahlum: The dynasty existed in the person of the king.
-[311] See, for example, Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 30<sup>th</sup> anniv. ed. (New York, NY: Vertigo- DC 2018).
+Even the universe conspired to affirm Chan-Bahlum’s assertions of divine involvement. On the day he began the rites to sanctify the buildings housing his version of history. Lady Beastie and her offspring reassembled as a group in the sky on the open south side of the Group of the Cross.
-<br>
+A year and a half later, on the day he celebrated his eighth solar year in office, the three gods of the Triad housed themselves. By this action they brought the sanctuaries inside the three temples, the pib na, alive with their power. So powerful and eloquent was Chan-Bahlum’s statement of the origins of his dynasty and the preordained nature of its descent pattern, that no subsequent king ever had to restate any proofs. When later kings had problems with descent, they simply evoked Chan-Bahlum’s explanation of the workings of divinity to justify their own right to the throne.[382]
-* Part II: Figures and Traditions
+Pacal’s and Chan-Bahlum’s vision of the Maya world has crossed the centuries to speak to us once again in the twentieth century. Their accomplishments were truly extraordinary. Pacal’s tomb with its access stairway and innovative structural engineering is so far a unique achievement in the New World. The imagery of his sarcophagus lid is famous around the globe, and the life-sized plaster portrait of this king found under the sarcophagus has become an emblem of modern Mexico (Fig. 6:22a).
-** 6. Anarchism Against Anarchy the Classical Roots of Anarchism
+Chan-Bahlum (Fig. 6:22b), in his own way, exceeded even the accomplishment of his father by creating the most detailed exposition of Maya kingship to survive into modern times. His tablets have captured the Western imagination since they were first popularized in 1841 by Stephens and Catherwood in their Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Chan-Bahlum’s masterful performance is the clearest and most eloquent voice to speak to us of both the ancient history of kings and the religion that supported their power.
-*Stephen R. L. Clark*
+Both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum had personal agendas as they worked out the political and religious resolution to their problems of dynasty. Their success, however, was meaningful within a larger context than just their personal pride and glory. During the century of their combined lives (A.D. 603 to 702), Palenque became a major power in the west, extending its boundaries as far as Tortuguero in the west and Miraflores in the east. Under their inspired leadership, Palenque took its place in the overall political geography of the Maya world. In the end, however, Palenque’s definition of dynasty as a principle transcending lineage did not provide salvation from the catastrophe of the collapse of Maya civilization. The descendants of Pacal, “he of the pyramid,” followed their brethren into that final chaos when the old institution of kingship failed and the lowland Maya returned to the farming lives of their ancestors.
-*** I. Making a Consensual Community
+. Bird-Jaguar and the Cahalob
-There may somewhere in the multiverse be intelligent creatures who must cope by themselves, like baby turtles, from the moment that they hatch: C. J. Cherryh has perhaps come close to imagining such unashamedly egoistic creatures, “kif,” in her Chanur sequence.[312] How precisely such creatures would come to treat their conspecifics, how they would learn to communicate or bargain with them for whatever individual advantage, is a matter, so far, for baffled speculation. No readers of this volume are likely to be so alien. We were all born to human parents, taught a mother tongue, and imbued with whatever unexamined attitudes our parents or carers—and their companions—shared. Even in adulthood we are dependent animals, requiring the company and services of uncounted others. As Aristotle observed,
+In the distant past, a gleaming white city[383] once graced the precipitous hills lining the western shore of a huge horseshoe bend of the great river known today as the Usumacinta (Fig. 7:1). One of the early visitors to the ruins of that once magnificent city, Teobert Maier,[384] named it Yaxchilan. Since Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s pioneering study of its inscriptions, this kingdom has been central to the recovery of historic information about the Maya.[385]
-<quote>
+In Yaxchilan’s heyday, visitors arriving by canoe saw buildings clustered along the narrow curving shore which contained and defined the natural riverside entrance into this rich and powerful community. The city ascended in rows of broad, massive terraces built against the face of the forest-shrouded hills that stood as an impassive natural citadel alongside the mighty river. From the temples (Fig. 7:2a) built upon the summits of the tallest bluffs, the lords of Yaxchilan commanded the sweeping panorama of the rich green, low-lying forest which extended, on the far side of the river, all the way to the hazy horizon in the northeast. The light of sunrise on the summer solstice[386] would spill over that horizon to shine through the dark thresholds of the royal sanctuaries whose presence declared the authority of the Yaxchilan ahau over all those who lived below.
-the man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the city, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.
-<right>
+Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,”[387] or more delicately put, “Progenitor-Jaguar,” on August 2, A.D. 320, founded the dynasty that ruled this kingdom throughout its recorded history. From that day on, until Yaxchi- lan was abandoned five-hundred years later, the descent of the line was unbroken.[388] Of Yat-Balam’s many descendants, the most famous were Bi Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar, a father and son who collectively ruled the kingdom for over ninety years, from A.D. 681 until around A.D. 771. These two rulers stamped their vision of history upon the city with such power and eloquence that they were the first of the ancient Maya kings to have their names spoken again in our time.[389] Yet in spite of the glory of their reigns and their long-lasting effect upon history, they faced problems of descent from the father to the son. Bird-Jaguar’s claim to the throne was vigorously disputed by powerful noble clans who were allied with other members of the royal family. Even after Bird-Jaguar overcame his adversaries and became king, many of the public buildings he commissioned were erected to retrospectively defend his own actions and prepare a secure ascent to the throne for his heir. In this chapter, we will focus on his problems and the political strategies and alliances that finally enabled him to fulfill his ambition to rule that ancient kingdom.
-(Aristotle Politics 1.1253a30: 1995, p.11)
-</right>
-</quote>
-Even the imagined Cyclopes, “clanless and lawless and hearthless” (1.1253a5, citing Homer Odyssey 9.114—5), at least have neighbours who may come running to understand their cries for help. Even they must have households of some sort, in which to beget and bear and rear their offspring. Even they must find their mates from somewhere more or less compatible. “Each of them,” said Homer, “rules over his children and wives” (Politics 1.1252b20). Such simple households are perhaps replicated amongst the poor even of larger unions: “the poor man, not having slaves, is compelled to use his wife and children as attendants” (Politics 6.1322b40: 1995, p.250). Unsurprisingly, being born as wholly dependent creatures, we depend upon our parents or carers, and find ourselves, long before we have any political opinions or rational arguments, bound by affection (mostly) and respect for these larger figures.
+The history of Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors in the Early Classic period does not survive in great detail. Most of the monuments from those times were either buried or destroyed as each new king shaped the city to his own purposes. However, thanks to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of reusing ancestral texts in his own buildings (Temples 12 and 22), we do have records of the first through the tenth successors of Yaxchilan. One of these venerable texts, a badly eroded hieroglyphic stairway, provides the dates of several early accessions, as well as accounts of the visits of lords from other kingdoms. These brief and sketchy early inscriptions outline the first three hundred years of Yaxchilan’s history. It was a time in which its dynasty prospered and held an important place in the overall political landscape of the Maya.[390]
-<quote>
+The foreign visitors mentioned above were ahauob sent by their high kings from as far away as Bonampak, Piedras Negras, and Tikal to participate in Yaxchilan festivals. Reciprocal visits were made as well. Knot-eye-Jaguar, the ninth king of Yaxchilan, paid a state visit to Piedras Negras in the year 519. The relationship between these two kingdoms was apparently a long-lasting one, for another Yaxchilan ahau, presumably Bird- Jaguar, participated in the celebration of the first katun anniversary of the reign of Piedras Negras Ruler 4 in 749, 230 years later. These state visits affirm the ancient and enduring value that the kings of Yaxchilan placed upon the participation of high nobility in the rituals and festivals of their city. Public performances under the aegis of the high king, by both foreign and local lords, affirmed the power of the king and demonstrated public support for his decisions. We shall see shortly how the manipulation of such dramatis personae on monuments was the vital key to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.
-The male parent is in a position of authority both in virtue of the affection to which he is entitled and by right of his seniority [he is typically several years older than his wife]; and his position is thus in the nature of royal authority.
-<right>
+Our story opens around the year 647[391] with the birth of a child to the Lady Pacal, favored wife of the king, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar,[392] and scion of a powerful family allied to the king through marriage. The child, whom the proud parents named Shield-Jaguar, was to have a glorious career at Yaxchilan, living for at least ninety-two years and ruling as high king for over six decades. His mark on the city was long-lasting and profound, for later kings left many of his buildings untouched. Among his greatest works were the vast number of tree-stones he set among the plazas and in front of his temples on the summits of his sacred mountains. Shield- Jaguar inherited a city already built by his predecessors, but the accomplishments of his long lifetime exceeded their work by such a factor that, while much of his work is still preserved, most of theirs is forgotten, buried under his own construction and that of his son, Bird-Jaguar.
-(Politics 2.1259b10: 1995, p.33)
-</right>
-</quote>
-Of course, we also grow up, and grow bigger. Adolescent rebellion against parental authority is likely universal in our species (and in many other mammalian kinds): or rather, rebellion against particular authorities in the hope of ourselves becoming such authorities. The impossible question in Greek rhetoric, it is of some interest to note, was “Have you stopped beating your father yet?” (Diogenes Laertius Lives 2.135; see also Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 7.1149b8). The rebel, to modify a remark of Chesterton, does not disrespect authority—he merely wishes to have such authority for himself, so as to respect it more perfectly.[313] As Chesterton concluded, the really dangerous criminal is the modern political philosopher, who genuinely does disrespect the whole notion of “authority” (a point to which I shall return).
+Most of Shield-Jaguar’s early life is lost to us. What little biographical data we do have tells us that when he was around eleven, one of his siblings participated in a war led by Pacal, the king of Palenque we met in the last chapter.[393] This event must have lent prestige to the royal family of Yaxchilan, but their public monuments say nothing about it. We only know of this event because it was preserved on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C at Palenque. The fact that Pacal described his Yaxchilan cohort as the “sibling” of the eleven-year-old Shield-Jaguar tells us that, even at that early date, Shield-Jaguar had probably been named as heir. Otherwise, Pacal would have chosen to emphasize the captive’s status merely as the son of a male of the royal family.[394]
-Households may turn into clans, retaining the parental hierarchies into which we are born and reared, or else they may find common cause with other households near at hand, partly to demarcate the land that counts as “theirs” and partly to exchange their surplus goods and special crafts. Plato’s account of such a development is apostrophized as merely a “city of pigs” by Glaucon (Plato Republic 2.372d), but perhaps it is not even, really, a “city” or “township” (polis) at all, but—exactly—a collection of households with no particular common interest in the character and goals of its human agents. “A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time” (Politics 5.1303a25[314]), though that is the model that social contract theorists have often assumed—as if we were indeed the solitary super-turtles (so to speak) that I imagined earlier!
+Later in his life, the demonstration of the young heir’s prowess as a military leader took on a special political importance—enough so that the lords of Yaxchilan required that Shield-Jaguar take a high-ranked captive before he could become king. As prelude to his accession, Shield-Jaguar went into battle and captured Ah-Ahaual, an important noble from a B kingdom whose ruins we have not yet found, but which was highly important in the Maya world of that time.[395] A little over a year later, on October 23, 681, at the approximate age of thirty-four, Shield-Jaguar became high king of Yaxchilan.
-<quote>
+Strangely enough, the only picture of Shield-Jaguar’s accession rite to have survived shows not the new king but his principal wife, Lady Xoc, in rapt communion with Yat-Balam, the founding ancestor of the Yaxchi-lan dynasty. Lady Xoc achieved a central place in the drama of Yaxchilan’s history in this and in two other bloodletting rituals she enacted with, or for, her sovereign liege.[396] Her kinship ties with two powerful lineages of the kingdom made her political support so important to Shield-Jaguar that he authorized her to commission and dedicate the magnificent Temple 23. On the lintels of that building were recorded the three rituals that comprised the apical actions of her life.
-Any city (polis) which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness. Otherwise, a political association sinks into a mere alliance, which only differs in space [i.e. in the contiguity of its members] from other forms of alliance where the members live at a distance from one another.
-<right>
+Thus, with the approval and probably at the instigation of her husband, Lady Xoc was one of the few women in Maya history to wield the prerogatives usually reserved for the high king. Unlike Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque, however, Lady Xoc never ruled the kingdom in her own right. The hidden hand of her husband, Shield-Jaguar, underlies the political intentions of the extraordinary Temple 23. His influence can be seen in both the substance of its narrative scenes and in the texts[397] carved on the lintels that spanned the outer doorways. Constructed in the center of the city’s first great terrace, and in a position to dominate the plazas that extended along the riverfront, this temple is one of the greatest artistic monuments ever created by the Maya.
-(Aristotle Politics 1.1280b6[315])
-</right>
-</quote>
-One likely form of authority for a clan or for some other slightly larger social form will indeed be the royal: “just as household government is kingship over a family, so conversely this type of kingship may be regarded as household government exercised over a city, or a tribe, or a collection of tribes” (Politics 3.1285b30[316]). One advantage, at least for the stability of the system, of a merely dynastic royalty is that it does not depend on the merit of the king that he be king, though his authority may indeed be reduced, and his inheritance rendered illegitimate, if he fails too openly in his quasi-parental duties. But maybe the very claim to be “royal,” and to require the sort of affection, respect and proper fear that children may feel for their elders, creates the notion of merit: how is it that this one person, or this one line of descent, “deserves” the office?
+The carved lintels above the doorways of Temple 23 combine to present a carefully orchestrated political message critical to Shield-Jaguar’s ambition and to the future he hoped to create. Made of wide slabs mounted atop the doorjambs, these lintels displayed two carved surfaces. The first, facing outward toward the public, was composed of pure text. The second was a series of narrative scenes hidden away on the undersides of the lintels, facing downward toward the floor (Fig. 7:2b). A general viewer approaching the building could read only the text above the doorways, which recorded the dedication rituals for various parts of the temple. This text stated that the house sculpture (probably the stucco sculpture on the entablature and roof comb) had been dedicated on August 5, 723, and the temple itself on June 26, 726.[398] The all-important narrative scenes could be seen only by those privileged to stand in the low doorways and look up at the undersides of the lintels.
-<quote>
+It is here, on the undersides of the lintels, that we see Lady Xoc enacting the three bloodletting rituals that are today the basis of her fame (Fig. 7:3). The sculptors who created these great lintels combined the sequence of events into a brilliant narrative device. If we look at the lintels from one perspective, we see that each portrays a different linear point in the ritual of bloodletting. Over the left doorway we see Lady Xoc perforating her tongue; over the center portal we see the materialization of the Vision Serpent; over the right we see her dressing her liege lord for battle. If we shift our perspective, however, we see that Shield-Jaguar intended these scenes to be interpreted on many different levels. He used the texts and the detail of the clothing the protagonists wore to tell us that this same bloodletting ritual took place on at least three different occasions:[399] during his accession to the kingship, at the birth of his son when he was sixty-one, and at the dedication of the temple itself.
-We may imagine one set of circumstances in which it would be obviously better that the one group should once and for all be rulers and one group should be ruled. This would be if there were one class in the city surpassing all others as much as gods and heroes are supposed to surpass mankind—a class so outstanding, physically as well as mentally, that the superiority of the rulers was indisputably clear to those over whom they ruled.
-<right>
+Over the central door, Lady Xoc is depicted with a Vision Serpent rearing over her head as she calls forth the founder of the lineage, Yat-Balam, to witness the accession of his descendent Shield-Jaguar in 681[400] (Fig. 7:3a). This critical event in the lives of both the principal players was appropriately located on the center lintel, at the heart of the drama. Shield-Jaguar himself is not portrayed here, although his name does appear in the text after the “fish-in-hand” verbal phrase. The sole protagonist is the woman, who by her action as bloodletter materializes the founder of the dynasty to sanction the transformation of his descendant into the king. Since we know of no other pictorial representation of Shield-Jaguar’s accession,[401] we may speculate that he considered his wife’s bloodletting the most important single action in this political transformation.
-(Politics 7.1332b20[317])
-</right>
-</quote>
-But once it becomes clear, or widely suspected, that the king and his lineage are not so surpassingly great, his subjects may prefer some more egalitarian system—leaving aside the moments when they replace the king with a sometime-popular despot (one probably unconstrained by family feeling or tradition). After all, even kings—especially kings—depend on others to advise and act for them (Politics 3.1287b30); why then might not the king’s “friends” and servants do the job without him? Why might they not in their turn solicit support and agents from the common folk? A similar moral may issue from Plato’s Republic: if the only people we could trust to rule us with intelligence and integrity must be philosopher-kings, and we cannot find such anywhere, perhaps we should be content instead with the “least worst” constitution, in which “every individual can make for himself the kind of life which suits him” (Republic 8.557b).
+Over the left door, Lady Xoc kneels before Shield-Jaguar and pulls a thorn-laden rope through her mutilated tongue in the action that will materialize the Vision Serpent. Shield-Jaguar stands before her holding a torch, perhaps because the ritual takes place inside a temple or at night. Although this lintel depicts the first stage in the type of bloodletting ritual shown over the central door, this particular event took place almost twenty-eight years later.[402]
-Two further problems arise for royalty which may be answered through a more egalitarian solution. The first is simply that—like parental authority in the household—it may easily become despotic: obedience will then be enforced by threats of violence, as though subjects were no more than slaves. Only those of a “slavish” disposition—in Aristotle’s view, barbarians—could put up with this for long: “these barbarian peoples are more servile in character than Greeks (as the peoples of Asia are more servile than those of Europe); and they therefore tolerate despotic rule without any complaint” (Politics 3.1285a20; see also 7.1327b25[318]). The better route is a form of community spirit that allows citizens to “live as they like,” each taking an equal share in any collective decision-making:
+The occasion for this particular act of sacrifice was an alignment between Jupiter and Saturn. On this day those planets were frozen at their stationary points less than 2° apart, very near the constellation of Gemini. This was the same type of planetary alignment we saw celebrated at Palenque when Chan-Bahlum dedicated the Group of the Cross, even though the conjunction at Yaxchilan was perhaps less spectacular, since it involved two planets rather than four. Significantly, this hierophany (“sacred event”) took place only sixty-two days after a son was born to Shield-Jaguar. The birth of this child on August 24, 709, and the bloodletting event that followed it on October 28, were special events in Shield- Jaguar’s reign. This bloodletting would later become the pivot of his son’s claim to Yaxchilan’s throne.
-<quote>
+Over the right door (Fig. 7:3b), the sculptors mounted the final scene. Lady Xoc, her mouth seeping blood from the ritual she has just performed, helps her husband dress for battle. He already wears his cotton armor and grasps his flint knife in his right hand, but she still holds his flexible shield and the jaguar helmet he will don. Here Shield-Jaguar is preparing to go after captives to be used in the dedication rites that took place either on February 12, 724, or on June 26, 726.
-Such a life, they argue, is the function of the free man, just as the function of slaves is not to live as they like. This is the second defining feature of democracy [the first being that all citizens should have equal shares in the making of collective decisions]. It results in the view that ideally one should not be ruled by any one, or, at least, that one should [rule and] be ruled in turns.
-<right>
+The depiction of a woman as the principal actor in ritual is unprecedented at Yaxchilan and almost unknown in Maya monumental art[403] at any site. Lady Xoc’s importance is further emphasized by the manner in which Bird-Jaguar centers his own strategy of legitimacy around this building. The three events portrayed—the accession of the king, the bloodletting on the Jupiter-Saturn hierophany, and the dedication of the building itself, were all important events; but the bloodletting on the hierophany was the locus of the political message Shield-Jaguar intended to communicate. Perhaps the planetary conjunction alone would have been enough reason for such a bloodletting to take place. We suspect, however, that more complex motivations were involved. Later, when Bird-Jaguar commissioned monument after monument to explain who he was and, more importantly, who his mother was, he focused on this event as the key to his kingdom.
-(Politics 6.1317b10[319])
-</right>
-</quote>
-The second problem, by Aristotle’s account, is that a city, a polis, is not after all just the same as a household, or even as a clan, and is not best served by too strict a unity. This is Aristotle’s chief complaint against Plato’s Republic (Politics 2.1261a20), that a polis is composed of distinct households and individuals of many kinds and functions. Citizens must have property of their very own, even if there is also some shared property. But how then shall the polis be at peace, if not by affectionate agreement? A merely contractual theory of state-formation, as though some chance collection of lawless persons had come together to swear a pact of mutual defence and forbearance, wholly neglects the need for a common custom underlying all explicit laws and regulations, and presents us with the obvious problem that we cannot now be reasonably bound by any such contracts made by our brigand ancestors (especially if there is no record of any such sensible compact)! It is better to accept that we are all born into communities with their own customs and bonds of affection and respect, and that the question before us is rather how we would prefer to manage our social relations, what simple changes we might wish to make, or realize we have already made. We no more need to make up all the customs by which we live than we need to make up our languages. Fortunately so: “When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.”[320]
+There are points of interest to make about this bloodletting ritual and the birth that preceded it. Lady Xoc, patroness of this building and the giver of blood, was at least middle-aged at the time of this birth.[404] She had been shown as an adult at Shield-Jaguar’s accession, twenty-eight years earlier, and she may well have been beyond her childbearing years at the time of the later bloodletting. Certainly, other inscriptions make it clear that the child in question was born to Lady Eveningstar, another of Shield-Jaguar’s wives. Why, then, is Lady Xoc celebrating a celestial event E linked to the royal heir born to another woman?
-How far do we need any overt laws and regulations additional to common custom? After all,
+Some startling information about Lady Xoc’s role in Shield-Jaguar’s political machinations is revealed on a lintel mounted over the door in the east end of Structure 23. On its underside, this all-glyphic lintel (Lintel 23) records Shield-Jaguar’s twenty-fifth year anniversary as ruler and also Lady Xoc’s dedication of this extraordinary temple. On the edge of this obscure lintel, facing outward toward the viewer, we find some critical and unexpected information about Lady Xoc. The text tells us that this particular passageway[405] into the temple was dedicated by Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s sister—his aunt, in other words. The title sequence in this aunt’s name is relevatory, for it delineates an up-to-now unknown genealogical relationship between Lady Xoc and the king (Fig. 7:4).[406] We learn here that Lady Xoc was the daughter of Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s father’s sister. In plain English, she was the maternal first cousin of his mother, and his own maternal first cousin once removed.
-<quote>
+What this information tells us is that Lady Xoc was distantly related to the patriline of Shield-Jaguar’s mother, but he married her not because of her mother’s relatives but because her father was a member of a powerful noble lineage. How do we know that her father’s line was important, when it is not even mentioned in the inscriptions? We can deduce its importance from the fact that it was worthy to take a wife from the same family that provided the woman who was wife to the king 6-Tun-Bird- Jaguar and mother to the heir, Shield-Jaguar. In other words, anyone powerful enough to marry a woman from the same family that provided the queen-mother to the royal house must also be of extraordinarily high-rank. The importance of the line of Lady Xoc’s father is further confirmed by the fact that it was eligible to provide a wife to the royal house in the next generation. Thus, it was a lineage important enough to take a wife from the highest levels in the kingdom and in its own right to be in a wife-giving alliance with the royal house. In fact, it is precisely this marriage alliance with Lady Xoc’s father that led Shield-Jaguar to take her as his wife in the first place.
-there is no advantage in the best of laws, even when they are sanctioned by general civic consent, if the citizens themselves have not been attuned, by the force of habit and the influence of teaching, to the right constitutional temper—which will be the temper of democracy where the laws are democratic, and where they are oligarchical will be that of oligarchy.
-<right>
+What we find amazing here is that Lady Xoc’s patriline is utterly absent from the public record. On Lintel 23, Lady Xoc’s relationship to that patriline is suppressed in favor of her kinship to her mother’s people. As we have shown above, her mother’s clan was already allied to the royal house of Yaxchilan, for Shield-Jaguar’s mother was a member of that patriline. In the best of worlds, Shield-Jaguar could have safely ignored such a well-attested and secure alliance in the public record. What, then, led Shield-Jaguar to commission the extraordinary Temple 23 with its homage to Lady Xoc and her mother’s clan? Why did he deliberately eliminate her father’s clan from public history by redefining her importance in terms of people who were already his allies?
-(Politics 5.1310a18)
-</right>
-</quote>
-And if the citizens are indeed thus attuned, what need is there for further legislation, or any “government” beyond the self-regulation of the whole civic community? Aristotle indeed acknowledges that
+We suspect that the answer to this question lies in a new marriage that Shield-Jaguar contracted late in his life. His new wife, Lady Eveningstar, who bore him a son when he was sixty-one, was apparently a foreigner of high rank. On Stela 10, her son, Bird-Jaguar, recorded her name in his own parentage statement, remarking that she was a “Lady Ahau of Calakmul” (Fig. 7:4).[407] Yet Shield-Jaguar’s treatment of his new wife and the powerful alliance she represented was not what we might expect. Despite the great power and prestige of Calakmul, Shield-Jaguar never once mentioned Lady Eveningstar on his own monuments. Instead, the principal concern of his late monuments was to secure support for Bird- Jaguar, the child she gave him.
-<quote>
+To this end, he commissioned Temple 23 when his son was thirteen years old.[408] He honored Lady Xoc, who represented local alliances with two important lineages, as the major actor of the critical events in his reign. And, in the same series of lintels, he emphasized her relationship to her mother’s patriline.[409] But what of her father’s people, not to mention the royal house of Calakmul?
-heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction—at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time. Most of the cities which have admitted others as settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction.
-<right>
+To elect a child of Lady Xoc to succeed him would have brought Shield-Jaguar strategic alliance with her father’s people, a local lineage of extraordinary importance. Alternatively, to designate Lady Eveningstar’s child as the heir would have sealed a blood bond with one of the largest and most aggressive kingdoms of the Peten, but it was also an alliance with a foreign power.[410] The decision for Shield-Jaguar was a difficult one: increased prospects for peace and stability within his kingdom versus an elevated position in the grand configuration of alliance and struggle embracing all of the great kingdoms of the Maya.
-(Politics 5.1303a25[321])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Such factions may lead to war, and be suppressed by violence—so making the members of the subject (that is, the subjugated) population, effectively, into slaves. This is certainly not to advise the outlawing of all immigration, but to acknowledge that native-born and immigrants will need time, and patience, to adjust.
+Temple 23 was his effort to forge a grand compromise: to honor Lady Xoc and the principle of internal alliance while building support for the child of the foreign alliance. He chose the greatest artists of his kingdom to carve what are even today recognized as great masterpieces of Maya art. In the elegant reliefs he depicted his senior wife carrying out the most sacred and intimate act of lineage fealty, the calling forth of the royal founding ancestor. When she gave her blood for his new heir, she did so in the most horrific ritual of tongue mutilation known from Maya history. No other representation of this ritual shows the use of a thorn-lined rope in the wound. Her act was one of extraordinary piety and prestige—and an act of audacity by the king, for he simultaneously consigned the mother of the heir, scion of Calakmul, to public obscurity. For Shield-Jaguar, this was a masterful three-point balancing act. By honoring Lady Xoc, he was also honoring that patriline. He used texts upon the lintels of the temple to publicly emphasize her relationship to his mother’s family and thus secure that alliance. Lastly, he satisfied his foreign alliance by choosing the child of that marriage as the heir.
-But even if we don’t have to make up the customs and communities in which we live, may there not be some profit in imagining how they might, acceptably, be arranged (as political theorists from Democritus to Rawls have done)? What would we reasonably do to rescue ourselves from the imagined “war of each against all”? There is a certain ambiguity in what seems to have been a standard ancient opinion, turning on the imagined “lawlessness” of the days before civil community:
+This strategy of compromise worked, at least while he was still alive. Perhaps Shield-Jaguar’s extraordinary age was one of the contributing factors in this drama. For him to have lived long enough to marry again and to sire a child in that marriage may have surprised the lineages allied to him by previous marriages. Furthermore, any children born in his youth would have been in their middle years by the time of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. By the time of Shield-Jaguar’s death in his mid-nineties, many of his children may well have been dead or in advanced age themselves. Because of this factor, Bird-Jaguar’s rivals would have had as legitimate a claim on the throne as he; it is likely that he faced the sons and grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar. We cannot, of course, prove that these rivals existed, for they did not secure the privilege of erecting monuments to tel! their own stories. This is one of those situations in which we have only the winner’s version of history. Nevertheless, we know that some set of circumstances kept the throne empty for ten long years, when a legitimate heir of sufficient age and proven competence was available. We surmise that Bird-Jaguar needed those ten years to defeat his would-be rivals. During this long interregnum no other accessions appear in the record. There was no official king, although there may have been a de facto ruler.
-<quote>
+There could, of course, be many reasons for such a long delay between reigns. Bird-Jaguar’s own program of sculpture after he became king, however, clearly indicates what he felt were his greatest problems. The first was public recognition of his mother’s status and her equality with Lady Xoc.[411] The second was his need to forge alliances among the noble cahal families of Yaxchilan to support his claim to the throne and force the accession ritual. He built temple after temple with lintel upon lintel both to exalt the status of his mother and to depict his public performance with those powerful cahalob. Like his father, he married a woman in the lineage of his most important allies and traded a piece of history for their loyalty.
-For the laws are what bind cities together, and as the soul perishes when the body has perished, so the cities are destroyed when the laws are abolished. Hence, the theologian Orpheus hints at their necessity when he says ‘There was a time when every man liv’d by devouring his fellow Cannibal-wise, and the stronger man did feast on the weaker ... (for when no law was in control each man maintained his right by force of hand, even as it is permitted to fishes and beasts of the wild and the winged ravens and vultures, each to devour the other, for justice exists not among them), until God in his pity for their misery sent to them law-bearing goddesses, and men admired these for the way they stopped the lawless cannibalism more than for the way they civilized life by means of the fruits of the earth.’ Hence, too, the shrewd Persians have a law that on the death of their king they must practise lawlessness for the next five days, not in order to be in a state of misery but in order to learn by experience how great an evil lawlessness is, inflicting, as it does, murders and rapine and things which are, if possible, worse, so that they may become more trusty guardians of their kings.
-(Sextus, Against the Professors 2.31—3;[322] see also Hesiod, Works and Days 274—9)
+The fathering of an heir at the age of sixty-one was not the final accomplishment of Shield-Jaguar’s life. He remained a vigorous leader, both politically and in the realm of war, for many more years. Work on Temple 23 began around 723, when he was seventy-two years old. In his eighties, he still led his warriors into battle and celebrated a series of B victories in Temple 44, high atop one of the mountains of Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:1). Even at eighty-four, Shield-Jaguar went to battle and took a captive, but by then he must have been feeling his mortality. He began a series of rituals soon after his last battle to demonstrate forcefully his support of Bird-Jaguar as his heir-apparent—at least according to the story Bird- Jaguar gives us. In light of the political statement that Shield-Jaguar built into Lady Xoc’s Temple 23 at the height of his power, there is reason to believe that at least the essence of Bird-Jaguar’s account of events leading up to his reign is true.
-</quote>
-Are we to suppose that we need kings (that is to say, bullies) or rather a sense of justice, fair play, shame (without which kings and their subjects will certainly degenerate)? Or is this “Orphic” imagining, this thought experiment, merely a projection back into pre-history of the actual Mediterranean experience, in which cities were all, implicitly, at war with each other (Plato Laws 1.626a)? What might really bring us a peace that is more than a word? Is anarchy really “lawless”?
+The series of events preceding Shield-Jaguar’s death and Bird-Jaguar’s ascent to the throne began on June 27, 736. On that day Shield- Jaguar, at the age of eighty-eight, conducted a flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:5a and b), a celebration usually occurring shortly after a summer solstice. We do not know the exact nature of this ritual, but pictures of it show rulers and nobles holding a human-high, wooden staff with a four-to-six-inchwide cloth tied down its length. This narrow cloth was decorated with elaborately woven designs and flapped openings, usually cut in the shape of a T. Shield-Jaguar recorded his first display of this staff on Stela 16, which he erected at the highest point of the city in front of Temple 41. Bird-Jaguar commissioned his own retrospective version of his father’s action on Lintel 50 (Fig. 7:5b).
-Both monarchical and more egalitarian constitutions may issue at last in violence, and despotic control of their subjects. This is not immediately to say that the rulers of such cities will be seeking their own advantage rather than their subjects’ (which is the criterion by which both Plato and Aristotle identify degenerate constitutions), but it is clearly very likely that, whatever excuses they may offer, all such violent rule will also be literally despotic. Only those (if any) who really should be considered slaves or slavish should be treated as if they were slaves, having no conception of their own of a good life for themselves and for their kin, nor any will to achieve it. Whether there are such people as “natural slaves” (who live and behave as slaves whatever the constitution under which they live) is maybe moot. That Aristotle would consider the complaisant subjects of such violent and coercive rule as he observed in eastern empires to be slaves is not. But those who are not thus slavish deserve much better.
+The next time we see this flapstaff ritual is on Stela 11, a monument erected by Bird-Jaguar soon after his accession. Designed to document events that culminated in his successful ascent to the throne, this stela includes the image of another flapstaff ritual which had occurred on June 26, 741, exactly five years after Shield-Jaguar’s earlier flapstaff ceremony. In this scene (Fig. 7:5c), the shorter Shield-Jaguar,[412] who was then ninety- three years old, faces his son under a double-headed dragon representing the sky, above which sit Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors.[413] Both men now hold the same flapstaff that Shield-Jaguar displayed on Stela 16. Bird-Jaguar took pains to emphasize the importance of this mutual display. He did so by depicting this scene both atop and between texts that recorded his accession to the throne, thus asserting that his father had shared this ritual with him to legitimize his status as heir. Furthermore, Bird-Jaguar set this dual depiction in front of Temple 40 (Fig. 7:5c and e), which was situated on the same hill summit as Temple 41 where Shield-Jaguar had placed his earlier depiction of the flapstaff ritual. This close juxtaposition emphasized the linkage between the two rituals and supported Bird-Jaguar’s political aspirations.
-<quote>
+This father-son flapstaff event took place only four days before the end of the tenth tun in the fifteenth katun on 9.15.10.0.0. Five days later, on 9.15.10.0.1 (July 1, 741), another ritual took place that was so important and involved so many critical people that Bird-Jaguar recorded it glyphically and pictorially three times (Fig. 7:6), in three different locations. These locations all pivoted thematically around Temple 23, the building that became the touchstone of his legitimacy.
-Yet it cannot, perhaps, but appear very strange, to anyone ready to reflect on the matter, that it should be the function of a statesman to be able to lay plans for ruling and dominating neighbouring cities whether or not they give their consent. How can something which is not even lawful be proper for a statesman or lawmaker?
-<right>
+The most distant of these depictions, Lintel 14 of Temple 20, shows two persons. One is a woman named Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and the other is a man with the same family name, Lord Great-Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:6a). This woman would become the mother of Bird-Jaguar’s son and heir, and the man, who is named as her brother, was most likely the patriarch of her lineage.[414] Great-Skull-Zero belonged to a cahal lineage that was apparently an important source of political support, for Bird- Jaguar continued to depict him on public monuments, even after his own accession. In this earlier ritual, both Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother hold a Vision Serpent the two of them have materialized through bloodletting.[415] She also holds an offering bowl containing an obsidian B blade and bloodstained paper, while he holds the head of the serpent aloft as a female ancestor materializes in its mouth. The name of this ancestor, “Lady Ahau of Yaxchilan, Lady Yaxhal,” appears in the small text above the apparition’s head.
-(Politics 7.1324b25[323])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Coercion is improper, whether it is of conquered peoples or of the other members of the statesman’s polis. And coercion may sometimes be covert, depending on deceit by statesmen and laziness amongst subjects. The twin principles of a democracy are on the one hand that the decisions of the demos, the people, rule, and on the other that all citizens live as they choose (which is not necessarily quite the same as living as they—for the moment—please). Clearly those principles may conflict, if—for example—the poor, being “in the majority,” expropriate the property of “the rich,” or some majority moral opinion is enforced on those who flatly disagree.
+It is possible that this bloodletting rite was part of the rituals of marriage between Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero, but none of the glyphs recorded on this lintel refer to marriage. Whatever the occasion, we can presume that this lady and her kinsmen were vitally important to Bird-Jaguar’s successful campaign to replace his father as high king. Going against precedent, he gives them an unusually prominent place in history, depicting them as participants in this critical bloodletting ritual.
-Political community depends on real consensus, founded in the fact that every citizen has a share in collective decision-making—and no decisions are enforced even by stable majority factions on a recognized minority. This can hardly be possible if the supposed polis is the size of Babylon or anything we would now call a “nation-state” (see Politics 3.1276a24).
+The second time we see this bloodletting is on a retrospective stela (Fig. 7:6b) found next door in Temple 21, a building in which Bird-Jaguar deliberately replayed the iconographic program of Lady Xoc’s temple in celebration of the birth of his own heir.[416] This newly discovered stela[417] shows Bird-Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, engaged in the same bloodletting as his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her brother. This stela emulates the style and iconographic detail of Lintel 25 on Temple 23, which depicts Lady Xoc materializing the founder of the dynasty at Shield-Jaguar’s accession. Bird-Jaguar declares—by means of this not-so- subtle artistic manipulation—that his mother’s actions were every bit as important as those of his father’s principal wife.
-<quote>
+On the front of the stela and facing the entry door, Lady Eveningstar is depicted holding a bloodletting plate in one hand and a skull-serpent device in the other, while a huge skeletal Vision Serpent rears behind her. As on Lintel 25, this Vision Serpent is double-headed and emits Tlaloc faces. The text records the date, 4 Imix 4 Mol, and states that a “fish-inhand” vision event took place u cab chan kina “in the land of the sky lords.” A coupleted repetition attests that “Lady Eveningstar let blood.” On the rear, she is shown drawing the rope through her tongue and here the text specifies that she was “the mother of the three-katun lord, Bird- Jaguar, Holy Lord of Yaxchilan, Bacab.” Bird-Jaguar very likely installed this monument to emphasize his mother’s legitimate status, as well as her ritual centrality during his father’s lifetime. At any rate, this stela was part of his program to assert the legitimacy of his own son and heir, whose birth was celebrated on the central lintel of this temple.[418]
-A city composed of too few members is a city without self-sufficiency (and the city, by its definition, is self-sufficient). One composed of too many will indeed be self-sufficient in the matter of material necessities (as a nation may be) but it will not be a city, since it can hardly have a constitution.
-<right>
+Bird-Jaguar set the third depiction (Fig. 7:6c) of this critical bloodletting ritual over the central door of Structure 16, a building located at the eastern edge of the river shelf. Carved on the outer edge of Lintel 39, the scene shows Bird-Jaguar sprawled on the ground as he supports a Serpent Bar, skeletal in detail and emitting GII as the materialized vision. The date is again 4 Imix 4 Mol[419] and the action a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. Now, however, the actor is the future king himself.
-(Politics 7.1326b[324])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Of course we may, if we are “free” by temperament and education, accept that not every collective, dialectical decision is as we personally wish, but once it is clear that almost all the collective decisions go against our own and our friends’ votes and arguments, the city is on the brink of war: a faction may be as tyrannical as any despot, and must be resisted.
+Based on these three representations of this critical bloodletting, as well as depictions of similar events at other sites,[420] we can visualize this great ritual in the following vignette.
-What if the poor, on the ground of their being a majority, proceed to divide among themselves the possessions of the wealthy—will not this be unjust? ‘No, by heaven’ (someone may reply); ‘it has been justly decreed so by the sovereign body.’ But if this is not the extreme of injustice, what is? Whenever a majority takes everything and divides among its members the possessions of a minority, that majority is obviously ruining the city.
+The starlit darkness broke before the first flush of light as the sun rose from Xibalba over the dark waters of the river. Venus, who had preceded his brother out of the Underworld by almost two hours, now hovered brightly near the seven lights of the Pleiades and the bright star Aldeba- ran.[421] Nine times had the Lords of the Night changed since the sun had taken its longest journey through the sky on the day of the summer solstice. Birds waking in the trees across the river and along the hills above the city raised a crescendo of song, counterpointing the barking of the village dogs and the squawks of brilliant red macaws flying along the edge of the water. Far in the distance, a howler monkey roared his own salutation to the new day. The celestial stage was set for an important festival and the community of people who lived along the river waited anxiously for the rituals that would soon begin.
-<right>
+A crowd of ahauob, cahalob, and people of lesser rank milled restlessly within the cool plaza beside the great river. The iridescent feathers of their headdresses bobbed above their animated conversations like a fantastic flock of birds. The brilliantly embroidered and dyed cloth of their garments swirled in a riot of color against the hard whiteness of the plaster floor and the distant green backdrop of the mist-shrouded forest. As dawn broke through the darkness of night, more people drifted toward the plaza from the distant hillslopes. Still more arrived in canoes, having fought the high floodwaters to cross the river so that they too could witness the great ritual announced by the king.
-(Politics 3.1281a11[325])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Not all decrees are necessarily just ones, even by local standards. Whether the rich hold their property justly in the first place may also be moot. But the chief moral is that a properly political community is both broadly self-sufficient and self-governing, and that all attempts to rule by violence or fraud are improper. David Keyt identified the clearly “anarchist” implications of Aristotle’s principles (as also Plato’s).
+The king’s family, arrayed in front of the gleaming white walls of the Tz’ikinah-Nal, the house Lady Xoc had dedicated many years ago, and the Chan-Ah-Tz’i,[422] the house of the seventh successor of Yat-Balam, watched the sun rise over the huge stone pier that had been built over the river on its southern side. No one could see the pier now, of course, for the great Xocol Ha[423] was in flood from the thunderstorms of the rainy season. The roar of the tumbling waters played a ground behind the rhythms of drums and whistles echoing through the great open spaces along the canoe-strewn shore. Merchants, visitors, pilgrims, and farmers from near and far had laid their wares along the river for the people of Yaxchilan to peruse. They too joined their voices to the cacophony of sound swelling throughout the gleaming white plazas of the city.
-Aristotle defines a deviant constitution as one under which the rulers rule for their own advantage (Politics 3.1279a19—20). He goes on to claim that deviant constitutions are characterized by their use of force (3.1281a23—24; see also 3.1276a12—13), that they are contrary to nature (para phusin) (3.1287b37—41), and that they are unjust (3.1282b8—13). Aristotle does not explicitly connect these three claims with each other or with his definition. But the derivation of the anti-coercion principle shows how they can be linked together. That the rulers in a polis with a deviant constitution must use force to maintain themselves in power is a consequence of the nature of their rule. For deviant constitutions are all despotic (3.1279a19—21; 4.1290a25—29; 7.1333a3—6). Under such a constitution the rulers, looking only to their own advantage, treat those outside the constitution, the second-class citizens, as slaves (see 3.1278b32—37 and 4.1295b19—23). Since these outsiders are free men (3.1279a21; see also 4.1292b38—41), there can be no question of their enduring such treatment willingly (see 4.1295a17-23). Thus, under a deviant constitution there is always a group of subjects who obey their rulers only because they are forced to. In a democracy it is the rich; in an oligarchy, the poor; in a tyranny, the free (for tyranny see 3.1285a25—29; 5.1314al0—12). Given the Aristotelian equation of the forced and the unnatural, it follows at once that deviant constitutions are contrary to nature.[326]
+The royal clan stood in two groups, the hard and dangerous tension between them radiating down into the crowd below. The cahalob and ahauob of the court arranged themselves in clusters, clearly indicating their support for one or the other branch of the family. The aging but indomitable Lady Xoc[424] took up position with her kinsmen in front of the Tz’ikinah-Nal. In this, the place of her glory, she contemplated the irony of her fate. Here, in the most magnificent imagery to grace the city, she had commemorated her devotion to Shield-Jaguar. The finest artisans of the realm had carved the lintels in the house behind her, declaring publicly and permanently that she had materialized the founder when her lord acceded as king. And the reward for that sacrifice? She had been forced to deny her own father’s kinsmen and to let her blood to sanctify the final issue of her aged husband’s loins: Bird-Jaguar—son of a foreigner.
-*** II. The Point and Peril of Ethical Concern
+Even now the men of her father’s lineage were as reluctant as she to give up their privileges as kinsmen of the king’s principal wife. The gods had favored Shield-Jaguar by giving him a life span beyond that granted to other humankind. He had lived so long that most of the sons of her womb were dead, as were many of their sons.[425] The sharp pain of remembered grief cut through her reverie. The matriarch, soon to enter her fifth katun of life, glanced at her remaining offspring, her thwarted and angry kinsmen, and the powerful cahalob allied to her father’s clan. All stood quietly, grimly, allowing the old woman her moment of bitter reflection.
-So far there is a clear agreement on the part of a wide range of classical writers with one of the staple doctrines of an anarchist philosophy. Political authority cannot rest upon coercion, and the ideal form of human community will be both self-sufficient and self-governing. Everyone who is capable of reaching and acting on a decision about what to do, everyone who has a working conception of what will make a life worth living, must have a say in collective decisions. We cannot avoid the necessity of such collectives, even by wandering away into the wilderness and surviving by our own singular endeavours (a project that only a few exceptional individuals can accomplish, and they only with a lot of luck). Even they will, almost certainly, have to come to some agreement with any neighbouring tribes and cities, even simply to be left alone. But might not simple treaties be enough for us? Might we not agree merely to bring any goods for exchange to some central market, and even conclude a pact of mutual defence against any who would attack that market, or our households? Even the necessity of finding mates from outside our immediate families might be managed by, as it were, the marriage-mart, perhaps with appeals to some recognized “sacred” elements? Such treaties will not be long sustained unless the parties all find an agreeable profit in them, and are all sufficiently alike in what they consider a “fair” trade, or a “just” defence, or a “proper” marriage partner, but there need be no considerable concern for how householders manage their own affairs at home.
+Most of the witnessing emissaries from towns along the river gathered before the other royal group in anticipation of the celebration to come. Bird-Jaguar, renowned warrior, defender of the realm and future king, quietly conversed with his mother, Lady Eveningstar, and his new wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero. They were framed by the splendor of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. At thirty-one, the heir radiated a physical strength to match his valor and ambition. The bride’s lineage patriarch, Great-Skull- Zero, stood beside her, accompanied by the other cahalob who, by their presence here, declared themselves allies of the king’s son. Chief among them, Kan-Toc proudly and dispassionately surveyed potential friends and foes below, ready to place his prowess as warrior at the disposal of the future king.
-A polis, on the other hand, so Aristotle concluded, is dedicated to some particular conception of what a good life may be. The end of the city is not mere life; it is, rather, a good quality of life.
+The nobles flanking the principal players in this drama stood in small groups on the steps of the temples. Their arms folded across their chests, they spoke of the day’s events, the condition of the new crop, and hundreds of other topics of concern. Some were bare-chested, but the most important lords wore blinding white capes closed at the throat with three huge red spondylus shells. This cotton garb was reserved for those privileged to serve as attendants to the king, or those who held the status of pilgrims to the royal festivals.[426] Farther away, warriors of renown in their finest battle gear stood with other notables who carried the emblazoned staff-fans of Maya war and ceremony. Other nobles sat in informal groups, engaging in lively conversation among the riot of color in the long-shadowed light of the brilliant morning. Excitement and anticipation were becoming a palpable force pulsing through the crowd of people that now included a growing number of farmers and villagers who had come in from the surrounding countryside to share in the festivities.
-<quote>
+Shield-Jaguar, the ninety-three-year-old king, sat frail but erect upon the long bench inside the central room of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. The morning light coursing through the door warmed his bony chest, bared above his white hipcloth, as he mused over the many shivering hours he had spent in such rooms in the dark time before dawn. Now with his aged cronies, the last of his most trusted lords, he sat in this venerable house that had been dedicated 286 years earlier by the seventh successor of Yat-Balam.
-Otherwise, there might be a city of slaves, or even a city of animals; but in the world as we know it any such city is impossible, because slaves and animals do not share in happiness [eudaimonia] nor in living according to their own choice. Similarly, it is not the end of the city to provide an alliance for mutual defence against all injury, nor does it exist for the purpose of exchange or [commercial] dealing. If that had been the end, the Etruscans and the Carthaginians would be in the position of belonging to a single city; and the same would be true to all peoples who have commercial treaties with one another. It is true that such peoples have agreements about imports; treaties to ensure just conduct; and written terms of alliance for mutual defence. On the other hand, they have no common offices to deal with these matters: each, on the contrary, has its own offices, confined to itself. Neither party concerns itself to ensure a proper quality of character among the members of the other; neither of them seeks to ensure that all who are included in the scope of the treaties are just and free from any form of vice; and they do not go beyond the aim of preventing their own members from committing injustice against one another. But it is the goodness or badness in the life of the city which engages the attention of those who are concerned to secure good government. The conclusion which clearly follows is that any city which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness. Otherwise, a political association sinks into a mere alliance, which only differs in space [i.e. in the contiguity of its members] from other forms of alliance where the members live at a distance from one another.
-<right>
+Shield-Jaguar’s years weighed heavily upon him. This would surely be the final festival of his life—his last opportunity to seal his blessings upon Bird-Jaguar before the gods, the ancestors, and the people of his kingdom. Four days earlier, he had stood before the people with his son and heir and displayed the ceremonial cloth-lined flapstaif. It was important that all his people, noble and common folk alike, witness and accept his gift of power to Bird-Jaguar. The issue of the inheritance still tormented his spirit so powerfully he feared he was not adequately prepared for his trial with the Lords of Death. It was common scandal among all the great houses on the river that the men of Lady Xoc’s lineage continued to press their claims on the king, despite all that he had done for them and for her. The kinsmen of his principal wife had become his most formidable enemies. They would surely maneuver to place one of her own offspring on the throne after his bones lay in the vaulted grave that awaited his fall into Xibalba. Bird-Jaguar would have to be a subtle and powerful leader to take and hold his rightful place as the successor of his father.
-(Politics 3.1280b6[327])
-</right>
-</quote>
-This latter possibility in turn is the root of another form of anarchist philosophy, less community minded and more in line with what would now be considered “right-wing anarchism” or “libertarianism.” The sophist Lycophron, it is said, expressly claimed that the law was only a contract about allowable claims upon one another, without any concern to make the citizens virtuous or just. We know too little of Lycophron to conclude that he therefore promoted the notion of a “minimal state” or “conflict management agencies” concerned only to assess conflicting claims about ownership or injury, still less that he had a working “social contract” theory about our proper obedience to the sort of civil authority that might emerge from what would once have been only a paid service.[328] But that idea, of “justice” as an arrangement between contending parties, saving them from undue harm while requiring them also to forego undue profit (as Glau- con proposes in Plato Republic 2.358e), can also be considered an element in the development at least of liberal politics. An element only, and a risky one: Herodotus also noted the possibility that civil authority began with a general agreement to acknowledge the good judgement of a particular man considered “wise.”
+A shout from the crowd outside brought Shield-Jaguar back to the present and his immediate duty to the dynasty of Yat-Balam. The Ancestral Sun had climbed above the mouth of the eastern horizon until he hovered free of the earth. Despite the fierce glare the sun brought to the world, Venus retained his strength on this special day so that the brothers could be seen together in the morning sky, momentary companions like the aged king and his energetic son. It was one day after the halfway point of Katun 15. The bloodletting rituals about to begin would consecrate that benchmark in time and demonstrate the king’s support for his youngest son.
-<quote>
+The old man’s eyes sparkled as he watched Lady Eveningstar, mother of the heir, move gracefully into the frame of light before his doorway. She would be the first to offer her blood and open the portal to the Other- world.[427] Dressed in a brilliant white gauze huipil, high-backed sandals, and a flower headdress, she stepped forward to stand before her son. Shield-Jaguar was too frail to make the precise ceremonial cut in his wife’s body and that role now fell to Bird-Jaguar. Holding a shallow plate within the circle of her folded arms, Lady Eveningstar knelt before Bird-Jaguar. The bowl was filled with strips of beaten-bark paper, a rope the thickness of her first finger, and a huge stingray spine. Her eyes glazed as she shifted her mind into the deep trance that would prepare her for what was to come. Closing her eyes, she extended her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could. Bird-Jaguar took the stingray spine and, with a practiced twist of the wrist, drove it down through the center of his mother’s tongue. She did not flinch, nor did a sound pass her lips as he took the rope and threaded it through the wound.[428] She stood near the edge of the platform so that all the assembled witnesses could see her pull the rope through her tongue. Her blood saturated the paper in the bowl at her chest and dribbled redly down her chin in brilliant contrast to the deep green jade of her shoulder cape.
-As the Medes at that time dwelt in scattered villages without any central authority, and lawlessness in consequence prevailed throughout the land, Deioces, who was already a man of mark in his own village, applied himself with greater zeal and earnestness than ever before to the practice of justice among his fellows. It was his conviction that justice and injustice are engaged in perpetual war with one another. He therefore began his course of conduct, and presently the men of his village, observing his integrity, chose him to be the arbiter of all their disputes. Bent on obtaining the sovereign power, he showed himself an honest and an upright judge, and by these means gained such credit with his fellow-citizens as to attract the attention of those who lived in the surrounding villages. They had long been suffering from unjust and oppressive judgments; so that, when they heard of the singular uprightness of Deioces, and of the equity of his decisions, they joyfully had recourse to him in the various quarrels and suits that arose, until at last they came to put confidence in no one else.
-<right>
+Bird-Jaguar removed some of the saturated paper from the plate and dropped it into the knee-high censer that stood on the floor beside his mother’s left leg. After placing fresh paper in her bowl, he removed her head covering and replaced it with the skull-mounted headdress that signaled Venus war and gave honor to the brother of the Sun.[429]
-(Herodotus 1.96–7[329])
-</right>
-</quote>
-The conclusion of the story has Deioces established as an absolute monarch, with a palace at Ecbatana. The “equity of his decisions,” it turns out, was in the end only a gambit, to achieve monarchical power of a sort that Herodotus spends his Histories quietly rebuking and contrasting with the willing obedience of (some) Greeks to an impersonal Law. Demaratus, for example, responds to Xerxes’ baffled enquiry about how so few Greeks should hope to stand against so many of his army that they are free, but also obedient to Law, “which they fear much more than your subjects fear you” (7.104).[330]
+Lady Eveningstar pulled the last of the rope through her tongue, B dropped it into the bowl, and stood swaying as the trance state took possession of her consciousness. In that moment Bird-Jaguar saw what he had been seeking in her eyes—the great Serpent Path to the Otherworld was opening within his mother. He set the ancestral skull into her hand and stood back. That was the signal. The deep moaning voice of a conch trumpet echoed throughout the city, announcing the arrival of the Vision Serpent. Black smoke billowed and roiled upward from the god-faced censer behind Lady Eveningstar and formed a great writhing column in which Bird-Jaguar and his people saw the Double-headed Serpent and the god of Venus war she had materialized with the shedding of her blood. A song of welcome and awe rose from the crowd below as they drew blood from their own bodies and offered it to the god now born into their presence.
-So also Herodotus credits the ascent of the Athenians to their “freedom”:
+The crowd writhed and sway ed as a tide of ecstasy coursed throughout the city. Trumpeters and drummers, caught in the tumult of their music, accelerated their rhythms to a frenzied tempo. Dancing lords whirled across the terrace below the king and his family, their glowing green feathers and hip panels suspended at right angles to their whirling bodies. People throughout the crowd drew their own blood and splattered it onto cloth bands tied to their wrists and arms. The plaza was soon brightly speckled with devotion. Smoke columns rose from censers which stood upright throughout the plaza as the ahauob and the cahalob called their own ancestors forth through the portal opened by the Lady Eveningstar.
-<quote>
+Feeling the awesome strength of his mother’s vision, Bird-Jaguar knew he had chosen the penultimate moment to publicly affirm the alliance he had forged by his marriage to Lady Great-Skull-Zero. 1 he numbers of fierce and powerful cahalob who had allied themselves with his cause would give his rivals pause and strengthen his own claim as the rightful successor of the great Shield-Jaguar.
-It is plain enough ... that freedom is an excellent thing since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbours, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that, while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since then they worked for a master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself.
-<right>
+Motioning through the haze of smoke that drifted along the terrace from his mother’s sacrifice, he signaled Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother to bring their own vision through the portal. His wife wore a brilliantly patterned huipil, a heavy jade-colored cape, and a bar pectoral. On her head sat the image of the Sun God at dawn to complement the symbols of Venus worn by his mother. Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of his wife’s lineage, was richly dressed in a skull headdress, a cape, a bar pectoral, knee bands made of jade, a richly bordered hipcloth, a heavy belt, an ornate loincloth, and anklet cuffs. Both were barefoot and grasped the deified lancets of the bloodletting ritual in their hands.
-(Herodotus 5.78)
-</right>
-</quote>
-This trope, of the “free” Greek or Westerner against the naturally “servile” Easterner, is not one that we should now endorse, but it remains significant for our understanding of what “freedom,” eleutheria, might mean, and why it is not to be equated with any simple rule of non-interference or even the more difficult attempt at compromise between competing interests. Freedom is a way of living together as equals. A merely “minimal” state, or an alliance, may have no interest in the character of its members, or the way they manage their households, so long as they keep their agreements. But this condition is bound to be unstable: those who keep their agreements only from fear of retribution, and esteem their “freedom” only so that they can get what they currently desire, may be easily corrupted, and likewise expect their partners to be corrupt. Bargains between desperate brigands, or even complacent burghers, have little force: notoriously, it is hard to ensure cooperation even in the possible partners’ ultimate self-interest, when it so often makes selfish sense for either party to defect. The only solutions we seem to have discovered are either to concede sufficient power to Leviathan (monarchical or republican) to suppress rebellion, or else to rear us all in virtuous habits of a proper sort. Anarchists—and Aristotle—reject the option of Leviathan: Aristotle concluded that all poleis must be concerned with the virtue of their members, since our goal is not merely survival, life on whatever terms, but a recognizably good or worthwhile life.
+Holding in readiness a shallow plate filled with paper strips, Lady Great-Skull-Zero gestured toward her brother. Like her mother-in-law, she extended her tongue far out of her mouth and permitted Great-Skull- Zero to make the cut of sacrifice. Grasping the obsidian, he pierced her tongue in one deft motion, then handed the bloody blade to Bird-Jaguar. Gazing into the eyes of his new kinsman and future king, Great-Skull- Zero remained motionless while Bird-Jaguar slashed down into his extended tongue. Bleeding heavily and deep in the vision trance, Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Great-Skull-Zero danced together, bringing forth the Serpent known as Chanal-Chac-Bay-Chan.[430] As the great Serpent writhed through their arms, they saw the ancestor Na-Yaxhal materialize between them. A roar rose from the plaza, coming most loudly from the throats of those lords allied with Bird-Jaguar and his wife’s clan.
-<quote>
+Finally it was time for the king’s son to sanctify the day with the gift of his own blood. Bird-Jaguar was more simply dressed than Great-Skull-Zero. His hair, worn long to tantalize his enemies in battle, was tied above his head with a panache of feathers which hung down his back. Around his neck he wore a single strand of beads, and a bar pectoral suspended on a leather strap lay against his brown chest. His wrists, ankles, and knees were bejeweled with deep blue-green strands of jade and in the septum of his nose he wore a feather-tipped ornament. His loincloth was simply decorated and brilliantly white so that his people could see the blood of sacrifice he would draw from the most sacred part of his body.
-The city as a whole has a single end. Evidently, therefore, the system of education must also be one and the same for all, and the provision of this system must be a matter of public action. It cannot be left, as it is at present, to private enterprise, with each parent making provision privately for his own children, and having them privately instructed as he himself thinks fit. Training for an end which is common should also itself be common. We must not regard a citizen as belonging just to himself: we must rather regard every citizen as belonging to the city, since each is a part of the city; and the provision made for each part will naturally be adjusted to the provision made for the whole.
-<right>
+His wife, still weak from her own sacrifice, came to his side to help him with his rite,[431] but his main assistant would be an ahau who was skilled in communication with the gods. The white cape shrouding this ahau’s shoulders contrasted vividly with Bird-Jaguar’s sun-darkened skin. Lady Eveningstar grasped a shallow basket filled with fresh, unmarked paper in one hand, and held the stingray spine her son would use in the other. Still dazed, Great-Skull-Zero stepped in front of Bird-Jaguar, took the basket from his kinswoman’s hand and placed it on the plaza floor between Bird-Jaguar’s feet. Face impassive, Bird-Jaguar squatted on his heels, spreading his muscular thighs above the basket. He pulled his loincloth aside, took the huge stingray spine, and pushed it through the loose skin along the top of his penis. He pierced himself three times before reaching down into the bowl for the thin bark paper strips it contained. Threading a paper strip through each of his wounds, he slowly pulled it through until the three strips hung from his member. His blood gradually soaked into the light tan paper, turning it to deepest red. From the saturated paper, his blood dripped into the bowl between his legs. When he was done, his wife reached down for the bowl and placed the bloodstained paper of his sacrifice in the nearby censer along with offerings of maize kernels, rubber, and the tree resin called pom.
-(Politics 8.1337a21[331])
-</right>
-</quote>
-This may be a challenge to a merely “libertarian” philosophy, but not to a more sophisticated anarchism. Anarchists, almost above all others, must have a respect for virtue as this is commonly understood.
+The rising columns of smoke revived the attention of the milling, tired crowd below. Many of the people who had drifted away to the adjacent courts and riverbank to examine the goods brought in by traders and visitors from other cities and kingdoms hurried back to the main plaza. They wanted to witness Bird-Jaguar’s materialization of the god. Times were dangerous along the Xocol Ha, and they hoped for a young, vigorous ruler, skilled in battle and wily in statecraft, to lead the kingdom through the growing peril of the times.
-But what exactly does Aristotle’s virtue require? Much of what he says of virtue, and its importance for any life worth living, should be uncontentious:
+High above the crowd, Bird-Jaguar’s legs gave way beneath him as the trance state overpowered him. Sitting back onto his right hip, he stretched his legs out through the billowing smoke. In his arms, he held the Double-headed Serpent that manifested the path of communication special to kings. God K—the god called Kauil who was the last born of BI the three great gods of the cosmos—emerged from the mouths of the serpents. The great conch-shell trumpets sounded for the third time, warning that a god had been materialized from the Otherworld, this time by the king’s son, Bird-Jaguar.
-<quote>
+It was midmorning when the royal family’s bloodletting obligations were fulfilled. Walking with a painfully careful gait, Bird-Jaguar led his mother, his wife, and Great-Skull-Zero to the bench in the Chan-Ah-Tz’i where Shield-Jaguar had been sitting throughout the ritual. The white- caped attendants moved aside as Bird-Jaguar sat down on the right-hand side of his father.[432] His own wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, sat to his right. Lady Eveningstar moved to take the position on Shield-Jaguar’s left, but before she could mount the bench, Lady Xoc entered and usurped that position for herself. In silent menace, the old woman forced the younger woman to take the outside position, jarring everyone present into realizing that neither she nor her kinsmen would ever yield their power without a fight. In a state of uneasy truce, the royal family watched the remainder of the rituals unfold as the ecstasy of the morning’s activities ebbed into the exhaustion of afternoon.
-No one would call a man happy who had no particle of courage, temperance, justice, or wisdom; who feared the flies buzzing about his head; who abstained from none of the extremest forms of extravagance whenever he felt hungry or thirsty; who would ruin his dearest friends for the sake of a quarter of an obol; whose mind was as senseless, and as much deceived, as that of a child or a madman.
-<right>
+Bird-Jaguar understood all that his father had done for him. First there had been the flapstaff ritual of four days ago and now this great blood ritual so close to the period ending celebration. His father’s public acknowledgment of his favor could not be denied nor would it be forgotten. In the years ahead, this ceremonial recognition would be the most important single component of his claim to the throne. His fight would be a hard one, but now he knew that not only his father but all the ancestors of the royal clan had selected him as the inheritor of the glory of Yaxchilan. After this moment together in eternity, it was simply a matter of time and patience.
-(Politics 8.1323a25[332])
-</right>
-</quote>
-But he is also confident that different sorts of virtue, different kinds and levels of goodness, are appropriate for different classes within the polis. How exactly any particular polis orders its affairs or ranks its virtues is a matter for that polis: “self-government” is perhaps a more contentious notion than he allows, if there are always decisions to be made (or customs to be followed) about who counts as a contributing agent. Even when he speaks of such people as are not “naturally” slaves as being themselves “free,” as individuals and as members of the polis, he expressly excludes women, children, farmers, mechanics, day labourers, and any other persons incapable, by temperament or occupation, of participating in needful political offices. Nor—as he well knew—were all actual slaves also “natural” slaves. Ancient Greek “democracy,” by modern liberal standards, was restricted to the freeborn, native, few, even if it allowed more say in the polis than overtly oligarchical regimes. Tyrants and demagogues, he even suggested, were likelier to give support to slaves and women—as both being good informers against their lords!
+<center>
+<verbatim>  </verbatim>
+</center>
-<quote>
+Shield-Jaguar was in his mid-nineties and not far from death when this multiple bloodletting took place. We surmise that his advanced age precluded his direct participation in this critically important rite; but, as we have seen, just about everyone else who was important to Bird-Jaguar’s claim participated: his wife and her brother, who was the patriarch of her lineage, Bird-Jaguar himself, and his mother. The four-day-long sequence that began with the flapstaff event and ended in this multiple bloodletting was well-timed. Less than a year later, on June 19, 742, the old man died, and at age thirty-two Bird-Jaguar began his campaign to follow his father into office.
-Kings are maintained and secured by their friends but it is characteristic of tyrants to distrust them above all others, for whereas everyone wants [to overthrow tyrants], it is their friends who have most power to achieve this. The methods applied in extreme democracies are thus all to be found in tyrannies. They both encourage feminine influence in the family, in the hope that wives will tell tales of their husbands; and for a similar reason they are both indulgent to slaves. Slaves and women are not likely to plot against tyrants: indeed, as they prosper under them, they are bound to look with favour on tyrannies and democracies alike—of course the people likes to act as absolute ruler. This is the reason why, under both these forms of government, honour is paid to flatterers, in democracies to demagogues, who are flatterers of the people, and, in the case of tyrants, to those who associate with them on obsequious terms—which is the function of the flatterer. Tyranny is thus a system dear to the wicked. Tyrants love to be flattered, and nobody with the soul of a freeman can ever stoop to that; a good man may be a friend, but at any rate he will not be a flatterer.[333]
-<right>
+Bird-Jaguar’s first action of public importance after his father’s death was a ballgame (Fig. 7:7) he played on October 21, 744. On the front step of Structure 33, his great accession monument, his artists depicted a captive, bound into a ball, bouncing down hieroglyphic stairs toward a kneeling player.[433] The text carved on this step associated this bailgame with events in the distant mythological past, placing Bird-Jaguar’s actions firmly within the sacred context of the game as it related to the larger cosmos.[434] Bird-Jaguar framed this event with the scenes he felt would most powerfully serve his political ends. Successive panels flank the central scene on the upper step[435] of the stairway leading to the temple platform. To the immediate left of his own bailgame scene, Bird-Jaguar portrayed his own father kneeling to receive a ball bouncing down a hieroglyphic stairway. On his right, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, also kneels to receive a ball. Other panels show important cahalob engaged in the game, as well as Bird-Jaguar’s wives holding Vision Serpents in rites that apparently preceded active play.
-(Politics 5.1313b29)
-</right>
-</quote>
-One further common excuse for the restriction was that only those who could defend the city were legitimately its rulers: so Athens allowed poorer folk to play a part because it was more dependent on the oarsmen of its navy than on armed infantry or the still more limited cavalry:
+Two years later, on June 4, 746 (9.15.15.0.0), Bird-Jaguar celebrated his first big period ending. He recorded this rite in an unusual way, embedding it into the Stela 11 scene depicting him and his father engaged in the flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:8). The text for the period ending tells us that on that day, Shield-Jaguar erected a tree-stone and that he held a staff in his hand.[436] This claim is a bit strange, since Shield-Jaguar had been in his grave for over four years (he died on June 19, 742). In reality, we know that Shield-Jaguar could not have erected a tree-stone, held a staff, nor done anything else on that date. What the reader is meant to understand is that Bird-Jaguar acted in his place.
-<quote>
+Even more curious, the final phrase in this text states that these actions took place u cab, “in the land of” Bird-Jaguar. How had the BI kingdom become “the land of” Bird-Jaguar when he hadn’t yet acceded to office and would not qualify for that event for another six years? The embedding of this period-ending notation into the scene of the father-son flapstaff ritual had a special intention. By this juxtaposition Bird-Jaguar implied that he and his father (even after death) acted together on both occasions, and that the kingdom had become Bird-Jaguar’s by this time, if only in de facto status.[437]
-In Athens the poor and the people generally are right to have more than the highborn and wealthy for the reason that it is the people who man the ships and impart strength to the city; the steersmen, the boatswains, the sub-boatswains, the look-out officers, and the shipwrights—these are the ones who impart strength to the city far more than the hoplites, the high-born, and the good men. This being the case, it seems right for everyone to have a share in the magistracies, both allotted and elective, for anyone to be able to speak his mind if he wants to.
-<right>
+The next time we see Bird-Jaguar on a monument, he is once again displaying the flapstaff (Fig. 7:5d). The date is now June 25, 747, eleven years after Shield-Jaguar’s first performance of this ritual, and some six years after the father-son event. By repeating this flapstaff rite yet again, Bird-Jaguar was commemorating his growing command of Yaxchilan’s ritual life.
-(Ps-Xenophon, Constitution 1.2[334])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Another was that “banausic” occupations limited intelligence and were likely to cripple bodies: a properly “liberal” education, suitable for and supportive of “freedom,” would not allow children to take up such occupations (as professional musicians, craftsmen, slave-masters). Some might nowadays add computer nerds, scientists, and bureaucrats to the list of “banausic” persons!
+Two years later on April 3, 749, Lady Xoc, Shield-Jaguar’s principal wife, died and went to join her husband in Xibalba. She had survived him by seven years. A little over a year later—exactly four years after the 9.15.15.0.0 period ending discussed above—Bird-Jaguar conducted a ritual in which he acted as warrior and giver of sacrifices. On June 4, 750, wearing the mask of the god Chac-Xib-Chac, he presented three unnamed victims for sacrifice. He carved this scene on the temple side of Stela 11 (Fig. 7:8), opposite the depiction of the father-son flapstaff event and the unusual period ending text discussed above.[438] These three events—the flapstaff, the period ending, and the GI sacrifice—were of such central importance to his campaign for the throne that Bird-Jaguar surrounded them with texts recording his accession. One text recording that event as hok’ah ti ahauel, “he came out as king,” was carved on the narrow sides of the tree-stone. A second text recording the event as chumwan ti ahauel, “he sat in reign,” was carved under the scene of the flapstaff event. As a finishing touch to the program of Stela 11, Bird-Jaguar placed miniature figures of his dead mother and father in the register above the sacrificial scene. They view his performance with approval from the world of the ancestors.
-<quote>
+Bird-Jaguar’s campaign of legitimization was now close to completion, but some barriers still remained. He had yet to prove his prowess as a warrior by taking a captive of sufficient prestige to sacrifice in the accession ceremonies, and to demonstrate his potency by fathering a male child and heir. These last events were never witnessed by his mother, for she died in the following year. On March 13, 751, Lady Eveningstar went to join her rival, Lady Xoc, in the Otherworld.
-Occupations are divided into those which are fit for freemen and those which are unfit for them; and clearly children should take part in useful occupations only to the extent that they do not turn those taking part in them into ‘mechanical’ types. The term ‘mechanical’ [banausos] should properly be applied to any occupation, art, or instruction which is calculated to make the body, or soul, or mind of a freeman unfit for the pursuit and practice of goodness.
-<right>
+With the principal female players in this historical drama dead, Bird-Jaguar embarked on the last phase of his crusade. On February 10, 752, 357 days after the end of the sixteenth katun, Bird-Jaguar went to war and took a captive named Yax-Cib-Tok, a cahal of an as-yet-unidentified king.[439] Eight days later, on February 18, Lady Great-Skull-Zero bore him a son, Chel-Te-Chan-Mah-Kina. This son would later take Shield- Jaguar’s name when he himself became the king. With these events Bird- Jaguar’s long struggle for the throne came to an end. Seventy-five days later he was crowned king of Yaxchilan.
-(Politics 8.1337b[335])
-</right>
-</quote>
-From which it might follow that Aristotle himself would not approve the Athenian mode of civic defence, as requiring people to have a say in the collective decision-making (as defenders of the city) who could not, by their education and occupation, fulfil that task.
+Like the multiple bloodlettings that preceded Shield-Jaguar’s death, this capture and the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir loomed large in his program of propaganda. He inscribed the capture on a glyphic step (Fig. 7:9a) located in front of a door leading into Temple 41, the structure built by his father on the highest point of the city. This was the location where Shield-Jaguar himself had erected the depiction of his first flapstaff ritual and the stelae recording the most famous captures of his career. By inscribing the record of his own battle triumph on this building, Bird- Jaguar associated himself with his father’s triumphs as a warrior.
-The author we call Ps-Xenophon was yet more explicit in his disdain for “the worse sort of people”:
+Bird-Jaguar also mounted a pictorial representation of this capture (Lintel 16, Fig. 7:9b) inside Temple 21. Temple 21, if you remember, was BI the structure designed to parallel the glory of Lady Xoc’s magnificent Temple 23. In the scene on this lintel, Bird-Jaguar, dressed in battle armor, stands before his seated captive who bites on his thumb in a gesture of submission or fear.
-<quote>
+Bird-Jaguar also depicted the rituals celebrating the birth of his son in two separate locations, maximizing the political implications of the event in the public record. He placed the bloodletting ritual that celebrated the birth over the right-hand doorway of Temple 21, next to the central capture scene described above. If we look at this scene (Fig. 7:9c), we see Bird-Jaguar preparing to draw blood from his own genitals, while one of his wives, Lady Balam, Lady Ahau of lx Witz,[440] pulls a rope through her tongue while holding a plate filled with blood-splattered paper.
-Everywhere on earth the best element is opposed to democracy. For among the best people there is minimal wantonness and injustice but a maximum of scrupulous care for what is good, whereas among the people there is a maximum of ignorance, disorder, and wickedness; for poverty draws them rather to disgraceful actions, and because of a lack of money some men are uneducated and ignorant.
-<right>
+This depiction corresponds to Lintel 24 in the program of Temple 23, the bloodletting celebration at the birth of Bird-Jaguar himself. Obviously, Bird-Jaguar wished the audience to draw some parallels. In the earlier bloodletting on Temple 23, Lady Xoc was shown acknowledging the birth of a son to a co-wife, Lady Eveningstar. Here Lady Balam acknowledges the birth of her husband’s heir, also the child of another wife. The only logistical difference is that Lady Great-Skull-Zero is not a foreign wife, as Lady Eveningstar had been, but a woman from a prominent cahal lineage of Yaxchilan. In addition, Temple 21 houses the stela (Fig. 7:6b) that depicts Bird-Jaguar’s mother in the critical 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, which we described in such detail in the vignette. The presence of this stela linked yet another critical bloodletting ritual to the birth of the heir.
-(Ps-Xenophon 1.5[336])
-</right>
-</quote>
-Not only their character but their constitution makes them unreliable:
+In an adjacent temple (Temple 20), Bird-Jaguar mounted another representation of the birth rituals. In this second depiction, Lady Great- Skull-Zero, the mother of the newborn child, holds a Personified Bloodletter in one hand and a bloodletting bowl in the other (Fig. 7:10b). Against her ribs she grasps the tail of a Vision Serpent which winds its way across empty space to rest in the hand of the infant’s father, Bird-Jaguar. The text recording the birth sits immediately in front of the human head emerging from the Vision Serpent’s mouth. This head most likely represents either an ancestor recalled to witness the arrival of the infant heir or the infant himself, Chel-Te-Chan, being metaphorically born through the mouth of the Vision Serpent. This birth scene is mounted in the same building as Lintel 14, which shows Lady Great-Skull-Zero holding the Vision Serpent with Great-Skull-Zero in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting rite (Fig. 7:6a and 7:10c). Thus, in both Temples 20 and 21, Bird-Jaguar connected the birth of his heir and the taking of his captive to the multiple bloodletting event that was so fundamental to his political claim.
-<quote>
+With these last two acts—the taking of a captive and the production of an heir, Bird-Jaguar became the king. It is curious that after all his long struggles for the throne, he was never particularly interested in picturing this hard-won accession rite. He did, however, inscribe textual records of this event on Stela 11, the steps of Stela 41, and on the lintels of Structure 10, which he built directly across the plaza from Lady Xoc’s building.
-For oligarchic cities it is necessary to keep to alliances and oaths. If they do not abide by agreements or if injustice is done, there are the names of the few who made the agreement. But whatever agreements the populace makes can be repudiated by referring the blame to the one who spoke or took the vote, while the others declare that they were absent or did not approve of the agreement made in the full assembly. If it seems advisable for their decisions not to be effective, they invent myriad excuses for not doing what they do not want to do. And if there are any bad results from the people’s plans, they charge that a few persons, working against them, ruined their plans; but if there is a good result, they take the credit for themselves.
-<right>
+The only actual surviving picture of his accession appears in Temple 33, one of the largest and most important constructions he commissioned during the first half of his reign. Built on a slope above and behind the string of buildings documenting his right of accession (Temples 13, 20, 21, 22, and 23), this building has a lintel over each of its three doors and a wide step portraying the bailgame events discussed earlier (Fig. 7:7) on its basal platform. The accession portrait is over the left door (Lintel 1, Fig. 7:11a). There, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself holding the manifestation of GIF[441] outward toward an audience we cannot see. Behind him stands the mother of his new son, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a bundle to her chest.[442] The verb in the text over her head records that she will soon let blood,[443] just as Lady Xoc did for Shield-Jaguar on the day of his accession (Lintel 25, Fig. 7:3b). Presumably, as the bloodletter for the king, she, like her predecessor Lady Xoc, would be responsible for materializing the founder of the dynasty. Her name is also written in a form that identifies her as the mother of the heir—the child who would become the second Shield-Jaguar.
-(Ps-Xenophon 2.17[337])
-</right>
-</quote>
-But this must be a corruption of any preferred constitution. If the people ignore the claims of honour and civil friendship, how long can their lordship last? Such chaos will be replaced, sooner or later, by some form of despotic rule, since the people themselves will be shown to be incapable of ruling themselves, or standing by their decisions. And maybe Aristotle was not wholly wrong to think that some occupations, some educations, unfit us for any share in collective decision-making. Those wholly absorbed in, for example, making bridles are not best placed even to train horses, let alone manage the cavalry or the conduct of a war. The same applies—though Aristotle does not explicitly say so—to those absorbed in healing the sick: a doctor does not deliberate about whether to heal a patient, but only how (Nicomachean Ethics 3.1112b12-15). But whether or not time and public effort should be expended, say, on the healing arts is exactly what a civil community may sometimes have to determine, without regard to the fixed options of particular crafts and craftsmen. Should any effort be made to rear disabled or otherwise “defective” children? Should elderly males be encouraged, or even allowed, to procreate?
+Bird-Jaguar’s accession rites culminated nine days later with the dedication of a new building, Temple 22, located on the river terrace immediately adjacent to Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s memorial (Fig. 7:12). Into this new building, he reset four very early lintels. These lintels were presumably removed from the important ancestral building now encased within the new construction. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of lintels and inscriptions from the buildings of his ancestors was a very important part of Bird-Jaguar’s political strategy.
-<quote>
+On the brand-new lintel he placed over the central doorway of Temple 22, he commemorated the dedication of the earlier temple, which had been named Chan-Ah- Fz’i by King Moon-Skull, the seventh successor in the dynasty. This ancient dedication had taken place on October 16, 454. The inclusion of the earlier texts was meant to link Bird-Jaguar’s dedication of the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i temple to the actions of the ancestral king. The official dedication of Temple 22 took place on May 12, 752, nine days after Bird-Jaguar had become the new king.
-The question arises whether children should always be reared or may sometimes be exposed to die. There should certainly be a law to prevent the rearing of deformed children. On the other hand, if the established social customs forbid the exposure of infants simply to keep down the number of children, a limit must be placed on the number who are born. If a child is then conceived in excess of the limit so fixed, a miscarriage should be induced before sense and life have begun.... It remains to determine the length of time for which [men and women] should render public service by bringing children into the world. The offspring of elderly men, like that of very young men, tends to be physically and mentally imperfect; and the children of old age are weakly. We may therefore fix the length of time for which procreation lasts by reference to the mental prime. This comes for most men—as some of the poets, who measure life in seven-year periods, have suggested—about the age of 50.
-<right>
+Obviously. Bird-Jaguar had to have begun construction of Temple 22 at a much earlier date for its dedication rituals to have played a part in his actual accession rites. This is but one more example of the extent of the power he wielded before he officially wore the crown. His choice of this building as his first construction project, and the one most closely associated with his accession rites, was deliberate. Not only was Temple 22 a new and impressive version of his illustrious ancestor’s Chan-Ah-Tz’i, it stood right next door to Lady Xoc’s pivotal building. Through this construction project, Bird-Jaguar asserted both his mastery of Lady Xoc’s imagery and his connection to a famous and successful ancestor. The purpose of this building (and Temple 12, in which he reset another group of early lintels), was to encase and preserve earlier important monuments and to declare his status as the legitimate descendant of those earlier kings.
-(Politics 7.1335b19[338])
-</right>
-</quote>
-The Aristotelian polis, in short, may begin to feel oppressive, even without a distinct organ of government, a distinct class of governors. There must be officers to oversee all manner of implicit regulations (see Politics 1321b12-1322b16), but these duties should be shared amongst the citizens. What sanctions Aristotle proposes for his imagined (or reported) rules may be unclear: it may be that mere public oversight, and consequent embarrassment, will be enough to do the work (and exile of the offender be a last resort). “To be under the eyes of office-holders will serve, above anything else, to create a true feeling of modesty and the fear of shame which should animate freemen” (Politics 7.1331b1[339]). So also with decisions about the extent of “private” property: it may be oppressive to remove excesses of land or money from “the rich,” but no civil community will long survive gross inequalities. Either citizens will agree to share or moderate their wealth, or some will find themselves expelled, or the city will descend into war and tyranny. But its continuance will still depend upon the actual, not merely the assumed, agreement of its citizens.
+This construction project was just the opening shot in a grand strategy that would completely change the face of Yaxchilân over the next ten years (Fig. 7:12). Bird-Jaguar dedicated the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i just nine days after his accession. To the left of the adjacent Temple 23 and attached to it, he built Temple 24 (dedicated on September 2, 755). Its lintels recorded the deaths of his immediate ancestors: his grandmother’s on September 12, 705; Shield-Jaguar’s on June 19, 742; Lady Xoc’s on April 3, 749; and his own mother’s on March 13, 751.
-*** III. Enemies of the Political
+While still working on the huge terrace that supported the group of buildings surrounding Temple 23, Bird-Jaguar began construction on yet another temple, Temple 21. This structure also replicated the magnificent lintels of Lady Xoc’s building. Bird-Jaguar designed the program on this temple around the following scenes: his capture of Yax-Cib-Tok; his own bloodletting in celebration of his son’s birth; and a bloodletting rite that took place on March 28, 755, probably as part of the dedication rites for the temple itself (Fig. 7:9d). The giver of blood in the final event was Lady 6-Tun, a woman from Motul de San José, another of Bird-Jaguar’s wives. These images, of course, deliberately echoed the lintels of Temple 23. Bird-Jaguar intensified the association of this new building with Lady Xoc’s monument by planting inside it the stela recording his mother’s B pivotal bloodletting rite on 9.15.10.0.1. Carved in a style emulating the Lintel 25 masterpiece from Lady Xoc’s temple, this stela depicts Lady Eveningstar (Fig. 7:6b) wearing the same costume as her rival while materializing the same double-Tlaloc-headed Vision Serpent. This, and other imagery, shows us how obsessed Bird-Jaguar was with equating his mother with Lady Xoc.
-One of the strangest comments on anarchistical theory is the suggestion that “anarchists maintain that no questions are political questions.”[340] On the contrary, anarchists are bound to be considering politics—that is, the proper management of self-governing communities freed from domination.[341]
+Next to this building, he constructed Temple 20, which had three lintels showing many of the same events. One depicts his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her patriarch participating in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting. A second shows his wife letting blood along with Bird-Jaguar in celebration of the birth of their son. The third lintel depicts the ritual display of four captives by Bird-Jaguar and an unnamed noble. This lintel has been tentatively dated to November 13, 757.[444]
-The anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, nor by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between members of that society and by a sum of social customs and habits—not petrified by law, routine or superstition, but continually developing and continually re-adjusted in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals.[342]
+Across the plaza trom temple 23, Bird-Jaguar constructed three more buildings: Temples 10, 12, and 13. In Temple 12, he reset another series of Early Classic lintels. These recorded the first through the tenth successors of the dynasty, and the accession of the tenth king, Ta-Skull, on February 13, 526. This building, along with Temple 22, honored the members of the long dynasty of Yaxchilan from which Bird-Jaguar descended, and preserved important public records which would have otherwise been lost when he covered over earlier structures during the course of his building program.
-What customs need to be preserved, what modified or adjusted? What practices can be helpfully accepted, and what would be, inevitably, corrosive? Most of these questions are to be answered, precisely, by the citizens of whatever polis, not by theorists, however sensible. Consider an illuminating comment by David Brooks, writing in 2016 about the USA:
+To the west of Structure 12, Bird-Jaguar commissioned a great L-shaped platform surmounted by two buildings housing two sets of lintels. The first set, Lintels 29, 30, and 31, are all glyphic and record his birth, accession, and the dedication of the building itself (Temple 10) on March 1, 764. The other building (Structure 13) housed pictorial lintels of extraordinary interest (Fig. 7:13). The first, Lintel 50, shows Shield- Jaguar’s original flapstaff ritual, the event that began Bird-Jaguar’s race for the throne.[445] Balancing Shield-Jaguar’s flapstaff rite is Lintel 33. This lintel, found over the right-hand door of the temple (Fig. 7:13c), shows Bird-Jaguar conducting his own flapstaff event eleven years later on June 25, the summer solstice of the year 747.
-<quote>
+Lintel 32 (Fig. 7:13b), found over the middle door, shows Bird- Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, in a bundle rite. According to his inscription, this rite took place the day after his father persuaded Lady Xoc to let her blood in acknowledgment of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. The masterly representation of Lady Xoc’s extraordinarily painful suffering is just across the plaza, so we may assume that Bird-Jaguar used Lintel 32 to show that his own mother was also directly involved in the rituals surrounding his birth. In fact, she holds a bundle that very probably contained the bowl, rope, and lancet used in the bloodletting rite. By this means, he asserted that her role on that occasion was every bit as important as Lady Xoc’s. As a finishing touch, he framed his mother’s participation in the bundle ritual with the flapstaff events he considered to be a key part of his legitimization. The program of this building thus links those crucial events together into a single web of causality. It is retrospective history at its best. Bird-Jaguar masterfully orchestrated events, with their many shades of meaning and connections, to fit the conclusions he wished his people to accept as fact.
-We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society—politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force. Our founding fathers [that is, of the USA] chose politics. Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate. The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal. But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.[343]
-</quote>
-Better also than the suggestions of an uninvolved political theorist!
+With the completion of this last building, Bird-Jaguar had accomplished his campaign of political legitimization. His major problem now was to maintain the loyalty of his nobility and secure their support for his own son. His own problems with the succession appear to have marked B1 him deeply; so much so that the efforts of his remaining years were spent in a concentrated effort to insure that his own heir did not suffer the same fate.
-But it is still possible to identify some risks and even some opportunities: the most obvious risk is the one described by Herodotus, whereby some agency originally hired to help settle disputes, or facilitate decisions, in a suitably friendly, dialectical way becomes, by degrees, the Master. The temptation to correct the obvious errors of an Aristotelian polis leads quickly to a novel despotism: “the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.”[344] An associated peril lies in the management of common property: may not such management encroach by careful and seemingly reasonable steps on any remaining “private” property? Even the most “right-wing” or libertarian of political theorists cannot wholly escape the problem, as though everything could be sensibly partitioned as the singular and unquestioned property of single citizens, inherited by steps which may often have been wholly unjust. Conversely, it is all too easy for what should be common property to be appropriated for “private” use and management. In the words of the seventeenth-century protest against enclosures:
+Bird-Jaguar began this new campaign with a set of buildings constructed on the slopes above the river shelf. Pivotal to the program was the huge Temple 33, which he flanked with Temple 1 to the west, and Temple 42 to the east (Fig. 7:14). The ten lintels on these three buildings record a sequence of events beginning with Bird-Jaguar’s accession and culminating with its fifth anniversary. He repeated the same narrative strategy he had used in the building sequence which centered around Temple 23: the repetition of key scenes in more than one location. In this way he was able to feature several different people, thereby allowing many of his nobles and allies the prestige of appearing with the king in the permanent public record of history (Fig. 7:14).
-<verse>
+Forty days after his accession, Bird-Jaguar staged the first of these ceremonial events, a bundle ritual, on June 12, 752, ten days before the summer solstice (Fig. 7:15a). One pictorial representation of this event shows us Bird-Jaguar (on Lintel 5 of Temple 1) holding a tree-scepter in each hand, while Lady 6-Sky-Ahau, another foreign wife, this time from Motul de San José,[446] holds a bundle. In the second depiction of this ritual (Lintel 42 of Temple 42), Bird-Jaguar appears not with his wife but with Kan-Toc, one of his most important cahalob.[447] The king holds out a GII Manikin Scepter, an important symbol of the kingship, toward this cahal, who is shown gripping a battle ax and shield.
-The law locks up the man or woman
-Who steals the goose from off the common,
-But leaves the greater villain loose
-Who steals the common from off the goose.
-The law demands that we atone
-When we take things we do not own,
-But leaves the lords and ladies fine
-Who take things that are yours and mine.[345]
-</verse>
-An identical crime is committed by colonialists who seize what they imagine to be “unowned” land or wilderness, without attention to the needs and uses of the “native born.” Who owns what, and what such ownership involves, are plainly “political” questions, not merely “legal” ones (to be answered solely by reading documents endorsed or created, exactly, by the thieves). Nor can they be answered “neutrally,” by appeal to some universally acknowledged principle, since it is exactly such principles that are in dispute between differing communities and classes. We may, perhaps (as Aristotle hoped), slowly discover at least what practices are likely or certain to be destabilizing failures, ridiculed by all later generations. Amongst those foolish practices, it seems, are both fully collectivist responses and fully idiotic ones (where “idiotic,” despite its connotations, means only “individualized”). The super-turtles may perhaps be able to lay claim to their own personal space and property, and bargain by their personal skill and strength with every other turtle. We are born and reared and live within communities we did not build, and share the products of many generations’ effort (which were often poorly rewarded).
+We do not know the occasion for this ritual event, but Bird-Jaguar found it politically advantageous to represent it on these two lintels—one displaying a foreign wife who probably brought a powerful alliance with her, and the other featuring one of his most important nobles. In the Maya tradition, subordinate nobles were rarely depicted on the same monuments as the high king. Here Bird-Jaguar is obviously flattering his cahal, perhaps cementing his allegiance by publicly acknowledging his importance. The same reasoning would apply to the monument depicting his foreign wife. She must have brought her own set of alliances with her when she came to marry the king of Yaxchilân.
-On the one hand, not all property within the polis should be purely collective, to be used only and entirely as the whole consensus decides. On the other, no particular citizen should ever have so much property as to overwhelm all others. In what Aristotle considers the normal, or “natural,” shape of a community there are natural limits on accumulation: no one citizen and no household can plausibly enjoy, own, manage, or maintain more than some definite amount of land or other form of wealth. The creation of money to facilitate exchange makes a difference: there is no natural limit on how much money could be accumulated by careful management (or sheer luck). And this is made most evident when money itself becomes something to be bartered or rented out, at whatever rate of interest the lender may require. Usury is hateful, and unnatural (Politics 1.1258b1).[346] Dante, for that reason, placed usurers (bankers) in the same circle of hell as “sodomites” (Inferno 17; see also Leviticus 25.36)! The actual sin of Sodom, incidentally, had more to do with the use of wealth than is now commonly remembered, or Dante noted: “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16.49). The duties of free citizens, eleutheroi, include—are almost defined by—generosity: that is the virtue especially of free men, eleutheriotes (Nicomachean Ethics 2.1107b9-16). That is why there should be personal, “private”’ property (Politics 2.1263b10). But the unlimited accumulation of such wealth, beyond what any one citizen or household could reasonably use or enjoy or even manage efficiently, is certain to destroy the sort of companionship essential to the polis. This same accumulation may result in a global “unfettered capitalism,” of an “anarchic” rather than “anarchistical” kind: mere “lawlessness,” allowing those with the power to attempt whatever they please (not necessarily to achieve just what they please). That sort of “anarchy” is actually merely oligarchy.
+Later in the same year, on October 16, 752, Bird-Jaguar staged another series of rituals, once again depicting each of them in double imagery. During the first ceremony, he displayed a strange-looking staff mounting a basket with a GII miniature sitting atop it (Fig. 7:15b). In one version of this ritual (Lintel 6, Temple 1), Kan-Toc, the same cahal we saw above, stands before the king. He is holding bloodletting paper in one hand and a jaguar-paw club in the other. In the contrasting depiction (Lintel 43 of Temple 42), another wife, Lady Balam of lx Witz, stands with Bird-Jaguar. She holds a bloodletting bowl with a bloodstained rope hanging over one side. She is the same wife we saw letting blood on Lintel 17 to celebrate the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir. Here Bird-Jaguar watches her let blood again in an event occurring either just before or just after his scene with the cahal. Note that the paper held by Kan-Toc in the alternate depiction now rests in Bird-Jaguar’s hand. The fact that the paper is depicted in both scenes lets us know we are seeing different moments in the same ritual.
-The other chief enemy of the “political” (that is, the careful and companionable sorting out of the problems of collective life) may seem, by contrast, to be ethically high-minded. Even Aristotle, despite his attention to the different morals and manners of differing communities and institutions, was as sure as any other ethical philosopher that virtue and virtuous acts were not dependent on borders. People of one city or nation may suppose that different acts are decent, and differing characters of real worth, but what was truly wrong on one side of a border cannot be right on the other, merely by people’s saying so (Cicero Republic 3.33[347]). Despots may wish us to think otherwise:
+This particular ritual apparently lasted for several days, for two days later Bird-Jaguar reappears on Lintel 7 (Fig. 7:15c), this time holding the GII Manikin Scepter. Another of his wives appears with him, hugging a large bundle to her chest. While we cannot positively identify the woman depicted here (her name is badly eroded), we are reasonably certain she is another foreign wife, this time a second wife from Motul de San José.[448]
-<quote>
+The final episode in this series of lintels records the most famous and important capture of Bird-Jaguar’s lifetime—the taking of Jeweled-Skull (Fig. 7:15d). Once again, he commissioned two versions of the event. As before, one shows him acting with a cahal and the other with a wife. On Lintel 41, Lady 6-Sky-Ahau of Motul de San José stands before the king, who is dressed in full battle regalia including cotton armor and lance. She has been helping him dress for war in the same type of ritual we saw Lady Xoc perform for Shield-Jaguar thirty-one years earlier. In this scene, however, the action is a little farther along than that shown on the earlier Lintel 26 (Fig. 7:3c). Here Bird-Jaguar is already fully dressed in the Tlaloc war costume and ready to enter the battle.
-Their first end and aim is to break the spirit of their subjects. They know that a poor- spirited man will never plot against anybody. Their second aim is to breed mutual distrust. Tyranny is never overthrown until people can begin to trust one another; and this is the reason why tyrants are always at war with the good. They feel that good men are dangerous to their authority, not only because they think it shame to be governed despotically but also because of their loyalty to themselves and to others and because of their refusal to betray one another or anybody else. The third and last aim of tyrants is to make their subjects incapable of action. Nobody attempts the impossible. Nobody, therefore, will attempt the overthrow of a tyranny, when all are incapable of action.
-<right>
+The capture itself appears on Lintel 8 of Temple 1. Bird-Jaguar, dressed in the battle gear his wife had helped him don, holds the unfortunate Jeweled-Skull by the wrist. Kan-Toc, the cahal he had shown twice before, yanks on the bound hair of his own captive. The manner of Bird-Jaguar’s presentation is highly important. Not only does he share his moment of victory with a subordinate, he represents the two captures[449] as equally important.[450] If it were not for the more elaborate detail of Bird- Jaguar’s costume and the larger size of the text describing his actions, a E casual onlooker might be hard-pressed to identify who was the king and who the lord. Both protagonists are about the same size and occupy the same compositional space.
-(Politics 5.1314a20[348])
-</right>
-</quote>
-And moral relativism does indeed leave us exposed to threats and bribes.
+Why would Bird-Jaguar share the stage of history with his wives and cahalob? In the age-old political traditions of the Maya, the high king’s performance of public ritual affirmed the legitimacy of his power and gained public support for his decisions. Few rulers before Bird-Jaguar had felt compelled to document these mutual performances in monumental narrative art. By allowing his subordinates onto the stage of public history, Bird-Jaguar was actually sharing with them some of his prerogatives as king.
-<quote>
+Shield-Jaguar had used this same strategy to deal with his wife Lady Xoc and the lineage she represented. Bird-Jaguar was merely extending this strategy further to include the cahal lineages whose alliances he needed to secure his own position and to insure that his son inherited the throne without dispute. Notice, however, that Bird-Jaguar produced his heir with a woman of this internal cahal lineage, opting for a different solution than his father had with his marriage to a foreigner. We suspect he did not want his own son, Chel-Te, to face the opposition from the internal lineages that had very probably kept him off the throne for ten B years.
-The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings. Being mere data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull them to sleep by any means at his command. Truckling, compromise, time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, would be on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is all that he means by good. The absolute moralist, on the other hand, when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain harmony by sacrificing the ideal interests. According to him, these latter should be as they are and not otherwise. Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom if need be, tragedy in a word—such are the solemn feasts of his inward faith. Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree. It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.[349]
-</quote>
-There are, in short, good practical reasons why would-be rebels and revolutionaries should at least hope that most or many of their company are sound objectivists, unlikely to be seduced away by servile fears or fancies. But the very fact of a universal ethic may begin to erode our earlier loyalties, to parents or companions, cities or sacred pledges. And this engenders yet another sort of “anarchistical” outcome: the cosmopolitan. The Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope may seem to be more obviously an “anarchist” than Aristotle, precisely because he did not acknowledge the authority either of particular princes or of ancient custom.[350] Early Stoics were similarly dismissive of many common precepts, urging instead that the better life was to “go along with nature,” to accept what usually happens in nature as the proper guide. The dead bodies of our friends, even of our family, were only meat, after all, and sexual desire and fulfilment was not limited to mates socially approved or allowed.[351] The “democratic” nostrum, that each should do as he pleases, was appropriate, at any rate, for those who reckoned themselves “wise”: “only the wise man is free, but the inferior are slaves” (Diogenes Laertius Lives 7.121).[352] It hardly mattered, in practice, whether such sages were openly atheists or else considered themselves the equal of the gods. Rejecting all established ideas of good order in the name of whatever principles they themselves saw reason to accept, they deconstructed notions like property, chastity, or even, in the end, humanity.
+Setting his son and heir into the midst of this web of alliance became the preoccupation of the second half of Bird-Jaguar’s reign, and the strategy and emphasis of his political art reflect his new goal (Fig. 7:16). The centrally placed Temple 33 was the first sculptural program designed to focus on the problem. In it Bird-Jaguar employed a uniquely Yaxchilan strategy. At Palenque, in the Group of the Cross, and in the murals at Bonampak, other Maya kings recorded specific rituals which were designed to publicly affirm a child’s status as the chosen heir. Bird-Jaguar never recorded a similar heir-designation rite for his own son, Chel-Te. Instead, he repeatedly depicted himself and the most important of his cahalob in public performance with his heir.
-This was certainly not what those early Stoics would themselves have wished, as staunch moral realists. Later Stoics were indeed cautious about allowing novices to read the earlier Stoic works[353] and were insistent that we should first of all remember who and what we are (fathers, sons, and citizens) and what our local duties might be (Epictetus Discourses 2.10[354]) before seeking to think and act as “citizens of the world,” cosmopolitai, with no overriding loyalty to household, polis, or imperial dictat (see Diogenes Laertius Lives 6.63). We need the background of family life and civil sympathies ever to conceive that there are other transcendent obligations. If those earlier forms are dismissed as only the deceits of despots how shall we ever find any better standard? Must not despotic rule be simply the norm of life, and our best hope be to join the ranks of despots?
+This new strategy was begun with the celebration of the five-tun period ending on 9.16.5.0.0 (April 12, 756). Once again, Bird-Jaguar created multiple representations of the event. He mounted the first of these depictions over the right-hand door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11c). In this scene, Bird-Jaguar holds a GII Manikin Scepter out toward the smaller figure of a cahal. This noble, named Ah Mac, is someone we have not seen before. The cahal holds his own Manikin Scepter and wears the same type of clothing as the king, although his headdress is different.
-<quote>
+The second depiction of this period-ending rite is located several hundred meters up the river in Temple ST[451] (Fig. 7:16), one of the first of a series of buildings to be erected in that new area of the city. On the central lintel (Fig. 7:17b), Bird-Jaguar is depicted with his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, celebrating the period ending with a bundle rite. The bundle holds the bloodletting instruments he will use to draw his holy blood. The composition of this scene echoes both his accession portrait on Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11a) and the bundle rite celebrated by his own father and mother to commemorate his birth (on Lintel 32, Fig. 7:13b). The replication of these earlier ritual actions was designed to deliberately link all these actions together in one great string of causality. Just as Shield- Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar had performed the bundle ritual before them, so would Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero reenact it for both his accession and this period ending. The parallel Bird-Jaguar wished to draw is obvious: The first pair of actors were his own parents; the second were the parents of his heir, Chel-Te.
-All these, my friends, are views which young people imbibe from men of science [sophoi], both prose-writers and poets, who maintain that the height of justice is to succeed by force; whence it comes that the young people are afflicted with a plague of impiety, as though the gods were not such as the law commands us to conceive them; and, because of this, factions also arise, when these teachers attract them towards the life that is right ‘according to nature,’ which consists in being master over the rest in reality, instead of being a slave to others according to legal convention.
-<right>
+The bundle ritual conducted by Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull- Zero is linked to Chel-Te by the events depicted in the lintels over the flanking doorways. Over the right portal, Chel-Te stands before Great- Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:17c), the patriarch of his mother’s lineage. Great-Skull- Zero is depicted here precisely because he is Chel-Te’s mother’s brother. Exactly this relationship (yichan[452] in Mayan) stands between his name and the heir’s below.
-(Plato Laws 10.890a)
-</right>
-</quote>
-It may be a lot more likely, of course, that most such would-be despots will find themselves only the tools of more successful tyrants, having no strength of mind or spirit to resist corruption. An anarchistical philosophy that is only nihilistic, a rejection of the very idea of ethical authority, will usually turn out to serve the interests of another. A better anarchistical philosophy will be the one toward which Aristotle may be seen to gesture: the ideal of a civil community (not necessarily even a single territory) small enough, self-confident enough, to preserve the ties of affection and established custom in a way that allows all those who can to share by turns in any important office, to manage their own affairs without overmuch oversight, and slowly to adapt any current customs in the light of changing circumstance and improving knowledge. There are other forms of social life than the master-slave relationship: we can, after all, be friends. Having learnt that truth from our immediate neighbourhood, we may begin to think even aliens and strangers are as human as ourselves (as Hierocles as well as Ezekiel advised.)[355] Without that beginning, thrown upon the world as if we were only turtles, we shall mostly end as slaves.
+Over the left door (Fig. 7:17a), Chel-Te stands before his mother who sits on a bench and gestures to him with her right hand. Since the flanking scenes have no date, we presume that all three lintels depict different actions that took place on the same day. First, Bird-Jaguar and his wife enacted a bundle rite; next, Chel-Te presented himself to his mother; finally, he appeared before his maternal uncle, who was the head of his mother’s clan. The goal of these juxtapositions was not to glorify Bird-Jaguar, but to show his wife’s lineage giving public support to his son as the heir.
+One year later, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself and his son over the central door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11b). The date is 9.16.6.0.0 (April 7, 757), and the event, the celebration of his fifth year in office as king. Both father and son display the same bird scepters Bird-Jaguar held out to Lady 6-Sky-Ahau forty days after his accession on June 12, 752 (Lintel 5, Fig. 7:15a). Bird-Jaguar chose this location carefully. Temple 33, if you remember, is the building that housed the only picture of Bird-Jaguar’s accession. It was also prominently located on the slope immediately above the temple program of legitimization. By depicting his son’s participation in this important ritual at this key site, Bird-Jaguar hoped to document in public and permanent form Chel-Te’s status as the heir.
-[312] S. R. L. Clark, “C. J. Cherryh: The Ties that Bind,” Yearbook of English Studies 37.2, ed. David Seed (London: Maney 2007) 197–214, rptd. Philosophical Futures (Frankfurt: Lang 2011) 189–208.
+Nine years later, Bird-Jaguar erected another series of lintels for his son, elaborating upon strategies he had used in earlier buildings. Going upriver again, he built a new temple next to the one that showed his son and wife celebrating the five-tun period ending. This time the event he chose to focus on was the fifteen-tun ending date, 9.16.15.0.0 (February 19, 766). Over the center door (Fig. 7:18), he depicted both himself and his son displaying GII Manikin Scepters in these period-ending rites.[453]
-[313] G.K.Chesterton,The Man Who Was Thursday, ed. Matthew Beaumont (London: Penguin 2011 [1908]) 36.
+Bird-Jaguar took a different strategy, however, in the two flanking lintels. Over the right door, he showed a woman, presumably his wife Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a Vision Serpent in her arms as she materializes a vision. Over the left door (Fig. 7:18c), he repeated for the second time the scene of his mother Lady Eveningstar acting with Shield- Jaguar on the occasion of his own birth during the Jupiter-Saturn hiero- phany. This juxtaposition is critical. The center lintel proves that Bird-Jaguar acted with his son, and the left lintel relegitimizes his own claim to the throne by declaring once again that his mother acted with his father in the same ritual sequence his father memorialized with Lady Xoc. This is but another example of Bird-Jaguar’s oft-repeated declaration that his mother was as good and as exalted as his father’s principal wife. Clearly the man “doth protest too much.”
-[314] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, ed. Richard Stalley (Oxford: OUP 1995) 185.
+Any problems Bird-Jaguar encountered, either because of his mother’s status or because of rivals with better claims to the throne, would very likely be inherited by his son. Aware of the difficulties his heir might still face, Bird-Jaguar was not yet willing to rest on his laurels. He apparently used the same period-ending date, 9.16.15.0.0, to seal the allegiance B of yet another cahal for his son. This fellow, Tilot, ruled the territory on the other side of the river from a subordinate town called La Pasadita. Three lintels mounted on a building at that site show Bird-Jaguar acting in public with Tilot. On the center lintel (Fig. 7:19b), Bird-Jaguar scatters blood on the period ending while Tilot stands by as his principal attendant. Flanking this critical scene is a picture of Tilot and Bird-Jaguar standing on either side of an unfortunate captive taken in battle on June 14, 759 (Fig. 7:19a). On the other side (Fig. 7:19c), Tilot stands before Chel-Te, who sits on a bench as either king or heir.
-[315] Aristotle 104–5.
+These lintels lent prestige to Tilot by depicting him in public performance with the high king. The third scene, however, was the payoff, for it shows this powerful cahal in public performance with Bird-Jaguar’s son, Chel-Te. The price Bird-Jaguar paid for this allegiance was the personal elevation of Tilot into a co-performer with the king; but by sharing his prerogatives and his place in history, Bird-Jaguar reinforced the submission of this cahal to his own authority and secured Tilot’s loyalty to the heir.
-[316] Aristotle 122
+[[][]]
-[317] Aristotle 283.
+The last monument Bird-Jaguar erected during his life continued his effort to secure the succession. It also brought his story full circle. Set on Lintel 9 (Fig. 7:20), the single lintel within Temple 2, a building situated on a terrace just below Temple I,[454] this scene shows Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of the queen’s lineage, conducting a flapstaff ritual with Bird- Jaguar. As we mentioned above, this was the ritual first enacted by Shield- Jaguar on June 27, 736 (Fig. 7:5a and b). It was also the ritual Bird-Jaguar enacted with his father on June 26, 741, just before Shield-Jaguar died (Fig. 7:5c). It was the ritual depicted on Lintel 33 as well (Fig. 7:5d), on June 26, 747, with Bird-Jaguar as the sole actor. This final ritual took place on June 20, 768, nearly thirty-two years after its first enactment.
-[318] See S. R. L. Clark, “Slaves and Citizens,” Philosophy 60 (1985): 27–46, rptd. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics and Politics (London: Routledge 1999) 23–39.
+The flapstaff rituals had always been critical to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy to prove himself the legitimate heir to Shield-Jaguar. To show himself enacting the same event with his brother-in-law was an extraordinary elevation of that cahal’s prestige. But his reason for allowing such honor to fall to Great-Skull-Zero is also patently clear from the text on Lintel 9. There Great-Skull-Zero is named yichan ahau, “the brother of the mother of the ahau (read ‘heir’).” Bird-Jaguar participated in this double b display to insure that Great-Skull-Zero would support Chel-Te’s assumption of the throne after Bird-Jaguar’s death. The strategy apparently worked, for Chel-Te took the throne successfully and was known thereafter as the namesake of his famous grandfather, Shield-Jaguar.
-[319] Aristotle 231.
+Ironically, even though Bird-Jaguar had had problems demonstrating his right to the throne on his home ground, his regional prestige had been secure even before he was formally installed as king. The king of Piedras Negras had felt his presence prestigious enough to invite him to participate in the designation of the Piedras Negras heir; and this event took place three years before Bird-Jaguar was even crowned. Bird-Jag- uar’s royal visit is recorded in an extraordinary wall panel (Fig. 7:21) commissioned retrospectively by Ruler 7 of Piedras Negras. The panel depicts a palace scene where a celebration is taking place. The occasion is the heir-designation of Ruler 5, Ruler 7’s predecessor. The events recorded on the wall panel are these: On July 31, 749 (9.15.18.3.13), Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras celebrated the end of his first twenty tuns as king, in a ritual witnessed by Jaguar ofYaxchilan,[455] who had come down the river by canoe to participate in it. The date of this anniversary falls during the period when Yaxchilan was without a king. We cannot identify the Yaxchilan visitor with absolute certainty, but it was most likely Bird-Jaguar, who would have come as the de facto king of Yaxchilan.
-[320] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968 [1790]) 172.
+When next Bird-Jaguar appears in a Piedras Negras text, his name and actions are clear. The cahalob portrayed in the scene on this particular wall panel are divided into four groups. The king of Piedras Negras sits on a bench and talks to the seven cahalob seated on the step below him. An ornamental pot divides them into two groups—one of three and another of four people. On the king’s immediate right stands an adult and at least three smaller figures, one of which is the heir to the Piedras Negras throne.[456] At the king’s far right stands a group of three lords talking among themselves. The texts around and in front of this latter group identify these people as Yaxchilan lords; and, according to the text next to the Piedras Negras king, one of them is the great Bird-Jaguar himself.
-[321] Aristotle 195.
+This scene took place on October 20, 757 (9.16.6.9.16), during the fifth year of Bird-Jaguar’s reign. He had come down the river to conduct a bundle rite for the designation of the Piedras Negras heir. This ritual was apparently celebrated just in the nick of time, for forty-one days later, on November 30, Ruler 4 died. Ruler 5, the heir whose inheritance Bird- Jaguar publicly affirmed, took the throne on March 30, 758 (9.16.6.17.17).
-[322] Sextus Empiricus, Works, trans. Robert Bury, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2014) 205–7.
+Interestingly enough, Bird-Jaguar’s visit to Piedras Negras was never recorded in the public forum at Yaxchilan. It would seem that the Piedras Negras heir and his descendants are the ones who gained prestige from this visit and wished to record it for their posterity. What then did Bird- Jaguar gain? Presumably, if he went to Piedras Negras at the behest of Ruler 4 to give his public support to the Piedras Negras heir, he secured reciprocal support for his own son’s claim.
-[323] Aristotle 256.
+Bird-Jaguar’s political problems and his use of monumental art to work out solutions were by no means novel either to his reign or to the political experience at Yaxchilan. Other Maya rulers, such as Pacal and Chan-Bahlum of Palenque, had their own problems with succession. Within the history of the Classic Maya, however, Bird-Jaguar’s solution— sharing the public forum with powerful political allies—was new. The fact that this strategy worked so well would gradually lead to its adaptation by other kings, up and down the Usumacinta River, in the years to come.
-[324] Aristotle 262.
+Before Bird-Jaguar, Maya kings did not depict themselves on public monuments with cahalob, regardless of how noble or powerful these nobles might have been or how important to the king’s political machinations they were. In indoor mural paintings, of course, the practice was different. Even in the very early murals of Uaxactun, the court, not just the king, was represented. On stelae and architectural lintels, however, kings normally depicted only themselves and occasionally family members—especially mothers and fathers from whom they claimed legitimate inheritance. Cahalob could and did commission monuments to celebrate important events in their lives, but they erected them in their own house compounds or in the subordinate communities they ruled for the high kings. Bird-Jaguar was the first to elevate his cahalob to stand beside him in the public eye. He did so to secure their support for his claim to the throne. That alliance must have been a fragile one, however, for he was forced to share the stage of history with them again and again in order to maintain the alliance, both for himself and his son.
-[325] Aristotle 106–7.
+Bird-Jaguar was not the first Maya king to find himself in a struggle to command the succession. Primogeniture can go wrong as often as right, especially when ambitious offspring from multiple marriages are competing for the throne. We can be sure that Bird-Jaguar was not the first son of a foreign wife to compete for a Maya throne. Others before him manipulated the system and strove to use the nobility to support their claim. Bird-Jaguar, however, was the first to exalt those cahalob by depicting them standing beside him in the public record, and we know he did not do so out of a sense of largess. Those cahalob he portrayed with him sold their loyalty for a piece of Yaxchilan’s public history. The price they—and B the people of the city—paid was more than sworn fealty to the king. The precedents established by Bird-Jaguar were dangerous and eventually debilitating. A king with Bird-Jaguar’s personal charisma and ferocity in battle could afford to share the power of the high kingship; but the legacy of conciliar power he left to the cahal families he honored was not so well commanded by his descendants.
-[326] David Keyt, “Aristotle, and the Ancient Roots of Anarchism,” Topoi 15 (1996): 135; see also “Aristotle, and Anarchism,” Reason Papers 18 (1993): 133–52, rptd. Aristotle’s Politics, ed. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety (Oxford: Rowman 2005) 203–22.
+. Copán: The Death of First Dawn[457]
-[327] Aristotle 104–5.
+The mountain spine of the Americas wends its way through Maya country, creating a cool high region of mists and towering volcanoes. From the base of these mountains, the peninsula of Yucatán stretches far to the north through the territory of the kings. Located on the southeastern margin of the Maya world, the Copan River drains the valley system it has carved from the rugged, forest-shrouded mountains of western Honduras. This waterway eventually joins the mighty Motagua River on its way to the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea. The broadest valley in this system shares its name, Copan, with that river.[458]
-[328] See Richard Mulgan, “Lycophron and Greek Theories of Social Contract,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40.1 (1979): 121–8.
+This river is responsible for the richness of the land in the Copan Valley. Each year during the rains of summer and fall, floodw’aters deposit the alluvial soils from the mud-laden river waters onto the valley floor. The resulting fertile bottomlands follow the ambling path of the river through low foothills and the higher ridge lands of the rugged mountains (Fig. 8:1). On their upper reaches, these mountains are covered by pine forests, while deeper in the valley, they are covered with tropical growth—including the mighty ceiba, the sacred tree of all Mesoamericans.
-[329] Translations of Herodotus are taken from Herodotus, The Histories, trans. George Rawlinson (London: Dent 1910).
+From the dawn of time, the Copan Valley was an inviting place to live. Between 1100 B.C. and 900 B.C. the first settlers, who were just learning to rely on agriculture to feed themselves, drifted into the valley from the Guatemalan highlands or perhaps the adjacent mountains of El Salvador. These earliest immigrants lived in temporary camps, enjoying a good life in the tall gallery forest along the water’s edge. They hunted deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary[459] among the trees and ate the maize and beans they harvested from clearings they had cut with stone axes. By 900 B.C., their farmer descendants had built permanent homes and spread out to occupy the entire valley. There, throughout the bottomlands and foothills, they left the debris of their pottery cooking vessels and the bowls, plates, and cups of their daily meals. Eventually these people established at least three villages—one in the Sepulturas Group, another in the area called the Bosque, and the last under the Great Plaza later built by Copan’s kings (Fig. 8:9).
-[330] So also Aristotle: “Laws resting on unwritten custom are even more sovereign, and concerned with issues of still more sovereign importance, than written laws; and this suggests that, even if the rule of a man be safer than the rule of written law, it need not therefore be safer than the rule of unwritten law” (3.1287b1; 128).
+These prosperous pioneering farmers buried their loved ones under their patio floors within earshot of the children and descendants working and playing above them. In proximity to their homes and families, ancestral spirits could dwell happily in the Otherworld. When the family patriarch stood on the patio and conducted a bloodletting, he knew the ancestors were below his feet—close at hand should he want to call them forth. The departed were buried with an array of gifts and personal belongings, including quantities of highly prized jade, as well as incised and painted pottery with sacred images the Maya had borrowed from the I Olmec—the creators of the first great interregional system of thought and art in Mesoamerica.[460]
-[331] Aristotle 298.
+These rites for the beloved dead show us that the people of the valley had already begun the process that led to the creation of social stratification, for the privileged were more able than others to take rich offerings with them into Xibalba. The differences in social standing among families in the villages, engendered by bountiful harvests or success in varying commercial enterprises, would become both the foundation of kingship and its burden in the centuries to come. During the Middle Preclassic period, however, the people in the Copán Valley were blessed with an unfailing abundance of all the requirements of life. Their prosperity may well have outstripped even their contemporaries in the lowlands of the Petén, for the quantity of jade found in their tombs exceeds all other burials known from that time.[461]
-[332] Aristotle 252
+By contrast, we know little of the Copanccs who lived in the valley during the Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D.150). This was the time when their Maya brethren in the lowlands, at places like Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactún, were acknowledging their first kings. In contrast, Copán saw a major reduction of population and building activity during this 450-year span. Archaeologists have found traces of human activity from the first three centuries of this period in only two locations—one south and the other southwest of the Acropolis. And even this weak trace disappears from the record during the last 150 years of this period.
-[333] Aristotle 219–20. See also Ps-Xenophon: “Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can’t hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave.” Ps-Xenophon, “Constitution of Athens,” Works, by Xenophon, trans. Edgar Marchant, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1984) 7: 481 (2.10).
+Scholars working on the history of the Copán Valley have no explanation for this curious lapse. This inexplicable disappearance of population from a thriving area becomes even more enigmatic when compared with Maya activities in both the Pacific areas to the south and the lowlands to the north. In all other parts of the Maya world, the Late Preclassic was a time of exuberant innovation and social experimentation. It was a time when the institutions of government achieved their Classic forms with the invention of kingship. To all appearances, however, the valley of Copán was seriously depopulated, and those who lived among the remnants of a more glorious past did not participate in the events sweeping the Maya society of that time. Kingship, for the Copanecs, would come to the valley only in later years when the mythology and symbolism of governance had already been developed.
-[334] Ps-Xenophon 7: 474–507.
+By A.D. 200, however, the valley of Copán had recovered and her people had joined the mainstream of Classic Maya life. The construction of the first levels of the Acropolis stimulated a series of building projects, including floors and platforms that would serve, in future centuries, as the foundations lor the Great Plaza, the Ballcourt, and the Acropolis of Copán’s cultural apogee (Fig. 8:1). During this early time, farmers and craftspeople settled the rich agricultural bottomlands north of the river, building their homes as close as possible to the valley’s growing center of power.
-[335] Aristotle 299–300.
+This pattern of settlement created no difficulties in the beginning when there was plenty of farmland and only a moderate number of people to support. But slowly the surrounding green sea of maize and forest gave way to a city of white and red plazas—with fine structures of stone, wood, and thatch all jostling for position. Soon, social standing and proximity to the dynamic pulse of the city became more important to these exuberant people than their own food production. Meter by meter, over the centuries, they usurped the richest cropland, constructing their lineage compounds on acreage that used to be fields, gradually forcing the farmers up into the margins of the valley.[462] These new urban elite established particularly dense neighborhoods around the Acropolis, in the area now under the modern village of Copan, and on the ridge above it at a spot called El Cerro de las Mesas. Aristocrats and commoners alike vied with each other for the privilege of residing in the reflected brilliance of the Acropolis and the concentration of power it represented.
-[336] Ps-Xenophon 7: 497.
+[[][Fig. 8:2 The Founding of Copan as a Kingdom<br><sub>b-c: drawing by B.W. Fash</sub>]]
-[337] Ps-Xenophon 7: 495–7.
+The Classic dynastic chronicles of Copan refer to this dawning era of the kingdom in ways that closely match the archaeological evidence. Later Copan kings remembered the date A.D. 160 as the year their kingdom was established as a political entity. At least three kings recorded 8.6.0.0.0 (December 18, A.D. 159) as a critical early date of the city, and Stela 1 (Fig. 8:2) records the date July 13, A.D. 160, in connection with the glyph that signifies Copan both as a physical location and a political entity. Unfortunately, the area of the text that once recorded the precise event is now destroyed, but we believe that later Copanecs honored this date as the founding of their kingdom.[463]
-[338] Aristotle 293.
+By A.D. 426, Copan’s ruling dynasty was founded and the principle of kingship was accepted by the elites reemcrging in the valley society after the dormancy of the Late Preclassic period. No doubt here as elsewhere in the Maya world, the advent of this institution consolidated the kingdom, creating a politically coherent court in which the ahauob could air their differences and rivalries while at the same time presenting a unified front to their followers.
-[339] Aristotle 279.
+Yax-Kuk-Mo’ (“Blue-Quetzal-Macaw”), who founded the ruling dynasty, appears in the historical and archaeological record[464] about 260 years after the recovery from the Late Preclassic slump. We know that he founded the dynasty of kings who led the kingdom of Copan throughout the Classic period. All the subsequent kings of Copan counted their numerical position in the succession from him, naming themselves, for example, “the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[465] In all, sixteen descendants followed Yax-Kuk-Mo’ onto Copan’s throne, and these kings ruled the valley for the next four hundred years.
-[340] Jonathan Barnes, “Aristotle, and Political Liberty,” Aristoteles “Politik”: Akten des XI. Symposium Aristoteli- cum. Friedrichshafen/Bodensee 25.8—3.9.1987, ed. Günther Patzig, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck 1990) 249–63, rptd. Mantissa: Essays in Ancient Philosophy IV, ed. Maddalena Bonelli (Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 2015) 36—55. The remark is repeated by Andres Rosler, Political Authority and Obligation in Aristotle (Oxford: Clar- endon-OUP 2005) 151; Rosler also appears to equate the anarchist ideal with a “political vacuum” (153).
+| <verbatim>#</verbatim> | <strong>Name</strong> | <strong>Accession</strong> | <strong>Death</strong> | <strong>Other dates</strong> |
+| <strong>1</strong> | <strong>Yax-Kuk-Mo’</strong> | | | <strong>426–435?</strong> |
+| 2 | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>3</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>4</strong> | <strong>Cu-Ix</strong> | | | <strong>465 ± 15 yrs</strong> |
+| <strong>5</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>6</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>7</strong> | <strong>Waterlily-Jaguar</strong> | | | <strong>504–544 +</strong> |
+| <strong>8</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>9</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | <strong>551, Dec. 30</strong> | <strong>????</strong> |
+| <strong>10</strong> | <strong>Moon-Jaguar</strong> | <strong>553, May 26</strong> | <strong>578, Oct. 26</strong> | |
+| <strong>11</strong> | <strong>Butz’-Chan</strong> | <strong>578, Nov. 19</strong> | <strong>626, Jan. 23</strong> | |
+| <strong>12</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Imix-God K</strong> | <strong>628, Feb. 8</strong> | <strong>695, Jun. 18</strong> | |
+| <strong>13</strong> | <strong>18-Rabbit-God K</strong> | <strong>695, Jul. 9</strong> | <strong>738, May 3</strong> | |
+| <strong>14</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Monkey</strong> | <strong>738, Jun. 11</strong> | <strong>749, Feb. 4</strong> | |
+| <strong>15</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Shell</strong> | <strong>749, Feb. 18</strong> | <strong>????</strong> | |
+| <strong>16</strong> | <strong>Yax-Pac</strong> | <strong>763, Jul. 2</strong> | <strong>820, May 6 -(</strong> | <strong>mos.</strong> |
+| <strong>17</strong> | <strong>U-Cit-Tok</strong> | <strong>????</strong> | <strong>822, Feb. 10</strong> | |
-[341] See S. R. L. Clark, “Townships, Brigands and a Shared Religion,” Griffith Law Review 21 (2012): 392—412.
+In actuality, Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the first king of Copan. It is probable, however, that he earned the designation of founder because he exemplified the charismatic qualities of the divine ahau better than any of his predecessors. It is important to remember that here, as at Palenque and the other kingdoms that acknowledged such great statesmen, the definition of a founding ancestor served a deeper social purpose. Aristocrats who descended from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ constituted a distinct cluster of noble families, the clan of the kings, by birth superior to all the other elite in the valley. In principle, these people owed the reigning monarch a special measure of loyalty and support.
-[342] Peter Kropotkin, Peter Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Petr Alekseevich (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger 2010 [1927]). 157, ctd. Brian Morris, Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (Oakland, CA: PM 2015) 243.
+The earliest date associated with Yax-Kuk-Mo’, 8.19.0.0.0, (February 1, 426), appears as retrospective history on Stela 15, a monument of the seventh successor, Waterlily-Jaguar. At the other end of the historical record, Yax-Pac, the sixteenth successor and the last great king of the dynasty, also recorded events in the life of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He did so on his Altar Q (Fig. 8:3), which he called the “Altar of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” Yax-Pac used the sides of the altar to unfold the sixteen successors of his line, beginning with the founder and ending with himself. On the top, he inscribed two important deeds of Yax-Kuk’-Mo’.[466] There we can read that on 8.19.10.10.17 (September 6, 426), Yax-Kuk-Mo’ displayed the God K scepter of royal authority. Three days later on 8.19.10.11.0 (September 9) I Yax-Kuk-Mo’ “came” or “arrived” as the founder of the lineage[467] (Fig. 8:4a and b). Yax-Pac recorded these two events as if they were the fundamental actions that spawned the dynasty and the kingdom. His commemoration of these events was critical to his campaign for political support from the many ahauob who reckoned their aristocratic pedigree from this founder. Later in the chapter we shall see why Yax-Pac was so anxious to associate himself publicly with the charismatic founder of his dynasty.
-[343] David Brooks, “The Governing Cancer of Our Time,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 2016, [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.nytimes.]] [[http://www.nytimes.com][com/2016/02/26/opinion/the-governing-cancer-of-our-time.html]]. One reader of the current chapter correctly comments that a principal cause of conflict may be, exactly, a disagreement about what can sensibly or justly be decided by individual persons or smaller collectives, without any need to impose a universal rule. Neither appeals to an imagined “common good” nor to a supposed “right of private property” will be uncontroversial—especially as even the latter will itself constitute a demand to impose a universal rule, as though it is obvious who “owns” what, or what obligations such “ownership” imposes either on the would-be proprietor or on others.
+The thirteenth successor, a particularly powerful man named 18- Rabbit, also evoked these early rituals of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the basis of authority over his own ahauob. On Stela J, 18-Rabbit inscribed his own accession and that of his immediate predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K, in an intricate text rendered in the form of a mat, the symbol of the kingly throne. On the first strand of the mat, he linked 9.13.10.0.0, the day this extraordinary monument was dedicated, to 9.0.0.0.0 (December 11, 435), a day when Yax-Kuk-Mo’ performed another “God K-in-hand” event (Fig. 8:4c).
-[344] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 2d ed., 3 vols. (London: Allen 1966) 1:71.
+Recent excavations under the Acropolis have turned up a building erected either during or shortly after the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Discovered under the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (10L-26), this newly excavated temple once held in its back chamber a stela dated at 9.0.0.0.0,[468] Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is recorded as the king in power when the baktun turned, while his son, the second king of the dynasty, was the owner of this tree-stone. Most important for our understanding of Copan’s history, the text associates the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ with the same date that would be evoked by his descendant, 18-Rabbit. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not an invention of later kings who were fabricating a glorified past for political reasons. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ did rule Copan, and in doing so he left a sacred legacy of tree-stones and temples to his descendants that is now coming to light in the excavations of the Acropolis.
-[345] Anonymous. See Ian D. Morris, “Who Steals the Common from the Goose?” (17 March 2018) at[[http://www.iandavidmorris.com/][www.]] [[http://www.iandavidmorris.com/][iandavidmorris.com/who-steals-the-common-from-the-goose/ ]](accessed 17 August 2020).
+This early temple, which is called Papagayo by the archaeologists,[469] was built only a few meters away from the first Ballcourt, which had been built during an earlier predynastic time. These two buildings became two of Copan’s central metaphors of power throughout its recorded history— the temple of kings and the ballcourt portal to the Otherworld. As the centuries progressed, the successors of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ commissioned temple after temple, building layer upon layer until that first temple and its companions grew into a range of sacred mountains overlooking a forest of tree-stones in the Great Plaza below.[470]
-[346] Further on Aristotle’s economic theory: Scott Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Theory, 2d ed. (New York, NY: OUP 1997).
+Papagayo temple held not only the 9.0.0.0.0 tree-stone, but also a step placed inside it during a remodeling project by the fourth successor, a ruler named Cu-Ix. Its text and accumulating evidence from ongoing excavations show that Papagayo was embedded in predynastic architecture and that it remained a focus of dynastic activity for centuries after the founder died.[471] This marvelous little temple emerged from obscurity when a tunnel was excavated into the southwest corner of the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs.[472] Both the step and the above-mentioned stela are part of the growing body of inscriptions from the Early Classic period that have been emerging in recent excavations. Among the early kings who have been identified from this collection of inscriptions are the first ruler, Yax-Kuk-Mo’; his son, the second ruler; the fourth, Cu-Ix; the seventh, Waterlily-Jaguar, who left us two tree-stones (Stelae 15 and E) in the Great Plaza; the tenth, Moon-Jaguar, who left at least one tree-stone in the area under the modern village; and the eleventh, Butz’-Chan, who erected a tree-stone both in the village area and in the growing Acropolis. (See Fig. 8:3b for a summary of chronology that has been recovered to date.)[473]
-[347] The Hellenistic Philosophers 1: Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary, ed. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (Cambridge: CUP 1987) 432—3 [67S].
+Late Classic Copanec kings considered that their authority sprang from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and his charismatic performance as king. From his reign onward, Copan’s dynastic history unfolded steadily until the system itself collapsed four hundred years later when the civilization of the Classic Maya as a whole failed. Many of the works of Copan’s earliest kings still lie buried under the Acropolis and inside other structures, and are just beginning to come to light. Unfortunately, even when we uncover a buried building or find a fragmentary stela, we rarely find names associated with it. The reason for this is clear. Inscriptions are often unreadable, either because they were already old and worn when they were buried or because they were ritually “terminated” when they were placed in their final resting places. Earlier monuments were torn down to make room for the newer ones, and older buildings were either buried or broken up to be recycled as building materials. There is reason to suspect, however, that the destruction and reuse in construction of inscriptional materials was not a casual matter. The Copanecs, like other Maya, probably defused the power of places and objects they wished to cover or dispose of through special termination rituals involving defacement and careful breakage. These rituals are a source of much of the damage to early inscriptions at Copan.
-[348] Aristotle 220—1.
+Our access to recorded history really begins in earnest with the twelfth successor, Smoke-Imix-God K. This ruler stands out as a man of extraordinary accomplishment in a world that produced many great kings. One of the longest-lived kings in Copan’s history, he reigned for sixty-seven years, from A.D. 628 to 695. He presided over the Late Classic explosion of Copan into a major power in the Maya world, expanding the dominion of its dynasty to the widest extent it would ever know. The period ending on 9.11.0.0.0 (A.D. 652) represented one of the pinnacles of his reign. On that date, he erected a series of stelae throughout the valley, making it his personal sacred space in the same manner that other kings marked out the more modest spaces of pyramid summits and plazas for their ecstatic communion.[474] At the eastern entrance to the valley, he set Stelae 23, 13, 12, and at the western entrance, Stelae 10 and 19, all pivoting off Stelae 2 and 3 set up in the huge main plaza north of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:5a). Thus Smoke-Imix-God K activated the entire city of Copan and its valley as his Otherworld portal. Even recalcitrant lords of the noble lineages might hesitate to plot intrigue within the supernatural perimeter of a king so favored by the Ancestors.
-[349] William James, “Rationality, Activity and Faith,” Princeton Review 2 (July—Dec. 1882): 82, rptd. as part of “The Sentiment of Rationality,” William James, The Will to Believe (New York, NY: Longmans 1896) 63—110. There is also, of course, a downside to such “fanaticism”: those willing to compromise their principles may fight more genuinely “civil” wars.
+Smoke-Imix-God K’s conversion of the entire community of the Copan Valley into a magical instrument bent to his will was more than a boastful gesture. Under his aegis, the Copan nobility enjoyed prestige and wealth at the expense of their rivals in neighboring cities. They were the dominant elite of Maya civilization’s southeastern region.[475] On the same 9.11.0.0.0 period ending, Smoke-Imix-God K celebrated his preeminence over his nearest neighbor, Quirigua, by erecting Altar L there[476] (Fig. 8:5b). In years to come this nearby kingdom, which straddled the rich trade routes of the Motagua River, would throw off the yoke of Copan in a spectacular battle. As Smoke-Imix-God K pursued his dream of empire, however, that day was far in the future. While the king grasped lands to the north and west on the Motagua, Maya lords, most likely from his own city, established themselves in the Valley of La Venta on the Chamelecon River between Copan and their non-Maya neighbors to the east.[477] In the hands of the powerful and ambitious Smoke-Imix-God K, Copan may have been one of the largest Maya royal territories of its time.
-[350] See Keyt, “Roots” 130.
+In A.D. 695, 18-Rabbit succeeded Smoke-Imix-God K and began his own transformation of his ancestors’ work. Where his predecessor had defined the boundaries of the sacred valley, 18-Rabbit chose the pivotal center of Copan as the stage for his own contribution to the glorious I history of the dynasty. Exhorting the truly exceptional sculptors, architects, scribes, and artisans of his time to extend their arts well beyond the limits of precedence, 18-Rabbit brought about the creation of many beautiful dramas in stone. In the course of a lifetime, he transformed the center of Copan into a unique and beautiful expression of Maya royal power that has endured to the present, unfailingly touching the most dispassionate of modern visitors.
-[351] Long and Sedley 430–1 [67E-G]).
+One of his many projects was the remodeling of the Ballcourt. 18- Rabbit capped the older markers created by his predecessors with new images emphasizing his personal role as the incarnation of the Ancestral Hero Twins in their triumph over the Lords of Death. Next to the Ballcourt and within the adjacent space of the Great Plaza, 18-Rabbit also created a symbolic forest of te-tunob (Fig. 8:6). Within this magnificent grove each tree-stone bore his portrait in the guise of a god he had manifested through ecstatic ritual. All the tree-stones found in the Great Plaza were placed there between 9.14.0.0.0 and 9.15.5.0.0 (a.1). 711 — 736).[478]
-[352] Long and Sedley 431–2 [67M]).
+One of 18-Rabbit’s final projects focused on the Acropolis directly south of his Ballcourt. There he rebuilt one of the ancient living mountains of his forebears, a monument referred to today as Temple 22.[479] 18-Rabbit commissioned his best artists to decorate this amazing building inside and out with deeply carved stone sculpture. Outside the temple, great Witz Monsters reared at the four corners of the cosmos, while the doorway of the inner sanctum, the king’s portal to the Otherworld, was framed by an arching Celestial Monster—the sky of the apotheosized Ancestors—laced with the blood scrolls of royal sacrifice (Pl. <verbatim>#).</verbatim> This sky of the king was held aloft by Pauahtunob, the age-old burden-bearers who stand at the four points of the compass and lift the heavens above the earth. Here they allowed the king to enter the darkness where only divine ahauob could go and return alive.
-[353] Long and Sedley 430 [67E]).
+The magnificence of 18-Rabbit’s work lay not in the themes, which were traditional for Copan and all Maya ahauob, but rather in their execution. Unlike Pacal and Chan-Bahlum at Palenque, 18-Rabbit revealed no special political agenda in his efforts. Instead he focused solely upon the centrality of the king in the life of the state. From Smoke-Imix- God K he had inherited a court of nobles already accustomed to governing neighboring cities. To control these noble subordinates, 18-Rabbit needed to energetically and eloquently assert the prerogatives of his kingship over them. As we can see from the examples of his monumental art shown above, he accomplished his purpose with theological sophistication and poetic passion. Few kings in Maya history have ever wielded the canon of royal power with results as truly breathtaking as those of 18-Rabbit. But this balance of power was not to hold for long. From the clear vantage afforded us by hindsight, we can understand the root of the disaster that ended his reign. His beautiful expressions of the pivotal role of the divine king were aimed at a noble audience who would become increasingly convinced of their own ability to manage the affairs of the kingdom without the king.
-[354] Long and Sedley 364 [59Q]).
+The beginning of the end can be seen in the monumental art created by these very nobles. As the prosperity of the kingdom overflowed from the king to the valley elite, this elite began putting up monuments which, although erected in private and not public space, emulated royal practices. During 18-Rabbit’s reign, for example, a lineage of scribes occupying Compound 9N-8 built an extraordinary family temple (Structure 9N-82- Sub; Pl. <verbatim>#)</verbatim> dedicated to God N, the patron god of writing, and hence, of history itself. The texts of the temple mention the high king and probably also his predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K.[480] Not only were the nobility of 18-Rabbit’s reign privileged to commission such elaborately decorated buildings, they were able to take full advantage of the extraordinary artistic talent flourishing in the community of this time. In the case of Structure 9N-82, the <verbatim>scribes</verbatim> lineage was able to hire one of the finest masters in the valley to execute their sculpture.
-[355] Long and Sedley 349–50 [57G]).
+During 18-Rabbit’s forty-two-year reign, Copan not only flourished as an artistic center of the first rank, but also became an multi-ethnic society, drawing in non-Maya people from the central region of Honduras around Lake Yojoa and Comayagua.[481] The recruitment of these people into the city created a truly cosmopolitan state, but one in which a slight mythological adjustment had to be made. Traditionally, the high king had always been the living manifestation of the special covenant which existed between the Maya people and their supernatural ancestors. By bringing in people from a non-Maya ethnic group, however, 18-Rabbit had to expand upon this tradition. There is not the slightest hint of unorthodox ritual in his monuments. Still, his lavish amplification of the cult of the king as god and supernatural hero may register his public appeal to barbarians less knowledgeable in Maya theology, and more impressed by pageantry, than local aristocrats. He may have persuaded such new converts to Maya culture that he was indeed their advocate to the Other- world, just as he was the advocate for his own people. Whether or not he enacted such a strategy, he did succeed in enhancing the power base of his kingdom and increasing the population of the valley.[482]
-<br>
+As had happened in other ambitious Late Classic kingdoms, the path of war and expansion taken by Copan finally turned back upon itself. The unfortunate 18-Rabbit reaped the whirlwind caused by his predecessor’s actions. In mid-career and at the height of his glory, he had installed a new ruler named Cauac-Sky (Fig. 8:7) at Quirigua, the kingdom brought under the hegemony of Copan by his father, Smoke- Imix-God K. The installation ritual, a “God K-in-hand” event, had taken place on January 2, A.D. 725, in “the land of (u cab}” 18-Rabbit of Copan.[483] Thirteen years after this accession, Cauac-Sky turned on his liege lord and attacked, taking 18-Rabbit captive in battle and sacrificing him at Quirigua on May 3, 738.[484]
-** 7. Kant on Anarchy
+The subsequent fate of Copan was profoundly different from that of Tikal or Naranjo after their defeat by Caracol. In their excavations, archaeologists have found no evidence that Quirigua dominated Copan at all. The population of Copan continued to burgeon, its lords pursued their architectural plans, and its merchants plied their trade with the rest of Honduras. In other words, everything was business as usual. A person looking at the record of the city’s economic and social life would never l> guess that anything had changed.[485]
-*Oliver Sensen*
+Although it is possible that Cauac-Sky just wasn’t able to dominate so vast a neighbor from his more modest city, a more convincing explanation to this puzzle emerges. The absence of effect in the archaeological record may register a fundamental reaction of the Copan people themselves. The death of the king precipitated no faltering in the orderly world of the nobility and common tolk, perhaps because they were coming to believe that they could get along without a king. Apparently, the ruling dynasty was in no position to challenge that belief for quite some time. According to the inscriptional record, it took the dynasty almost twenty years to recover the prestige it lost when 18-Rabbit succumbed to his rival. Ultimately, this failure fooled the patriarchs of the subordinate lineages into believing that their civilized world could survive quite well without a king at the center.
-*** I. Introduction
+There was still a king at Copan, however, even if he was an unremarkable one. Thirty-nine days after the defeat of 18-Rabbit, on a day close to the maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar,[486] a new king named Smoke-Monkey acceded to the throne. We have not been able to associate this king with any stelae or structures at Copan. In fact, the only historical episode of his reign that we know of was recorded by one of his descendants. This event, a first appearance of Eveningstar, was recorded in Temple 11 by the sixteenth successor of the dynasty, Yax-Pac.[487] After ruling for ten silent years, Smoke-Monkey died, and Smoke-Shell, his son,[488] became the king on February 18, 749.
-Why should one avoid anarchy, according to Immanuel Kant? Kant equates anarchy with “lack of any government,”[356] a condition in which there are no legitimate state powers.[357] He only uses the term “anarchy” eleven times in his published writings, and does not devote a separate chapter or essay to the topic. But he describes a state without a legitimate government as a state of nature, and so Kant’s discussion of anarchy then becomes the question why one should leave the state of nature, and submit to a legitimate government. The Kant literature answers this question in different ways.
+Although Smoke-Shell reigned only fourteen years, he succeeded in reestablishing the tradition of glorious public performance, if not the glory, of his dynasty. In contrast to the long decades of humiliation that were the price of defeat paid by the ahauob of Tikal and Naranjo, Smoke- Shell brought his kingdom back from the ignominy of defeat within a katun. The strategy he used featured two main components: an ambitious building program and a judicious political marriage.
-In this chapter, I first describe how Kant conceives of the state of nature (see Section II). I then present a common interpretation in the Kant literature of why one should leave the state of nature (Section III), and argue for an alternative interpretation (sections IV-VII). Finally, I contrast Kant’s views with the influential conceptions of Hobbes and Locke (Section VIII). I argue that Kant conceives of the demand to leave the state of nature as a prescription of reason. However, reason does not prescribe it as a means to something else we want, such as safety, happiness, or a maximum of freedom, but as a categorical command.
+Shortly after taking the throne, Smoke-Shell began reconstruction work[489] on one of the oldest and most sacred points in the city center—the locus that had grown over that very early temple that contained the 9.0.0.0.0 temple and its adjacent Ballcourt. The magnificent result of his effort, the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (Structure 10L-26), is one of the premier monuments of the New World and a unique expression of the supernatural path of kings.[490] Inscribed upon this stairway of carved risers is the longest Precolumbian text known in the New World, comprising over twenty-two hundred glyphs.[491] This elegant text records the accessions and deaths of each of the high kings of the Yax-Kuk-Mo’ dynasty. This record of Copan’s divine history rises out of the mouth of an inverted Vision Serpent, pouring like a prophetic revelation of the cosmos, compelling the ancestors of Smoke-Shell to return through the sacred portal he 1 had activated for them. Flowing upward in the midst of this chronicle sit the last five successors of the dynasty, Smoke-Monkey, 18-Rabbit, Smoke- F Imix-God K, Butz’-Chan, and Moon-Jaguar, carved in life-sized portraits <verbatim><</verbatim> (Fig. 8:8). These ancestors are girded in the battle gear of Tlaloc-Venus 1 conquest war we have seen in full bloom at Tikal, Caracol, and Dos Pilas. In his version of history, Smoke-Shell proclaimed the prowess of his predecessors as warlords despite the personal defeat of 18-Rabbit by a vassal ahau.
-*** II. Kant on the State of Nature
+As the building on his portal progressed, Smoke-Shell sent to a faraway, exotic place to bring a new wife to Copan. From the opposite side of the Maya world, a royal woman from the famous kingdom of Palenque crossed the dangerous lands to marry her new husband and bear him a son who would become the next king.[492] His strategy echoes the marriage alliance between Naranjo and Dos Pilas that revived the Naranjo dynasty after its defeat by Lord Kan of Caracol. This marriage likely occurred late in Smoke-Shell’s life, for his heir came to the throne when he was less than twenty years old.
-In order to talk about the importance of avoiding anarchy, Kant—like the thinkers of his time—uses a state-of-nature scenario. Unlike Hobbes, however, Kant does not believe that the state of nature would necessarily be a war of all against all, a condition in which life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”[358] According to Kant, it is not necessarily the case that a state of nature would be marked by hostility or violence, or “as Hobbes puts it, a bellum omnium contra omnes.”[359] Instead, it is always possible that violence might break out, since there is no authority capable of settling disputes: “It should be called only a status belli omnium contra omnes, a condition of injustice; a legal condition ... in which the determining and deciding of what is to be law can occur no otherwise than by violence.”[360] Unlike Hobbes, who believed that even in his time there were areas in the world that were in the state of nature,[361] Kant does not believe that the state of nature ever was an actual situation; he conceives ofit merely as a concept of reason: “the status naturalis does not exist at all, and never has; it is a mere Idea of reason.”[362]
+Smoke-Shell’s efforts to revive the dynasty and to persuade his nobility to follow him apparently succeeded only in the short term. He bequeathed his child, Yax-Pac, a variety of problems touching every stratum of society, from the highest to the most humble. In every long-lived dynasty, the pyramid of royal descendants increases every generation until an enormous body of people exists, all sharing the prerogatives of royal kinship. Not only are these people a drain on the society that must support them, but they create political problems by intriguing against one another. The general nobility was also growing in wealth and power at this time. Needless to say, Yax-Pac would have to be a very strong king to control and satisfy all these political factions. In addition to this, the valley of Copan was plagued by a variety of economic and ecological problems. The rulers of Copan, by and large, had done their job too well. The valley resources had been overdeveloped and strained to their very limits. Now it seemed that the trend toward progress was reversing itself.
-The problem arises in the first place, according to Kant, because human beings have an “unsociable sociability.”[363] Human beings have a predisposition to seek society, but also a disposition to compare themselves to others, and to try to be superior.[364] If this “crooked wood ... [of which] the human being is made”[365] stayed by itself, it would “grow stunted, crooked and awry.” So, on the one hand, the development of one’s capacities can be achieved “only in society,” but, on the other, humans’ “own inclinations make it so that they can not long subsist next to another in wild freedom.”[366] Thus, even in the state of nature, human beings would not necessarily live in solitude, but might form associations with other human beings.
+Overpopulation was one of the primary problems Yax-Pac would have to deal with during his reign. The kingdom had continued to grow at a steady rate during the two reigns following 18-Rabbit’s capture. Throughout the eighth century, more and more residential complexes[493] sprang up on the rich bottomlands around the Acropolis (Fig. 8:9). The region within a one-kilometer radius of the Ballcourt contained over fifteen hundred structures, with an estimated density of three thousand people per square kilometer. At least twenty thousand people were trying to eke out a living from the badly strained resources. This population simply could not be supported by local agriculture alone, especially since T the best land was buried under the expanding residential complexes around the Acropolis.[494]
-Kant distinguishes human circumstances of three kinds:[367] a solitary state of nature, a social state of nature, and a state in a civil society under a government and coercive laws. Kant developed this account based on Gottfried Achenwall’s work, which he used repeatedly as the textbook for his lectures on natural law. Whereas Achenwall contrasts the state of nature to a social state, for Kant “in the state of nature, too, there can be societies.(e.g., conjugal, paternal, domestic societies in general, as well as many others).”[368] However, there would be no law or enforceable norms of distributive justice in the state of nature: “A condition that is not rightful, that is, a condition in which there is no distributive justice, is called a state of nature (status natur- alis).” Kant defines “distributive justice” here as “what is the decision of a court in a particular case in accordance with the given law under which it falls, that is, what is laid down as right.”[369]
+When Yax-Pac came to the throne, he inherited a disaster in the C making. Over the generations, expanding residential zones had covered J the best agricultural lands, forcing farmers into the foothills and then onto the mountain slopes. There they were forced to clear more and more forest to produce maize fields. Clearing, in turn, caused erosion. Shorter fallow periods were depleting the usable soils at an even faster rate, just when the kingdom was required to feed the largest population in its history.[495]
-What are missing in the state of nature are therefore the three authorities that Kant regards as necessary for a rightful state.[370] A state of nature lacks a universal lawmaker, a judge that can apply the law, and a regent or police force that can enforce the law. In the state of nature “there is need, that is to say, for a universal legislation that establishes right and wrong for everyone, a universal power that protects everyone in his right, and a judicial authority that restores the injured right.”[371] The danger of violence in the state of nature arises because, without the three state authorities, everyone is entitled to judge for himself what is right, and there is no way to arbitrate disputes or rule our predation: “Now it is left to the judgement of every individual man, what he will acknowledge to be right or wrong, and he is therefore able to infringe even the freedom of another without hindrance.”[372] As a result, human beings “can never be secure against violence from one another, since each has its own right to do what seems right and good to it.”[373]
+Deforestation caused other problems as well. People needed wood for their cooking fires, for the making of lime in the construction of temples,[496] for building houses, and for dozens of other domestic and ritual uses. As more and more people settled in the valley, the forest gradually retreated, exposing more and more of the poor soils on the mountain slopes and causing more erosion. The cutting down of the forest also affected climate and rainfall, making it yet more difficult for people to sustain themselves. With an insufficient food supply came malnutrition and its resultant chronic diseases, rampant conditions that affected the nobility as well as the common people.[497] The quality of life, which was never very good in the preindustrial cities of the ancient world, fast deteriorated toward the unbearable in Copan under the pained gaze of its last great king.
-The conclusion Kant draws from this analysis is that one should leave the state of nature, and enter a civil condition under the three authorities: “when you cannot avoid living side by side with all others, you ought to leave the state of nature.”[374] But why?
+As his father had before him, Yax-Pac continued to place the focus of his royal performance upon dynastic history, holding up the values of his predecessors as the canon by which he would guide Copan through the dangers and crises of the present. After becoming king on July 2, 763, Yax-Pac’s first action on Copan’s beautiful stage[498] was the setting of a small carved altar representing the Vision Serpent into the Great Plaza amid the tree-stones of his rehabilitated predecessor, 18-Rabbit (Fig. 8:20). This small altar celebrated 9.16.15.0.0, the first important period ending after his accession.
-*** III. The Incentive to Leave the State of Nature
+Shortly thereafter, the young ahau turned his attention to an ancient temple standing on the northern edge of the Acropolis, overlooking the forest of tree-stones. This old temple had been built by the seventh successor of the dynasty and named on its dedication step “Holy Copan Temple, the House of Mah Kina Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[499] At the base of the temple stairs, Yax-Pac’s father, Smoke-Shell, had erected Stela N, his final contribution to Copan’s public history. Yax-Pac chose the locale of that old temple as the site of his greatest work. There he planned to raise Temple 11, one of the most ambitious structures ever built in the history of the city. In the tradition of his forebears, he encased the old temple in the new, shaping the imagery of the new temple into a unique and spectacular expression both of cosmic order and of the sanctions that bound the fate of the community to that of the king. Through this building and the Otherworld portal it housed at the junction of its dark corridors, Yax-Pac began his lifelong effort to ward off the impending disaster that hung over the valley.
-There is a sharp divide in the Kant literature surrounding Kant’s political philosophy concerned with what is known as the “independence thesis.”[375] Some scholars argue that Kant’s legal and political philosophy is independent of his moral philosophy in that Kant provides reasons for why one should form a civil society that are independent of his moral philosophy. While Kant argues that the moral philosophy relies completely on a priori grounding,[376] he seems to provide empirical reasons for someone to leave the state of nature.[377]
+We are not sure of the exact starting date for the construction of this temple, but work on it must have begun in the first few years of Yax-Pac’s reign. Six years later, on March 27, 769, following the celebration of the equinox, Yax-Pac dedicated the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the temple. This Reviewing Stand faced the inner court and temples of his forebears which studded the West Court of the Acropolis. Built against the first terrace of the pyramid that would eventually support Temple 11, the Reviewing Stand was a metaphorical Xibalban Ballcourt, complete with three rectangular markers set into the plaza floor below in the pattern of a playing alley (Fig. 8:10). Jutting outward into the West Court, this stairway was a place of sacrifice where victims were rolled down the stairs as if they were the ball.[500] The stair itself carried an inscribed history of its dedication rituals, naming the structure as a ballcourt. Huge stone conch shells marked the terrace as the surface of the Xibalban waters through which the ax-wielding executioner god Chac-Xib-Chac (an aspect of Venus, the firstborn of the Twins) rose when he was brought forth by the king’s ecstasy.
-Kant says, for instance, that human beings “are compelled by need”[378] to leave the state of nature, and this seems to be a very plausible claim in its own right, independently of Kant’s arguments. The state of nature as Kant describes it is a condition in which one’s life is in danger. Because of the threat of violence, one can also not develop one’s capacities fully, and one’s freedom to carry out one’s plans is severely restricted. So, if one wants the “enhancement of external freedom,”[379] or even basic safety, it is prudent to leave the state of nature and submit to the coercive laws of a civil state.
+Yax-Pac further indicated that the entire West Court was under the murky waters of the Underworld by placing two floating caimans[501] atop the platform opposite the Reviewing Stand. The southern side of this pyramid was thus a representation of Xibalba. It was the “place of fright,” the Otherworld where sacrificial victims were sent into the land of the Lords of Death to play ball and to deliver messages from the divine ahau.[502] With the construction of such an elaborate, theatrical ballcourt, Yax-Pac was making an important statement about his strategies for the kingship: He would require himself to excel in battle against noble enemies and bring these enemies here to die.
-The strongest textual support for this reading is in Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace. There, he says that the “problem of establishing a state . is soluble even for a nation of devils.”[380] By “devils” here he means beings with purely self-seeking inclinations, and his claim is that, even if one has a multitude of thoroughly selfish beings, “nature comes to the aid ... precisely through those self-seeking inclinations ... and the human being is constrained to become a good citizen.”[381] Kant’s argument that even selfish beings should enter a state is that they need laws for their self-preservation.
+As the king set about preparing his new temple and the supernatural landscape surrounding it, he reached back to 18-Rabbit, the source of both his dynasty’s success and its profoundest failure. In August of the same year in which he dedicated the Reviewing Stand, Yax-Pac built within the Acropolis what would be the first of many bridges to his paradoxical ancestor. The king set Altar Z on the platform between Temple 22—the magnificent temple created by 18-Rabbit on his first katun anniversary— and Temple 11, the structure that would become his own cosmic building (Fig. 8:11). Yax-Pac may also have set another important precedent with this small monument, for we think it makes mention of a younger brother of the king.[503] This inscription is significant because it indicates the beginning of a trend in Yax-Pac’s strategies in regard to the public record. In the course of his lifetime, Yax-Pac peopled Copan’s stage of history with an ever-increasing troupe of ahauob. This is a strategy we have seen before at Yaxchilan—sharing power is always better than losing it.
-Kant describes the task of forming a state as follows:
+[[][Fig. 8:12 Temple 11: Architectural Detail]]
-<quote>
+The first katun ending of Yax-Pac’s life was a significant one. Not only was it the first major festival of his young career, but by coincidence it tell on the day of a partial eclipse, followed sixteen days later by the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar.[504] To celebrate the katun ending,[505] Yax-Pac sandwiched a tiny building, Temple 21a, between 18-Rabbit’s great cosmic building, Temple 22, and the now-destroyed Temple 21.[506] The small scale of Temple 21a and its position between the two huge buildings suggests Yax-Pac had assigned most of the available labor to the ongoing construction of Temple 11. Yet regardless of the scale, Yax-Pac was clearly intent upon associating himself with the earlier king. Perhaps Smoke-Shell had successfully restored 18-Rabbit’s reputation and he was, by that time, remembered more for the accomplishments of his reign than the ignominy of his death. Nevertheless, the repeated efforts by Yax-Pac to embrace the memory of this ancestor suggest that there was a pressing need to continue the process of rehabilitation not only of 18-Rabbit but also of his dynasty in the face of a disenchanted nobility.
-Given a multitude of rational beings all of whom need universal laws for their preservation but each of whom is inclined covertly to exempt himself from them, so to order this multitude and establish their constitution that, although in their private dispositions they strive against one another, these yet so check one another that in their public conduct the result is the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.[382]
-</quote>
-This evidence suggests that Kant bases the claim that one should leave the state of nature not on any distinctive moral considerations, but that the reason to form a state is a “Hobbesian prudential account.”[383] Not only would his legal philosophy be independent from his moral philosophy, but more importantly it would not need any further assumptions, such as the Categorical Imperative, or a metaphysically ambitious account of freedom in order to ground political normative claims.
+On 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773), two years after the katun ending, Yax-Pac dedicated Temple 11. The magnificent cosmic statement he made in this monument would become the basis of his fame. Before the passage of time had sullied its original splendor, this building was truly one of the most unusual and intriguing temples ever built in the F Precolumbian Maya world. Facing the northern horizon, this two-story-high temple with wide interior vaults towered over the Ballcourt and 1 Great Plaza. Its principal north door opened through the mouth of a huge Witz Monster,[507] which glared down at the gathered populace below. At each of the two northern corners of this microcosmic world stood a giant Pauahtun (Fig. 8:12a), its huge hands holding up images of the Cosmic Monster, arching across the roof entablatures in symbolic replication of remnant of the full-figured inscription that was over the door the arch of heaven and the planetary beings who moved through that path on their supernatural journeys.[508] It was as if he took the magnificent sculpture at the heart of Temple 22, 18-Rabbit’s greatest building, and turned it inside out so that it became the outer facade rather than an arch over the door to the inner sanctum. Today, fragments of the scaled body of this Cosmic Monster litter the ground around the fallen temple.
-If this is correct, however, then Kant’s argument that one should leave the state of nature would depend only on what he would call a “hypothetical imperative.”[384] On this view, one should avoid anarchy, and leave the state of nature, if one wants to increase one’s external freedom (or secure one’s self-preservation, etc.). It is then an empirical question[385] whether everyone has this desire, and whether it is the overriding desire for everyone. For instance, if one is faced with a choice of a comfortable life in servitude, or a dangerous journey through the desert that might give one freedom eventually, would everyone choose to enhance her or his external freedom? The argument would also be contingent upon circumstances. There could be situations in which one perceives a weakness in one’s enemy, and where it would be advantageous to strike first, rather than subject oneself to laws that protect one’s enemy as well. But even if one could assume that all human beings have one particular, highest, and overriding desire (such as for freedom, or self-preservation), the command to avoid anarchy “would still be only contingent”[386] and not an absolute command.
+Yax-Pac designed the ground floor of this temple with a wide eastwest gallery crossed by a smaller north-south corridor. In this way he engineered an entrance to the building from each of the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west. Just inside each of these four doors, panels facing one another record historical events important to Yax-Pac’s political strategy and the dedication of the temple itself.[509] What is curious about each pair of texts is that one is in normal reading order, while the other facing text reads in reverse order as if you are seeing a mirror image. It is as if you were standing between the glass entry doors of a bank—the writing on the door in front of you would read normally while the writing behind you would be reversed. If you were standing outside, however, the texts on both door would read in the proper order. In Temple 11, of course, the walls are not transparent, but this made no difference, since the audience addressed by these texts consisted of the ancestors and the gods. Apparently, they could read through solid walls. Furthermore, each pair of texts is designed to be read from a different direction starting with the north door: To read them in proper order (that is, “outside the bank doors”) the reader would have to circulate through all four of the directions. This attention to the “point of view” of the gods is not unusual in Maya art.
-However, even if the empirical evidence can ground a plausible case for the Hobbesian prudential account, there is textual evidence that Kant has something stronger in mind. In the same work in which he seems to advance a prudential justification for leaving the state of nature, Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant states explicitly that the injunction to leave the state of nature is “a principle of moral politics,” and that “this principle is not based upon prudence but upon duty”[387] and that this principle is characterized by “unconditional necessity.”[388] He views a foundation on empirical grounds as “uncertain,”[389] and puts forth “a politics is cognizable a priori,”[390] by which he means that “the human being’s own reason makes it a duty for him”[391] to exit the state of nature.
+Just to the south of the place where the two corridors cross, Yax-Pac built a small raised platform set within the skeletal, gaping jaws of the Maw of the Otherworld. The carved image of this great Maw was set at both the southern (Fig. 8:12b) and northern (Fig. 8:13) entries onto the platform. He made the northern side special by replacing the lower jaw of the Maw with a bench depicting twenty ancestral figures, ten each on either side of an inscription recording his accession as king (Fig. 8:14). These were the dynasts who had preceded him onto the throne of Copan.[510] Yax-Pac had brought them forth from the land of the ancestors to participate in his accession rite. Their sanction of this rite was forever frozen in this stone depiction, serving as a testament to those privileged elite who would enter the temple to see and affirm.
-But how exactly does reason do this, and why does the duty to leave the state of nature follow a priori?
+Temple 11 was the greatest work of Yax-Pac’s life. To be sure, he built other buildings during his reign, but none so grand in size, ambition, and conception as this one.[511] Temple 11 was an umbilicus linking the kingdom of Yax-Pac to the nurturing, demanding cosmos: the final great expression at Copan of the Maya vision. Its lower level, especially to the south, manifested the underwater world of Xibalba.[512] The great rising Acropolis that supported it was the sacred mountain which housed other portals into the Otherworld. The temple roof was the sky held away from the mountain by the Pauahtunob at the corners of the world. The front door was the huge mouth of the mountain, the cave through which the king entered sacred space. At the heart of the temple was the raised platform defined as the portal to the Otherworld. This building sealed the covenant between Yax-Pac, his people, and their collective destiny. Its enormous size and grand scope were designed to proclaim the power of the king to rally his people in the face of their difficulties. It may not have been the finest Maya temple ever built—the sculptures weren’t anywhere near the artistry of 18-Rabbit’s. Nor was it the most architecturally sound—the vaults were so wide they had to be reinforced because the walls started to fall down as soon as the builders began to raise the second story. Nevertheless, this temple was the statement of authority the young king hoped would help keep disaster at bay.
-*** IV. The Duty to Leave the State of Nature
+[[][Fig. 8:14 Temple 11 bench]]
-Kant holds that it is not just prudent to avoid anarchy and form a law-governed state, but that it is a duty to do so. A duty is something that one ought to do even if one does not want to do it: “Duty is that action to which someone is bound.”[392] A duty therefore expresses an obligation, or a necessitation; i.e., an obligation “makes necessary an action that is subjectively contingent and thus represents the subject as one that must be constrained (necessitated) to conform with the rule.”[393] Since an obligation often goes against what one wants to do, it is expressed by an imperative, and since it is not conditioned upon a desire or end one wants to produce, realize, or achieve, it is a categorical imperative: “Obligation is the necessity of a free action under a categorical imperative of reason.”[394] A categorical imperative does not derive from any end that one might seek because of a desire: “A categorical (unconditional) imperative is one that represents an action as objectively necessary and makes it necessary not indirectly, through the representation of some end that can be attained by the action.”[395] If one abstracts from all desires and ends, however, only the form of law remains: “The categorical imperative, which as such only affirms what obligation is, is: act upon a maxim that can also hold as a universal law.”[396]
+Yax-Pac continued to refine his fundamental statement of charismatic power during the next three years in construction projects that altered the west side of the Acropolis. At the five-year point of Katun 17, three years after he had dedicated Temple 11, he set Altar Q (Fig. 8:3) in front of the newly completed Temple 16, a massive pyramid he built at the heart of the Acropolis. Replete with images of Tlaloc warfare and the skulls of slain victims, Temple 16 replicated the imagery of his father’s great project—Temple 26—as Temple 11 had reproduced Temple 22 of 18-Rabbit’s reign.[513]
-Kant argues that these notions of duty, obligation, and categorical imperative “are common to both parts of the Metaphysics of Morals,”[397] to ethics as well as the political demand to leave the state of nature. He states the supreme principle of ethics as: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[398] And he states the “principle of right” as: “So act that you can will that your maxim should become a universal law (whatever the end may be).”[399] So, Kant believes that there is one supreme law that expresses the essence of obligation, whether it be such political obligations as the duty to leave anarchy, or moral obligations: “Within this universal law are comprehended both legal and ethical laws.”[400]
+Altar Q, a low, flat-sided monument, was more suited to the functions of a throne than those of an altar. It depicted each of the sixteen ancestors seated upon his own name glyph. The whole dynasty unfolded in a clockwise direction, starting with Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and culminating with Yax-Pax himself. His ancestors sit in front of a monument celebrating war while they ride just below the surface of the symbolic sea he created in the West Court. The program of imagery is an elegant and powerful statement of power. Ironically, the charisma of the divine lord as exemplified in battle and conquest belied the reality of Yax-Pac’s circumstances, for this was to be the last great exhortation of kingship to be built in the valley of Copan.
-There is, however, an important difference between ethical and juridical laws, according to Kant, but it does not lie so much in the content of the law itself but rather in the way in which one is bound to follow the law. Kant distinguishes the law that says what is commanded from one’s motive for following this law:
+For all of its elegance and centrality, the West Court and Altar Q mark a change in strategy for Yax-Pac. Up to this time, kings had acknowledged the passage of sacred time with buildings, sculptures, and inscriptions erected only in the ceremonial heart of the community. Now, however, Yax-Pac also began to write his history outside the Acropolis by traveling to the residential compounds of his lords to conduct royal rituals within their lineage houses. This was clearly a comedown for an “ahau of the ahauob,” made necessary by the need to hold the allegiance of his lords in the face of civil disaster.[514]
-<quote>
+The next important period-ending date that Yax-Pac celebrated, 9.17.10.0.0, was commemorated not only in the royal precinct of the Acropolis, but also in the household of a noble family of the city. The date and description of the scattering rite that Yax-Pax enacted is inscribed on a bench in the main building of Group 9M-18[515] (Fig. 8:9), a large noble household to the east of the Acropolis. Yax-Pac’s action is recorded as an event still to come in the future at the time the patriarch dedicated his house, the place where he held court over the affairs of his family and followers (Fig. 8:15). Strangely the name of the patriarch was not included on the bench. Instead it records a dedicatory offering given in the name of Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s father.[516] Perhaps the lineage patriarch felt he should not place his name so close to that of his liege lord, so he remained anonymous. Nevertheless, he brought prestige to his own house and weight to the decisions he made astride this bench by focusing on the high kings as the main actors in his family drama.
-In all lawgiving ... there are two elements: first, a law, which represents an action that is to be done as objectively necessary, that is, which makes the action a duty; and second, an incentive, which connects a ground for determining choice to this action subjectively with the representation of the law.[401]
-</quote>
-In ethics, one should not just do the right thing, according to Kant, but also do it simply because it is right.[402] But a legal rule demands that one engage in some outwardly observable behavior—e.g., stop at a red traffic light—although it does not demand that you do so out of a particular motive:
+Shortly after the period ending, another lineage benefited from Yax- Pac’s ritual attention, and bragged about it inside the new house of their leader. The scribal lineage living in Group 9N-8 (Fig. 8:9) dismantled the magnificent structure an earlier patriarch had commissioned during the reign of 18-Rabbit and put a new, larger building in its place. The elegance of this building was unmistakable. Its upper zone was sculpted with mosaic images of the lineage’s own patriarch; and on either side of the door that led into the large, central chamber of the building, a Pauahtun, one of the patron gods of their craft, rose dramatically from the Maw of Xibalba.
-<quote>
+Almost all of the floor space of this chamber was occupied by a bench[517] on which the patriarch sat to conduct the business of the lineage. This bench (Fig. 8:16) records that on 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Ch’en (July 10, 781),[518] this patriarch dedicated his new house while the king participated in those rites with him. As Yax-Pac had done for the lineage head of Compound 9M-18, he honored this patriarch by participating in rituals on his home ground. The king was breaking precedent, going to his subordinate rather than the other way around. At Yaxchilan, Bird-Jaguar had also gone to his subordinate across the river at La Pasadita, but in that instance he had functioned as the principal actor while the cahal was clearly in a position of subservience. In the scribes’ building, Yax-Pac’s name closes the text, but the noble is given equal billing. Furthermore, this text doubles as the body of a Cosmic Monster, imagery directly associated with the royal house of Copan. Four Pauahtunob hold up the bench in the same way that they hold up the sky in Temples 22, 26, and 11. The head of this scribes’ lineage utilized the same symbolic imagery as his king, and he did so apparently with Yax-Pac’s approval.
-All lawgiving can therefore be distinguished with respect to the incentive.That lawgiving which makes an action a duty and also makes this duty the incentive is ethical. But that lawgiving which does not include the incentive of duty in the law and so admits an incentive other than the idea of duty itself is juridical.”[403]
-</quote>
-But for juridical and ethical duties there is the same supreme law that declares that an action is a duty: “a categorical imperative is a law that either commands or prohibits, depending upon whether it represents as a duty the commission or omission of an action.”[404]
+Yax-Pac thus gave away some of the hard-earned royal charisma of his ancestors to honor the head of this lineage. Was this the act of a desperate man? In all likelihood the king was fully aware of the potential danger in his capitulation to the nobility, but regarded it as a necessary step in his efforts to save the kingdom from impending economic disaster. He was clearly seeking solutions to immediate political problems threatening the peace and stability of the domain destiny had placed in his hands. Like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan in the west, Yax-Pac tried to secure the continuing loyalty of the patriarchs of his kingdom by sharing his prerogatives with them, particularly the privilege of history.
-But how could there be a law that commands independently of what one desires, and why should one think that there really is such a law? The first question concerns the source of the supreme laws of duty (cf. Section V), the second question its justification (cf. sections VI and VII). I shall pursue these questions before trying to explain why the law also, on Kant’s view, commands one to avoid anarchy and form a law-governed state (cf. Section VIII).
+Once Yax-Pac had embarked on this policy, he pursued it systematically and creatively during the second half of Katun 17. He raised monuments in the community at large and in the main ceremonial center and “lent” his historical actions to the monuments of significant others in the political arena of Copan. In the region now under the modern village of Copan (Fig. 8:5), the king erected two monuments to celebrate the first katun anniversary of his accession. Here, in the village area, he planted Stela 8 (Fig. 8:17), on which he recorded this anniversary and a related bloodletting which took place five days later. As we have seen so often before, the anniversary date fell on an important station of Venus: the maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[519] Yax-Pac also chose to record his parentage on this stela, reminding his people that he was the child of the woman from Palenque. This is the only monument ever to mention Yax-Pac’s relationship to his mother, and it is possible that he did so here in order to lend prestige to his half brother by the same woman.
-*** V. The Source of Obligation
+The second monument celebrating Yax-Pac’s first katun anniversary, Altar T, also graced the central plaza of the town. Here, for the first time, we are formally introduced to Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, the king’s half brother by the woman Smoke-Shell had brought from Palenque to rejuvenate the lineage.[520] As we shall see shortly, this sibling would become an important protagonist in the saga of Copan during the twilight of its dynasty.
-Kant rejected desires and inclinations as sources of duty because they can only provide prudential and contingent foundations for a command to avoid anarchy. Desires do not ground duties: “only practical reason ... can do that,”[405] and reason generates duties in a way that its principle “is given a priori by pure reason.”[406] What does it mean to say that pure reason gives a principle, and that it does so a priori? How does Kant conceive of the origin or source of the principle of duty? The idea is that a moral command is something “our own.faculty.provides out of itself.”[407] Independently of what one desires, or how one actually deliberates, one’s own reason prescribes “a universal law which we call the moral law.”[408]
+Altar T was decorated on three sides with twelve figures, some human and some animalistic. All of these figures faced toward a central inscription referring to the half brother (Fig. 8:18). The figures on Altar T emulate the style of Altar Q, Yax-Pac’s great dynastic monument of twenty years earlier.[521] This design was chosen quite intentionally to honor the king’s half brother. The top surface has a rendering of the image of ‘ a great crocodile sprawling in the waters of the earth. Waterlilies decorate his limbs, and his rear legs and tail drape over the corners and the back of the altar. Like fanciful scales, the king’s name marches down the spine of the crocodile, and the tail of the great beast falls between two humanlike figures personifying the date of Yax-Pac’s accession and its anniversary twenty years later. Sitting among the extended legs of the floating crocodile in the world under its belly are six human figures, presumably ancestors. To be sure, Altar T and its imagery celebrated the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s accession, but the protagonist whose name sits under the nose of the crocodile is the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac himself.
-Kant does not conceive of identifying the moral law as a matter of discovering any sort of independent reality—of a world of, say, Platonic universals. The moral law thus cannot be discerned by means of “any intuition, either pure or empirical.”[409] Rather, “reason.with complete spon- taneity.makes its own order according to ideas.according to which it even declares actions to be necessary.”[410] Reason prescribes duties independently of and prior to experience, “as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves”[411]—in short, a priori.
+We know Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac was the half brother of the king because his status as child of the king’s mother was prominently inscribed on Altar U, a monument he himself raised (Fig. 8:19) in the town which once existed under the modern village. The “sun-eyed throne stone,”[522] as the Copanecs called it, depicts a sun-eyed monster flanked by two old gods who sit at the open Maw of the Otherworld. The inscriptions on the rear and top surface retrospectively document Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s participation in rituals on 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793) and the seating on January 29, 780, of yet another player on Copan’s historical stage. Named Yax-Kamlay, this man, who may have been a younger full brother of the king, also played a crucial role in the last half of Yax-Pac’s reign. The name Yax K’amlay means “First Steward”[523] so that this full brother may have functioned in a role like “prime minister,” while the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, governed the district of the ancient city under the modern village area for the high king. This type of governance, rule by a council of brothers, ultimately failed in Copán, but it succeeded at Chichón Itzá, as we shall see in the next chapter.
-Kant calls the source of the law of duty “autonomy,” or the “law-giving of human reason.”[412] In his theoretical philosophy, Kant argues that reason provides out of itself a priori laws that govern the function of our cognitive faculty, and he argues that practical reasoning about what one is obligated to do incorporates an a priori constitutive principle of reason with respect to our desires: “the understanding is the one that contains the constitutive principles a priori for the faculty of cognition.; for the faculty of desire it is reason, which is practical without the mediation of any sort of pleasure.”[413]
+The altar stone was dedicated on June 24, 792, a day near the summer solstice, but the text also records events later than this date. We surmise that the altar was commissioned as an object in anticipation of its function as a historical forum. The anticipated rituals occurred on the day 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793), a day that happily coincided with the thirtieth tun anniversary (30x360) of the king’s accession and the thirteenth haab anniversary (13x365) of Yax-Kamlay’s seating. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, who dedicated the altar, honored both his kingly half brother and the man who was the king’s first minister by celebrating this unusual co-anniversary. It was Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, however, who is clearly the protagonist of the inscription.
-Kant’s alternative is, therefore, that the law originates directly from one’s own reason. This does not mean that the law is innate, in the sense that God, “an implanted sense[,] or who knows what tutelary nature[,] whispers to it.”[414] A law that was implanted in us by God or by evolution or some other aspect of nature would not be strictly necessary. If moral laws or obligations were based on some contingent feature of our existence, they would, Kant maintains, “lack the necessity that is essential to their concept.” They would merely have, at best, a “subjective necessity, arbitrarily implanted in us,”[415] but not an absolute necessity.
+Let us stop for a moment and imagine what the king would have seen as he led a procession from the Acropolis to the village on the day these anniversaries were to be celebrated.
-If, for instance, our sense of morality were a product of cultural evolution, we would have a very different conception of moral requirements if we had evolved under different circumstances. Imagine two tribes, one of which has developed under conditions of famine for thousands of years, while another has lived in a region that is prone to tsunamis. The first tribe might have survived because its members had adopted a rule calling for them to share food and to assist others more generally. The second tribe might have survived because its members had adopted a rule enjoining: “Run first, then come back for survivors.” The rules of each tribe might be deeply ingrained, and psychologically each rule might appear to the members of the tribe accepting it as a necessary command. But, in fact, on the story envisioned here, the commands endorsed by both tribes are historical in origin, and thus contingent. A law can be innate without being strictly necessary.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-If Kant’s view is not based on empirical, historical, or biological considerations, it is also not based on an ambitious metaphysics. He does not envision obligation as based on a non-natural, supersensible property. The foundation of duty as he understands it is “mixed with no anthropology, theology, physics, or hyperphysics and still less with occult qualities (which could be called hypophysical).”[416] Rather, he argues, moral commands are the spontaneous but necessary products of our reason, a way our reason necessarily functions pre-consciously.
+Yax-Pac paused on the causeway near the ancient tree-stone erected by his ancestor, Smoke-Imix-God K, when the valley had known happier times and lived in hope. He could see the visage of his ancestor etched by the shadows cast in the sharp morning light. The great te-tun displayed two faces—a proud human one facing the rising sun, and another masked with the image of the Sun God watching the ending of the days. Smoke- Imix was forever caught in his act of sacrifice, eternally materializing the sacred world for his people with the shedding of his blood.[524]
-*** VI. The Conditional Argument
+For a moment, Yax-Pac wondered what kind of immortality his forebear had won with the great tree-stone he had erected halfway between the Acropolis and the old community now governed by his younger half brother, the son of the royal woman from Palenque. He was grateful that the ancestors had provided him with such a capable sibling. The vigorous, optimistic Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac strove to give him the labor and tribute necessary to keep the kingdom together in these hard times, and now he was overseeing the celebration of the thirtieth tun of reign. By coincidence, Yax-Pac’s anniversary fell on the same day that ended the thirteenth haab of Yax-Kamlay’s administration. They would commemorate the two anniversaries together.
-Why should one think that human beings possess a faculty that immediately and spontaneously prescribes necessary duties? Kant gives two arguments in favor of the autonomy of reason. The first one is a conditional argument: only autonomy can yield unconditional obligation. By itself, the argument only shows that “if duty is a concept that is to contain significance and real lawgiving for our actions it can be expressed only in categorical imperatives.” But this strategy leaves open the question whether “there really is such an imperative,”[417] and Kant gives a second argument in order to support belief in the reality of the supreme law of duty.
+Yax-Pac walked twenty paces ahead and paused again when he saw the smaller tree-stone[525] visible in the small compound to the west of the double portrait of his ancestor. This portrait of Smoke-Imix was less impressive in scale, but equally important, for it preserved the memory of the king as warrior, celebrating the half-period of Katun 12. On that day, Venus had stood still just after he had journeyed across the face of his brother, the Sun, to become Morningstar.[526] 18-Rabbit had made his debut as the heir on the occasion of that period ending. Who among the nobility remembered, or respected, such things nowadays? There was a coughing and shuffling of silent impatience in the halted entourage behind him. He ignored them.
-The first argument builds on the idea that we hold duties to be necessary and universal:
+As the low, long-shadowed light of the morning sun rose above the mountains rimming the far side of his lands and broke through the mist, Yax-Pac sighed and turned back to look across the valley. He gazed with pride on the Kan-Te-Na, Pat-Chan-Otot,[527] the house he had dedicated soon after the solar eclipse at the end of Katun 17. Silhouetted against the beams of brilliant yellow light,[528] it towered above the Acropolis, echoing the huge mountains that rose above the valley floor in the distance. The sacred mountains beyond the sacred portals built by the men of his dynasty were bare now, like bones drying in the sun. It was winter and those mountains should be green with growth from the fall rains, but all he saw was bone-white rock and the red slashes of landslides scarring the faces of the witzob. The stands of forest that had once graced the ridgetops were only memories now in the mind’s eye of the very, very old. Even the occasional patches and scraggly survivors he had found in his childhood wanderings were gone—not a single sapling reared its silhouette against the blue sky.
-<quote>
+Thirty tuns ago today he had followed his father, Smoke-Shell, onto the throne. Then he had been a young man who had not even seen the end of his first katun. He had harbored great hopes of a glorious and prosperous reign, but the gods and the ancestors seemed to be turning their backs on the people of the sacred Macaw Mountain.
-Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold ... as a ground of obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity; that, for example, the command ‘thou shalt not lie’ does not hold only for human beings.[418]
-</quote>
-At first, this is just an assumption about our ordinary beliefs, but as such it has received backing from empirical science.[419] The second step of the argument is the claim that experience can never yield conclusions marked by strict universality and absolute necessity.[420] Only a priori judgments can feature these qualities—as for instance, the analytic judgment that all bachelors are unmarried. If a statement is necessary and universal, it must be an a priori proposition: “Necessity and strict universality are.secure indications of an a priori cognition.”[421]
+Yax-Pac’s eyes swept across the valley, catching an occasional glimmer of light from the distant waters of the river. Mostly he saw the white houses of his people—hundreds of them—filled with children, many of them sick and hungry. Smoke still rose from the kitchen fires, but Yax-Pac knew the young men had to walk many days now through wider and wider strips of barren land to find firewood. From time without beginning, the earth had yielded up her abundance—wood to cook the bountiful harvests of earlier generations and to make the plaster covering for the buildings and plazas commissioned by the ancestors. What was one to make of a world without trees? The earth itself was dying, and with it all must eventually die.
-Conversely, Kant argues that “all possible”[422] groundings of duty other than “the fitness of. [the will’s] maxims for its own giving of universal laws” would yield “heteronomy.”[423] And heteronomy cannot ground unconditional obligation: “heteronomy of choice, on the other hand, not only does not ground any obligation at all but is instead opposed to the principle of obligation.”[424] But why does Kant believe that all alternative theories yield heteronomy, and why does he think that heteronomy cannot ground obligation?
+In the glory days of his grandfathers, his people had believed in the favor of the gods and in the endless cycles of wet and dry that gave rhythm to the passage of days and life to the earth. More and more children had been born, and more and more people had come from distant lands to live in his valley. The more there were, the more they needed fuel and lumber, and the more they cut the forest. The river ran red with the soil of the mountains, naked now, having given up their flesh to the hard storms of summer and the floods of the winter months. Always there was too much rain, or not enough. The hard rains washed away the earth and the rock below could no longer nourish the seeds of the sacred maize. Too much of the good land along the river was under the houses of the noble clans.
-Regarding the first question, Kant argues that any alternative theory ultimately depends upon a desire as the reason a certain rule is prescribed:[425] (i) Suppose one assumes that moral laws come from society, then one still needs a desire to fit into this society and be rewarded in order for those laws to be applicable to oneself. (ii) Or suppose one believes that moral laws are ultimately based on our sentiments. In this case, one has obviously granted that morality is based on feelings and desires.[426] (iii) Kant even argues that a non-natural moral realism, according to which moral requirements are (non-natural) moral properties that are part of the fabric of the world, would ultimately be based on desires. His reason is that all knowledge begins with the senses.[427] This is one of the main results of his Critique of Pure Reason. We do not have an intellectual intuition that could intuit non-natural properties:
+The farmers had been driven higher and higher up the stony mountainsides looking for land that could hold their crops. Some of them even had to tie ropes around their waists as they worked the nearly vertical walls of the mountainsides. Anywhere the hard rock cradled a shallow pocket of earth, they planted their seed and hoped the young sprouts of maize would find enough water and nourishment to lift their delicate leaves into the air.
-<quote>
+Yax-Pac felt a shiver run up his back in the cold morning air. It was only thirty-five days after the winter solstice, but already it was clear that there had not been enough rain during the fall and winter. His people were facing another bad year, with too many mouths to feed with what little the earth yielded to the hard labor of his farmers. He knew in his heart that they must somehow bring back the forest, for it was the source of life. But what was he to do? His people were sick and dying already. They had to cut and burn the scraggly bush that patched his land like scabs to plant their crops or death would win its final battle with the people of the land of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He saw no way out of this losing battle with the Lords of Death, except more prayer and sacrifices to the gods and the ancestors of the Otherworld. If they would only hear the cry of his people and touch the earth with the gift of gentle rain, perhaps the times of his fathers would return.
-we cannot cook up … a single object with any new and not empirically given property … Thus we are not allowed to think up any sort of new original forces, e.g., an understanding that is capable of intuition of its object without sense.[428]
-</quote>
-So, in order to detect non-natural value properties, one would need some kind of sensibility. Since one could not discover non-natural properties with one’s five senses, the only remaining available way for one to detect them would by means of a feeling.[429] But if a feeling is the foundation of a rule, then “it would, strictly speaking, be nature that gives the law.”[430] Since nature rules our feelings and desires, our reason would not give its own law as in the case of autonomy, but would receive the law from outside itself—and this is heteronomy.
+Yax-Pac’s eyes traveled up again toward the impassive face of Smoke-Imix and he shivered once more. This was the face of his ancestor which turned toward the west and the death of the sun. Straightening his shoulders, Yax-Pac firmly dismissed all thoughts of doom from his mind and resumed his march toward the house of his brother. Today they would meet to celebrate the years of their reigns: Yax-Pac as the king would be together with his younger brothers and councillors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay. Perhaps, in the quiet moments between their public performances in the rituals, he would have time to talk to the two men who shared the burden of rule with him. They all longed for the old days when there was plenty of everything and no end in sight for the glory of Copan. Maybe together they could get the ancestors to pay attention to the plight of the children of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Pondering the past and his grim vision of the future, Yax-Pac resolved to harness the power and will of his people. While he lived in this world, all of his thoughts, the wisdom of his ancestors, the skill of his scribes and artisans, would be bent to the salvation of his people and his kingdom.
-Heteronomy cannot yield obligation, according to Kant, because the feelings and desires that are basic, on his view, to heteronomous approaches to moral judgment are constantly in flux: people’s feelings and desires vary over time, and one person’s feelings and desires differ from those of others. Thus, these feelings and desires “can never be assumed to be universally directed at the same objects”;[431] any principles based upon them would “be very different in different people.”[432] But even if there were something that everyone wants all of the time, any command based upon a universal desire would still be conditioned and contingent.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-Wherever an object of the will has to be laid down as the basis for prescribing the rule that determines the will, there the rule is none other than heteronomy; the imperative is conditional, namely: if or because one wills this object, one ought to act in such or such a way; hence it can never command ... categorically.[433]
+This remarkable co-anniversary and the two men who shared it with the king were also celebrated in the Acropolis at almost the same time. On 9.18.5.0.0 when Altar U was about to be completed, Yax-Pac set a small throne stone inside the back chamber of Temple 22a, the council house (Popol Nah) that had been erected next to 18-Rabbit’s Temple 22 by his successor, Smoke-Monkey.[529] On the throne, he celebrated his own katun anniversary (which had been commemorated by Altar T and Stela 8 in the Village area), the co-anniversary he had shared with Yax-Kamlay, and finally the hotun ending. This final date he associated with Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac so that all three of them appear prominently together. In the council house built by his grandfather in the dark years after 18- Rabbit’s defeat, Yax-Pac celebrated his own council of siblings.[530]
-Desires are contingent and relative, and cannot ground a necessarily and universally binding law. However, so far the argument has only been conditional:
+[[][Fig. 8:20 Yax-Pac and the Vision Serpent Altars in the Great Plaza]]
-<quote>
+The altars of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay signal Yax- Pac’s radical intentions in his efforts to sustain the government, for these brothers must have stood as close to the status of co-regent as the orthodox rules of divine kingship could allow. Furthermore, the two altars Yax-Pac erected in the old village area constituted major historical and theological statements. Not only did the king and his half brother call upon Copan’s best artists and scribes to execute their new vision of authority, but they communicated this vision in a style that was highly innovative, even in the expressive and daring tradition of Copan’s artisans.[531] These large, dramatic, boulderlike altars were the first to combine glyphs and zoomorphic figures, and the first altar monuments to stand on their own without a stela to accompany them.
-By explicating the generally received concept of morality we showed only that an autonomy of the will unavoidably.lies at its basis. Thus whoever holds morality to be something and not a chimerical idea without any truth must also admit the principle of morality brought forward.[434]
-</quote>
-*** VII. The Unconditional Argument
+Yax-Pac shared his royal prerogatives with his brothers in response to the growing stress in the valley as social and economic conditions worsened. He also invited people of lesser status, such as the lords of Compounds 9M-18 and 9N-8 to share royal privilege by erecting monuments memorializing the king’s participation in the dedications of their houses. In this way, he broadened his power base. Perhaps the pressures were different, but Yax-Pac, like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, chose to share his power in order to conserve it. For a while, his strategy worked. In the end, however, the precedents of sharing central power with nonroyal patriarchs destroyed the divinity that had sustained the Copan kingship for more than seven hundred years.
-Kant recognizes that an additional argument is needed to show “that there really is such an imperative.”[435] He does not claim to be able to demonstrate why the human mind prescribes the moral law to human beings: “all human insight is at an end as soon as we have arrived at basic powers or basic faculties.”[436] But he believes that he can show that reason really does prescribe this law. If experience cannot yield necessity,[437] but if he can show that the law is necessary, then it must be independent of experience; it must be a priori: “We can become aware of pure practical laws.by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason directs us.”[438]
+As Copan declined, bits of her history slowly began to slip from the grasp of her people. Neither Yax-Pac nor his lords left any major monuments that celebrated the turning of the katun on 9.18.0.0.0. For reasons yet unknown, the next hotun, 9.18.5.0.0 (September 15, 795), saw a lot of activity. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s Altar U, found in the town beneath the modern village, mentioned that period ending and it was celebrated in Temple 22a as we discussed above. Perhaps more important was Yax- Pac’s return to the forest of tree-stones erected by 18-Rabbit in the Great Plaza. On the eastern side of this plaza, between Stelae F and H, he set I another of the Vision Serpent altars (G2) next to the first monument (Altar G3) he had erected there just after he became the high king (Fig. 8:20).
-Kant presents a thought experiment in order to show that we are aware of the necessity of morality. He envisions a case in which no desire speaks in favor of the morally right action, but in which one’s desires favor the immoral alternative. Kant invites us to inquire of someone
+Five years later on the half-period, 9.18.10.0.0, the third of these Vision Serpent monuments, Altar Gl, was erected. With this monument in place, the triangular portal set in the middle of 18-Rabbit’s tree-stone forest was completed. This altar, right in the ceremonial center of the city, also affirmed the political duality binding Yax-Pac to his half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This superb sculpture, called the “na-chan altar” by the Copanecs, presented a double-headed image of the Cosmic Monster, skeletal at one end and fleshed at the other (Fig. 8:21). Each side of its body displayed a special text. On the north side, the dedication of the altar “in the land of Yax-Pac” was recorded; on the south, Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac’s name. The placement of this altar was highly significant. It was one thing for the half brother to get star billing in the town under the modern village, but entirely another for him to be featured in the sacred precinct in the center of the kingdom. The Acropolis and the Great Plaza had always been the sanctuary of the divine kings.
-whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of.immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it impossible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be.[439]
+Yax-Pac’s next project, Temple 18 (Fig. 8:22a), must have been under construction during the time of this same 9.18.10.0.0 period ending. This temple is the last building Yax-Pac ever built on the Acropolis, and its smaller scale is good evidence of the reduced assets available to the king less than twenty-five years after he dedicated his magnificent Otherworld portal in Temple 11. Set on the southeast corner of the Acropolis, directly across trom Temple 22, this final royal sanctuary contained an elaborate vaulted tomb chamber that was looted in ancient times.[532]
-We can easily structure the example in a way designed to ensure that no desire speaks in favor of refusing to give false testimony. So: the agent has a powerful position at court, and would like to retain this position; he loves his life and family; he does not believe in an afterlife; he does not believe that any good will come from his inaction because someone else will give the false testimony if he does not; and so forth. Even if one construes the thought experiment in this way, the agent still can be envisioned as believing that giving false testimony would be morally wrong, and that he should refuse the prince’s request: “he is aware that he ought to do it.”[440] Even if no desire speaks for an action, it can still be perceived as necessary.
+Yax-Pac placed this building in one of the most potent points in the city, an area that had been the focus of his attention for thirty years. This temple completed a skewed southward triangle with Temples 21a and 22a, anchored on Temple 22, the sacred building housing the portal of his ancestor 18-R.abbit (Fig. 8:11). The inscription carved into the interior walls of the outer chamber of this temple recorded the date of its dedication as 9.18.10.17.18 4 Etz’nab 1 Zac (August 12, 801), the day of the zenith passage of the sun (Fig. 8:22b). The imagery carved on the jambs of the doors in the outer and the center walls is a radical departure from precedent at Copan and reflects the dark final days of its dynasty. Yax-Pac and a companion (most likely his half brother) wield spears and strut in the regalia of warriors (Fig. 8:23) at the place of the waterlily. They wear cotton armor, shrunken heads, ropes for binding captives, and the bones of past victims. Grasping shields and weapons, they are ready for battle with Copan’s foes.
-Kant does not rest his argument on our sense that the moral command is necessary, though. Rather, he uses our sense of what we ought to do to establish that we are justified in believing that we are free: “He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.”[441] Freedom, here, is the ability to act independently of one’s desires, and if no desire inclines one to make a morally required choice but one nonetheless has a sense that one can act morally, then one has a sense that one is free, even if he “would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would . [make the moral choice] or not.”[442] In this context, freedom is assumed to be in some way causally efficacious—it should be able to move an agent towards the moral action. Kant agrees with Hume that “the concept of causality brings with it that of laws.”[443] The content of the moral law cannot be based upon desires, because the thought experiment excludes all desires as motives of the moral action. Therefore, Kant argues, only the form of the law remains, and freedom is the metaphysical ground or the “ratio essendi”[444] of the Categorical Imperative. Again, this is the same for the moral and the political law:
+The symbolism on these two doors reflects a change in strategy in direct correspondence with the violent death throes of Copan. In this last building, Yax-Pac did not reiterate the cosmic sanction of his reign. Instead, he announced his success and prowess as a warrior. Although all Copan’s kings had been warriors and sacrificial executioners, this choice of portraiture is unusual in Copan’s history.
-<quote>
+The Hieroglyphic Stairs built by Smoke-Shell emphasized the role of the ancestral kings as warriors, and this same Tlaloc-war iconography was prominently displayed on Temple 16 and Temple 21. Nevertheless, these were merely ancestral portraits or stage backdrops for rituals. Such rituals may have required wars to provide victims to send to the Otherworld in the tradition of Maya political life, but the Copanec tradition since the time of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had been to show the ruler standing in the portal of the Otherworld. It was his role as communicator with the ancestral dead and the materializer of the gods that preoccupied Copan royal portraiture.
-Since all obligation also rests on freedom itself, and has its ground therein ... Professor Kant calls all moral laws ... laws of freedom, and includes thereunder the aforementioned leges justi et honesti.inasmuch as they impose on the action the restrictive condition of fitness to be a universal law.[445]
-</quote>
-Thus, every moral requirement, every obligation, rests ultimately on a command issued by one’s own reason: “The reason is that we know our own freedom (from which all moral laws, and so all rights as well as duties proceed) only through the moral imperative.”[446] And any duty I have to another being ultimately rests on a duty to follow the moral law enunciated by my own reason:
+In all of the city’s long history, this is the only building on which the king is actually shown in battle, wielding the weapons of war.[533] We can only assume the role of king as active warrior became increasingly important to his public image as the crisis within his kingdom deepened. None of Yax-Pac’s enemies are mentioned by name, but neighboring kingdoms may well have been making forays, or perhaps the non-Maya peoples who had always lived just beyond the borders decided to move against the failing kingdom. Copan may also have been suffering from internal political problems. The nobles who had ruled parts of the kingdom for the high king, especially in its expanded version, may have decided to strike out on their own. War apparently was the only means at Yax-Pac’s disposal to fend off these challenges. Sadly, when authority fails, force is the last arbiter.
-<quote>
+In spite of these upheavals, the machinery of the state ground on. Yax-Pac recorded the end of his second katun as king on 9.18.12.5.17 2 Caban 15 Pax (December 4, 802), on a beautifully carved stone incensario. This incensario is the only monument we have identified so far from the second half of that katun.[534] We do have one other record of Yax-Pac’s activities from the end of this katun, albeit an unusual one. Yax-Pac paid a state visit to Copan’s old rival, Quiriguá, in order to perform a scattering rite on 9.19.0.0.0 (June 28, 810) (Fig. 8:24). This visit was unusual on two counts. First of all, kings rarely traveled to neighboring kingdoms; they preferred to send ambassadors.[535] Second, this sort of scattering rite was usually performed at the homesite, not in another king’s city. As far as we know, Yax-Pac did not perform a similar sacrificial ritual at Copán, although we know he was still ruling there, for his death was commemorated there some ten years later.
-For I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I at the same time put myself under obligation, since the law by virtue of which I regard myself as being under obligation proceeds in every case from my own practical reason; and in being constrained by my own reason, I am also the one constraining myself.[447]
-</quote>
-Moral and juridical laws alike are grounded in the autonomy of reason: the “ground of obligation. rests, as has been sufficiently shown, solely on the autonomy of reason itself.”[448] But recall that legal duties only demand the “conformity.of an action with law, irrespective of the incentive to it” and trace the “legality (lawfulness)” ofan outward behavior, whereas ethical laws also demand that one act from a certain incentive, and trace the “morality” of an action.[449] The difference is relevant in practice to the ways in which a victim can claim a right from another. In both cases, the obligation arises from the agent’s own reason. However, in ethics the victim can claim a right by reminding the agent of his duty to follow the law of the agent’s own reason:
+Yax-Pac died shortly before 9.19.10.0.0 (May 6, 820).[536] Although he had struggled valiantly to retain the loyalty and cooperation of the nobles in his valley, his strategy did not ultimately succeed. After seven hundred years, the central authority in the valley of Copan had less than a decade of life left.
-<quote>
+Although we do not know the exact date of Yax-Pac’s death, his survivors chose this half-period date (9.19.10.0.0) to commemorate his entry into the Otherworld. On that day they erected Stela 11 in the southwest corner of the platform supporting Temple 18 (Figs. 8:11 and 8:22), the last building he constructed. The imagery on this stela (Fig. 8:25) depicts Yax-Pac standing in the watery Otherworld holding the bar of office. In this instance, however, the bar is missing the serpent heads that symbolized the path of communication between the supernatural world and the human world.[537] Yax-Pac no longer needed them for he was already among the supernatural beings, a state marked by the smoking torch piercing his forehead. In the Otherworld Yax-Pac was manifested as God K, the deity of kings and their lineages.[538]
-the other, having a right to do so, confronts the subject with his duty, i.e., the moral law by which he ought to act. If this confrontation makes an impression on the agent, he determines his will by an Idea of reason, creates through his reason that conception of his duty which already lay previously within him, and is only quickened by the other, and determines himself according to the moral law.[450]
-</quote>
-This is different from the legal case. Although the juridical law, “so act externally that the free use of your choice can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal,” is “indeed a law that lays an obligation on me,”[451] and is “based on everyone’s consciousness of obligation,” it “cannot be appealed to as an incentive to determine his choice.”[452] One is justified in coercing the other into fulfilling his obligation: “there is connected with right.an authorization to coerce someone who infringes upon it.”[453] This is because what is wrong infringes the political law of freedom, and coercion removes what is hindering that which is commanded by the political law. It is justified by “hindering a hindrance of freedom.”[454] However, the victim does not claim her right by reminding the agent of his duty, even though the state itself is, on Kant’s view, justified in using coercion:
+The inscription on this strange rounded stela is enigmatic, but we have hints of its meaning. 1 he verb is a phonetic spelling of hom, the verb we have already seen recording ‘I ikal’s war. Ilere, however, the word does not refer to the destruction of war, but rather to the other meaning of the verb, “to terminate” and “to end”—as, for example, “to end a katun.” Following hom is the glyph that stands for “founder” or perhaps “lineage” or “dynasty” in other texts at Copan Putting all this together, we understand this text to mean that the people of Copan believed the dynasty of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had ended with the death of Yax-Pac.[539]
-<quote>
+Yax-Pac was not, however, the last king of Copan Although his reign was a difficult one, he was fortunate in one respect. He lived long enough to gain a place in history, but died soon enough to avoid the final tragedy. The king who oversaw those last days of kingship at Copan was named U-Cit-Tok. His is perhaps the saddest story of all the Maya kings we have met, for he inherited a world that had already fallen apart. There were too many people, too much of the forest gone, too many nobles grabbing honor and power for their own benefit, too little faith in the old answers, too little rain, and too much death.
-Thus when it is said that a creditor has a right to require his debtor to pay his debt, this does not mean that he can remind the debtor that his reason itself puts him under obligation to perform this; it means, instead, that coercion which constrains everyone to pay his debts can coexist with the freedom of everyone, including that of debtors, in accordance with a universal external law. Right and authorization to use coercion therefore mean one and the same thing.[455]
-</quote>
-In the legal case, too, any obligation is grounded in the autonomy of the agent as a pre-conscious, necessary lawgiving of one’s own reason. The difference to the ethical case is merely that the law does not require that one act from a particular motive, only that one do the right thing.
+This tragic man became the new king on 9.19.11.14.5 3 Chicchan 3 Ho (February 10, 822),[540] a day that contained some of the old astronomical associations beloved by the Maya, it was the day of disappearance for the Morningstar and a time of conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, which were just visible in the hours before dawn. The accession rituals of that day were commemorated on an altar placed on the mound at the north end of the Ballcourt (Fig. 8:11) near Stela 2, the old monument that commemorated Smokc-Imix-God K and the earlier days of Copan’s glory.
-This difference explains Kant’s statements about a “nation of devils.”[456] Kant’s point is not that beings with selfish desires justify the need to found a state on these desires. Rather, he is concerned here with the way in which one can motivate beings who know what is right, but are not motivated to do the right thing, into following their own reason. The initial problem is that, in order to establish the right constitution of a state, “many assert it would have to be a state of angels because human beings, with their self-seeking inclinations, would not be capable of such a sublime form of constitution.” The passage addresses a motivational problem. The devils already know what the right constitution of a state is in virtue of their “understanding.” However, they lack the motivation to form a state, and it is this problem that must be “soluble even for a nation of devils.” Kant’s answer to this problem is to use coercion, in order to “so order this multitude ... as if they had no such evil dispositions.”[457]
+[[][Fig. 8:26 U-Cit-Tok, the Last King of Copan]]
-But how does Kant get from the autonomy of reason, and its law, to the command to leave the state of nature? As the “nation of devils” passage makes clear, it is one thing for the supreme law of obligation not to be based upon prudential considerations, but it is another thing to determine why one should be motivated to abide by it, and so to leave the state of nature. How does Kant explain the need to avoid anarchy?
+The south side of the altar (Fig. 8:26) depicts the new king seated across from Yax-Pac in direct emulation of Altar Q, and in the tradition pursued by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac on his monument. As on Altar Q, the Calendar Round sits between the two kings, but U-Cit-Tok felt the need to qualify its meaning even further by writing chumwan, “he was seated,” after it.[541] On the left, in the same place occupied by Yax-Kuk-Mo’ on Altar Q, the new ruler sits on his own name glyph, holding out a fanlike object toward his predecessor. On his opposite side, in the same position he occupies on Altar Q, sits Yax-Pac. Perched on his name glyph, Yax- Pac mirrors the position and clothing of his successor, passing on, by analogy, the power and sanction of his divinity. It was not the younger version of the king that U-Cit-Tok wished to evoke, but the divinity of the mature and aged Yax-Pac. The pattern of Yax-Pac’s beard emulates his portrait on Stela 11, the image of his last and irreversible journey into Xibalba.
-*** VIII. The Duty to Leave the State of Nature
+The final hours of the kings of Copan are frozen in this amazing altar. On the other side is a scene of two figures, seated profile to the viewer while engaged in some sort of ritual (Fig. 8:27). We will never know what the sculptor intended to depict here because the altar was never finished.[542] In the middle of his cutting the imagery into the stone, the central authority of Copan collapsed. The sculptor picked up his tools and went home, never to return to his work on the altar. Copan’s dynastic history ended with the echoing slap of that sculptor’s sandals as he walked away from the king, the Acropolis, and a thousand years of history. The kings were no more, and with them went all that they had won.
-The grounding and justification of the highest law of obligation means that a human being is under this law even in the state of nature. So, even in a state of nature an agent knows what the principle of obligation declares to be morally right and just. Accordingly, “the state of nature need not, just because it is natural, be a state of injustice,”[458] and “in the state of nature, too, there can be societies compatible with rights.”[459] Even in terms of property rights, the law that governs obligation is already known in the state of nature: “in terms of their form, laws concerning what is mine or yours in the state of nature contain the same thing that they prescribe in the civil condition.”[460] Kant even argues that this must be the case, for only autonomy can ground any obligation at all (see above).
+The residential compounds beyond the Acropolis continued to function for another century or so. Some of the lineages even profited enough from the disintegration of central power to continue adding to their households. But without the central authority of the king to hold the community together, they lost it all. The lineages would not cooperate with each other without the king to reduce their competition and forge bonds of unity between them. Toward the end, one of the buildings in Compound 9N-8 collapsed onto an occupant, but his relatives never even bothered to dig him out. It was the final straw—the people simply walked away.[543] Within two centuries of the demise of the last king of Copan, 90 percent of the population in the Copan Valley system was gone.[544] They left a land so ravaged that only in this century have people returned to build the population back to the levels it knew in the time of Yax-Pac. Today, history is tragically replaying itself, as the people of Copan destroy their forests once more, revealing yet again the bones of the sacred witzob—but this time we are all threatened by the devastation.
-There are passages in which Kant seems to put forth a hypothetical reason for leaving the state of nature. Kant says about a subject: “unless it wants to renounce any concepts of right, the first thing it has to resolve upon is the principle that it must leave the state of nature,”[461] and that human beings accept the coercive powers of a state “so that they may enjoy what is laid down as right.”[462]
+. Kingdom and Empire at Chichen Itza
-These statements can be read as offering a hypothetical reason why one should avoid anarchy: if one wants to life in a rightful condition, one should leave the state of nature. But Kant does not, in fact, postulate a desire to live in a rightful state, or a desire (because one fears for one’s safety or possession) to avoid anarchy. Rather, the command of duty holds a priori, and this means that there is also an unconditioned command to bring it about: “‘You ought to enter this condition,’ holds a priori.”[463] One should leave the state of nature because only in this way is it possible to fulfill the command of duty. Even if one knows what is in accordance with duty, achieving it “can never be secure”[464] outside a rightful condition, and so, for Kant, outside a state. The reason, again, is that outside of a rightful condition there is no lawmaker, judge, nor police capable of ensuring that justice is achieved:
+Maya kingdoms were dying as the tenth cycle of the baktun neared its end. The epidemic of political chaos spread a thousand miles across the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, from Palenque to Copan; and in the southern lowland country, few dynasties endured into the ninth century. Yet in the northern part of the peninsula, in the dry forest lands of the northeast, in the rugged hill country of the west, on the northwestern plain, and along the coasts, Maya states not only flourished during the Terminal Classic period, but grew in strength and numbers (Fig. 9:1).[545]
-<quote>
+The cultures of these northern lowlands were distinctive from those in the south in several respects. The northerners, for example, developed architectural techniques using concrete wall cores surfaced with veneer block masonry.[546] They used this construction technique to render elaborate programs of political and religious imagery (Fig. 9:2) in complex stone mosaic facades and wall carvings. Further, the northern Maya developed a historical tradition of their own, distinct from the south’s, collected in books called the Chilam Balam. In them, each community compiled and kept its own version of history, which, after the Spanish conquest, was transcribed from its original hieroglyphic form into an alphabetic system using Spanish letters to record Mayan words.[547] The histories kept in these many books describe successive incursions of foreigners from outside Yucatán, some from as far away as central Mexico. Because these Classic period societies of the northern lowlands had a significantly greater interaction with outsiders than the Maya in the south, they assimilated a greater amount of foreign culture. This interaction resulted in their developing a more international outlook in politics and trade.
-It is therefore necessary, as soon as men come close to exercising their reciprocal freedom, that they leave the status naturalis, to come under a necessary law, a status civilis; there is need, that is to say, for a universal legislation that establishes right and wrong for everyone, a universal power that protects everyone in his right, and a judicial authority that restores the injured right, or dispenses so-called justitia distributiva (suum cuique tribuit).”[465]
-</quote>
-Even in the state of nature, two tribespeople could agree that a just border to their domain is the stream that divides their territories. However, there is no lawmaker, such as a land registry, to lay down who owns the land. Furthermore, if there is a dispute, because the stream dried out in a drought, or it changed its course in a flood, there is no judge to arbitrate what is right in accordance with the law, and there is no police force to see that justice is done. So, the command to leave the state of nature is part of the command of duty. One should abide by laws that one could will to be universal, and, in order to achieve this, one should avoid anarchy.
+[[][Fig. 9:1 The Yucatan Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet]]
-If this interpretation is correct, then there is a clear difference between Kant’s account of why one should leave the state of nature and the accounts of Hobbes and Locke.
+In spite of its international tradition, the northern region merges into the southern lowlands without geographic interruption; and from the time of the earliest kingdoms, the Maya living in both regions were linked, linguistically, culturally, economically, and politically.[548] Although the destinies of southern and northern kings in the Terminal Classic period diverged, they ultimately shared a common root. Since the institution of ahau was at the heart of government in both regions, we must look at the distinctive ways the northerners modified its relationship to central leadership in order to understand how the northerners transcended the limitations that led to failure in the south.
-In contrast to Hobbes, life in Kant’s state of nature is not necessary “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”[466] One might live in a small community, and not have much interaction with other tribes. There is not automatically a war of all against all.[467] There are important similarities between Kant and Hobbes in that, for Hobbes, too, there are laws in the state of nature, for instance, to seek peace, and to arrange one’s liberty in such a way that others grant one the same liberty one grants them.[468] However, there is no need to think that the laws Hobbes envisions as obtaining in the state of nature are more than Kantian “hypothetical imperatives.” Hobbes calls the law of reason a precept “by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved.”[469] If one wants self-preservation, and peace, one should give up certain liberties and leave the state of nature. In contrast to Kant’s, Hobbes’s account is purely prudential.
+The social catastrophe of the ninth century was the culmination of the gradual faltering of Maya kingship over a thousand years of history and many ingenious attempts to accommodate change. Yet in the end, this chain reaction of collapsing governments became the catalyst that pushed some of the peoples of the north toward a fundamental revision of the basic institution of ahau.
-Kant’s account seems close to Locke’s. For Locke, too, has argued that in the state of nature there is a law of reason, the “law of nature.” Like Kant’s, Locke’s law of nature prescribes what is needed to protect “life, liberty, and property.”[470] However, scholars debate what exactly the foundation and content of this law is.[471] In a voluntarist fashion, it might trace the will of God, and only be binding because it is God’s command. Even if it is something that human reason can discern by itself, it seems to track objective moral truths—con- cerned with, say, what is good for human beings. Kant’s account differs importantly from Locke’s in this regard. Obligation is not based on the will of God, but is grounded in the autonomy of reason.[472] But it is not only the binding force but also the content of the moral law that is prescribed by reason alone and does not track any sort of independent truth. Furthermore, Kant’s account is not based on human reason per se; he argues that his principle is valid for all rational beings, even non-human ones. Finally, Kant and Locke seem to differ on the question whether the state of nature actually existed. Locke believes that it once obtained in the real world,[473] while Kant holds that it is only a thought experiment designed to clarify the justification of coercion.
+Few of the Maya kingdoms were able to make the crucial transition from one form of government to another. The southern kingdoms of the Terminal Classic period tried, but their leaders failed because they attempted to solve their burgeoning social problems using methods that were fast becoming obsolete: the time-honored politics of the divine dynasties. The aggrandized kingdoms of such men as Great-Jaguar-Paw and Lord Kan II were never able to establish stable empires because they could not transcend the pride and exclusivity of the kingship—pride that compelled conquered dynasties to resist the acknowledgment of permanent subordination; exclusivity that prevented would-be emperors from effectively sharing power. On the other hand, some ahauob in the northern lowlands did succeed in perpetuating central government in this time of turmoil. Like the conqueror kings in the southern lowlands, the Itzá lords sought to break out of the limitations imposed by many small, competing realms. The way they accomplished this was to forge a conquest state and hegemonic empire with its capital, Chichén Itzá, in the center of the north. This city witnessed the birth of a social and political order based upon a new principle of governance, mu! tepal, “joint rule.”
-Kant argues that—whatever our desires, circumstances, or human nature might consist in— there is a direct, unconditional command to avoid anarchy.
+For a few centuries, Chichén Itzá ruled the Maya of the north without rival. The ahauob of Chichén Itzá honored many of the religious and political protocols laid down by generations of kings before them. Yet, at the same time, they were revolutionizing the ancient royal institutions, creating new policies, rituals, and symbols partly inspired by foreign traditions. At the height of their power in the lowlands, they extended the boundaries of their military and economic interests—and their religious and political vision—to the point where all of Mesoamerica knew of Chichén Itzá, as either a valuable ally or a formidable enemy.
+Our last royal history will recount the transformation of Chichén Itzá, its rise and triumph through foreign invasion and alliance—through war on an unprecedented scale, diplomacy, and brilliant political innovation. It is also the story of the Itzá’s opponents in this struggle: the orthodox Maya ahauob of Cobá and the innovative and international ahauob of the Puuc hills region. In their conflicts with Chichón Itzá, these powers endured and lost the closest thing to a world war the northern Maya would experience before the coming of the European conquerors.[549]
-[356] Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties 7:34n. Page numbers in Kant references cite the volume and page of Kants gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: de Gruyter 1902ff.; only references to the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] cite the page numbers of the A- and B-editions. All translations of Kant’s works are taken from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press. All the italicized material in the Kant quotes is emphasized in the original texts.
+At the northern apex of the ancient city of the Itzá, the Castillo rises into the clear air above the dry forest that stretches away into the distance across the flat plain (Fig. 9:3) of central Yucatán. This structure is a mute but eloquent testimony to the engineering elegance and revolutionary vision of a city that, in its heyday, stretched for at least twenty-five square kilometers[550] beyond its wide central plazas (Fig. 9:4). Here at the heart of the community, the vision is a silent one. Unlike the kings of the south, the last divine lords of Chichón Itzá chose not to use hieroglyphic texts on their stelae and buildings to proclaim their histories and triumphs. Instead, these rulers pursued a magnificent architectural program of bas- reliefs carved on piers, walls, pillars, and lintels. The decision to tell their story in pictures unencumbered by the written word was a deliberate one, for these cosmopolitan Maya had changed the institution of ahau and the kingship derived from it.
-[357] Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 8:330.
+Archaeology and the carved-stone inscriptions found in other parts of the city also give testimony to this transformation. These two sets of E evidence, however, tell two quite different, though ultimately related, versions of Chichén Itzá’s history.[551] During the Late Classic period, while the southern lowland kingdoms flourished, new cities came to prominence in the range of low hills called the Puuc in the northwestern part of the peninsula.[552] While divine ahauob ruled these cities,[553] the culture of their people shows strong ties to the Gulf Coast region and highland Mexico. These ties can be seen in features of architectural decoration and ceramic styles. One group of foreigners, called by archaeologists the “Putun” or “Chontai” Maya,[554] traded with the Puuc communities during the Late Classic period, and heavily influenced their culture. Indeed, the elite of the Puuc region may well have regarded themselves not only as ethnically Putun, but also as the political inheritors of the great traditions of the southern Classic period kingdoms. Described as crude barbarians by the Yucatecan Maya in some of their later books, these Chontai speakers were probably no more barbarian than the Germanic generals who, by diplomacy and force, took over Roman provinces in the waning years of that civilization.
-[358] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ch. XIII.
+% hile the Puuc hills in the west nurtured a prosperous and cosmopolitan constellation of new cities, the eastern region witnessed the establishment of a huge Late Classic state with its capital at Cobâ. With more than seventy square kilometers of homes, temples, house-lot walls, and stone causeways, Cobâ was undoubtedly the largest city in the northern region of Maya country.[555] Beyond its teeming multitudes and towering pyramids, Cobâ reached out for the agricultural produce and human labor of the surrounding towns. These communities were physically linked to the great city by stone roads that helped to reinforce the alliances and obligations between the noble families of vassals and the ahauob in the center.[556] In contrast to the Maya of the Puuc cities, the people of Cobâ and their kings sustained strong cultural ties to the southern kingdoms. The style of their great pyramids reflected Petén traditions and their divine lords raised tree-stones with extensive, and unfortunately badly eroded, hieroglyphic texts. Like the ahauob of Palenque and Copân, the nobility of Cobâ apparently regarded themselves as frontier stalwarts of a great Maya tradition with its heart in the southern lowlands.
-[359] Immanuel Kant, Lectures on the Metaphysics of Morals Vigilantius [“Vigil” in the following] 27:591.
+Archaeological research documents that, soon after the consolidation of these distinctive western and eastern kingdoms in the northern lowlands by the end of the eighth century, a series of strategic coastal strongholds was established by canoe seafaring peoples. These people were called the Itzâ by archaeologists, after references to them in Books of Chilam Balam.[557] These coastal Itzâ used pottery styles which would become characteristic of Chichén Itzâ, and they brought with them foreign goods, such as Mexican obsidian, both black and green.[558] Eventually, these merchant warriors founded a permanent port facility on an island off the northern coast, at the mouth of the Rio Lagartos, where they could command a rich trade in the sea salt prized in Mexico and elsewhere. Called Isla Cerritos,[559] this small island was literally transformed by artificial construction into a single round and massive platform with masonry docking along its entire periphery for the large dugout canoes used by these peoples.
-[360] Kant, Vigil 27:591.
+At some juncture in their expansion along the coastal areas, the Itzâ moved inland to establish a new state in the north. Although the Chilam Balam books claim the Itzâ incursions came from the direction of Cozumel Island and the east coast of the peninsula, the archaeological evidence suggests they came directly inland from their outposts along the coast. It is hardly accidental that their final major capital at Chichén Itzâ was established in the center of the northern plain, directly south of their port at Isla Cerritos. That central zone, however, was already a frontier between the state of Cobâ to the east and the Puuc cities to the west and south. The Itzâ marched provocatively into a region that was already occupied by formidable kingdoms. It is clear that they intended to stay. The first step in their plan was the conquest of Izamal, a kingdom that boasted one of the largest and most famous pyramids in the north.[560] Once they had overcome Izamal, the Itzâ armies kept right on going. They aimed for a border city between Coba and the Pune, an ancient center known as Yaxuna (or Cetelac, as some call it).
-[361] Cf. Hobbes ch. XIII.
+The massive pyramids of Yaxuna had been raised by kings in the Preclassic and Classic periods and were the largest such structures in the central northern lowlands. Following a decline in the Late Classic period, Yaxuna experienced a resurgence of both population and prestige in the Terminal Classic. At the time of the Itza incursions, Yaxuna was probably a sizable town, marking the boundary between Coba’s sphere of influence and the Puuc cities to the west. In this flat land without rivers, there were only two clear geographic markers: the deep natural wells, called cenotes, and the sacred mountains raised by ancestral peoples. Both were used by the northern Maya to stake out political centers and frontiers. Yaxuna had large ancient pyramids and the aura of power and legitimacy such places contain. It also had a great natural well. Both of these landmarks made it the logical choice for a border city.
-[362] Kant, Vigil 27:589.
+The Itza could not take Yaxuna immediately because the king of Coba and the rulers of the Puuc cities claimed it as their own. By dint of diplomacy or force of arms, these two kingdoms initially repelled the invaders’ advance, thus forcing the Itza to chose another nearby sacred spot for their new capital. The Itza established their new city at a another cenote that would come to be known as Chichen Jtzd, “the Well of the Itza.” This site was located twenty kilometers to the north of Yaxuna.
-[363] Immanuel Kant, Idea of a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim [IUH] 8:20.
+This first confrontation was but the opening round in a grim war for control of the northern part of the peninsula. Responding to the new intruders, the king of Coba commissioned the construction of the most ambitious political monument ever raised by the Maya: a stone road one hundred kilometers long, linking the center of Coba to the ancient center of Yaxuna. Townsmen and villagers living along the route of this sacred causeway quarried three quarters of a million cubic meters of rock from the earth for its construction. They filled the masonry walls and packed down tons of white marl on the road’s surface, using huge stone rolling pins. This road declared Coba to be master of a territorial domain covering at least four thousand square kilometers, nearly twice the size of the southern lowland kingdom of Tikal at its height.[561]
-[364] Cf. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 6:27.
+At Yaxuna, the arrival of the masonry road triggered a frenzy of building activity on the foundations of the ancient ruins (Fig. 9:5). Early Classic buildings were quarried to provide building blocks for the new temples and palaces that rose at the edges of the broad plaza area where the Coba road ended. Masons removed the rubble and stone from the sides of the Preclassic Acropolis and piled it up again into a pyramid twenty-five ] meters high, facing eastward toward Coba. To this conglomerate of old and new, the Yaxuna people added a ballcourt and its associated temples and platforms. We know that the Puuc cities also had their part in the rebuilding of Yaxuna because the style of the new buildings emulated the Puuc tradition, rather than that of Coba.
-[365] Kant, IUH 8:23.
+Surrounding this new seat of authority, the inhabitants founded a perimeter of smaller communities, one almost exactly midway between Yaxuná and Chichón Itzá (Fig. 9:6). To decorate their small palaces, artisans of these towns carved stone bas-reliefs displaying the warriors of the polity taking captives (Figs. 9:7 and 9:8). They also displayed bas- reliefs of the accession of their lords, including one who acceded to the rank of cah, a variant of the cahal status of nobles in the southern lowland kingdoms (Fig. 9:9).
-[366] Kant, IUH 8:22.
+Ultimately, however, the efforts of the Puuc cities and Coba to remain in power in the center of the northern lowlands failed. After many years of bitter fighting, Chichón Itzá’s armies won the battle on the fields of Yaxuná. The rebuilding of that city ended almost as soon as it had begun. Quarried blocks of stone lay strewn at the base of ancient platforms, abandoned in hasty retreat before the masons could use them. The occupants of the perimeter communities likewise fled, leaving their little decorated palaces unattended and their homes to fall into ruin.
-[367] Cf.Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Kant’s Doctrine of Right. A Commentary (CUP 2010) 44—9.
+We cannot say how long this war lasted, but its final outcome is certain. The war reliefs of Yaxuná[562] were cast down from their buildings to be rediscovered a millennium later by archaeologists (Fig. 9:10). The inhabitants of Chichón Itzá, by contrast, went on to expand their city, adding many ambitiously conceived buildings dedicated to their triumph and glory. The cities of the Puuc region and the great capital of the northwestern plain, Dzibilchaltún,[563] likewise collapsed as political capitals. As Chichón Itzá prospered, these rival kingdoms were eventually abandoned. The final occupation of Uxmal also shows the presence of the pottery styles of Chichón Itzá.[564] Cobá may not have been abandoned in the wake of this catastrophe, but it experienced a slow, steady decline in public construction.[565]
-[368] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals [MS] 6:306.
+The archaeology of Chichón Itzá itself yields an enigmatic and controversial picture of these events.[566] Traditionally, archaeologists regarded the city as having had two major occupations: an earlier “Maya” community with Puuc-style temples and palaces, including dedicatory lintels with hieroglyphic texts; and a later “Toltec” or foreign community established by Mexican conquerors and their Maya allies. In reality, Chichen Itza shows evidence of having always been a single city occupied by a remarkable. increasingly cosmopolitan nobility. This nobility manipulated diverse political expressions in their public art—some Maya, some Mexican—but all aimed at reinforcing and consolidating their authority.
-[369] Kant, MS 6:306.
+This revised vision of Chichen Itza as a single, unified culture is based upon a realization that the pottery style of the “Toltec” city was at least partly contemporary with the pottery style of the Puuc and “Maya” Chichen. It is also based upon recognition that the settlement organization of the city is unitary: A network of stone roads links principal groups into a whole. Finally, although the artistic style of the “Toltec” part of the city is distinctive, this style also utilizes Maya hieroglyphic texts.[567] The royal patrons of this “Toltec” complex in the northern section of Chichen Itza may have favored murals and sculpture over texts, but they were not illiterate foreigners. They were true Maya citizens.
-[370] Cf. Kant, MS 6:313–6.
+What the archaeology of Chichen Itza does suggest is that several generations of rulers built public architecture and sculpture to commemorate their increasing success in war and trade. As the ahauob of Chichen Itza w’orked to forge a conquest state that incorporated the territories of their enemies, the political statements they commissioned departed more and more from the prototypes they had inherited from the southern kings. These kings abandoned narrative portraits with inscribed texts in favor of assemblies of portraits carved on pillars in the great colonnades or engraved on the interior walls of their temples, throughout this book we have shown how changes in the strategies of public art reflect improvisations in the institution of ahau. In the case of the Itzá, these changes were designed to legitimize not only conquest but also consolidation. We have seen such improvisation before in the case of Early Classic Tikal, but here the strategy is more comprehensive, reaching into the very essence of the institution of ahau itself—namely its focus upon the lineal connection between males of descending generations.
-[371] Kant, Vigil 27:590.
+The political organization of Chichón Itzá, as conveyed in its hieroglyphic texts, was revolutionary even before the initiation of the non- glyphic public art programs. This innovativeness is particularly evident in the treatment of family relationships between ahauob,[568] as we shall see shortly. The nobles of this city shared extraordinary privileges with their rulers. The texts of Chichón Itzá are scattered throughout the city in places traditionally reserved for the use of kings: on the stone lintels spanning the doorways of public buildings; on the jambs of these doorways; on freestanding piers in doorways, an architectural fashion of the Terminal Classic period; and on friezes decorating the interiors of these buildings.
-[372] Kant, Vigil 27:589.
+The written history of Chichón Itzá covers a remarkably short span for a city of such importance. The dates associated with these texts are all clustered within the second katun of the tenth baktun. The earliest clear date at the site, July 2, A.D. 867, is inscribed on a monument that was found lying on the ground. This monument, know n as the Watering Trough Lintel, has a deep corn-grinding-metate surface cut into it. Recently, the intriguing question has arisen that an inscription on a temple called the High Priest’s Grave,[569] traditionally regarded as the latest date at the site (10.8.10.11.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, or May 13, A.D. 998) might actually have been carved much earlier. We suggest instead that this date fell on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, 842) and is thus the earliest date in the city. This alternative makes better sense in light of the tight clustering of the other inscribed dates found within the city. The date inscribed on the High Priest’s Grave is only one of several texts, including several undeciphered historical ones, on the temple. Hence it clearly falls into the phase of public literacy in the city.
-[373] Kant, MS 6:312. This point only refers to determining what is right in a particular situation, not the criterion of rightness itself, as I will argue from Section IV onward.
+At the same time, the High Priest’s Temple is architecturally a prototype of the four-sided Castillo with the famous serpent sculptures on its stairways.[570] The Castillo is the focal point of the later northern center only a few meters to the north and east of it. The imagery within the High Priest’s Temple, including a bound noble on a column and a serpent- entwined individual over the inner dais, clearly anticipates the iconography of buildings in the great northern center such as the Temple of the Chae Mool and the Temple of the Warriors. This earlier placement of the High Priest’s Grave would tie the “Toltec” northern center to the “Maya” southern center architecturally and spatially. If confirmed, it would also make the original implementations of the “Toltec” iconographic and architectural styles which lack inscriptions completely contemporary with the “’Maya” styles found with the dedicatory monuments throughout the southern districts of the city.
-[374] Cf. Kant, MS 6:307.
+The restricted distribution of dates at Chichón Itza is commensurate with the intent of the texts, for they do not delineate a dynastic history like those we encountered in the southern kingdoms. The inscriptions of the southern cities focused on the commemoration of major events in the lives of kings and their significant others, often tying these events to major conjunctions in the cycles of time. The focus of attention in the Chichén Itzá texts is upon rituals of dedication carried out by groups of lords. The historical information given consists not of personal history but of dates, names, and the relationships among the actors who participated in these rituals.
-[375] Cf. Thomas Pogge, “Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive Liberalism?’” Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mark Timmons (OUP 2002) 150–1; Georg Geisman, “Recht und Moral in der Philosophie Kants,” Annual Review of Law and Ethics 14 (2006): 3–124; and Gerhard Seel, “How Does Kant Justify the Universal Objective Validity of the Law of Right?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2009): 71–94.
+The Temple of the Four Lintels is one of three Puuc-style buildings containing inscribed monuments in a group that terminates the main north-south sacbe, or roadway, of the city (Fig. 9:11). The assemblage of lintels from this building illustrates the general rhetoric of these inscriptions. The name of the principal protagonist is listed, along with the date of the inscription and the action being commemorated. This information is followed by a statement of his relationship to a second person. This second person may then be qualified as the agent of yet another ritual in the overall process of dedication. Finally, in a couplet structure, there is a reiteration of the dedication by the principal individual, followed by a listing of two more individuals who are said to be related to one another. The date of this particular dedication, July 13, A.D. 881, is thrice recorded on the lintels of this temple.
-[376] Cf. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [GMS] 4:389.
+This focus upon dedicatory rituals and their participants leaves us with only a brief and enigmatic history of the important people of Chichén Itzá. We are not told when these people were born or when they acceded, warred, or died as we were in the southern kingdoms. We do, however, have some glimmering of the kinds of rituals being carried out. In the Four Lintels texts, there are references to the drilling action which creates new fire[571] and several of the individuals named carry a “fire” title. Furthermore, two of these lintels carry images on them which, when found in other scenes at Chichén Itzá, pertain to sacrifice. The most prominent images are the bird which claws open the chests of victims to extract the heart and the serpent which rises above the sacrifice.[572]
-[377] Cf. Pogge 147.
+The Casa Colorada is a sizable temple south of the main city center and next to the sacbe leading to the southern group containing the Temple of the Four Lintels. Here, a hieroglyphic frieze records a series of events that took place on two different dates, 10.2.0.1.9 6 Muluc 12 Mac (September 15, 8 69),[573] and 10.2.0.15.3 7 Akbal 1 Ch’en (June 16, 8 70). Again, we see the names of several different lords listed along with the ritual actions they performed on these days. We find recorded, among others, a “fish- in-hand” bloodletting ritual and the ceremonial drilling activity associated with the creation of fire (Fig. 9:12). Here, as in the case of the Four Lintels texts, the emphasis is again upon a series of individuals who are named as agents of different actions.
-[378] Kant, IUH 8:22.
+The bridge between the textual programs and the purely artistic programs in the city can be found on the carved doorway column in Structure 6E1[574] (Fig. 9:13). In this one instance, the artist wrote out the names of the individuals glyphically, but rendered their actions in portraits. On the doorway column of this building, we see four striding figures. One of them carries a handful of throwing-stick darts and a severed human head. The others carry axes of the kind used in decapitation sacrifice[575] and knives used in heart-extraction rituals at Chichen Itza.[576] Here then we have a group of titled individuals[577] who are participants in, or witnesses of, a death sacrifice. Another glyphic inscription is found in the nearby Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs (Structure 6E3). This temple is associated with a particular kind of elite residence called a Patio Quad structure,[578] which finds its most spectacular expression in the Mercado, a colonnaded palace in the main northern center. In the past this Patio Quad type of house has been attributed to the “Toltec-Chichen Itza,” illiterate foreigners living within the city. The presence of these traditional Maya-style glyphs on a building which is clearly the household shrine of this group, however, is but one more example that the “Maya” and “Toltec” styles existed simultaneously in time, as part of one unified culture.[579]
-[379] Pogge 147.
+Any overview of the monumental art of Chichén Itzá raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Who were these mysterious lords who did not care to celebrate their births, accessions, and triumphs as Maya rulers had done before them? This is a matter which is not easily resolved. First of all, the actual number of historical individuals recorded in the texts is still a point of controversy. Those people we can identify with relative certainty are listed in Figure 9:14. Second, sorting out the kin relationships at Chichén is a perplexing task. The relationships we are sure of are given in Figure 9:15. The connections here are between women of ascending generation and their progeny, as expressed in the glyphic expressions “mother of” and “child of mother.”
-[380] Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace [ZeF] 8:366.
+At the most, these glyphs tell us that there were two, perhaps three, generations of women who were mother, grandmother, and possibly greatgrandmother to the major group of men named as “siblings” in these texts. The kinship ties among these five men can be determined in the following ways: (1) Two of them, Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi, are the children of the same mother, and (2) four of them are named in the kind of yitah, or “sibling,” relationship we have seen recorded at Caracol and Tikal. Kin- Cimi, Ah-Muluc-Tok, Wacaw, and Double-Jawbone are all named in this “sibling” group. Since Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi share the same mother, Kakupacal can also be added to this group of brothers.
-[381] Kant, ZeF 8:366.
+We have seen siblings before in the royal histories of the Maya, but not in sets of five. Moreover, although there are many more discoveries to be made in these texts, as of now there is no clear evidence that any one of these individuals was superior in rank to any of the others. All carry such noble titles as ahau and yahau kak, “lord of fire,” but there is no single individual whom we can identify with certainty as king. This situation is exacerbated by the presence of at least one, and perhaps two, more such sibling sets in these texts, as shown in Figure 9:14. While there may eventually be evidence to suggest generational relationships among the groups, for the present there are no clear father-son relationships in any surviving record from Chichen Itza. The dates of the texts in question cover a span of time which is relatively brief by Maya standards, and the texts imply contemporaneous actions by these people. The native chronicles of the Itza declare that Chichen Itza was ruled by brothers in its heyday[580]—and a brotherhood of princes is exactly what we see emerging from the ancient texts.
-[382] Kant, ZeF 8:366.
+There are precedents for the sharing of power between a Maya king and his key relatives. Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal ruled their expanded domain together. Yax-Pac of Copan had co-regents of a sort in his brothers. Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan elevated his cahalob, his noble kin, and his supporters to stand beside him on the royal monuments of the realm. Of course, the king had always been an ahau, like many of the nobles around him. The dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles, however, was still a fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years.
-[383] Pogge 149.
+At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya had a word for this kind of government: multepal, joint or confederate government.[581] It was a multepal that ruled Mayapan, the last regional capital of the northern Maya, which was established after the fall of Chichen Itza, during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200–1450) and just before the Spanish conquest.[582] Within the Mayapan government, there was a particularly powerful family, the Cocom, whose patriarch was generally regarded as the “first among equals.” There was also a rival political faction, the Xiu, whose family patriarch was high priest of the cult of Kukulcan and carried the title of Ah Kin Mai, Priest of the Cycle. Neither of these leaders, however, could successfully claim to rule their constituents in the manner that the Classic period southern kings did. We are convinced that the present textual evidence at Chichen Itza points to an earlier and precedent-setting multepal as the institution of government in that city.
-[384] Kant, GMS 4:414.
+The Cocom family of the Conquest period claimed to be the descendants of the ancient rulers of Chichen Itza. According to legend, the Cocom returned to the territory of the city of the sacred well after the fall of Mayapan in A.D. 1450.[583] Chichen Itza texts from the end of the Classic period provide some support for their claim to be the former rulers of that city. In the text of the Casa Colorada frieze discussed above, Yax-Uk-Kauil, Kakupacal, and other notables are associated with Hun-Pik-Tok, who is called “Divine Cocom, the ahau (vassal) of Jawbone-Fan” (Fig. 9:12).[584] The name Hun-Pik-Tok also appears on the lintel from the Akab Tzib, where he is again named the vassal of the “Divine Cocom” overlord, Jawbone-Fan. The ancient pedigree of the Cocoms is thus confirmed by their appearance in the inscriptions of Kakupacal and his siblings in the early history of Chichón Itzá.
-[385] Cf. Pogge 147.
+Since neither Hun-Pik-Tok nor Jawbone-Fan is tied to any of the sibling sets, we have no way of knowing what kin relationship they may have had with Kakupacal and his siblings. Hun-Pik-Tok, moreover, does not get the amount of historical attention we have seen on the monuments of other Maya kings. Instead, he is, at most, an antecedent presence to the sibling sets, either providing them with some form of legitimacy or acting as their ally. Nevertheless, we can assume from all of this evidence that the multepal form of government probably did not originate at Mayapán, as some have believed, but in Chichón Itzá itself.
-[386] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason [KpV] 5:26.
+We also know that Chichón Itzá, like the more orthodox Maya kingdoms, also used an Emblem Glyph, which can be loosely translated as “divine Chichén Itzá lord.”[585] The main phrase of the Chichén Itzá Emblem Glyph is comprised of male genitalia and a le sign. Male genitalia are one of the most ancient and venerable of titles taken by kings, and probably connote the concept of “progenitor.”
-[387] Kant, ZeF 8:378.
+The Emblem Glyph was widely used in the names of Chichén’s leaders: Several members of the sibling sets used the Emblem Glyph as a title. This “male-genitalia” glyph even occurs as part of the name of the oldest female appearing on the monuments. In the name of this woman, the grandmother of the five brothers, the glyph probably simply connoted the simple idea of an ancestress. In the southern kingdoms, contemporaries of the ruler could also refer to themselves with the Emblem Glyph title. In those cases, however, there was never any ambiguity as to which of these lords was the high king and which were in positions of subordination. The ambiguous nature of the hierarchical labels at Chichón is just one more piece of evidence supporting the concept of confederate rule.
-[388] Kant, ZeF 8:377.
+The texts we have surveyed so far give us only a glimpse of Chichón Itzá’s rich and complex-history. To examine the culture and political structure further, we must turn to the richer and more extensive political statements found in the imagery on its public art. Here we find a marked thematic contrast to the art of the southern lowland Maya kingdoms, particularly those of the Late Classic period. Chichén Itzá’s many carved panels, pillars, piers, lintels, sculptures, and murals do not celebrate the king, but rather groups of people, particularly in processional arrangements.
-[389] Kant, ZeF 8:378.
+One of the most spectacular of these stone assemblies is the gallery of notables carved on the squared columns of the Northwest Colonnade and the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9.16). The Northwest Colonnade is a spacious, beam-and-mortar roofed building found at the base of the raised pyramid crowned by the Temple of the Warriors. The gallery of notables is, literally, a frozen procession representing 221-plus striding men. These stone figures frame the processional route which leads to the temple stairway (Fig. 9:17).[586]
-[390] Kant, ZeF 8:378.
+For the most part, the individuals portrayed are warriors, as the name of the building complex implies. The majority are armed with spearthrowers, although some carry bunched spears and others clubs studded with ax blades. There is also a depiction of another defensive weapon, a curved stick evidently used to parry spears hurled by enemies.[587] These weapons are associated with the Tlaloc-warfare complex which we saw operating among southern lowland kingdoms. In the art of Chichen Itza, however, there are abundant and explicit depictions of the actual waging of war with such weapons. Some of the warriors in the procession are clearly veterans, proudly displaying their amputated limbs. Each is an individual portrait, differing in details from the others (Fig. 9:18). In addition to the warriors, there are other important people. Some have been identified as sorcerers or priests by the regalia they wear and the fact that they are not armed (Fig. 9:18d). There is also one intimidating old matriarch striding among all of these men.[588] She is probably either the matriarch of the principal sodality or a representative of the Moon Goddess Ix-Chel, also known as Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. This figure echoes images from elsewhere in the city and we find her as well in the Temple of the Jaguars across the great platform from the Temple of the Warriors.
-[391] Kant, ZeF 8:365.
+In the center of the procession, on the columns in front of the stairway leading upward to the sacrificial stone, the Chae Mool, there is an assembly of prisoners. This group of bound captives confirms the essential intent of the overall composition—to celebrate victory in war. Despite the brilliant and innovative architectural framework, the political message here is the same as the one we have seen throughout our earlier histories— capture and sacrifice of rival lords by the powerful. There is one significant difference, however. In the monumental art of the southern kingdoms, we have seen prisoners stripped, humiliated, and often mutilated. Here, the captives are dressed in rich regalia, in most respects the same kind of attire worn by the highest ranking of the victorious warriors surrounding them (Fig. 9:18c). Obviously, the Itzá preferred to absorb their enemies rather than destroy them.
-[392] Kant, MS 6:222.
+Although the elite of Chichón Itzá clearly had ties to the non-Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the winners celebrating here are as clearly “Maya” in their appearance as their victims. Let us pause now to imagine what a procession like this would have been like in the days when Chichón was entering into the era of its glory.
-[393] Kant, MS 6:222.
+A bewhiskered, grizzled face swam before the eyes of the adolescent boy as the old steward shook him awake in the cold dampness of the colonnaded hall. It was still dark in the plaza in front of his family compound. Inside, the red-painted walls and heavy wooden rafters glinted in the flickering torchlight, festooned with stone-edged weapons and sparkling gear. Already the boy’s elder kinsmen were dressed in their sleeveless jackets of embroidered cotton armor. Their golden-feathered, greenstone- studded helmets shone in the dim light. As the men engaged in animated conversation, the small blue birds, which hung like diadems from the front of their helmets, bobbed with the movements of their heads. They reminded the boy of the pretty little birds that swooped among the swarms of insects at half-light, devouring them by the thousands, like the Itzá overwhelming their enemies on the field. The men’s green-feathered back- shields were emblazoned with the fearful insignia of their family and their city. Schoolboys from the villages vied with one another to supply the long strips of cotton[589] with which the men strapped each other’s arms and legs for war.
-[394] Kant, MS 6:222.
+Laughter and casual conversation filled the boy’s ears, and his belly growled as the scent of hot corn gruel laced with chocolate and chili filled his nostrils. He moved quickly to join the others. No battle today. Instead, they would march in victory to the great council hall of the lords.
-[395] Kant, MS 6:222.
+Accompanied by the ancient shamans, his father emerged from the family shrine which sat on a steep platform across the plaza. The blood of last evening’s sacrifices stained their long robes and matted their flowing hair. The boy’s heart swelled with pride as he remembered the lords the men of his family had taken captive in the campaign of the hill towns. His older brother had told him how the shouts of victory had mingled with the screams of terror as the women of the vanquished had fled their burning homes.
-[396] Kant, MS 6:225; cf. GMS 4:402.
+If the sacrifices were finished, the boy knew it was getting late. As he dressed hastily, he could hear the defeated nobles in their finery being assembled by his siblings on the plaza before the great hall. The drums of his clan began sounding the march. Still straightening his helmet, the boy rushed down the stairs to join the procession as it moved off led by his father, their great captain.
-[397] Kant, MS 6:222.
+Drumsong and the smoke of morning temple fires rose from the arcade of tall shade trees and fruit orchards lining the road. Dawn was just turning the sky pale-blue as the boy’s clan reached the main thoroughfare, joining the other groups of warriors who were pouring in greater and greater numbers from the paths among the trees. Together, they headed northward on the great white limestone road. The jogging rhythm of the warriors surrounding him propelled the boy forward, even as he strained to catch a glimpse of the prisoner-kings of the enemy whom the high lords of the council paraded among them. The company marched the battle dance of the Itza, a frightening, sinuous rush of warriors that carried death to all who opposed it. The massive red walls of the first house of the siblings loomed to the boy’s right as the swelling ranks of the army emerged onto the plaza of the old center. Their arrival was punctuated by a roar of approval from the crowds lining every side.
-[398] Kant, GMS 4:421.
+The great captains danced forward, reenacting the capture of their enemies. Uttering his distinctive hawklike war cry, the boy’s father grabbed a valorous ahau by the hair and pushed him off balance, stabbing his spear into the air. Up ahead, the procession slowed as the vast stream of men expanded out onto the broad avenue, flanked on one side by the Observatory and on the other by the Red House. Elbowing past the intent ranks of his clan and their provincial allies, the young boy maneuvered himself to the edge of the battle group. It was his responsibility, he reminded himself as the older men gave way, to stand at the exposed edge of his family’s ranks, moving them at the signals from his father and his elder siblings.
-[399] Kant, ZeF 8:377.
+Moving forward with the impetus of the men-at-arms, the boy passed the old Castillo, its sacred cave now sealed by the graves of seven great lords.[590] It loomed high above the far side of the parade. The new Castillo, still under construction, rose proudly before them, surrounded by a sea of city folk. As the crowd fell back cheering, the army writhed onto the blinding white plaza and danced across to the Great Ballcourt. Also unfinished, this structure was vast beyond all imagining, encompassing an awesome vision of victory and sacrifice at the heart of the mighty city. The sweet stench of death filled the boy’s nostrils as he passed the huge skull rack before the Ballcourt. The hollow-eyed heads of defeated enemies glared back at him, sending a shiver down his spine as he contemplated their earthly remains mounted in row upon row on the tall wooden rack. The older trophies shone in the morning light with the creamy-white brillance of naked bone, while others taken more recently still bore the flesh and hair of their unfortunate owners. All hung as grim reminders of what the wargame would bring for some of the prisoners today.
-[400] Kant, Vigil 27:526.
+At full strength now, the army swirled around the Castillo, gyrating to the reverberation of hundreds of great wooden drums and the wail of the conch trumpets. Thousands upon thousands of warriors arranged in long sinuous lines moved with the discipline of years of combat, pushing back the crowds to the edges of the plaza and up onto the flanks of the buildings. The prisoners moved in their midst, each one the ward of a great veteran. The boy’s father signaled his son to shift his battle group into tormation along the eastern side of the great northern plaza, joining the others of his province. In a moment the wargames would begin in earnest.
-[401] Kant, MS 6:218.
+Vibrating with tension, the men faced a wide sea of their compatriots across the plaza. When the signal whistles and cries rose from their captains, they rushed forward to engage each other as they had engaged the enemy in the battle of the hills. The crowd roared encouragement. More warriors rushed forward in the melee to dampen the danger of accident. Circles opened in the crowd as brave enemies were freed from their bonds and given weapons with which to pantomime deadly combat with the Itzá’s best heroes. Dart duels cut alleyways throughout the ranks as men moved out of the line of fire.[591] The dance of death progressed, parry and thrust, the groans of surprise at a sudden wound. Some Itzá would join their ancestors today if they were not alert.
-[402] Cf. Kant, GMS 4:390.
+In the midst of this melee, the boy saw his father squaring off against his highest-ranked prisoner, both armed with stabbing spears. The two men closed vigorously, wrestled, and then closed again. The lord fought well, but the boy’s father was in better condition and soon had his prisoner down on the plaza with a spear under his chin. There was a pause. Suddenly the father raised up his enemy and gave him back his spear. He gazed into his face and then turned his back to him as he would to a sibling and trusted battle companion. The decision he offered his enemy was to die taking his captor with him. Such a death, however, would be a humiliating act of cowardice. Better by far to live as a younger sibling, a prince of the hated Itzá and their city of the new creation. The captive grasped his spear tightly and, for a moment, the boy thought his father’s time had come. But then the captive’s fingers slowly relaxed, his eyes dropped, and he fell into line behind his captor as the group came back together again and moved off toward the council house.[592] The boy felt a flush of pride. Not all of the lords would have taken such a chance, but he knew his father held his position in the high council by means of his courage as well as his wisdom.
-[403] Kant, MS 6:218–9.
+The boy’s battle party moved forward to the steps of the Temple of the Warriors, the council house of the Itzá nation. The ambassadors from distant allied cities in the western mountains were arrayed along the front of the halls with their piles of sumptuous gifts. Dressed in long skirts, the dreadful shamans of the city moved among them, waving their crooked staffs and billowing censers and muttering incantations against treachery. The lords of the council gathered on the steps with their highest-born prisoners, announcing the names of those who had joined the nation and those who had chosen to go to the Otherworld today. Those who chose death were honored with ritual celebration before being led through the lower hall and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice. There, as the sun stood high in the sky at midday, one after the other they received the gentle death, so called because no one ever made a sound when his heart was cut out. The great Vision Serpent rose in the clouds of incense surrounding their lifeless bodies.
-[404] Kant, MS 6:223.
+The sacrifices continued through the afternoon, and the warriors, engaged in their games on the plaza, clustered like angry bees around a hive until the sun sank in bloody splendor. The boy amused himself with the games and wondered if he would ever get to sacrifice in the Great Ballcourt when it was finished by the master builders and masons of the defeated hill cities. Mostly, however, his thoughts were with his father, sitting in the council house plotting the future of the city. Now that there was peace in the land, the Itza could look outward to the world beyond and the challenges it would bring.
-[405] Kant, ZeF 8:365.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-[406] Kant, ZeF 8:379.
+The eternal stone rendering of this procession in the Temple of the Warriors depicts figures wearing three of the basic motifs of Tlaloc warfare we have seen in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:18a): the Tlaloc mask, the year-sign headdress, and the clawed-bird warrior. In the temple above this procession, a second gathering of portraits was carved on twenty more columns. Here there are no prisoners, but only warriors and dignitaries. These figures, ranged along the back wall of the hall before the throne dais, embody some particularly fine expressions of this particular artistic program. Although these familiar images of warriors and important dignitaries frame the ritual space which the leader occupied, as we have come to expect in the lineage houses of the earliest Maya kingdoms, they are also different. This great procession of VIPs stands in place of the traditional Classic symbol of the domain—the carved portrait of the victorious king. The throne is still upheld by the customary small warrior figures, but at Chichen Itza, the Maya did not attempt to record the personal identity of the man who sat there.
-[407] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] B2.
+The same principle holds true for the Temple of the Chae Mool, an earlier council house buried beneath the Temple of the Warriors. Above the benches that line the walls of this building’s inner sanctum, brightly painted murals portray seated lords, wearing masks of the gods who ruled their cosmos. Seated upon jaguar-skin pillows, some of these lords extend offerings in flat bowls, while others sport shields and carry ax scepters with the bottom portion carved to represent the body of a snake. These scepters resemble the Manikin Scepters of royal office displayed in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:19, south bench). Still other lords (Fig. 9:19, north bench) carry spearthrowers and throwing spears while they sit on thrones carved to represent full-bodied jaguars. This kind of jaguar throne, even more than the jaguar-skin pillow, was the furniture of rulers among the southern lowland peoples. Yet here we have not a single preeminent personage but whole assemblies of nobles seated upon this type of throne.
-[408] Kant, KpV 5:31.
+The message of this mural is clear. Once again, the throne is empty. What is being depicted with that empty throne is the historical idea of a central public persona in the city’s government, not a real individual. Each of the surrounding figures is depicted in a distinctive manner. They are clearly meant to represent real people. The government of Chichen Itza, in both its earlier manifestation in the Temple of the Chae Mool, and in its later and more splendid expression in the Temple of the Warriors, is pictured as an assembly, a multepal. What are we to make of the historical legends that claim Kukulcan ruled this city, or of the heroic captains such as Kakupacal and Hun-Pik-Tok of the Cocom, who are likewise mentioned? The answer to that question will have to wait on further archaeological evidence, for these figures certainly do not seem to be centrally focused upon in the public art.
-[409] Kant, KpV 5:31.
+The Great Ballcourt, directly across from the Temple of the Warriors complex, expands and complicates the political program. Here, in addition to an assembly of lords, we see other images of central importance. These figures are known as Captain Sun Disk and Captain Serpent (Fig. 9:20).[593] Captain Sun Disk carries a spearthrower and throwing spears and sits inside a nimbus identified by its triangular protrusions as the sun. Captain Serpent also carries the weapons of war, but he sits entwined within the coils of a great feathered snake.
-[410] Kant, KrV A548/B576; italics supplied.
+[[][Fig. 9:21 Lower Temple of the Jaguars: The Upper Registers after Maudslay]]
-[411] Kant, KpV 5:29.
+The importance of the individuals bearing these insignia is clear in the assembly compositions, such as the one found in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:21), where Captain Sun Disk looks down upon the upward-gazing Captain Serpent from his place on the central axis of the overall picture. But there are problems in attempting to identify these insignia as the regalia of real people. First of all, in the imagery of the Classic Maya, the nimbus means simply that the individual so portrayed is a revered ancestor.[594] Captain Sun Disk’s position in the compositions of the Great Ballcourt is variable. In two of the main pictures, however— the one found in the North Temple at the apex of the playing court, and the one in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars across from the Temple of the Warriors—Sun Disk is at the top of the overall picture, the favored locality in Classic Maya art for dead predecessors. Second, the Serpent insignia is not confined to one individual, even on the Great Ballcourt scenes. In the Lower Temple of the Jaguars, for example, there are two Serpent Captains, one feathered and the other decorated with cloud scrolls.[595]
-[412] Kant, Vigil 27:499.
+Two serpent captains within a composition could be interpreted as indications of the presence of particularly important individuals; but if we go back to the Temple of the Warriors, there are entire processions of serpent captains (Fig. 9:22). Therefore, we can only conclude that the insignia pertains not to an individual but to some important status. Even more significant is the fact that a serpent captain is also found among the prisoners arranged before the stairway of the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9:18). This status then is not even peculiar to Chichen’s own elite.
-[413] Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment 5:196–7.
+It is a difficult task to discover individuals who stand out as unequivocal leaders in a program devoted to assembly. The sun-disk status is a real one, and perhaps it pertains to an individual ancestor, but the iconography of this image never shows Captain Sun Disk actively engaged in any of the scenes as a leader. The Serpent insignia is also important, but it too pertains to many people among the nobility at Chichón Itzá.
-[414] Kant, GMS 4:425.
+What can be derived with certainty from these public monuments is that the government of Chichón Itzá carried out successful campaigns of war against its enemies. The murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:23) are explicit illustrations of the kind of warfare actually fought with the spearthrower and throwing spear displayed in Tlaloc warfare throughout the Classic period in the southern lowlands. This battle scene, and others in the Temple, show that these wars were fought within the communities of the vanquished. Women are shown fleeing their homes as the battle rages around them. It was the kind of war that resulted in “the tearing down of vaults and buildings,” or hom as it was written in the texts of Tikal and Caracol.
-[415] Kant, KrV B168.
+As always, the penalty of defeat was capture and sacrifice. Victims had their hearts torn out by warriors dressed in the guise of birds, while the great feathered serpent floated above them.[596] Others were shot with arrows or had their heads chopped off. Decapitation sacrifice was particularly associated with the ballgame, as displayed in the reliefs of the Great Ballcourt (Fig. 9:24), but it was also associated with fire ritual, as seen in mural paintings along the basal wall of the Temple of the Warriors. Like their cultural predecessors, however, the people of Chichén Itzá adhered to the ancient Maya notion of the ballgame as a metaphor for battle, and of the ballcourt (or its architectural surrogates in stairways and plazas)[597] E as the primary setting for decapitation sacrifice. Indeed, the Great Ballcourt at Chichén Itzá was evidently constructed as a monument to the successful completion of the Itzá’s wars of conquest.[598]
-[416] Kant, GMS 4:410.
+The volume of sacrifice at Chichén Itzá is grimly commemorated in the skull-rack platform[599] next to the Great Ballcourt. We have reason to suspect, however, that not all of the kings and nobles captured by Chichén Itzá ended up on the skull rack. The well-dressed prisoners paraded in the Northwest Colonnade below the Temple of the Warriors could easily blend in with the victors if freed from their bonds. There are also processing dignitaries in the Lower Temple of the Jaguar that bear a remarkable resemblance to lords of the Yaxuná area (Fig. 9:25). The message here is the clear. In a government organized around the principle of confederation and assembly, the major political consequence of war need not be the defeat and humiliation of a rival dynasty. Instead, this dynasty might be incorporated into the expanding cosmopolitan state. In a city already housing numerous ahauob, there may well have been room for the vanquished.
-[417] Kant, GMS 4:425.
+At its height, Chichón Itzá ruled supreme in the Maya lowlands. We do not know how far its elite extended their claims to dominion, but surely they prevailed over most of the northern lowlands. After the founding of their kingdom, the Puuc cities fell and Coba slowly dwindled to insignificance. There were some hold-out polities in the southern lowlands, but these intrepid survivors of disaster provided no challenge to a city the size of Chichón Itzá and most likely attempted to negotiate an advantageous relationship with its government. How far beyond the lowlands Chichón Itzá’s lords may have extended their domain is still an open question. During this period many fortified capitals of highland México—Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and Tula, to name but a few—show significant connections to the Maya world. We suspect that in future investigations, more of Chichén Itzá’s Maya legacy will be found in the other cultures of Mexico that so astounded the Spaniards.
-[418] Kant, GMS 4:389.
+One idea that the Maya of Chichén Itzá did not pass on to their Mesoamerican neighbors was divine kingship and its concomitant hieroglyphic literature. This docs not, however, imply a paradox in our vision of the last great burst of Maya social innovation. In order to perpetuate the principle of kingship in this period of crisis, to expand it beyond the limitations that caused its demise in the south, the Maya lords of Chichén Itzá terminated the office of king and the principle of dynasty that had generated it. We do not believe, as some have said, that the people of Chichén Itzá were vigorous Mexican foreigners. Their leaders were Maya ahauob as well as participants in the culture of Mesoamerica. Their enemies, at least among the Puuc cities, were similarly cosmopolitan. If earlier Classic iconographic allusions are any guide, the Itzá were certainly not utilizing novel tactics in warfare. They were adhering to the same four-hundred-year-old precepts of Classic Maya Tlaloc-Venus warfare we have already seen in the south.
-[419] Cf. Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules (OUP 2004) 5–7; as well as Chandra Sripada and Stephen Stich, “A Framework for the Psychology of Norms,” Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, eds. P. Carruthers, S. Laurence and S. Stich, Vol. 2 (OUP 2007) 280–301.
+The key to success for the Chichén Itzá lords lay in their redefinition of the political consequences of defeat in war. They turned away from the dynastic blood feuds of the past and moved toward effective alliance and i consolidation. This consolidation would become the guiding principle of empire among the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Culhua- E Mexica. At the core of this principle of alliance is the notion of itah, “sibling” or “kinsman of the same generation.” Two siblings perpetuated the first Maya conquest state, that of Tikal and Uaxactún. It was this very principle of brotherhood that Bird-Jaguar invoked in his manipulation of his noble supporters. Even as the lords of the Puuc region desperately fought to withstand Chichén Itzá, they began to declare itah relationships among themselves.[600]
-[420] Cf. Kant, KrV B2-4.
+[[][Fig. 9:25 Warriors from Chichen Itza and the Yaxuna Region]]
-[421] Cf. Kant, KrV B4.
+With Chichen Itza, the first and last Mesoamerican capital among the Maya, we come full circle in the history of their kingship. The divine lords who emerged in the Late Preclassic period to dance upon their sculptured pyramids were first and foremost ahauob, members of a category of being that made them all essentially the same substance. They were siblings in a brotherhood that began with the Ancestral Twins and prevailed throughout all subsequent history. The reassertion of the idea of brotherhood marked the dismantling of that first principle undergirding kingship: dynasty. When the Ancestral Heroes, through the magic of sacrifice, killed one another and brought each other back to life in the Place of Bailgame Sacrifice in Xibalba, they became father and son to each other. So divine kings brought life out of death and were brought to life by the sacrifices of their fathers before them. The lords of Chichen Itza did not celebrate dynasty, nor did they contemplate sacrifice as kings. They were brothers and ahauob together, as their ancestors were at the beginning of time.
-[422] Cf. Kant, KpV 5:39.
+. The End of Literate World and its Legacy to the Future
-[423] Kant, GMS 4:441.
+Naum-Pat, Halach Uinic (“true human”), felt the gentle waves of the dark, glittering sea lap against his feet as he watched the strange canoes bob against the stars. They were vast floating palaces really. Lit from within with lamps and torches, their tall masts and rigging graced the cool moonlight of Lady Ix-Chel.
-[424] Cf. Kant, KpV 5:33.
+“Mother of all,” he whispered to himself, “where did these foul-smelling barbarians come from?”
-[425] Here I will consider three examples. For a discussion of Kant’s full argument see my “Kant’s Constructi- sivm” Moral Constructivism: For and Against, ed. Carla Bagnoli (CUP 2013) 63–81.
+He sighed in astonishment and worry. He had been a seaman all his life. Like his people a thousand years before him, he had plied the deep blue waters and treacherous shallows in great canoes, laden with honey, salt, slaves, chocolate—treasure of all kinds. He had fought enemies upon its rolling surface; he had ridden out the great storms that tormented its waters; he knew every port and people that graced its shores. The sea was his, world of his ancestors, great and dangerous and rich in precious, holy things. Now it had vomited up this monstrosity—a canoe that was a house. The light-skinned barbarians wielded great power, no doubt about it. A shiver ran up his spine. They would be worse and more dangerous than the Aztec pochteca—those dangerous merchants from the west who were extending the Mexica empire toward the ancient lands of the true people.
-[426] Cf. Kant, GMS 4:441–5; KpV 5:39–41.
+On the temple mountain yesterday, that old fool of a priest had addressed these new strangers as if they were gods. He had blown incense on them only a moment before they had pushed him aside and entered the sanctuary. After defiling and smashing the sacred images of the gods, they had opened the bundles and handled the holy objects of the ancestors, taking those made of sun-excrement—the yellow metal the foreigners coveted. Metal-lovers, these strange creatures wore helmets, armor, and great knives of the bright and hard substance. Wonderful stuff, he thought as he contemplated the price such objects would bring in the Mexica ports. He cursed the hairy strangers, calling upon the powers of the Otherworld to open the sea and consume them ... and soon.
-[427] Cf. Kant, KrV B1.
+Worse than looting the temple—other pirates had done that—these men had raised up the World Tree in the form of a wooden cross. They had opened a book—small, black, and poorly painted, but still a book— and read from it in their unutterable tongue. The chilan, his city’s prophet and interpreter for the gods, had watched from the crowd at the base of the temple, shaking his head in fear and wonder.
-[428] Kant, KrV B798.
+Naum-Pat shuddered with the horror of the memory of what the strangers had done. As he did so, the words of the famous prophecy of the Chilam Balam went through his mind.
-[429] Kant, KpV 5:58–9.
+“Let us exalt his sign on high, let us exalt it that we may gaze upon it today with the raised standard,” the great prophet had exhorted them so many years ago. “Great is the discord that arises today. The First Tree of the World is restored; it is displayed to the world. This is the sign of Hunab-Ku on high. Worship it, Itza. You shall worship today his sign on high. You shall worship it furthermore with true goodwill, and you shall worship the true god today, lord. You shall be converted to the word of Hunab-Ku, lord; it came from heaven.”
-[430] Kant, GMS 4:444.
+Naum-Pat had watched in stunned disbelief as the strangers threw down the kulche’, the images of the gods, in the Holy House, and put the wooden Tree in its place. A groan had escaped his throat as he saw the prophecy materialize before his eyes. They had put up the Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First Tree of the World. For the people it had been a very powerful sign. The local chilan had been disturbed enough to send word by courier canoe to the chilanob on the mainland.
-[431] Kant, KpV 5:26.
+Like the chilan, Naum-Pat had seen the raising of the Tree as a powerful portent, but somehow the strangers’ black book had frightened him more. In all the world, only real human beings, only Maya, had books. Others, like the Mexica, had pictures of course, but not the written words of ancestors and heroes, not the prophecies of the star companions. Books were records of the past, they were the truth, the guide to the cycles. The strangers’ metal knives were powerful weapons, but many weapons of the Maya could kill just as efficiently. It was the books that Naum-Pat feared, for with books came true knowledge, knowledge that could vanquish his people’s present and capture and transform their future.
-[432] Kant, KpV 5:25.
+Naum-Pat could not imagine the strangers attacking his people on the neutral ground of Cozumel, Lady Ix-Chel’s sacred isle. They had come ashore with smiles and gifts of clear stones that were like strangely-colored obsidian. He had planned a feast for them tomorrow in the council hall and would treat them distantly, yet with dignity. But what of the future? W as this the beginning of the time of discord and change the great chi- lanob had predicted ‘ The fear in his belly whispered that it was so. As Naum-Pat turned his back to the quiet beach and headed home, his thoughts turned to his children.
-[433] Kant, GMS 4:444.
+In the Maya world, its’at, “one who is clever, ingenious, artistic, scientific, and knowledgeable,” was used with the same respect and in the same contexts we use the word “scientist” today. That its’at also meant “artist” and “scribe” was no accident. For the Maya, as for ourselves, the written word held the key to their future survival. Writing was the power of knowledge made material and artifactual. It was the armature of wealth, prosperity, and the organized labor of the state. It was the wellspring from which flowed knowledge and lore, orally repeated and memorized by the common folk in their songs and prayers.[601] The arrival of the Spanish changed all that and subverted Maya literacy to the ambitions of the Europeans.
-[434] Kant, GMS 4:445.
+But the beginning of the end of literacy occurred centuries before the Conquest, with the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms in the ninth century A.D. As much time separates us from Columbus as separated Naum-Pat from the Classic kings. He and his proud people were still Maya, still civilized, and their elite were still able to read and write, but they lived in a dark age of petty lords and small temple mountains.[602] His age, like our own medieval period, was dimly lit by the flickering lamp of literacy and the collective memory of a great past; but his people’s hope for future greatness was snuffed out by the Spanish conquerors. What brought down the awesome power crafted by the kings of our histories and made them, by the time the Spanish appeared, only a dim memory to their descendants?
-[435] Kant, GMS 4:425.
+The end of the Classic period witnessed a major transformation of the Maya world, one that would leave the southern lowlands a backwater for the rest of Mesoamerican history. Sometimes, as at Copán, the public record stopped dramatically, virtually in mid-sentence. Other kingdoms died in one last disastrous defeat as at Dos Pilas. For many, however, the end came when people turned their backs on the kings, as they had done at Cerros eight hundred years earlier, and returned to a less complicated way of living. Regardless of the manner in which the southern kingdoms met their doom, it is the staggering scope and range of their collapse that stymies us. This is the real mystery of the Maya and it is one that has long fascinated Mayanists and the public.[603]
-[436] Kant, KpV 5:46.
+We have no final answer to what happened, but as with all good mysteries, we have plenty of clues. At Copán, the last decades of the central government were those of the densest population. The voiceless remains of the dead, both commoner and noble alike, bear witness to malnutrition, sickness, infection, and a hard life indeed. In the central Petén, where raised fields played an important role in people’s sustenance, the agricultural system was productive only as long as the fields were maintained. Neglect of the fields during conditions of social strife, such as the growing military competition between Late Classic ruling lineages, likely led to their rapid erosion and decay.[604] Rebuilding these complex agricultural systems in the swamps was beyond the capabilities of individual farmers without the coordination provided by central governments, so they moved out as refugees into areas where they could farm—even if that meant jostling the people already there.
-[437] Cf. again Kant, KrV B3.
+The collapse also came from a crisis of faith. The king held his power as the patriarch of the royal lineage and as the avatar of the gods and ancestors. Ecological and political disaster could be placed directly at his feet as proof of his failure to sustain his privileged communication with the gods. Moreover, because of the way the kings defined themselves and their power, the Maya never established enduring empires, an arrangement that would have created new possibilities of economic organization and resolved the strife that grew in ferocity and frequency during the eighth century. Kings could become conquerors, but they could never transcend the status of usurper, for they could never speak persuasively to the ancestors of the kings they had captured and slain. Each king wielded the written word and history to glorify his own ancestors and his own living people.
-[438] Kant, KpV 5:30.
+As time went on, the high kings were driven to unending, devastating wars of conquest and tribute extraction. In part they were urged on by the nobility. During the Early Classic period, this class comprised a relatively small proportion of the population, but even by the time of Burial 167 in the first century B.c. in Tikal, they were growing rapidly in both numbers and privilege. Averaging about ten centimeters taller than the rest of the population, they enjoyed the best food, the greatest portion of the wealth, and the best chance of having children who survived to adulthood. Since everyone born to a noble family could exercise elite prerogatives, it did not take too many centuries of prosperity for there to be an aristocracy of sufficient size to make itself a nuisance to governments and a burden to farmers. Increasing rivalry between nonroyal nobles and the central lords within the kingdoms appears to have contributed to the downfall of both.
-[439] Kant, KpV 5:30.
+The situation forced the gaze of the nobility outward toward neighboring kingdoms and the tribute they could win by military victory. In the short term, the strategy worked, but in the long term that kind of endemic warfare caused more problems than it solved and eventually the rivalry of the nobility helped rupture the central authority of the king.
-[440] Kant, KpV 5:30.
+Foreign relations were also troublesome at the end of the Classic Period. In the wake of the collapse of Teotihuacán in the late seventh century, other regional civilizations like El Tajin, Xochicalco, and Cacaxtla made a bid for power. Barbarians and marginally civilized peoples in the borderlands between the ancient great powers, like the Chontai Maya-speaking people living in the Tabasco coastlands, also asserted control of trade routes and established new states in both the highlands and lowlands. These merchant warriors, called the Putún, meddled in the affairs of Maya kingdoms and eventually established new hybrid dynasties that prospered at the expense of the traditional Maya governments.
-[441] Kant, KpV 5:30.
+[[][Fig. 10:1 The Last Inscriptional Dates Before the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization]]
-[442] Kant, KpV 5:30.
+The failure of the Maya way of life did not descend upon them with the dramatic suddenness of a volcanic explosion, a shattering earthquake, or a sweeping plague. The Maya had time to contemplate their disaster during the century it took for their way of life to disintegrate into a shadow’ of its former self. By A.D. 910, the Maya of the southern lowlands built no more temple-mountains to house their portals into the Otherworld and I they erected no more tree-stones to commemorate the glory of their kings and cahalob. Throughout the lowlands, they abandoned literacy as part of the public performance of their kings (Fig. 10:1) and retreated from the society they had built under their leadership.
-[443] Kant, GMS 4:446.
+We have observed the sad end of the kings of Copan, but U-Cit-Tok was not alone in his suffering, nor was he the first to watch central government fall amid growing crisis. On the other side of the Maya world, at Palenque, the last words written in the historical record occur in a pitiful little inscription carved on a blackware vase. This vase was not even found in a royal context but in a slab-covered tomb under the floor of a modest residential compound below the escarpment where the great ceremonial precinct of the old glory days was located. The man who recorded his accession in the text tried to enhance his renown by calling himself 6-Cimi-Ah-Nab-Pacal[605] after the great king who had brought Palenque to glory one hundred and fifty years earlier. The vase, however, was made in some obscure town on the swampy plain north of Palenque, and was probably a barbarian Putun Maya gift to an otherwise silent king.[606] Within fifty years of this date, Palenque had been abandoned and reoccupied by wandering tribesmen who lived atop the debris in the disintegrating buildings, leaving broken fragments of bailgame yokes and hachas lying forlornly about. As at Copan, one of these wanderers was killed when the north building of the Palace collapsed[607] and no one dug his body out to give it honorable burial.
-[444] Kant, KpV 5:4n.
+[[][Fig. 10:2 Piedras Negras Stela 12]]
-[445] Kant, Vigil 27:523–4.
+At Piedras Negras, a venerable and powerful kingdom on the Usuma- cinta River southeast of Palenque, the last king closed the history of his domain on a glorious high note of artistic achievement. Stela 12 (Fig. 10:2) is a masterpiece showing the ritual display of captives taken in a war with the small kingdom of Pomona[608] downriver on the Usumacinta, perhaps in a ploy to stop people from the flourishing Putún homeland farther downriver from coming up into the territory of the ancient kingdoms. If this was the intention of the Piedras Negras lords, it did not work. The victory over those unfortunate Pomona lords apparently did not contribute to the survival of Piedras Negras. Pomona’s last recorded date fell in the year A.D. 790, while the victor lasted only another twenty years. The last inscription at Piedras Negras celebrated the end of the nineteenth katun in A.D. 810.
-[446] Kant, MS 6:239.
+This same twenty-year period saw the demise of Yaxchilán farther upriver on the Usumacinta. Like Palenque, Yaxchilán went out with a whimper rather than a bang, but as with Piedras Negras, the last inscription speaks of war. Bird-Jaguar’s son Chel-Te had indeed lived to rule, testimony to his father’s political success. Chel-Te, in his turn, sired a son whom he named after an illustrious ancestor—Ta-Skull, the tenth successor, who had made the alliance with Cu-Ix of Calakmul[609] in the sixth century. The last Ta-Skull, however, did not live up to the memory of his ancestor. He commissioned only a single lintel, mounted in a tiny little temple that he built next to the lineage house where Bird-Jaguar, his paternal grandfather, had given the flapstaff to Great-Skull-Zero, his grandmother’s brother (Fig. 7:20). The all-glyphic lintel Ta-Skull set above the solitary door of this new temple celebrated his victory in war, but the victory must have been hollow one. Not only does the paltry scale of the building signal Yaxchilán’s drastic decline, but its inscription was the work of a inept artisan. The glyphs started out large on the left and got smaller and smaller as the scribe ran out of room to the right. Like his liege, the writer had failed to plan ahead. He was not alone, for the kings of Bonampak and other smaller centers in the region fell silent at the same time.
-[447] Kant, MS 6:417–8.
+Onward upstream at Dos Pilas in the Petexbatún region, the story was the same. During a final battle at the capital of the famous Flint-Sky- God K and his conqueror progeny, a desperate nobility threw up a huge log stockade[610] around the sacred center of their city, trying to shield themselves against the vengeance wreaked on them by their former victims. The kings who oversaw the last public history of that dying kingdom were forced to erect their tree-stones at other places than their capital. One Dos Pilas king recorded an image of himself in A.D. 790 on a stela at Aguateca at the southern end of his dynasty’s conquered territories. On the northern frontier, the last-known Dos Pilas king struggled to retain I control of the Pasión River. He raised two stelae at the little community of La Amelia, at the northeastern edge of his greater realm, on the Pasión River near its confluence with the Usumacinta. He also raised several tree-stones at the strategic site of Scibal. These last-known (Fig. 10:3a) images of a Dos Pilas king, elegant, dynamic, and confidently carved, show him valiantly playing ball. The recorded date is A.D. 807. Such play usually celebrated victory and sacrifice, in remembrance of what the Heroic Ancestors had won and sacrificed in the beginning. But we know in hindsight that the Lords of Death won this time. This man’s kingdom probably ended in a violent cataclysm soon thereafter. Within a few years of the Dos Pilas ballplayer stelae, barbarian kings, probably from downriver, had taken Seibal, its prize vassal, and had effectively cut its trade routes to the Usumacinta River and the Peten.
-[448] Kant, KpV 5:125–6.
+[[][Fig. 10:3]]
-[449] Cf. Kant, MS 6:219.
+The end of Katun 19 in A.D. 810 saw the last gasp of many kingdoms throughout the lowlands; 9.19.0.0.0 also marked the end of the royal history declared by two great dynasties in the central Peten heartland, the old rival kingdoms of Naranjo and Calakmul. Calakmul was the strongest of these realms, for its king was able to raise three stelae (15, 16, and 64) on that date. All three present him in front view, standing atop a captive and holding a shield and a God K scepter. Evidently this special show of power exhausted his fund of local support for public historical celebrations, for we don’t hear from him again. For an indefinite time thereafter, kings without history (or at least, without texts discovered by archaeologists) must have ruled at Calakmul, for one holy lord of this capital did evidently witness a katun rite at Seibal thirty-nine years later. Indirectly then, we know that Calakmul still continued to exist, even after the end of its own known texts.
-[450] Kant, Vigil 27:521.
+Naranjo’s final historical ruler erected only one monument—Stela 32—but it was an extraordinary one. Unusually large, this tree-stone celebrates both the ruler’s accession and the katun ending. Shown seated on a great cosmic throne, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar drawn in an exaggerated style that seems to turn everything into flying scrolls.
-[451] Kant, MS 6:231.
+Turning to the far southwest of the Maya world, we find what is perhaps the most interesting of these 9.19 stelae, a tree-stone erected at Chinkultic (Fig. 10:3b) in highland Chiapas. This carving bears stylistic affinities to the emerging art of the Puuc region in the northern lowlands and ultimately to Itza monuments at Chichen Itza.[611] Since dated monuments were not known in this part of Chiapas in earlier times, Chinkultic’s appearance on the stage of history may reflect the beginning of a diaspora, a movement of literate Maya nobility from the lowlands into the highlands.[612] They might have been looking to a new political order as well as to a new land, their eyes turned to the Chontal-speaking Putun and the revolutionary state of Chichen Itza.
-[452] Kant, MS 6:232.
+Since the greatest part of Maya history took place during the four hundred years of the tenth baktun (9.0.0.0.0–10.0.0.0.0), one would think that the end of the cycle, with its promise of new beginnings, would have been celebrated with hope and enthusiasm by the Maya kings who survived to witness its completion. Ironically, the reverse is true. It was as if they all thought of it as a time of ill omen. Only the king of the resurgent Uaxactun dynasty and the ahau of Oxpemul, a little center north of Calakmul, celebrated the end of this great cycle.
-[453] Kant, MS 6:231.
+Twelve years into the eleventh baktun, a captive event recorded on the High Priest’s Grave establishes Itza presence at Chichen Itza on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, A.D. 842). The High Priest’s Grave is a massive, four-sided pyramid with Feathered Vision Serpent balustrades. Like the Pyramid of the Sun at the great city of Teotihuacan, it was built over a cave to mark it as a place of “origin.” The raising of the Temple of the High Priest’s Grave with its captive iconography marked (Fig. 10:4a) the triumph of a new social and political order in the northern lowlands and a new era of barbarian, hybrid Maya states throughout the Maya world. Through the sy mbolism of the cave, it also declared the new state to derive frorfFthe same origin as the great states of earlier times.]
-[454] Kant, MS 6:231.
+Yet not all the new rulers chose revolution. Some attempted to build on the foundation of ancient Maya kingship. The earliest Chichen Itza date is remarkably close to the last date (10.0.10.17.15; A.D. 841) at Machaquila, a kingdom just west of the then-defunct Dos Pilas hegemony. That last Machaquila king, One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint (Fig. 10:4b), depicted himself without the deformed forehead and step-cut hair that had been the T ethnic markers of the Classic Maya elite. Either his people had abandoned the old style by then, or they were intruders who knew how to use Maya l symbolism in the old orthodox ways. In light of contemporary events at neighboring Seibal, we think this lord was a Putun trying vainly to rekindle the ancient royal charisma at an old hearth of power. At Machaquila, 1 the ruler sided with the orthodox Peten ritualists, while at Seibal, as we shall see, the lords worked to create a new vision out of the tattered 1 remains of the old kingship.
-[455] Kant, MS 6:232.
+With the end of the first katun in the new cycle (10.1.0.0.0) came the last surge of historical kingship in the southern lowlands. On that date a lord raised a monument at Ucanal, the old border town between Naranjo and Caracol, and another lord celebrated at Xunantunich, a hilltop citadel in Belize above the river trail leading eastward to the Caribbean coast. Ueanal’s monument is particularly noteworthy because it is carved in a style that had grown to prominence in the region around Tikal late in Baktun 9. It shows the Ucanal ruler (Fig. 10:5) standing with one of his lords on top of a struggling, belly-down captive, scattering his blood in celebration of the katun ending. Above him, floating in a S-shaped scroll of blood, lies a Tlaloc warrior of the type who haunted Ucanal a hundred and fifty years earlier during the Naranjo wars. Together, the king and his colleague, who ruled other cities on the headwaters of the rivers emptying into the Caribbean, defined a new eastern frontier of the old royal territory. Beyond them to the east, in the rich river valleys of Belize, some communities survived and even flourished, but these Maya eschewed royal history.[613] To the south and west, other Putún, wise in the ways of the literate kings, raised stelae in chorus at Altar de Sacrificios on the Usuma- cinta and at Seibal on the Río Pasión.
-[456] Kant, ZeF 8:366.
+[[][Fig. 10:4]]
-[457] Kant, ZeF 8:366.
+The simultaneous expression of literate kingship at several surviving capitals reveals the different kinds of strategies their royalty chose in order to cope with changing times. While the Pasión was now the domain of Putún kings trying to forge new and more effective ritual formulae, the territory to the north of this river, the old heartland of Petén, belonged to conservative kings determined to stick to the old ways. These men were caught between the astute merchant warriors working their way along the rivers in the south, the rising Itza hegemony in the north, and other barbarians who carried their commerce along the Caribbean coast and up the rivers of Belize. The world of the holy lords shrank back upon its Petén birthplace, its ancient capitals shattering into petty fiefdoms.
-[458] Kant, MS 6:312.
+At Seibal, to celebrate the end of the first katun in the new baktun, a new king commissioned one of the greatest displays of creative artistry of the Late Classic period—the extraordinary Temple A3. That Seibal king, like One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint of Machaquilá, appears to have been a foreigner,[614] for he too wore his hair long and had the undeformed forehead of barbarian outsiders. Nevertheless, he knew the Classic Maya way and used it to create one of the most innovative statements of kingship in Maya history.
-[459] Kant, MS 6:306.
+The new ruler, Ah-Bolon-Tun-Ta-Hun-Kin-Butz’ (Ah-Bolon-Tun, for short), came to Seibal after the disappearance of its last Dos Pilas overlord. He took charge and revitalized Seibal enough to make it a major player in the politics of the time. To celebrate the end of the first katun of the new baktun, Ah-Bolon-Tun commissioned a temple with four stairways, each facing one of the cardinal directions. In this respect, he designed this temple to parallel the High Priest’s Grave at Chichén Itzá.[615]
-[460] Kant, MS 6:312.
+[[][Fig. 10:5 Ucanal Stela 3 drawing by Ian Graham]]
-[461] Kant, MS 6:312; italics supplied.
+In contrast to the one at Chichen, however, this building clearly declared the personal power of the king. Ah-Bolon-Tun decorated his temple with an elaborate polychrome and modeled stucco frieze displaying four larger- than-life portraits of himself over the doorways, each holding offerings and standing at his portals to the Otherworld. He also portrayed other people, perhaps the witnesses to his celebration, as well as monkeys, birds, and other animals—all in a great profusion of corn plants. The effect was no doubt quite spectacular, a world-renewal ceremony that all could admire and understand.
-[462] Kant, MS 6:311.
+[[][Fig. 10:6]]
-[463] Kant, MS 6:306.
+He placed one tree-stone inside the building and one at the bottom of each stairway to form the quincunx pattern so important to ancient Maya imagery. On the eastern tree-stone, he holds a staff and stretches his right hand out in the scattering gesture. On the northern tree-stone (Fig. 10:6a), he holds the Cosmic Monster as a ceremonial bar and records that three Ch’ul-Ahauob, one from Tikal, one from Calakmul, and one from Motul de San Jose witnessed the period-ending rites at Seibal.[616] This passage affirms that those three ancient capitals, or some local pretenders to their titles, were still active at this time and that the political landscape was stable enough to make royal visits worthwhile. The record of this gathering of holy Maya lords in the southern kingdoms shows that the conservative holdouts in Peten may have attempted to insulate themselves from change, but that they were prepared to deal with and acknowledge the barbarian kings.
-[464] Kant, MS 6:313.
+The western te-tun shows Ah-Bolon-Tun holding the Vision Serpent, named Hun-Uinic-Na-Chan, as if it were a ceremonial bar. On the south te-tun, the king wears the jaguar-costume of Gill and holds up God K’s head in his right hand. The central tree-stone shows him holding a round shield in his left hand and lifting up the Manikin Scepter in the other. These five images depict Ah-Bolon- Tun in some of the most important costumes of Classic Maya kings, but never had these costumes been assembled into one composition in this way, nor had the Cosmic Monster and Vision Serpent been merged with the ceremonial bar in quite this manner. In addition to his innovative treatment of these themes within the Maya canon, he also introduced new symbols—ones shared by the Itza at Chichen Itza.[617]
-[465] Kant, Vigil 27:590.
+Many modern scholars have taken Ah-Bolon-Tun to be a Chontal- speaking intruder from the lower reaches of the Usumacinta.[618] While he may have been from an intruding group, it hardly matters. As we have seen, Ah-Bolon-Tun was a practiced and skillful manipulator of the Classic Maya imagery of kingship and therefore an acceptable Maya ruler. Moreover, his contemporaries in the old dynasties of other kingdoms dealt with him as a legitimate ahau. Unfortunately, whatever synthesis of the ancient kingship with barbarian beliefs he tried to put together soon began to unravel.
-[466] Hobbes ch. XIV.
+His successors gamely attempted to sustain the effort, but evidently lacked his command of the old orthodoxy. They erected tree-stones to celebrate the next two katun endings and by doing so they give us clear and poignant documentation of a people who were losing their roots in this ancient culture. Each image became more confused than the last, diminishing not only in the skill with which the drawings were executed but also in the very syntax of symbols that gave Classic Maya art its meaning (Fig. 10:6b). The last Seibal imagery w’ould have seemed gibberish to the literate Maya of earlier generations.
-[467] Cf. Hobbes ch. XIII.
+The central Peten kingdoms managed to stave off most intruders, although some barbarians probably established an outpost on the east end of Lake Peten-Itza at Ixlu. While the newcomers built architecture like their cousins at Seibal,[619] the images their king raised on tree-stones were perfectly standard and deliberately echoed the canon of period-ending presentations particular to Tikal. They were trying to buy into the old orthodoxy. On 10.1.10.0.0 and again on 10.2.0.0.0 (A.D. 879), this king erected tree-stones showing him materializing the Paddler Gods through bloodletting (Fig. 10:7a). The Tlaloc-marked, spearthrower-wielding warrior we saw at Ucanal floats in blood scrolls along with the Paddler Gods. More revealing, however, is a round altar that accompanied Stela 2. In his own name, this Ixlu lord claims status as a Ch’ul-Ahau of Tikal, while his reference to the gods repeats exactly the prose of an earlier stela at Dos Pilas.[620]
-[468] Cf. Hobbes chs. XIV-XV.
+[[][Fig. 10:7]]
-[469] Hobbes ch. XIV.
+The kings of Tikal had lost more than the area at the east end of Lake Peten-Itza. The last king of Tikal erected his only tree-stone in the middle of the forest of kings in front of the North Acropolis. The image is fairly well wrought, with the figure presented in front view holding the ribbondecorated staff that had become prominent with the staff-kings four hundred years earlier (see Fig. 5:1a and b). In order to display the detail of the backrack in the manner of the traditional style, the artist wrapped it out to the king’s side in a completely unrealistic pose. A bound captive lies belly down behind the king’s ankles, echoing both the old style of composition and the kingdom’s former glory. As in the case of Ixlú and Ucanal, small figures float above in the blood scrolls of the king’s vision. All in all, the image is conservative and deeply concerned with remaining faithful to the old way of doing things. In contrast to the innovative king of Seibal, this Tikal ahau was a fundamentalist.
-[470] Locke, Second Treatise 2.6.
+[[][Fig. 10:8]]
-[471] Cf. Alex Tuckness, “Locke’s Political Philosophy,” [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/]] [[https://plato.stanford.edu][locke-political/ ]](Summer 2018; last visited September 25, 2019).
+Perhaps he had reason, for his domain was a shadow of its former self. The final years of Tikal saw the kingdom fragmented into a series of petty, competing domains. All claimed legitimacy as the seat of the Ch’ul- Ahau of Tikal. While the dynasty of its old nemesis, Caracol, erected its last tree-stone in 10.1.10.0.0 (A.D. 859), Tikal’s old subordinate, Uaxac- tún, which had reestablished its independence, erected its own tree-stones until 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). In this final irony, Uaxactún’s monumental art lasted twenty years longer than its former master’s.
-[472] Cf.again Kant, KpV 5:125—6.
+Furthermore, on the border halfway between Uaxactún and Tikal, yet another lord had established himself as an independent king at the little site of Jimbal (Fig. 10:8a). This ahau erected a tree-stone on the same date as his Tikal rival—10.2.0.0.0, and like his Ixlú contemporary, he used the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Here again the Paddler Gods float in blood scrolls above the king. This king outlasted the Tikal king by twenty years and erected another all-glyphic tree-stone on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889) on the same date as the lord of Uaxactún.
-[473] Cf. Locke 2.14.
+[[][Fig. 10:9 Toniná Monument 101<br>drawing by Peter Mathews]]
-<br>
+To the north of Tikal near Calakmul, a king of the site now called La Muñeca erected a tree-stone on the katun-ending in A.D. 889. Xultún, a little-studied kingdom northeast of Uaxactún, had sustained a tradition of stela erection since Cycle 8 times, but it too ended on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). Like Tikal, the last performances of Xultún’s artists (Stelae 3 and 10) evoked the old tradition, but at Xultún, the artistic convention called for the king to be portrayed displaying small effigy gods of the Baby Jaguar and Chae (Fig. 10:8b). We don’t yet know the reason why this date marked the ending of monumental art at so many different sites.
-** 8. Barbarians in the Agora American Market Anarchism, 1945–2011
+The diaspora up the headwaters of the Usumacinta into the highlands can be seen in two more stelae in Chiapas—one at Comitán dated to A.D. 874 and one at a place called Quen Santo in A.D. 879. The last historical declaration of the Classic Maya kings was raised not too far away, also in the Chiapas highlands, at the unlikely kingdom of Toniná. A bellicose realm during most of its Late Classic existence, Toniná’s most glorious moment came when its king captured Kan-Hok-Xul, the aged second son of Palenque’s most famous king, Pacal. For a brief time, the same Toniná king also had a Bonampak lord as his subordinate.[621] Perhaps the military skill of Toniná’s warriors preserved them longer than other Classic-period kingdoms, or perhaps it was their isolated position at the western edge of Maya territory in a valley off the major trade routes. Whatever it was, Toniná’s people retained their Classic heritage longer than any other Maya kingdom. Their last king erected a tree-stone (Fig. 10:9) to celebrate the ka- tun 10.4.0.0.0, which fell on January 20, A.D. 909. This was the last kingly portrait and inscription ever mounted publicly by the Maya of the southern lowlands, and it conformed exactly to the generations-old artistic tenets of that kingdom.
-*J. Martin Vest*
+[[][Fig. 10:10]]
-*** I. Introduction
+However, the collapse of the southern lowlands was not the end of Maya civilization. In the northern lowlands where rainfall rather than raised-field agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, kingdoms prospered as never before in the ninth and tenth centuries. It is in the north, rather than in the south, that the Maya finally established empires over the dominions of kings. As we have seen, the greatest of these empires had its capital at Chichén Itzá, a city with allies at Tula in highland Mexico but with no equal in Mesoamerica during the eleventh century a.D. First cousins of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s people at Seibal, the Itzá constructed a world without kings—a world that was instead ruled by councils of lords.
-In the winter of 1949—1950 a handful of friends gathered in the home of Murray Newton Rothbard, a graduate student in economics at Columbia University and a proponent of limited government and laissez-faire. They had convened to indulge a favorite pastime—arguing—and the conversation drifted to the ethical legitimacy of the state when one of those in attendance confronted Rothbard with a particularly trenchant question. If police and courts can be established through majority fiat, he asked, “why not infrastructure or even collectivized industry?” When the gathering broke up in the early hours of the morning, Rothbard found himself still mulling the question, unable to answer it in any way congenial to his existing beliefs. Shortly after, Rothbard decided that the state would, for purposes of moral consistency, have to go.[474] Rothbard’s epiphany and the questions it provoked set the course of his activism and scholarship for the rest of his life; and, from then until his death in 1995, he worked tirelessly to spread his vision of a stateless political order, one in which government functions would devolve on freely competing individuals and firms and in which security, courts, and even law would be provided on the open market.
+The Classic Maya view of a world without kings was of a world beyond the pale, a barbarian place without true order. The Chilam Balam chronicles of the northern lowland Maya suggest that the ahauob of Chichón Itzá were sufficiently barbarian to devise such a state. These confederate lords were also Maya enough to regard their solution as a perpetuation of a time-honored practice. They transformed kingship into an abstraction, vested in objects, images, and places, rather than in the individual identity and written words of a person. Their principal image of kingship was not the living king, but a dead king sitting on his sun disk, an icon that had developed from the Classic period ancestor cartouche. Captain Sun Disk may or may not have been an actual person, but his identity as an individual was not the critical message. The function of this imagery was to symbolize the idea of an ancestral king presiding as a spirit over the realm of Chichón Itzá.
-The relationship of Rothbard’s vision to the broader terrain of political thought has long caused trouble for the taxonomist of ideas. In this essay, I shift focus away from Rothbard and American libertarianism to detail a longer history of “market anarchism”[475]—a strain of thought of which Rothbard was just one of many brilliant expositors. This lineage, beginning with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the American individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, sharply criticized “capitalism” while affirming the rightness and efficacy of private property, trade, competition, and, in some cases, even corporations or “trusts.” The entire sweep of anarchist intellectual history, however, cannot be shoehorned into the “market” mold. As we will see, anarchists like Peter Kropotkin had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, jettisoned that framework altogether, insisting on the meaninglessness of private property, scarcity, and competition. Kropotkin and other market-skeptical anarchists profoundly influenced twentieth-century anarchism. As a result, market-oriented anarchism—despite its long history—contrasts sharply in key respects with more recent iterations of anarchist ideology.
+For the Itzá the image of such an ancestral king was an anonymous human sitting inside the sun disk wielding the spearthrower and darts of Tlaloc war (Fig. 10:10a). His image could be replaced by a mirror, another ancient symbol of kingship from the Classic period. These two critical symbols of kingship at Chichón, the mirror and the ancestral king, were found together in a cache inside one of the earliest and most important temples at Chichón Itzá—the Temple of Chae Mool, the structure that was later buried inside the Temple of the Warriors. Under the throne seat inside this earlier temple, the ruling council placed a hollowed-out stone column. Inside was a sun disk (Fig. 10:11) carefully wrapped in a sacred bundle, along with stones of divination, the bodies of a finch, representing the warriors of Chichen, and of a pygmy owl, symbolizing Tlaloc war.[622]
-While I argue for the historical continuity and distinctness of market anarchism as a strain of political thought, it is not my intention to hypostatize that label or any other, especially given that many of the market anarchists under analysis here recognized no such descriptor. “Market anarchism” functions here as an analytical imposition on the historical record rather than an innocent reflection of it. My approach is pragmatic. Labels bundle some ideas together and exclude others, simultaneously facilitating and foreclosing on analytical possibilities. This essay employs market anarchism as (in the well-worn language of the historian’s cliché) an “analytical lens.” My intent is not to maintain that only adherents of these ideas qualify as proponents of “real” anarchism, nor to chase any anarchists, living or dead, out of the family circle.
+[[][Fig. 10:11 Turquoise Mosaic with a Pyrite Mirror. Offering in the Bench from the Temple of Chac Mool]]
-*** II. Proudhon and the Individualists
+In the center of the disk was a golden mosaic mirror of iron pyrite. Surrounding it was a gleaming turquoise mosaic version of the sun disk divided into eight compartments. A profile serpent with a crest of feathers arcing around its head occupied every other compartment, forming a pattern like the four-serpent design that decorated the Classic period ancestor frame (Fig. 10:10b). These crested serpents are the late versions of the Vision Serpent we saw rising in the scene of Shield-Jaguar’s accession, spitting out the image of the founder dressed in the garb of Tlaloc war.
-Anarchists have claimed as their own such early modern figures as Gerard Winstanley and William Godwin, but the first figure to use “anarchist” self-referentially was a radical book printer from Besançon named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon’s thought, contrary to some conceptions, owed much to liberal bourgeois market ideals. First as a youth in the bucolic French Jura in the 1810s and 1820s and then as a wandering journeyman printer, Proudhon evolved a nearly mystical love of the French countryside and its people—a love which was offset by an equally intense suspicion of the centralization and hierarchy of large cities like Paris. Importantly, Pierre-Joseph’s work as a printer also led to his engagement with the political and social thought of the prior two centuries and his interaction with the utopian socialist Charles Fourier—experiences which pushed him to ruminate on the political and social problems of the day.[476]
+At Chichen Itza, this mosaic mirror was not passed through the generations from king to king. Instead, it was set into the throne to endow it with power and authority. The person who sat on that throne was rendered the temporary steward of ancestral power, a “two-day occupant of the mat,” as the enemies of the Itza scornfully called them.
-In 1840, Proudhon published his first major work, What Is Property? He answered the titular question with a single word—“theft.” For Proudhon, the domination of others was no more legitimate an enterprise for agents of the state than it was for proprietors, and he saw scarce difference between the claims of the monarch and those of the landlord. “The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign—for all these titles are synonymous—imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once.” Governments, at their very core, institutionalized domination of man by man, and for that reason were illegitimate. In an epoch-shattering (and often quoted) passage Proudhon imagined a conversation with one of his readers in which he pointed toward a solution.
+Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent—Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans and the Vision Serpent of the southern Maya—became the second great abstract symbol of kingship. While images of serpents—feathered, scroll- covered, and plain—abound in the art of Chichen, nowhere in the existing texts is this being given a person’s name. The role of the Feathered Serpent as it writhed between the victims of sacrifice and the hovering ancestor above was clearly derived from the Vision Serpent of Maya kingship. But for these Itza Maya, the Vision Serpent ceased to be the instrument the king used to communicate with the ancestors and became a symbol of the divinity of the state.[623] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the cult of Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, was still the cult of the Maya nobility in Yucatán.
-What is to be the form of government in the future ? I hear some of my younger readers reply: ‘Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.’ ‘A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs—no matter under what form of government—may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans.’—‘Well! you are a demo- crat?’—‘No.’—‘What! You would have a monarchy.’—‘No.’—‘A constitutiona- list?’—‘God forbid!’—‘You are then an aristocrat?’—‘Not at all.’—‘You want a mixed government?’—‘Still less.’—‘What are you, then?’—‘I am an anarchist.’
+The revolutionaries at Chichón Itzá and the final orthodox kings of the Peten seem to have converged on a central and shared ritual theme in their pursuit of political survival: the Vision Serpent and the calling forth of the Gods and Ancestors through it. In a set of gold plates called the Battle Disks, dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichón Itzá, acts of war (Fig. 10:12a) and sacrifice are depicted. Above many of these scenes writhe Feathered Serpents, Vision Serpents, and blood scrolls embracing Tlaloc warriors, bird warriors, and even GUI, the ancient Sun deity. The similarities to southern lowland images of the same period are striking and underscored by other correspondences in the iconography and epigraphy of these disks and the Cycle 10 monuments of the south.[624] But while the southerners tried to call forth the ancestors to reinforce the ancient definitions of kingship, the lords of Chichón called them forth to proclaim a new order of power. The economic and military success of Chichón Itzá in this contest was undeniable and may have served to seal the doom of the holdouts in Petén.
-If the state could not satisfy the Enlightenment’s demand of equality for all, it would have to go.[477]
+However, while the Maya of the northern lowlands did succeed in transforming the structure of their government to establish an empire, Chichón at its height was a capital without a public history, without the written declarations of kings embedded into its stone walls. It was a capital that turned its back on a thousand years of Maya royal practice and relegated literacy to the books of chilanob, men who were sorcerers and prophets, but not kings. Joining the ranks of the nonliterate peoples of Mesoamerica, this kingdom looked to the larger world of the Mexican and the Gulf Coast peoples for its prosperity and future. The result of the success of Chichen lords was the Mayanization of Mesoamerica.[625]
-Proudhon’s program, however, did not call for the suppression of the market but for its radical expansion, a process he called the “absorption of government by the economic organism.” To begin with, his stance on property was decidedly more nuanced than his flamboyant formula suggested, representing a ratcheting up of Lockean criteria, not their suspension. By “property,” he did not mean the individual occupancy, possession, and use of things but the abstract legal title which allowed men, in absentia, to exclude others from using them. With that type of property, he argued, came the possibility of economic accumulation in the form of ground rent as well as all the attendant social ills of economic inequality. More fundamentally, that kind of property established privileges unsustained by the claims of toil. The person who works an acre of land, whether he has rented it or homesteaded it, has properly mixed his labor with its soil and is the rightful owner of all the resulting benefits, including the improvements to the land. Ground rent represents a usurpation of this right by the landlord. In the case of agricultural production,
+Chichen Itza was a great state indeed, but once literate history had been disengaged from the central authority, Maya lords would never again harness the beliefs and aspirations of their own people as once they had. How long that state endured is still a matter of debate among scholars, but it evidently became the template for a cyclic form of government in which power became centralized at one regional capital, then dissolved to re-form elsewhere. After the fall of Chichen Itza, another regional capital arose in the northern lowlands at Mayapan—founded by Cocom lords who claimed descent from the lords of Chichen Itza.
-Proudhon believed, the answer to present pathologies was simple: the abolition of rent payments and devolution of land titles to those who “mixed their labor” with the soil. With rent payments abolished, the tendency toward accumulation would evaporate, making private property in land a benign institution. Under such circumstances, “you may, without the slightest apprehension, permit the proprietor to sell, transmit, alienate, circulate his property at will.” Conversely, Proudhon argued, schemes for nationalization or collectivization of the land were productive of government-grade mischief and, at any rate, would be resisted fiercely by the peasants.[478]
+The lords of Mayapan also erected their own tree-stones, but they had become something very different from those of the Classic lords. Their imagery shows gods (Fig. 10:12b) like those in the Dresden and Madrid codices, books that prescribed the timing and nature of ritual. One badly damaged image appears to show a Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First World Tree, mentioned in the prophecy of Chilam Balam. A bird flutters in the sky above the tree in an image that recalls the World Trees at Palenque. Mayapan flourished for a time and then disintegrated as the factions comprising its government struggled among themselves for power. Although the Spanish cut short the bickering among the several small states ruled by these factions, the pattern of cyclical centralization was a precedent the Maya would have likely continued.
-Agricultural property, Proudhon believed, lent itself readily to his individualistic propertarian anarchism. Industry, on the other hand, with its high capital requirements and its dramatic division of labor, presented a thornier set of problems, and here, Proudhon argued, “every industry, operation or enterprise, which by its nature requires the employment of a large number of workmen of different specialties, is destined to become a society or company of workers.” Collective ownership of the means of production, however, this was not, and these enterprises would be run on wholly contractual and market-oriented bases. In its dealings with the broader society the worker collective must swear off all “combinations” and submit to the “law of competition.” Within the company, all positions would be open to all workers, subject to “suitability of sex, age, skill, and length of employment.” Importantly, each worker’s pay would correspond to the “nature of [his or her] position, the importance of the talents, and the extent of responsibility” and each “shall participate in the gains and in the losses of the company, in proportion to his services.” Individual workers would be free to come and go, provided all accounts were settled.[479]
+The last king of the Maya to reign independently was a man named Can-Ek, king of the Itza who fled after the kingdom of Mayapan failed to the region that had once been ruled by the Ch’ul-Ahauob of Tikal. The last Can-Ek (a name probably meaning Serpent-Star[626]) was at least the third ruler of that name to appear in Spanish chronicles. The first greeted Cortes and his expedition as they made their way across the Peten to Honduras in 1525.
-Proudhon exercised a profound, if relatively short-lived, influence over the direction of radical politics in Europe, but in the United States his ideas made a longer-lasting impact. In 1848 an American named Charles A. Dana heard Proudhon speak in the French National Assembly. Impressed with what he heard, Dana returned home to the United States and wrote a series of articles on Proudhon’s thought for the New York Tribune. Around the same time that Dana was introducing Proudhon to the American public, William B. Greene, son of Massachusetts postmaster Nathaniel Greene, published his own series of articles on Proudhonian banking and credit theory, eventually brought together and published in 1850 as a pamphlet entitled Mutual Banking. In subsequent years Greene lobbied the Massachusetts state legislature (unsuccessfully) to throw its weight behind mutual banking, and he also published several translations of Proudhon’s work in the radical press, including an excerpt from What Is Property?[480]
+Another Can-Ek met a second Spanish entrada, or “expedition,” to the Itza made in 1618 by the Padres Fuensalida and Orbita. Their goal was to convert the Itza to Christianity. Can-Ek’s reaction to their message bears witness to the power accorded the written word among the Maya. Can-Ek told the padres that, according to the prophecies of the katuns— which projected history to predict the future—their spiritual message was not correct. The padres described his reaction in these words:
-Greene’s Proudhonianism, however, was not the only strain of anti-statist thought vying for the attention of American radicals. For decades, a handful of American intellectuals had pushed the logic of Jeffersonian individualism all the way to its logical, anarchistic, conclusion. Josiah Warren, the father of American individualist anarchism, had participated in Robert Owen’s experimental commune at New Harmony, and had come away from the experience convinced of the importance of individual sovereignty in human affairs. Unlike most of the individualist anarchists and libertarians who have followed in his train, Warren not only rejected human relationships built on force, but even looked with suspicion on human “combinations” in general. He argued that “the only ground upon which man can know liberty, is that of disconnection, disunion, individuality.” Because of this belief, Warren rejected the institution of government on the grounds that it threw men into combinations which could only cause mischief. Lysander Spooner, a decade Warren’s junior, came to similar conclusions regarding the incompatibility of government and individual liberty by extending the natural rights arguments of Jefferson and others. According to this line of reasoning, consent was an ethical prerequisite for all interactions between human beings, including the establishment and maintenance of government. But if the “consent of the governed” meant anything at all, Spooner argued, it must mean the deliberate consent of every single individual subject to the state’s authority. No “government” as such could ever meet this requirement, so the state itself was illegal according to the canons of natural law. By the end of his life Greene—and his project of Proudhonian mutualism—had become closely associated with this American individualist milieu.[481]
+<quote>
+“The time had not yet arrived in which their ancient priests had prophesied to them they were to relinquish the worship of the Gods; because the period in which they then were was Oxahau, which means Third Period ... and so they asked the padres to make no further attempts in that direction, but to return to the village of Tipu and then, on another occasion, to come again to see them.”[627]
+</quote>
-Greene’s importation of Proudhon brought together two great streams of anti-state thought, but it was in the work of another Massachusetts native, Benjamin R. Tucker, that their fusion was fully realized. Born in South Dartmouth in 1854, Tucker developed an interest in individualist anarchism at an early age and met many of the tradition’s rainmakers while still in his teens. In 1874, he traveled to Europe to study Proudhon’s philosophy, and soon after returning to the United States published a full English translation of What Is Property? In 1881, Tucker embarked on the project that would be his most influential, an individualist anarchist newspaper, Liberty, which he described as a “journal brought into existence almost as a direct consequence of the teachings of Proudhon, ... which lives principally to emphasize and spread them.” As if to underscore the centrality of Proudhon to Liberty’s mission, the paper’s masthead carried a quotation from Proudhon: “Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order.”[482]
+Finding the Itza unwilling to listen, the priests left, and several other attempts to convert the Itza during the next seventy years were met by the same intransigence and sometimes even with violence. It was not until 1695 that the resistance of the Maya to Christianity eased. At that time another padre, Andres de Avendaño y Layóla, accompanied by two other Franciscans and a group of Maya from the town of Tipú in northern Belize, journeyed to the shores of Lake Petén-Itzá to a town named Chacan.[628] After a long night filled with tear and overactive imaginations fueled by memories of past massacres, the three Franciscans emerged from their hut in the morning to see a wedge of flower-adorned canoes emerging out of the glare of the rising sun. The canoes were filled with resplendent warriors playing drums and flutes. Sitting in the largest of the canoes at the apex of the wedge rode King Can-Ek, whom the Spanish chronicler described as a tall man, handsome of visage and far lighter in complexion than other Maya.[629]
-The fusion of Proudhonian mutualism and American individualism effected in the pages of Liberty produced an anarchism paradoxically more comfortable with the operations of the market than either of its parent ideologies. American anarchism’s individualism—especially in the hands of Warren—had appeared at some points in danger of drifting off into demands for economic autarky, such was its distrust of social entanglements. From the very beginning, however, Proudhon’s influence in America tempered this hyper-individualism. In his Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments, for example, William Greene had emphasized the deeply social character of all human enterprises, arguing that “what we possess we owe partly to our own faculties, but mainly to the educational and material aid received by us from our parents, friends, neighbors, and other members of society.” Tucker’s peculiar amalgam of the two schools moved past this recognition of human interdependence to identify market institutions as the primary site for the reconciliation of individuals’ various wants. In defiance of anarchistic common sense, he insisted that wage labor was not slavery, but rather “a form of voluntary exchange,” and therefore “a form of liberty.” Tucker even stood at the ready to defend that institution most despised by turn-of-the-century progressives and radicals—the trust. Anarchism, he wrote, “discountenances all direct attacks on [trusts], all interference with them, all anti-trust legislation whatsoever.” On the contrary, “it regards industrial combinations as very useful whenever they spring into existence in response to demand created in a healthy body.”[483]
+Dressed with all the elegance of his station, King Can-Ek wore a large crown of gold surmounted by a crest of the same metal. His ears were covered with large gold disks decorated with long dangles that fell to his shoulders and shook when he moved his head. Gold rings adorned his fingers and gold bands his arms. His shirt was made of pure white cloth elaborately embroidered with blue designs, and he wore a wide black sash around his waist to mark his status as priest of the Itzá. His sandals were finely wrought of blue tread with golden jingles interwoven. Over everything else, he wore a cape made of blue-flecked white cloth edged with an blue-embroidered border. It bore his name spelled in glyphs.[630]
-The differences of opinion between Tucker and his anarchist forebears on these matters owed much to a subtle shift in emphasis in libertarian theory effected by Tucker. For Proudhon, the world’s evils stemmed from hierarchies—those embedded in existing property relations as well as in governments. The remedy for hierarchy and its attendant social ills, he believed, was thoroughgoing equality. For Tucker, however, the battleground had shifted onto another set of paired opposites: monopoly and competition. By supporting monopolies in the issuance of money and credit, in access to land, through the levying of tariffs, and through the protection of intellectual property, Tucker argued, the state undermined the salutary effects of competition. A truly free market, he believed, not only would undermine the coercive potential of corporations and wage labor, but would also drive down the revenues to be made through usury, rent, and profit. Competition alone, Tucker argued, would deliver to the worker the full value of his labor, and only through competition could economic justice be achieved.[484]
+After Can-Ek stepped ashore onto a mat, his men followed him off the canoes while keeping the music going without a break. Silence fell across the plaza when he raised the feather-mounted stone baton he held in his hand. The black-dressed priests of the Chacans came forward to do the king reverence and argue for the sacrifice of the foreigners who had invaded their lands.
-In 1908, Benjamin Tucker’s bookstore and print shop burned to the ground, bringing an end to Liberty and to Tucker’s participation in anarchist agitation. With his wife and daughter, he relocated to France, where he spent most of the rest of his life before dying in 1939. Tucker’s retirement, however, signaled more than the conclusion of a single propagandist’s career. Liberty had come to serve as the rallying point for an entire movement, bringing together the centrifugal tendencies of American individualist anarchism through Tucker’s forceful rhetoric and uncompromising ideological consistency. Other individualist journals existed, but none could fill Liberty’s role as the unifying voice of American market anarchism. Had the movement been healthy it might have survived the loss of its flagship journal. But years of infighting over abstruse points of theory and a slow defection of anarchists to the ranks of state socialism had weakened the movement; with the disappearance of Liberty the remaining exponents of American market anarchism were scattered to the historical winds.[485]
+Protecting his guests from the Chacan priests, Can-Ek returned to his canoe, taking the Spanish and their party with him for the two-hour canoe trip to his home island. There he hosted Avendaño and his fellow padres in his own house, where they were fed and tended by two of his unmarried sons and two of his unmarried daughters, all of very attractive appearance, according to the Spanish commentator. With the help of two interpreters, Gerónimo Zinak and Ah-Balan-Chel, Avendaño tried to convince Can-Ek that the time prophesied by the Chilam Balam and the katun histories was soon to come.
-*** III. Social Anarchism
+Can-Ek listened politely to what Avendaño had to say and told him to return another time. That time came later in the same year when Avendaño, in yet another entrada, journeyed south from Merida through the land of the Cehaches, past the huge ruins of Tikal,[631] and to the shore of Lake Petén-Itzá. Once again Avendaño and his party waited for Can- Ek in Chacan. When the Itzá arrived, “they came in some eighty canoes,” Avendaño wrote, “full of Indians, painted and dressed for war, with very large quivers of arrows, though all were left in the canoes—all the canoes escorting and accompanying the petty King, who with about five hundred Indians came forward to receive us.”
-Proudhon’s rejection of the economic and political status quo, his embrace of “anarchism,” and his pyrotechnic written works inspired European radicals, many of whom embraced him as a guiding star of their movement—at least initially. Generally, while these second- and third-generation anarchists retained Proudhon’s focus on statelessness as well as his rejection of “capitalism,” they quickly moved away from his orientation toward market mechanisms. Market anarchists (like their radical liberal cousins) have often argued for the co-terminousness of market and civil society and have often subsumed within “the market” all voluntary arrangements, but the language and logics of the market have their own historical specificity. The proponents of so-called “social anarchism” embraced conceptualizations of the free society quite at odds with ideas of property, trade, and competition, and their beliefs about the stateless future throw into relief the peculiarities of market anarchism.[486]
+The time Avendano had spent learning to speak Mayan and to know Maya prophecies as thoroughly as the Maya’s own chilanob was about to bear fruit. He was to use Maya memory of history to turn their future to his own ends.
-The social anarchist tradition has always registered a profound ambivalence about its own relationship with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. On one hand, its intellectual debt to him has been too substantial to ignore. The incendiary Mikhail Bakunin acknowledged Proudhon as “the master of us all,” while Peter Kropotkin, the pacific Russian prince turned libertarian communist, claimed that “Proudhon laid the foundations of anarchism.” As late as 1937, the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolph Rocker could describe him as “one of the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most many-sided writer of whom modern socialism can boast.” From the very beginning, however, anarchists and scholars of social anarchism harbored doubts about Proudhon’s relationship to that tradition. Proudhon, Bakunin wrote, “remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, immersed in the Bible, in Roman law and metaphysics. His great misfortune was that he had never studied the natural sciences or appropriated their method.” By the middle of the twentieth century, Proudhon-skepticism had evolved into outright rejection of his relevance. George Woodcock recalled that mid-century anarchists regarded Proudhon with “suspicion and condescension,” and in a 1996 essay, activist and author Larry Gambone admitted that he had neglected Proudhon’s works for decades because of Proudhon’s ill-repute among anarchists. Albert Meltzer’s Anarchism: Arguments For and Against argued emphatically that Proudhon was a mere precursor to anarchism who never “engaged in Anarchist activity or struggle” and who had been sullied by forays into parliamentary participation.[487]
+Can-Ek must have known it was a special moment too, for in the trip back to Tayasal he tested the courage of his Spanish guest. While they were in the canoe surrounded by painted and befeathered Maya warriors of fierce demeanor, Can-Ek reached down to place his hand over Avendano’s heart. “Are you frightened?” he asked. Hoping to elicit signs of fear, Can-Ek found instead a man prepared to die for what he believed. Avendano looked up at the fearsome ahau and told him he had come in fulfillment of the very Maya prophecies that earlier Can-Ek had used against Padres Fuensalida and Orbita.
-Social anarchism’s alienation from its Proudhonian origins, however, had less to do with Proudhon’s coolness toward activism or his time as an agent of the state and much more to do with genuine ideological differences with his libertarian descendants. The anarchist thinkers following Proudhon increasingly emphasized the dialectical relationship between self and other, and the inherently “social” nature of individual liberty. Because of this, they moved further and further away from private property and the attendant institutions of contract and exchange. For Mikhail Bakunin, the means of production were to be collectivized. While conceding the necessity of management, he insisted that “the management of production need not be exclusively monopolized by one or several individuals. And the managers are not at all entitled to more pay.” Equality of wages aside, Bakunin maintained some of Proudhon’s emphasis on individual productivity, believing that the lazy or intransigent are “free to die of hunger or to live in the deserts or the forests among savage beasts.” Anyone wishing to partake in the benefits of society, however, “must earn his living by his own labor, or be treated as a parasite who is living on the labor of others.”[488]
+“Why should my heart be disturbed?” he retorted. “Rather it is very contented, seeing that 1 am the fortunate man, who is fulfilling your own prophecies, by which you are to become Christians; and this benefit will come to you by means of some bearded men from the East; who by signs of their prophets, were we ourselves, because we came many leagues from the direction of the east, ploughing the seas, with no other purpose than borne by our love of their souls, to bring them, (at the cost of much work) to bring them to that favor which the true god brings them.”[632]
-It was in the hands of the anarcho-communists—and especially those of anarcho-communism’s most famous exponent, Peter Kropotkin—that economic calculation and market activity ceased to play any role at all in anarchist theory. In The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin derided as antediluvian the assumption that individual contributions to the social product could be measured and proportionally remunerated.
+Avendano had turned the tables on Can-Ek. In an act of bravado and perhaps of remarkable insight, he reached up and mimicked Can-Ek’s challenge by putting his own hand on the king’s chest and asking, “Are you now the one who is disturbed by the words of your own prophets?” Can-Ek replied, “No,” but he was putting a good face on the matter, for his own action would soon show he had accepted that the time foretold by the prophecy had come.
-No distinction can be drawn between the work of each man. Measuring the work by its results leads us to absurdity; dividing and measuring them by the hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing remains: put the needs above the works, and first of all recognize the right to live, and later on, to the comforts of life, for all those who take their share in production.[489]
+When Avendano landed at Tayasal, the capital of the Itza, he and his men were led, for the second time that year, through the streets to Can- Ek’s palace. In the center of the house sat a round stone pedestal and column which the Itza called Yax-Cheel-Cab, “First Tree of the World.” On the western side of the pedestal base, the ill-made (according to Avendano) mask of a deity called Ah-Cocah-Mut rested. Since mut is the word for both “bird” and “prophecy,” we take the image to be the remnant of the Celestial Bird that stood on the crown of the Wacah Chan Tree in Classic-period imagery. Here was the sad echo of the image on Pacal’s sarcophagus, of the great tree-stones of the Classic period, of the tree carved on the stela of Mayapan, and of the tree Naum-Pat saw the Spaniards raise in the temple on Cozumel.
-In addition to being impossible, Kropotkin believed, the calculation of value was unnecessary. Modern science and technology had finally conquered the age-old problem of economic scarcity and, if relieved from supplying the frivolous and wasteful demands of the middle classes, the fields and workshops of Europe and the United States could easily provide “well-being for all.” A few years of such abundance, Kropotkin predicted, would cause the world to exclaim: “Enough! We have enough coal and bread and raiment! Let us rest and consider how best to use our powers, how best to employ our leisure.” The problem of incentives, Kropotkin argued, would attenuate with the disappearance of “repugnant and unhealthy drudgery,” largely a symptom of the capitalist mode of production. In general, Kropotkin believed, the ostensibly natural human inclination toward self-interest was also an artifact of capitalist society. Rather, within human beings existed a natural predisposition to altruistic behavior, bred into them by eons of evolutionary forces which, he argued, selected for intra-species cooperation rather than competition. Men and women, therefore, generally need not be compelled to contribute to the common good by the threat of starvation, as even Bakunin believed.[490]
+In a temple behind the Yax-Cheel-Cab, Avendano saw a box holding a large bone. He realized later he had seen the remains of the horse Cortes had left with the first Can-Ek 172 years earlier.
-Finally, Kropotkin went so far in his rejection of market mechanisms as to cast doubt on the benefits of trade. He cautioned readers that he did not desire “all exchange to be suppressed, nor that each region should strive to produce that which will only grow in its climate by a more or less artificial culture.” He did, however, believe that “the theory of exchange, such as is understood to-day, is strangely exaggerated, that exchange is often useless and even harmful.” Longdistance trade between communities re-introduced the threat of market calculation with all of its attendant social ills. Far better, he believed, to limit one’s dealings to the local commune where need rather than profit dictated the allocation of resources).[491]
+Avendano and his companions spent several days in Tayasal, surrounded wherever they went by curious and suspicious Itza. He complained that neither the admonitions of the king nor the protest of the Spaniards forestalled the curious Maya, who touched them everywhere including “the most hidden parts of a man.”[633] All the time Avendano used the old prophecies to work on Can-Ek’s mind. When he finally convinced the Itza king to be baptized, Can-Ek remained suspicious, demanding to know what the bearded priest intended to do, “since they thought that there was some shedding of blood or circumcision or cutting of some part of their body.” The king, like the suspicious Xibalbans of the Popol Vuh, volunteered a child to try it first. Satisfied that he would sustain no physical injury, he suffered himself to be baptized, and soon thereafter three hundred of his people followed his example.
-The first years of the twentieth century, as we have seen, were hard times for the individualists, but social anarchism was just coming into its own. In the years following 1900, there arose a novel (though not entirely new) emphasis within anarchism on the revolutionary potential of labor unions, an approach which met with greatest success in Spain. There the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) had by the 1930s come firmly under the control of anarchists of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI); when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the CNT/ FAI lent its rifles to the cause of anti-fascism. More than that, it instituted anarchist measures in Republican-controlled territories and by 1937 three million people lived in rural anarchist collectives. In the cities, anarchists seized workshops and factories, with Barcelona’s entire industrial plant coming under worker control. The vicissitudes of war, however, buffeted the anarchist experiment. Supply shortages disrupted industry and with it the war effort, while the threat of Franco’s looming victory pushed the CNT/FAI into closer and closer collaboration with the Spanish Republican government—itself increasingly a puppet of its only international arms supplier, the Soviet Union.
+In the midst of these conversion efforts, “governors, captains, and head men of the four other Petens or islands,”[634] arrived at Tayasal splendid in the riotous color of their full war regalia. Avendano calmed them down by inviting them to share food and drink. In his own words, he “treated them kindly, speaking to them more frequently and pleasantly, discoursing with them in their ancient idiom, as if the time had already come (just as their prophets had foretold) for our eating together from one plate and drinking from one cup, we, the Spaniards, making ourselves one with them.”[635]
-On December 16, 1939, Pravda informed its Soviet readers that in Spain “the purging of the Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.” By the middle of 1937, the Spanish experiment in anarchism was finished. Two years later, Franco’s forces defeated the Republicans and ended the Spanish Civil War. The meteoric rise and fall of Spanish syndicalism seemed to exhaust libertarian energies the world over, and, in the postwar period, anarchism’s appeal as a mass movement gave way to a global preoccupation with state socialisms of various stripes. Though they had held out a few decades longer, the collectivists found themselves consigned, just like their individualist cousins, to the dustbin of history. The eclipse of libertarian thought, however, was short-lived.[492]
+To argue with these new lords, who would soon prove to be formidable enemies, Avendano spoke to them in Yucatec, read their own books to them, and used their katun prophecies to convince them it was time to accept conversion. He described these books in detail.
-*** IV. Rothbard and Market Anarchism
+It is all recorded in certain books, made of the bark of trees, folded from one side to the other like screens, each leaf of the thickness of a Mexican Real of eight. These are painted on both sides with a variety of figures and characters (of the same kind as the Mexican Indians also used in their own times), which show not only the count of the said days, months and years, but also the ages and prophecies which their idols and images announced to them, or, to speak more accurately, the devil by means of the worship which they pay to him in the form of some stones. These ages are thirteen in number; each age has its separate idol and its priest, with a separate prophecy of its events.
-The market anarchist tradition in the United States lay dormant from 1908 until the arrival of Rothbard. Born in 1926 to immigrant parents, Rothbard came of age surrounded by communists and communist-sympathizers in New Deal-era New York. Encouraged in part by his father’s individualistic tendencies, he drifted into a stubborn opposition to the leftist milieu in which he had been raised, and by his early twenties had cast his lot with the libertarian wing of the Old Right, hungrily consuming the works of Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Patterson, Garet Garrett, and H. L. Mencken. By 1949, his explorations in the libertarian tradition had led him to reject the role of government altogether. The adherents of the postwar libertarian right, however, found themselves in a pitched—and hopeless—battle with the ascendant statist forces in their midst. The “New Right,” which coalesced in the 1950s around the intellectual nucleus of William F. Buckley’s National Review, nominally sought a fusion of three widely diverging strands of right-wing thought and activism: traditionalism, Old Right libertarianism, and anti-communism. In practice, though, the New Right rather swiftly evolved to prioritize anti-communism over all other commitments, with Buckley and others advocating dramatic expansion of government to meet the Soviet threat.[493]
+(Means 1917:141)
-Many erstwhile libertarians made their peace with the new dispensation, but Rothbard was not one of them, and by the early 1960s he found himself sidelined by the gatekeepers of conservative opinion. Just as libertarianism’s working relationship with conservatism devolved, Rothbard began casting about for new alliances, and he soon found them in the emergent New Left. Publications and interviews from the sixties feature Rothbard’s recurrent appeals for a left—right rapprochement along libertarian lines; and, by the end of the decade, efforts on behalf of such a rapprochement began to bear fruit. In May 1969, Rothbard participated in the formation of the Radical Libertarian Alliance, comprising both disaffected right-wingers like himself and elements of the anti-war left. The Libertarian Party emerged from these efforts three years later. American libertarianism, birthed as a kind of left deviationism from postwar conservatism, had come into its own as a political movement. By the early 1970s, Rothbard had started to distance himself from the “cultural leftism” which pervaded the libertarian movement, and in the 1980s he shifted decisively back to the right, forming alliances with the ascendant “paleoconservative” movement associated with Patrick Buchanan and others.[494]
+The hostile chiefs, especially one named Covoh, did not like his words and soon drove Avendano and his companions out of Tayasal in a dangerous, near-fatal retreat through the forest. But a year later, another expedition came back, this one armed and prepared to take on the stubborn Itza by force, if necessary. After a few hours of token resistance, the Itza gave up and fled their island home, leaving the houses of their gods and the site of their Yax-Cheel-Cab to be ravaged by the Spaniards. After 178 years of resistance, the Itza gave up with barely a whimper on March 13, 1697, the day 12.3.19.11.14 1 lx 17 Kankin in the Maya calendar.[636]
-Despite these shifting alliances, Rothbard’s basic program remained remarkably consistent throughout his decades as an expositor of the libertarian creed. At its foundation lay natural law, which he interpreted with Locke to mean that “every man has a property in his own person,” and that “this nobody has any right to but himself.”[495] From this, Locke and Rothbard conclude, it follows that the individual’s physical efforts, “the labour of his body and the work of his hands,” belong to him as well, and that “whatsoever that he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with and joined something to it that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”[496] In Man, Economy and State Rothbard built on this framework by deducing the economic and political outline of a society which respected in full the natural rights of every individual, concluding that such circumstances would “[lead] to the property structure that is found in free-market capitalism.”[497]
+The Long Count position of the fall of Tayasal is not that important because the Maya had long since given up the Long Count as a way of keeping time, but they had retained the count of the katuns. The ends of the katuns were the ages Avendano described. Named for the ahau day on which each twenty-tun cycle ended, the katun cycled through the full thirteen numbers used in the tzolkin count. Because the 7,200 days that make up a katun are divisible by 13 with a remainder of -2, the ahau number of each successive katun drops by two. 13 Ahau is followed by 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, 7 Ahau, 5 Ahau, 3 Ahau, 1 Ahau, 12 Ahau, and so on until the count runs through all the numbers. This unit of thirteen katuns formed the basis of the katun prophecies that Avendano used against Can-Ek; each katun ending within the thirteen had its prophecy. The date of Avendano’s visit fell in the katun that ended on 12.4.0.0.0 10 Ahau 18 Uo (July 27, A.D. 1697).
-Because the concepts of freely competing police agencies and courts are central to his libertarianism, it is worth describing Rothbard’s vision of these institutions in detail.[498] In the absence of government, he argued, insurance companies would establish private security services to protect subscribers from crime and to minimize indemnity payouts. While public-option police waste time and resources extracting justice for an abstract “society,” Rothbard believed, private police could dedicate themselves to protecting life and limb and restoring stolen property to its rightful owners. If (as would often be the case) the aggressing party had his own insurance policy and his own police, the altercation could precipitate violence between police forces. But, Rothbard insists, this would be “pointless and economically as well as physically self-destructive.” In order to avoid such disruptive and dangerous eventualities (which paying customers would never tolerate, at any rate), each security firm would necessarily “announce as a vital part of its service, the use of private courts or arbitrators to decide who is in the wrong.” In practice, each party would plead his case in his own court (which may be associated with his security company). In the not- unlikely event that each court finds in favor of its own client, the case is taken to a third court, agreed on by both firms ahead of time. Its decision would be final and enforceable. At each step in the process, individuals’ and firms’ cooperation would be impelled by the ancient tactic of ostracism, with intransigent parties risking their access to private courts in the future. Finally, law itself required no centralized planning according to Rothbard. Merchant courts, admiralty law, Anglo-Saxon common law, ancient Roman private law, and ancient Irish law, he points out, were all provided by decentralized “free market” judges who built reputations for expertly applying reason and precedent to concrete legal disputes.[499]
+The Chilam Balam of Chumayel records the following prophecy for Katun 10 Ahau:
-This program’s relationship to anarchism is complex, and Rothbard’s attitude toward the older tradition reflects some of his ambivalence about this relationship. Predictably enough, he rejected the anarcho-communist project in whole, finding in it not only economic error but also a dangerous commitment to irrationalism. But he also leveled sharp criticisms at the individualists like Spooner and Tucker. He found lacking, for example, Lysander Spooner’s faith in juries, insisting on the necessity of rationally derived libertarian law. Even more trenchant were his criticisms of the earlier individualists’ understanding of profit, rent, and interest. Both Proudhon and Josiah Warren subscribed to forms of the labor theory of value. To explain the persistence of these features of economic life, then, they turned in varying degree to the notion of monopoly, arguing that the state artificially props up the privileges of landlords, moneylenders, and bosses through force. Rothbard did not deny that state power represented a thumb on the scales of economic distribution, but he did reject the notion that rent, interest, or profit derived exclusively from state-propped privilege. Rather, he pointed toward time preference, and urged the world’s individualists to investigate another school of anti-state thought:
+<quote>
+Katun 10 Ahau, the katun is established at Chable. The ladder is set up over the rulers of the land. The hoof shall burn; the sand by the seashore shall burn. The rock shall crack [with the heat]; drought is the change of the katun. It is the word of our Lord God the Father and of the Mistress of Heaven, the portent of the katun. No one shall arrest the word of our Lord God, God the Son, the Lord of Heaven and his power, come to pass all over the world. Holy Christianity shall come bringing with it the time when the stupid ones who speak our language badly shall turn from their evil ways. No one shall prevent it; this then is the drought. Sufficient is the word for the Maya priests, the word of God.
-<quote>
+<right>
-There is, in the body of thought known as ‘Austrian economics,’ a scientific explanation of the workings of the free market (and of the consequences of government intervention in that market) which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their political and social Weltanschauung. But to do this, they must throw out the worthless excess baggage of money-crankism and reconsider the nature and justification of the economic categories of interest, rent and profit.[500]
+(Roys 1967:159–160)
+</right>
 </quote>
-Not surprisingly, the deep disagreements between Rothbard and the anarchists, as well as his affinities with the liberal tradition from Locke to Ludwig von Mises, pushed the economist away from the label “anarchism.”[501] Early in his career, he even toyed with the neologism “nonarchist” as a descriptor for his brand of libertarianism. Despite these objections, Rothbard made peace with the term, and by the late 1960s he and his growing cadre of followers had come to call their brand of libertarianism “anarcho-capitalism.” This rhetorical gesture has caused consternation ever since, both in the camps of would-be fellow travelers who balk at alliances with “anarchists” as well as among adherents of older forms of anarchism who deny the relevance of Rothbard’s vision to their intellectual tradition.[502]
+Ahau, the katun that followed 10 Ahau, was even more ominous than the prophecy above, for throughout Maya history as it was recorded in the katun prophecies, 8 Ahau was a katun of political strife and religious change. These prophecies were the basis of Avendano’s success and Can-Ek’s resigned acceptance of baptism and eventually his defeat.[637] The fatalism that was at the heart of Can-Ek’s thinking came from the katun prophecies. This fatalism was part of the legacy of the Classic-period attitude toward history and its relationship to cyclic time and supernatural causality. Classic-period scribes emphasized the connectedness among the actions of their living kings, the actions of ancestors in the historical and legendary past, and the actions of gods in the mythological past. We do not think men like Jaguar-Paw, Smoking-Frog, Chan-Bahlum, Bird-Jaguar, and Yax-Pac believed that the past dictated the present, but that these events unfolded within the symmetries of sacred time and space. They looked for symmetries and parallelisms as part of their political strategies, and when they could not find them, they very probably manufactured them. The result of this type of thinking, transformed by the exigencies of the Collapse and then the Conquest, became predictive history and produced the fatalism of Can-Ek.
-*** V. Left-Wing Market Anarchism
+The Spaniards who met Naum-Pat on the island of Cozumel, and 178 years later convinced Can-Ek that his world had come to an end, brought with them a different vision of history and the importance of human events. In their view, w hich we of the Western world have inherited, the history of the New World began with the arrival of Columbus. The eyewitness accounts of these times registered the cataclysmic clash of worlds and realities that was the Conquest and its aftermath; but, as with the story of Can-Ek, we see these events only through the eyes of the Conquerors, not of the peoples they found and changed forever.
-Like the postwar conservative movement with which it had parted ways, Rothbardian libertarianism proved vulnerable to deviationism, and beginning in the 1970s a number of competing visions sprung up to its left. This strain of thought, like Rothbardianism before it, belongs in large measure to the broad tradition of market anarchisms, but the left libertarians have been promiscuous in their intellectual appropriations. This tendency has made theirs an intellectually dynamic school of political thought, but has also placed some of them in tension with Rothbar- dian libertarianism and even the broader market anarchist milieu.
+Yet as we have shown, the peoples of Mesoamerica had a long and rich historical tradition preserved in many different forms, including myth, oral literature, ritual performance, the arts, painting, and writing. The Maya had kept their written history pristine and untainted by foreign interests for sixteen hundred years before those first Spaniards stepped ashore and surprised Naum-Pat. The conquerors knew the importance of written history to the identity of the people they subdued and used this knowledge to their own ends. They worked to destroy glyphic literacy among the Maya by burning their books and educating Maya children, when they allowed education at all, in Spanish and Latin only.[638] Their logic was clear and compelling: Native literacy perpetuated resistance to the Conquerors and their religion. Denied public history, the stubborn Maya continued to write their own books in secret, eventually in the Roman alphabet as they learned the ways of the Europeans. There are h-men among the Yucatecs today who still read and keep a book of prophecy in the tradition of the Books of Chilam Balam, and the Maya of highland Guatemala still observe and record the ancient count of days and use it to make sense of their lives.
-One of the earliest and most consistently market-oriented of the left libertarian deviationists was Samuel E. Konkin III. Born in Saskatchewan in 1947 and raised in Edmonton, Konkin first entered political activism as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta. There he served as head of the Young Social Credit League, an organization dedicated to forwarding the bizarre economic theories of the British engineer C. H. Douglas. By 1968, Konkin had discovered libertarianism and had joined the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter at the University of Wisconsin, where he was enrolled in a graduate program in chemistry. The following year, he traveled to YAF’s national convention as a delegate, met Rothbard and other luminaries of the nascent libertarian movement, and—along with all the other libertarians—was expelled from the convention. The episode etched in stone Konkin’s commitment to the libertarian cause.[503]
+Driven underground, glyphic literacy and the history that went with it was lost until the process of decipherment began to remove the veil. Because we can once again read their words, the ancient Maya are no longer a mute receptacle of our vision of what they must have been. We of the modern world no longer see the historical Maya as our immediate intellectual forebears envisioned them—as serene astronomer priests telling their charges when to plant the crops. Neither were the ancient Maya the “rational economic” people of some current theoretical schemes of social science, nor mindless automatons “behaving” without will or self- awareness as they lived their lives and left witness of their existence in the archaeological record. They were, as occasion warranted, warlike, politically acute, devout, philosophical, shortsighted, inspired, self-serving human beings. Their rulers were fully engaged in managing governments and ruling large populations through the myths and symbolisms they shared with their people. The language and images they used are ones their distant descendants can still understand today.
-Konkin’s passage through the ideological straits of American libertarianism imparted to his thinking a profound affinity for the market. In the institutions of state and economy he located the two opposing dynamics of all human interaction—the coercive and the voluntary. Konkin believed that the negation of the state entailed nothing more nor less than the universalization of the market, and he accepted the broad outlines of Rothbard’s free-market account of security, courts, and law. Konkin dissented from Rothbardian orthodoxy, however, with regard to revolutionary praxis. Means, he believed, must be consistent with ends. Since anarchism sought the abolition of political mechanisms in favor of economic ones, it followed that the suitable means to attain that end were economic and not political. Accordingly, he was appalled by the founding of the Libertarian Party, and through the 1970s evolved a body of market anarchist ideas as an alternative to the political approach favored by mainstream libertarians.
+Recently, Linda Schele had a unique opportunity to observe firsthand the shift of the ancient Maya into the active voice and the potential this transformation holds for the Maya of the modern world. In 1987 while working on the archaeological project in Copán, Honduras, Linda was the guide to a group of American linguists and Maya Indians from the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, México, who came to visit those ancient ruins. During that afternoon and the following day, she shared what she knew of the ancient kings of the city. Some of the visitors were bored and others distracted or doubtful, but for the most part, the Maya and Americans alike were enchanted with what those working at the site had learned. Most of all, they came to the realization that the ancient inscriptions could actually be read. A few grasped that there was powerful history locked up in those silent stones.
-In his 1980 New Libertarian Manifesto, Konkin limned the details of a program which he called “agorism.” In Konkin’s hands, un-coerced market activity expanded from the mere end of libertarian activism to its means. The underground economy, he argued, represented the germ of a new stateless society. If freed from the quasi-religious stigmas inculcated by government and its allies, black markets would attract investment, driving profits out of officially-sanctioned activities and depriving the state of revenue. Even more importantly, as the underground economy grew in size and complexity, investors could be expected to commit an increasing amount of resources to addressing security threats, especially those posed by state actors. This, Konkin believed, would give rise to the free-market security-insurance companies of libertarian theory, and would signal the beginning of the end of government.[504]
+They finished the final tour and ate a late lunch together before piling back into their buses to begin the long trip home. While they ate, the leader of the Maya, a Cakchiquel named Martin Chacach Cutzal.[639] asked Linda if she would come to Antigua, Guatemala, that summer and give a workshop on the ancient writing system to a group of modern Maya. She thought about it (for about five minutes) and realized that a lifetime’s dream was about to come true. The modern Maya had asked to learn about the writing and the history of their forebears. Linda[640] traveled to Antigua and, amid the earthquake-shattered ruins of a Spanish church, went on a marvelous four-day journey of discovery into the ancient past with forty Maya men and women.
-Another pioneer in market anarchism’s leftward shift was former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess. Hess’s relationship with market anarchism began in 1968, when, after reading an essay by Murray Rothbard entitled “Confessions of a Right Wing Liberal,” he publicly cast aside his identity as a conservative and assumed the position of Washington editor of the new Libertarian Forum. In a March 1969 article, “The Death of Politics,” Hess showcased his embrace of Rothbardian market anarchism. “Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism,” he argued, “is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic” and “encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value .... Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.” Already underway, however, was a subtle shift in Hess’s thinking away from narrow economism and toward a more open-ended understanding of voluntary action. In a piece published two months later in Libertarian Forum, Hess wrote:
+During the last day, they all worked on reading the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque, one of the most beautiful inscriptions ever carved by the ancient Maya. Everyone cut up a drawing of the inscription and, following Linda’s lead, taped the disassembled text down onto a large sheet so that they could write a translation below each glyph. The resulting grid displayed the structure of the text, showing how its time statements, verbs, and actors worked.
-<quote>
+The final session had to end with the text only half translated so that everyone could prepare for the traditional closing ceremony required for such events. Excited with the results, even though they were only half done, almost everyone came forward to express their feelings about the magic that had happened during those four days. Exuberant that it had worked so well, Linda was nevertheless disappointed and a little hurt when one of the most enthusiastic participants, a Kekchi named Eduardo Pacay, known as Guayo to his friends, disappeared without saying a word.
-Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives.It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them . Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
-</quote>
-Hess’s emphasis on consent rather than any formal political or economic arrangement could prove troublesome to anarchists hoping for an established orthodoxy. “The market,” capacious enough to enfold all voluntary interactions, could include such ostensibly anti-market institutions as collective ownership and participatory democracy.[505]
+Two hours later, everyone reassembled for the closing ceremony, which was held at the headquarters of the “Francisco Marroquin” project. A polyglot of conversation in at least ten languages floated over the sounds of a marimba as everyone drank rum and cokes or soft drinks and nibbled on snacks of beef, chicken, beans, and tortillas. Finally done eating, everyone stood or sat around the courtyard of the old house as the formal ceremony began in which gifts were given to the teachers and everyone got a diploma declaring that they had participated. Toward the end, Guayo and the two other Kekchi who had been in his team appeared carrying the meter-high chart they had made during the workshop. They opened the tightly rolled paper, and while two of them held it stretched out, Guayo read their translation—in Kekchi. Before forty awestruck witnesses, a Maya read aloud one of the ancient inscriptions in his own language for the first time in four hundred and fifty years.[641] That day, 12.18.14.3.5 1 Men 3 Xul in the ancient calendar,[642] was 291 years after Can-Ek’s conversion and 1,078 years after the last dated monument of the Classic period.
-Despite its efflorescence within the libertarian movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, left market anarchism remained a muted tendency until the 1990s, when a resurgent interest in leftwing anarchism occurred in libertarian circles. These latter-day expressions of left market anarchism have included a diverse range of positions and emphases, but a broad consensus of sorts is discernible. No publication has been more influential in highlighting and forging that consensus than a 2011 collection of essays, Markets Not Capitalism, edited by Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson. In their introduction to the Karl Hess-dedicated volume, the editors argue that the left market anarchists adopt the historical left’s criticisms of “persistent poverty, ecological destruction, radical inequalities of wealth, and concentrated power in the hands of corporations, bosses, and landlords.” They dissent, however, from the mainstream left’s attribution of these problems to private property or market mechanisms. Absent state interference, they argue, markets evidence distinct “centrifugal” tendencies, undermining inequalities of wealth through pervasive and withering competition.[506]
+The magic of that moment was special to Guayo and his friends, but it was equally important to the rest of us. In the “world history” courses that punctuate our childhood education, we learn to place a special value on written history and the civilizations that possess it. In antiquity, history was a very special and rare kind of consciousness and it is a momentous event in our own time when we rediscover a lost reality encapsulated in written words. The Maya inscriptions that have been unlocked by the decipherment offer us the first great history of the Americas.
-Kevin Carson’s essay “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” elaborates one of the most sophisticated of these arguments. Rothbard had earlier pointed out that Mises’s response to the “economic calculation problem” demonstrated the limits of central planning when engaged in not only by states but also by corporations. Because corporations internalize transactions and thus insulate themselves from the pricing mechanism, Rothbard argued, they too are subject to all the calculative inefficiencies of governments. Carson builds on Rothbard’s argument by expanding the logic of Hayek’s slightly different criticism of intervention, which argued that markets capitalize on the dispersed information of individual actors. When applied to the logic of the firm, Carson points out, Hayek’s emphasis on dispersed knowledge casts severe doubt on the effectiveness of hierarchical organizations to gather and deploy information. A free market which did not prop up poorly performing corporations, then, would not only whittle down to size the mega-corporations of the “statist quo” but would also select in favor of those organized on less hierarchical lines.[507]
+Maya history as we have presented it is, of course, a construction of our times, sensibilities, and intellectual agendas. The ancient Maya who lived that history would have seen it differently, as will their descendants. Even our own contemporaries who work with different patterns of data and different agendas w ill eventually change some of the details and ways of interpreting this information; but that is only the natural result of time and new discoveries. Yet for all the limitations that lie within the proposition that history cannot be separated from the historian, these very limitations are part of the nature of all history—ours as well as theirs. Each generation of humanity debates history, thus turning it into a dynamic thing that incorporates the present as well as the past. This process has been happening with American history both before and after Columbus; it is happening to the history of the last fifty years even as we watch events unfold with mind-boggling rapidity on the evening news. It will happen to the Maya history we have constructed here. But you see, that is the miracle. There is a now Maya history that can be debated and altered into a dynamic synergy with the present and the future. And with that synergy our perception of the history of humanity is changed.
-In addition to the leveling and decentralizing effects of stateless economies, Chartier and Johnson’s introductory essay emphasizes the politically open-ended potential of free markets and their capacity to create “spaces for social experimentation and hard-driving grassroots activism.” Free markets, they argue, foster values that include “not only the pursuit of narrowly financial gain ... but also the appeal of solidarity, mutuality and sustainability.” In some cases, this broader, more humanitarian set of values might even be necessary for the peaceful and prosperous flourishing of markets themselves. Charles W. Johnson has argued, for example, that the libertarian commitment to non-coercion represents a necessary but insufficient element of a prosperous and peaceful stateless society. In place of a “thin libertarianism” which doggedly refuses discussion of these broader commitments, Johnson encourages a “thick libertarianism” which recognizes the broader matrix of values in which any theory of politics or economics must be situated. While these broader personal commitments could be anything, Johnson argues, libertarianism itself supports and embodies a decidedly left-liberal set of values: anti-racism, anti-sexism, and egalitarianism, among others.[508]
+ Epilogue: Back to the Beginning
-*** VI. Conclusion
+On a warm night in May of 1986, Linda and I, Mary Miller, and many friends celebrated the opening of the Blood of Kings exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by letting a little blood from our fingers onto paper and copal incense and burning the offering. I carefully wrapped the ashes, along with the obsidian blades we had used, in a paper bundle. The following summer, I buried the bundle in the cement benchmark at the center of Yaxuna, a place where I hope to work for ten more years. So we take our thoughts and our feelings for the ancient Maya from this book and from our distant homes back to the Maya field with us, Linda to Copan, me to Yaxuna. Maybe we are a little superstitious, but I’d rather think we’re empathetic, for the Otherworld still shimmers over the Maya landscape even as we of the West pass through it in oblivious innocence.
-Particularly in its more recent manifestations, market anarchism has tended to expand the meaning of “markets” beyond the political-economic concerns of trade and competition to embrace a general emphasis on voluntary action. Karl Hess’s thought, for example, continued to evolve through the 1970s, and by the end of the decade he had tamped down much of his earlier emphasis on market activity. In a 1980 essay in the dandelion called “Anarchism without Hyphens,” he denied the relevance of economic programs to anarchism as such and offered a simple formulation to replace the congeries of anti-state “-isms” then (and now) prevalent: “An anarchist is a voluntarist.” More recently, Kevin Carson, whose work has been central in the articulation of twenty- first-century market anarchism, has expressed doubts about “the market” as a general rubric for a non-coercive society.[509]
+Don Emetario, captain of the Maya workmen at Yaxuna, and my friend, took me aside at the end of the summer’s work in 1988 to tell me this story. A few years ago he was walking home to the village from his fields along the modern dirt road that cuts through the ruins of Yaxuna. It was dusk, and in the reddening light he saw a tiny boy standing before him, naked and bald. Thinking it might be his son, Emetario cried out to him, but the child ran off the road and disappeared into a hole in the rocky surface of the ancient community. Emetario ran home for a flashlight and peered down into the hole, but all he could see was something furry like a night animal. Was this the “lord of money (the Earthlord)”? Emetario asked me. 1 replied that there are always strange things to be found in ruins, but that I did not know what it was he saw.
-Market anarchism is at least as old as the social anarchist tradition with which it is often compared. It is in significant ways conceptually distinct from social anarchism, notwithstanding efforts by some within and without the market anarchist tradition to shake “the market” loose from its historical moorings and offer it as a synonym for stateless human interaction. At the same time, the easy conceptual evolution from market anarchisms to non-market anarchisms (particularly on the left) suggests that something more historically complex has happened than the evolution of two hermetically sealed intellectual traditions. Why, we might ask, do market-oriented libertarians often drift off into sympathy with the broader anarchist tradition, even those variants of anarchism which have demonstrated little patience for liberal economics? One answer may be that there has always been an unarticulated relationship between the anarchist project and that realm of ordered chaos the Marxists call the “anarchy of production.” Indeed, the authoritarian left has always suspected this. Marx’s derisive characterization of Proudhonian mutualism as “bourgeois socialism” is unsurprising in the context of this chapter’s claim that Proudhon was a market anarchist. But what to make of Lenin’s rejection of the entire anarchist tradition—including its collectivist variants—as “bourgeois individualism in reverse.” If “the market” fails to encompass the full complexity of human interactions outside state coercion, it is probably also true that it is one of the closest approximations to hand, and anarchists—even the communists among them—are working from models drawn up in Manchester.[510]
+I rather suspect that Emctario’s cousin, Don Pablo, knows more than I do about such things. Don Pablo is a H-men, a “known,” or shaman, of the village, who also works for the Yaxuna project. On the last day of our work in the summer of 1988. Don Pablo was working with our photographer in the southern end of the community, clearing the grass from stone foundations for pictures. In the
+course of the conversation, tie regarded the principal acropolis of the south, a fine raised platform with three buildings upon it, erected in the Preclassic period, at the dawn of Maya history.
-The close relationship between the market and anarchism should not surprise us. Authorities have always recognized the dangers presented by the agora and its inhabitants—often late denizens of the wolf-prowled spaces beyond the city where dangerous men and ideas flourish.
+“Here was a great temple,” he said, “but the portal is now closed.”
-Similarly, anarchists and anarchism have since the middle of the nineteenth century presented another kind of barbarian threat—a vision of what happens if modernity’s promises of life, liberty, and property or liberty, equality, and fraternity are taken too seriously. Anarchism’s threat to the established order has sometimes taken a more concrete form, as when it guided the hands of terrorists as they prepared daggers, poisons, ropes, and revolvers for the enemies of the people. Market anarchists, though a more pacific lot than the nineteenth-century propagandists of the deed, represent one more barbarian incursion, one that has reached the market and threatens to set loose all of its dangerous forces. But we probably ought not fret. There have, after all, always been barbarians in the agora.
+We cannot open the Maya portals to the Otherworld with excavation alone, no matter how careful and how extensive. For the portals are places in the mind and in the heart. We, as pilgrims from another time and reality, must approach the ruined entrances to the past with humility and attention to what the Maya, ancient and modern, can teach us through their words as well as their deeds. So our book is a beginning for us on that path—I look forward to hearing what Don Pablo has to say about our progress.
+<right>
+David Freidel
+<br>Dallas, Texas
+<br>September 1988
+</right>
-[474] Murray N. Rothbard, “Transcript: How Murray Rothbard Became a Libertarian” [address to 1981 Libertarian Party Convention, Denver, CO], Mises Wire (Mises Institute, April 28, 2014) [[https://mises.org][https://mises.org/blog/]] [[https://mises.org][transcript-how-murray-rothbard-became-libertarian]] (June 29, 2020).
+ Update 1991
-[475] Few will be satisfied with my use of this term. It has generally been employed by left-libertarians to distinguish their more egalitarian and “social” variant of propertarian anarchism from Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism. At least implicitly, then, market anarchism has hitherto been considered exclusive of anarcho-capitalism. I have used the term generically, encompassing not only anarcho-capitalism and its left-libertarian critics, but the entire lineage of market-friendly anarchisms dating back to P.-J. Proudhon.
+Since A Forest of Kings went to press, new information relevant to our stories has been discovered. In the 1990 season, excavators in the Caracol Project under the direction of Arlen and Diane Chase discovered several new stelae. According to project epigrapher Nikolai Grube, one of these records an attack on Tikal during the war in which Lord Kan II conquered Naranjo in A.D. 637. Simultaneously, in the Dos Pilas project under the direction of Arthur Demarest, excavators cleared a hieroglyphic stairway, which Stephen Houston and David Stuart, the project epigraphers, analyzed as recording the capture of Shield-Skull, the father of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal on the date 9.12.6.16.17 11 Caban 10 Zotz’ or May 3, A.D. 679. Because we knew only of Caracol’s conquest of Tikal in A.D. 562 when we wrote our story of this period, we could not explain why it had taken so long for Tikal to recover from this single defeat nor why the broken stelae had been allowed to lie unattended in the Great Plaza for over a hundred years. Now it seems likely that Tikal was defeated and devastated at least two more times after the first Caracol victory and that Flint-Sky-God K and his allies disfigured the monuments in the Great Plaza only three years before Ah-Cacaw’s accession in A.D. 682.
-[476] George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography (Montréal: Black Rose 1987), 1—35. The search for origins has led historians of anarchism to plumb nearly every crevice of modern and pre-modern intellectual history, and figures ranging from Christ and Lao-Tze to Jonathan Swift have been drafted for the cause. See George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York, NY: World 1971). See also Peter H Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper 2008), 53—129. On the matter of anarchism’s historical specificity I agree with Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, who “stress [anarchism’s] novelty and relatively recent roots” and reject ahistorical presentations of the ideology as a timeless struggle. Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Chico, CA: AK Press 2009), 15. Anarchism, in the modern sense, could not exist before the emergence of the idea of “society,” conceived of as a site of human activity independent from the mechanisms of coercive authority. See John R. Ehrenburg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York, NY: NYU P 2017); and Larry Sidentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2017).
+The third great discovery came from Nikolai Grube, who deciphered the glyph for “dance” (ak’ot) in May 1990. This new discovery is particularly important to the Bird-Jaguar story in Chapter 7 because the Flapstaff, Basket-staff, and Bird-staff rituals as well as the display of the God K scepter and the bundle can now be identified as public dances. Dance, it turns out, has been one of the focal acts of Maya ritual and political life even until today.
-[477] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (Princeton, NJ: Benjamin R. Tucker 1876), 271—272, 279; Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 42—52.
+<right>
+Linda Schele
+<br>Austin, Texas
+<br>February 1991
+</right>
-[478] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (New York, NY: Haskell House 1969), 207—215, 240. Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 45.
+ Glossary of Gods and Icons
-[479] Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution, 216, 222—223.
+The Baby Jaguar appears frequently in paired opposition with Chac-Xib-Chac in scenes of dance and sacrifice. He most often appears with the body of a infantile human, although he may also be represented as an adult, fully zoomorphic jaguar. In both aspects, he wears a scarf and is associated with the sun. His human aspect sometimes wears a cruller, associating him with GUI of the Palenque Triad. The Baby Jaguar is particularly important at Tikal in the early inscriptions where it appears as if it were the name of the kingdom. At minimum, it was considered to be a god particularly associated with Tikal, perhaps as its patron. The Baby Jaguar also appears in early inscriptions at Caracol. See Chac-Xib-Chac.
-[480] Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1988), 137—140.
+Bicephalic Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-[481] William Gary Kline, The Individualist Anarchists: A Critique of Liberalism (Lanham, MD: UP of America 1987), 8–21, 35–46.
+Blood is represented by a bifurcated scroll, sometimes with plain contours and sometimes with beaded outlines representing the blood itself. To mark the scroll as blood rather than smoke or mist, the Maya attached a number of signs representing precious materials: kan, “yellow,” yax, “bluegreen,” chac, “red,” shells, jade jewelry like beads and earfiares, obsidian, mirrors of various materials, “zero” signs, and bone. This imagery merges with that of God C, which imparts the meaning “holy” or “divine.” Blood is the holy substance of human beings. See God C.
-[482] Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 140–143; Liberty 1: 12, 3; Liberty 1: 1, 1.
+The Bloodletting Bowl is a flat, shallow plate with angled sides, called a lac in Mayan. It held offerings of all sorts and was often used in caches in a lip-to-lip configuration in which a second bowl was used as the lid. In bloodletting scenes, the bowl usually holds bloodied paper, lancets of various sorts, and rope to pull through perforations.
-[483] Kline, The Individualist Anarchists, 49, 74–75.
+Cab or Caban, see Earth.
-[484] Ibid., 74–76.
+Cauac Signs consist of a triangular arrangement of disks in groups of three, five, or more, combined with a semicircular line paralleled by a row of dots. These signs derive from the day sign Cauac, but in the iconography they mark both things made of stone and the Witz Mountain Monster. When they appear in zoomorphic form or with a wavy contour, cauac signs mark the Eccentric Flint. Combined with the God C-type head, the cauac signs refer to sacred stones, like altars. When the zoomorphic form has eyelids and a stepped forehead, it is the Witz Monster or Living Mountain. See Witz Monster.
-[485] James Joseph Martin, Men against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827—1908 (Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles 1970), 271–278.
+The Celestial Bird, also known as the Serpent Bird and the Principal Bird Deity, has a long tail, personified wings, and the head of a zoomorphic monster. Often it appears with a round object and woven ribbon held in its mouth, with a trefoil pectoral around its neck, and a cut-shell ornament attached to a jade headband. In its most common representation it sits atop the World Tree or astride the body of the Cosmic Monster. In its earliest manifestations, it appeared prominently in the Late Preclassic art of the southern highlands. There it represented the idea of nature out of control but brought into order by the Hero Twins and their avatar on earth, the king.[643] This concept of the king as the guardian of ordered nature first came into the iconography of the lowland Maya with the image of this bird, especially in the context of the World Tree.
-[486] By “social anarchism” I mean the anarchist lineage running from Mikhail Bakunin through Peter Kropotkin to the twentieth-century anarcho-communists and syndicalists. This usage, like “market anarchism,” is fraught as all political ideologies are ultimately “social.” My employment of the term is merely conventional.
+The Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster.
-[487] First Bakunin quote taken from George Woodcock, “On Proudhon’s ‘What Is Property?’” Anarchy, 106: 353; second Bakunin quote taken from Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books 2002), 26; Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment (Montréal: Black Rose Books 1995), 27; Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: AK 2004), 4–5. Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, xiv; Larry Gambone, Proudhon and Anarchism: Proudhon’s Libertarian Thought and the Anarchist Movement (Victoria: Red Lion 2008); Albert Meltzer, Anarchism, Arguments For and Against (San Francisco, CA: AK Press 1996), 5.
+The Ceremonial Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-[488] Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, 89, 424.
+Chac-Xib-Chac is frequently paired with the Baby Jaguar in early inscriptions, while in Late Classic pottery painting they occur together in scenes of dance and sacrifice. Chac-Xib-Chac can appear in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form, but he is distinguished by a shell diadem, a fish fin on the face of his human version, a shell earflare, and his frequent wielding of an ax. All but the shell diadem and the ax are features shared by G1 of the Palenque Triad, and in fact the two may be aspects of the same entity. Chac-Xib-Chac was the prototype of the great god Chae of the Maya of Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Kings frequently portray themselves in the guise of Chac-Xib-Chac or wear him behind their legs suspended on a chain. On the Cosmic Plate (Fig. 2:4), he is identified by date and actions as Venus as Eveningstar.[644] See Baby Jaguar.
-[489] Petr Aleksieevich Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York, NY: G. Putnam and Sons 1906), 216. Original emphasis.
+The Cosmic Monster, also known as the Celestial Monster and the Bice- phalic Monster, is a dragon-type monster with a crocodilian head marked by deer ears. The body has legs, usually terminating in deer hooves with water scrolls at the joints. Its body sometimes resembles a crocodile marked with cauac signs, but it can also appear as a sky band or as the lazy-S scrolls of blood. At Yaxchilán, the Monster appears with two crocodile heads, but usually the rear head is the Quadripartite God, which Y hangs upside down in relation to the front head to mark it as a burden of the Cosmic Monster. The front head is usually marked as Venus while the Quadripartite Monster is the sun. Together they represent the movement of Venus, the sun, and by extension, the planets across the star fields at night and the arc of heaven during the day. The Cosmic Monster marks the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds as it exists on the perimeter of the cosmos. See World Tree and Quadripartite Monster.
-[490] Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 20, 144, 216; Petr Aleksieevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann 1915).
+The Death God (God A) appears as an animated skeleton, sometimes with the gas-distended belly characteristic of parasitical disease or the decay of a corpse. There appear to have been many versions of this god, differentiated by slight variations in the anatomy, the objects carried, and the actions done in the scene. These variations may represent different aspects of the same god, or just as likely, different Lords of Death named for various diseases or actions.
-[491] Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 255.
+The Directional Gods, see Four-Part Gods.
-[492] Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 453—468.
+The Double-headed Serpent Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-[493] Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books 2000), 23—58. See also George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (New York, NY: Basic Books 1976); and Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative Movement (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1988).
+Earth is represented by bands marked with cab signs from the glyph meaning “earth.” These bands may be split to represent a cleft from which a tree grows or ancestors emerge. In some representations, earth bands may also represent the concept of territory or domain.
-[494] Raimondo, An Enemy of the State; Kevin Carson, “The Left-Rothbardians, Part I: Rothbard,” The Art of the Possible (blog), 2008. Accessed at the Center for a Stateless Society website, [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/12938]].
+Eccentric Flint and Flayed-Face Shield combine a flint lance blade or an eccentric flint with a shield made from a flayed human face. It is an object transferred from ancestor to king in the accession rites at Palenque. At other sites, like Tortuguero, Yaxchilan, and Tikal, this symbol combination is directly associated with war and capture.
+The Foliated Cross is a maize tree, representing the central axis of the world in the symbolism of cultivated nature. At its base is the Kan-cross Waterlily Monster representing the canals and swamps of raised-field agriculture. Its trunk, like that of the Wacah Chan tree, is marked with <verbatim><</verbatim> the God C image meaning “holy” or “sacred.” Its branches are ears of maize with a living human head substituting for the grains of maize as a A reference to the myth of creation in which human flesh was shaped from maize dough. Perched on its summit is the great bird of the center, in this context represented as the Waterbird associated with the canals around raised fields. The Waterbird wears a mask of the Celestial Bird. See World Tree.
-[495] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 15.
+The Four-Part Gods: Many gods in the Maya system occur in repetitions of four associated with the directions and colors of the four-part division of the world. In the Dresden Codex, Chae (God B) is the principal god shown in a four-part set, but in the Classic period the Pauahtunob[645] or Bacabob are the most frequent deities shown in four repetitions. In the 819-day count of the Classic inscriptions, GII (God K) appears in fourfold division associated with colors, directions, and the appropriate quadrants of the sky. See Pauahtun, GII, and Chac-Xib-Chac.
-[496] Rothbard believed with Thomas Aquinas that natural law—both in its physical and moral varieties—could be apprehended through observation of unfolding processes and that the potentialities buried in these processes tell us not only what is but what ought to be. Unfortunately, he argued, the natural-law theorists from Plato to Leo Strauss had incorrectly conflated “society” and “state,” transforming man’s manifest sociality into a “natural” need for coercive authority. This error, he believed, was not corrected until the early seventeenth century, when John Locke spelled out the individualistic implication of natural rights theory. Locke’s understanding of natural right, Rothbard argued, remained “riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies.” He believed, however, that the theory was perfected in the writings of Lysander Spooner and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century. Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1982).
+GI, GII, GUI, see the Palenque Triad.
-[497] Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 21; Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles with Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute 2009), 1047.
+God B, see Chac-Xib-Chac.
-[498] One of the first discussions of Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalist vision is found in Murray N. Rothbard, “The Real Aggressor,” Faith and Freedom, April 1954. The classic expression of the free-market defense paradigm is found in Rothbard’s Power and Market. See Rothbard, Man, Economy and State and Power and Market, 1047–1056.
+God C is a monkey-faced image that will often have representations of blood drops and other precious materials attached to it. The phonetic reading of the glyphic version as k’ul, the Maya word for “divinity,” “holy,” or “sacred,” identifies the icon as a marker for the same quality. When the image is associated with the depiction of a living being, such as a king or deity, it marks that being as a “divinity.” When it is merged with the image of a thing, such as a tree, stream of blood, or a house, it marks the image as a “holy” thing. See Blood and World Tree.
-[499] Rothbard, Man, Economy and State and Power and Market, 1047–1056.
+God D is the most difficult of the old gods to identify iconographically. He has large square eyes, an overhanging nose, a toothless mouth, and wears a headband embossed with a hanging flower. His glyphic name in the codices and the Classic inscriptions is Itzamna. In glyphic expressions at Naranjo and Caracol, which are structurally similar to those naming the Palenque Triad, he appears paired with Gill or the Baby Jaguar.
-[500] Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, ed. Roy Childs (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute 2000), 218.
+God K, see Palenque Triad (GII).
-[501] The relationship of market anarchism to liberalism is a very important facet of this history. In fact, it was not an anarchist but a nineteenth-century liberal—Gustave de Molinari—who most closely prefigured Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism. For a thorough discussion of Molinari see David M. Hart, “Gustav de Molinari and the Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition, Part I,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 5:1, 263–290; David M. Hart, “Gustav de Molinari and the Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition, Part II,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 5:4, 263–290; and David M. Hart, “Gustav de Molinari and the Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition, Part III,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 6:1, 83–104. For a discussion of the French liberal tradition out of which Molinari emerged, see Mark Weinburg, “The Social Analysis of Three Early Nineteenth Century French Liberals: Say, Comte and Dunoyer,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2:1, 45–63; and Robert Leroux and David M Hart, eds., French Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (London: Routledge 2012). For an explanation of the methodological relationship between the liberal Austrian School of economics and Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” accessed at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, [[https://mises.org][https://mises.org/library/praxeology-methodology-austrian-economics]].
+<strong>God L</strong> is one of the aged gods who appear principally in scenes of Xibalba. He is frail and bent with age, wrinkled in feature, and has a huge nose overlapping a toothless mouth. He is a smoker, preferring huge cigars or smaller cigarettes. His most important costume element is a headdress in the form of the mythological bird named Oxlahun Chan (13 Sky). He has a house in the Otherworld, where he is attended by the beautiful young goddesses who personify the number two. His rule of Xibalba is chronieled by a rabbit scribe.[646] He is also the god who presided over the assemblage of gods when the cosmos was ordered on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.
-[502] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Death Wish of the Anarcho-Communists,” Libertarian Forum, January 1, 1970; Murray Rothbard, “Are Libertarians Anarchists?” (Unpublished essay, c. 1955), accessed at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website [[https://mises.org][https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists]].
+God N, see Pauahtun.
-[503] Jeff Riggenbach, “Samuel Edward Konkin III,” accessed at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website [[https://mises.org][https://]] [[https://mises.org][mises.org/library/samuel-edward-konkin-iii]].
+The Headband Twins, who are characterized by ornate headbands displaying the Jester God of kings, occur most frequently in pottery scenes where they are named as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In their fully human aspect, they are the Classic period prototypes of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hun-Ahau Twin carries large dots on his cheek, arms, and legs and functions in the writing system as the anthropomorphic variant of the glyph for lord, ahau. In the Dresden Codex, this Twin appears as the god Venus in his manifestation as Morningstar. His Twin is marked by patches of jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs, and by a cut shell, read ds yax, attached to his forehead. This god functions also as the personification of the number nine and the glyph yax, meaning “blue-green” or “first.” See Palenque Triad.
-[504] Samuel Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (Los Angeles, CA: Koman Publishing 1983)
+The Hero Twins, see Palenque Triad and Headband Twins.
-[505] Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 176–189; Karl Hess, “The Death of Politics,” Playboy, March 1969. See also Carson, “The Left-Rothbardians.” Hess’s Libertarian Forum piece was republished as Karl Hess, “Where Are the Specifics?” in Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W Johnson (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2012), 289–91.
+The Jester God began as the personified version of the tri-lobed symbol that marked headband crowns of Late Preclassic kings. By the Classic period, this personified version had become the zoomorphic version of the glyph for ahau. Putting a headband with the Jester God, the ahau sign, or a mirror on any animal or human head glyph converted its meaning to ahau. Named for the resemblance of its pointed head to a medieval jester’s cap, this god can appear in miniature form held by the king; but it is most commonly attached to the headband of the king or worn on his chest as a pectoral. The Jester God will sometimes have fishfins on its face.
-[506] Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (New York, NY: Autonomedia 2011), 1.
+The Kan-cross Waterlily Monster is a special version of the waterlily distinguished by the presence of a Kan-cross on its forehead. Often the root formations, blossoms, and pads of the waterlily emerge from its head.
-[507] Kevin Carson, “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth,” in Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (New York, NY: Autonomedia 2011).
+It is especially associated with the water environment of agricultural canals. See Waterlily Monster.
-[508] Chartier and Johnson, “Introduction,” 3; Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarianism through Thick and Thin,” in Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (New York, NY: Autonomedia 2011).
+The Maize God was represented by a beautiful young man with maize foliation growing from his head. He is identified with the older set of Twins who were the father and uncle of the Hero Twins[647] and his most common representation is as the Holmul Dancer.
-[509] Karl Hess, “Anarchism without Hyphens,” the dandelion, 4:13. Kevin Carson, personal communication with author, December 4, 2017.
+The Maw of Xibalba is depicted as the great gaping head of a skeletal zoomorph. This creature has much in common with the mouth of the Witz Monster, but it is always represented with skeletal features and split-representation of two profiles merged at the lower jaw, whereas the mouth of the Witz Monster is shown either in profile or front view as the natural mouth of a fleshed creature. The Maw symbolizes death or the point of transition between the natural world and the Otherworld of Xibalba. In Temple 11 at Copan, the mouth of the Witz Monster was the outer door of the temple itself, while the central platform inside the building was the Maw to Xibalba. In that context, one reached the Maw by entering the mountain. A possible interpretation of the contrast in these images is that the Maw is the portal on the side of the Xibalbans, while the mouth of the Witz Monster is the portal in the world of humans.
-[510] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago, IL: H. Regnery 1950); Vladimir Lenin, “Anarchism and Socialism,” in Lenin’s Collected Works (Volume 5) trans. J. Fineberg and G Hanna and ed. V. Jerome (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1960), 327. For market anarchism’s capacious understanding of the market, see Charles W. Johnson, “We Are Market Forces,” in Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (New York, NY: Autonomedia 2011).
+The Mexican Year Sign is a trapezoidal configuration that is associated with the Tlaloc sacrifice complex. Its name comes from the function of a similar sign which marks year dates in the Aztec codices. See Tlaloc.
-<br>
+The Moon Goddess in her Classic period form often sits in a moon sign holding a rabbit. Her head functions both as the numeral “one” and as phonetic na. Since na was also the word for “noble woman,” the head of the Moon Goddess precedes female names, distinguishing them from the names of male nobles. In the codices and the Yucatec Colonial sources, the Moon Goddess was called Ix-Chel and she may appear as an aged woman with a toothless mouth.
-** 9. Rights, Morality, and Egoism in Individualist Anarchism
+The Paddler Gods are named from their appearance on four bones from the burial chamber of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal. In the scenes incised on these offerings, they paddle the canoe of life carrying the king’s soul through the membrane between the worlds and into death. The Paddlers appear with special frequency in references to period-ending rites, where they are born of the king’s blood offering. Both gods have aged features. The Old Stingray God is distinguished by squint-eyes and a stingray spine piercing the septum of his Roman nose. He sometimes wears the helmet of a mythological fish called a xoc. His twin is also aged, but he is distinguished by a jaguar pelt on his chin, a jaguar ear, and sometimes a jaguar helmet. From glyphic substitutions, we know this pair represents the fundamental opposition of day and night. The Old Stingray God is the day and the Old Jaguar God the night.[648]
-*Eric Mack*
+The Palenque Triad is composed of three gods most fully described in the inscriptions and imagery of Palenque where they are asserted to be the direct ancestors of that kingdom’s dynasty. Sired by the mother and father of the gods who had survived from the previous creation, they were born only eighteen days apart. Although their kinship to human kings is detailed only in the inscriptions of Palenque, we surmise they were considered to be ancestral to all Maya kings and thus central images in Maya iconography.
-*** I. Introduction
+GI, the first born of the Triad, is human in aspect and distinguished from his brothers by a shell earflare, a square-eye, and a fish fin on his cheek. He is particularly associated with the imagery of the incense burner in the Early Classic period and as a mask worn by kings during rituals. GI often wears the Quadripartite Monster as his headdress and is associated with the Waterbird.
-This chapter begins with a relatively long introduction that sets the context for its primary and fairly narrow focus. That primary focus is a pivotal debate that took place in the pages of Liberty (1881—1908), the centerpiece journal of the American individualist anarchist movement that flourished in the last several decades of the nineteenth century. That debate was between contributors to Liberty who held that individualist anarchism had to be grounded in explicitly moral principles and contributors who rejected moralism in the name of amoralist Egoism. The Moralists maintained that there were sound moral principles—especially moral principles demanding respect for individual lib- erty—and that these sound moral principles provided the proper grounding for the individualist form of anarchism to which Liberty was devoted. The Egoists argued that the rejection of the authority of morality was the next logical step after the rejection of the authority of religion and of the state, and that anarchism was best grounded upon amoralist Egoism and self-assertion. By 1887, the editor and publisher of Liberty, Benjamin Tucker (1854—1939), had explicitly sided with the Egoists and, as a consequence, throughout most of Liberty’s history natural morality, natural justice, and natural rights were vigorously denounced in the journal that was the primary voice of individualist anarchism.
+GII, the last born of the Triad, is always zoomorphic in aspect. His most important feature is a smoking object—such as a cigar, torch holder, or ax head—which penetrates a mirror in his forehead. He may appear as a reclining child, as a scepter held by a ruler, or as an independent full-figured being. His face always has the zoomorphic snout traditionally called a long-nose, but his body is often shown as human with a leg transformed into a serpent. He is thus the serpent-footed god. He is also called God K,[649] the Manikin Scepter, and the Flare God and has been identified with the Maya names Tahil, Bolon Tzacab, and Kauil.[650] GII is particularly associated with the ritual of bloodletting, the institution of kingship, and the summoning of the ancestors. He is the god most frequently shown on the Double-headed Serpent Bar.
-My primary purpose in focusing on this debate is to show that, while the common supposition is that the Moralists within this debate advocated a natural rights doctrine, the fact of the matter is that natural rights doctrine played no role at all in that debate. The Moralists in that debate were in fact followers of Herbert Spencer (1820—1903), who, like Spencer, often employed the vocabulary of rights but were really quite sophisticated indirect utilitarians. By the time of this debate in 1886–7, Lysander Spooner (1808–87), the great natural rights theorist of the individualist anarchism movement, was nearing the end of his life.[511] And neither Spooner nor anyone who could be described as Spoonerian was to be found among the Moralists. By the time of the Moralist-versus-Egoist debate, moralistic support for anarchist conclusions had already largely shifted from appeals to natural rights to indirect utilitarian arguments that derived from the work of Spencer. In the course of this chapter, I will explain the important difference between the natural rights approach and the indirect utilitarian approach, while documenting the indirect utilitarianism of the principal Moralists.
+GUI, the second born, is also human in aspect, but he is marked by a jaguar ear and a twisted line called a cruller underneath his eyes. Gill is also called the Jaguar God of the Underworld and the Jaguar Night Sun. His most frequent appearance is as an isolated head worn on a belt, carried in the arm, or surmounted on shields carried by kings and nobles. Both GI and GUI have Roman-nosed, square-eyed faces, long hair looped over their foreheads, and human bodies. GI and GUI will often appear as twins.
-Robert Nozick brought the term “individualist anarchism” back into the currency of political philosophy when he used this term to designate the Rothbardian free market anarchism that Nozick himself seeks to transcend in Part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.[512] In a long endnote, Nozick mentions and praises these nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists in a way that suggests that their views closely corresponded to Rothbard’s natural-rights-based anarcho-capitalism.[513] Nozick especially recommends the work of the two most powerful thinkers within the group, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. “It cannot be overemphasized how lively, stimulating, and interesting are the writings and arguments of Spooner and Tucker.”[514] Yet there are significant differences between the standard views of the nineteenth-century individualist anarchists and Rothbardian anarcho- capitalism—both in terms of economic doctrines and in terms of the sort of moral (or amoralist) grounding offered by the proponents of these doctrines.
+The Pauahtuns (also known as God N) are aged in feature with snaggleteeth, small human eyes, and a wrinkled visage. They often wear net headbands in combination with cauac or ‘‘stone” markings on their bodies as spellings of their name, paua (“net”) plus tun (“stone”). Characteristically, they wear a cut-shell pectoral or their bodies emerge from a conch shell or turtle carapace. The version that wears waterlilies in addition to the net headband might have the body of a young man.
-The individualist anarchists saw themselves as radical critics of capitalism. For capitalism, as they saw it, was a system of state-sponsored monopolies (and other restrictions on free trade) which impoverished the masses and enriched the few primarily by making it extremely difficult for agricultural and mechanical workers to acquire the capital necessary to become self-employed farmers and artisans. And this, in turn, made it extremely difficult for workers fully to capture the fruits of their labor, and enabled those already in command of capital to acquire an illicit share of the fruits of labor’s efforts. For this reason, the individualist anarchists tended to reject or at least be highly suspicious of interest and rental income and the profits of employers. In addition, the individualist anarchists tended to subscribe to something close to the labor theory of value, and this tended to lead them to the conclusion that there must be something fishy about any form of income that did not derive solely from the labor of the recipient of that income. Furthermore, most of the individualist anarchists endorsed a current-possession-and-use doctrine of property rights. This doctrine renders legitimate absentee ownership impossible—since absentee owners cannot be current possessors and users. It follows that no charge that a putative owner extracts from another party who is actually occupying and using some resources can be legitimate. So, once again rental income is condemned—along with interest income, which, after all, is merely rental income on money whose putative owner is not currently possessing and using. On the basis of these anti-capitalist conclusions, the individualist anarchists often labeled themselves “socialists”[515] while insisting that their radically anti-statist socialism—grounded in the recognition of genuine private property rights, the sanctity of voluntary contract, and unhindered free trade— placed them in strong opposition to all forms of state socialism.[516] Strikingly, it was precisely because of these characteristic economic features of nineteenth-century individualist anarchism that Rothbard himself explicitly declined to label himself an individualist anarchist.[517]
+The Classic Maya represented the Pauahtuns as beings who held up the four corners of the world. Sometimes they were the sky and sometimes the earth. The image of the Pauahtuns as world bearers is seen, for example, on Temples 11 and 22 of Copán. Pauahtuns are also depicted with scribes and artisans on painted pottery and on sculpture, as in the case of the Scribe’s Palace at Copán. The number five is personified as Pauahtun.
-We should note that Spooner, who is almost certainly the nineteenth-century individualist anarchist best known to contemporary free market anarchists and minimal statists, did not conform closely to the trends in economic thought I have just described. Spooner advanced a Lockean labor-mixing theory of private property rights, according to which a labor-mixer’s right to the material that he or she had purposively transformed remained in existence as long as the resulting transformation remained in existence.[518] The purposive investor of labor in some (previously unowned) land
+The Personified Perforator is a blade of flint or obsidian, or sometimes a thorn or a stingray spine attached to the ubiquitous long-nosed head that Y personifies inanimate objects in the Maya symbol system. Its other critical feature is a stack of three knots, a symbol that evokes bloodletting with S the perforator.
-holds the land in order to hold the labor which he has put into it, or upon it. And the land is his, so long as the labor he has expended upon it remains in a condition to be valuable for the uses for which it was expended; because it is not to be supposed that a man has abandoned the fruits of his labor so long as they remain in a state to be practically useful to him.[519]
+[[][Principal Bird Deity, see Celestial Bird.]]
-This entails that the property right persists when the owner, for a charge, steps aside and allows another to make use of the transformed object. Spooner also held that interest income and entrepreneurial profits could be legitimate—although he thought that these would be much decreased when all coercively imposed barriers to trade had been removed. Moreover, unlike most of the individualist anarchists, Spooner never described himself as a socialist.[520]
+The Quadripartite Monster appears in three major versions: as the rear head of the Cosmic Monster, as an independent image at the base of the World Tree, and as a scepter or headdress. It never has a body and its head is usually fleshed above the muzzle and skeletal beneath it. A flat bloodletting bowl marked with the sign for the sun, kin, forms its forehead and a stingray spine, a shell, and crossbands rest in the bowl. The stingray spine represents the blood of the Middleworld; the shell symbolizes the water of the Underworld; and the crossbands are the path of the sun crossing the Milky Way, a sign of the heavens which can be represented by a bird’s wing in Early Classic examples. GI of the Palenque Triad often wears this image as its headdress. The Quadripartite Monster represents the sun as it travels on its daily journey through the cosmos. See Cosmic Monster, World Tree, and GI.
-Spooner was also a strong advocate of the type of natural rights approach to political theorizing that one sees in Rothbard and Nozick and that constitutes the framework within which the debate between the Rothbardian anarchist and the Nozickian minimal statist takes place. Perhaps it was because Rothbard saw the political doctrines of the individualist anarchists through the lens of Spooner’s natural rights approach that he held that, while he had substantial differences with the individualist anarchists on economic matters, his differences with them on political matters were minor.[521] Perhaps it was because Nozick thought of Spooner—whose most well-known work was a rights-based critique of the consent theory of state legitimacy (Spooner 1870)—as the exemplar of individualist anarchism that Nozick felt comfortable applying to the label “individualist anarchism” to Rothbard’s natural rights and pro-capitalist position.
+The Royal Belt consists of a heavy waistband to which jade heads were attached at the front and sides. Typically, these heads, which read ahau, surmount a mat sign (or an equivalent sign of rule) and three celts made of polished jade or flint. A chain hung from the sides of the belt to drape across the back of the wearer’s legs where a god hung from the chain. Many examples of the dangling god are identified iconographically as Chac-Xib-Chac. This dangling version of Chac-Xib-Chac also occurs as the head variant of an important title reading chan yat or in some versions chan ton. The first paraphrases as “celestial is his penis” and the second as “celestial is his genitals.”
-As a result, both Rothbard and Nozick may have contributed to the view that, at least until the Moralist-versus-Egoist debate in Liberty, the natural rights approach thoroughly monopolized individualist anarchist political theorizing and that the Moralist opponents of the Egoists must, therefore, have been members of the natural rights camp. I also surmise that to some extent this belief in natural rights dominance among the individualist anarchists has arisen from the mistaken perception of Spencerian indirect utilitarian argumentation as simply being a version of natural rights theorizing. In James J. Martin’s Men versus the State—the work that remains the best overall account of the individualist anarchist movement—the defeat of the Moralists within this debate is characterized as the defeat of the natural rights view.[522] Spencerian doctrine appears within Martin’s discussion of this debate only when Tucker is cited as continuing to hold as a supposed complement to his new-found Egoism that social expediency calls for “the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty.”[523] The identification of the Moralist camp with natural rights advocacy also appears in Wendy McElroy’s superb book on a range of important debates that took place in Liberty.[524] McElroy entitles her chapter on the Moralist-versus-Egoist debate “Egoism v. Natural Rights.” More generally, McElroy mistakenly takes Tucker’s belief in natural laws concerning the causal conditions of human happiness—a Spencerian element within Tucker’s doctrine both before and after his adoption of Egoism—as evidence for his belief in natural rights as prescriptive principles.[525] The idea that the Moralists who confronted the Egoists in Liberty in 1886–7 were natural rights thinkers appears again in the entry on Benjamin Tucker in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. In this entry those who opposed Egoism (and who decamped from Liberty after Tucker sided with the Egoists) are described as “proponents of natural rights theory.”[526] The Wikipedia entry on Tucker similarly asserts that, when Tucker converted to “Max Stirner’s Egoist anarchism,” he abandoned his “natural rights position” and sided with the Egoists against the “Spoonerian Natural Lawyers.”[527] Tucker did indeed change his position around the time of this debate. But I hope to show that the debate that occasioned his change was not one between Egoists and Spoonerian natural law advocates.[528]
+The Serpent Bar, also known as the Bicephalic Bar, the Double-headed Serpent Bar, and the Ceremonial Bar, is a scepter carried in the arms of rulers, usually held against their chests. To hold the Bar, Maya rulers put their hands in a formal gesture with their wrists back to back and their thumbs turned outward. Its original function in the Late Preclassic period was to symbolize “sky” based on the homophony in Mayan languages between chan-“sky” and chan-“snake.” In Early Classic times, kings began to hold the double-headed snake as a scepter. Since it had originally marked the environment through which the gods move, its structural position in Maya symbolism overlaps partly with the Vision Serpent. In its fully developed form, it signals both sky and the vision path, as well as the act of birthing the gods through the vision rite.[651] See Vision Serpent.
-In Section II of this chapter, I spell out the differences between the sort of natural rights doctrine to which Spooner, Rothbard, and Nozick subscribed and Spencerian indirect utilitarianism. This provides the conceptual background for my claim that the Spencerian indirect utilitarianism which opposed Egoism in the pages of Liberty ought not to be conflated with genuine natural rights thinking. In Section III, I describe briefly the actual and waning presence of natural rights thinking within American individualist anarchism and point to some reasons why its presence during those last decades of the nineteenth century has seemed to be greater than it actually was. In Section IV, I will support my core contention that the Moralists who resisted the advance of Egoism in the pages of Liberty were, indeed, Spencerian indirect utilitarians. I do so by providing an account of the clash between the chief advocate of Egoism, James L. Walker (1845–1904), and his chief Moralist opponent, the Spencerian indirect utilitarian John F. Kelly (1859–1922). A further reason for recounting this debate is that, to borrow from Nozick’s remark about the writings of Spooner and Tucker, the debate between Walker and Kelly is lively, stimulating, and interesting. To my mind, it cannot be over-emphasized how subtle were the arguments of Kelly—who, as Tucker saw it, lost the debate.
+Serpent Bird, see Celestial Bird.
-*** II. Natural Rights Doctrine Contrasted with Spencerian Indirect Utilitarianism
+The Skyband consists of a narrow band divided into segments by vertical bars. Inside each segment is a glyph for a planet, the sun, the moon, or other celestial objects.
-Natural rights theories hold that each individual is morally bound to be circumspect in certain ways in her conduct toward all other individuals out of respect for or out of recognition of certain morally impressive properties that individuals have as persons. Natural rights theorists invoke such properties as being self-constituting or autonomous, being project-pursuers, possessing ultimate ends of one’s own, existing for one’s own purposes and not for one another’s purposes, or possessing lives of their own to live. On a natural rights view, the required constraint on one’s conduct toward others is a matter of honoring the special moral standing that other persons have in virtue of such properties—or the standing one must in logic extend to others because one has rationally claimed that standing for oneself. The basis for the required constraint in one’s conduct for others is a matter of their moral status, not a matter of that constraint’s being conducive to desired personal or social outcomes (although it may well also be so conducive).
+The Sun God is related to Gill of the Palenque Triad. This particular version features a Roman-nosed human head with square eyes and squintlike pupils in the corner. The four-petaled flower kin marks the head as the image of the sun.
-The doctrine developed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer—especially in its early and most libertarian form in the first edition of Social Statics[529]—is often viewed as a species of natural rights theory. Since Social Statics was the work of Spencer’s that was most influential on the American individualist anarchist movement, this view of Social Statics is one reason for the common belief that this movement as a whole was committed to the natural rights perspective. However, this natural rights reading of Social Statics is seriously mistaken. A brief precis of the crucial contentions of Social Statics should make this clear.[530] In Social Statics, Spencer maintains that the greatest (aggregate) human happiness is the ultimate good. The realization of the greatest human happiness is in accord with the Divine Will.[531] However, Spencer rejects Jeremy Bentham’s view that each choice about what particular action one should perform ought to be based upon a calculation of which available action will most advance “the creative purpose.” Instead, Spencer maintains that the only feasible route to the achievement of maximum human happiness is “to ascertain the conditions by conforming to which this greatest happiness may be obtained.” We must “find out what really is the line of conduct that leads to the desired end. For unquestionably there must be in the nature of things some definite and fixed pre-requisites to success.”[532] The crucial thing is to fix upon certain general prescriptions compliance with which necessarily enhances (or tends to enhance) general happiness, rather than to engage on a case-by- case basis in the search for the most expedient action. Spencer explicitly maintains that his dispute with Bentham is a dispute between two variants of utilitarianism—Bentham’s “empirical” utilitarianism and Spencer’s own “rational” utilitarianism.
+Tlaloc is a symbol of war and bloodletting consisting of a jawless head with blood scrolls emerging from its mouth and large circles around its eyes. It is associated with spearthrowers, darts used as weapons, and a certain type of flexible, rectangular shield. Warriors dressed in the costume of this complex usually wear a full-body suit made from a jaguar pelt. Often, a horned owl will also occur with this imagery. This symbolic complex and its sacrificial meaning is shared by many contemporary Mesoamerican societies, including Teotihuacan, which may have lent this ritual complex to the Maya during the Early Classic period.
-Spencer’s development of this rational utilitarianism then proceeds by means of a somewhat surprising and underappreciated move. He asserts that the maximization of aggregate human happiness requires that no individual be precluded from achieving his or her own happiness. Hence, Spencer concludes, the maximization of aggregate happiness requires that no individual’s maximization of his or her own happiness preclude any other individual’s maximization of her own happiness. Since individual happiness is attained through the exercise of one’s faculties, the prerequisite for maximizing (aggregate) human happiness is that each individual be allowed to exercise his own faculties subject to the constraint that his exercise not prevent any other individual from exercising her own faculties. Alternatively, each may obtain “complete happiness within his own sphere of activity [as long as he does not diminish] the spheres of activity required for the acquisition of happiness by others.”[533] Thus, we arrive at the Law of Equal Freedom, according to which “every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.”[534] This Law of Equal Freedom is further codified in Social Statics in terms of various rights; for example, the right to personal liberty, which each individual can enjoy without infringing upon the like rights of others.
+Twins and Oppositions: The principle of twinning and opposition is at the heart of Maya cosmological thought. Paired gods, like the Paddlers who represent day and night, are common in Maya religious imagery. Some twins represent oppositions and others are actual twins, born of the same parents. Any god could, however, if need be, appear alone outside its normal pairing. New oppositions could also be generated by new pairings. The most famous examples of twins are the Ancestral Heroes of the Popol Vuh, who are related mythically and historically to several of the frequently shown twins of the Classic period. Another context in which oppositions appear with regularity is in the glyphs that introduce Distance Numbers. In this context, the oppositions function as metaphors for the concept of change, the replacement of one thing by another. Some of the oppositions expressed in this context are male-female, life-death, windwater, Venus-moon, blood-water. The principle of paired oppositions remains today a fundamental characteristic of Mayan languages and metaphor. See Headband Twins, Paddlers, Palenque Triad, Chac-Xib- Chac, and Baby Jaguar.
-Despite this codification in terms of rights, Spencer’s doctrine is still at root utilitarian. The Law of Equal Freedom is to be followed because following it is the crucial prerequisite for the eventual attainment of “the creative purpose.” Punishing individuals for violating this principle lessens the disposition of persons over time to seek to maximize their own happiness in ways that preclude others from maximizing their happiness. At the same time, allowing individuals to attain their happiness in ways that may distress others—but do not violate their equal liberty—will lessen the disposition of persons over time to be distressed by others exercising their equal liberty. Both processes, in accordance with “the law of adaptation,”[535] lead to a harmonization of people’s interests and, eventually, to a maximization of aggregate happiness that consists in the maximization of each individual’s happiness.
+The Vision Serpent is usually depicted as a rearing snake, sometimes with feathers lining its body and sometimes with its body partially flayed. Personified (or ‘’Holy”) Blood is usually attached to its tail as a symbol of the substance which materializes it. It symbolizes the path out of Xibalba through which the ancestral dead and the gods enter the world when they are called in a bloodletting rite. Normally, Vision Serpents are depicted with a single head, but two-headed versions are known. The Maya apparently softened the distinctions between Vision Serpents and Double-headed Serpent Bars because they considered them to be related in meaning.[652] See Serpent Bar.
-*** III. The Presence and Apparent Presence of Natural Rights Thought inIndividualist Anarchism
+Wacah Chan, see World Tree.
-Appeals to the Sovereignty of the Individual as the fundamental principle governing social relations were central in the writings of Josiah Warren (1798—1874), the acknowledged founder of individualist anarchism. Warren’s doctrine was systematically articulated by Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–86) in The Science of Society.[536] Andrews called for “the cordial and universal acceptance of this very principle of the absolute Sovereignty of the Individual—each claiming his own Sovereignty, and each religiously respecting that of all others.”[537] And, long after its initial publication, Andrews’ The Science of Society was serialized in Liberty from October 30, 1886 through December 31, 1887; and Tucker eulogized Andrews in “A Light Extinguished.”[538] In a later issue of Liberty, Tucker honored Warren as “the first man to expound and formulate the doctrine now known as Anarchism; the first man to clearly state the theory of individual sovereignty and equal liberty.”[539] We should note, though, that, by this time, if pressed to explain “individual sovereignty,” Tucker would likely have described it as an affirmation of self-assertion rather than an affirmation of each individual’s moral rights.[540]
+Water is the substance in which the world floats. It is shown welling up out of the portal to the Otherworld. In at least some images, water is the atmosphere of Xibalba and actions which occur there take place as if they were underwater. Water is depicted in two ways: as Water Bands composed of alternating rows of dots, scrolls, and stacks of rectangles representing the surface of water, especially shallow water as in swamps or agricultural canals; and as bands filled with the images of waterlilies. Because nab, the word for “waterlily,” was homophonous with words for “lake,” “swamp,” and “river,” Waterlily Bands represented these bodies of water. Waterlily Bands often merge with the symbolism of Blood Bands. A Water Hole is a glyphic and symbolic version of water contained under the earth, in cenotes, and perhaps in rivers. It is related to the glyphic and iconic version of the Maw of the Underworld.
-Many of the works that Lysander Spooner composed in the 1880s were first published in Liberty. This included his incendiary “A Letter to Grover Cleveland,” which first ran in nineteen installments from June 20, 1885 to May 22, 1886. Tucker’s lengthy and moving obituary for Spooner, “Our Nestor Taken From Us,” appeared in Liberty in May of 1887.[541] One reason one might mistakenly think that Tucker himself was a natural rights advocate—at least during his in his pre-Egoist stage— was his association with and honoring of these three authors—especially Warren and Spooner.
+The Waterbird represents a generic class of bird the Maya associated with water, especially the waters of rivers, swamps, and the canals of raised- field agriculture. This bird usually has a long neck, but as in the case of the Palenque Emblem Glyph bird, it can also have a short neck. The head has the crest of the heron and the upturned, bulging beak of the cormorant. See the Celestial Bird.
-*** IV. Egoism versus Spencerian Moralism
+The Waterlily Monster is the personification of lakes, swamps, and other bodies of still water. It is characterized by the pads and blossoms of the waterlily and in some cases it will appear with an Imix glyph (distinguished from other imix glyphs by cross-hatching in its center) in its forehead. This particular version is closely associated with the tun and uinal glyphs that are used in Long Count notations. A particularly important title of Classic nobility was based on the uinal substitution as a reference to the nobility as “people of the waterlily” or, perhaps, “people of the swamps and lakes.”
-Now, at last, I turn to the Egoist-Moralist debate. To get to the core of this debate, I focus on the most important and impressive advocate of Egoism and the most important and impressive Moralist opponent of Egoism. Our exemplar of Egoism will be James L. Walker, writing as “Tak Kak,” and our exemplar of moralism will be John F. Kelly. As I mentioned above, Tucker ends up siding with Egoism—albeit, while seeking to formulate an amalgam of Egoism and a Spencerian endorsement of equal liberty.[542] Unfortunately, I cannot explore here the complex question of how the components of that amalgam are supposed to fit together to form a worldview that is less wild than Tak Kak’s.
+The Witz Monster is the symbol of the living mountain. It is depicted as a four-legged zoomorphic creature marked with the distinctive signs of the Cauac and “stone.” To differentiate the Witz Monster from the zoomorph representing “stone,” the Maya portrayed the mountain with eyelids and a stepped cleft in the center of its forehead. On pottery, the mouth of the Witz Monster is often depicted agape. The Witz Monster was placed on temples to transform them into sacred, living mountains. Its open mouth then became the entry into the mountain, symbolizing both the doorway of the temple and the mouth of a cave. To specify which mountain they were picturing the Maya would attach icons to the Witz or write its name within its eyes. See Cauac Signs.
-Walker, who was strongly influenced by German philosopher Max Stirner (1806—56),[543] initiated the debate with an essay entitled, “What Is Justice?” Walker defines justice as that which is required by a power “to which the individual owes respect and obedience” (Walker 1886a). Justice is what legitimate authority demands. Acting for the sake of justice is, therefore, always a matter of submitting to an external power. According to Walker, for most of human history people believed in justice because they believed in God. When people rejected their superstitious belief in God, they replaced it with superstitious belief in the legitimate authority of the state or society. While anarchists have rejected superstitious belief in state or social authority, they have replaced it with superstitious belief in moral authority. However, the anarchist critique of theological, state, and social authority must be extended to moral authority and, hence, to the conclusion that “there is no moral government of the world.” Not even slavery can be said to be unjust because “[t]he idea that slavery is ‘unjust’ is [merely] the idea that there is a rule or law against it.”[544]
+The World Tree is the central axis of the world. Called the Wacah Chan (“six sky” or “raised up sky”) in the glyphs, it appears in the form of a cross marked with God C to denote it is a divine or holy thing. The bejeweled, squared-snouted serpents which usually terminate its branches represent flows of liquid offering—human blood and its analogs, rubber, copal, and the red sap of the ceiba tree. Draped in the branches of the tree is the Double-headed Serpent Bar of kings and perched on its summit is the Celestial Bird Deity, who is the bird of the center in the directional model of the world. The World Tree often emerges from behind the rear head of the Cosmic Monster. The front head of the same creature can be depicted as its roots. The Tree is the path of communication between the natural and supernatural worlds as it is defined at the center of the cosmos. The Cosmic Monster is the same path of communication configured for the periphery of the cosmos. The king personifies this World Tree in his flesh. See Foliated Cross.
-Walker continually returns to the theme that, just as God has been overcome, so too must humanity, the substitute for God. In a passage that reminds one of Hegel’s description of Spirit transcending the sorrow of infinitude, Walker declares: “The individual who finally becomes conscious of himself is, just as he is, a universe,—humanity itself. He then knows that he has been dreaming about a something which is, after all, himself. He is incomparable.”[545] The Egoist “interests himself in any pursuit or neglects any without a thought that he is fulfilling or slighting any calling or mission or duty, or doing right or wrong. All such words are impertinent. Nothing is sacred or above him.” It follows that the Egoist has no interest in justifying his conduct; all his thinking concerns how to procure what he desires. “Justification is a piece of superstitious nonsense.”[546] “When [a man] comes to full consciousness, he sets up as his own master.” He attends to his own impulses and sentiments and is true to them—but not, presumably as a matter of principle. For the fully conscious man possesses ideas but is never governed by them. In “Egoism,” Walker says that if a man
+; Notes
-owns himself and is awed by no command, bewitched by no fixed idea or superstition, but does everything with a sense that his acts are his own genuine, personal, sovereign choice ... then the man is an Egoist, or one conscious that he is a genuine Ego.[547]
+; Prologue
-I simply do my own will.... Those who do their own will we classify as distinct from those who act under awe and obedience to supposed moral obligations—whether conceived as commands or the equivalent impression,—from a source outside the individual telling him to submit himself and forego his own inclinations.[548]
+[1] This conference, organized by Merle Greene Robertson at Palenque, was a pivotal meeting, bringing together thirty-five of the most active people in Maya studies. The acceleration of the glyphic decipherment and iconographic studies can be traced to this meeting and the timely publication of its results a year later.
-Indeed, Walker equates being governed by “fixed” ideas with insanity. “The devotee of the fixed idea is mad.” “Egoism is sanity. Non-Egoism is insanity.”[549] “[I]deas such as ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘justice,’ etc.. are merely words with vague, chimerical meanings”—at least when they do not refer to degrees of strength or weakness. If justice in action is understood simply as the strength to perform it, “[i]t is ‘just’ to enslave those willing to be enslaved.” Doing so is at least more just that enslaving a man or a horse that resists enslavement. “There is more virtue in the criminal classes [who resist impediments to their impulses and actions] than in the tame slaves.”[550]
+[2] Our work with the dynastic history of Palenque was built on Berlin’s (1968) identification of the rulers we called Pacal, Kan-Xul, Chaacal, and Kuk, and Kubler’s (1969) discussion of persons he called Sun-Shield and Snake-Jaguar. Kelley (1968) demonstrated the phonetic reading of one king’s name as Pacal or “shield.” Our work identified two new kings and an accession phrase that allowed us to fill in the gaps in Berlin’s and Kubler’s earlier work.
-Walker illustrates his preference for the resistant criminal over the willing slave in a short piece entitled “Killing Chinese,” which was published along with “What Is Justice?” Walker looks with favor upon the prospect of “the willing white slaves of America” resisting the competition of “Chinamen”—who he says are “fitted by nature and heredity to remain slave[s]”—by killing some of them. Walker adds that, when those whites better understand the nature of their own unwilling enslavement, “it is very probable that there will be some dead white men.” Walker explains that anyone who is shocked by his perspective is “a victim of the fixed idea that all men are brothers—a poetical fragment dissociated from and surviving the idea of the fatherhood of God.”[551]
+[3] David Kelley was the first to read Pacal’s name as it was originally pronounced; George Kubler identified the builder of the Group of the Cross as Snake-Jaguar (a name w’e later translated into Choi as Chan-Bahlum); and David Stuart read the inscription that dated Temple 22 and thus identified its builder as 18-Rabbit.
-In a later essay, Walker is yet more enthralled by the criminal rebel who knows no bounds. “The egoist, as an irrepressible, conscienceless criminal, is the coming force, who will destroy all existing institutions.”[552] When some presently existing Egoists “prey upon the masses, they do so because the masses are exploitable material, easily beguiled filled with spiritual ideas, and entertained with moral doctrines.”[553] However, things would be different were all or most men Egoists. “It will make a great difference when many egoists become fully self-conscious and not ashamed of being conscienceless egoists.”[554] Egoists at large “will not act very benevolently toward outsiders.” However, according to Walker, if we are both Egoists, “[n]othing that I could do for you (without setting you in power over myself) could fail to be agreeable to me.” Walker asks: “Do you not begin to think that by suiting only myself I am really doing far better toward others than by throwing myself away to serve them?”[555] Similarly, Walker asserts that his own will or desires will be aligned against the individual who wrings from others the fruits of their labor. Yet here Walker’s reasoning seems to be that he may be the next victim of the wringer. The wringer may become “an obstacle to the realization of my desire.”[556] Walker tells us that, qua Egoist, he joins the theologian and the Moralist in condemning rape. However, in his case this is not a matter of law or duty but, instead, inclination. Apparently in response to the thought that, as a willful Egoist, he could just as easily have an inclination to rape, Walker asserts: “[W]hen I am well, I shall want to do well.”[557]
+[4] The Harvard-Arizona Cozumel Project was directed by Jeremy A. Sabloff and William L. Rathje and was principally funded by the National Geographic Society. See Freidel and Sabloff (1984) for a description of the ruins on the island.
-There are no Egoists who do not do many acts to help others. Generosity is perfectly Egoistic. There is no quality so distinctively so, in contrast to dutiful moralism. It is a flower of character, without the slightest taint or smut of moral police forces in the forum of consciousness.[558]
+; Foreword
-Walker also appeals to Stirner’s idea of a union of Egoists. Once all or most of us free ourselves from the ideas of duty and obligation, the word “justice” can be used to refer to “the rules of a union of egoists with benefits to at least balance duties; and these duties are simply a matter of contract.”[559] Still, all that Walker can mean is that Egoists living among Egoists will each know (and be known to know) that attacks upon others’ lives, liberties, and possessions are apt to trigger costly counterattacks. Thus, each will have strategic reasons to avoid such attacks (if they will be detected). As Kelly points out, Walker cannot mean that through contract individuals can place themselves under obligations to one another to abide by certain norms. For this would require belief in the “fixed idea” that agreeing to abide by certain rules places one under an obligation to do what one has agreed to do. And Walker himself rejects this idea when he denies that making a promise provides one with a reason to keep it.[560]
+[5] Ahau is glossed in the Motul dictionary, one of the earliest colonial sources on Yucatec Maya, as “rey o emperador, monarca, principe or gran señor” (“king or emperor, monarch, prince or great noble”). In the inscriptions of the Classic period, the high king was an ahau, but so were many of the high nobles in his court. The inscriptions record that the king took the office of ahau when he became king and that he was a k’ul ahau, “holy (or divine) lord” of his kingdom. We shall use the ahau title to refer to Maya of this highest rank, and following the custom of using pluralizing suffixes from other languages as legitimate forms in English, we will pluralize ahau in the Maya fashion as ahauoh.
-Kelly’s point about contracts accomplishing little or nothing unless they have a binding effect deserves to be quoted in full.
+; 1. Time Travel in the Jungle
-[I]t is impossible to base a society upon contract unless we consider a contract as having some binding effect, and that the binding effect of a particular contract can not be due to the contract itself. That is to say, no special obligations could be created for us by a contract unless we were under some general obligations towards each other already, one of these being the keeping of faith.[561]
+[6] Huastec is recognized by modern linguists as a Mayan language. Archaeologically and linguistically, the separation between Huastec and other Mayan languages occurred very early—probably by 2,000 B.c.
-As we shall see, Kelly also provides arguments for why members of a union of Egoists who do not take themselves to be obligated by their agreements will often not abide by rules compliance with which would be beneficial to them.
+[7] The term Mesoamerica was invented by Paul Kirchhoff (1943) as both a cultural and geographic term to identify a region limited by aboriginal farming, which did not extend into the deserts of northern Mexico, to an eastward limit defined by Mayan- speakers and their cultural and economical influence.
-The last main element in Walker’s view is the claim that Egoism—at least when it is sufficiently widespread—provides the firmest basis for anarchism. This is because Egoism undermines all justifications that tyrants may offer for their authority.
+[8] There is still much controversy over the relationship between the hunter-gatherer populations who have left scattered stone-tool evidence ofcampsites in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and in the lowlands of Belize and the farming populations which emerge in the Middle Preclassic period (1000–400 B.C.) Some scholars believe that substantial new populations of farmers moved into the lowlands at the beginning of this period, bringing with them settled village life, the use of ceramic vessels, and the use of domesticated plants. They suggest that these are the true ancestors of the civilized Maya. However, Fred Valdez (personal communication, 1989), reports the presence of preceramic archaic occupation directly underlying the Middle Preclassic village at the site of Colha in northern Belize. With further research, the relationship between an indigenous hunter-gatherer population and the ensuing village farming populations will become clearer. Migration of peoples between the Maya highlands and the adjacent lowlands certainly did occur in antiquity, as it is continuing to occur today.
-Let us suppose all men Egoists. How would the pope persuade people to support him? How would Bismarck persuade Germans that they have an individual interest in holding Alsace? How would Lord Salisbury persuade Englishmen that they have an interest in holding Ireland? How would Grover Cleveland persuade us to support him and coerce the Mormons?
+[9] To say that the shaman conserves culture is only partly accurate, for his constant improvisation of interpretations must be anchored in the changes his people constantly experience from the world around them. His actions are indeed homeostatic in all senses of that word: They work to heal the contradictions in village priorities which inevitably come with the imposition of change from without. These actions conserve things of value by constantly reshaping the changes the Maya perceive in their world to fit fundamental cherished ideas which can be traced thousands of years into the past.
-But for the surrender to fixed ideas and the drilling and teaching which maintains their dominion, the State and the Church would be only so many men, their sacredness gone. How long would their power endure against the surprise, ridicule, indifference, or aversion of a mass of Egoists?
+[10] We called Stephen Houston and David Stuart asking them if they would send a letter to us documenting the new reading so that we could refer to it. Houston’s and Grube’s letters arrived within twenty-four hours of each other. This is typical of the growing dynamism in the field of decipherment. As more and more decipherments are made, they in turn generate new readings, so that when a critical mass is reached, many people at once come to the same conclusions. Houston and Stuart (1989) have since published their evidence for this reading.
-Walker’s view seems to be that, in the absence of fixed, superstitious ideas, people will not desire or will to support the pope, support the holding of Alsace or Ireland, or support the coercion of the Mormons. “Egoism, therefore, points to a general letting alone.”[562] Indeed,
+[11] Humboldt included five pages from the Dresden Codex in his 1810 narrative of his scientific travels in Mexico with botanist Aimé Bonpland. Del Rio’s travels were published by Henry Berthoud of London in 1822 in a book called Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City, which included seventeen plates depicting stone carving from Palenque.
-Egoism dissolves, not one fixed idea merely, but the habit and faith of fixity, therefore all, and furnishes the condition for the final eradication of all political domination.... We take liberty when we no longer feel bound. The bondage of idea is now the great bondage.. Authority, whether of Egoists or fanatics, can be overthrown only by Egoism.[563]
+[12] Our recounting of these interesting events is all based on George Stuart’s (n.d.) detailed study of the history of publication and research in the field.
-Yet might not the activities favored by these officials also be genuinely desired or willed by Egoists? Might not such Egoists agree to joint action to more effectively do as they will? Might not these Egoists “take liberty” to join together in such action when they are released from fixed ideas about rights or justice that condemn the activities favored by the pope, Bismarck, et al.? However, Walker denies this. Napoleon was possible only because
+[13] Ian Graham, director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, follows in their footsteps by publishing fine drawings and photographs of Maya inscriptions. Merle Greene Robertson is another of the great archivists. She has spent the last thirty years making rubbings, photographs, and drawings of Maya inscriptions and carvings.
-he was taken as an idol, deified and served by the unegoistic devotion of others who did the slaughtering and pillaging. To accomplish all this mischief it was necessary that there be a national spirit and a variety of other hate-breeding superstitions.[564]
+[14] This description was included in his A Study of Maya Art (1913). Completed originally in 1909 as his doctoral dissertation, Spinden’s work represents the first systematic study of Classic period iconography. Many of its observations and connections still hold good today.
-Walker holds that, although Egoists will have no natural sympathy with the pope or Bismarck or Napolean, they will by contrast be disposed by natural sympathy to “give all the aid required by any Mormon woman who wanted to leave her husband.”[565] This is of a piece with Walker’s claim that the fully conscious and, therefore, conscienceless Egoist will generally have benevolent and generous feelings at least for other Egoists. “The greatest reason why a particular Ego will not rob his neighbor may be that he does not want to.” Although any gratification of taste or appetite exhibits Egoism, Walker holds that, at least in their conduct toward other Egoists, genuine Egoists will not exhibit “repulsive traits of character.”[566] Walker’s views were brought together in his posthumously published The Philosophy of Egoism.[567]
+[15] Morley (1915:26) proposed this methodology and actually applied it to become the first to suggest a war event at Quiriguâ. Shortly after this time, however, he began a lifelong campaign to photograph and analyze all the Classic period inscriptions he could lind. 1 he two resulting works, The Inscriptions of Copan and The Inscriptions of the Petén. are still critically important resources, but in both, Morley paid almost exclusive attention to calendric material. He was never again interested in the “textual residue,” which ironically he systematically excluded from his drawings.
-The great opponent of Walker in the 1886–7 Egoist-Moralist debate in Liberty was John F. Kelly.[568] Kelly’s first response to Walker appears almost in passing within a lengthy critical review of Henry George’s book Protection or Free Trade.[569] Kelly denounces George’s purely instrumental and case-by-case attachment to liberty, and extends this charge to Tak Kak. According to Kelly, for George,
+[16] The critical papers outlining these discoveries were all published between 1958 and 1964, including Berlin (1958 and 1959), Proskouriakoff (I960, 1961a, 1961b 1963- 1964), and Kelley (1962).
-Liberty is not a good in itself; but is something to be sought after or trodden under foot according as it seems likely to produce immediate material advantages or not. Mr. George does not believe in taking a general principle as a guide; each particular action must be judged by its results,—that is, its direct results. This doctrine, also taught by some ultra-individualists like Stirner and ‘Tak Kak,’ is really only the revival of the Jesuit maxim that the end justifies the means. As an individual murder may produce beneficial results,—say an increases of wages,—Mr. George, Mr. Stirner, and ‘Tak Kak’ ought, according to their philosophy approve of it; but the true individualist, the holder of the utilitarian philosophy in its higher form, is bound to condemn the murder, because to generalize murder, as praise of a particular murder tends to do, would disrupt society and ultimately prove injurious to the greater number.[570]
+[17] This statement was published in the preface to the 1971 edition to his (Thompson 1971:v) Maya Hieroglyphs: An Introduction, but it was but one of several devastating criticisms he published against phoneticism as proposed not only by Knorozov but also by Whorf (Thompson 1950:311–312). His voice was powerful enough to shut down debate until the mid-seventies. Although there are still holdouts against phoneticism today, many of them strident in their opposition, the accumulated evidence, and especially the productivity of the phonetic approach, has convinced most of the working epigraphers that Knorozov was right. We are still engaged in energetic debate about details and individual readings, but there is wide consensus as to how the system works.
-It is very striking here that Kelly invokes the stance of “the true individualist” who Kelly identifies as “the holder of the utilitarian philosophy in its higher [i.e., non-Benthamite, non-direct] form.” But what exactly is the argument offered in the final clauses of Kelly’s statement? I believe it is a subtle argument that goes as follows:
+[18] Elizabeth Benson, director of the Pre-Columbian Library and Collections of Dumbarton Oaks until 1979, called a series of mini-conference between 1974 and 1978. The participants, David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, and Linda Scheie, worked out detailed paraphrases of the inscriptions of Palenque. This work resulted not only in many new decipherments but in the important methodology of paraphrasing based on syntactical analysis of the texts.
-i. To praise a particular murder on the ground that it yields the outcome that should ultimately be promoted—whether that be individual happiness or the greatest happiness of the greatest number—is to praise anyone’s commission of murder if it yields the outcome that should ultimately be promoted. (This is the generalization of which Kelly writes.)
+[19] Three of the four known Maya books are named for the cities where they are now found: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Paris Codex. The fourth, the Grolier Codex, resides now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of México. Made of beaten-bark paper folded in an accordion form, each codex combines pictures and written text drawn in bright colors on plaster sizing. The Maya read their books by folding the leaves from left to right until reaching the end of one side; they then turned the codex over and began reading the other side.
-ii. If one’s praise is effective, many individuals will endorse their commission of murder when they perceive that their actions will yield optimal outcomes; and they will realize that others also endorse their own commission of such murders.
+[20] Codices from the Mixtec recorded lineage histories as the land documents of their communities. Aztec sources record tribute lists, histories of various sorts, and calendric almanacs and were used to carry news from one part of the empire to another.
-iii. But it would be profoundly socially disruptive and contrary to the interests of most (if not all) individuals for many people to endorse their commission of murder when they perceive that their actions will yield optimal outcome and to realize that many others also endorse this view. (For this would radically undercut the mutual assurance of peaceful co-existence upon which social order rests.)
+[21] Yucatecan is the ancestor of modern Yucatec, Itzá, and Mopán, while Cholan diversified into Choi, Chontai, Chorti, and the extinct language, Cholti. Most linguists consider that the diversification into these daughter languages occurred after the Classic period ended (A.D. 900).
-iv. Therefore, for the sake of what should ultimately be promoted, one should reject the praise of any particular murder (or the deprivation of liberty involved in murder) on the ground that it yields the outcome that should ultimately be promoted.[571]
+[22] The descendant languages of these two proto-languages were found in approximately this distribution at the Conquest, but with the now extinct Cholti language spoken in the area between Choi and Chorti. Examples of glyphic spelling specific to one or the other language occur in roughly similar distributions, suggesting that they were in approximately the same distributions during the Classic period. Yucatec and Choi also evidence profound interaction in their vocabularies and grammars beginning during the Late Preclassic period, although they diverged from each other many centuries earlier.
-Kelly’s further conclusion is that, rather than following George in the direct pursuit of the general happiness, one should instead abide strictly by certain general norms—especially the norm against depriving individuals of their equal liberty—that enable each to pursue happiness in ways that do not injure others.
+[23] This particular homophony has long been known to epigraphers and iconogra- phers, although Houston (1984) was the first to fully document its use in the writing system.
-The argument explicated in propositions i—iv targets instrumental justifications of infringements upon liberty—justifications of the kind George was proposing. It does not so obviously apply to Walker’s apparently non-instrumental endorsement (in “What Is Justice?” and “Killing Chinese”) of whatever conduct toward others one truly wills to perform. Noting this, however, raises an important question about the nature of Walker’s Egoism. Does this Egoism call for one to maximize doing as one wills or desires over one’s lifetime—in which case, it will often call for one to engage in actions that one does not will or desire as the necessary means for future willed or desired action—or does it require that, at all times, one acts as one wills or desires? The tone of Walker’s proclamations suggests the latter position. The truly free Egoist will not spend much of his time submitting prudentially to the causal necessity of doing X in order to be able at some future time to do Y, even though he will genuinely will or desire Y in the future.
+[24] We use the word logograph rather than pictograph because most word signs were not pictures of the things they represented. All pictographs are logographs, but most logographs are not pictographs.
-If this is Walker’s view, he is unaffected by Kelly’s argument that better individual and aggregate overall results are attained through common compliance with general norms. He is unaffected because his Egoism does not call for the overall maximization of one’s willed or desired preferences. On the other hand, if one does as one wills at time t<sup>1</sup> even when one realizes that acting contrary to one’s will at t<sup>1</sup> will enable one to act in accord with one’s will at t<sup>2</sup> through t<sup>n</sup>, doesn’t this show one has been captured by a fixed idea—indeed, a superstition—that one must always do as one wills?
+[25] The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov (1952) first identified the way the phonetic spellings work, but it was many decades before his work became generally accepted by Western scholars.
-Let us return to Kelly’s argument for the indirect promotion of outcomes by way of compliance with general principles—even if this argument does not directly rebut Walker’s own version of Egoism. In his essay “Intelligent Egotism Anti-Social” Kelly repeats essentially the same argument that I ascribed to him above with the substitution of the norm against breaking promises for the norm against murder.
+[26] Kathryn Josserand has explored the discourse structure of hieroglyphic texts and found a fruitful comparison of the ancient patterns to the modern. She has found that many of the features that the ancient Maya repeatedly used, such as couplets (Lounsbury 1980), oppositions, building a text toward a peak event, and disturbance in syntax around the peak, are still used today.
-I must confess that I have a weakness for keeping a promise because it is a promise, and
+[27] Continuities in their toolmaking techniques suggest these people gradually developed village societies between 1500 and 1000 B.C., at least in the eastern Caribbean coastlands of Belize, where there is a gradual shift toward settled village life along the shores of the rivers. R. S. MacNeish (1982) carried out a survey in Belize and discovered the sites and stone artifacts dating from the archaic, prefarming period.
+<br>
+<br>Up until 1988. radiocarbon samples from the remarkable village site of Cuello in northern Belize dated the earliest Maya farmers at roughly 2000 B.C. This period of occupation fell in the Early Preclassic period of Mesoamerica. The weight of evidence (as announced by Norman Hammond, the excavator of Cuello, at the Austin Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in 1988) now favors redating the Cuello village occupation about a millennium later, in what archaeologists call the Middle Preclassic period.
-I fail to see how a civilized society can be maintained when that weakness is not general. For, if one’s promising to do a thing does not add to the probability of one’s doing it, promises disappear altogether, and contracts and concerted action become impossible except under duress.[572]
+[28] By 900 B.C., hierarchical society was established in the Copán Valley, resulting in a burial tradition with wide-ranging access to exotic goods, especially jade. These burials, especially Burial XVIII-27, are among the richest so far known from the early period in the Maya region (W. Fash n.d. and Scheie and M. Miller 1986. 75, Pl 17).
-Kelly’s view is that common compliance—and the expectation of common compliance—with certain general norms is essential for the maintenance and functioning of the social order; and this in turn is essential for the attainment of individual and aggregate happiness.
+[29] 1 he groups in the Pacific lowlands have long been accepted to have been May an- speaking. Linguists, especially Terrence Kaufman, Lyle Campbell, Nicholas Hopkins, Kathryn Josserand, and others, now propose that those peoples were speakers of the Mije-Zoqucan language family with the Zoqueans living in the western region closer to the Isthmus and with Mije groups in the east toward El Salvador (Kaufman, personal communication, 1989). If this distribution is correct, then much of the early symbolism of kingship from that region derives from the Mije-Zoqucan cultural tradition, rather than the Mayan.
-Therefore, if (as Walker maintains) morality does not genuinely provide us with such norms, rules will have to be enunciated and imposed by force by a political sovereign who himself will stand above the rules which he enacts. According to Kelly, Hobbes rather than Walker grasps the logical implication of the non-existence of natural morality. “[F]rom the necessity of preserving social relations and the non-existence of natural morality ... [Hobbes] deduces despotism.”’ A union of conscienceless Egoists would require the mailed fist of a Sovereign Egoist. Hence, rather than providing “the condition for the final eradication of all political domination,” Egoism demands political domination.[573]
+[30] This kind of social organization is called segmentary because it consists of politically autonomous groups who, for purposes of trade, ritual communion, marriage, and the management of hostilities, regard themselves as descendants of common ancestors and hence as segments of a large family. The lowland Maya developed other forms of social organization as their society became more complex—patron-client relationships, for example, between noble families and families devoted to crafts and skilled labor. Nevertheless, the segmentary lineage organization remained a fundamental building block of Maya society and politics throughout the span of the civilization. The period of civilization has been called segmentary state organization and this is a reasonable label in light of the enduring role of kinship in the hierarchical structure of royal governments.
+<br>
+<br>The archaeological investigation of the origins of Maya complex society in the lowlands is proceeding at a very rapid pace in the interior of the peninsula. Richard Hansen and Donald Forsyth (personal communication, 1989) have recently discovered that the community of Nakbc near El Mirador contains pyramidal mounds of 18 to 28 meters elevation dating to the Middle Preclassic period, perhaps between 600 and 300 B.c. This discovery indicates that before the advent of the Late Preclassic period, some lowland Maya communities were already experiencing the centralization of ritual activity and the concentration of labor power characteristic of the ensuing era of kings. The people of Copan already enjoyed extensive trade contacts and access to precious materials such as carved greenstone during this Middle Preclassic period. Recently, the elaborately decorated Swazy ceramics of northern Belize were redated from the Early Preclassic period into this Middle Preclassic period. Several sites in northern Belize, including Cuello and Colha, were sizable villages with centralized ceremonial activity and extensive trade contacts during this period. The famous Olmec heartland site of La Venta in the Gulf Coast lowlands flourished during the same era and was clearly importing vast quantities of exotic materials from highland sources. Some of the La Venta sources may well be situated in the Motagua drainage in the southeastern periphery of the Maya lowlands.
+<br>
+<br>Viewing this shifting landscape, we now suspect that during the Middle Preclassic period, a long-distance trade network, a “jade trail,” crossed the interior of the peninsula from the Caribbean coast of Belize, through the vicinity of El Mirador, and thence across to the Gulf Coast lowlands. We suspect a pattern similar to the situation after the collapse of the southern kingdoms in the ninth century. Then, a few complex societies endured in the interior to form a demographic archipelago across the sparsely inhabited forest. These societies facilitated trade in exotic commodities and also provided local products for export. This pattern may also exist at the outset of the demographic buildup leading to the emergence of civilization in Preclassic times. Eventually, further discoveries in the interior may push the origins of the institution of ahau back into the Middle Preclassic period. Even were this to be the case, however, ethnographic analogy with other areas of the tropical world, such as Central Africa, shows that small complex societies can coexist with large tribal societies for centuries without the tribal societies developing into states. The empirical record of the Late Preclassic still suggests that the institution of kingship coalesced and dominated Maya lowland society in a rapid transformation during the last two centuries B.c.
-The initial (Hobbesian) premise of Walker’s “What Is Justice?” is that all rule or law is the command of some being with superior power. Compliance with any rule or law is submission to the commanding agent. This is what motivations Walker’s revolt against all rule and law—including moral rule and law. Kelly, in contrast, advances a Spencerian conception of moral norms. On this conception, moral norms are the concomitants of social evolution. Hence, they are no one’s commands, and compliance with them is not a matter of subordinating oneself to anyone else’s will.
+[31] We discuss the structural transformations of kinship ideology which accompanied the invention of Maya kingship in Freidel and Scheie (1988b).
-Kelly thinks of societal norms as evolving though the selection of rules that are more and more conducive to individual and aggregate happiness. This process, for reasons laid out in Social Statics, moves humanity toward principles that ascribe equal rights to all individuals so that “in each generation people [are] less and less inclined to infringe on the rights of their neighbors, until at last, we have, to a great extent, become what Spencer calls organically moral.” Indeed, through this process, we will arrive at a state in which each person’s achievement of happiness will be compatible with— will even contribute to—the happiness of others. “Then we shall have reached that state which we all desire, that state in which the greatest happiness of each coincides with the good of all.”
+[32] See John Fox’s (1987) study of this kind of organization among the Postclassic Quiche of the Guatemala highlands.
-Further Spencerian themes are present when Kelly considers the individual who is “organized so that his ‘good’ leads him to commit actions injurious to others.” In such a case,
+[33] Lee Parsons (personal communication, August 1987) excavated a Late Preclassic offering in a major center of the Pacific slopes area which contained a set of three carved greenstone head pendants suitable for wearing as a crown. One of these head pendants is the Jester God, the diagnostic diadem of ahau kingship status from the Late Preclassic period until the Early Postclassic period (Freidel and Scheie 1988a). On Stela 5 at the site of Izapa, a major center of the Late Preclassic period in the southern highlands, the Jester God diadem is also depicted worn by an individual in authority (Fields n.d.). Under the circumstances, there is reason to believe that the institution of kingship predicated on the status of ahau was present in the southern regions of the Maya world as well as in the lowlands to the north during the Late Preclassic period.
-morality has commands to utter, commands growing more and more positive with the advance of society. Persons so organized must either learn to control their anti-social impulses, or they will inevitably be weeded out, until only those are left the pursuit of whose individual ‘good’ does not interfere with the like pursuit on the part of others.[574]
+[34] There is a massive four-sided pyramid at the northern lowland site of Acanceh in Yucatán which Joesink-Mandeville and Meluzin (1976) correctly identified as Preclassic on the basis of a partially preserved monumental stucco mask illustrated by Seler (Seler 1911). The iconography of this monumental mask is commensurate with the royal iconography of Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros (Freidel and Scheie 1988b). The famous noi thern-lowland bas-relief in Loltún Cave depicts a Maya king. Although not firmly dated by epigraphy or archaeological context, the style of the royal regalia is Late Preclassic (Freidel and Andrews n.d.).
-Evolution selects for persons who are disposed to comply with norms which operate to promote individual and aggregate happiness.
+[35] The city of El Mirador raised stelae in the Late Preclassic period (Matheny 1986), and Richard Hansen (1988) has discovered Late Preclassic-style stone stelae at the site of Nakbe, near that great city. We have yet to find any with hieroglyphic writing.
-Walker insists that, if everyone is better off acting in accord with various norms, including a norm commending the fulfillment of contracts, then everyone will so act even if he or she does not believe that such action is obligatory; i.e., is morally required by those norms. Part of the reason one may be better off acting in accord with one’s agreements will be to avoid the hostility or retaliation by one’s fellow Egoists.[575] Kelly offers a subtle game-theoretic response. He asks us to envision a society made up of intelligent Egoistic thieves. He then presents the case for simple intelligent Egoism yielding a theft-free world that would be better for everyone.
+[36] This early date is recorded on the Hauberg Stela (Scheie 1985c and Scheie and M. Miller 1986:191). The names of the phases of Maya history—Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic—are misleading in that civilized life and with it public works of enormous size began earlier than the Classic period. Although an important temple of the Late Preclassic period was excavated at Uaxactun early on (Ricketson and Ricketson 1937), it was not until the last fifteen years that archaeologists finally began to uncover the truly amazing accomplishments of the lowland Maya during the Late Preclassic period.
-[A]ll the time spent in stealing and guarding against theft is wasted. Were all to renounce theft, the total wealth would be as great as before, and the time previously spent in stealing or preventing stealing would be available for the production of more wealth, or the enjoyment of that produced. Here, then, is a splendid opportunity for the display of the powers of intelligent egotism.
+[37] The latest dated monument from the Classic period is found at the site of Tonina. It has the date 10.4.0.0.0 or the year 909.
-Yet, according to Kelly, these individuals will not converge on non-theft.
+[38] Pat Culbert (1988 and personal communication, 1986) gives an overall population distribution of 200 people per square kilometer for the entire Maya region. He estimates a population of 500.000 at Tikal.
-It is advantageous to stop stealing; each one is intelligent enough to see this; yet it is out of their power to abstain. For mark that what is really advantageous to the individual is not that he should stop stealing, but that all others should; and while this latter might be such a gain to him as to make it worth his while to quit stealing himself to secure it, yet he can have no certainty his doing so will secure it.[576]
+[39] We will describe the Maya state with several words, including kingdom, domain, dominion, and polity—a word that technically connotes territoriality and political dominion without additional qualifications as to the nature of the organization or whether it can be considered a nation or a state.
-Nor will a contract among these intelligent Egoist thieves yield a stable convergence on nontheft. For such a contract “can be of no binding effect on men who are free from the dominion of ‘fixed ideas,’ who refuse to keep a promise merely because it is a promise.” In the absence of moral principles, convergence on non-theft will only be achieved through political despotism. Hence, contrary to Walker, “[m]orality, instead of being slavery, is the condition of liberty.”[577]
+[40] Berlin (1958) noticed this special type of glyph in the inscriptions of many different sites. He showed that it is composed of two constants—the “water-group” affix, which we now know to read ch’ul (“holy”), and the “ben-ich” affix, which reads ahau—and a variable, which corresponded to the city in which the Emblem Glyph was found. Since he could not decide whether this new type of glyph referred to the city as a place or to its ruling lineage, he decided to call it by a neutral term—Emblem Glyph.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (1985a, 1985b, 1986) has done the most recent work on Emblem Glyphs. Following Berlin’s and Marcus’s (1973 and 1976) work, he observed that the rulers of some neighboring communities, such as Palenque or Tortuguero, are both named as ahau of Palenque, suggesting that the territorial entity named by the Palenque Emblem Glyph is larger than the capital city. He also noted that in star-shell war events the main signs from Emblem Glyphs appeared as if they were locations. Combining these data, he proposed that Emblem Glyph are titles, naming the person who has it as a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”) of a polity. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have additionally recognized glyphs representing geographical features and separate population centers within an area described by a single Emblem Glyph. Finally, we have evidence from Copán that noble lineages tracing their descent to different founders, and presiding over distinct communities within the realm, nevertheless used the same Emblem Glyph. The Copan Emblem Glyph appears on Altar 1 of Rio Amarillo in the name of a governor who ruled that subordinate site, and at the same time traced his descent from a founder other than the founder of Copán’s royal line (Scheie 1987d). Emblem Glyphs thus denote a kingdom or polity as a territorial and political entity with a hierarchy of social positions and different geographical and urban locations within it.
-Kelly’s final objection to Walker is that the normative solipsism of Stirnerite Egoism is incompatible with friendship. “Friendship implies equality, the recognition of others as like one’s self, while, according to Stirner, the ego is alone, surrounded only by things which it is for him to use to his best advantage.”
+[41] Joe Ball (1989) reports that in the Buena Vista region of northern Belize the larger palace complexes are distributed at five-kilometer intervals throughout the region he surveyed. In between the larger compounds, residential clusters and single-family holdings are found distributed at regular intervals. He has found pottery at the smaller compounds that was probably made at the large Buena Vista center. More important, in debris at Buena Vista, he also has found very well-made pottery with the name of the king of Naranjo (Smoke-Squirrel, whom we shall meet in one of our histories) painted on the rim. Seiichi Nakamura (1987) and the Japanese team working in the La Venta Valley near Copán in Honduras have found the same pattern. One of the largest sites in their survey area, Los Higos, has a stela in the style of Copán, while at least one second-level site had an ahau important enough to have received an incised alabaster vase as a gift from Yax-Pac, the high king of Copán. This gifting down of elite goods was apparently one of the ways Maya kings retained the loyalty of their subordinate lords.
-Tucker’s siding with Tak Kak against the Moralists broke the friendship between Kelly and Tucker, and Kelly’s association with Liberty. But the most poignant expression of this break was supplied by Kelly’s sister Gertrude, who had also been a frequent contributor to Liberty.
+[42] Research to date by Mathews and Justeson (1984:212–213) and Stuart (1984b and 1986c) has documented the use of this cahal title only in sites of these regions. However, other Maya polities certainly had parallel constructions of political ranking and may also have used this title. Stuart and Houston (personal communication, 1987) have now expressed doubts as to the phonetic value of this title glyph, although they do not question its basic meaning. We will continue to employ it as a useful technical term for this rank that is already known in the literature.
-My friends, my friends, have you completely lost your heads? Cannot you see that without morality, without the recognition of others’ rights, Anarchy, in any other than the vulgar sense, could not last a single day?[578]
+[43] Cahalob appear as attendants to kings at Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but they also ruled sites like Lacanjá and El Cayo under the authority of the high kings of larger cities. At least one, Chac-Zutz’, was formerly identified as a king of Palenque, but it is now clear he was in fact a cahal probably serving as a war captain to the high king (Scheie n.d.b).
-*** V. Conclusion
+[44] The inscriptions from kingdoms up and down the Usumacinta record royal visits by people who are named theyahau, “the ahau of,” the high kings of allied kingdoms (Scheie and Mathews n.d.). These royal visits appear to have been one of the important methods of establishing and maintaining alliances between kingdoms and within them.
-By the mid 1880s the radical Lockean Lysander Spooner was outside the two mainstreams of individualist anarchist thought—Spencerian indirect utilitarianism and Egoism. This is exemplified in the Moralist-versus-Egoist debate in Liberty in which the Moralists were indirect utilitarians, not natural rights advocates. This seems to reflect a more general pattern in nineteenth-century political thought wherein natural rights thinking was crowded out primarily by forms of utilitarianism or amoralist rejections of morality.
+[45] Lateral descents of this kind are recorded several times in the inscriptions of Palenque, Tikal, Caracol, and Calakmul, among others (Scheie n.d.e). Enough examples are now documented to presume that brother-brother inheritance was an accepted pattern, which may still survive in the highlands of Guatemala. In many of the Maya groups living there, the youngest son inherits the house of his parents and is responsible for caring for them in their old age. Often the son will become owner of the house and the responsible male of the household while his parents are still alive.
+[46] Mathews (1986) generally requires the presence of an Emblem Glyph to define a polity, but since Emblem Glyphs usually do not occur in the northern inscriptions, he used other less certain data to suggest polity boundaries in this northern region. His resulting map of Late Classic polities shows a network of small states covering all of the lowlands, and if anything, his numbers may be overly conservative.
-[511] For one account of Spooner’s doctrine of rights, see Eric Mack, “Lysander Spooner: Nineteenth Century America’s Last Natural Rights Theorist,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29.2 (Sum: 2012): 139—76.
+[47] Kan-Xul of Palenque and 18-Rabbit of Copán were both captured late in their lives after long and successful reigns. They were apparently sacrificed by their captors—the rulers of the smaller towns of Toniná and Quiriguá, respectively.
-[512] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic 1974).
+[48] When we went to Palenque the first time in 1970, the Chois and Tzeltals living south of Palenque had to rely on canoes to carry cargo from their homes in the Tulijá Valley to Salto de Agua and Villahermosa. At that time there were many men who knew how to make dugout canoes, but when the new road was built from Palenque to San Cristóbal de las Casas, this region opened up to truck and bus travel. The younger generation uses modern transportation and the art of canoe making is being lost. See Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzman (1985) for a description of canoe making and its role in Choi society.
-[513] Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty revised edition (New York, NY: Macmillan 1978).
+[49] This carrying system places the cargo in a band passed across the bearer’s forehead and down his back. The weight is thus distributed into the muscles of the neck and onto the back, allowing amazingly heavy loads to be carried substantial distances. This method is still used throughout Central America, where one often sees small children walking down the highway bent under the huge load of firewood they carry back to their houses each day. Their parents will carry 100-pound sacks of grain using the same method.
-[514] Nozick 335n4.
+[50] We have all seen recent photographs of the pall of smoke from the burning forest hanging over the Amazon Basin. In the dry season, this is a fact of life across the Maya landscape as well. We might suppose that it would not have been nearly as bad during the Classic period, but archaeology and settlement-pattern studies suggest that the population of the Classic period at least equaled current levels and may well have exceeded them. At the height of the Classic period, soot from dry-season fires would have hung as oppressively over the landscape as it does today.
-[515] Nozick (336n4) notes that the most extensive individualist anarchist discussion of private protection agencies and the possible relationships among them was offered in Francis Tandy, Voluntary Socialism (Denver, CO: npu 1896).
+; 2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, AND THE MAYA WORLD
-[516] BenjaminR.Tucker,State Socialism and Anarchism and Other Essays (Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1985 [1886]).
+[51] The scene on the Acasaguastlan pot (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:181, 193–194) suggests that in Classic Maya thought these two planes of existence were more than just reciprocally dependent. The scene shows the Sun God in the midst of a vision represented by mirrored Vision Serpents—one manifesting day and the other night. Interspersed among the folds of these Vision Serpents are the beasts of the field and forest, elements representing the human community, the waters of both worlds, and sacrificial ritual which communicates between the two. The “waking dream” of the god is the world in which human beings live. On the other side of the equation, David Stuart (1984a, 1988c) has shown that the Maya believed that this vision rite, when performed by kings and other human beings, “gave birth” to the gods. Through this process, the beings of Xibalba, both supernaturals and ancestors, were materialized in the world of humans. If this reciprocity of the vision rite in both worlds was widely believed (and there is evidence to suggest it was), then the w’orld of human experience came into existence as a vision of the gods, while humanity gave the gods material presence in the Middleworld of people through performance of the same rite. In a very real sense, each plane of existence is materialized through the vision rituals performed by inhabitants of the other.
-[517] Murray Rothbard, “The Spooner—Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View,” Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, 2d ed. (Auburn, AL: Mises 2000) 205—18.
+[52] This is more than mere speculation. One of the results of the revolution in Maya hieroglyphic translation is confirmation of the hypothesis that what Maya villagers think of the world today, what their ancestors thought of it at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and what the Classic Maya kings thought of it are all transformations of one and the same model (Vogt 1964). These connections are possible only if, in fact, the villagers of the Classic period, the direct ancestors of the post-Conquest villagers, also shared this model of reality.
-[518] And, of course, if another party B destroys a still-existing feature created by A’s labor, B is guilty of violating A’s property rights.
+[53] These layers are represented in the three elements surmounting the sun-marked bowl of sacrifice in the forehead of the Quadripartite Monster. This symbol, which rests at the base of the World Tree or rides on the tail of the Celestial Monster, represents the sun as it moves through these domains. In turn, the three domains are symbolized by the signs resting in the sacrificial plate, with the crossed bands representing the heavens, the stingray-spine bloodletter representing the blood of sacrifice composing the Middleworld of earth, and the shell representing the watery world of Xibalba.
-[519] Lysander Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property (1855), The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner 3, ed. Charles Shively (Weston, MA: M&S 1971) 22.
+[54] Xibalba is the Quiche Maya term used in the Popol Vuh for the Underworld. Recinos notes the following about the derivations of this word: “Chi-Xibalba. In ancient times, says Father Coto, this name Xibalbay meant the devil, or the dead, or visions which appeared to the Indians. It has the same meaning in Yucatán. Xibalba was the devil, and xibil to disappear like a vision or a phantom, according to the Diccionario de Motul. The Maya performed a dance which they called Xibalba ocot, or ‘dance of the demon.’ The Quiche believed that Xibalba was the underground region inhabited by the enemies of man.”
+<br>
+<br>While Xibalba is traditionally regarded as the name of the Underworld, and certainly this is the principal spatial location of Xibalba in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1985), we suggest that the Classic Maya regarded the Otherworld as an invisible, pervasive, ambient presence. Even in the Popol Vuh, there are celestial aspects to Xibalba as interpreted by Dennis Tedlock: “They [the Ancestral Hero Twins] choose the Black Road, which means, at the terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld will take them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that they were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they descended below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the Road to Xibalba.” (Tedlock 1985:38; brackets ours). Tozzer’s (1941:132) annotated discussion of Landa’s understanding of Maya hell and heaven likewise reveals the fact that in Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya supernatural abode of gods and ancestors traversed the Underworld, Middleworld, and heavens.
+<br>
+<br>Our analyses of the texts and images pertaining to the Otherworld of the Classic Maya suggest that this is a parallel world revealed in trance. The ritual public spaces of the kings, where people congregated to witness sacrifice, were explicitly designed to convey the idea that they were in the Otherworld (see the acropolis plazas of king Yax-Pac at Copán in Chapter 8). We believe that in the thrall of great public ceremonies, the combination of exhaustion, bloodletting, intoxication, and expectations of trance yielded communal experiences of the Otherworld denizens conjured forth by royalty. Such experiences confirmed the legitimate power of the kings who bore primary responsibility for the interpretation of the visions.
-[520] Rothbard fails to note these economic differences between Spooner and most of the other individualist anarchists in Rothbard, “Doctrine.”
+[55] The Popol Vuh stories give the best and most humorous view of Xibalba. We recommend the translation by Dennis Tedlock (1985). Michael Coe has done more than any other scholar to associate the Popol Vuh vision with imagery from the Classic period. See Michael Coe (1973, 1978, and 1982) and Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more detailed discussion of Xibalba and Maya concepts of the afterlife.
-[521] Rothbard, “Doctrine” 207.
+[56] Thompson (1950:10–11) was the primary proponent for the crocodile identification. Puleston’s (1976) work on the iconography associated with raised fields supported Thompson’s ideas. Recently, Taube (1988) has presented convincing evidence that the turtle was also used as a symbol for the land surface of the world.
-[522] James J. Martin, Men against the State (Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1970) 252.
+[57] The expressions for the directions vary greatly from language to language, and depend to some degree on whether the speaker faces east or west when naming them. East has different names in different Mayan languages: In Yucatec, it is lakin or “next sun”; in Cholti, it is tzatzib kin or “strong sun”; in Chorti, it is wa an kin, “risen sun ; and in Choi, it is pasib kin or “arrived sun.” North is xaman (there is no etymology for this word) in Yucatec; in Choi chiik iklel and in 1 zeltal kini ha al refer to the north as the direction of winter rains. In Chorti north is tz’ik, “left (side of the sun),” and in Izotzil it is xokon winahel, the “side of heaven.” West is chikin, “eaten sun,” in A ucatec and yaram kin, “below the sun,” in Lacandon. In Choi bdhlib kin, “set sun,” or mahlib kin, “gone away sun’—as well as male! kakal, “gone away sun ’ in Tzotzil—refer to the west as the leaving or setting position of the sun. South, known as nohol in Yucatec and nool in Cholti, is the great side of the sun, because this direction is on the right-hand side as one faces the rising sun.
-[523] Martin 251.
+[58] The glyph wac ah chan is recorded in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque as the name of the sanctuary inside the Temple and by extension the name must refer to the central image of the interior panel. That central image is the World Tree. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the Temple of the Cross.) Nicholas Hopkins in the 1978 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing was the first person to suggest a decipherment for the glyph naming this axis as “stood-up or raised up sky,” and David Stuart’s (personal communication, 1986–87) work with the proper names of buildings and stelae contributed greatly to the recognition of this wac ah chan as a proper name.
-[524] Wendy McElroy, The Debates of Liberty (New York, NY: Lexington 2003).
+[59] David Stuart (1988c) has made an argument that the Double-headed Serpent Bar is another manifestation of the path of communication between the Otherworld and our world.
-[525] McElroy 53.
+[60] As we shall see, other important people in addition to kings could participate in opening the portal to the Otherworld through elicitation of the Vision Serpent. As long as the Maya had kings, they remained the pivotal characters in such royal dramas.
-[526] Aaron Steelman, “Tucker, Benjamin,” Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2008) 513–4.
+[61] This plate was painted by the same artist who executed the famous Altar de Sacrificios vase. See Schele and M. Miller (1986:304—307, 310–312) for a detailed analysis of this plate.
-[527] “Benjamin Tucker,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia, Feb. 8, 2020) [[https://en.wikipedia.org][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Tucker]] (Mar. 24, 2020).
+[62] Symbols representing the power of objects began as a profile polymorphic image directly attached to objects such as earflares and bloodletters during the Late Preclassic period, personifying such objects as alive with power (Schele and M. Miller 1986:43–44 and Freidel and Schele 1988b). Objects and people continued to be decorated with these little power polymorphs in public art throughout the Classic period. The metaphysics of this way of regarding the material world is cogently summarized by the great Mayanist ethnographer E. Z. Vogt speaking of the modern highland Maya of Chiapas: “The phenomenon of the inner soul is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to the Zinacantecos also possesses an inner soul: domesticated plants, such as maize, beans, and squash; salt; houses and the fires at the hearths; the crosses; the saints in the churches; the musical instruments played in ceremonies; and the Ancestral Gods in the mountains, as well as the Earth Lord below the surface of the earth. The ethnographer in Zinacantan soon learns that the most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons, nor between persons and objects, as we think of these relationships, but rather between inner souls inside these persons and material objects, such as crosses.” (Vogt n.d.:10-l 1). Crosses, we should add, are further described by Vogt: “In Chiapas they symbolize ‘doorways’ to the realm of the Ancestral Gods who live inside the hills and mountains and/or represent Ancestors themselves, as the Classic Maya stelae depict rulers or royal ancestors” (Vogt n.d.:25). David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has associated these same concepts with the God C “water group” set of signs. This set reads ch’ul, “holy” or “sacred,” in the writing system.
-[528] A careful analysis of the path of Tucker’s moral and anti-moral ideas does not exist. But it is clear that he was never a Spoonerian natural rights advocate and that he never become as much of an amoralist as he proclaimed. Tucker’s view seems always to have been some mixture of endorsing norms because they are advantageous to oneself, because they are advantageous to each person, because they accord with the Law of Equal Freedom, and because one has agreed to them. He continued to appeal to each of these even after and despite his explicit embrace of amoralist Egoism.
+[63] The Spanish describe the Maya drawing blood from all parts of their bodies as their principal act of piety. In Classic representations and post-Conquest descriptions, the most important rites required blood from the penis or tongue, although it could also be drawn from any part of the body (Joralemon 1974 and Thompson 1961). The ritual served two primary purposes in the understanding of the ancient Maya: as the nourishment and sustenance of the gods and as the way of achieving the visions they interpreted as communication with the other world (Furst 1976). The Maya believed this bloodletting-vision rite gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a, 1988c), and thus materialized them in the human world. Every important dynastic and calendric ritual in Maya life required sanctification through bloodletting (Scheie and M. Miller 1986). It brought the central axis into existence and allowed communication with the ancestral dead and the gods.
-[529] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York, NY: Schalkenbach 1970 [1851]).
+[64] Mayan languages have two words for “house”: otot is a “house,” but the word incorporated the idea that someone possesses it (analogous perhaps to “home” in English). Na, on the other hand, is a building that does not include ownership in the concept of the word. The word otot cannot be uttered without implying that the house is owned—it is always someone’s house. Na was used in the proper names of temples, but otot is the glyph used to name the category of object to which “temple” belonged. Temples were sacred houses owned by the gods and the spirits of the ancestral dead who resided in them. Thus we know that the ancient Maya thought of the temple as an inhabited place.
-[530] Spencer’s earlier essay “The Proper Sphere of the State” (1843), The Man versus the State, ed. Eric Mack (Indianapolis, Liberty Classics 1981), employs the terminology of natural rights much more than does Social Statics. Yet, even in “The Proper Sphere of the State,” the doctrine at work is fundamentally utilitarian. (As far as I know, the American anarchists were unfamiliar with “The Proper Sphere of the State.”)
+[65] The term “monster” has been in Maya scholarly literature since Spinden’s (1913) first study of Maya iconography, but it is a loaded term to English speakers recalling the Frankensteinian tradition in literature and films. Nevertheless, “monsters” in our own tradition usually exhibit features combining animal and human or distorting the normal features of either to the level of the grotesque. The Maya generated their images of supernatural creatures in the same way, combining animal with human or exaggerating the features of both to produce an image that could never be mistaken for a being from the natural world. It is in this sense that wc use the term “monster,” without intending to associate it with any of the negative connotations that have become attached to the word. We use it in its original sense of “something marvelous, a divine portent or warning, something extraordinary or unnatural” and “an imaginary animal (such as a centaur, sphinx, minotaur, or heraldic griffin, wyvern, etc.) having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animal forms” (OED:1842- 1843).
-[531] In his introduction to the 1864 edition of Social Statics, Spencer tells us that he would no longer appeal to the thought that the greatest aggregate happiness was the Divine Idea. He does not tell us to what he would instead appeal.
+[66] David Stuart (personal communication 1987) first recognized the glyph for witz in its many permutations at Copan and interpreted it as “mountain.” Most important, he found a passage on the Hieroglyphic Stairs where witz is written with the zoomorphic image formerly identified as the Cauac Monster. Distinguished from the cauac zoomorph meaning “stone” by the presence of eyelids and a stepped indention in the forehead, this “mountain” image is the long-nosed god, so prevalent in Maya art and on buildings, which has in the past been called Chae. Rather than referring to the raingod, however, the image identifies the temple as a “mountain” as well as a sacred house. The doorways of temples at Copan and especially in the northern regions are often built in the form of this monster to identify them as the ti’ otot “mouth of the house.” The mouth of the mountain is, of course, the cave, and Maya mythology identifies the road to Xibalba as going through a cave. The Maya not only used natural caves as the locations of bloodletting and vision ritual (MacLeod and Puleston 1979), but the inside of their temple was understood to be the cave pathway to the Otherworld. The ritual of bloodletting materialized the World Tree as the path to the supernatural world. See “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: 301–316) for a detailed examination of the imagery associated with this pathway.
-[532] Spencer, Statics 61.
+[67] These are elementary and pervasive metaphors of shamanistic ecstasy (sec Mircea Eliade 1970:Chapter 8). It is our basic working hypothesis that Maya royal charisma was essentially shamanistic as this concept is defined by Eliade (see Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
-[533] Spencer, Statics 62.
+[68] Ritual activities of the modern Maya generally involve the creation of altars, arbors, and corrals which, in their essential features, realize the structure of the world given in this model: four trees at the corners, or six poles holding up the altar. And the associations given by modern “knowers” of these rituals are the same as those to be found in the ancient royal performances: the fourfold arrangement of the cosmos; the use of sacrifice (now chickens, turkeys, deer, or pigs), and most significant, the principle that the created “place” is a conduit to the supernatural. The fact that the modern village Maya, and their direct village ancestors as described by the conquering Spanish, performed ritual that is resonant with that of Precolumbian Maya, albeit of elite and royal status, clearly implies that the knowledge and the performance were the province of the commoner ancients as well.
-[534] Spencer, Statics 69.
+[69] The pervasive quality of access to the supernatural in shamanistic cosmology is well articulated by Mircea Eliade: “Although the shamanic experience proper could be evaluated as a mystical experience by virtue of the cosmological concept of the three communicating zones [heaven, earth, underworld], this cosmological concept does not belong exclusively to the ideology of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism, nor, in fact, of any other shamanism. It is a universally disseminated idea connected with the belief in the possibility of direct communication with the sky. On the macrocosmic plane this communication is figured by the Axis (Tree, Mountain, Pillar, etc.); on the microcosmic plane it is signified by the central pillar of the house or the upper opening of the tent— which means that every human habitation is projected to the ‘Center of the World, or that every altar, tent, or house makes possible a break-through in plane and hence ascent to the sky.” (Eliade 1970:264–265; brackets ours, italics original.)
-[535] Spencer, Statics 76.
+[70] Vogt (n.d.) describes the staffs of high office among the modern peasant Maya of the highland region in terms strictly commensurate with this hypothesized attitude of the ancient Maya toward sacred objects and facilities. For example, he states, “The batons are washed and censed in communities such as Chamula in order not only to rid them of accumulations of sweat and dirt, but also to rid them symbolically of any mistakes made by a predecessor serving in the same position. Note that the first washing in Chamula rids the batons of sweat and dirt, and administrative errors, while the water and liquor used in the second and third cleanings are served to the officials who in drinking these liquids renew the sacred power that has come down to them from the Ancestral Gods via these batons. Note also that the silver-headed batons are believed to be infallible; if administrative errors have been made, they are the mistakes of human officials who hold these batons while serving in high offices” (Vogt n.d.:39^4O). Similar repeated ritual results in accumulative power endowed in the silver coin necklaces of the saints housed in Zinacantan center (Vogt 1976:127–128).
-[536] Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society (New York, NY: Fowler 1852).
+[71] New excavations of Temple 26 at Copan have demonstrated that the iconography of the Ballcourt at Copan remained the same in all of its manifestations from Early Classic through Late Classic times. Other buildings, such as Temple 22, retained the same sculptural program through different construction phases, suggesting that those particular foci were symbolically defined early in the city’s history and remained unchanged through subsequent centuries. When new buildings were to be constructed, the Maya performed elaborate rituals both to terminate the old structure and contain its accumulated energy (Freidel and Scheie n.d. and Scheie 1988b). The new structure was then built atop the old and, when it was ready for use, they conducted elaborate dedication rituals to bring it alive. These dedication and termination rituals permeate the archaeological record and they represent a major component of the history recorded in the inscriptions at many sites.
-[537] Andrews.
+[72] The containment rituals were elaborate and their effects widespread in the archaeological record. The portrait images of both humans and deities were effaced, often by destroying the left eye and nose. Color was removed or whitewashed and sculpture slashed, broken, burned, or sometimes carefully sealed in. Holes were drilled in pottery vessels and other objects were broken or effaced to contain their power. In an earlier building under the summit of Temple 26 at Copan, a circle of charcoal and broken stingray spines, remaining from a ritual conducted to terminate an earlier version of the temple, was recently discovered (W. Fash 1986). At Cerros, this ritual involved the careful burial of the old facade and rituals in which hundreds of pottery vessels were broken over the building. The huge percussion holes that mar the Olmec colossal heads are also remnants of termination rituals (Grove 198 1), reflecting the long-term presence of this ritual and its underlying definition of sacred energy in Mesoamerican thought.
-[538] Benjamin Tucker, “A Light Extinguished,” Liberty 4 (June 19, 1886): 4.
+[73] The Old Testament Bible is a complex compilation of history, law, poetry, and prophecy (Drane 1983:22–23) written down over an extended period of time by several authors (Spuhler 1985:113) during the emergence of the Hebrew nation as a state. Behind the Bible is a long history of literacy and of literature both in Greater Mesopotamia and in Egypt. In these respects, the Quiche Popol Vuh is quite comparable. It too is a complex compilation of law, poetry, and history pertaining to a nation. It is also subsequent to a long history of literacy in bordering territory and related society, namely among the lowland Maya. The parallels between the histories of the Old Testament and earlier sacred literature from Mesopotamia are often striking, particularly with respect to Genesis (Spuhler 1985:114–115). In the same fashion, the parallels between the Creation story in the Popol Vuh and the allusions to Creation in the sacred literature of the Classic lowland Maya are beginning to become clear. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the Popol Vuh does not register direct transmission of the Classic Maya cosmology or theology any more than the Old Testament registers directly the beliefs of Sumerians. In both instances, we are dealing with long and complicated literary and theological traditions. Ultimately, our interpretations of the Classic Maya reality must be anchored in the contemporary Classic period texts, images, and archaeological record.
-[539] Benjamin Tucker, “On the Picket Line,” Liberty 14 (December 1900): 1.
+[74] The surviving version of the Popol Vuh combines stories of the great protagonists of Maya myth, the Hero Twins called Hunahpu and Xbalanquc, with creation stories and the dynastic history of the Quiche. Found in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango by the Spanish priest Ximénez in the seventeenth century, the book records the history of Quiche kings to the year 1550. Ximénez hand-copied the original and transcribed it into Spanish. The original is now lost, but we have the copy made by Ximénez. Of the three English versions by Recinos (1950), Edmonson (1971), and Tedlock (1985), we recommend the Tedlock version as the easiest reading for those interested in knowing these stories. The Popol Vuh is one of the finest examples of Native American literature known to the modern world.
-[540] Martin says: “In some ways ... [Tucker’s] adoption of the newly discussed tenets of egoism was tied up with the understanding of individual sovereignty derived from Warren earlier” (250).
+[75] See Freidel and Scheie (1988b) and Cortez (1986).
-[541] Benjamin Tucker, “Our Nestor Taken From Us,” Liberty 4 (May 28, 1887): 4. In this obituary, Tucker chides Spooner because “[h]e entirely failed to recognize the substantial identity of Herbert Spencer’s political teachings with his own simply because Spencer reaches his conclusions by totally different methods.” I suspect that Spooner understood better than Tucker the importance of the difference between his own doctrine and that of Spencer.
+[76] Karl Taube (1985) associated the older set of twins with the maize god and the image from pottery painting known as the Holmul Dancer.
-[542] The debate between the Egoists and Moralists re-emerged in Liberty in 1895 within a dispute about the rights of children. See McElroy’s chapter on “Children’s Rights” (69—83).
+[77] Many of the underworld creatures pictured on Classic Maya pottery have Emblem Glyphs in their names. Houston and Stuart (1989) have shown these beings are the way or “coessences” of the ahau of those kingdoms.
-[543] Stirner’s core work, Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum (1844), was first published in English as The Ego and His Own by Tucker in 1907. On Stirner, see David Leopold, “Max Stirner,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford U, Oct. 22, 2019) [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner]] (Mar. 24, 2020).
+[78] Sec Michael Coe’s (1973, 1978, 1982) works on Maya pottery painting for a corpus of images showing Xibalba and its denizens.
-[544] James L. Walker, “What Is Justice?,” Liberty 3 (Mar. 6, 1886): 8.
+[79] There are as many modern myths about the Precolumbian ballgame as there are ancient ones. The most persistent is that the winner was sacrificed, because the loser was considered unworthy. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that curious idea and the stories of the Popol Vuh, our most detailed information on the game, clearly demonstrates that the loser not the winner was the victim of sacrifice. The father and uncle of the Hero Twins were decapitated after they lost to the treacherous Lords of Death. The most interesting recent work on the Precolumbian ballgame is Ted Leyenaar’s (1978) documentation of a game still played in the state of Sinaloa. His photographs of the equipment and the play resemble Classic Maya imagery to a remarkable degree.
-[545] James L. Walker, “The Rational Utilitarian Philosophy,” Liberty 4 (Jan. 22, 1887): 8. Walker’s critic, John Kelly, astutely observes that “[t]he unconditioned ego seems nothing else than the absolute—God.” John Kelly, “Intelligent Egotism Anti-Social,” Liberty 4 (May 7, 1887): 7.
+[80] All Maya calendar counts are in whole days. Since fractions were not available, the Maya used only whole-day adjustments to account for remainders in cycles of fractional lengths. For instance, a lunation is approximately 29.53 days long. To account for the accumulating error in a whole-day count, the Maya alternated a 29-day and 30-day moon to give a 29.5-day average. However, even this approximation soon accumulated discernible error between where the count said the moon should be in its cycle and what one observed in actuality. To adjust for that error, the Maya would place two 30-day months back to back, with different sites using different formulas of 29- and 30-day sequences. None of these approximations produced a particularly satisfactory result. With the true tropical year of 365.2422 days, they did not even try. Instead they kept a simple whole-day count that proceeded day by day without attempting to adjust for the .2422 day that accumulated each year. They were aware of the length of the true solar year and reckoned by it when necessary so that rituals would fall on the same point within it—for example, on a solstice. In their calendar, however, they let the count of days drift, with their New Year’s day, 1 Pop, falling one day later in the solar year every fourth repetition. See Floyd Lounsbury (1978) for a detailed discussion of the Maya calendar and number system.
-[546] James L. Walker, “Selfhood Terminates Blind Man’s Buff” [sic], Liberty 4 (July 3, 1886): 8.
+[81] The use of letters of the alphabet to name these gods comes from Schellhas (1904), the first modern scholar to systematically study their images and glyphic names in the codices. God K, the deity of the 819-day count, appears in four versions which are distinguished by the color glyph and direction of the four quadrants through which the count moves. The first 819-day-count station began 6.15.0 before the creation day and is associated with the birth of the mother of the gods in the text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque (Lounsbury 1976 and 1980; Scheie 1981 and 1984b).
-[547] James. L. Walker, “Egoism,” Liberty 4 (Apr. 9, 1887): 5.
+[82] No apparent relationship to astronomical or seasonal periodicities has been discovered, so that we presume the cycle is based on numerology.
-[548] Walker, “Utilitarian” 8.
+[83] Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1987) has proposed that uayeb is an agentive noun derived from the Choi word waye!, “to sleep.” Uayeb (the five-day month at the end of a year) is, thus, the “resting or sleeping” part of the year.
-[549] Walker, “Egoism” 5—6.
+[84] The Maya, like other Mesoamerican people, believed the world had been created more than once and then destroyed. Each creation used one form of matter that was destroyed by its opposite, for example, a world of fire destroyed by water. Aztec myth makes the current creation the fifth to exist. The writers of the Popol Vuh described these successive creations as the attempts of the gods to create sentient beings who would recognize their greatness. The gods tried different solutions; animals, people of mud, and then wood. Finally in the fourth attempt, they succeed in creating humanity of maize dough. If this seventeenth-century version corresponds to the ancient myth, the current existence is the fourth version in the cosmos to have been created.
-[550] Walker, “Justice” 8.
+[85] Justeson and Mathews (1983) have proposed that the name of this 360-day year is Yucatec and derived from the practice of setting stones to mark the end of years in this count.
-[551] James L. Walker, “Killing Chinese,” Liberty 3 (March 6, 1886): 8.
+[86] The ancient Maya called these twenty-day months uinic or “human being” because people have twenty fingers and toes just as a month had twenty days. Modern scholars most often use the term uinal because that is the term found in the Colonial sources from Yucatán. Both terms were apparently extant in the Classic period, for both spellings occur in the inscriptions; however, there is a preference for uinic over uinal. The Maya apparently thought of the month as a “person,” while they thought of the year as a “stone-setting.”
-[552] Walker, “Selfhood” 8.
+[87] Except for katun, these terms are coined by modern scholars from Yucatec dictionaries of the Colonial period. Each term is a Yucatec number, bak, pic, calab, combined with tun, the word for year or stone.
-[553] Walker, “Egoism” 6.
+[88] We transcribe the Maya vertical arrangement into a left to right format using arabic numbers with periods separating the various cycles. The highest cycle, the baktun (“400-stone”), is written 13.0.0.0.0: 13 baktuns, no katuns, no tuns, no uinals, no days.
-[554] Walker, “Selfhood” 8.
+[89] The thirteenth 400-year period of the Maya Calendar is soon to end. 13.0.0.0.0 will occur again on December 23, 2012, but this date falls on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, rather than on the creation day, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. From the ancient inscriptions, we know that the Maya did not consider it to be the beginning of a new creation as has been suggested. At Coba, the ancient Maya recorded the creation date with twenty units above the katun as in Date 1 below.
+<br>
+<br>| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 0. 0. 0. | 0 | 4 | Ahau |
+<br>| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 9.15.13. 6. | 9 | 3 | Muluc |
+<br>| 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. | 8 | 5 | Lamat |
+<br>
+<br>These thirteens are the starting points of a huge odometer of time: each unit clicks over from thirteen to one when twenty of the next unit accumulate. The baktun clicked from thirteen to one four hundred years after the creation date. The Olmec lived during the fifth 400-year cycle; the earliest written dates in Mesoamerica fall into the seventh cycle; and Classic history took place in the last quarter of the eighth and all of the ninth 400-year cycle. The latest Long Count date known is 10.4.0.0.0 at Tonina. Since dates rarely required that numbers higher than the baktun be written, the Maya regularly excluded them from their dates.
+<br>
+<br>We have one exception to this practice at Yaxchilan, where a scribe wrote a date on the stairs of Temple 33 with eight of the larger cycles above the baktun recorded (Date 2 above). The Yaxchilan scribe intended to set this important historical date in its larger cosmic scale, and by doing so told us that all of the higher cycles of the calendar were still set at thirteen during Maya history. Another inscription, this one from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, projects into the future to the eightieth Calendar Round of the great king Pacal’s accession. They give us a count of the precise number of days it will take to come to this date which happens to be only eight days after the end of the first 8,000-year cycle in this creation (Date 3 above). The pictun will end on October 15, 4772, in our calendar and the anniversary will occur eight days later on October 23, 4772.
+<br>
+<br>Combining the information from all these dates, we have reconstructed the nature of Maya time in this creation. On the day of creation, all the cycles above the katun were set on 13, although this number should be treated arithmetically in calendric calculations as zero. Each cycle within the calendar is composed of twenty of the next lowest units, moving in the order 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000, 3,200,000, 64,000,000, and so on toward infinity. With this information, we can project how long it will take to convert the highest thirteen in the Coba date to one—41,341,050,000.000,000,000,000,000,000 tropical years.
+<br>
+<br>These huge numbers are meant, of course, to represent the infinite scale of the cosmos, but ihey give us other kinds of information. Although the Long Count appears to record a linear concept of time, it, like the other components of Maya calendrical science, was cyclic. Different eras came and went, and each era was itself composed of ever larger cycles, one within the other and all returning to a starting point. The metaphor used by modern scholars is that of a wheel rolling back on its starting point. It is the huge scale of the higher cycles that allowed the Maya to unite linear and cyclic time. From a human point of view, the larger cycles can be perceived only as a tangent, which has the appearance of a straight line. We use this type of scale in the same way to build a cyclic concept into our essentially linear definition of time—our cosmologists place the “Big Bang” 15,000,000,000 years ago and they contemplate the possibility that it was but one of many “Big Bangs.”
-[555] Walker, “Justice” 8.
+[90] Lounsbury (1976) has discussed “contrived numbers,” as deliberately constructed time distances which link days before the creation date to days in the historical present. The function of these contrived relationships is to demonstrate that some historical date was “like-in-kind” (on the same point in many of the important cycles of Maya time) to the pre-creation date. The worlds that exist on either side of that creation date (13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku) have their special symmetries and patterns of sacredness. To demonstrate that a historical date is “like-in-kind” to a pre-creation date is to say it has the same characteristics and brings with it the symmetry and sacredness of the previous pattern of existence.
-[556] Walker, “Egoism” 5.
+[91] These four books, named for the cities in which they are found or for their first publishers, are the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex. Made of beaten-bark paper coated with a fine plaster surface and folded like accordions, the books record in pictures and writing which gods and what acts were associated with days in the calendar. Tables for anticipating the cycle of Venus and eclipses of the sun are also included as books of learning and prognostication for calendric priests specializing in the use of the calendar.
-[557] Yet, on what basis does Walker say that opposition to rape is a component of wellness?
+[92] In trying to understand how the ancient Maya thought about time and space, modern people can think of the fabric of time and space as a matrix of energy fields. These fields affect the actions of human beings and gods, just as the actions of these beings affect the patterns within the matrix. For the Maya, it was a relationship of profound and inextricable interaction.
-[558] Walker, “Egoism” 6. Yet, on what basis does Walker say that generosity is a “flower” of character?
+[93] At Palenque, Tikal, and Copan, historical texts recall events that occurred during Olmec history, 1100–600 B.C., or in Late Preclassic times, 200 B.c. to A.D. 200. The texts at Palenque and Tikal imply that each of those dynasties had ruled during those early times, although archaeology has shown that neither kingdom existed during Olmec times. The symbolic relationship they meant to imply was similar in nature to the Aztecs’ proclamation of themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Toltec or our own invocation of Rome or Athens as the source of our political ideology.
-[559] Walker, “Justice” 8.
+[94] When we started writing this book, we presumed that primogeniture was the primary system of inheritance and that the examples of brother-brother successions were historical rarities. Our research, however, has shown that lateral succession was far more frequent than we had believed (Scheie n.d.e.). We still believe that primogeniture was the preferred pattern, but that lateral succession from older brother to younger brother was also acceptable.
-[560] Walker, “Egoism” 5.
+[95] William Haviland (1968) provides a lucid and remarkably prescient discussion of Classic Maya kinship organization from the vantage of ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnological information. The epigraphic data generally support the patrician organization he describes.
-[561] James F. Kelly, “A Final Statement,” Liberty 4 (July 30, 1887): 7.
+[96] Although clan structure is a common social institution in the prcindustrial world, in the case at hand there is a specific glyph that designates the founding ancestral king of a royal Maya clan (Scheie 1986b). This characterization of Maya elite organization is documented in Classic Maya history and is not an extrapolation backward from the period of the Spanish Conquest. The function of designating a founding ancestor is to define a group of descendants as relatives and to internally rank these people.
-[562] Walker, “Egoism” 6.
+[97] Several reconstructions of the Classic period kinship system have been posited based on evidence from the inscriptions and languages, but we find the evidence for a patrilineal and patrilocal system to be by far the strongest. The major proponents of this system have been Haviland (1977) and Hopkins (n.d.).
-[563] Walker, “Egoism” 7.
+[98] This lineage compound was excavated during the second phase of the Proyeto Arqueologia de Copan. Dr. William Fash first proposed the identification of this compound as the residence of a scribal lineage, an interpretation we accept (W. Fash 1986 and 1989).
-[564] James L. Walker, “Reply to Kelly,” Liberty 4 (July 2, 1887): 7.
+[99] The glyph for this rank was first identified by Mathews and Justeson (1984) as a title for a subordinate rank. David Stuart (1984b) greatly expanded their discussion by analyzing the distribution and iconographic context for the title. Although the proposed decipherment of the title as cahal is disputed by some epigraphers, we shall use it as a convenient way of identifying this office, accepting that the reading may change in the future.
-[565] Walker, “Egoism” 6.
+[100] The type-rank system used in the Copan Valley survey developed during Phase 1 of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan (Willey and Leventhal 1979). Phase 11 of the PAC excavated one example of each of the four types under the direction of Dr. William Sanders. These four excavated examples have been consolidated and are now open to the public. The excavations will be published by the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia in a series of volumes entitled Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán. The information related here comes from personal conversations with Dr. William Fash, who participated in the excavations (see also W. Fash 1983b).
-[566] Walker, “Reply” 7.
+[101] Peter Mathews (1975) first identified the “numbered successor” titles as a way of recording lineage successions, an idea that was elaborated by Berthold Riese (1984). We subsequently found these counts are reckoned from a named ancestor who occurs with the notation “first successor” (Scheie 1986b and Grube 1988). In the Group of the Cross at Palenque and on Altar 1 at Naranjo, a complementary succession is reckoned from mythological ancestors who lived beyond the bounds of human history—that is, before this manifestation of creation materialized on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.
-[567] James l. Walker, The Philosophy of Egoism (Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1972 [1905]).
+[102] Recorded on Altar 1, the Rio Amarillo ruler names himself as an ahau of the Copán polity, but lists his lineage as descended from its own founder (Scheie 1987d).
-[568] McElroy describes Kelly as an advocate of “natural rights,” but then observes that he provides “a somewhat utilitarian defense of morality” in his “Morality and Its Origin” (57). See James F. Kelly, “Morality and Its Origin,” Liberty 4 (Feb. 26, 1887): 7.
+[103] Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) began five days before the summer solstice of 641 and ended on December 6 of the following year. Muan-Chan of Bonampak began the rites for his heir on December 14, 790, and ended them on August 6, 792, with a battle in which he took captives for sacrifice. He memorialized this series of rites in the amazing murals of Temple 1 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986b).
-[569] James F. Kelly, “George’s ‘Protection or Free Trade,’” Liberty 4 (Dec. 11, 1886): 7—8.
+[104] See the chapters “Kingship and the Rites of Accession,” “Bloodletting and the Vision Quest,” and “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986) and Stuart (1984a, 1988c) for a full discussion of these rituals and their representations in Maya art.
-[570] Kelly, “Protection” 7.
+[105] Peter Furst (1976) first discussed this bloodletting ritual as a quest for a vision which the Maya interpreted as communication with the supernatural world. Furst associates this bloodletting ritual with similar beliefs in many other societies, and he has been a longtime advocate of the role of shamanism in the institution of rulership from Olmec times on. David Stuart (1984a and 1988c) has added rich detail to our understanding of the complex of imagery and texts associated with bloodletting. Bloodletting has been discussed in the context of both rituals and objects manufactured for use in ritual by Scheie and M. Miller (1986).
-[571] I owe this reading of Kelly to Mary Sirridge.
+[106] David Joralemon (1974) provides a clear iconographic discussion of the prismatic- blade bloodletter. Scheie (1984a and n.d.d) describes the epigraphic and iconographic evidence for obsidian as a material from which prismatic-blade bloodletters were made. Freidel (1986a) reviews some of the larger economic implications of the control by governments of obsidian as a prized ritual commodity.
-[572] James F. Kelly, “Egotism” 7. A more precise statement of this argument would insert “by providing one with a moral reason to do it” between the two main clauses of the second sentence.
+[107] All Maya communities would have celebrated the great regularities of the Maya calendars: the hotun (five-year) endings within a katun, the katun (twenty-year) endings, New Year’s, the 819-day count, the coming of the rains, important points in the solar year, such as solstices and the zenith passages, and stations in the planetary cycles. But each great city also had its own histories that generated a series of local festivals celebrating the founding of the city, the date associated with its special patron gods, the anniversaries of its great kings and their births, triumphs, and deaths. Thus the system of festivals combined those occasions celebrated by all Maya with a complementary series derived from the individual histories of each dynasty. Both kinds of celebrations appear in the glyphic record.
-[573] Kelly, “Egotism” 7.
+[108] David Stuart has been instrumental in identifying a set of verbs recording rituals of dedication for temples as well as for their plaster and stone sculptures. His date for the dedication of lemple 11 at Copán (September 26, 773) is four years after the dedication of the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the building on March 27, 769. At Palenque, we have about the same time span in the Temple of Inscriptions. The last date in the ongoing history of the interior panels is October 20, 675, some eight years before the death of Pacal on August 31, 683. The 675 date appears to be the last historical date recorded before the tablets were sealed inside a containing wall to protect them during the rest of the construction. Given that the center and back walls must have been standing so the huge panels could be set in them, we deduce that the construction and decoration of the temple took about nine years.
-[574] Kelly, “Final” 7.
+[109] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya rulers in the northern lowlands were explicitly concerned with the well-being of their farming populations precisely because ill treatment encouraged migration, which they could not easily impede (Roys <verbatim>[1962];</verbatim> N. 1 arris <verbatim>[1984]</verbatim> on demographic fluidity). During the Precolumbian era, the periodic abandonment and reoccupation of some centers and the clear evidence of demographic fluctuation at others indicates similar principles in operation. See Freidel (1983).
-[575] Walker, “Reply” 7. However, Walker cannot explain that hostility or retaliation on the basis of the wrong done to these parties.
+[110] Analysis of skeletal materials at Tikal by Haviland (1967) suggests that Classic elite populations enjoyed taller stature and generally somewhat greater physical robusticity than the commoners.
-[576] Kelly, “Egotism” 7.
+[111] The public fair is, and was in antiquity, a temporary marketplace established in town squares near the important civic and religious buildings during religious festivals. Such fairs occurred in cycles and were also no doubt occasioned by great historical events in the lives of rulers. (See Freidel [1981c] for a discussion of this economic institution among the Maya.)
-[577] Kelly, “Egotism” 7.
+[112] See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of visits between elites.
-[578] Gertrude Kelly, “A Letter of Protest,” Liberty 4 (Aug. 13, 1887): 7.
+[113] R. L. Roys (1957) summarized descriptions of marketplaces on the north coast of the peninsula.
-** 10. Transcending Leftist Politics: Situating Egoism Within the Anarchist Project
+[114] Since the place-notation system of the Maya used only three marks—one, five, and zero—addition and subtraction were simple geometric operations that could be conducted with any handy material laid out on a grid drawn in the dust. To add, the two numbers were laid side by side and then collapsed into a sum. The twenties only needed to be carried up to obtain the answer. Subtraction reversed the process and was, thus, a simple geometric operation, which like addition required no memorization of tables. Multiplication was more difficult, but still possible without tables or much training. The system allowed the illiterate to do simple arithmetic needed for trade and exchange without formal education.
-*David S. D’Amato*
+[115] Colonial period sources describe verbal contracts, but there is no reason to suppose that contracts, tribute lists, and some form of accounting were not kept in written form, especially since we have just these sorts of documents from the Aztec of Central Mexico. Unfortunately, the writing surface that would have been used for such purposes, bark paper sized with plaster, did not survive in the tropical forest that was home to the Classic Maya.
-*** I. Introduction
+[116] See Landa’s descriptions of life in Yucatán shortly after the conquest (Tozzer 1941) and Roys’s (1943) discussion of Indian life during the Colonial period of Yucatán.
-Though it is not without its forerunners, egoism as a subset of anarchist thought has its beginnings in The Ego and Its Own,[579] Max Stirner’s work of unflinching iconoclasm, published in 1844.[580] Stirner’s has been variously regarded as the most extreme, revolutionary, radical, and dangerous book ever written,[581] relentless in its attacks on all fixed ideological and philosophical systems. As one of the first truly thoroughgoing critiques of modernity, Stirner’s masterwork can be regarded as heralding many of the themes we now recognize in existentialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism more generally; indeed, his influence on postmodern thought, though woefully underappreciated, is apparent in the works of such notable thinkers as Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, among others. Stirner’s unique variety of radical thought is also closely linked to the post-left and post-anarchist literatures; it is clear from these relationships that Stirner’s work, if it has not figured prominently in political theory more generally, has at least played an important role in helping anarchism remain self-critical and, therefore, relevant, in allowing us to evaluate, reflect upon, and ultimately move beyond established ideologies and patterns of thought. Though Engels famously named him “the prophet of contemporary anarchism,”[582] Stirner fits only uncomfortably with other anarchists of the first generation. Indeed, there is hardly a definite answer to the question of whether Stirner is an anarchist at all. In his study of Stirner, the Marxist social theorist Max Adler reads him out of anarchism, contending that he cannot be an anarchist because anarchism is a distinct ideological current only insofar as it sits “within [the] socialist labor movement.”[583] Post-left anarchists[584] have sought to refocus anarchism outside or beyond traditional preoccupations with class theory, socialism, and labor movement ideology. These anarchists throw a spotlight on an enduring truth: the left’s relationship with anarchism has always been fraught with difficulty. For if anarchism is just revolutionary workerism, then it loses its historical character as a libertarian critique or interpretation of socialism; yet if anarchism leaves its socialist roots completely in the past—and with it its traditional commitments to, for example, trade unionism and class struggle—then it arguably becomes something else, perhaps the supposedly aimless lifestylism derided famously by Murray Bookchin.
+[117] See Freidel (1986a) for a recent discussion of Mesoamerican currencies.
-*** II. The Dynamics of Egoism
+[118] For a discussion of Maya merchant activities and such speculation see Freidel and Scarborough (1982).
-For the egoist, all systems of morality—indeed, all claims to objective truth—are superstitions, often positioned precariously on still earlier and more fundamental superstitions, all invented ultimately by human minds. Such superstitions are, therefore, owed nothing—no deference, duty, or devotion. They are projections of human consciousness, to be discarded as easily as they were created.[585] The individual must not allow his creatures, frozen artifacts of his “will of yesterday,” to become his commanders.[586] On this view, liberal notions of natural rights are, as Jeremy Bentham said, “rhetorical nonsense”;[587] but the egoist goes further, damning every attempt to establish a code of conduct for the individual. If morality is baseless, the egoist says, then whatever the individual wills is permissible; his power—the ability to do the thing—makes it his right.[588] Everything else is so much unfounded religious thinking.
+[119] “...they traded in everything which there was in that country. They gave credit, lent and paid courteously and without usury. And the greatest number were cultivators and men who apply themselves to harvesting the maize and other grains, which they keep in fine underground places and granaries so as to be able to sell (their crops) at the proper time.” (Tozzer [1941:96], parens original)
-Stirner argued that we give birth to ideas and then project them outward, only to have these ideas—our creations—lord over us and dictate our behaviors and ways of life; these ideas thus become reified, taking on a life of their own. The result is enslavement to moralities, ideologies, and religions, a condition that neuters the experience of life and subordinates the true interests of the individual.[589]
+[120] Such visits by high-ranked nobles who represented high kings are documented at Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras (Scheie and Mathews n.d.) and at least one vessel from Burial 116 of Tikal depicts such a visit by lords from the Usumacinta region who display- gifts before Tikal lords (see W. R. Coe [1967:102] for a drawing of this scene). In fact, the offering of gifts, especially cloth and plates full of various substances, is one of the most commonly represented scenes on Maya pottery.
-The ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon furnish an apposite contrast to Stirner’s. Where Proudhon condemns “the authority of man over man,”[590] Stirner leaves all options available to the unique individual, unmoved by moral claims against authority. Where Stirner celebrates the untrammeled “own will” of the individual, recognizing none of the limits with which justice or other aspects of morality might saddle it, Proudhon looks forward to the day when “the sovereignty of the will” and “the right of force” will “retreat before the steady advance of justice,” culminating in “scientific socialism.” While the classical anarchist is an enemy of the state, careful to distinguish government from society (for example, in Martin Buber’s conception, the political principle from the social principle), the egoist anarchist is no less an enemy of society itself.
+[121] Dennis Puleston (1976 and 1977) accepted the central importance of raised-field agriculture to ancient Maya civilization and proceeded with experimental reclamations of ancient canals to see how the system worked. The experiment not only yielded information on the productivity of the system, but demonstrated how the Maya used the animals and landscape associated with it—water lilies, water birds, fish, and caiman—as important components of their cosmic model and their royal symbolism.
-The juxtaposition of social power and political power is an important, even central, theme in anarchist history and literature.[591] Much of anarchist thought has been a treatment of this contrast— and, accordingly, of the promise of the eventual and spontaneous emergence of the true social organism from beneath the violence and repression of the state. Since William Godwin (and before), a picture of human perfectibility has, explicitly or otherwise, permeated anarchist (and proto-anarchist) thought.[592] Human beings, sufficiently motivated by reason and guided by experience, will eventually arrive at a free society—harmonious, socially cooperative, and free of domination by the state. Egoists have ridiculed this vision as a naive delusion, oppressive in its own right and dependent for its realization on the emergence of human beings quite unlike any in history.
+; 3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings
-The tension inherent in the relationship between egoism, which acknowledges no limits on individual thought and behavior, and anarchism, which attempts to moderate individual liberty with the law of equal freedom, is aptly illustrated in the debates of Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker. Marsden, sparring with Tucker in a 1914 issue of The Egoist, writes, “We meant that the kind of people [Proudhon] describes never walked on earth: that they were unreal: figures with no genuine insides, stuffed out with tracts from the Church of Humanity and the Ethical Society.”[593]
+[122] Some modern visitors are aw ed by the architectural scale and design of Maya ruins. Yet the architectural techniques they used—corbeling and the post-and-lintel system— were primitive even by the standards of the ancient world. The most spectacular exploitations of the corbel systems are found at Palenque and in the use of concrete core construction in some northern lowland kingdoms. The most wonderful technology of the Maya, from our vantage, was their agricultural system. Despite evidence in some instances that the Maya over exploited and allowed the degeneration of their land, generally their success in producing food and commercial crops was nothing short of spectacular, in an age when modern nations are allowing the rapid destruction of the tropical forest belt of the globe, we have much to learn technologically from the Maya who maintained a civilization of millions for over a thousand years in such an environment.
-From the outset, Stirner’s ideas put him distinctly at odds with the other classical anarchists, if indeed he can be positioned among them. The question of how to understand him in relation to those anarchists has been the subject of debate and disquiet in anarchist circles; many anarchists see Stirner’s egoism as irreconcilable with anarchism.[594]
+[123] The Maya knew of metals from at least the Early Classic period onward, because their tribal and chiefly neighbors in lower Central America used them. 1 he lowland Maya chose not to use metals, for reasons yet unknown, until very late in their history.
-Anarchists have always rather enjoyed defining one another out of the anarchist movement, complacently satisfied that theirs is the one true anarchism, others’ so many heresies. Unsurprisingly, many anarchists have worked themselves into a lather to excommunicate Stirner and those influenced by his thought.
+[124] There were no eligible beasts of burden in Mesoamerica at the time of the emergence of farming village life. The largest animals—the tapir, the peccary, the deer, and the large felines—were categorically unsuited either to domestication or service as burden carriers.
-Stirner would not have been troubled by this; indeed, he would likely excommunicate himself from the Church of True Anarchism, as so many egoists have. For the egoist, classical anarchism’s opposition and resistance to political and economic authority both does not go far enough and goes too far. It does not go far enough in that it leaves the myriad other potential sources of hierarchical domination and repression unexamined, elevated above the ever-fluctuating desires of the unique, subordinating the ego to various spooks. Yet it goes too far in advancing its own series of constraining concepts and precepts, in instituting “a redemptionist secular religion” founded upon highly tendentious ideas about reason and human nature.
+[125] The regional timing of the establishment of large-scale public centers in the Maya lowlands is a matter of continuing debate. Matheny (1986) and Hansen (1984) place the initial construction of the Tigre complex at El Mirador in the second century B.C., while W. R. Coe (1965a) identities major public construction at Tikal somewhat later, in the middle of the first century B.c. The Tikal dating is commensurate with the dating at Cerros in Belize (Freidel and Scarborough 1982). Our position is that while the point dates of radiocarbon samples range over roughly a century, 25 B.c. to 125 B.c. for the earliest decorated buildings in the lowlands (perforce the earliest evidence of the kingship they celebrate), the statistical range of possibility for the radiocarbon assay representing an actual absolute date shows an overlap of all the reported contexts. For example, a date from Structure 34 at El Mirador of 125 B.c. + 90 years and a date from Structure 2A-Sub 4 at Cerros of 50 B.c. + 50 years, have a statistically high probability of being contemporary.
-Stirner of course denies the existence of an absolute or universal human essence, seeing in the idea a variety of unsustainable religious faith. In this way, he anticipates Sartre’s declaration that “existence precedes essence.”[595] Sartre writes similarly that “man is free and there is no human nature in which I can place my trust.”[596] The specific individual—ultimately inarticulable, his thoughts, desires, and motives ever in flux—is anterior to proposed essences and universal or absolute truths.
+[126] We have outlined the technical arguments from iconographic and archaeological evidence for this interpretation of Maya history in a series of papers, principally Freidel and Scheie (1988b).
-It is generally true of anarchism, even with all of its ideologically uncompromising variations and schools, that it resists being reduced to a static, absolute set of prescriptions or a system. Max Nettlau, the eminent historian of anarchism, exhorts anarchists not to “permit themselves to become fossilized upholders of a given system.”[597] Egoist anarchism takes this general concern, the reluctance to embrace a single formula, and extends its application, undertaking the destruction of all fixed ideas. As conceived by Stirner and others in his tradition, egoism is able to liberate anarchism from “univer- salist limitations,” pushing anarchists to interrogate not only capitalism and the state, but other sources of harmful authority.[598] The egoist currents therefore contend that anarchism, “encrusted with leftist clichés,” has lost some of its potency. In Stirner’s egoism, labor politics loses the traditional place of honor it enjoys in classical anarchism; but rather than filling the void with another collection of sacred idols, egoist and post-left strains of anarchism are satisfied with the void, ready to fill it with their creations. “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness,” Stirner writes,
+[127] Cerros (“hills”) is the modern name of this place; its original name was lost long ago.
-but I am the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
+[128] The evidence for sea travel by the people of Cerros is principally in the form of faunal remains of reef and deep-water fish (Carr 1986b). Dugout canoes made from great tree trunks are traditional to the Maya of Belize and are made even today in some parts of the country.
-Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the ‘good cause’ must be my concern? What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me.[599]
+[129] The evidence for long-distance trade between Cerros and people to the north along the coast of Yucatán, down into the mountainous regions of the southern highlands, and into the interior of the southern lowlands is derived from analyses of exotic materials which do not normally occur in down-the-line trade between neighbors. The Cerros people had available, for example, distinctive marine shells from the northern coast of the Peninsula (Hamilton n.d.) and their craftspeople were familiar with a wide range of foreign styles, which they used freely in the pottery manufactured at the site (R. Robertson n.d). Additionally, there are numerous examples of exotic materials at the site which must have been traded in from other parts of Belize or from the southern highland region (Garber 1986).
-The individual is a creator of value—indeed, the only creator of value. Each individual, faced with such bottomless absurdity, ultimately unable to brace himself against false essentials, must decide for himself what is important.
+[130] A simple public platform of this description is Structure 2A-Sub 4–1<sup>st</sup>, which, like the first true royal temple at Cerros (Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>) was built as part of the final phase of the nucleated village underlying the later ceremonial center (Cliff 1986). Similar platforms preceded the construction of royal temples in the North Acropolis at Tikal in Guatemala during the same time period (W. Coe 1965a).
-*** III. Egoism and Contemporary Leftist Ideologies
+[131] Clay drums with cutout and applique faces were found as smashed fragments in the deposits of the nucleated village at Cerros. Elements of the iconography include the “cruller” of GUI (a Sun God and the younger of the Ancestral Heroes Twins) and shark teeth, a signal of GI, who characteristically wears a fish barbel and is associated with Xoc, the shark (see the Glossary of Gods). These drums initiate a long tradition of effigy vessels and vessel supports among the lowland Maya (Freidel, Masucci, Jaeger, and Robertson n.d.).
-The obvious facial similarities between such ideas and those associated with existentialism (as found in, for example, Sartre and Camus) led to a second rediscovery of Stirner in the 1960s and 1970s.[600] Stirner’s ideas are echoed in Sartre’s notion of bad faith, the paradoxical decision to choose (freely, for our choices are necessarily free) to renounce our freedom, to deny the inescapable fact of choice and self-authorship and engage instead in self-deception.
+[132] The reconstruction of vegetal environment and foodstuffs is based on research carried out by Cathy Crane (1986). The fish and game animals have been identified by Carr (1986a and 1986b).
-Some Stirner scholars have contended that the resemblance is only superficial, that the existentialists, where they have engaged Stirner, have misunderstood him in important ways.[601] Arguing that, as “generalized accommodation[s] to modernity,” psychoanalysis and existentialism do not pose a serious threat to the established political order, John F. Welsh rejects proposed rapprochements between Stirner’s egoism and existentialism, specifically mentioning Sartre’s work in his
+[133] The vessels, affectionately termed “beer mugs” by the Cerros crew, are very effectively designed to hold beverages: graspable, narrow at the straight rim, and weighted on the flat base to discourage tipping. They are identified by Robertson as appropriate for liquids and their context is associated with burials and high ritual (R. Robertson 1983).
-argument. Welsh argues that Camus and Herbert Read ignore key lessons of Stirner’s work and “[denude] The Ego and Its Own of its explosive content.”[602]
+[134] Cathy Crane has positively identified cotton at Cerros; the presence of cacao is a more tenuous identification, but there are some macrobotanical remains that look promising.
-*** IV. Egoism and Poststructuralism
+[135] These are, in fact, the jewels of an ahau that were found deposited in a dedicatory cache at the summit of Structure 6B at Cerros (Freidel 1979; Garber 1983; Freidel and Scheie 1988a). Structure 6 was the second royal temple to be built at Cerros, and it was erected while the first, Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>. was still open and in use. The location and design of Structure 6 shows that it was constructed by the successor of the patron of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>. It is hence likely that the jewels found buried in the summit of Structure 6B belonged to the first king of Cerros, patron of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>.
-Saul Newman’s vital work approaches Stirner as a precursor to and a lens through which to understand poststructuralism. Certainly Stirner meaningfully anticipates attempts by poststructuralists to stress “difference over sameness and [emphasize] particularity at the expense of universality.”[603] Newman notes that Foucault, for example, has thrown into sharp relief the ways in which the universalization of “certain rational discourses”—associated with modernity—has silenced or expelled the voices and lived experiences of homosexuals, criminals, and the mentally ill, among many others.[604] Poststructuralism and anarchism seem to be in conversation, simultaneously informing one another, rather than existing in a relationship of one-way influence.[605]
+[136] See Freidel (1979; 1983) and Freidel and Scheie (1988b) for technical discussions of the origins and distribution of the lowland Maya sculptured pyramid.
-Leonard Williams introduces Hakim Bey’s ontological anarchism within this context, arguing that the anti-essentialism of poststructuralism gives way to a recognition of “the local and contingent nature of political life.”[606] Bey’s post-left anarchism posits a radical break with politics, an immediate reclamation of areas of autonomy in daily life. Central to this notion is Bey’s idea of the temporary autonomous zone; the temporary autonomous zone is presented as the deliberate, immediate creation of an “Outside,” a “true space of resistance to the totality” in which the individual rejects the search for order and embraces chaos. Bey sees chaos as lying at the center of his project.
+[137] We do not know how the building crafts of the ancient Maya world were divided, but we suspect they did not have architects in the sense of the modern world—that is, specialists who design buildings and are responsible for iconographic programs as well as engineering. More likely, the Maya had specialists, perhaps entire lineages, who were trained in the art of building. Their training, however, would have been less as artists responsible for what the building said, and more as master craftsmen responsible for how the message was executed. We have chosen to use the term “Master Builder” for this specialty, rather than architect, in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, I. M. Pei, or Mies van der Rohe.
-Unlike anarchists who “have been claiming for years that ‘anarchy is not chaos’”—who, like all political idealists, seek peace and order—Bey regards order “as death, cessation, crystallization, alien silence.”[607] Order here is the triumph of fixed ideas. If classical anarchists see liberty as the mother of order, egoism-tinged anarchisms question the claimed relationship between the two, content to embrace chaos, to disclaim attempts to contrive order from chaotic foundations. Indeed, egoists regard the anarchist project as a creation of those “who desire to dispel the illusory stases of order,” who see contrived attempts at order as standing in the way of “the unlimited creative potentials of chaos.”[608] Thus, in Postanarchism, Newman describes, in terms similar to Bey’s, “an anarchism of the here and now,” ontologically free and “unencumbered by [the] revolutionary metanarrative” of traditional anarchism, which identifies the eventual disappearance or destruction of state power as its goal.[609]
+[138] These activities have the prosaic title of “termination rituals” in our present scholarly reports (Robertson and Freidel 1986), but the practice clearly encompassed both beginnings and endings of major ritual work such as building temples, rebuilding temples, and finally abandoning them. We believe that the vessels broken on such occasions first held the foods of offering and ritual meals, as found among contemporary Maya. The identification of the fruit-tree flowers is based upon palynological analysis in progress by Cathy Crane. A complete anther of a guava flower is a likely prospect in light of the clustering of four preserved grains of this tree in the deposit.
-*** V. Egoism and Revolution
+[139] Although we did not find the outline under this particular building, this is a known Maya practice in the preparation of superstructures (Smith 1950) and a logical deduction in light of the fact that the building and stairway were built in a single construction effort. We know, therefore, that their finished proportions were determined by the initial work.
-The idea of revolution is an important point of departure for post-left anarchism. Like other individualists in the anarchist tradition, Stirner has been dismissed by many social anarchists as bourgeois and anti-revolutionary.[610] And indeed egoists have treated the idea of revolution with a level of derision, resisting the notion that, to be free, the individual must wait for a revolution to occur at some remote moment in the future, when workers have become sufficiently classconscious. For anarchists in the post-left tradition, “the revolution of everyday life” is “the only revolution that matters,” rooted firmly in the individual’s own wants and purposes, not in political slogans and orthodoxies.[611]
+[140] These sockets for massive posts are more than 3.5 meters deep and 1.2 meters in diameter. If the size of the posts used in modern postholes throughout the Maya area (Wauchope 1938) can be taken as a guide, these temple posts rose 6 to 9 meters above the floor level of the summit temple or superstructure. The walls of the summit temple rose about 2 meters, hence these temple posts rose far above the roof of the temple.
-Stirner’s idea of insurrection contemplates ongoing, autonomous escapes from the reaches of power instead of active struggles to fight or capture it, motivated by an inward-looking discontent with oneself rather than the “political or social act” of trying to effect “an overturning of conditions.”[612] For Stirner, political or social revolution represents an attempt to put the cart before the horse insofar as it begins by “aim[ing] at new arrangements.” Stirner says that while insurrection “has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances,” it does not start from this goal, instead contemplating
+[141] The raising of the great posts constitutes one of the episodes in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985). These posts are called acante, “raised up or stood up tree,” in the rituals of the Yucatec-speaking Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest (Tozzer 1941; Roys 1965). The raising of these posts defined the sacred space within which the shaman communed with the supernatural forces. We have given the technical discussion of this interpretation of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>’s posts in Freidel and Scheie (1988a).
-a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. [R]evolution [aims] at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’[613]
+[142] The plan of this temple, while unusual, is not unique. Across the bay from Cerros, there is an Early Classic temple at the community called Santa Rita (D. Chase and A. Chase 1986). The plan of this Early Classic building, constructed a few centuries after Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, is more complex but comparable in principle to the one described here. Maya temples generally featured an inner sanctum where the most intimate features of ritual action took place, as described further in Chapter 7 in the context of Chan-Bahlum’s accession monuments. The distinctive character of the Cerros example is that the path of entry into the inner sanctum corresponds to the path of the sun.
-Following Stirner, Renzo Novatore regarded anarchists as a “nobility,” as “aristocratic outsiders,” committed not to revolutionary social change or “the construction of a new and suffocating society,” but to the retrieval of self-creation, premised on the idea of the self-consciously “liberated Human Being” (emphasis in original and importantly not gendered).[614] This distinction deeply informs the set of projects that make up the various strains of egoist anarchism.
+[143] These assemblages consist of a fairly constant set of elements. The center ornament was usually made of jade which had been shaped into a thin-walled cylinder with one end flaring out into a flat surface, often carved to resemble a flower. This part, which is called an earflare because of its shape, was carved by drilling, sawing, and abrasion with reeds, string, sand, and water. During the Early Classic period, this main earflare often had a quincunx design with bosses arranged around the central hole at the four corners. The Maya depicted a curling leaf of maize sitting above the earflare and a large counterweight, often made of shell or pearl, hanging below it. Another popular arrangement had a finger-sized cylinder, which was drilled through its long axis, hanging diagonally from the center of the earflare. To hold it out from the face, a thin string, possibly made from deer or cat gut, was threaded through the center drill-hole, through a bead on the end of the cylinder, back through the drill-hole, and finally through the pierced carlobe to a pearl or shell counterweight.
-*** VI. Egoism and Lifestyle Anarchism
+[144] As described by Schele and M. Miller (1986) for Classic period examples, and by Landa (Tozzer 1941) with respect to the carving of sacred wooden images at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya artists may well have performed major public work of this kind in altered states of consciousness achieved by fasting, bloodletting, and the use of intoxicants. Once executed, the error in the proportions of the building may have been left in the design as a divine expression to be accepted and accommodated rather than corrected.
-Collectivist anarchism bristles at the notion of a liberated individual unwilling to sacrifice herself for the holy cause of revolution. In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, Bookchin bemoans “a latter-day anarcho-individualism”—which he dismissively labels “lifestyle anarchism”—that he sees as “supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism.” In lifestyle anarchism, Bookchin perceives the narcissistic influence of bourgeois culture and “the antirational biases of postmodernism.” Concerned to preserve the “socialistic character of the libertarian tradition,” Bookchin expects all anarchists in good standing to demonstrate “responsible social commitment” in service to the revolution; they must participate in “organized, collectivistic, programmatic” political action, properly aware of the true meaning of freedom.[615] Strictly regimented and imposing all kinds of duties and devoirs, Bookchin’s anarchism appears positively authoritarian, reminiscent of Marsden’s remark to Tucker about the archism of anarchists. Many of Bookchin’s criticisms of “lifestyle anarchism” were anticipated by Marx in his confrontation with Stirner’s egoism. So captivated was Marx by Stirner’s thought that he dedicated three-fourths of The German Ideology to his critique of “Sankt Max.”[616] That book decries what Marx and Engels regard as Stirner’s “spiritual” and “bourgeois outlook,” as well as his supposed confusion about class categories.[617]
+[145] The earliest archaeologically documented inscribed object in the lowlands is a bone bloodletter found in a Late Preclassic period burial at the site of Kichpanhá, a few miles south of Cerros in northern Belize (Gibson, Shaw, and Tinamore 1986).
-Many egoists have agreed with Bookchin’s position that their ideas are out of place in the anarchist tradition. Parker, for example, eventually concluded, following Marsden, that anarchism and egoism cannot be reconciled, that the former compels the individual to exalt the abstract ideal of humanity and thus to abstain from acting on his desires. Marsden classes anarchism with Christianity, understanding it as another in a long line of renunciatory systems of self-denial and control. Similarly, Marsden’s insight in her exchange with Tucker underscores egoism’s unshrinking assault on morality. “Conscience,” she writes, “takes the Ego in charge and but rarely fails to throttle the life out of him.” Correctly regarding anarchism not as a system without rules, but rather as a most exacting system of behavioral prohibitions, Marsden argues that the archism of “Armies, Courts, Gowns and Wigs, Jailors, [and] Hangmen” is “light and superficial as compared with that of our Clerico-libertarian friends.”[618] Here, it seems, Marsden had touched a nerve. Once among her greatest admirers,[619] Tucker soured on Marsden after this exchange, put off by her round rejection of anarchist ideology.
+[146] On this building there are also special raised and modeled glyph panels attached to earflare assemblages. Such panels are also found on other Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros, Structures 6B and 29B. Similar panels are further reported or illustrated on Structure N9-56 at Lamanai (Pendergast 1981), Structure 34 at El Mirador (Hansen 1984), and on Structure H-Sub 8 at Uaxactún (Valdes 1988). The principle of glyphically “tagging” earflare assemblages, the central power objects of the entities represented as head masks on such panels, is thus a widespread convention in the Late Preclassic period. So far, only the glyphs “tagging” the earflares on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> have been read, as discussed further on in this chapter.
-In their keenness to point out problems with treating egoism as leading to, as a form of, or as even compatible with anarchism, egoist thinkers like Marsden and Parker actually affirm Stirner’s “centrality and importance to [the anarchist] tradition.”[620] In its challenges to anarchism, Stirner’s egoism pushes anarchism to remain relevant, to incorporate new discourses and strategies, updating itself for the twenty-first century rather than remaining mired in nineteenth-century categories and ways of thinking about radical struggles.
+[147] This four-petaled flower regularly appears on the cheek of the Sun God in its young human, old human, and cruller-eyed GUI aspects during the entire Classic period.
-*** VII. Egoism and Sexual Liberation
+[148] In the great creation myth of the highland Quiche Maya, given in their Book of Council, the Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985), the ancestral Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, apotheosize as the sun and the moon rather than the sun and Venus. Actually, the younger twin could be associated in the Classic period with the moon as well as the sun (Schele and M. Miller 1986:308–309), while the elder twin was the Sun in the first opposition and Venus in the second. It is important to grasp that such multiple natures as jaguar/sun/moon or Venus/Celestial Monster/sun are not exclusive and unchanging, but rather inclusive and dynamic. The Waterlily Jaguar, for example, the quintessential predator in royal warfare, can be associated with both the sun as it manifests the Sun God and with Venus in the Venus-timed war rituals discussed in Chapter 4. These “aspects” constitute statements of momentary affinity and resonance. The fact that some of these connections are remarkably enduring and pervasive in Maya thought does not belie the perpetual necessity of reiteration in ritual to re-create and sustain them. Ultimately, the charismatic supernature of the king is dependent upon a logic which mandates his inclusion in such cosmic categories.
-Daniel Guerin identifies important tensions between the egoist approach and the outmoded politics of the labor movement, among them “the endemic homophobia” in the latter and “the exclusive concern with class,” while ignoring, for example, what Guerin sees as Stirner’s “concern with sexual liberation.”[621] Marsden followed Stirner in emphasizing this concern; more recent treatments of her work note her importance as a forerunner of queer theory, her zealous resistance to facile, superficial categories, and her truly avant-garde readiness “to [extend] the status of the autonomous individual to all those who resist categorization.”[622]
+[149] One of the creatures especially associated with Venus, as described in the Glossary, is the Celestial Monster. Derived from a crocodilian model, this beastie was long- snouted, like the Cerros creature.
-The journals Marsden edited, including The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist, hosted spirited attacks on “the crass, ostrich-like stupidity of our national attitude on sex matters in general,” on “the heavy veil of Decency (so often the bitterest enemy of truth) enshroud[ing] practically all open discussion” of human sexuality and related matters.[623] Neither Stirner nor Marsden let repressive notions of good taste stand in the way of their probing deconstructions of sex and gender ideologies. Over one hundred years ago, Marsden challenged readers with the idea “that there is no definite reality which can be substituted as that to which Woman corresponds,” that “in itself feeling is sexless,” and that the differences between men and women are “infinitesimally small.”[624] She understands gender as a socially-constructed sacred ideal, one that exists apart from “the physical differences which are all which exist of sex.”[625] Indeed, Marsden’s radical and trailblazing efforts to transcend stale gender norms and stereotypes have drawn the ire of some feminists for allegedly “betraying and undermining [the] political, economic[,] and cultural empowerment of woman.”[626] If Marsden’s work and ideas prefigure the politics of trans and queer liberation, then such criticisms closely approximate the more general debate between radical feminists and the transgender movement.[627] Others have likewise observed the sex and gender implications of Stirner’s work. In discussing his translation of the title of Stirner’s only book, David Leopold observes that “Stirner clearly identifies the egoistic subject as prior to gender.”[628] Gender is just the kind of dominating abstraction, laden with duties and proscriptions, that Stirner is eager to explode, another (that is, apart from formal political institutions, capitalist relations, etc.) source of authority limiting the unique person.
+[150] Schele (1974:49–50) dubbed this figure the Jester God because of the resemblance of its tri-pointed head to a medieval court jester.
-A proper appreciation of Stirner’s ideas allows one to free oneself from both traditional gender roles and guilt or shame associated with one’s desires, “to become the owner of his own desires.”[629] Indeed, Stirner’s egoist ideas were a principal influence on Der Eigene, “the world’s first homosexual journal,” first published in 1896 and “dedicated to unique [eigenen] people” “who are proud of their uniqueness [Eigenheit] and want to insist on it no matter what the cost!”[630] The individualist anarchist John Henry Mackay, Stirner’s biographer, was an important contributor to the journal under the pseudonym Sagitta.
+[151] The Maya writing system uses special signs called semantic determinatives to specify particular meanings when a value could be in doubt. One of these determinatives is the cloth headband worn by kings. In various manifestations, the headband can have the regular ahau glyph attached, as well as a mirror and, most importantly for our purpose, a Jester God. Whenever this ahau-Jester God headband is present, the glyph, whether it is a human head, a vulture, a rodent, or whatever, reads ahau. To wear this headband in the Classic period is to be an ahau.
-Through Marsden’s pioneering efforts, egoism also became a significant influence on modern art and literature. Indeed, her subeditors include influential figures of literary modernism such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and no less a literary giant than James Joyce was among her contributors.
+[152] The Headband Twins are the particular manifestation under discussion. Named glyphically as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam, this set of twins has one member marked by large body spots and the Jester God headband, while the other sports a cut-shell yax sign on his forehead and jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs.
-*** VIII. Egoism and Individualism
+[153] There are additional details in the iconographic program of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> which confirm this interpretation. The glyph panels “tagging” the earflare assemblages on the eastern side of the building contain the word jwc, meaning “green” and “first.” Here they denote that the sun and Venus of the eastern side are “first,” as they should be at dawn. On the western side of the building, the Venus image on the upper panel is being disgorged from the split representation of the framing sky/snake (in Cholan languages, the words for “sky” and “snake” are homophonous [chan/chan]), signaling that the movement is down as it should be in the setting of the sun with the Eveningstar above it.
-Assuming that they identify with it at all, egoists prefer to treat anarchism as another way of stating or explaining the importance of individual self-realization, predicated on a certain sensibility perhaps expressed in the idea that “the individual is above all institutions and formulas.”[631] And those egoists who do self-identify as anarchists frequently take care to place their individualism in the place of honor, to associate themselves with “anarchist individualism” (as against individualist anarchism).[632]
+[154] The Maya shaman establishes a four-part perimeter of sacred space. Inside of this space he can pass over the threshold to the Otherworld. We detail the manner in which Late Preclassic kings harnessed shamanistic ecstasy to their emerging definitions of royal charisma in a recent professional article (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
-Yet even the relationship between egoism and individualism is contested, as Stirner’s ideas potentially imply a refusal to accept “the constrained and over-regulated forms of individuality on offer to us today.”[633] These constrained and over-regulated forms are associated in the literature with liberalism.[634] Stirner’s work, as well as that of today’s post-left anarchists, is not easily reduced to or understood through the lens of present-day left-right categories; it rejects ideology itself, and so naturally rejects liberalism, which, for Stirner, frees man, an abstraction, while subjecting the individual to domination and alienation.[635] Stirner regards liberalism as entailing “the normalization of the individual” through “a whole series of regulatory, judicial, medical and disciplinary procedures,” all calculated to erase “difference and individuality.”[636]
+[155] There are Late Preclassic masks wearing the Jester God headdress in Group H at Uaxactiin, a remarkably preserved and recently excavated temple complex in the interior of the lowlands (Valdes 1988).
-Political liberty means that the polis, the state, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like state, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.[637]
+[156] There are other potential interpretations of these images which we are exploring, including the prospect that the “first” Venus and sun, on the eastern side, represent the ancestors, while the western Venus and sun represent the human king and his heir (Freidel n.d.).
-Here, Stirner turns the Enlightenment—and prevailing narratives associated with it—on its head, scornful of the notion that through revolution (Stirner has in mind specifically the French Revolution) the individual had become free. The revolution and the ideas it represented had not defeated authority, had not altered or even reached the underlying structures of domination, but merely ushered in a new host of enslaving abstractions.
+[157] Reading “between the lines” in this fashion is the key to understanding the people and politics behind the masks and ritual portraits of Maya art. Although such interpretations are subject to dispute and discussion as to their content, there is no doubt that the Maya intended their art and public texts as political propaganda as well as offerings of devotion. The documentation of this strategy is to be found in the texts of royal temples of the Classic period, as described in subsequent chapters.
-Stirner sees “in liberalism only the old Christian depreciation of the I,” a rebirth or reinvention of Christianity in the new terms provided by the Enlightenment.[638] Politics is just another incarnation of religion, its projects and plans so many rites and rituals, the state a new god to be propitiated again and again. With affected solemnity and self-seriousness, we line up to vote as we might have assembled to receive the Eucharist, and recognize the moral imperative of paying taxes as we might have understood the duty to tithe.
+[158] The earliest public architecture at Cerros, Structure 2A-Sub 4—lst, the small and undecorated pyramid next to the dock, has a radiocarbon date of 58 B.C.+ 50 years from a single large piece of carbonized wood from a sealed plaster floor. The abandonment ritual of the latest public building, Structure 29B, provided us with a piece of burnt wood which registered 25 B.c. + 50 years. What must be understood here is that any radiocarbon date is only the best statistical approximation of the age of an object: the + years give a range into which the date may fall. The wider the + range, the higher the probability that the date falls within that range. The beginning and ending dates of public architecture at Cerros fall within the + range of each other, indicating a range of as little as fifty and as much as one hundred years for all of the public architecture of Cerros to have been built. Other archaeological evidence from the site supports this dating. For example, no change in the style or technology of ceramics occurs between the earliest and the latest building (R. Robertson n.d.). And only eight distinct construction episodes, a very low number for most Maya sites, have been detected in the stratigraphic sequence of architecture (Freidel 1986c). Together, this evidence supports the view that Cerros underwent a veritable explosion of public construction in the first century B.c.
-Still, rather than discarding liberalism as without value or insights, Stirner is catechizing it, eager to expose it to a searching dialectical process that yields new insights and proceeds to a higher level of analysis. His goal is to explode liberalism’s boundaries, opening space for a radical, pluralistic “hyper-liberalism,” radically accommodative of difference.[639] He offers a route of egress from the left-right political spectrum itself, indeed, from all accepted political categories and existing labels.[640]
+[159] Group H at Uaxactun (see Chapter 4) has this same internal court entered through a portal building atop an acropolis.
-Whether or not Stirner was an anarchist, his ideas arguably come to influence the anarchist movement first and most notably through the work of Benjamin R. Tucker, who published Steven T. Byington’s celebrated translation of The Ego and Its Own, the first in English, in 1907. Tucker encountered Stirner’s ideas through his friend and aide, the writer and publisher George Schumm, and James L. Walker, to whom Tucker referred as “the most thorough American student of Stirner.”[641]
+[160] Vernon Scarborough has written detailed discussions of the impact of construction activity on the surrounding landscape at Cerros (Scarborough 1983; 1986).
-In his important history of the American individualist anarchists, James J. Martin observes that Josiah Warren’s influence on Tucker prepared the ground for Tucker’s embrace of egoism. After participating in the utopian socialist communities of Robert Owen, Warren, careful “to preserve the SOVEREIGNTY OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL inviolate” (emphasis in original), “had dismissed altruism and subscribed to enlightened self-interest.”[642]
+[161] The excavations in temples and pyramids at Cerros were limited in scope compared to those carried out in some Maya centers because the archaeological project had many other research objectives to address as well. Future excavation at the site will no doubt expose more examples of the elaborate stucco work of Late Preclassic royal architecture. Despite the limitations of the record at Cerros, this remains the largest analyzed and reported sample of such decoration from a Maya site. Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Lamanai promise to provide substantive new samples as excavations at those sites are reported and extended.
-It is nevertheless important not to understate the extent to which Tucker’s adoption of egoism was in fact a meaningful break with those who had influenced him rather than an expression of fidelity to them. Tucker’s foremost American influences, the immediate predecessors of his explicit “philosophical anarchism,”[643] were deeply committed to fundamentally liberal conceptions of natural and inalienable individual rights. Warren himself positively invoked the Declaration of Independence and extolled “natural liberty.” Ezra Heywood, another of Tucker’s personal mentors, wrote of “the fundamental right to property.” Such earlier American individualists (other important examples include Lysander Spooner, J.K. Ingalls, William B. Greene, and Stephen Pearl Andrews) frequently called upon natural law and “the natural laws of trade” in their arguments against both the capitalist system and the state. Their individualist anarchism was, they believed, the system demanded by the cosmic order, indeed by science itself. (Tucker was, indeed, wont to call his political system “scientific anarchism.”) “There are,” J.K. Ingalls writes, “certain great laws or first principles which pervade universal Nature, and act with exceptionless uniformity.”[644] Indeed, it has been argued that individualist anarchism, particularly its American variant, was more akin to radical liberalism than to other schools of anarchist thought.[645] Much as Stirner’s thought pushed the boundaries of traditional liberalism, so did the American individualists radicalize liberalism to create their unique iteration of anarchism.
+[162] These are the jewels in our little story of the traders’ landing at Cerros.
-*** IX. Stirner and Dialectics
+[163] The grasping of a mirror is one way of signifying accession to the rulership in the texts of the Classic period (Scheie and J. Miller 1983).
-A consideration of the relationship between Stirner’s thought and dialectics must entail a consideration of both Hegel and Marx.
+[164] The ancient Maya believed the sacred liquids could be transmuted into other forms, resulting in a group of substances that were transformations of one another. This group included blood, fire, smoke, water (Freidel 1985), but other liquids, gases, and vapors were also related (Scheie and M. Miller 1986).
-Stirner’s work emerges within the context of Hegel’s philosophy and cannot be fully understood, if understood at all, without a proper appreciation for the basic mechanics of Hegel’s dialectical process and his phenomenology.[646] Stirner “had the advantage of being taught his Hegel by Hegel,” having attended his lectures on the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of spirit. Whether Stirner’s work follows in the dialectical tradition or explodes it is of course the subject of scholarly debate. And indeed it is possible that The Ego and Its Own, presenting a trenchant case against many of Hegel’s key ideas while employing “the distinctive triadic pattern of Hegel,”[647] does both.
+[165] Offerings of precious and powerful objects are common in the record of Maya royal temples. These are typically called dedicatory offerings with the connotation that the objects were given to the gods by the devout to sanctify buildings and carved stone monuments, like stelae. William Coe’s detailed monograph on the offerings from one Maya center, Piedras Negras (W. Coe 1959), documents the complex symbolism of these objects. The cache from Stela 7 at Copan and newly found caches from Temple 26 incorporate ancestral heirlooms made of jade. Such objects were principally used in shamanistic rituals performed by kings to materialize sacred beings in this world (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
+<br>
+<br>The burial of such objects in buildings or carved monuments enhanced their power to function as the pathways of this type of communication and as portals to the Otherworld. Just as the caching of whole objects focused sacred power, the reciprocal act was to smash and burn objects to release sacred power prior to scattering or sprinkling. In an earlier phase of Temple 26, for example, large numbers of valuable greenstone jewelry were shattered in pit fires set on the four sides of a temple to be buried by new construction. This last kind of termination ritual (R. Robertson n.d.) was often carried out in the same general cycle as dedicatory rituals (Walker n.d.).
-Leopold contends that Stirner exploits the dialectical structure in order to develop his antiHegelian arguments, using a “self-conscious parody of Hegelianism.”[648] Welsh interprets Stirner’s egoism as a method with which to free dialectical social theory “from the Marxian shackles that are used to understand it.”[649]
+[166] The technique of using internal buttressing of this kind is common in Maya architectural construction. It was especially valuable when large-scale buildings were being raised rapidly. The Maya masons employed loose angular rubble when they could in such projects, and provided vertical stability by capping off the rubble with small rocks, gravel, and dirt which could then support another layer of large loose boulders. The internal walls provided lateral stability.
-*** X. Egoist Individualism and Communism
+[167] Although the resulting arrangement resulted in ridiculously narrow alleyways between the flanking stairways and the central platform, the plan was intended to emulate a conventional arrangement now known on the thirty-three-meter-high pyramid at Lama- nai, which also dates to the Late Preclassic (Pendergast 1981). This arrangement can also be seen on a pyramid at El Mirador (Matheny 1987). The three-temple arrangement of small temples or temple-platforms is one of the more important architectural traditions of Late Preclassic architecture.
-Despite the apparently irreconcilability between Marx’s communism and Stirner’s egoism—and the history of open hostility I have noted here—some anarchists have seen egoism as implying communism (at least anarchist communism, if not orthodox state communism). Marx and Engels themselves prosecuted “a sterile war against Stirner’s book,” quite clearly aware of its implications for their communist doctrine. Stirner’s book worries deeply about closed, self-contained, and comprehensive systems like their version of communism, which reduce humankind and its apparent classes to “large blob[s] of protoplasmic homogeneity,” to borrow the words of anarchist Laurance Labadie.[650] Still, communist anarchists have found in Stirner a radical attack on private property and, paraphrasing Stirner, a revolt against the pressure exerted by the property-owning class.
+[168] This pattern is best illustrated in the tri-figure panels of Palenque (Scheie 1979), but it is also found at other sites. The famous Stela 31 at Tikal (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982) depicts king Stormy-Sky flanked by portraits of his father, Curl-Snout.
-Emma Goldman, following Stirner, sees private property and capitalism as obstacles to the freedom of the individual—and she opposes these not in spite of her individualism, but because of it. Whereas state communists regard individualism itself as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, the anarchist communist tradition treats individualism differently, and is thus able to reconcile itself to Stirner. John P. Clark credits Stirner with inspiring Goldman’s outlook “on individuality and personal uniqueness,”[651] evident in her claim “that if society is ever to become free, it will be so through liberated individuals.” To Goldman, Stirner is misunderstood, seen as “the apostle of the theory ‘each for himself, the devil take the hind one,’” when in fact his “individualism contains the greatest social possibilities.”[652]
+[169] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:241–264) and M. Miller and Houston (1987) for further discussion of the Classic Maya ballgame.
-In The Philosophy of Egoism, Walker, who frequently contributed to Tucker’s Liberty under the pseudonym Tak Kak, encapsulates another, decidedly different, possible egoist position on private property: “I have a right to what I can take and openly keep, and another has a right to take it from me if he can.”[653] Prudential concerns may encourage one to refrain from a given action, to chart a different course, but not moral considerations in the sense of normative rules outside of and independent of the individual. As a practical matter, the goal of the self-conscious egoist is to “discover where [his] true, most lasting interests lie,” “allow[ing] no moral considerations to obscure [his] view.”[654] The juxtaposition of Goldman and Walker here demonstrates the general difficulty inherent in claiming Stirner’s egoism for any political or economic doctrine.
+; 4. A War of Conquest:<br> Tikal Against Uaxactun
-*** XI. Egoism, Civilization, and Work
+[170] Some of the largest buildings ever constructed in the Precolumbian world were built at El Mirador at least two centuries before the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan. See Ray Matheny’s description of El Mirador and its amazing architecture in the National Geographic Magazine (September 1987).
-If egoism by definition resists all political and economic programs, it also damns society and civilization. Post-left anarchism has thus been closely related also to the primitivist tradition within anarchism, which posits civilization itself as a source—really the primary source—of domination and oppression. Primitivists associate civilization with a process of domestication that has denatured human beings and introduced hierarchical, authoritarian forms of social organization, that has removed people from the condition of wildness.[655] John Zerzan decries the reign of a “techno- scientific hegemony,”[656] a virulent monoculture infecting human beings and the natural world and precluding all other social possibilities. The political left, in Zerzan’s thought, is “discredited and dying”; its perspective “surely also needs to go” because it is irrelevant and unable to confront “the steady worldwide movement toward complete dehumanization.”[657] In fact, the left—scientific, rationalistic, and industrialist—is responsible in large part for this dehumanization, euphemistically called progress. We are possessed by the mindless desire to consume, captive to the drive for more. Primitivists argue that, prior to civilization, defined roughly as the time before the domestication of plants and animals, human beings enjoyed more gender autonomy and equality and more leisure time, affiliating in less violent societies marked by sharing and equality.[658]
+[171] The political collapse of El Mirador remains one piece in the puzzle of the Protoclassic period as discussed in Chapter 1. The city was not completely abandoned after its heyday, but the modestly prosperous Classic period inhabitants never again laid claim to dominion in a landscape populated by an increasing number of rival kings.
-The link back to Stirner and his egoist project is primitivism’s focus on denaturing processes, the ways in which modernity, technology, and civilization alienate human beings. Wolfi Landstreicher, however, offers an anarchist egoist critique of civilization that is explicitly non-primitivist, one that inquires, indeed, whether primitivism could be a positive impediment to a thoroughgoing anti-civilization project.[659] Landstreicher resists what he sees as primitivists’ reification and abstraction of what were actual relationships “between real, living, breathing human beings.” The attempt to boil such complex lived relationships down to an essential or idealized quality of primitiveness, Landstreicher argues, risks making anarchism another quest for the “eschatological vision” of a perfect future, “a program for the future” just like Marxism. It furthermore “dehumanizes and deindividualizes” the actual human beings who become the models of the primitive.
+[172] We call this complex Tlaloc-Venus war because of the imagery worn by its practitioners and the regular association of its conduct with important stations of Venus, Jupiter, and conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn (Kelley 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Closs 1979; Lounsbury 1982, Scheie 1984a, n.d.c). The “star-war” nickname comes from the way the Maya recorded the event by using a Venus sign (Kelley argued that it was simply “star”) over the glyph for “earth” or the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom attacked. See Note 45 for further discussion.
-Related to its critiques of society and civilization is post-left anarchism’s battle with the labormovement-left’s naive romanticization of work. Rather than stopping at criticizing the exploitation of workers under capitalism, post-left anarchism has been critical of the social institution of work itself, even arguing, “In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”[660] Post-left anarchists have criticized workerist anarchism for its glorification of work and the factory as a symbol, preferring to call for more radical social interventions. Bob Black, for example, writes: “Work is much easier to glorify than it is to perform.” Similarly, Parker, arguing that anarchism will only ever appeal to a small minority, damns “the proletarian mythicists” for saddling anarchists with an “association with the dreary cult of ‘the workers.’” Parker quotes John Henry Mackay’s contention that anarchism “is not the concern of a single class,” emphasizing that it is instead “the concern of every individual who values his individual liberty.”[661] For Black, like Stirner, “ideologies like liberalism, humanism, Marxism, syndicalism, and Bookchinism” are much more alike than they are different, linked by the fact that they make demands of the individual, intent on dictating terms and establishing control over her behavior.[662] These ideological systems seek to substitute themselves for the volition of the thinking, feeling, flesh-and-blood unique, living para- sitically on it. (Here, again, we have good reason to avoid sexing or gendering the unique.) Black is eager to point out that, when Bookchin “accuses rival anarchists of individualism and liberalism,” he is merely repeating the charges that Stalin casts against all anarchists.[663] He further notes that the indictment of post-left anarchists as “decadent” only reveals Bookchin’s envy and ressentiment, as the slur lacks any real meaning and serves only to identify “people perceived to be having more fun than you are.”[664] Bookchin here appears as a moral scold, bitter at “lifestylists” for rejecting his rigid, burdensome so-called anarchism.
+[173] A pit with a constricted neck dug into the bedrock by the ancient Maya.
-Notwithstanding egoism’s aversion to morality, post-left anarchists have at times made conciliatory gestures in the direction of “practice-based virtue approaches” to ethical questions.[665] Newman, for example, acknowledges the desirability of cultivating “certain ethics and virtues for political struggle and autonomous experience,” identifying anarchist practices as producing “anti- hierarchical identities and values.” Stirner’s ideas connecting such values to education were very much ahead of their time; he anticipates later arguments in favor of an active and self-directed process of learning, as opposed to pedagogical approaches that treat the student as the passive recipient of the teacher’s knowledge and expertise. For Stirner, education as it exists is fundamentally and irreparably manipulative, “calculated to produce feelings in us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out.”[666] Welsh explains that Stirner regards education (and the process of socialization more generally) as inculcating self-renunciation, inverting the relationship between the individual and the object of his studies. Instead of dissecting and digesting the object “as an active subject,” the individual is relegated to a position of passivity, of subordination to something external and alien to him.[667]
+[174] W. R. Coe (1965a and 1965b) has published detailed descriptions of these very early occupations as well as the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods of Tikal.
-*** XII. Conclusion
+[175] William Coe (1965b: 1406) himself makes this suggestion.
-There is no simple, obvious answer, and quite possibly no right answer at all, to the question of whether Stirner or those he has influenced can accurately be classed as anarchists; his individualism is fundamentally different from the kind usually identified with anarchism: “Human essence, which was seen by the anarchists to be beyond the reach of power, was found by Stirner to be constructed by it.”[668] Post-left anarchism has often styled itself as neither left nor right,[669] in an effort to save the anarchist project from the individuality-stifling programs of political visionaries eager to impose their blueprints for the ideal free society. It therefore has no shortage of enemies in an anarchist community with deep historical and ideological ties to the left.
+[176] The empty Late Prcclassic period tomb at the summit of Structure 4 at Cerros also testifies to the practice of burying exalted dead in the early temple complexes, but in actuality the notion of the corpse as a worthy inclusion in the power structure of places does not appear pervasively until the Classic period. Tikal may prove precocious in this ritual activity.
-Notwithstanding any commonalities between the thinkers and ideas constituting post-left anarchism, egoist anarchism, or anarchist individualism, it is difficult to justify identifying them as a single school or movement. Indeed, to undertake such school-building would be contrary to the main thrust of Stirner’s work, that the irreducible feelings and wants of the unique person are more important and fundamental than the ideas of academics and the movements of activists.[670] These traditions want no part of the political, of its meetings, committees, leaders, or movements, spurning all the varieties of institution-building in favor of “unmediated desire.”[671] Stirner’s ideas equip anarchists with new analytical tools that discourage us from seeing in anarchism the promise of a final terminus—a post-revolution paradise. Instead, Stirner immerses anarchism in an endless recursive cycle in which power dynamics are repeatedly reconsidered in light of new circumstances and cannot be facilely reduced, for example, “to a mere function of the capitalist economy or class interest.”[672]
+[177] W. R. Coe (1965b:15) identifies the main burial (two skeletons were found in the chamber) as a female.
+[178] See W. R. Coe (1965a:15–17 and 1965b: 1410–1412) for full descriptions of this tombs and its contents. Coggins (1976:54–68) discusses the stylistic affinities of the tomb.
-[579] There are several competing translations of Stirner’s title, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. For the first English translation, its publisher Benjamin R. Tucker chose The Ego and His Own, an “extremely unfortunate” rendering of the German according to Jason McQuinn, who favors The Unique and Its Property. In T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York, NY: Autonomedia 1985), Hakim Bey suggests that “The Unique & His Own-ness would better reflect [Stirner’s] intentions, given that he never defines the ego in opposition to libido or id, or in opposition to ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’ The Unique (der Einzige) might best be construed simply as the individual self” (67).
+[179] The archaeological record is rapidly changing with respect to the early public depictions of Maya kings. Richard Hansen (1989) reports the presence of carved stone stelae at Nakbe, a satellite of El Mirador, which carry the same kind of elaborate scroll work found here. Because these early representations often depict the individual as masked, their identification as historical people is somewhat problematic.
-[580] As David Leopold notes in the introduction to his 1995 Cambridge University Press translation, the book is dated 1845, but was actually published in the latter half of October 1844.
+[180] See XV. R. Coe (1965b:21) and Coggins (1976:79–83) for detailed descriptions of this tomb and its contents.
-[581] Saul Newman writes that Stirner’s book “was described as the ‘most revolutionary book ever written.’ It is certainly the most dangerous.” Saul Newman, “Introduction: Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts,” Max Stir- ner, ed. Saul Newman (London: Palgrave 2011) 1.
+[181] The mask is about the same size relative to a human body as other pectorals known archaeologically (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:81, Pl. 19) and in Maya depictions of rulers. Most telling are the five holes drilled in the lower edge to suspend the cylinder and bead arrays normally depicted with such pectorals.
-[582] Steve J. Shone, American Anarchism (Leiden: Brill 2013) 222.
+[182] This three-pointed symbol of ahau, initially a geometric element, was worn as the central diadem of a characteristic headband with three jewels (viewed from the front). The three-jewel crown is seen on the foreheads of the upper masks of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros with the geometric forms as described in Chapter 3. On the stucco masks of gods in Group H at Uaxactún (Valdes 1987), the three-jewel crown appears with snarling humanoid faces in the personified form that would become the Jester God of Classic period imagery.
-[583] Max Adler quoted in David Osterfeld, “Freedom, Society, and the State: An Investigation Into the Possibility of Society without Government,” Anarchy and the Law, ed. Edward P. Stringham (London: Transaction 2007) 505.
+[183] William Haviland (1967:322–323) notes that around A.D. 1, a difference in average height could be seen between those people buried in lavish tombs and the rest of the population at Tikal. This difference continued to grow during the Early Classic period marking what Haviland sees as the development of a ruling elite who had consistent access to better nutrition.
-[584] The writings of post-left anarchists have generally referred to their ideas as “post-left anarchy” rather than “post-left anarchism,” underscoring the fact that they do not seek to create another -ism, an ideology or system. Here, I refer to “post-left anarchism” to distinguish anarchy as a social condition from anarchism as a movement that aspires toward that condition.
+[184] Christopher Jones (n.d.) has associated the construction phases detected in the North Acropolis, Great Plaza, and East Plaza with the dynastic history of Tikal as recovered from the inscriptions.
-[585] As the egoist anarchist writer John Beverley Robinson said, “Whatever gods you worship, you realize that they are your gods, the product of your own mind, terrible or amiable, as you may choose to depict them. You hold them in your hand, and play with them, as a child with its paper dolls; for you have learned not to fear them, that they are but the ‘imaginations of your heart.’” “Egoism,” Freedom 38.414 (Jan. 1924): 3.
+[185] Chris Jones (n.d.) also speculates that the eastern and western causeways were built at this time as “formalizations of the old entrance trails into the site center.”
-[586] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge: CUP 1995) 175.
+[186] Chris Jones (n.d.) suggested an association between these massive building projects and the ruler in this burial.
-[587] Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge: CUP 2012) 1.
+[187] One of the basic historical problems facing Mayanists is the relatively great size of Peten centers and communities of the Late Preclassic period compared to other parts of the lowlands. One explanation would hold that El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún among other centers had early special relationships with those kingdoms of the southern mountains and Pacific slopes regions that show precocious complexity and which supplied the lowlands with strategic commodities (Sharer 1988). We agree that such special relationships are a possibility and that commerce would have attracted more farmers to the region from elsewhere in the lowlands. At the same time, the real potential of the swampy interior for ordinary farmers lies less in its proximity to the highlands than in the development of intensive agriculture based upon effective water management. The great Late Preclassic public works of El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún suggest to us that these governments attracted and commanded labor for many other overtly practical projects, particularly raised-field agricultural plots. Intensive agriculture, of course, would not only guarantee the prosperity of commoners. It would also generate the surplus of commodities necessary to sustain a flourishing trade with the highlands. This “agricultural attraction” hypothesis, however, points to the great antecedent civilization in Mesoamerica’s swampy lowlands: the Olmec of the Gulf Coast. We anticipate the future discovery of more direct relationships between the lowland Olmec of such centers as La Venta and the Middle Preclassic pioneers who first farmed the swamps of Petén.
-[588] Stirner 92.
+[188] This famous building was reported by Oliver and Edith Ricketson (1937) as part of their work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
-[589] This paragraph is taken from David S. D’Amato, “Egoism in Rand and Stirner,” Libertarianism.org (Cato Institute, Mar. 11, 2014) [[http://www.libertarianism.org][www.libertarianism.org/columns/egoism-rand-stirner]].
+[189] In 1985, Juan Antonio Valdes (1988) began excavations of Group H as part of the Programa de Patrón de Asentamiento. Trenches excavated that year into the platform yielded only Mamón and Chicane! ceramics, dating all interior construction phases to the Preclassic period. In total, he found seven construction phases including the most extraordinary and complete example of Late Preclassic masked architecture now known.
-[590] David R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith, eds., Proudhon: What Is Property? (Cambridge: CUP 1994) 208.
+[190] Freidel has discussed the comparative iconography of Structures 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and E-VII-Sub, suggesting that both display the Sun cycle surmounted by Venus (Freidel 1979; 1981a).
-[591] Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP 2004), 26—7.
+[191] The meanings applied to particular buildings were by no means mutually exclusive. Witz is a general term meaning “mountain,” which was applied in glyphic and symbolic form to Maya buildings to define them as the living mountain. In principle, all Maya pyramids were Witz Monsters. On some buildings, such as Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> or Structure E-VII-Sub, the animus of the mountain itself is a relatively minor component of the overall decoration, specifically given in the lowermost frontal masks on those buildings from which the larger and more important sun masks emerge. On other buildings, such as the one discussed here, the Witz aspect is central. Still other buildings, as we shall see at Palenque and Copan, emphasize the World Tree which grows from the heart of the mountain. These are not different messages, but aspects of a single unitary vision. The aesthetics of Maya ritual performance encourage such creative and diverse expression of nuance.
-[592] In Political Justice, Godwin writes “that perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species, so that the political, as well as the intellectual state of man, may be presumed to be in a course of progressive improvement.” William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, accessed at knarf.english.upenn.edu/Godwin/pj12.html.
+[192] Because the specific signal of the Witz monster is his crenelated forehead, as seen on the lower Monster, we have to be cautious in identifying the upper Monster as another Witz, for the top of the mask is destroyed. Nevertheless, the rest of the mask, including the blunt snout surmounted by a human nose, ‘ breath ’ scrolls flanking the gaping mouth, and the eye panels, comprise a virtual replication of the lower, complete mask. When the Late Preclassic architects intend a primary contrast in meaning between masks at different vertical points in a mask stack, as on Structures 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and E-VH-Sub, they usually distinguished them by using different muzzle forms and other features. Hence it is likely that the upper mask here replicates the primary meaning of the lower mask.
-[593] Dora Marsden, “Views and Comments,” The Egoist 1.2 (Jan. 15, 1914): 25.
+[193] All the other buildings in the group have a single room that was entered from a door on the court side of the building. Sub-10 has a door on both the inner and outer sides with flanking plaster masks on both sides of the substructural platform. One entered the group by mounting a stairway rising up the platform from the plaza to the west of Structure H-X, which was a mini-acropolis flanked by a north and south building. Once atop Structure H-X, one could walk to either side of Sub-10, but the main processional entrance was up its short western stair, through the building, and down the east stairs. The use of a building as a gateway into an acropolis is also found on Late Preclassic Structure 6 at Cerros.
-[594] Ruth Kinna, “The Mirror of Anarchy: The Egoism of John Henry Mackay and Dora Marsden,” Newman, Stirner 42.
+[194] The Late Preclassic architectural jaguar mask varies from the strikingly naturalistic animal depictions of Structure 29 at Cerros, to the blunt-snouted snarling zoomorphic image of the sun on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, to the anthropomorphic version found here in which the fangs are reduced to residual incurving elements within the mouth panel. What began as a broad incisor-tooth bar under the square snout on the sun jaguar of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> is here reduced to the single projecting tooth which will be characteristic of divinity and the Ancestors in the Classic period. This anthropomorphic jaguar, however, still carries the squint eyes and bifurcated eyebrows of the 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> version. On Structure 29 at Cerros, the appearance of this humanoid ahau is enhanced by its physical emergence from a naturalistic jaguar head. At Tikal, Early Classic Temple 5D-23-2<sup>nd</sup> has a comparable humanoid ahau mask emerging from a jaguar head. In this case, the jaguar carries the mat symbol in its mouth (A. Miller 1986: Fig. 9). The particular ahau masks on Temple H-Sub-10 at Uaxactun are framed below by enormous knots, signaling that they are in fact giant replicas of the girdle heads worn on the belt of the king. Scheie and J. Miller (1983) have discussed these ahau pop and balain pop (“king/mat” and “jaguar/mat”) images of kingship.
-[595] See, for example, Skye Cleary, Existentialism and Romantic Love (London: Palgrave 2015), and John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (London: Routledge 2010) 17.
+[195] The full extent of Late Preclassic construction is not known in either case, and massive constructions at Tikal likely hide very substantial public monuments of this period (Culbert 1977).
-[596] Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale UP 2007) 36.
+[196] Recent excavations at the site of Calakmul in southern Campeche suggest that it was a kingdom with a substantial Late Preclassic and Early Classic occupation. David Stuart (personal conversations, 1989) reminded us that the pyramids of El Mirador are visible from the summits of Calakmul’s largest buildings. That great kingdom was very probably a significant player in the demise of El Mirador, and as we shall see in the next chapter, a vigorous rival of Tikal and Uaxactun for dominance of the central Maya region.
-[597] Joseph A. Labadie remarked similarly, “It is immaterial whether one be a Communist or an Individualist so long as he be an Anarchist. Anarchy, as I see it, admits of any kind of organization, so long as membership is not compulsory.” Joseph A. Labadie, “Cranky Notions,” Liberty 5.18 (April 14, 1888): 16.
+[197] The name glyph in Early Classic texts (Fig. 4:10) consists of yax (“first” or “blue-green”), a bamboo square lashed at the corners with rope, and the head of a fish. Lounsbury and Coe (1968) suggested a reading of moch for the “cage” portion of the glyph, and Thompson (1944) proposed a reading of xoc for the mythological fish head in this name. In some examples, these two signs are preceded by yax, perhaps giving Yax- Moch-Xoc as the full name. It is interesting that this moch-xoc glyph appears in the name of Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39, although that ruler is listed as the ninth successor, rather than the founder.
-[598] Giorel Curran, Twenty-First Century Dissent: Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism (London: Palgrave 2007) 35.
+[198] Peter Mathews (1985a:31) first proposed this calculation, which Jones (n.d.) subsequently supported by showing that the 349 tuns between the accessions of the eleventh and twenty-ninth successors divides into an average reign of 19.3 tuns. The kings who ruled between 375 and 455 were the ninth, tenth, and eleventh successors, with the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, acceding in 426. Giving an average reign of one katun each to the ten rulers who preceded him places the founding date of the lineage somewhere between 8.9.0.0.0 (A.D. 219) and 8.10.0.0.0 (A.D. 238). These calculations fit well with the known archaeological history of likal and with the appearance of historical monuments and portable objects inscribed with historical information dated between A.D. 120 and A.D. 200 (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82–83, 199).
-[599] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge: CUP 1995) 7.
+[199] Chris Jones (n.d.) speculates that Stela 36 is even earlier than Stela 29. Found in a plaza at the end of the airfield at Tikal about 3.5 kilometers from the North Acropolis (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:76), this stela may depict one of the unknown rulers between the founder and the ninth successor. The location of this very early monument away from Tikal’s center is curious in any case.
-[600] The first arguably being the rediscovery of Stirner’s book by the individualist anarchists in Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty circle. See Steve J. Shone, American Anarchism (Leiden: Brill 2013) 225.
+[200] Mathews (1985a:44) associates this scroll-jaguar image with another scroll-ahau- jaguar, a glyph at C5 on Stela 31 that he suggests is the name of a ruler. Unfortunately the date associated with this character fell in the destroyed section of Stela 31, so that we are not able to identify this personage as the same ahau portrayed on Stela 29 or as a different one because royal names could be reused in the Maya culture, as in the kingdoms of Western Europe.
-[601] John F. Welsh, Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2010) 24—28.
+[201] The main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph is a bundle of strands bound together by a horizontal band tied in a knot. The anthropomorphic version of this bundle glyph is a Roman-nosed head with a twisted rope or jaguar tail hanging in front of the ear. The kings on Stela 29 and other later monuments wore headdresses with a twisted rope or jaguar tail in the same position as a way of marking themselves as the living embodiment of the Emblem Glyph and thus of the kingdom. This same head substitutes for an ahau glyph half-covered with a jaguar pelt, which Scheie (1985a) read balan-ahau or “hidden lord” in an earlier study of the substitution patters of these glyphs.
+<br>
+<br>In October, 1989, Stephen Houston and David Stuart informed us they had read the same glyph not as balan-ahau but as way, the word for “sorcerer” and “spirit (or animal) companion.” Nikolai Grube sent a letter to us at almost exactly the same time detailing his own reading of this glyph and its head variant. All three suggested to us that the kings on Stela 29 and 31 are depicted in their their roles as “sorcerers” and one who can transform into their animal companions in the Otherworld. We accept their observations and further suggest that when this way head appears in the position of an Emblem Glyph on the lintels of Temple 4 that it refers to the king as the ch’ul way, “the holy shaman.”
-[602] Welsh 28.
+[202] The floating figure on Stela 29 is not named, but we can reconstruct its function from other representations. At Tikal there are two kinds of floating figures: gods materialized through bloodletting, as on Stela 4 and Stela 22, and ancestors recalled by the same rite. This latter type of image is specifically named on Stela 31 as the father of the protagonist Stormy-Sky. Since the floating figure on Stela 29 is patently human, we presume he is the ancestor from whom Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar received the throne.
-[603] Saul Newman, Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Abington, UK: Routledge 2005) 139.
+[203] Scheie and M. Miller (1986:121) called the Leiden Palenque ruler Balam-Ahau- Chaan, while Mathews (1985a:44) called this ruler “Moon-Zero-Bird,” based on the occurrence of his name glyph on Stela 31 at D6-C7 and on the Leiden Plaque at A10. Fahsen (1988b) followed Mathews in the name usage and identified a new occurrence of his name on Altar 13 at Tikal.
-[604] Id.
+[204] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:63–73, 110, 120–121, 319) for detailed discussions of the iconography and inscription on the Leiden Plaque.
-[605] Leonard Williams, “Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchism,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4.2 (Fall 2010): 111.
+[205] David Webster (1977), among other Mayanists, believes that warfare during the early phase of the lowland civilization was instrumental in the establishment of an elite warrior class. These warlords, in his view, launched wars of conquest against less organized neighbors, which yielded them land and booty for their followers. Rising population and a diminishing ratio of arable land to people spurred this kind of warfare and precipitated elitism among the lowland Maya in Webster’s scenario. Webster argues his case from the instance of an impressive early fortification surrounding the center of Becan (Webster 1976). While we find Webster’s work stimulating, we see no clear empirical support for a general condition of conquest warfare during the Late Preclassic period and the first centuries of the Early Classic. Ancient Maya farming settlements, beginning in the Preclassic, were characteristically open and rather dispersed across the landscape until the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 800–1000; see Ashmore 19 81). Although Maya centers certainly contained acropolis constructions suitable for defense as citadels, walled forts of the kind used by populations experiencing direct attack and capable of withstanding siege are not common among these people. Where internecine warfare is aimed at ordinary settled populations in modern and historical preindustrial societies, it often generates a response of nucleated and defended communities. In this regard, a number of Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya are indeed fortified in this fashion (Webster 1979). Our own position is based upon substantive information from texts and images. From the Maya vantage, warfare explicitly served to prove the charisma of kings and high nobility. Ethnohistorical documents (Roys 1962) confirm that such charisma was fundamental to the attraction of population into emergent and flourishing polities (see also Demarest 1986; Chapter 7.) In particular, kingdoms of the Peten, in our view, required and utilized massive organized commoner labor—not only to create and refurbish centers, but also to create and maintain the intensive agricultural systems upon which their economies depended. While the impact of warfare on Maya commoners remains to be elucidated archaeologically, there is positive epigraphic and iconographic evidence to identify the advent of conquest warfare among these people at the close of the fourth century A.D. Preliminary results from research projects aimed at investigating the consequences of conquest warfare (Chase n.d.) indicate that victory indeed economically benefited the winners at the expense of the losers, probably through rigorous tribute extraction (see Roys <verbatim>[1957]</verbatim> for a discussion of predatory tribute at the time of the European Conquest).
-[606] Williams 112.
+[206] The front of the Stela 9 is badly eroded, but the shape, size, and detail of the object in the crook of his right hand correspond to Tikal and Xultún monuments showing rulers holding heads in the guise of deities. The eroded area in front of his legs probably depicted a kneeling captive.
-[607] Hakim Bey, Immediatism (Edinburgh: AK Press 1994) 2.
+[207] An earlier katun ending, 8.4.0.0.0, is recorded on a broken celt in the collections of Dumbarton Oaks (Schele and M. Miller 1986:84–85). Coggins (1979:44–45) suggested that the emphasis on the celebration of the katun cycles was introduced via Uaxactún from Teotihuacán and that the celebration of repetitive cycles in the Long Count versus the commemoration of one-time historical events was an introduction from Teotihuacán. Since Teotihuacán shows no evidence of using or even being aware of the Long Count calendars and since katun celebrations are dependent on having the Long Count, we find it implausible that something so fundamentally and exclusively Maya would have been introduced from Central Mexico and a cultural area that shows no evidence of having ever used the Long Count or the katun as a basis of calculation or celebration.
-[608] John Moore, “Lived Poetry: Stirner, Anarchy, Subjectivity and the Art of Living,” Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age, ed. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen (Manchester: Manchester UP 2004) 57.
+[208] Fahsen (1988b) also identifies Stela 28 as Great-Jaguar-Paw based on the appearance of a prominent jaguar head and paw in the lower left corner of the monument. His identification seems to be a good one, but the style of Stela 28 is a bit problematic, since it would have to mark either 8.16.0.0.0 or 8.17.0.0.0.
-[609] Saul Newman, Postanarchism (Cambridge, UK: Polity 2015) xii.
+[209] Stela 39 was found interred in Structure 5D-86-6 in the Lost World Complex (Laporte and Vega de Zea 1988), a building that sits in the center of a group built on the same plan as the contemporary Group E at Uaxactún. The huge four-staired pyramid, with its talud-tablero terraces, faces on the cast a set of three buildings arranged in the same pattern as Group E at Uaxactún. Group E is known to mark the two solstice points at its outer edges and the equinox in its center. The Lost World complex is much larger in scale and has been identified by Laporte as the work of Great-Jaguar-Paw, whom he believes to be buried in the same building as the stela. The rituals ending the seventeenth katun very probably occurred in the Lost World complex, perhaps atop the great pyramid at its center.
-[610] Kinna 43.
+[210] The date in the surviving text corresponds to a katun ending which most investigators have interpreted as seventeen, giving a reading of 8.17.0.0.0. The name at the top of the surviving text is Jaguar-Paw, which is exactly the name occurring with this date on Stela 31. However, while looking at a cast of this monument at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Ethnologia of Guatemala, Federico Fahsen (personal communication, 1986) suggested that the number is nineteen rather than seventeen. I resisted his suggestion at first, but it has merit. The Jaguar-Paw name is followed by a “child of mother” expression and the name of a female. Furthermore, the very first glyph could well be the yunen “child of parent” glyph identified by David Stuart (1985b:7) on Tikal Stela 31. Jaguar-Paw’s name may, therefore, occur in a parentage statement for the king who ruled Tikal at 8.19.0.0.0, presumably Curl-Snout.
-[611] Bob Black, “Preface,” The Right to be Greedy (Loompanics Unlimited, 1983) [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][library/bob-black-preface-to-the-right-to-be-greedy-by-for-ourselves]] (June 2, 2020)
+[211] This date and the events that occurred on it have been the subject of speculation by Proskouriakoff as quoted by Coggins and by Mathews. Clemency Coggins, following suggestions by Proskouriakoff, has offered several variants of the same essential scenario. Coggins proposed that this date marks the arrival of foreigners in the region, which corresponded either to the death of Great-Jaguar-Paw I or to his loss of power to those foreigners. In the first scenario (Coggins 1976:142; 1979b), she proposed that Curl-Snout, the next ruler to accede at Tikal, was a foreigner from Kaminaljuyu. In the second (Coggins 1979a:42), she suggested that Curl-Snout came from El Mirador via Uaxactún bringing Feotihuacanos with him. These Teotihuaeanos then withdrew’ to Kaminaljuyu around A.D. 450. In yet another interpretation, Coggins (n.d.), following new information from Mathews, proposed that Curl-Snout kidnapped Smoking-Frog, whom she identifies as the daughter of Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal, and took her to Uaxactun on the 8.17.1.2.17 date, where he married her. Curl-Snout then took over Tikal after Great-Jaguar-Paw, his new father-in-law, died.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (1985a:33–46) examined the Tikal-Uaxactun relationship in the larger framework of the Early Classic period. He pointed out that the two sites account for twenty of the thirty-five Cycle 8 monuments and twenty-two of the fifty-two known Cycle 8 dates. The date shared between them is the earliest shared date (not a period ending) now known, and in subsequent history such shared dates “record major battles,” with a few recording important dynastic dates, such as births or accessions. In the records of the shared date at both sites, Mathews identified a person named “Smoking-Frog of Tikal” as the major actor along with Great-Jaguar-Paw, who let blood on this occasion.
+<br>
+<br>Mathews pointed out a pattern of data that is fundamental to interpreting this event. Since Smoking-Frog appears with the Tikal Emblem Glyph at both sites, he was an ahau of Tikal who became the dominant lord at Uaxactun. The conquest of Uaxactun was apparently directed by Smoking-Frog, but Great-Jaguar-Paw, who must have been an old man at the time, also let blood. Smoking-Frog appears as the protagonist of Uaxactun monuments at 8.18.0.0.0. while the ruler Curl-Snout, who succeeded Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal about a year after the conquest, acts at Tikal on the same dates. At Tikal, however, Smoking-Frog’s name appears on all of the Curl-Snout monuments and Curl-Snout acceded “in the land of Smoking-Frog,” suggesting that the new ruler ofTikal held his throne under the authority of Smoking-Frog.
+<br>
+<br>Mathews offered the following explanation for this pattern:
+<br>
+<br>“...if 1 am correct then the nature of the Tikal-Uaxactun ties at this time originates from the placement of Smoking-Frog or of one of his close relatives in power at Uaxactun. This could have been achieved through marriage or by conquest. The nature of the 8.17.1.4.12 event—bloodletting—could be used to support either possibility. Bloodletting was an important feature of both warfare (sacrifice of the captives) and of royal marriages (autosacrifice by the wedding couple). If the event was war, then presumably Tikal imposed a member of its own royal family as ruler of Uaxactun. If the event was marriage, then Tikal apparently married into Uaxactun’s ruling dynasty. Either way, I suspect that Tikal played the dominant role in the relationship between the two sites.”
+<br>
+<br>We accept Mathews’s scenario as the most likely, and we favor his suggestion of conquest as the type of interaction, although a royal marriage may also have resulted from the conquest. The iconography associated with representations of the events are consistently associated with war and bloodletting in Maya history.
-[612] Stirner.
+[212] This censer is composed of a zoomorphic head with a tri-lobe device over its eye. The same head appears on Stela 39 with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a sky sign on top of it. This combination also occurs at Copan, where the Tikal Emblem Glyph main sign is replaced by the bat of Copan in a context where the tri-lobed head can be identified as the head variant of the sign known as the “impinged bone.” Combined with the sky sign, the “impinged bone” and its tri-lobed head variant identify place names or toponyms (Stuart and Houston n.d.). In these cases, the “sky-impinged bone” identify the main sign of the Emblem Glyphs as a geographic location corresponding to the polity as a place. On Stela 39, the place where the event took place is identified as Tikal. On Stela 5, it is Uaxactun, which used the split-sky sign that also identified Yaxchilan, although there is no reason to suppose that the two kingdoms were related.
-[613] Stirner 279.
+[213] The most elaborate example of this complex in its Maya form is on the monument of a Late Classic conqueror. Dos Pilas Stela 2 (Fig. 4:17b), depicts Ruler 3 (Houston and Mathews 1985:17) hulking over his captive, Yich’ak-Balam (Stuart 1987b:27–28), the king of Seibal. Ruler 3 wears the same balloon headdress as Smoking-Frog, but the costume is now in its complete form with a full-bodied jaguar suit, the trapezoidal sign called the Mexican Year Sign, an owl, the goggle-eyed Tlaloc image, and throwing spears and rectangular flexible shields. Piedras Negras Stela 8 (Fig. 4:17a) depicts Ruler 3 of that kingdom in the same costume as he stands on a pyramidal platform with two captives kneeling at this feet.
-[614] Renzo Novatore, “Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution,” The Anarchist Library (Il Libertario, 1919) [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/renzo-novatore-anarchist-individualism-in-the-social-revolution]] (June 2, 2020).
+[214] The date of the Dos Pilas event (which was also recorded on Aguateca Stela 2) and a set of related verbs called “Shell-star” events at other sites were first associated with the periodicities of Venus by David Kelley (1977b). Michael Goss (1979) and Floyd Lounsbury (1982) showed this category of event to be associated with the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar and the two elongation points. Lounsbury went on to add Jupiter and Saturn stationary points to the astronomical phenomenon included in this complex.
+<br>
+<br>Berthold Riese (in Baudez and Mathews 1979:39) first suggested that the star-shell events were war related, a hypothesis that Mary Miller (1986b:48—51, 95–130) has brilliantly supported with her analysis of the inscriptions and imagery in Room 2 of the Bonampak murals. These paintings depict one of the most amazing battle scenes known from the history of art, all under a register that shows stars being thrown into the scene from the heavens. The day is an inferior conjunction of Venus with a heliacal rising of Morningstar probable on the next day (M. Miller 1986b:51). The day of the event, August 2, 792, was also a zenith passage and the constellations that appear in the east just before the dawn of that day, Cancer and Gemini, are also represented on the register.
+<br>
+<br>The Uaxactun costume with its spearthrower, balloon headdress, and bird is regularly associated with these shell-star events. The costume also appears in scenes of self-inflicted bloodletting (Scheie 1984a), such as those shown on Lintels 24 and 25 of Yaxchilan, where a drum-turban decorated with tassels occurs with the complex. Other icons in the complex include the trapezoidal design known as the Mexican Year Sign and the goggle-eyed image known as Tlaloc to the later Aztecs. Along with the balloon headdress, spearthrowers, owls, flexible shield, a jaguarian image made of mosaic pattern, and a full-body jaguar suit, this set of imagery forms a special ritual complex that meant war and sacrifice to the Maya (see Scheie and M. Miller [198 6:17 5–240]).
+<br>
+<br>This complex of imagery also appears at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Kaminaljuyu, Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and numerous other sites throughout Mesoamerica between A.D. 450 and 900. First discovered at Kaminaljuyu (Kidder, Jennings, and Shook 1946), this merging of traditional Maya imagery with Teotihuacân-style imagery has been taken to signal the presence of Teotihuacanos at the Maya sites, especially at Tikal (Coggins 1976, 1979a, 1979b). Teotihuacan certainly had the same complex of iconography and there it was associated with war (Pasztory 1974) and with sacrifice (Oakland 1982 and Parsons 1985). Teotihuacan has been seen by many of these researchers as the innovator of this ritual complex and the donor and dominant partner in all instances where this complex of iconography appears in non-Teotihuacan contexts. We argue that the relationship between the Maya and Teotihuacan during the Classic period is far more complex that these explanations suppose. See René Millon (1988) for his evaluation of the interaction from the viewpoint of Teotihuacan.
-[615] Janet Biehl, ed., The Murray Bookchin Reader (London: Black Rose Books 1999) 164.
+[215] The same iconography appears in later inscriptions with an glyph juxtaposing the sign for Venus with “earth” or the main signs of Emblem Glyphs. This type of war we shall call “star-shell” war or simply “star war.”
-[616] Paul Thomas, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” Political Theory 3.2 (1975): 159.
+[216] The coincidence of this iconographie complex with Venus and Jupiter/Saturn stations of importance to the Maya (the heliacal risings of morning and evening stars, the eastern and western elongation points of Venus, and the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn) is overwhelming. This particular kind of war costume and related iconography occurs at the following sites associated with the following astronomical and historical events:
+<br>
-[617] Welsh 43n30.
+<br>(1) 17.1.4.12—1/16/378: Uaxactun St. 5, conquest by Tikal on a day with no detected astronomical associations
+<br>
-[618] Dora Marsden, “Views and Comments,” The Egoist 1.5 (Mar. 2, 1914): 199.
+<br>(2) 9.4.3.0.7—10/19/517: Piedras Negras Lintel 12, display of captive with visiting lords 7 days before maximum elongation (-.7) of Morningstar
+<br>
-[619] Of Marsden’s The New Freewoman, Tucker wrote, “I consider your paper the most important publication in existence.”
+<br>(3) 9.4.5.6.16—2/5/520: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded event, first appearance of Eveningstar (26 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
-[620] Saul Newman, “Introduction: Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts,” Newman, Stirner 12.
+<br>(4) 9.8.0.0.0—8/24/593: Lacanja St. 1, period ending rite on the first appearance of the Eveningstar (33 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
-[621] David Berry, “The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guerin and the ‘Synthesis’ of Marxism and Anarchism,” Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red, ed. Alex Prichard et al. (London: Palgrave 2012) 199.
+<br>(5) 9.8.13.10.0—1/4/607: Piedras Negras, Lintel 4, unknown event 17 days before maximum elongation (-1.7) of Eveningstar
+<br>
-[622] Anne Fernihough, Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism (Oxford: OUP 2013) 180.
+<br>(6) 9.8.14.17.16—6/3/608 and 9.9.12.0.0—3/10/625: Lamanai St. 9, days of no astronomical associations
+<br>
-[623] Dora Marsden, “Intermediate Sexual Types,” The New Freewoman 8.1 (Oct. 1, 1913): 155.
+<br>(7) 9.9.15.0.0—2/23/628: Piedras Negras St. 26, period-ending rites 5 days after maximum elongation (-.14) of Morningstar
+<br>
-[624] Dora Marsden, “Views and Comments,” The New Freewoman 2.1 (July 1, 1913): 24.
+<br>(8) 9.10.6.2.1—2/6/639: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, death of Ruler 1, retrograde before inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
-[625] Id.
+<br>(9) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, a mosaic helmet with Palenque Triad on first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
-[626] David Ashford, Autarchies: The Invention of Selfishness (London: Bloomsbury 2017) 62.
+<br>(10) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Piedras Negras St. 34, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
-[627] I refer here to the long-running debate between “gender critical” radical feminists who have advocated, for example, “womyn-born womyn” positions and policies and the transgender movement generally. For more on this debate and the relationship between feminism and transgender theory generally, see Talia Bettcher, “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford U 2009) [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism/trans/ ]](June 2, 2020).
+<br>(11) 9.11.6.1.8—10/11/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, war event of Ruler 2; Jupiter is 1.44 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (345.41)
+<br>
-[628] Leopold xl.
+<br>(12) 9.11.6.2.1—10/24/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 2, war event with heir and youths from Bonampak and Yaxchilan; Jupiter is .45 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (344.46)
+<br>
-[629] Yvonne Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850—1930 (London: Palgrave 2009) 79.
+<br>(13) 9.11.9.8.6—2/10/662: Piedras Negras St. 35, eroded (6 days before shell-star event); Jupiter is .40 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (89.68)
+<br>
+<br>(14) 9.11.15.0.0—7/28/667: Chicago Ballcourt Panel, bailgame sacrifice by Zac- Balam: Jupiter is .06 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point
+<br>
+<br>(15) 9.12.0.0.0—7/1/672: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, mosaic helmet verb with Palenque Triad 5 days after maximum elongation (-.73) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(16) 9.12.7.16.17—4/27/680: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded action of Lady of Site Q, 12 days after maximum elongation (-.776) of Morningstar
+<br>
+<br>(17) 9.12.9.8.1—10/23/681: Yaxchilan Lintel 25, accession of Shield-Jaguar and fish-in-hand bloodletting by Lady Xoc; Jupiter is .17 after 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (318.27)
+<br>
+<br>(18) 9.12.10.0.0—5/10/682: Copan St. 6, period-ending rites on the retrograde position after inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(19) 9.12.11.13.0—1/20/684: Palenque, Group of the Cross, end of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rite 11 days before the maximum elongation of Morningstar (-.53)
+<br>
+<br>(20) 9.12.14.10.11—11/16/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, macah of Lady Ahpo-Katun, 4 days before maximum elongation (-.20) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(21) 9.12.14.10.19—11/19/686: Piedras Negras St. 8 and 7, death of Ruler 2, 1 day before maximum elongation (-.10) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(22) 9.12.14.10.17—11/22/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, nawah of Lady Ahpo Katun, 2 days after maximum elongation (-.18) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(23) 9.12.14.11.1—11/26/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, preaccession rite of Ruler 3, 6 days after maximum elongation (-.62) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(24) 9.12.18.5.16—7/23/690: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication rites for the Group of the Cross, complex conjunction with Jupiter .33 after its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (221.43), Saturn at its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary (225.50), Mars at 219.20, and the moon at 232.91
+<br>
+<br>(25) 9.12.19.14.12—1/10/692: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication of the sanctuary buildings, 23 days before maximum elongation (-1.67) of Morningstar and 8<sup>th</sup>-tropical year anniversary of Chan-Bahlum’s accession
+<br>
+<br>(26) 9.13.3.8.11—8/21/695: Tikal, Structure 5D-57, nawah by Ruler A; Jupiter is .42 before the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (45.64); Saturn is at 2<sup>nd</sup> station (282.4)
+<br>
+<br>(27) 9.13.3.9.18—9/17/695: Tikal, Temple 1, Lintel 3, bloodletting and 13<sup>th</sup> katun anniversary of the last date on Stela 31; Jupiter is .36 after the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (45.70): Saturn is at its 2<sup>nd</sup> station
+<br>
+<br>(28) 9.13.17.15.12—10/28/709; Yaxchilan Lintel 24, bloodletting of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar; Jupiter is .58 after the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (117.20); Saturn at 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (114.92)
+<br>
+<br>(29) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Naranjo St. 1, action by Smoking-Squirrel on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(30) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Piedras Negras St. 7, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(31) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Tikal St. 16, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(32) 9.14.9.7.2—3/9/721: Piedras Negras St. 7, 17<sup>th</sup> tun anniversary of Ruler 3’s accession; Jupiter is .81 after the 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (81.05); Saturn at 1<sup>st</sup> (249.77)
+<br>
+<br>(33) 9.15.0.0.0—8/22/731: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), period-ending 5 days before maximum elongation (-.125) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(34) 9.15.4.6.9—12/3/735: Aguateca 2 and Dos Pilas 16, star over Seibal war on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(35) 9.15.5.3.13—10/7/736: Piedras Negras St. 9, 7<sup>th</sup> tun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession, 21 days before maximum elongation (-2.66) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(36) 9.16.4.1.1—5/9/755. Yaxchilan Lintels 8 and 41, capture of Jeweled-Skull by Bird-Jaguar on a day with no detected astronomical associations
+<br>
+<br>(37) 9.17.0.0.0—1/24/771: Tikal St. 22, scattering rite, visible eclipse 15 days after superior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(38) 9.17.5.8.9—6/15/776: Bonampak St. 2, accession of Muan-Chaan 14 days before maximum elongation (-.74) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(39) 9.17.15.3.13—1/18/786: Bonampak St. 3, capture??? by Muan Chaan 13 days before maximum elongation (-.55) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(40) 9.18.0.0.0—10/11/790: Cancuen 1, period-ending rites 14 days before maximum. elongation (-.43) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(41) 9.18.1.15.15—8/16/792): Bonampak Room 2, battle to take captives on the zenith passage of sun and the inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(42) 10.1.0.0.0—11/30/849: Ixlú St. 2, scattering rite, 16 days after maximum elongation (-.95) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>To test that these astronomical associations are not the product of the natural periodicity of planetary motions and thus coincidental, we calculated the dates and planetary data for every hotun (five-tun period) in Classic history. The pattern holds. The flaloc-war iconography appears when a period-ending date coincided with a important Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn station, and it does not appear on dates without these associations.
+<br>
+<br>If the Tlaloc complex was borrowed from Teotihuacán, an interpretation that seems likely, it may have come with the astronomical associations already in place. However, we will not be able to test that possibility since no Teotihuacán art or architectural objects have dates recorded on them. The Teotihuacanos apparently did not consider the calendar or the days on which the events of myth and history occurred to be important public information. Thus, the astronomical associations with this ritual complex may well have come into being after the Maya borrowed it and made it their own.
-[630] Ivory 59.
+[217] We do not understand the full four-glyph phrase yet, but the first glyph is a hand with a jewel suspended from the extended first finger. This same sign is used as the principal verb for the completion of katuns and other period endings, especially when recording the katuns with a reign. Thrice this verb is written with its phonetic spelling appended to it: once on Tortugucro Monument 6, a second time on Naranjo Altar 1, and finally on Copán Stela A (Fig. 4:18). These spellings have a shell marked by three dots superfixed to a sign identified in Landa as ma or surrounded by a dotted circle, generally accepted as the syllable mo. The shell sign is the main glyph in the verb identified in the Dresden and Madrid codices and in the inscriptions of Chichén Itzá as the “fire drill” glyph. For many years, we presumed this glyph to read hax. the back and forth motion of the hands that drives the drill. Recently, however, Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1987) reinterpreted this glyph to read hoch’, also a term for “to drill or perforate” in Yucatec. The shell in his spelling has the value ho, giving the value ho-m(a) and ho-m(o) for the “completion” hand discussed above. In Choi and Yucatec, horn is “to end or finish (acabarse)” (see Aulie and Aulie 1978:66 and Barrera Vasquez 1980:231). Homophones in Yucatec mean “a boundary between property” and most important, “to knock down or demolish buildings or hills (desplomar lo abovedado, derribar edificios, cerros).” The latter meaning especially seems appropriate to the context of conquest.
+<br>
+<br>[[]]
+<br>
+<br>David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) takes the horn discussed above to spell the future suffix on a root ending in -h. Stephen Houston, following Stuart, has suggested lah, a word meaning “to end or finish in Yucatec. This reading is the other possibility, although we find it less likely because in other contexts, such as the west panel of the Temple of Inscriptions, the ma phonetic complement is retained when other tense/aspects are distinguished by different suffixes. However, if this lah suggestion proves to be the correct reading, it still provides an appropriate meaning to the event—that the battle “finished” or “ended” the defeat of Uaxactún.
+<br>
+<br>Regardless of which reading proves to be the correct one in the long run. the association of the “completion” hand with war events seems to be clear. On Lintel 3 of Tikal Temple 4, for example, the same verb appears with an event that took place one day after a “star-war” event against Yaxhá (see glyph C7a on the lintel).
-[631] John Beverley Robinson, “Egoism,” Slaves to Duty, by John Badcock, Jr. (Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1972) 32.
+[218] Mathews (1985a:44) observed that the first of the glyphs recording this bloodletting action shows the lower half of a body sitting on its heels in the position assumed by a man when drawing blood from his penis (Joralemon 1974). Mathews suggested the glyph is a direct reference to male bloodletting. Federico Fahsen (1987) has documented other occurrences of the same verb at Tikal with the same meaning. The second verb shows a hand with its thumb extended as it grips a lancet of some sort. The same sign appears in the Early Classic version of the west glyph, which is shown on Yaxchilán Lintel 53 as a monster head biting down on the glyph for the sun. In the two examples of this verb on Stela 31, the hand with lancet has a ba or a bi sign attached to it, producing in the Maya way of spelling a term which should end in -ab or -ib. In Yucatec, the word for west in chikin, “bitten or eaten sun”; the word for “to bite” is chi’; and the word for “bitten” and “to prick or puncture” is chi’bal (Barrera Vasquez 1980:92). The verb is apparently chi’bah, “he was punctured.”
-[632] See, for example, the works of E. Armand and Renzo Novatore, among others.
+[219] Prescott Follett (1932) compiled a useful summary of the weapons and armor depicted in Maya art as well as Colonial descriptions of warfare. Mary Miller’s (1986b) analysis of the Bonampak murals gives evidence of a battle in progress while Schele (1984a), Dillon (1982), and Taube (1988b) discuss the aftermath of battle.
-[633] Newman, Postanarchism 20.
+[220] Marisela Ayala Falcon has called our attention to what is perhaps the most astounding and poignant episode in our entire story. Stela 5, the tree-stone depicting the conqueror Smoking-Frog, was set directly in front of Temple B-VI1I (Fig. 4:5). Excavated by the Carnegie Institution in the thirties, this building was uniquely constructed as a mausoleum. Ledyard Smith (1950:101) describes a tomb built like a chultun directly under the floor of the upper temple and extending down to the bedrock below. He cites the type of loose fill and the construction technique used in the substructure as evidence that the tomb “chamber was constructed at the same time as the substructure” (Smith 1950:52).
+<br>
+<br>Stela 5, the conquest monument, was located in the center of the temple stairs. The stela “lies only a few centimeters from the center of the lowest step of the stairway. The floor was laid at the time of the stairway and turns up to the stela, which was not put through it” (Smith 1950:52). On the other hand, Stela 4, Smoking-Frog’s 8.18.0.0.0 monument, was erected by cutting through this same floor. The stairway and floor then were completed when Stela 5 was set in its place, thus identifying the temple as a victory monument constructed to celebrate the same events as Stela 5.
+<br>
+<br>Of the tomb, Ledyard Smith (1950:52) said this: “It is of interest that it [Temple VIII] was probably built as a burial place; and that the tomb, which contained five skeletons, is one of the few at the site that held more than a single body; and that it is the only example of a group burial found at Uaxactún.” The five people buried in it comprise the most extraordinary detail of all. Smith (1950:101) reported the skeletons included an adult female who was pregnant when she died, a second adult female, a child, and an infant. That the only group grave at Uaxactún should happen to be located in a tomb constructed inside the temple celebrating Tikal’s victory is no accident. The identity of the dead as two women, an unborn child, an infant, and an older child is no coincidence either. These people were surely the wives and children of the defeated king. They were killed and placed inside the victory monument to end forever the line of kings who had ruled Uaxactún.
+<br>
+<br>The defeated king himself was likely taken to Tikal to meet his end. His family stayed at Uaxactún watching the victors construct the new temple at the end of the causeway that connected the huge temple complexes of the city (Group A and B according to archaeological nomenclature). They must have known the tomb was being constructed in the substructure and who would occupy it.
+<br>
+<br>The scene of their deaths can be reconstructed also. A circular shaft dropped to a ledge cut midway down and then fell another couple of meters to the bedrock floor below, dropping five meters in all. The bottom of the shaft widened on its east-west axis to torm the burial chamber. The pregnant woman died and fell on her side with her knees drawn up around her unborn child. Her body lay in the southwest corner. The other woman lay along the north wall with the child lying next to her waist in the center of the tomb. The infant was thrown into the southeast corner. Plates, bowls, and jugs, probably containing food for their journey, were placed around them and then the chamber was sealed with what Smith (1950:101) called an “elaborate stucco adorno painted red. [The] adorno [was] set into the shaft and covered with the floor of the temple.”
-[634] Id.
+[221] Despite the crucial role of weaponry in any interpretation of combat tactics, the investigation of Maya chipped-stone weapon tips remains in the preliminary stages. The hypothesis presented here, that the Teotihuacanos introduced the spearthrower as a weapon in the Maya lowlands, is not original to us. For example, Irvin Rovner (1976:46), from the vantage of Becan, and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (1976:96), from the vantage of Tikal, both note the linkage between the stemmed projectile form and imported Mexican obsidian in the time of the known Early Classic contacts. Gordon Willey (1972:161–177; 1978:102–105) provides some overview discussion of the development of lowland Maya bifacially chipped point-shaped artifacts. The relatively smaller stemmed varieties of point are characteristic of the Late Classic period. Although the function of such points is a matter for empirical investigation through microscopic inspection of edge damage, these points arc in the appropriate range for projectile weapons, such as the spear flung using a throwing-stick. The relatively larger laurel-leaf-shaped points, suitable for the thrusting spears and explicitly depicted by the Classic Maya in their war art, definitely occur by Early Classic times at such sites as Uaxactun and Altar de Sacrificios and persist throughout the Late Classic. During the Late Preclassic period, the smaller stemmed varieties of bifacial point are absent from such communities as Cerros (Mitchum 1986); the characteristic pointed artifact is the large, stemmed, plano-convex macroblade “tanged dagger.” This artifact is suitable for a shock weapon such as the thrusting spear, but not for a projectile weapon; it is broadly distributed in Late Preclassic times throughout the Maya region (Sheets 1976). Nevertheless, there is some preliminary evidence from even earlier contexts tentatively identified as Archaic hunter-gatherer groups in Belize (MacNeish 1981) for the presence of projectile weapons among the original inhabitants of the lowlands. We surmise that while the Maya probably always knew about the throwing-stick and its spear, it did not figure prominently in their politics until it was declared a weapon of war by Great-Jaguar-Paw. In all, the stone-artifact evidence will provide a useful arena for the further exploration of the hypothesized change in battle tactics after A.D. 400.
-[635] See generally Saul Newman, “Politics of the Ego,” Newman, Power 13—30.
+[222] Mathews (1985a:44—45) proposed much the same interpretation, but there are problems with the calendrics of this passage, which may lead to a different interpretation. The date at the beginning of this passage is clearly 10 Caban 10 Yaxkin with G4 as the Lord of the Night. This particular combination occurred only on 8.6.3.16.17, a date much too early for the chronology of this text and its actors. Christopher Jones, Tatiana Pros- kouriakoff, and others (see C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:70) have pointed out that the accession date on Stela 4 is 5 Caban 10 Yaxkin with the same G4, and thus the date on Stela 31 has been accepted as an error. The problems with this interpretation are twofold:
+<br>
+<br>(1) 8 Men is written just above this Calendar Round on Stela 31 and 8 Men is exactly two days before 10 Caban, reinforcing the likelihood of a 10 Caban reading.
+<br>
+<br>(2) The clause preceding this date records the dedication of a house named Wi-te-na. The reconstruction of the date of this dedication event is problematic because part of the passage was destroyed in the ritual burning that accompanied deposit of Stela 31 in Temple 33. However, if the date recorded immediately before this burned area belongs to the house dedication, it took place 17 tuns, 12 uinals, and 10 kins (or 17.10.12, since the Distance Number could be read either way) after the conquest of Uaxactun. This chronology gives a date of 8.17.18.17.2 11 Ik 15 Zip (June 26, 395) or 8.17.18.15.4 12 Kan 17 Pop (May 19, 395). The relevance of this dedication date is that the 10 (or 5) Caban 10 Yaxkin event, which has been taken to be Curl-Snout’s accession, took place both in “the land of Smoking-Frog” and in the Wi-te-na. Unless the house dedicated seventeen years after the conquest of Uaxactun carried the same name as an earlier house, the Stela 31 event must have taken place after the house was dedicated.
+<br>
+<br>In this second interpretation, the day of the event would be 8.19.7.9.17 10 Caban 10 ‘ axkin (September 2, 423), but the Lord of the Night would be in error, for this day requires G8. Fortunately, the historical argument we propose in this chapter does not depend on the precise date of this event, for the date is not the critical information. Regardless of the timing of the action, the protagonist clearly is Ciirl-Snont, but he acts ‘in the land of Smoking-Frog.” The ahau of higher rank is Smoking-Frog.
-[636] Newman, “Politics” 28.
+[223] The deep interaction of Tikal and Uaxactiin during this period is further supported by the Early Classic murals in Uaxactun Temple XIII. The murals show two high-rank males confronting each other across a three-column-wide text. Next to them sits a palace building with three women sitting inside, and beyond the house, two registers with several scenes of ongoing rituals. The style of dress, the ceramics associated with the building, and the style of the glyphs (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1989) date the mural to approximately the time of Uolantun Stela 1 (8.18.0.0.0) and Tikal Stela 31 (9.0.10.0.0). The main text of the mural has the name of a person called Mah Kina Mo’ (Lord Macaw) and perhaps the name of Stormy-Sky of Tikal. Most interesting, Fahsen (1988a) reports an inscription found on a headless statue in Temple 3D-43, a structure located at the juncture of the Maier and Maudslay causeways. The inscription dates to the time around 8.18.10.8.12 (November 5, 406) and it includes a character named K’u-Mo’. We have no way now of knowing if these two references to someone named Macaw refer to the same person, but the time and place are right.
-[637] Stirner 97.
+[224] David Stuart (in a letter dated February 10, 1988) suggested a reading of yilan (or yitah) for the T565 relationship glyph first identified by Kelley (1962) at Quirigua. In Chorti, this term means “the sibling of.” Ihtan is the root, while y is the possessive pronoun used with vowel-initial words. We (Scheie n.d.e) have tested this reading at Tikal, Caracol, Chichen Itza, and other Maya sites and found it to be productive. It is used, for example, to represent the relationship between two kings of Caracol (Rulers IV and V) who were born less than twelve years apart.
-[638] Newman, Power 14.
+[225] At Palenque and Yaxchilan, a horned owl and a shield substitute for each other in the names of the ruler Pacal and G3 of the Lords of the Night. The owl in this context appears with a spearthrowing dart penetrating its body or its head. Exactly this combination occurs in the headdress on Stela 31, which depicts the dart-pierced bird with the shield over its wing. In the title, the spearthrower dart is replaced by the spearthrower itself, so that “spearthrower-owl” and “spearthrower-shield” and combinations of the “spearthrower dart” with the bird and the shield are all variations of the same name.
+<br>
+<br>[[][Spearthrower and owl from the Tikal Ballcourt Marker]]
+<br>
+<br>Virginia Fields (personal communication, 1989) pointed out to me the importance of Stela 32 (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982: Fig. 55a) to the spearthrower-owl identification. This fragment was found in Problematic Deposit 22, a dedication cache intruded into the stair of Structure 5D-26-lst in the North Acropolis. The image depicts a front-view person dressed in regalia identical to the shield carried by C url-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. However, hanging over the chest of the figure is a crested bird very similar if not identical to the bird medallion on Stormy-Sky’s headdress. If Fields’s identification of this bird as the owl in the spearthrower title is correct, then the title is directly associated with the war costume worn by Curl-Snout, just as we propose.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (personal communication, December 1989) presented us with the final piece of the puzzle by pointing out an entry in the Cordemex dictionary of 1 ucatec (Barrera Vasquez 1980:342) and its relationship to the phonetic value of the cauac sign as cu. The entry has ku (cu in our orthography) as “the omen owl, owl, bird of prophesy in the books of Chilam Balam.” This cu word for “owl” also occurs in Choi and in Tzcltal where it is registered as cuh. Since the objects at the corners of the shield are thought to have the phonetic value hi or he in glyphic contexts, the entire configuration may be the full spelling cu-h(e). Mathews’s observations thus identify the cauac-marked shield as a direct phonetic spelling of the owl and, just as important, with an owl specifically associated with prophecy and fortune-telling. Phis particular association apparently had a very ancient history that derived from the owl’s prominent role in this war iconography.
-[639] Kinna 44–45.
+[226] This final event on Stela 31 took place on June 11, 439, in the Julian calendar when Venus was Morningstar and 44.93+ from the sun. The maximum elongation occurred fifteen days later on June 27 with Venus at 45.62+ from the sun, or .69+ beyond the June 11 position. However, June 11 can be taken as an arrival position for eastern elongation, the point at which Venus is farthest from the ecliptic of the sun as we see them from earth, and on that day Venus was magnitude -4.4, about as bright as it gets. 1 his date then belongs to the same category of astronomical hierophany as the war/Tlaloc events discussed above (See Note 47).
-[640] Newman, “Introduction: Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts,” Stirner 13.
+[227] The text on Stela 31 concerning Curl-Snout has proven to be extremely resistant to decipherment. The events and actors as we understand now are as follows:
+<br>
-[641] Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (New York, NY: Benj. R. Tucker 1907) ix.
+<br>(1) On 8.17.18.17.2 (June 26, 395) a temple named Wi-te-na was dedicated by Curl-Snout.
+<br>
+<br>(2) On 8.17.2.16.17 (September 13, 379) or 8.19.7.9.17 (September 2, 423), Curl- Snout engaged in a dynastic event that involved displaying a scepter “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (see Note 53 for a discussion of this problematic date).
+<br>
+<br>(3) On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396), Curl-Snout ended Katun 18 in his own land as a one-katun ahau, a title that indicates a person was under twenty years old or else still in his first katun of reign when the event happened. If he was under twenty years old more than seventeen years after his accession, he was indeed young when he acceded, perhaps explaining why Smoking-Frog appears to be the dominant ahau in the kingdom.
+<br>
+<br>(4) On 8.19.5.2.5 (April 13, 421) an unknown event was done by an unknown person.
+<br>
+<br>(5) On 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, 411) another event occurred, but the record of it is lost in the damaged area of the text. We do not know who the actor was, but the event occurs on one of the most extraordinary astronomical hierophanies we have yet discovered in Maya inscriptions. Since July of 411, Jupiter and Saturn had been within four degrees of each other, hovering around an azimuth reading of 72+ as they crisscrossed each other in a triple conjunction that would finally end in March of the following year. This day occurred shortly after the second of these conjunctions just when Venus had swung out 47.22^ to its maximum elongation as Eveningstar.
+<br>
+<br>Federico Fahsen (1988b) has posited that the lost event associated with this date was the accession of Stormy-Sky. We find his suggestion interesting because its fits so well with the chronology of the text on Stela 1 and the date in Burial 48, which is generally accepted as Stormy-Sky’s tomb. Since Stela 1 records the “completion of the second katun” of Stormy-Sky’s reign, he must have reigned at least forty years. Moreover, if 9.1.1.10.10 (March 20, 457), the date painted on the walls of Burial 48, is taken as Stormy-Sky’s death (Coggins 1976:186), then the accession must have been at least two katuns earlier—or 8.19.1.10.10, at the latest. 8.19.10.0.0, the date most of us have taken as his accession date, not only falls after that limit, but its 2-katun anniversary fell on 9.1.10.0.0, nine years after the death date. In contrast, Fahsen’s earlier date has its 2-katun anniversary on 9.0.15.11.0, six years before the tomb date and just after the latest date on Stela 31, 9.0.14.15.15 (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:73). This chronology is much more satisfactory.
+<br>
+<br>We also find support for Fahsen’s suggestion in the fragmentary glyph that follows the 8.18.15.11.0 date on Stela 31. It resembles the T168:518 accession glyph that is used at Naranjo and Palenque. If this date is the accession of Stormy-Sky, then the date under 442 above is likely to correspond to the earlier placement.
+<br>
+<br>(6) On 8.19.10.0.0 (February 1, 426), Stormy-Sky, the son of Curl-Snout, became king or else completed the half-period of the nineteenth katun.
-[642] James J. Martin, Men Against the State 251, 14.
+[228] There may have been earlier records of the event, but they have not survived into modern times or archaeologists have not yet found them.
-[643] We must take care not to confuse Tucker’s use of “philosophical anarchism” with the technical meaning often assigned to the term by contemporary scholars. Tucker explicitly supports the elimination of the state, whereas, as a technical term today, “philosophical anarchism” may describe the view that even if the state is desirable in a certain sense, there are reasons that we are not obligated to obey its rules.
+[229] The period of thirteen katuns was very important in Maya thought. The thirteen numbers of the tzolkin (260-day calendar) divided into the 7,200 days of a katun gives a remainder of + 11 or -2. Thus, each time the Long Count advances one katun it reaches the same day name combined with a number two less than the starting point, as in the consecutive katun endings 6 Ahau, 4 Ahau, 2 Ahau, 13 Ahau, 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, and so forth. It takes thirteen katuns to cycle back to the original combination. The 12 Etz’nab 11 Zip (9.0.3.9.18) of the Stela 31 passage cycled back on the katun wheel thirteen katuns later on 9.13.3.9.18 12 Etz’nab 11 Zac. On the occasion of that anniversary, the Late Classic descendant of Stormy-Sky conducted his own bloodletting and war in an episode we will encounter in the next chapter.
-[644] Joshua King Ingalls, “Uprightness the Only Path to Safety: A Sermon,” Libertarian Labyrinth, [[http://wiki.libertarian-labyrinth.org][http://wiki.]] [[http://wiki.libertarian-labyrinth.org][libertarian-labyrinth.org/index.php?title=Uprightness_the_only_Path_to_Safety]] (August 17, 2020).
+[230] This Ballcourt Marker was found inside an altar set inside a court on the north end of Group 6C-XVI-Sub (Fialko 1988 and Laporte 1988). The altar platform was built with a single Teotihuacán-style talud-tablero terrace, a short stairway leading to its summit on which the marker was once mounted in an upright position (Fig. 4:23). We believe that this group was a nonroyal compound, probably for a favored noble lineage subordinate to the high king.
-[645] See William Gary Kline, The Individualist Anarchists: A Critique of Liberalism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1987), in which Kline argues that individualist anarchism was, rather than a truly radical critique of American society, merely a peculiar example of liberalism. Albert Weisbord similarly contends that individualist anarchists like Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin R. Tucker represent a “bourgeois Liberal-Anarchism” fundamentally unlike other more radical anarchisms. Weisbord, The Conquest of Power (New York, NY: Covici-Friede 1937): 225.
+[231] A ballcourt marker with depictions very similar to these murals was found on a ranch in La Ventilla near Teotihuacán in 1963 and is now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico. This Teotihuacan example is made in four pieces joined by tenons and, at 2.13 meters, is twice the size of the meter-high Tikal example (Bernal <verbatim>1969:#8).</verbatim> The Denver Art Museum owns a third example, but we know nothing of its provenience.
-[646] See, for example, Welsh 36; Jason McQuinn, “John Clark’s Stirner: A Critical Review of Max Stirner’s Egoism,” [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-mcquinn-john-clark-s-stirner-a-critical-review-of-]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][max-stirner-s-egoism]] (June 2, 2020).
+[232] This is a unique piece of Mesoamcrican history. First, the lowland Maya of the Preclassic period kingship already celebrated royal events in conjunction with the bailgame played with rubber balls, as we have seen at the center of Cerros where ballcourts are linked to the image of the severed head of the Jaguar Sun. The bailgame is the fundamental metaphor of life out of death: The sacrifice of the Ancestors and their apotheosis occurs in the context of ballgames with the lords of Xibalba. The form of sacrifice associated with the ballgame is specifically decapitation; we have seen that the kings of Tikal and Uaxactún focused upon the severed head resulting from such acts. Further, we know that the severed head of the sun and the bailgame are both central to Maya concepts of warfare.
+<br>
+<br>All well and good: But the lowland Maya did not play the bailgame with markers like the one found at Tikal. Their courts could have carved stones laid into the playing surfaces and sometimes rings or tenoned sculptures mounted in the side walls. The Tikal Ballcourt Marker is a Teotihuacán-style artifact that was used in an entirely different game played with a smaller ball, with sticks, and without courts. Eric Taladoire (1981) has summarized the evidence for this distinctive Early Classic bailgame in his comprehensive review of the Mcsoamerican ballgame. At Teotihuacán, this kind of ballcourt marker and game are depicted in the Mural of Tlalocán, and an actual stone marker was discovered in the La Ventilla Complex at this city. Outside of Teotihuacán, examples of this kind of marker are found in the western region of Mesoamerica; one example is reported from Kaminaljuyu, which clearly had significant ties to Tikal and other lowland Maya capitals during this period (Brown 1977). The Tikal example seems to be of local manufacture, since the long inscription on its shaft is clearly Mayan and refers to local events, but its form deliberately emulates the style of the Teotihuacán game.
-[647] Lawrence S. Stepelevich, “Hegel and Stirner: Thesis and Antithesis,” Idealistic Studies 6.3 (September 1976) [[http://www.unionofegoists.com][www.unionofegoists.com/authors/stirner/max-stirner-criticism/hegel-and-stirner-thesis-and-antithesis-by-]] [[http://www.unionofegoists.com][lawrence-stepelevich/]] (June 2, 2020).
+[233] The date of this accession is somewhat problematical. The best solution gives 8.16.17.9.0 11 Ahau 3 Uayeb (May 5, 374) for the date of accession, with the alternative being 8.18.5.1.0 11 Ahau 13 Pop (May 10, 411) (Fialko 1988).
-[648] David Leopold, “Max Stirner,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 2019) [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://]] [[https://plato.stanford.edu][plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/ ]](June 2, 2020).
+[234] Pendergast (1971) found green obsidian in a Late Preclassic cache at Altun Ha, while Hammond reports green obsidian in Late Preclassic contexts at Nohmul (Hammond n.d.). Later materials in Teotihuacan style are known from a cache at Becan (Ball 1974b, 1979, 1983), and Burials 10 and 48 at Tikal (W. R. Coe 1965a). Conversely, Maya-style artifacts have been excavated at Teotihuacan (Linne 1934, 1942 and Ball 1983). The appearance of these objects imported from the opposite region or manufactured in the style of the other culture signals the opening of an extensive interchange network that moved material goods as well as ideas and symbols throughout Mesoamerica.
-[649] Welsh 269.
+[235] The Tlaloc complex of imagery is particularly associated with the “star-shell” type of war we have been discussing as battle timed by Venus and Jupiter hierophanies (Scheie 1979, n.d.; Lounsbury 1982; M. Miller 1986b; Closs 1979). Many of the territorial conquests in which rulers of known sites were captured are associated with this complex: Caracol’s defeat of Tikal and Naranjo; Tonina’s defeat of Palenque; Dos Pilas’s defeat of Seibal; Piedras Ncgras’s defeat of Pomona; Tikal’s defeat of Yaxha; and more.
+<br>
+<br>Most captives in Maya art are shown as individuals, some named by glyphs incised on their bodies, most unnamed and anonymous. Their captors stand on captives bodies or display them publicly as offerings whose presentation will gain them merit with the gods. Named prisoners are a minority and those named with their kingdoms identified are rarer still. In most contexts, then, the Maya gleaned prestige from the identities of their captives as individuals as much or more than as representatives of their kingdoms. This remains true of the kingly captives, with the exception that their status as ahauob of their home kingdoms is repeatedly emphasized. If there was war that resulted in territorial conquest as well as political dominance, then these star-shell events are the likely candidates. The first and perhaps the most impressive example of this kind of war was Tikal s conquest of Uaxactun. See Note 47 for a discussion of the astronomical association of this war and sacrifice complex.
-[650] M. George van der Meer, “Examining Exploitation: One Mutualist Perspective,” Center for a Stateless Society, [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/14777 ]](August 17, 2020).
+[236] Coggins (1976; 1979a:259–268) has presented detailed arguments for these identifications, although the case for identifying Burial 10 as the burial place of Curl-Snout is the weaker of the two cases. We find her evidence well argued and accept her identifications.
-[651] John P. Clark, qtd. An Anarchist FAQ (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007) [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq]] (June 2, 2020).
+[237] Coggins (1976:177–179) remarks that this deposit was found in a dump west of the North Acropolis. She lists seven skeletons, a basalt mano and metate, olivo shells, green obsidian, a mosaic plaque, a couch shell, and thirty-eight vessels, many of them in the style of Teotihuacan. Among these vessels is one depicting the group of Teotihuacanos apparently leaving a Teotihuacan-style pyramid to arrive at a Maya temple, which Coggins speculated was in fact a record of the arrival of Teotihuacanos in the Maya lowlands.
-[652] M. George van der Meer, “Examining Exploitation: One Mutualist Perspective,” Center for a Stateless Society, [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/14777 ]](August 17, 2020).
+[238] It is just about this time that the cylindrical tripod spread throughout Mesoamerica and became one of the principal pottery forms of the Early Classic period through the entire cultural sphere. The shape, which provides particularly useful surfaces for displaying imagery, was adopted by all of the major cultural traditions of the time. In general the Maya style is taller in the vertical axis than the squatter style of Teotihuacan.
-[653] James L. Walker, The Philosophy of Egoism (Denver, CO: Katharine Walker 1905) 34.
+[239] The other possibility is that the cities are Tikal, Kaminaljuyu, and Teotihuacan (Coggins 1979a:263). Kaminaljuyu is a likely candidate for the middle temple depicted on the vase which shares features of both Teotihuacan and Maya architecture. However, if Coggins’s dates of A.D. 386 to 426 for this deposit are correct, the deposit is some seventy-five to a hundred years earlier than the Teotihuacan-style architecture and tombs at Kaminaljuyu. Furthermore, recent excavations in the Lost World group at Tikal by Juan Pedro Laporte (1988) have demonstrated the presence of talud-tablero architecture at Tikal by the third century A.D. A place ruled by Maya which has both styles of architecture is very probably Tikal. The two types of talud-tablero temples represented in the scene are distinguished by their roofcombs and the U-shapes marking the Maya version.
-[654] Badcock 27.
+[240] Marcus (1980) has also commented on these tasseled headdresses, also associating them with Teotihuacan emissaries to Monte Alban.
-[655] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible (Oakland, CA: PM Press 2010) 684.
+[241] Charles Cheek (1977) proposed a model of conquest to explain the appearance of Teotihuacano architectural and ceramic styles at Kaminaljuyu, placing the time of Teotihuacan conquest in the sixth century. Kenneth Brown (1977 and personal communication, 1986) sees Kaminaljuyu as a port of trade serving as a neutral, secure ground for both lowland Maya and highland Teotihuacanos to trade upon.
+<br>
+<br>At Kaminaljuyu, both lowland Maya and Teotihuacanos seem to have been present during the Middle Classic period (A.D. 400–600). Lowland Maya ceramics and jade artifacts are known at Teotihuacan, especially in the Merchants’ Barrio with its curious arrangement of round buildings (Rattray 1986). Teotihuacanos also seem to have been physically present at Tikal. Moholy-Nagy (personal communication, 1986) believes there were a limited number of people of Teotihuacan ethnic origin at Tikal. This identification is based on a burial pattern consisting of cremation and the use of a pit to deposit the human remains and funerary offerings. Two of these pit burials are known: Problematic Deposit 50 found in a dump west of the North Acropolis and Problematic Deposit 22 found in the center of the North Acropolis in front of Structure 5D-26.
+<br>
+<br>Coggins (1979b:42), following Proskouriakoff, suggested that the appearance of the Teotihuacán imagery at Uaxactún and Tikal signaled the arrival of a foreign people. She has suggested that Curl-Snout was in fact a Kaminaljuyu foreigner who usurped the throne of Tikal on the demise of the old dynasty. Archaeological evidence, however, documents Maya interest in green obsidian for use in cached offerings as early as the Late Preclassic period. New excavations at Tikal place the talud-tablero style of architecture at Tikal earlier than the date of the Uaxactún conquest. The lowland Maya and Teotihuacán had long been known to each other and had long traded for exotic goods originating in each others domains. 1 he appearance of Tikal kings in this Teotihuacán costume represents either an intensification of this contact or the adoption of a Teotihuacán ritual complex by the Maya for their own use. It does not signal the conquest of the central Petén or its dominance by foreigners.
-[656] John Zerzan, “Why Primitivism?” Twilight of the Machines (Port Townsend, WA: Feral 2008) 103.
+[242] Pasztory (1974) divided Tlaloc imagery into two categories, Tlaloc A, which is associated with water and agricultural fertility, and Tlaloc B, which is associated with war and sacrifice. She pointed out that the goggle-eyed imagery of Stela 31 and the Burial 10 vessels is not a Tlaloc image, but rather humans who wear goggle eyes, which she proceeded to associate with war iconography at Teotihuacán (Pasztory 1974:13–14). This war and sacrifice complex appears as the central theme of the Atetelco murals at Teotihuacán. The iconography of that complex is consistent with Teotihuacán imagery as it appears at foreign sites and may well represent a ritual or religious complex that Teotihuacán traders or political emissaries took with them as they spread outward from Teotihuacán in the fifth and sixth centuries.
+<br>
+<br>Karl Taube (n.d.) has recently identified a war complex he associates with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. The symbolism of this imagery includes the Mosaic Monster headdress, which he identifies as a War Serpent. He cites recent excavations at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Sugiyama 1989; Cabrera, Sugiyama, and Cowgill 1988) in which were found mass burials of warriors who were perhaps sacrificed in dedication rituals sometime during the mid-second century A.D. One of these burials contained eighteen mature males of warrior age. They were buried with obsidian points, mirrors that warriors wore on the back of their belts, war trophies in the form of human maxillas and mandibles, and shell imitations of maxillas and teeth. Other artifacts included 4,358 pieces of worked shell, many of which were drilled at one or both ends. Following suggestions by Berio (1976), Taube suggested these pieced shells were from the Mosaic Monster (his War Serpent) headdress. These recent excavations and work on the war complex of Teotihuacán are enriching our understanding of war in Mesoamerican tradition, especially in the Tlaloc- complex we have seen at Uaxactún and Tikal.
-[657] Zerzan 104.
+[243] Taube (n.d.) follows Rene Millon in suggesting that all of Mesoamerica saw Teotihuacán as the place where the sun and moon were created. We are not yet convinced that the Maya accepted that view, but the imagery at Teotihuacán, especially in the murals of Tetitla called the Tlalocán (Pasztory 1976), represented the city as the earthly replication of the sacred source of creation and genesis. We contend that the Teotihuacanos thought of themselves as citizens of the central sacred spot in the human plane of existence. The Maya on the other hand understood that all temples performed this function and that all kings were the embodiment of the world axis. We do not see Maya kings, their nobles, or the common folk standing in awe of Teotihuacán, no matter its internal definition of itself.
-[658] Zerzan 107.
+[244] See the July 1982 issue of the National Geographic Magazine for Hammond’s descriptions of this sacrificial burial.
-[659] Wolfi Landstreicher, A Critique, Not a Program: For a Non-Primitivist Anti-Civilization Critique (Victoria, BC: Camas 2018).
+[245] However, there may be hints that this complex was associated with Venus. Pasztory (1976:245–247) associates the Atetelco warrior iconography with the sun ritual and follows Sejourne in associating the goggle-eyed warriors with half-darkened faces with the later Venus deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. However, the Venus association may also be a Postclassic loan to the people of the Valley of Mexico from the lowland Maya. The sacrificial ritual depicted at Cacaxtla in the eighth century seems to be closer to the Late Classic Maya version of the complex than to Atetelco.
-[660] Bob Black, The Abolition of Work (Loompanics Unlimited 1986) 17.
+[246] Coggins (1979b:41–42) suggests a variant of exactly this scenario.
-[661] Bob Black, “Anarchy After Leftism,” n.d., [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-after-]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][leftism]] (August 17, 2020).
+; Chapter 5: Star Wars in the Seventh Century
-[662] See Black, “Anarchy After Leftism.”
+[247] The kings changed to a costume consisting of a double-stranded necklace with a pectoral; a thick belt mounting a head-celt assemblage on the tront and a backrack on the rear; a hipcloth overlaid by a pointed loincloth; and elaborate cuffs on the ankles and wrists. The headdresses vary with the particular stela and on Stelae 3 and 9 Kan-Boar wears a cape over his shoulders.
-[663] Id.
+[248] These staff monuments include Stelae 13, 9, 3, 7, 15, 27, 8, and 6.
-[664] Id.
+[249] Coggins (1976:184–208) identified Burial 48 as Stormy-Sky’s grave. Chris Jones (n.d.) dates the construction of 5D-33-2<sup>nd</sup> to a time following the sealing of Burial 48. The temporal gap between the sealing of the tomb and the temple construction is unknown, but he assigns the temple construction to the period of the staff portraits. He also dates the spectacular Structure 5D-22—2<sup>nd</sup>, the huge temple on the northern edge of the Acropolis, to this same period. Arthur Miller (1986:40–50) describes the imagery of this temple in detail, although he assigns the dates of the tombs and construction phases differently from either Coggins or Jones. Miller points out that once the temple was built, the imagery was unchanged until the seventh century when it was encased by the thirty-meter-high Structure 5D-33-lst. No matter which of these chronologies proves to be correct, it is clear that the iconography depicted on these buildings was commissioned during the period of the staff kings, and that these buildings remained the principal backdrop for royal ritual in the Great Plaza until the seventh century.
-[665] Benjamin Franks, “Anarchism and Ethics,” The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (New York, NY: Palgrave 2019) 563.
+[250] The clearest data for ordering the monuments comes from dates and a series of “numbered successor” titles that record the numerical position of a particular king following the founder of his dynasty (Mathews 1975; Riese 1984; Scheie 1986b; Grube 1988). Recorded both on monuments and on a looted pot (Robiscek and Hales 1981:234), these “numbered successor” titles allow’ us to reconstruct the order in which the kings reigned, and to know which kings are still missing from the record. Epigraphers still debate which monuments should be associated with w’hich ruler. The three main theories that describe these events have been put forward by Clemency Coggins (1976), Chris Jones (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982), and Peter Mathews (1985a). None of these reconstructions is likely to be completely accurate: the eroded conditions and incomplete nature of the inscriptional record make study of this period in Tikal’s history difficult. We present our own theory in the main text.
-[666] Stirner 61.
+[251] See Chapter 4, Figures 4:6 through 4:9.
-[667] David S. D’Amato, “Compulsory Education as Social Control,” Libertarianism.org (Cato Institute, Sep. 12, 2019) [[http://www.libertarianism.org][www.libertarianism.org/columns/compulsory-education-social-control]] (June 2, 2020)
+[252] A. Miller (1986:43–44) identifies the lower masks as “the sun still in the Underworld.” The center masks he associates with the Old God effigy from Burial 10, which has the same trefoil eyelashes as the Cauac Witz Monster; and the upper masks, he sees as Venus. Although our identifications differ, the interpretative concepts are the same: These masks represent manifestations of the Hero Tw’ins and other cosmic imagery as the sacred definition of the temple in Tikal’s ritual life.
-[668] Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2001) 75.
+[253] If we calculate the span of time between the death of the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, and the accession of the twenty-first successor, we end up with seventy-two years. Dividing this number by the number of kings who ruled during this period gives us an average reign of about eight years.
-[669] Jason McQuinn, “Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind,” The Anarchist Library, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][org/library/jason-mcquinn-post-left-anarchy-leaving-the-left-behind]] (June 2, 2020).
+[254] C. Jones (n.d.) says that the stairs of the twin pyramids were rebuilt at least once, suggesting that the complex was used for more than one katun celebration. He also notes the existence of two twin-pyramid complexes during this period.
-[670] Welsh 267.
+[255] The tw’in-pyramid complexes consist of two pyramids with stairways mounting the four sides of each. These platforms, which never had temples at their summits, sit on the east and west sides of a raised plaza. A row of uncarved stelae paired with plain altars are always erected in front of the west facade of the east pyramid. On the north side of the plaza, a carved stela recording the period-ending rite stands with its altar inside a roofless, walled enclosure entered through a vaulted door. On the south side of each complex is a small building which always has nine doors (see C. Jones <verbatim>[1969]</verbatim> for a detailed description of these complexes at Tikal). Dating the beginning of the twin-pyramid complex to the late fifth or early sixth century is important, for the endings of katuns and their quarter points provide one of the great regular patterns of time on which the Classic Maya system of festival and fair revolved. These complexes are unique to Tikal and they play a role of central importance in the ritual life of Tikal in the second half of the Classic period.
-[671] Sara C. Motta, “Leyendo el anarchismo a través de ojos latinoamericanos: Reading Anarchism through Latin American Eyes,” The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, ed. Ruth Kinna (London: Continuum 2012) 261.
+[256] Caracol was first discovered in 1937 by Rosa Mai, a logger. He reported it to A. H. Anderson, the archaeological commissioner of Belize, who visited the site that year. Linton Satterthwaite of the University Museum conducted several field seasons between 1950 and 1958 that resulted in excavations and removal of many of its monuments to safe locations (see A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:3—7 for a history of investigations). Arlen and Diane Chase resumed archaeological investigations in 1985, resulting in the discovery of important new inscriptions and archaeological data of major importance. Chase and Chase confirm earlier reports (Healy et al. 1980) of a very densely packed settlement. The city is situated five hundred meters high on the Vaca Plateau near the Maya Mountains of Southern Belize (A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a: 1–2).
-[672] Newman, Anti-Authoritarianism 77.
+[257] Proskouriakofl ’s work, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, was published in 1950. In this study she carefully compared the manner in which a fixed set of objects were depicted on monuments with inscribed dates in the Maya calendar. By showing how these depictions changed over time, she was able to produce a series of dated examples against which an undated monument could be compared and given a general style date. Her work still stands today as the principal means by which we formally assign stylistic dates to Maya sculptures.
-** 11. De Facto Monopolies and the Justification of the State
+[258] See Proskouriakoff (1950:111–112) for her description of the hiatus.
-*Ralf M. Bader*
+[259] Willey’s (1974) brief and brilliant discussion of the hiatus as a “rehearsal” for the ninth-century collapse of southern Classic Maya civilization reviews many of the political and economic problems confronting the Maya in the wake of the collapse of extensive trade with Teotihuacan and the proliferation of competing polities in the lowlands (see also Rathje 1971). Although a “pre-historical” view, Willey prophetically pinpointed those very areas of social stress that emerged as significant in our translations of the Maya’s own histories of their times. What the Maya themselves are silent on is the linkage between political and economic power. We are confident that there are more allusions to wealth and prosperity of an economic sort in the texts than we can presently identify, but the essential challenge of extending Maya history into the economic domain rests squarely in the fieldwork of archaeologists. One key will be to pursue the strategic imperishable commodities, such as obsidian, jade, and shell, from their stated functions and values in the texts into the contexts of the actual objects excavated from the earth (Freidel 1986a). Meanwhile, the hiatus remains an issue of regional dimensions in Maya research.
-</quote>
+[260] In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff published a study of the distribution of monuments at the site of Piedras Negras and other sites. This study identified for the first time historical events and people in the Classic Maya inscriptions. During the next several years, she published a series of papers that changed the world of Maya studies forever by providing the keys to reconstituting their history through study of the inscriptions. These included identification of women in Maya inscriptions and art (1961b), a description of her discovery of the historical method (1961a), and finally her description of historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan (1963–1964). These articles more than any others are at the heart of the decipherment and the reclamation of Maya history from the darkness of a muted past.
-The fundamental question of political philosophy ... is whether there should be any state at all.
-<right>
+[261] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that almost all pre-9.7.0.0.0 monuments were deliberately effaced, while monuments after that time appear to have been damaged only accidentally. Early monuments were abraded, broken, and moved. Scars from the pecked lines that facilitated their mutilation are still in evidence. Other carvings (the back of Stela 10 and Altar 13) were rubbed smooth. Jones comments, “I would guess that this energetic onslaught was the result of a successful raid on Tikal, probably at the end of the reign of Double-Bird, the man on Stela 17.”
-Robert Nozick[673]
-</right>
-</quote>
-*** I. Introduction
+[262] A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:33) report that Altar 21 was found in a central trench dug along the east-west axis of the ballcourt in Group A. The use of the term altar for this monument is something of a misnomer. Beginning in the Late Preclassic Period, Maya placed commemorative stones both in the center and at the ends of the plastered playing surfaces of ballcourts (Scarborough et al. 1982). These markers presumably pertained to the rules of the game and also to the rituals that kings carried out in the ballcourts. Generally, the monuments of ballcourts, including reliefs along the sides of some courts, allude to war and sacrifice. This linkage strongly suggests that the ballgame bore a metaphorical relationship to war (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986; Chapter 6). Located in the center of the playing field, the altar in question is a round monument with 1 Ahau, the day upon which the katun of its dedication ended (9.10.0.0.0), and the events in the lives of the Caracol kings, Lord Water and Lord Kan II (Rulers III and V, in the dynastic list). Stephen Houston (in A. Chase n.d.), the project epigrapher, immediately recognized the implications of that remarkable inscription. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:60–62) proposed that the hiatus at Tikal was the direct result of its conquest by Caracol, an argument that we accept.
-This chapter explains how Nozick’s notion of a de facto monopoly makes room for states that are justified in claiming a monopoly on coercion despite lacking authority and despite their citizens lacking political obligation. Along the way, it establishes that political obligation and political authority are fundamentally distinct mechanisms for underwriting content-independent duties, but that neither can plausibly apply in the absence of consent.
+[263] We follow the chronological analysis of Altar 21 first presented by Houston (in A. Chase n.d.; A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:99–100). This day, 9.6.2.1.11 6 Chuen 19 Pop, corresponded to an ax event, a type of action that is associated with shell-star war events at Dos Pilas. Most significantly, this same glyph records what happened to 18- Rabbit, a king of Copan captured by Cauac-Sky, his contemporary at Quiriguá. Although the “ax” verb is used in astronomical contexts in the codices, it is clearly associated with war and decapitation ritual in the Classic inscriptions and on pottery (see, for example, the Altar de Sacrificios vase, National Geographic, December 1975, p.774).
-*** II. The Problem of Coercion
+[264] Houston (in A. Chase n.d.) noted that the date of this war event, 9.6.8.4.2 7 Ik 0 Zip, corresponds to the stationary point of Venus that forewarns of inferior conjunction. The verb, a star (or Venus) sign, here followed by the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph, occurs throughout the inscriptions of war events timed by Venus apparitions or Jupiter and Saturn stations. The location is indicated by the main signs of the appropriate Emblem Glyph or simply as the “earth.” Here the star war took place at 1 ikal.
-States are coercive. They use force as well as the threat of force in order to make citizens commit or omit various actions. It is because of their coercive nature that anarchists consider states to be objectionable. They argue that only consent on the part of all those who are governed by a state can give rise to political obligation or confer the requisite normative powers on the state. The state cannot permissibly claim a monopoly on force within a certain territory unless all the individuals in that territory have consented to its rule. As a result, anarchists consider non-consensual states to be illegitimate. Such states cannot permissibly rule and are morally objectionable.
+[265] Clemency Coggins (1976:258) notes that this period “is characterized by the poverty of its burials.” During this time there is only one burial “rich enough to have had painted ceramics.” Burials in residential areas were equally poor. In an insightful and anticipatory interpretation of stylistic similarities, Coggins (1976:385–386) posited influence from Caracol into the Tikal region exactly during this period and culminating with the first stela known to have been erected after the hiatus, Stela 30 and its altar, depicting the ahau name of its katun in the style of Caracol. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:6O-61) attribute many characteristics, especially in Burials 23 and 24, to Caracol funerary practices.
+<br>
+<br>Chase and Chase (1989) report a 325 percent increase in population at Caracol following the Tikal war. There was a corresponding increase in large, single-phase construction projects both of temples and extensive terracing systems. Tomb space became so sought after that chambers were built into substructures and reused for several people before being finally sealed. Whereas Tikal saw an impoverishment of burial furniture, Caracol experienced a remarkable enrichment. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) have suggested that much of the labor for these construction projects and the wealth of Caracol during this period was transferred from the prostrate kingdom of Tikal.
-The crucial question for determining whether the state can be justified is whether it is permissible for the state to use force as well as the threat of force. On what grounds and under what conditions can the state be justified in using coercion? On the face of it, there is a strong presumption against coercion and in favour of liberty.
+[266] Houston (in A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:91) suggested that Caracol Rulers IV and V (Lord Kan II) were brothers since they were born only twelve years apart (Ruler IV on 9.7.2.0.3 or November 30, 5 75, and Ruler V on 9.7.14.10.8 or April 20, 5 88). A reading suggested by David Stuart (1987b:27, 1988a, and n.d.) supports Houston’s proposed relationship. On Stela 6, the last clause closes with the information that the halfperiod ending 9.8.10.0.0 was witnessed by Ruler V who was the yitan itz’in, “the sibling younger brother of” Ruler IV. We should also observe that the parentage of Rulers IV and V is not clearly stated in the inscriptions. The most likely reconstruction is that the throne descended from father to firstborn son, but there is some evidence of a break in the descent line with these two brothers.
-Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.[674]
+[267] The Emblem Glyph of this kingdom has a snake head as its main sign. It was identified with Calakmul, a site north of the Guatemala-Mexico border, first by Joyce Marcus (1973 and 1976) and later by Jeffrey Miller (1974). Miller identified looted stelae in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum as coming from the “Snake site,” as Calakmul is sometimes known. Although the Calakmul identification was widely accepted at first, several epigraphers began questioning it because of the unusually wide distribution of this Emblem Glyph and the damaged condition of Calakmul’s monuments. Peter Mathews (1979) assembled all the then-known inscriptions, many of them looted, marked with the Snake site or its dynasty and gave the site the noncommittal designation “Site Q.”
+<br>
+<br>Several years ago, however, Ian Graham discovered the sawed-off remains of the looted monuments currently housed at Cleveland and Fort Worth, in a site called El Perú, located to the west of Tikal in the northwest Petén. Finding the remnants of these shattered stelae at El Perú convinced most epigraphers that the Snake site was finally to be identified as El Perú.
+<br>
+<br>Recently, however, Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have once again questioned the Snake site identification based on the following grounds:
+<br>
+<br>(1) Stelae from El Perú have another Emblem Glyph distinct from the Snake Emblem Glyph. This second Emblem Glyph does not appear paired with the Snake Emblem Glyph in the manner of other double Emblem Glyphs, such as those found at Yaxehilán, Palenque, and Bonampak. This distribution suggests that the Snake Emblem Glyph appearing on El Perú Stela 30 is a reference to a foreign power.
+<br>
+<br>(2) A key Snake site king named Jaguar-Paw appears in the inscriptions of several sites. His birth was recorded on Calakmul Stela 9 and also on Site Q Glyphic Panel 6. His accession was inscribed on El Perú Stela 30 and on Dos Pilas Stela 13. Finally, his capture by Tikal’s Ah-Cacaw was declared in conjunction with a war event in Temple I of that city. The Tikal and Dos Pilas references are clearly to foreigners. The El Perú reference may be taken either as foreign or local, while the Site Q and Calakmul references are more likely to be local.
+<br>
+<br>(3) Finally, Stuart and Houston have identified a place name consisting of a waterlily plant (nab) over a chi hand merged with a tun sign, resulting in the phrase nab tunich. This place name appears with names incorporating the Snake Emblem Glyph at Naranjo, where it is in a foreign context. The Dos Pilas inscriptions say that Jaguar-Paw’s accession occurred at nab tunich, and most important, the ruler on Calakmul Stela 51 has nab tunich in his name. They feel the place is most likely to be some part of Calakmul and prefer the identification of the Snake Emblem Glyph as Calakmul.
+<br>
+<br>We became convinced of the Calakmul identification when Scheie noticed that a fragment in the Tamayo Collection from the side of the Fort Worth stela, recorded a “God K-in-hand” action with two persons named in association. The first of these is the protagonist of that stela, Mah Kina Balam, but his name is followed by ichnal and the name of the current ruler of Site Q. David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has shown that the ichnal glyph means “in the company of.” Given this reading, the fragmentary text records that the El Perú lord enacted the ritual “in the company of” the ruler of Calakmul, giving us strong evidence that Jaguar-Paw of Site Q was a visitor at El Perú for the ritual. Based on this interpretation, we follow Marcus, J. Miller, Stuart, and Houston in accepting Calakmul as the Site Q kingdom. However, we also acknowledge that the evidence is still not indisputable and that Site 2 may be a yet undiscovered city.
-For the state to be justified, it may not engage in rights violations. This means that a justified state can only use coercion on the condition that doing so is permissible and does not violate any rights. The rights of individuals, however, put into doubt the permissibility of state coercion, or at least significantly restrict the scope of permissible coercion, thereby limiting the range of activities in which the state can permissibly engage.
+[268] This same glyph names the fourth successor of the Copán dynasty who reigned about eighty years earlier (Grube and Scheie 1988).
-Nozick agrees with the anarchist that states lack authority and that citizens do not have political obligation when consent is absent. In order to address the anarchist’s challenge and show that non-consensual states can be justified, Nozick attempts to show that it can be permissible for states to exercise a monopoly of force and coerce their citizens even in the absence of consent.[675] Rather than focusing on the obligations that individual citizens have, Nozick is concerned with the prerogatives that the state has and the actions that it can permissibly perform. In particular, he argues that a non-consensual state can claim a monopoly on coercion without violating the rights of its citizens.[676] States can, accordingly, be justified even though they lack authority and even though citizens lack political obligations.
+[269] We have, of course, no direct evidence that Yaxehilán ever participated in the oncoming wars. However, a representative of the Calakmul king attended an important ritual conducted by the tenth king of Yaxehilán. This visit suggests they were at least on friendly terms, if not outright allies. If Cu-ix installed Ruler I on the throne of Naranjo, as Stela 25 implies, then the Naranjo ruler was very likely part of the proposed alliance against Tikal. By the middle of Katun 5, Tikal may have been surrounded by an alliance of hostile states.
-*** III. Enforcing Duties
+[270] This is the stationary point that ends the retrograde movement of Venus as it flashes across the face of the sun at inferior conjunction. The Morningstar would then resume motion in its normal direction, heading toward its maximum distance from the sun.
-The moral prohibitions it is permissible to enforce are the source of whatever legitimacy the state’s fundamental coercive power has.[677]
+[271] Captives, especially those of high rank, were sacrificed in a mock ball game played upon hieroglyphic stairs (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:214—263 and M. Miller and Houston 1987).
-Consensual states can have a wide scope of permissible coercion. As long as there are no limits on which rights can voluntarily be surrendered,[678] the scope of coercion that is rendered permissible on the basis of the consent of the governed is, in principle, unlimited. The scope of legitimate coercion on the part of non-consensual states, however, seems to be rather limited. In particular, it appears to be restricted to cases in which the rights of individuals are either removed or overridden.[679]
+[272] Mathews (1977) identifies 9.5.12.0.4 as the birth date of Naranjo Ruler I based on an anniversary expression on Stela 3 and a “five-katun-ahau” title included with Ruler I’s name on Stela 27. Based on this last citation, Mathews proposed that Ruler I lived into his fifth katun and ruled until at least 9.10.12.0.4, long after the conquest date. Closs (1985:71), on the other hand, takes the anniversary sequence on Stela 25 as the celebration of the accession of this ruler. Closs’s interpretation has the virtue of placing the birth of this ruler earlier than 9.5.12.0.4 and placing his transition to status as a “five-katun ahau” on a correspondingly earlier date. Since we have neither a clear birth nor accession verb with any of these dates, the final interpretation will have to wait for additional information to appear. The text of Stela 25, however, clearly declares that the event which took place on that date, be it birth or accession, took place “in the land of Cu-Ix of Calakmul.”
-The non-consensual use of coercion can be justified straightforwardly when it comes to enforcing duties that are enforceable.[680] Coercion is justified if it is used appropriately (i.e., satisfying procedural constraints, proportionality requirements, etc.), both prospectively in order to prevent rights violations and retrospectively in order to punish rights violations and rectify past wrongs. Using force as well as threatening the use of force in order to enforce moral prohibitions that are enforceable does not amount to a rights violation. This is because the relevant rights have been forfeited by the aggressor who has violated or is about to violate someone’s rights, thereby rendering the use of coercion permissible.[681] If rights are forfeited as a result of the rights-violating behaviour of individuals, coercion on the part of the state may be permissible.[682]
+[273] Heinrich Berlin (1973), citing a personal communication from Linton Satterth- waite, first commented on this 9.9.18.16.3 7 Akbal 16 Muan date that is shared between Caracol and Naranjo, although he offered no interpretation of its significance. David Kelley (1977b) suggested that it should have corresponded with the heliacal rising of Venus as Morningstar, tempering his suggestion with the caution that his data was too varied to commit to a particular answer. The most important component of his paper was the identification of the “shell-star” complex associated with this particular category of date. Following up on Kelley’s work, Michael Closs (1979) identified the shell-star category as Venus dates and posited that this Caracol-Naranjo date corresponded to the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar, an association confirmed by Floyd Lounsbury and extended to include the Bonampak war scene. See Chapter 4, notes 45 and 47, for a detailed discussion of the war and astronomical associations connected with this set of dates.
-Whilst the state can be justified in using coercion to enforce moral prohibitions, on the basis that enforceable duties may permissibly be enforced, this justification of coercion does not straightforwardly carry over to the enforcement of compliance with positive laws, in particular laws that—unlike laws against, say, murder—do not simply codify and promulgate natural duties. States standardly make positive laws that go beyond the narrow content of protecting natural rights and use coercion to enforce compliance with these laws. For coercion to be justified in those cases it would either have to be the case that citizens have political obligation or that the state has political authority.
+[274] David Stuart (1987b:29) first read this collocation as k’u.xa.ah, pointing out that it also occurs on a captive panel at Tonina. He notes that k’ux is “eat/bite/pain in proto-Cholan. Stuart himself suggests that the event may be captive torture, a practice well documented in narrative scenes of the Classic period, but he also notes that Victoria Bricker suggested to him that it might also be cannibalism, a practice documented archaeo- logically in many parts of Mesoamerica, including the Maya lowlands. Freidel participated in the excavation of a deposit of butchered human bones found in a small platform at the Late Postclassic lowland Maya community of San Gervasio on Cozumel Island in 1973. The feet and hands had been sawed away from the meat-bearing limb bones. No matter the action recorded here, it boded no good for the captive.
-*** IV. Obligation and Authority
+[275] Mathews (1985a:44) dates Stela 6 at 9.6.0.0.0 and identifies it as the last monument in a 200-year hiatus in monument dedication at Uaxactún.
-There are two general mechanisms that give rise to content-independent justifications for using coercion to ensure compliance with positive laws: political obligation and political authority.[683] On the one hand, if citizens have an enforceable content-independent obligation to do what the law says precisely because it is the law, then one can use coercion to enforce compliance with positive laws.[684] If citizens have political obligation and owe a duty of compliance, then the state can be justified in using coercion to ensure compliance.[685] On the other hand, coercion can be justified if the state has the requisite moral powers to impose duties on its citizens. If the state has political authority and is able to impose enforceable duties, coercion can be used permissibly to ensure compliance.
+[276] Berlin (1958) first noted the mutual use of the same Emblem Glyph at both Tikal and the Petexbatún sites, although he posited that the Tikal Emblem Glyph was subtly differentiated from the Petexbatún version. Marcus (1976:63–65) suggested that the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas actually recorded the history of Tikal lords who conquered Dos Pilas and reigned there in the name of the regional capital. Coggins (1976:445^446) sees an offshoot of the Tikal royal family moving to Dos Pilas after the death of Stormy- Sky, and sending one of its sons back to Tikal to reestablish the old family and reign as Ruler A.
+<br>
+<br>Houston and Mathews (1985:9) and Mathews and Willey (n.d.) also think it likely that Dos Pilas was established from Tikal, perhaps by a minor son or a segment of the royal family that moved out of Tikal during the hiatus. With the new information available to us, we know that this hiatus occurred because of Tikal’s defeat by Caracol. They believe the Dos Pilas dynasty intruded itself into the area, using a strategy of intermarriage and war to consolidate its position. They, however, also see the Dos Pilas dynasty as independent of Tikal, a position we accept. We, furthermore, see a tension and competition between Tikal and Dos Pilas that unfolds as Tikal struggled to reestablish the prestige of its rulers.
-These two mechanisms differ in important ways. The former makes law-making into a form of duty-activation, whereas it amounts to duty-creation on the latter.[686] In the first case, citizens have a general duty to do what the law says, which is then triggered by the enactment of particular laws and thereby gives rise to specific duties. These specific duties are derivative. They are derived via factual detachment from a general standing obligation that is naturally understood in terms of a wide-scope requirement: OUGHT(the law requires O-ing —— O) together with the facts about the specific laws that have been enacted. In the second case, the state exercises a moral power and creates specific duties by enacting laws, so that one acquires a duty to O because it is the law that one should O.[687] Such an exercise of a moral power creates non-derivative duties. This can be understood in terms of a narrow-scope requirement: the law requires O-ing —— OUGHt(O). In this case, there is no prior standing duty from which the specific duties are derived. Instead, there is a standing liability. Put differently: the contrast is between citizens’ being obligated to comply with a law that requires one to O and a law’s creating an obligation to O for its citizens. Although one ends up with a duty to O in each case, these duties are generated via different mechanisms. Whilst the political-obligation and political-authority models might seem to be practically equivalent and to generate the same sets of duties, they differ in important respects. Differences emerge, in particular, once one not only focuses on what actions people are required to perform and what the state may enforce but also takes into consideration to whom the duties are owed and who is being wronged in case of non-compliance. Similarly, differences emerge once one ceases to presume a fixed set of citizens but instead considers situations in which the set of citizens varies across time.
+[277] According to Houston and Mathews (1985:11–12), this second son, named Shield- Jaguar, is recorded on the West Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas.
-First, these mechanisms can differ in terms of the person or group to whom the resulting duty is owed. In the case of political obligation, the obligation is owed by citizens to whomever this general obligation is owed; i.e., the detached duty is owed to the same entity to whom the wide-scope conditional obligation is owed. This is standardly the state, but can also be some other agent or group of agents, such as the other members of a society, as might be thought to be the case, for instance, in the case of a social contract.[688] If x (the state) is owed political obligation by y (the citizen), then compliance with any law that x makes will be owed by y to x, even when the law concerns how y ought to treat z. If one has a standing obligation that is owed to the state, then the derived obligation to treat z in a certain way will not be owed to z (despite its being an obligation that concerns z) but will instead be owed to the state. Although the existence of the law might well give rise to reasonable expectations on the part of z, such that y ends up having (additional) reasons to comply with the law and treat z in a certain way that derive from z’s interests, the enforceable obligation that derives from y’s political obligation will not be owed by y to z but to x.[689]
+[278] The El Chorro and El Pato lords name a woman with the Dos Pilas Emblem Glyph as their mother. Mathews and Willey (n.d.) and Houston and Mathews (1985:14) note that the time involved makes their identification as sisters of the king—or at minimum, members of the royal family of Dos Pilas—a likely interpretation.
-In the case of political authority, by contrast, the law creates a duty that can be owed to particular individuals who are identified by the law. If x (the state) has a moral power to change the normative situation of y (the citizen), then it can create a duty for y that y owes to z. This is particularly clear when the state exercises its moral power to create rights and corresponding obligations. The resulting duties will be owed to the particular rights holders, not to the agent exercising the moral power, nor to the community of persons in whose name that agent is acting.[690] The duty created by someone who has authority need not be owed to that agent. If x exercises its authority and creates a (directed) duty for y to treat z in a certain way, then the one who is wronged in case y fails to act accordingly is the person z to whom the duty is owed, not the entity x that exercised authority and created the duty. Although violating a duty that has been created by someone who has the authority to do so conveys disrespect for that authority—i.e., one acts as if no duty had been created, as if the person did not have authority—this phenomenon of disrespect differs from wronging the one to whom the duty is owed.
+[279] Unfortunately, since the first half of the stair (Hieroglyphic Stair 2, East 3) is destroyed, we have neither the exact date nor the action recorded in this passage. Since other dates on this stair occur between 9.11.9.15.9 and 9.12.10.12.4, we surmise that this action fell within the same period.
-To whom the duty is owed matters for the question who is being wronged. This, in turn, has various practical consequences such as to whom compensation is owed, to whom one needs to apologise, and which relationships are being impaired. It might be argued that the effects of the two mechanisms can be aligned as long as the state suitably specifies to whom compensation is owed. This, however, requires additional legislation, which means that the two mechanisms are not equivalent in the sense of giving rise to the same duties in the same circumstances. Moreover, whilst this might work when it comes to compensation, it does not work across the board. Problems arise, in particular, when one is concerned with the impairment of relationships. If y owes a duty to the state to the effect that y treat z in a certain way, then the state can make it the case that y needs to compensate z in case of non-compliance and maybe apologise to z, but the state cannot make it the case that y’s relationship with z is impaired by non-compliance, and hence cannot make it the case that the apology is an appropriate response to the wronging, since the relationship that is impaired is that in which y stands to the person to whom the duty is owed.
+[280] Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified the combination of a waterlily-imix glyph (nab) with a shell-winged dragon as the name of Lake Petexbatún. The action is called a “shell-dragon” ti kan toe, and may have occurred at that lake. The inscription names Jaguar-Paw as ihtah itz’in, the younger brother, of another Calakmul noble, who may also be named at Dos Pilas (HS2, E4).
-Second, these mechanisms differ in terms of the conditions under which a duty arises for a particular individual.[691] As long as someone has a political obligation to obey the laws of a particular state, this person has a duty to comply with all the laws of that state. If x has political obligation at t, then x is under a duty to O at t if there is a law in existence at t that requires O-ing. In the case of political authority, by contrast, the duty comes into existence at the time of the enactment of the law for all those who at that time have the corresponding liability. If the state exercises its authority at t and creates a law requiring citizens to O, then x is under a duty to O only if x is a citizen and hence is under the authority of the state at the time at which the law is enacted.
+[281] Jeffrey Miller (1974) first identified the accession date of Jaguar-Paw on a looted monument in the Cleveland Art Museum. He suggested the stela was from Calakmul and was once paired with another looted monument in the Kimbell Art Museum. His pairing of the stelae was correct, but Ian Graham found the remnants of both stelae at the site of El Perú. The Cleveland stela depicts a female who records her celebration of the katun ending 9.13.0.0.0. The accession of Jaguar-Paw is the dynastic event to which this katun celebration is linked.
-This has important implications for those becoming citizens subsequent to the enactment of the law, such as later generations. The case of subsequent generations poses no difficulties for political-obligation approaches.[692] By acquiring a political obligation to obey the laws of a particular state—e.g., by consenting to a state—one is bound to comply with the laws of that state, independently of when they were enacted. Normative powers views, on the contrary, run into difficulties. The enactment of a law gives rise to a duty for those who are subject to the authority at the time of enactment.[693] If a law is enacted at time t, yet x only comes into existence at a later time t' or only becomes a citizen at t' with the liability to have one’s normative situation changed by the law-making authority, then x will not be bound by that law. The initial exercise of the power only created obligations for those who had the liability at that time. Since x was not amongst them, the obligation needs to be created for x afresh. Put differently, becoming a citizen, on the political-authority approach, is a matter not of acquiring duties but of acquiring a liability. In order for duties to result from this liability, the authority needs to be exercised afresh; i.e., past exercises do not carry over to those who have only subsequently acquired the liability.[694]
+[282] David Stuart (1987b:25–27) has read this representation of an eye as the verb i/, “to see,” supporting his reading with the phonetic spellings that can accompany or replace it.
-Political obligation and political authority are not two sides of the same coin. They are different mechanisms that generate different duties and operate in different ways. These mechanisms are completely independent of each other. Contra Stephen Perry, it is not the case that we have an entailment in one direction but not the other direction, namely from political authority to the existence of a duty to obey but not vice versa. Instead, we have a forward-entailment problem in addition to the reverse-entailment problem identified by Perry. This is particularly clear when considering cases in which the state has authority but never exercises it, in which case the citizens do not acquire any obligations.[695] In order for political authority to give rise to duties, the relevant moral power must in fact be exercised. When it is exercised, its exercise gives rise to various specific duties, but not to a (general) duty to obey the law. Put differently, whenever there is a law requiring citizens to ^, there will be a corresponding duty to ^. There will not, however, be a general duty to obey the law. By contrast, a political obligation can be owed without the existence of any laws and without the activation of any duties.
+[283] Recall that Stuart and Houston (see Note 21) associate this toponym with Calakmul.
-Given a broad construal of the duty to obey the law (one that encompasses specific duties that can be created by law-making alongside the occurrent general duty to obey the law that can be triggered by law-making) as well as of political authority (one that encompasses both duty-creation and duty-activation), there will be entailment in both directions. The specific duties that political authority and political obligation yield (whether activated or created) will be the same when each is considered purely in terms of which actions citizens are required to perform or avoid performing (i.e., when we abstract from the question to whom the duties are owed). Given a narrow construal of each mechanism, by contrast, there will not be any entailment in either direction. As a result, the notion of political authority is not privileged over that of political obligation. Political authority and political obligation are simply two different mechanisms that operate in different ways, give rise to different duties, and can perform different justificatory work.
+[284] Houston and Mathews (1985:14—15) first published this scene and recognized its implications.
-Whilst both mechanisms succeed in justifying the use of coercion to ensure compliance with positive laws, neither would seem to be applicable in the absence of consent. Political obligation, where this is understood as an enforceable content-independent duty to obey the laws of a particular state, can only be founded on consent. Other proposed mechanisms for explaining political obligation, such as duties of gratitude or fair play, fail to underwrite duties that satisfy the requirements of enforceability, content-independence, and particularity.[696] Although they can give rise to various pro tanto reasons, they do not succeed in generating enforceable contentindependent obligations. Similarly, given the moral equality and independence of individuals, there is no natural moral inequality between states and their citizens (of the kind that is, say, suggested by the idea of the divine right of kings). As a result, moral powers have to be acquired. In order to acquire the relevant moral powers, the state would have to be authorised by its citizens: its citizens would need to consensually confer the relevant moral powers on the state.[697]
+[285] The second glyph in the text next to the seated figure is ch’ok, a glyph that Grube, Houston, and Stuart (personal communication, 1988) and Ringle (1988:14) associate with young persons who have not yet taken the throne. Our own study of this title confirms that it appears only in the names of people who are not yet kings, but their ages can range from five to forty-eight years. The title apparently refers to members of a lineage who are not in its highest rank.
-Since only consent can give rise to political obligation or confer the relevant moral powers on the state, justified non-consensual states are restricted to enforcing natural moral prohibitions and are not allowed to coercively enforce positive laws that go beyond these prohibitions. Laws can only be enforced to the extent that they merely codify and promulgate enforceable natural duties. This means that, in order for non-consensual states to be justified, they must be minimal states, in the sense that they are restricted to enforcing natural duties. If a non-consensual state creates laws and coerces people into doing things that they are not independently obligated to do, then this non-minimal state will be acting impermissibly and will not be justified. It will be coercively enforcing laws that it has created without having the right to do so. By making citizens comply with these laws as well as by punishing them for non-compliance, it will be violating the rights of its citizens.[698]
+[286] Proskouriakoff (1961b:94) first identified this woman in the imagery and texts of Naranjo, pointing out that each of her stelae is paired with another representing a male. She remarked on the presence of the Tikal Emblem Glyph in her name, and observed that the male was born several years after the most important date of the woman. She commented, “She is doubtless older than the man, and one may infer that the relationship could be that of a mother and son.” Berlin (1968:18–20) accepted Proskouriakoff’s analysis, further suggesting that Tikal entered into a dynastic marriage at Naranjo, and that this woman’s male offspring in turn married another woman from Tikal. Molloy and Rathje (1974) and Marcus (1976) both follow the suggestions of their predecessors, but Peter Mathews (1979) noted that the name of the father of this foreign woman in her parentage statement on Naranjo-Stela 24 matches Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas. Houston and Mathews (1985:11) posited two royal marriages for that king—one to a woman of Itzán, which produced the next king of Dos Pilas, and the other to a woman who produced a daughter he sent to Naranjo to marry a noble there. From this marriage came a grandson who was the next king of Naranjo. We accept Mathews’s identification and suggest that the royal woman married a male noble of Naranjo, for the next king, if he was her son, carried the Naranjo Emblem Glyph, rather than that of Dos Pilas.
+<br>
+<br>Berlin (1968:18) observed that the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival also occurs on Cobá Stela 1. On that monument, the date occurs in the last clause on the front in the form of a Long Count, the second notation of this kind in the text. Although the Long Count form of the date suggests that it was especially important in the inscriptional history recorded on this monument, the verb is too eroded to decipher. It appears to have involved a katun, perhaps as an anniversary, but the actor is clearly not any of the principals in the Naranjo-Dos Pilas affair to the south. The scene shows the Coba ruler dressed as the Holmul dancer standing on top of two bound captives who are flanked by two more captives. Although we suspect the Coba inscription records an event important to local history, the fact that the date is shared between Cobá and Naranjo may point to some important connection between the two zones.
-*** V. The Monopoly on Coercion
+[287] Interestingly, a variant of this name occurs in a reference to a foreign wife at Yaxchilán on Lintels 5 and 41 and in a reference to the wife of the ruler Yoc-Zac-Balam of Calakmul. We can come up with a number of explanations as to why the Wac-Chanil- Ahau appellative had this wide distribution: It could have been a special title of royal wives, or perhaps queen mothers; it may have designated foreign women in some way; or it might have been a name popular in the Usumacinta and Petexbatún regions.
-The state grants that under some circumstances it is legitimate to punish persons who violate the rights of others, for it itself does so. How then does it arrogate to itself the right to forbid private exaction of justice by other nonaggressive individuals whose rights have been violated?[699]
+[288] In the text at Tikal that records this war event, the extended finger has a bauble dangling from its tip. In this version and a related one on Caracol Stela 3, the jewel does not appear with the hand. However, this hand, both with and without the bauble, occurs in Glyph D of the Lunar Series. We had taken this common occurrence in Glyph D as evidence that both forms are equivalent, but Nikolai Grube and Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1990) have independently shown that the hand without the bauble and its substitutes in Glyph D read hul, “to arrive.” They have convinced us that the two forms of the hand do not substitute for each other in most contexts. Glyph D counts the age of the moon from its hul, “arrival,” a point defined as the first appearance of a visible crescent. In the context of the Naranjo event, they suggest that the verb is simply “she arrived,” an event that was followed three days later by the dedication ritual for a pyramid named with the main sign of the Naranjo Emblem Glyph. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival thus reestablished the house of Naranjo’s rulers.
+<br>
+<br>Archaeologically, there is some evidence supporting the association of termination and dedication rituals with the act of reestablishment or founding. Both kinds of rituals are similar in form and content (Freidel 1986b). Termination rituals involving the smashing of artifacts of pottery, jade, and other materials, and the layering of these materials in white earth, are found not only upon the occasion of the permanent abandonment of buildings, but also at their reconstruction. At Cerros, the first place this ritual activity was identified and documented in the Maya region (Robin Robertson n.d.; Garber 1983), it is clear that the same unbroken ritual offerings which terminate a building can be part of the dedication ceremony of the new building (Walker n.d.). Since the hul event was followed three days later by the dedication of a house, we may very well be dealing with a prime example of a house dedication used to establish a broken dynasty.
+<br>
+<br>Date and universal time: 710 June 28 (Gregorian); 24:22 U 1.
+<br>
+<br>JDN and sidereal time: 1980560.515278; Mean G.S.T.: 18h 49.6m
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Object</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>long</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>lat</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>dist</strong> | <strong>R.A.</strong> | <strong>Dec.</strong> |
+<br>| Sun | 95.45 | 0.00 | 1.017 | 6 23.8 | + 23 30 |
+<br>| Moon | 17.46 | 2.58 | 63.016 | 10.3 | + 9 17 |
+<br>| Mercury | 117.11 | -2.45 | 0.671 | 7 54.7 | + 18 29 |
+<br>| Venus | 116.05 | 1.52 | 1.574 | 7 53.5 | + 22 35 |
+<br>| Mars | 115.22 | 1.20 | 2.584 | 7 49.7 | + 22 25 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 121.25 | 0.73 | 6.255 | 8 14.7 | + 20 44 |
+<br>| Saturn | 115.52 | 0.61 | 10.101 | 7 50.6 | + 21 47 |
+<br>
+<br>As observed from 89.0 degrees west longitude, | 17.0 degrees north latitude:
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Object</strong> | <strong>Altitude</strong> | <strong>Azimuth</strong> | <strong>Mag.</strong> | <strong>Diam.</strong> | <strong>Phase(</strong><strong>%)</strong> |
+<br>| Sun | 0.6 | 294.6 | -26.8 | 31 30.9 | |
+<br>| Moon | -64.1 | 356.3 | -9.4 | 29 43.8 | 39.6 |
+<br>| Mercury | 19.4 | 284.1 | 1.5 | 10.0 | 20.7 |
+<br>| Venus | 19.9 | 288.4 | -3.9 | 10.7 | 93.3 |
+<br>| Mars | 19.0 | 288.4 | 1.8 | 3.6 | 98.9 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 24.4 | 285.5 | -1.8 | 31.5 | |
+<br>| Saturn | 19.1 | 287.7 | 0.3 | 16.5 | |
+<br>
+<br>(Outer diameter of Saturn’s rings: 37.2 arc seconds)
-Non-consensual states lack authority and their citizens do not have political obligation. Such states nevertheless have some fundamental coercive power.[700] The justification of coercion on the part of a non-consensual state is based on the right to enforce moral prohibitions. It is permissible for the state to employ (appropriate) force as well as the threat of force to prevent and punish rights violations. However, this is likewise permissible for everyone else. Everyone has the right to use force prospectively to prevent rights violations as well as retrospectively to punish those who have committed rights violations. In short, everyone is at liberty to enforce enforceable moral prohibitions.[701]
+[289] Based on the identification of the verb as “accession” at other sites, and on the recurrent anniversary celebrations of this date, Michael Closs (1985) first established that this event was the accession of this child to the throne.
-The state, however, claims a monopoly on coercion in a given territory.[702] In fact, this is one of the defining features of what it is to be a state (given a Weberian framework).[703] To justify the (minimal) state one must thus establish not only that it is permissible for the state to use coercion to enforce moral prohibitions but also that it is permissible for the state to claim a monopoly on coercion. In short, it has to be permissible for the state to use coercion to stop others from enforcing rights within a given territory.[704]
+[290] This pairing was first noted by Proskouriakoff (1961b:94). Stela 2, which depicts Smoking-Squirrel on his first katun anniversary, pairs with Stela 3, which represents Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau. The inscription on Stela 3 connects her arrival to his anniversary. Stela 30, depicting Smoking-Squirrel on the same anniversary, couples with Stela 29, which also records her arrival as well as her initial temple dedication. Smoking-Squirrel’s Stela 28 pairs with Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 31. Finally, Stelae 22 and 24 pair together in recording the accession of the young Smoking-Squirrel and its aftermath.
-This means that even an ultraminimal state would seem to go beyond enforcing moral prohibitions by claiming a monopoly on coercion and thereby prohibiting and preventing private enforcement, despite the fact that there would seem to be no duty to refrain from engaging in private enforcement. As a result, it will violate the enforcement rights of those who have not consented to its rule. “If the private exacter of justice violates no one’s rights, then punishing him for his actions (actions state officials also perform) violates his rights and hence violates moral side constraints.”[705] This suggests that prohibiting private enforcement and claiming a monopoly on coercion itself amounts to a rights violation. This, in turn, implies that coercion on the part of the state in this regard at least will not be permissible. Yet, since the use of coercion needs to be permissible if the state is to be justified, this implies that there cannot be any justified non-consensual state.
+[291] Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2–3:152) notes that Dcanal lies on high ground at the southwestern end of a spur of hills rising above a flat basin on the west bank of the Mopan River. The glyph name for the site is Kan Witz, “Precious Mountain.”
-Justifying the state’s claim to a monopoly on coercion is rather difficult, given that enforcement rights are universal. The state of nature is a situation of moral equality, where no one is inherently subordinate to anyone else. There is no asymmetry as regards fundamental coercive power. Instead, individuals are symmetrically situated with respect to each other. Everyone can use coercion to enforce moral prohibitions and punish wrongdoing. In a civil condition, by contrast, only the state is meant to be justified in doing so. In order for its monopoly to be justified, the state needs to occupy a privileged position.
+[292] Based on conversations with Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1989), Stephen Houston (1983) first identified this captive and discussed the war between Naranjo and Ucanal. He noted the passages on Stela 2 and 22, and recognized the same name on a pot. He also called attention to this name on Sacul Stela 1, where it appears with the date 9.16.8.16.1 5 Imix 9 Pop (February 12, 760). The text records a scepter ritual enacted by a Sacul lord “in the company of” (yichnal [Stuart, personal communication. 1988]) Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal. Houston pointed out that the time span (sixty-five years) between the Naranjo attack and this event makes it likely that this later Shield-Jaguar was a namesake. He also remarked that Ucanal had reestablished the prestige of its own ruling lineage by that time.
-The state uses force and claims to be justified in doing things that individuals cannot permissibly do. Why is it permissible for the state to prohibit individuals from O-ing (namely enforcing right) when it is fine for the state to O? Explaining this asymmetry is difficult because a protective association derives its rights from its members. As Nozick notes, no new rights emerge at the group level. The rights of a protective association, and likewise ofa state, have to be reducible:
+[293] In commenting on this passage, Berlin (1968:20) suggested that it names the wife of the young king as a woman from Tikal. He also posited that the woman named here is not Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, the daughter of Flint-Sky-God K. We agree with his suggestions, but we believe she was also from Dos Pilas. The glyphs that precede her name include “18 ???” and “Lord of the shell-winged-dragon place.” This shell-winged dragon is especially associated with Dos Pilas as the toponym of Lake Petexbatún. The person named thus appears to be a lord of Dos Pilas. His name is followed by yihtah, “the sibling of,” (Stuart 1988a) and a glyph Berlin proposed as “wife.” Lounsbury (1984:178–179) has read it as yatan, “his wife.” The male from Dos Pilas seems to be named as the “sibling of the wife” of the king. The wife was a woman of Dos Pilas. Smoking-Squirrel apparently married a woman in his grandfather’s family to reinforce the alliance with Dos Pilas.
-<quote>
+[294] Venus as Morning Star was 6.93+ from the sun, while Jupiter hung at 107.82 and Saturn at 108.09, both frozen at their second stationary points. As we will see in the following chapters, this pairing of Saturn and Jupiter was carefully observed by the Maya and used to time particularly important dynastic events.
-the legitimate powers of a protective association are merely the sum of the individual rights that its members or clients transfer to the association. No new rights and powers arise; each right of the association is decomposable without residue into those individual rights held by distinct individuals acting alone in a state of nature.[706]
-</quote>
-Accordingly, it would seem that one can establish the requisite moral asymmetry only by means of consent. There are two possibilities. Either individuals voluntarily transfer their enforcement rights to the state and thereby render impermissible their own engagement in private enforcement, insofar as giving up these rights implies that they are no longer at liberty to engage in private enforcement. Or a state that can impose duties (either by exercising political authority or by triggering political obligation) can prohibit private enforcement and can thus make it impermissible for citizens to make use of coercion. Yet, in the absence of consent no such moral asymmetry arises, and it is consequently difficult to explain how the state can be permitted to do things that citizens are not permitted to do.[707]
+[295] The data on the day in question, shown on page 460, was generated with “Planet Positions,” a BASIC program written by Roger W. Sinnott, 1980.
-*** VI. The De Facto Monopoly
+[296] In his map of the Naranjo region, Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 5) used Sacnab as an alternative name for Lake Yaxhá. Sacnab is “clear lake,” while Yaxhá is “blue water.” Maier (1908–1910:70) reported that there are two lakes at the location connected by a natural channel. One of these lakes was called Yaxhá and the other Sacnab. Apparently the names he was given at the end of the nineteenth century come from the Precolumbian names of the lakes.
-The non-consensual state is not normatively privileged. It does not have some special right that others lack. This means that it does not have a de jure monopoly. Only those who have voluntarily transferred some of their rights to the state and over whom the state has some form of authority stand in an asymmetric normative relation to the state. Those who have not consented, by contrast, are the moral equals of the state. The difficulty is thus to reconcile the asymmetry implicated in a monopoly with a commitment to moral equality, without relying on consent.
+[297] 9.14.0.0.0 is also recorded on Stela 23, but as a future event, which will follow the current events described in the narrative. The coincidence of the first appearance of Eveningstar on this katun ending was recorded at two other kingdoms. On Stela 16 at Tikal, Ah-Cacaw wears the skeletal god of Eveningstar (Lounsbury, personal communication, 1978) as his headdress, and on Stela C at Copán, 9.14.0.0.0 is connected by a Distance Number to a first appearance of the Eveningstar many years before the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date.
-Nozick’s solution to this problem appeals to the notion of a de facto monopoly. Instead of having a de jure monopoly, the state merely has a de facto monopoly. The state is not normatively but only empirically privileged. Since there is no de jure asymmetry, there is no conflict with moral equality. Yet, the way in which the state is empirically privileged is nevertheless normatively significant. The asymmetry that is involved in a de facto monopoly does not concern the possession of rights but, rather, the exercise of rights. Although the state has the very same rights as everyone else, there is a right that is such that the state is the only one who is able to exercise this right. In virtue of its dominant position, the state is uniquely capable of exercising a right that everyone has.
+[298] Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 3) reported finding this stone “on the centerline of the ballcourt at the northern extremity of the plaza” in 1972. He posited that it was moved there as the result of Postclassic or even post-Conquest activity, but we believe that the sequence of associated events suggests the placement was deliberate. Caracol conquered Naranjo and erected a stairs there to celebrate its victory. Forty years later, a recovered Naranjo conquered Ucanal and placed a piece of that stairs in the ballcourt of the kingdom they had just defeated. Others (Houston 1983:34 and Sosa and Reents 1980) have also made this connection between defeat, revival, and victory.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1976) suggested that triumphal stairs were forceably erected at the site of the loser by the victor. Houston also points out that this type of victory stairs has survived in remarkably good condition at sites like Seibal, Naranjo, and Resbalón, but that they were often reset in illegible order. He suggested that the dismantling and resetting in scrambled order may have been the loser’s way of neutralizing the stair after they had revived their prestige. Apparently one could damage the monuments of a defeated enemy, as Caracol apparently did at Tikal, but the monuments of a victor were not to be defiled in the same way. You reset them out of reading order to neutralize them.
+<br>
+<br>Interestingly, Ucanal’s suffering did not end here. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) report finding a panel at Caracol that depicts two Ucanal captives, bound and seated on legged, stone thrones. Dated at 9.18.10.0.0, the monument documents a Caracol that is once again erecting stelae and returning to its old pattern of aggression. A renewed Caracol apparently struck at the same border community that had felt the earlier wrath of a recovered Naranjo.
-Nozick points out that the enforcement of rights might well involve procedures which risk being unfair and unreliable and which thereby impose risks on others. He provides two arguments designed to show that this kind of risk imposition can be permissibly prohibited. On the one hand, one can appeal to procedural rights and argue that those who make use of risky enforcement procedures can be prohibited from engaging in enforcement since they would otherwise violate procedural rights. On the other hand, Nozick advances an epistemic principle of border crossing that implies that it is impermissible for x to punish y, even when y is guilty and doing so does not violate y’s right, on the grounds that x has not suitably ascertained whether or not y is guilty; i.e., x is not in the requisite epistemic position to permissibly punish y.[708]
+[299] Chris Jones (n.d.) dates several important projects to the last part of Tikal’s hiatus: a repaving of the North Acropolis; the completion of its present eight-temple plan; a rebuilding of the edge of the North and Central Acropolis which cut the Central Acropolis off from the East Plaza; and the remodeling of the East Plaza, which included placing a ballcourt in its center over the old Twin Pyramid Complex. Burials 23 and 24 were cut into the pyramidal substructure of Temple 5D-33—2<sup>nd</sup>, the huge masked building that fronted the North Acropolis. Jones suggests that Burial 23, the richer of the two, might be the tomb of Shield-Skull, the father of Ruler A, whom he suspects was the patron of much of this construction.
-Whilst everyone has the right to prohibit enforcement that is based on procedures that they deem to be unfair or unreliable, the dominant protective agency is in a privileged position. It is not privileged because its procedures are somehow guaranteed to be fair and reliable. Nozick does not assume the dominant agency to be epistemically privileged or to have special insight into which procedures are fair and reliable. Instead, it is privileged by virtue of its strength.[709] Its strength puts it into a privileged position because “the right includes the right to stop others from wrongfully exercising the right, and only the dominant power will be able to exercise the right against all others.”[710] The dominant agency can, accordingly, permissibly prohibit anyone else, in particular all independents (those individuals who have not consented) from engaging in private enforcement when using procedures that it deems to be unfair or unreliable. What the dominant agency deems to be fair and reliable then becomes the standard that ends up being enforced. Due to its strength, it can permissibly settle the question of what counts as a fair and reliable procedure.[711] Anything that deviates from the standards it adopts and is deemed unfair or unreliable will be prohibited. “The dominant protective agency will act freely on its own understanding of the situation, whereas no one else will be able to do so with impunity.”[712] As a result, the dominant agency has a de facto monopoly and thus qualifies as an ultraminimal state.
+[300] His first name has been read by Chris Jones (1988:107) as Ah-Cacaw, although he also appears in the literature as Double-Comb and Ruler A. Although the reading of one of the glyphs as ca has been questioned, we will use Ah-Cacaw as the name of this ruler.
-The notion of a de facto monopoly in this way allows for an asymmetry at the level of the exercise of a right. It thereby justifies the state’s claiming a monopoly on coercion in a way that is perfectly compatible with a commitment to moral equality.[713] In particular, it does not require any de jure monopoly that could only be established on the basis of unanimous consent on the part of all those governed by the state.[714]
+[301] Chris Jones (1988:107) cited skeletal information from Haviland (1967).
-*** VII. Conclusion
+[302] Nomenclature for the phases of these buildings can be a bit confusing for people unused to archaeological conventions. The phases of construction are numbered from the outside to the inside so that Temple 32-lst refers to the last construction phase of Temple 32. Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> refers to the next phrase inward; 33–3<sup>rd</sup> to the next, and so on until the earliest phase of construction is reached.
-There is room for justified non-consensual states. This space, however, is very narrow and can only be filled by a state that has a de facto but not a de jure monopoly. This is the only way in which a state can permissibly claim a monopoly of force without the consent of the governed.[715] Such a state is only justified in enforcing natural rights and prohibiting those who use risky procedures from engaging in private enforcement.[716] As a result, a justified non-consensual state must take the form of a Nozickian minimal state. Non-minimal states, by contrast, can only be justified if their citizens authorise them to perform the additional activities that go beyond those required to enforce enforceable moral prohibitions.
+[303] Both Coggins (1976:380) and Chris Jones (n.d.) speculate that Burial 23, the richer of the two graves dug into Temple 33—2<sup>nd</sup> just before the last phase of construction began, contained Shield-Skull. This enigmatic person did not leave any sculpted monuments that survived, but he is recorded on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 as Ah-Cacaw’s father. Jones also describes a significant building program which included Temple 5D-32-lst and the tomb of the twenty-second successor. Other buildings in the East Court and Central Acropolis may have been constructed during the reigns of the four intervening rulers. Unfortunately, since only the twenty-second ruler left us inscribed objects, we cannot know which of those rulers were responsible for the building programs. We interpret the absence of inscribed stelae during the reigns of the twenty-second through the twenty-fifth successors to have been the result of Caracol’s victory; but why the same Tikal rulers left the shattered remains of their ancestors’ stelae lying unattended in front of the North Acropolis, we don’t know.
-*** Acknowledgements
+[304] If our reconstruction of events is correct, the twenty-first ruler was captured by Lord Water of Caracol. The twenty-second ruler is in Burial 195 in Temple 5D-32, located to the immediate east ofTemple 33. The central temple held the older tomb of Stormy-Sky, as well as two others inserted into the substructure shortly before the second phase of construction was buried under the third. If the twenty-fifth ruler was in Burial 23 and if Burial 24 held the twenty-fourth ruler, then three of the four kings who ruled between the defeat and Ah-Cacaw’s accession are buried in the buildings fronting the North Acropolis.
-For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, I am grateful to Roger Crisp and Johann Frick.
+[305] Shook (1958:31) theorized that the stela was originally mounted in the rear chamber of Temple 5D-32. But since all other Tikal stela were erected in plaza space, we surmise that this one had been carried inside the temple from some other location. Chris Jones (n.d.) suggests that Stela 26 had been mounted in front ofTemple 5D-32, while Stela 31 was originally placed in front of 5D-33. The notion that the offering deposit was situated at the physical threshold of the Otherworld portal of these temples is derived from examples of other back-wall locations of altars and symbolic representations of Otherworld beings in the sanctums of Maya temples, as detailed, for example, in Chapter 6.
+[306] Chris Jones (n.d.) reports that a fragment of Stela 26 was placed alongside Altar 19 (the altar to Stela 31) in a pit next to the substructure ofTemple 33-lst. Since fragments from both monuments were put in the same cache, he presumes that both stelae were interred in their resting places in a single ceremonial sequence associated with the reestablishment of the Tikal dynastic lineage. Our reconstruction is somewhat different: We do not see any actual sundering in the old line as a result of the defeat by Caracol. There is no epigraphic evidence to suggest the insertion of any usurper Caracol kings; indeed, Caracol evidently did not even raise a victory monument here as they did at Naranjo. The victors apparently contented themselves with the desecration of Tikal royal historical monuments and the imposition of an effective ban on public history in the city. We interpret the ritual deposits of these two stelae—one recording a list of the kings from the lineage during its most aggressive and successful era, and the other recording its most glorious military victory—as a method of compensating for the desecration done to the monuments by the Caracol conquerors and as a means of establishing supernatural support for a new era of military success.
-[673] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic 1974) 4.
+[307] This description is based on images on the lower register of Room 1 at Bonampak. The event associated with that scene is the ‘fire house-dedication ritual now known from many different sites. Although our scenario concerns the honorable deposit of a desecrated stela at Tikal, the fire ritual was very probably of the same type because the material placed in the caches is identical to that placed in dedication caches in other buildings at Tikal (see Note 42 for a discussion of the interrelationship of dedication and termination rituals).
-[674] Nozick ix.
+[308] Harrison (1970) has interpreted the presence of family residences as well as administrative and ritual houses in the Central Acropolis. We presume that these buildings functioned both as residences for the royal family and as council houses for the institutions of governance.
-[675] This chapter focuses on the ways in which justification works within the hypothetical scenario that Nozick sketches in part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia; i.e., on what makes a state justified in this idealised hypothetical situation. In Ralf M. Bader, “Counterfactual justifications of the state,” Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 3 (2017): 101—131, I explain how this hypothetical account is relevant to the justification of states in the actual world, arguing that historical principles justify the state within the idealised hypothetical scenario, whilst counterfactual principles connect this to the non-ideal circumstances of the actual world.
+[309] The offering plates we describe here are the flat-bottomed plates found in the lip-to-lip caches especially associated with building termination and dedication deposits. One set of this type of cache vessel (Crocker-Delataille 1985:231 <verbatim>[#354])</verbatim> has zac lac incised on the side of the plate. This name associates these lip-to-lip plates with the great stone censers of Copan, which are called zac lac tun (Stuart 1986e). Zac has the meaning of “white,” but also of something “artificial,” in the sense of human-made. Lac is the word tor plate, while tun specifies that the zac lac was made of stone. Both types of vessels were receptacles for offerings [and both have interiors shaped like buckets or deep pans], Shook’s report does not mention either type of zac lac in Temple 34, but his descriptions of the pits dug in the floor closely resemble the bucket shape inside the Copan censers. We suspect that the Maya thought of them as being the same thing; and although no plates were deposited in the Temple 34 cache pits, the material in these caches closely matches dedication offerings from other deposits which have them. Our presumption that a zac lac would have been used to transport the offerings is based on the many depictions of such plates in scenes of ritual activities from painted pottery. The lac plate was one of the principal containers for offerings of all sorts.
-[676] In addition, Nozick claims that justifying the state requires one to show that it is an improvement vis-à-vis the relevant non-state alternative, or that it at least does not constitute a deterioration (cp. Nozick 4—5). How exactly to understand the baseline for comparison is somewhat unclear. Does it have to be an improvement relative to what would happen if the state were to suddenly disappear? Relative to what would have happened had the state never come into existence? Or relative to a non-state situation that could feasibly be brought about? How one is to understand the notion of an improvement is also unclear. Does it have to be a Pareto improvement? Or is it enough that it is an improvement on average? The metric of evaluation is also unclear. Along which dimension does the improvement need to take place? Is the metric specified in terms of well-being, or in terms of the extent to which rights are respected? However one resolves these questions, it will be an empirical question whether a given state classifies as an improvement along the relevant metric vis-à-vis the relevant non-state alternative.
+[310] These descriptions are based on the wall paintings of Bonampak and Temple XIII from Uaxactun.
-[677] Nozick 6.
+[311] Shook (1958:32) reports that some of the marine materials came from the Pacific, while others came from the Atlantic. Presumably, the Tikal lord traded for material both from the Gulf of Mexico and from the Belizean area of the Caribbean coast.
-[678] Nozick 58.
+[312] Flint and obsidian are associated with lightning strikes in most Maya languages and in much of their mythology. Most interestingly, the small obsidian blades found throughout the region are called u kach Lac Mam in modern Choi. This phrase translates as “the fingernails of the Lighting Bolt.”
-[679] If one allows for rights to be overridden—i.e., if one does not treat them, at least in some cases, as absolute side constraints—then the state can permissibly infringe rights without violating them (to use Thomson’s distinction). “We may (and, indeed, ought to) sometimes act in ways which infringe the rights of others, with no more justification than the great harm that would be done by allowing exercise of those rights. Governments will sometimes have such justifications for coercion (even where they lack the right to coerce), particularly where the well-being of many hangs in the balance or where unjust government threatens to replace just” (A. John Simmons, “The Anarchist Position: A Reply to Klosko and Senor,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16.3 (1987): 278). At least given a Nozickian view that treats rights as (quasi-absolute) side constraints, this can only be done in emergency situations to avoid moral catastrophes (cp. Nozick 30n). If the infringement of rights needs to meet a less rigorous justificatory burden, then this opens up room for the possibility of a Samaritan approach, in accordance with which the state can permissibly infringe rights in order to protect people from serious harm as long as doing so is not unreasonably costly. “[T]he presumption in favor of each citizen’s freedom from coercion is outweighed by the necessity of political coercion to rescue all of us from the perils of the state of nature” (Christopher H. Wellman, “Liberalism, Samaritanism, and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996): 219n13). On this approach, coercion will still be restricted to a limited set of cases.
+[313] Volcanic hematite is a rare iron mineral. It occurs naturally only in the context of active volcanoes—of which there are several in the southern Maya Mountains. The crystal takes the form of flat flakes with mirror-quality surfaces. Although the crystal is virtually noncorruptible by oxidation, it can be ground into a bright reddish-purple powder that can be used for decorative purposes. This powder contains sparkling fragments of the crystal form. Volcanic hematite was highly prized as a mosaic mirror material—superior even to the iron pyrite which the lowland Maya also imported. Hematite is found in relative abundance in Late Preclassic contexts and in decreasing amounts thereafter, suggesting that the known sources in the highlands were limited and became exhausted during the course of the Classic period. The mother-of-pearl backing on this particular mirror is commensurate with the Late Preclassic volcanic hematite mirrors found in the cache of royal jewels at Cerros as described in Chapter 3.
-[680] Enforceability is understood in the sense that it is permissible to enforce these duties, not in the weaker sense that it is merely possible to enforce them. The restriction to enforceable moral prohibitions means that we are setting aside non-juridical perfect duties as well as various imperfect duties, such as duties of beneficence, that cannot permissibly be enforced.
+[314] The practice of deliberately smashing jade artifacts, particularly earflare assemblages, has been identified as an aspect of lowland Maya termination rituals by James Garber (1983). David Grove (1986) has suggested the presence of a similar practice at the Middle Preclassic highland Mexican center of Chalcatzingo and it has been found in relation to one of the earlier phases at Temple 10L-26 at Copan.
-[681] Cp. Nozick 137–138.
+[315] This type of bundle has long been known from narrative scenes on pottery, on carved monuments, and in the murals of Bonampak. The Quiche talked about sacred bundles called the Pizom Q’aq’al. which contained relics from their founding ancestors. The Tzotzil today still use bundles in the rituals of office in much the same way they were used in ancient ceremonies. Juan Pedro Laporte found a lip-to-lip cache in the Lost World group. When opened it was found to hold the same array of marine materials, lancets made from the thorns called cuerno de toro in modern Mexico, jade, shell, and so forth. These objects were lying in a black substance which proved on analysis to be amate-fig bark paper, which had been painted blue and red. Around the entire offering, a band of fibrous cloth had been tied. Marisela Ayala (n.d.) was the first to identify this offering bundle with those represented in Maya imagery.
-[682] In addition to removal by forfeiture, rights can be removed by someone who has the relevant authority to do so; i.e., by someone who has the Hohfeldian moral power to divest individuals of their rights. However, as we will see shortly, the relevant kind of authority can only be established on the basis of consent and hence does not open up any additional room for permissible coercion on the part of non-consensual states. Coercion may also be justified when directed toward innocent threats as well as innocent shields of threats (cp. Nozick 34–5). These difficult cases cannot be accounted for in terms of forfeiture. We can set these cases aside, since they plausibly serve as occasions for the permissible use of coercion not by third parties but only by those actually being threatened.
+[316] Bruce Love (1987:12) describes the smearing of blood on idols and stelae as these rituals are described in ethnohistorical sources.
-[683] These two mechanisms are general and direct: the making of the law directly gives rise to an obligation. There can be specific indirect cases in which law-making triggers an independent duty; e.g., by solving a coordination problem (cp. Matthias Brinkmann, “A Rationalist Theory of Legitimacy” (DPhil diss., U of Oxford 2016) ch. 1.4.3). Duties that are created in this indirect manner do not satisfy content-independence (although it is arbitrary that a coordination problem is solved in one way rather than another, the reason for complying with the law is not due to its being a law but due to its providing a focal point that can solve the coordination problem) and may well not be sufficiently strong to warrant coercive enforcement.
+[317] In Room 1 at Bonampak, three high-ranked lords are shown being dressed in elaborate costumes. In the dedication scene on the lower register, these same three lords are shown dancing to the music of a band which marches into the picture from their right side. On their left, high-ranked nobles move into the scene in an informal procession. These latter appear to be both witnesses and participants in the ceremonies. I his same kind of dance very likely occurred in all or most dedication rites elsewhere, including 1 ikal.
-[684] Whilst being content-independent, the obligation can nevertheless be conditional; e.g., an obligation do what the law says because it is the law on condition that it is not unjust. (The same will be true in the case of political authority.)
+[318] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that another cache containing fragments of Altar 19, which he associates with Stela 31, and a fragment of Stela 26 were placed in a pit next to Temple 33–1<sup>st</sup>. He sees this as evidence that Stela 26 and 31 were deposited at the same time.
-[685] Stephen Perry, “Law and Obligation,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 50.1 (2005): 263–95, has pointed out that legal systems standardly do much more than attempting to impose obligations and that political obligation is not the relevant notion when it comes to characterising the normative relationship in which a citizen stands to laws that do not impose obligations but, say, attempt to create rights and permissions. (These cases should be characterised in terms of political authority on the part of the state and a liability to have their normative situations changed on the part of citizens.) This point, however, can be set aside for our purposes. When the permissibility of coercion is at issue, we are concerned with the behaviour of citizens. The question, in particular, is whether they are obligated to conform their behaviour in the way required by the law, so that the state can be justified in enforcing compliance. Political obligation will suffice just as well as political authority when it comes to justifying coercion on the part of the state. (Differences only arise if the state has the authority to directly take away the right not to be coerced in a particular way. Coercion could then be justified without having to proceed indirectly via creating a duty that can be coercively enforced.)
+[319] W. R. Coe (1967:48) described the construction sequence for Temple 33-lst in detail. Coggins (1976:445–447) and Chris Jones (n.d.) both agree that this construction project was associated with Ah-Cacaw’s reestablishment of the old lineage. Our understanding of this history descends from theirs, although we offer a slightly different interpretation of the data patterns. We see, for example, Temple 33-lst as both a new construction to declare the renewed authority and power of the dynasty, and as a method of ceremonially deactivating the North Acropolis. The Classic period Maya believed that sacred power and energy was accumulated in material objects (1) as they were used to contain the sacred power manifested in ritual and (2) as the actions of kings in the making of history focused the power of the cosmos onto them. To contain the accumulated power of an object which they wished to bury or discard, the Maya used a set of rituals to terminate the object formally. The dispositions of Stela 26 and 31 are examples of exactly these sorts of rituals; but these termination rituals also included drilling holes in pottery, knocking out the eyes of figures, destroying the faces of human imagery, removing color from sculpture, and many others. David Grove (1981) has proposed that this same behavior accounts for the mutilation of Olmec sculpture. Temple 33-lst seems to function like Temple 14 at Pa- lenque. Built by Kan-Xul after his brother Chan-Bahlum’s death, Temple 14 celebrates the dead brother’s emergence from Xibalba. It also contains the power in the Group of the Cross by blocking the main ceremonial access into it (Schele 1988b). Temple 33-lst performs the same function at Tikal by obstructing the formal, processional access into the center of the North Acropolis, deactivating it as the ritual focus of the dynasty.
-[686] This terminology is due to Bas van der Vossen, “Imposing Duties and Original Appropriation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23.1 (2015): 64–85.
+[320] In an insightful analysis, Coggins (1976:371) noted this stylistic relationship of this altar to the Caracol tradition and, long before the discovery of Altar 21 at Caracol, she suggested there might have been interaction in that direction.
-[687] This is a narrow account of Hohfeldian powers that is restricted to duty-creation and does not encompass duty-activation. It is a normative view of the moral power that amounts to something more than the mere ability to change the normative landscape. (It is only by working with a normative rather than merely descriptive construal that one can explain why a moral power is a (second-order) right; i.e., one of the specific Hohfeldian incidents of the general notion of a right.) This robust understanding of normative powers goes together with a normative construal of immunities that makes room for immunity-violations; cp. Ralf M. Bader, “Liberty, Threats, and Ineligibility” (unpublished ms.).
+[321] We do not yet have a phonetic reading of this verb, but its association with war and captive taking is widespread. Its other significant occurrence is in the heir-designation ritual of Chan-Bahlum at Palenque. Heir-designation rites as they were portrayed at Bonampak also involved the taking and offering of captives.
-[688] That political obligation is a case of triggering duties is particularly clear when the duty is owed not to the state but to someone else, as when, for example, citizens promise each other to obey the commands of the state. In that case, the state clearly does not possess a moral power but can merely trigger a preexisting obligation.
+[322] This ritual display of captives after a battle is the war event shown most often in narrative scenes in Maya art (Schele 1984a). We can see an excellent example of this in Room 2 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986:112–130). The event in the Tikal scene is spelled nawah. a term meaning “to dress or adorn” (Bricker 1986:158). Here, the action is the dressing of the captive in the garb of sacrifice. This action included stripping him of his regalia, replacing his battle garb with the cut-cloth kilt of sacrifice, replacing his ear ornaments with paper or flowers, and painting him in the color of sacrifice. Landa (Tozzcr 1941:117–119) reported that blue was the color painted on the stripped bodies of sacrificial victims before they were tortured or killed.
+<br>
+<br>Captives most often appear as sacrificial victims, rather than as warriors engaged directly in battle. Capture, and the rank of those captives taken, were central to the prestige of Maya nobles. Sacrificial victims also appear regularly in burials and in dedication rites. Brian Dillon (1982:44) found a deposit of sacrificial victims who were apparently lying in the belly-down position characteristic of captives when they met their fate. Captives, especially high-ranked ones, were often kept alive for years. They appeared repeatedly in all sorts of rituals, and their survival quite possibly created problems of succession in their lineages.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Harrison (1989) has provided us additional information on Structure 5D-57 that enriches this piece of history considerably. At the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, he demonstrated how the builders of the Central Acropolis used the geometry of the triangle in conjunction with older buildings to establish the location of new buildings. Using this technique. Structure 5D-57 was positioned in relationship to what he calls “Great-Jaguar- Paw’s clan house,” known archaeologically as Structure 5D-46, a great two-storied palace built on the west end of the Central Acropolis during the Early Classic period. So important was this palace to subsequent kings that while they added to it, they were careful to retain the original structure as a part of the functioning Acropolis throughout the subsequent history of the city.
+<br>
+<br>The identity of its original patron is established by a eaehe vessel deposited under the west stairs of 5D-46. The inscription on the pot records that it was made for the dedication of the k’ul na (holy structure) of Great-Jaguar-Paw.” Thus, Ah-Cacaw established the location of the building depicting his display of captives at the dedication of Temple 33 in relationship to the residence of the very ancestor whose victory over Uaxactun is celebrated on Stela 31. It was in Temple 33 that he deposited this tree-stone with such reverence. This is a remarkable folding of history back on itself and a wonderful example of the symmetries the Maya found so fascinating and useful in their construction of political history.
-[689] This is analogous to the way in which a promise made by y to x to look after z is owed to x. The beneficiary z can come apart from the entity x to whom the duty is owed.
+[323] The phrase, as written here, includes the “fish-in-hand” verb that records bloodletting and vision rituals at other sites. This verb is followed by a standard phrase including tit and a glyph representing a lancet and an “akbal” compound. In the past, we have presumed this “akbal” glyph referred to a performance of the ritual at night, but Victoria Bricker (1986:73–74) has suggested an alternative explanation that seems to be correct. The glyph consists of the signs ti, ya, the “akbal” sign, and H. If the “akbal” sign reads syllabically as ak\ the combination reads ti yak’il, “in his tongue.”
-[690] Stephen Perry has suggested that the obligation is owed to the community in whose name the state is acting (“Law” 282n36). This, however, is not correct and does not follow from an apt understanding of the ways in which moral powers work in general.
+[324] This verb consists of T79 (value unknown) superfixed to ta (T565) plus the combination -wan, an inflectional suffix for verbs having to do with position in or the shape of space. This same glyph and variants of it occur at Palenque, Copan, and many other sites associated with the dedication rituals for monuments and houses. The “T” in the number above derives from Thompson’s 1962 method of glyph transcription.
-[691] Relatedly, they will also differ in terms of the persistence conditions of the duties that are triggered or created.
+[325] For a full discussion of this day and its events, see the later parts of Chapter 4. Proskouriakoff (Coggins 1976:448) first noted that this date is linked to the Temple 1 date.
-[692] For an account of political obligation across generations, cp. Ela Leshem, “The State as a Moral Person and the Problem of Transgenerational Binding” (DPhil diss., U of Oxford 2018) ch. 3.
+[326] Even more intriguing is an observation recently made by Karl Taube in his study of Teotihuacan mirrors and war imagery (Taube n.d.). Following earlier work by George Kubler (1976), Taube notes the appearance of a species of cactus found in the highlands of Central Mexico. Both scholars have suggested that the platform under Ah-Cacaw refers directly to Teotihuacan, and Taube suggests it may refer directly to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. We think this may be correct, but we suggest the reference is far more oblique. At the time of the carving of these lintels, Teotihuacan was in severe decline (Millon 1988), but it had been in full florescence at the time of the conquest of Uaxactun when this iconography became so popular. We suggest the reference is to the conquest of Uaxactun and the long-lasting association of that victory with the memory of the Teotihuacanos. See René Millon’s (1988) evaluation of the Maya-Teotihuacan interaction in his discussion of the fall of Teotihuacan.
-[693] Cp. Stephen Perry, “Political Authority and Political Obligation,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law 2 (2013): 34: “[B]oth the power to impose the obligation, and, necessarily, the correlative liability to be subject to the obligation, must exist at the time that the directive is enacted.”
+[327] Scheie (1985a) proposed a reading of bal or balan for the Emblem Glyph ofTikal. New evidence from the Primary Standard Sequence on pottery has lent support to that reading and provided a direct association to this jaguar head. David Stuart (1987b:2–7) has read one of the glyphs in this pottery text as it tz’ibil, “his writing.”
+<br>
+<br>[[]]
+<br>
+<br>In one version of this glyph, the syllable ba is written with a jaguar head, and in another, bal appears as the head of the number 9. This last glyph standardly refers to a human head with the lower jaw covered with a jaguar pelt, and a yax shell sign affixed to its forehead. In many of the toponymic forms of the I ikal Emblem Glyph, the ‘ bundle is prefixed by yax. Since the main sign, as well as the head of the number 9, have phonetic values as bal, the name ofTikal was likely to have been Yax Bal or }ax Balam. The portrait head of the number 9, however, was also used to record the image and the name of the jaguar member of the Headband Twins, who are one of the Classic period manifestations of the Hero Twins. Tikal was apparently named as the special place of this god.
-[694] Whilst one can generate the same sets of duties by means of additional exercises of authority, the fact that additional actions are required to generate these duties implies that the two mechanisms are not equivalent in the sense that they generate the same duties in the same empirical circumstances but at most in the sense that any duty that can be created by one mechanism can also be created by the other.
+[328] Lintel 3 of Temple 4 depicts the son of Ah-Cacaw seated on a throne, but the point of view is rotated 90+ so that we see a front view of the king. Just as in Temple 1, the throne of the king sits atop a low stepped platform, but here the artist showed clearly the carrying bars of the Maya version of a sedan chair.
-[695] Perry, “Authority” 34, recognises that a moral power can exist without ever having been exercised.
+[329] Chris Jones (1988:1 10) follows an earlier suggestion by Marcus (1976:90) that the Emblem Glyph of this noble is that of Piedras Negras, based on the identification of the prefix as a leaf. However, the main sign of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph consists of the syllables^, ki, and bi, which can all appear in a variety of substitutions (Stuart 1987b:37). The snake form of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph is formed by simply using the head variant of bi. The Emblem Glyph on this bone has the blood group sign inverted, with the dotted part above the shell sign rather than below it. Therefore, we believe that the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of this captive noble is the snake head associated with Site Q and Calakmul.
-[696] Cp. A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1979).
+[330] Proskouriakoff (in Chris Jones 1988:109) first noted the recurrence of the death date on this bone. The other five events on MT 28 are also deaths, including that of someone named 18-Rabbit-God K on 9.14.15.4.3 and a woman on 9.14.15.6.13. The 18-Rabbit character may be named on Lintel 2 of Temple 1.
-[697] A further potential mechanism for acquiring authority proceeds via rights forfeiture.
+[331] Chris Jones (personal communication, 1986) secs little possibility that a passageway could have been left open to give access to the tomb. Ruler B probably oversaw the building of the substructure over the tomb of his father, although Ah-Cacaw is likely to have commissioned the lintels or at least to have overseen the information that would be put on them after his death.
-[698] This does not mean that all unjustified states are equally bad (cp. A. John Simmons, “Justification and Legitimacy,” Ethics 109.4 [1999]: 770). Although all unjustified states act impermissibly, they do so to varying degrees. Moreover, they can differ along a number of other dimensions; e.g., the extent to which they promote the welfare of their citizens.
+[332] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first recognized that the name phrase on Naranjo Stela 6 is the phonetic version of Smoking-Batab’s name. The day sign in the Calendar Round is eroded, but the three possible readings are:
+<br>
+<br>9.14.18. 4. 8 9 Lamat 11 Muan November 28, 729
+<br>9.15.11. 7. 13 9 Ben 11 Muan November 25, 742
+<br>9.16.4.10.18 9 Etz’nab 11 Muan November 22, 755
-[699] Nozick 51.
+; CHAPTER 6: THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MOTHER: Family and Dynasty at Palenque
-[700] Fundamental coercive power is power that does not rest on the consent of the person to whom it is applied (cp. Nozick 6). Coercive power that is conferred upon the state by those consenting to it is derivative and is only possessed contingently. Nozick is interested in the coercive power that a state does not just happen to possess as a contingent matter of fact but that it possesses fundamentally; i.e., in the conditions under which x (the state) can use force vis-à-vis y (a citizen) in the absence of y’s consent. (This is part of the reason why Nozick ignores consent theory. Cp. David Miller, “The Justification of Political Authority,” Robert Nozick, ed. David Schmidtz (Cambridge: CUP 2002) 16: “It is curious that Nozick gives no explicit attention to a Lockean contract as an alternative, more direct, route from the state of nature to a minimal state.”
+[333] According to one account by the family of Antonio de Solis of Túmbala in 1746, Palenque came to the attention of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century with its “discovery” by Spaniards. During the next forty years, many visitors, both civilian and government sponsored, went to Palenque and made a series of drawings and maps of the site, which are now in archives in Seville and Madrid and at the British Museum. A set of these early drawing and commentaries by Antonio del Rio and Paul Felix Cabrera appeared in Descriptions of the Ruins of an Ancient City, a two-volume work published by Henry Berthoud in 1822. With this publication, the ruined buildings and sculptures of Palenque came to the attention of the Western world and initiated a fascination with ancient Maya civilization that continues today. The most popular travel accounts were those written by John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in their Incidents of Havel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, published in 1841. These books truly brought the Maya to the attention of the Western world and were immensely popular at the time. For those interested in the history of discovery, see Graham (1971), Berlin (1970), and G. Stuart (n.d.).
-[701] The situation is different when it comes to the right to exact compensation, which only resides with the victim (and which can be waived by the victim); cp. Nozick 135.
+[334] This royal name combines the features of a snake and jaguar into one glyph block. At the Primera Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a meeting held at Palenque in December, 1973, at which most of Palenque’s kings were given their modern names, we elected to use the modern Choi spelling of this name combination—chan, “snake,” and bahlum, “jaguar.” Later research into the phonetic complements accompanying this name has shown that it was originally pronounced more like its modern Yucatec version, can-balam, but we have elected to retain the original spelling of this name in order not to add confusion by creating different names for the same person.
-[702] “A state claims a monopoly on deciding who may use force when; it says that only it may decide who may use force and under what conditions; it reserves to itself the sole right to pass on the legitimacy and permissibility of any use of force within its boundaries; furthermore it claims the right to punish all those who violate its claimed monopoly” (Nozick 23).
+[335] The longest inscription was the Hieroglyphic Stair of Temple 26 at Copán. We have deciphered enough of that inscription to know that it recorded a detailed dynastic history of Copán, but unfortunately the stairs were found already badly eroded and out of order for the most part. Time has not been kind to the stairs since they were uncovered in 1898 and much of what was visible then has since been worn away. This inscription is unlikely ever to be deciphered completely, making the panels of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque the longest intact inscription.
-[703] The monopoly on coercion is the crucial difference between a (dominant) protection agency and a state; more precisely, an ultraminimal state. This chapter only focuses on the monopoly aspect—i.e., on the ultraminimal state—and will set aside the step that results in a minimal state which involves protecting everyone’s rights and consequently might be thought to involve an impermissible redistributive element.
+[336] Pacal used the nine katuns leading up to and including his own lifetime as the framework for the dyntistic history he inscribed. Beginning with the katun ending on 9.4.0.0.0, he recorded the last royal accession to occur before each successive katun ended. When more than one king ruled within a katun, he linked their accessions to the half-katun or the thirteen-tun point within the katun. He ended the nine katuns with 9.13.0.0.0, the twenty-year period during which he built the temple and commissioned the tablets and their history. By using this device, Pacal locked all the accessions between Chaacal I and himself to specified period endings, thus setting the whole of Palenque’s history into a firm and indisputable chronological framework. This use of katun succession as the framework of history created the prototype of the katun histories that are common in the later books of Chilam Balam in Yucatán. Lounsbury (1974) first offered the chronological decipherment of the sarcophagus edge, while Berlin (1977:136) recognized the nine-katun sequence as the structural framework in which Pacal presented his history on the tablets above. For a detailed decipherment of the tablets from the Temple of Inscriptions, see Schele (1983, 1986c).
-[704] This has two aspects: on the one hand, the state has to prohibit individuals within its territory from engaging in unapproved private enforcement, and, on the other, it has to prohibit other states, protective agencies, and individuals outside its territory from engaging in unapproved enforcement activities within its territory.
+[337] Inscriptions document at least three, possibly four, more generations on later tablets, bringing the total number of generations to thirteen or fourteen during the entire history of Palenque.
-[705] Nozick 52.
+[338] The inscriptions of Palenque never record the exact kinship relationship between Ac-Kan, Pacal I, and Lady Zac-Kuk, but we can reconstruct it based on the following information. (1) Of the two men, only Ac-Kan became the king of Palenque. The texts of the Temple of Inscriptions are complete in the record of accessions from 9.4.0.0.0 until Pacal II, and Pacal I does not appear in that record. (2) Both men died in 612, but Pacal I died on March 9 while Ac-Kan died six months later on August 11. Most important, the records of their deaths on the edge of the sarcophagus lid are reversed, with the later date recorded first, as if we are to understand these persons in the order Ac-Kan/Pacal, rather than the order of their deaths. (3) Of the two men, only Pacal I is shown as a figure on the sides of the sarcophagus, even though he was never king.
+<br>
+<br>Something about their dynastic roles made it advisable to break the chronological order of the death list to put Ac-Kan before Pacal. At the same time, this something led the Maya to eliminate Ac-Kan from the portrait row and picture Pacal I instead. The most efficient explanation is that they were brothers and that the line passed through Pacal rather than Ac-Kan.
+<br>
+<br>In two other examples on the sarcophagus sides, one of a pair of rulers was eliminated from the portrait gallery, and in those examples we can determine the reason. The first pair, Manik and Chaacal I were born only five and a half years apart, while the other, Chaacal II and Chan-Bahlum I, were born only a year apart. These short periods between births make a father-son relationship between these pairs impossible—they were siblings. Of the first pair of brothers, only Chaacal I appears in portraiture; and of the second pair, only Chan-Bahlum I has a place on the sarcophagus sides. Why? The answer lies in inheritance: The children of only one brother might inherit the throne. The sarcophagus sides depict the direct descent of the line from parent to child. In this interpretation, Pacal I was the sibling of Ac-Kan and he is shown because his child inherited the throne. He won his place in Pacal the Great’s portrait gallery for his role as father of the next ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, and as the grandfather of the child named for him, Pacal, who became one of the greatest American rulers in history.
-[706] Nozick 89. Original emphasis.
+[339] Such tablets may well be at Palenque in the deep levels of the Palace or in some other building, for deep excavations have rarely been done at Palenque, and then often by accident. The time difference between Lady Kanal-Ikal’s rule and Pacal the Great’s was not long, for she was still alive when her great grandson was born. He was born on March 26, 603 and she died on November 7, 604. Her prominence in Pacal’s records and the twenty-year length of her reign makes likely that Lady Kanal-Ikal commissioned inscriptions and temple constructions during her reign.
-[707] The issue of explaining the moral asymmetry that is involved in the monopoly on coercion arises likewise when operating with a less robust conception of individual rights that makes it easier for rights to be infringed without being violated. If rights can be overridden more easily, it is easier for the state to do various things. Yet it is also easier for private individuals as well as other protection agencies and states to do those things, too.
+[340] He was forty-three years old at the time. He was thirty-seven when his mother died and thirty-nine at his father’s death.
-[708] Cp. Nozick 106—107. When operating with this epistemic principle, force can permissibly be used not only to enforce rights but also to enforce moral prohibitions that are not rights violations.
+[341] The plan and design of the Temple Olvidado became the hallmarks of Palenque’s architecture: double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls with multiple doors piercing exterior walls, and trefoil vaults arching across the inner galleries. Ihe vault system used in later buildings actually leaned the outer wall against the center wall, above the medial molding. The Palencanos never developed the true arch, but their system gave them the highest ratio of wall thickness to span width ever achieved in Maya architecture. The system also allowed them to pierce the outer walls of their buildings with more doors than any other Maya style, giving Palenque architecture the largest interior volume and best lighting known among the Maya. This innovative sequence began with the lemple Olvidado and culminated with the Group of the Cross and Houses A and D of the Palace.
-[709] The fact that it is merely the strength of the agency that accounts for its privileged position suggests that transactional components are inessential for a state to be justified. Although the account of the hypothetical emergence of the state that Nozick advances is a historical account that is partly though not fully transactional, insofar as clients but not independents voluntarily become members of the dominant protective association, this is not essential. If strength is all that is needed to underwrite a de facto monopoly, a protective agency that were to arise ex nihilo could permissibly prohibit private enforcement despite not having any (or at any rate not many) clients simply on the basis of being the most powerful protective agency. In chapter 6 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick tentatively puts forward the suggestion that the right to punish might be possessed jointly rather than individually. “To the extent that it is plausible that all who have some claim to a right to punish have to act jointly, then the dominant agency will be viewed as having the greatest entitlement to exact punishment, since almost all authorize it to act in their place.... Having more entitlements to act, it is more entitled to act” (Nozick 139—40). Unlike the permissibility of prohibiting private enforcement, this greater entitlement is not based on the strength of the association but on the number of clients that it has and hence can only result from a large number of individuals voluntarily deciding to become clients of that agency.
+[342] His construction projects probably also included Houses K and L on the south ends of the eastern and western facades, and perhaps other buildings that were found in excavations of the Palace courtyards.
-[710] Nozick 109.
+[343] See Scheie (1986a) for a full discussion of the development of Palenque’s architectural style.
-[711] This is not a crude form of “might makes right.” First, the dominant agency does not make it the case that something qualifies as fair. It does not constitute the relevant fairness facts. Instead, it settles, at least to a significant extent, in what way the notion of fairness will be interpreted in its territory and which standard of fairness and reliability will prevail. Second, not just any interpretation will qualify as admissible. It is not the case that anything goes. One can only permissibly prohibit the use of procedures that it is reasonable to deem unfair or unreliable.
+[344] This inference of the identity of the woman named in the Temple of Inscriptions as Pacal’s mother is based on the following pattern of data:
+<br>
+<br>(1) The woman who appears in the equivalent chronological position in the death list on the sarcophagus is his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk.
+<br>
+<br>(2) On the Oval Palace Tablet, the woman named as Pacal’s mother hands him the crown that makes him king, but his father is neither named nor pictured. The parent critical to his legitimate claim to the throne is his mother rather than his father.
+<br>
+<br>(3) His father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, never appears in an accession phrase in any of the inscriptions of Palenque. Furthermore, Pacal depicts Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ only on the sarcophagus where he appears as the king’s father and not as a king in his own right.
+<br>
+<br>(3) The goddess is born on a date deliberately contrived to have the same temporal character (see note 35) as Pacal’s birth.
+<br>
+<br>All of these factors emphasize that Pacal’s right of inheritance descended through his mother rather than his father. Pacal’s strategy for explaining the appropriateness of this pattern of descent was to establish an equation between his mother and the mother of the gods. To have named the woman who acceded shortly before his own accession with the name of the goddess is much in keeping with this strategy.
+<br>
+<br>The name itself consists of the bird from the Palenque Emblem Glyph, which is a heron, with feathers in its mouth. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1977) has suggested that this is a play on the name Zac-Kuk, based on the following word plays. The word for heron in Yucatec and Choi is zac bac, “white bone,” or some expression like “white crest.” The zac bac reading works well as the Palenque Emblem Glyph since the main sign in the Emblem Glyph is a long bone or skull, also bac. Lounsbury suggests that the feathers (kuk) in the mouth changes zac bac to zac kuk, thus making a play on the name of Pacal’s mother which was Zac-Kuk, “White (or Resplendent) Quetzal.” No one has, as yet, suggested a reading for the small sign mounted atop the heron’s head in the name. At the 1989 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Dennis Tedlock offered a different solution by linking the zac bac gloss with the name Xbaquiyalo, the first wife of Hunhunahpu and mother of Hun-Batz’ and Hun-Chuen in the Popol Vuh.
-[712] Nozick 108.
+[345] The stairs leading up the front of the Temple of Inscriptions and those leading down to the tomb have risers about 18 inches high. Today, the inner stairs are almost always damp and slippery from condensation in the tunnellike vaults; we assume the same conditions were extant when Pacal was buried.
-[713] There are multiple ways in which the ultraminimal state falls short of the Weberian conception of a monopoly on coercion. First, it does not adjudicate conflicts between non-clients but only prohibits nonclients from private enforcement vis-à-vis the agency’s clients (cp. Nozick 109). Second, it does not prohibit independents that are known to use fair and reliable procedures. Third, the Weberian account considers the state to be the sole authoriser of the use of force, yet the dominant protective agency does not claim a de jure monopoly but only a de facto monopoly: it prevents and threatens to punish individuals for using unauthorised force, but it does not claim to have a special right to do so. For these reasons, Nozick calls it a “statelike entity” (cp. Nozick 117—118). The argument nevertheless does establish the permissibility of non-consensual rule and succeeds in introducing a normative asymmetry that does not rely on consent.
+[346] While we have no way of determining who enacted the rituals described in this scenario, the fact that these particular actions were done is clear from the archaeological record at Palenque and from records of other burial rites, especially those of Ruler 3 at Piedras Negras (Stuart 1985a). The description of the objects deposited inside the coffin and tomb are drawn from Ruz (1973) and from his description of the sacrifice of five victims (1955). The description of the scale and feel of being in the tomb comes from the days Scheie spent locked inside the tomb helping Merle Greene Robertson photograph the stucco sculptures modeled on the walls.
-[714] This kind of de facto monopoly can also be found in Kant’s justification of the state, according to which the state is uniquely empirically positioned to enforce juridical laws; cp. Ralf M. Bader, “Kant and the Problem of Assurance” (unpublished ms.).
+[347] The drawings which survive on the sarcophagus sides are carefully drawn and beautifully designed. However, the carving, especially in the areas at some distance from the image of the falling Pacal, are very sloppily executed. Merle Robertson and Scheie take this contrast to mean that the carving was executed at the last minute and in a rush. See Merle Robertson (1983) for a detailed photographic record of the tomb.
-[715] Another way to put the point is that the space for states that are justified but lack legitimacy (in the sense in which Simmons, “Justification,” uses these terms) is very limited and can only be occupied by Nozickian minimal states that have de facto monopolies.
+[348] Xoc appears briefly on the Palace Tablet as the man who dedicated the north building of the Palace after Kan-Xul had been taken captive by the king of Tonina. He never became the king, but he apparently was a high-ranked official in the kingdom because he functioned as the surrogate of the captured Kan-Xul until a new king was selected from the royal clan. Given his age of thirty-three at the time of Pacal’s death, we have assumed he served Pacal as well as his descendants.
-[716] It is possibly also justified in infringing without violating rights in order to address emergency situations if rights are not absolute but can be overridden.
+[349] Chaacal, in fact, did become king after Kan-Xul was taken captive and executed at Tonina. His parentage statements do not name either Chan-Bahlum or Kan-Xul as his father. He was apparently the offspring of one of the women in Pacal’s lineage, perhaps a sister of Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul. Chac-Zutz’ was a cahal, who became an important figure (maybe the war chief of the kingdom) during Chaacal’s reign.
+[350] The offerings of the plaster heads, the plates and cups of food, the royal belt, and the slaughtered victims are located in the plans below.
 <br>
+<br>[[][Jester God headband mask]]
-** 12 Two Cheers for Rothbardianism Cory Massimino
+[351] The other possibility is that the portraits represent the great king Pacal and his wife Lady Ahpo-Hel.
-*Cory Massimino*
+[352] Merle Robertson (1979) first associated the imagery on these piers with glyphic accounts of Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation. The fact that Chan-Bahlum became a living incarnation of the sun is declared by him in his own textual account of this ceremony in the Temple of the Sun in the Group of the Cross.
-*** I. Introduction
+[353] The badly damaged condition of these stucco portraits and the texts that once accompanied them preclude identifying them with security, but logically they should be the most important ancestors in Chan-Bahlum’s claim to legitimacy. One possible pattern is that they all represent his father Pacal, but the headdresses, one of which is a jaguar head, suggest that they are meant to represent different individuals. The Maya often represented their names in the imagery of their headdresses. The jaguar headdress, then, may refer to Chan-Bahlum I, his great-great-great-grandfather.
-Murray N. Rothbard (1926—1995) was an economist, historian, political theorist, polemicist, activist, and founder of the variety of market anarchism he dubbed “anarcho-capitalism.” Both his supporters and detractors too often remember him for his late-career influence on paleolibertarianism, a movement that sought to synthesize populist conservatism and libertarianism (and, in Rothbard’s case, anarchism). After his turn to paleolibertarianism, Rothbard embraced Pat Buchanan and David Duke,[717] and called for the cops to be “unleashed” to “administer instant punishment.”[718] My goal here is not to defend Rothbard’s paleolibertarianism or reconcile it with anarchism, but to explore aspects and implications of his thought quite apart from paleolibertarianism, of which there is quite a bit. Rothbard had extensive influence on other anarchists, on libertarians, on conservatives, on radical leftists, on Austrian-school economists, and on others. In light of that, I think we should give Rothbard’s work another look.
+[354] At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan depicted the designation of his heir by showing a high-ranking noble displaying him at the edge of a pyramid. The audience on the mural consists of fourteen high-ranked individuals, but the ritual would have been held publicly, the entire community in attendance (M. Miller 1986b:59–97). At Palenque, Chan-Bahlum did not represent the audience, but we know it included everyone who stood in the plaza under the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions. In the Group of the Cross, he used a pyramid glyph to describe the action of heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) as being “pyramided.” The glyph actually reads le.match’ul na (using the transcription punctuation from Thompson s <verbatim>[1962]</verbatim> A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs) or lem ch’ul na: in Yucatec lem is glossed by Barrera Vasquez as “meter, encajar, introducir. To become the heir was “to introduce the child from the pyramid,” exactly the scenes Chan-Bahlum displayed on the Temple of Inscriptions piers.
-We can embrace important insights offered by Rothbard without endorsing his paleolibertarianism. We can’t reasonably regard paleolibertarianism, which he embraced during the last fifteen years of his life, as definitive of his overall position, any more than we can consider Rothbard’s prior affiliations with the Old Right[719] or the New Left[720] as somehow reflective of the authentic Rothbard. He enjoyed intra-group politicking and formed and destroyed many political alliances through the course of his life. If we want to understand his ideas, we should focus on the salient themes that can be consistently found across all his work over the course of his entire life and which guided his analytic focus throughout. We can call that bundle of themes “Rothbardianism.” My specific interpretations of Rothbard might, at first, confound critics and admirers alike, but I believe they’re all backed up by solid textual support. I hope the conversation around Rothbard can move past both cultish admiration and reflexive criticism and instead develop a sense of critical admiration for his thought.
+[355] Although the first royal temple at Cerros is designed around the quincunx or five-fold principle, the later public buildings there are triadic in concept. The earliest architects created an innovative variety of building designs, but the triadic principle was the most pervasive.
-“Rothbardianism,” I suggest, mainly consists in four broad (and usually disparate) frameworks that he attempted to synthesize and unite into a coherent whole. Rothbard thought all the sciences of human action were interrelated.[721] He was both a radical thinker, in the sense of having an integrated, root-and-branch approach to social issues,[722] and a dialectical thinker,[723] in the sense of analyzing moral, social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena from different vantage points and levels of generality in order to make apparent different aspects and interrelationships.[724] I will give a broad overview of each of Rothbard’s frameworks and the ways in which they fit together and reinforce each other in radical, dialectical fashion: (1) natural law theory in the tradition of Aristotle, (2) individualist anarchism in the tradition of Lysander Spooner, (3) liberal class theory in the tradition of Franz Oppenheimer, and (4) Austrian economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises. Then I will consider what other strands of anarchism can learn from Rothbardianism. Finally, I will explore potential lessons Rothbardianism can learn from other strands of thought, particularly classical and contemporary anarchism, and where the future of Rothbardianism might lie.
+[356] The glyphic phrase for these small inner houses, pib na, consists of<em>pib,</em> the word for “underground” as in the pits used for cooking, and na, “edifice or building.” Pib na is also the term for a “sweat bath” used by women after childbirth. Many cosmologies of modern Maya in Chiapas refer to a sweat bath in the heart of the mountain. This image may be intended here also.
-I want to note that Rothbard was a broad thinker and prolific writer. He was a systembuilder with many parts to his system. Boettke notes, “For those who are concerned with not just philosophizing about the world, but changing it, Rothbard provides a vision of a systematic science of liberty.”[725] There are surely aspects of Rothbard’s lengthy body of work that I won’t have time to explore here. But I hope to give a fair account of his overall thought and do justice to his legacy while also building upon it.
+[357] The text on the Tablet of the Cross writes this second event as yoch-te k’in-k’in, “he became the sun.”
-*** II. Natural Law Theory
+[358] All three panels have the same text on them, but the text is split in different ways in each temple. In the Temple of the Cross, it reads “ten days after he had become the stood-up one (yoch-te acai) and then he spoke of (iwal chi-wa or che-wa) U-Kix-Chan, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, the child of Pacal, Blood Lord of Palenque.” In the Temple of the Foliated Cross, the first event (yoch-te) appears on the left panel and the second (chi-wa) is on the right. In the Temple of the Sun, the glyphs from the left panel survive on Maudslay’s (1889—19O2:P1.86) reproduction of Waldeck’s original drawing, but nevertheless some of them are readable. The first phrase reads chumlah ti ahau le and paraphrases “He was seated as king, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, Blood Lord of Palenque.” The second section of the text is much more difficult, but the best probability is that it begins with a Distance Number that leads to the event ten days after the accession (9.12.11.13.0 5 Ahau 13 Kayab) and then jumps to the right tablet where the event was once written. Today only the long name phrase of the actor, Chan-Bahlum, survives on the right panel.
-On Rothbard’s view, morality “is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each with its own nature and its own ends.” The content of the moral law, then, depends upon the nature of the moral beings it concerns. But what is the essential nature of human beings? Rothbard followed Aristotle in thinking that what distinguishes humans from “inanimate objects and non-human living creatures,” who “are compelled to proceed in accordance with the ends dictated by their natures,” is the possession of “reason to discover such ends and the free will to choose” among them.[726] Rationality is the faculty that separates humanity from other natural kinds. It’s our capacity for reason that enables us to direct our actions towards specific ends of our own choosing.
+[359] Mayanists are still debating the identification of this smaller figure. Floyd Louns- bury (in his seminar on Maya hieroglyphic writing, 1975) first proposed that he is Chan- Bahlum at his heir-designation. Since all three of the texts located near his head record this heir-designation and, in’two of the three texts, a war event which took place more than a year later on 9.10.10.0.0, this interpretation has merit. In fact, it has resurfaced recently in a presentation by Basse and it has the support of David Stuart. Another alternative interpretation emerged at the 1987 Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Tom Jones proposed this figure represents the lineage founder, Bahlum-Kuk. Since founders also appear in accession scenes at Yaxchilan (Lintel 25) and Copan (the bench from Temple 11), this interpretation also has merit.
+<br>
+<br>For the present, we still hold to the older interpretation of this shorter figure as Pacal, based on the following arguments:
+<br>
+<br>(1) There is a transfer of a scepterlike object (in the Temple of the Cross a Quadripartite Scepter; in the Temple of the Foliated Cross, a Personified Perforator; and in the Temple of the Sun, a shield and eccentric-shield device). These transferred objects represent the power of the throne, and rulers at Palenque and other Maya sites wield them in scenes of rituals. If the smaller figure is Chan- Bahlum at his own heir-designation, he is already controlling these objects at age six. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1989) has suggested that this is a ritual in which the child was made acquainted with the objects he would one day wield as king. We find this interpretation less satisfying than one in which these objects are transferred from the former king, now deceased, to his son who is becoming the new king.
+<br>
+<br>(2) In the heir-designation presentation on the Temple of Inscriptions piers, the size of the child (104 cm) matches closely the size of six-year-old Choi children in the region today (M. Robertson 1979.132–133). The scale of the child presented in the Bonampak murals conforms to this size in direct proportion to the adult who holds him. The muffled figure in the Group of the Cross may be smaller than the larger figures, but he is still of a size larger than a six-year-old in proportion to the larger figure. The Temple of Inscriptions child when stretched out to full height is only 56 percent of the height of the adults who hold him. while the smaller figure in the Group of the Cross is between 73 percent and 78 percent of the height of the larger figure. According to Robertson’s modern measurements, a 1.04-meter six-year-old from the Palenque region is around 60 percent of the height of a 5’ 6” (1.70m) adult.
+<br>
+<br>(3) If the scene is the documentation of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites, and this interpretation is well supported by the inscriptions, then the composition format of each temple means to present this small figure as the source of power. He holds the objects of power on the inner tablet while the new king holds them on the outer panels. There is a transfer of these objects from the smaller person to the larger one as the scene moves inside to outside. The larger figure also dons the costume of kings in its most ancient and orthodox version during the transition from inside to outside: He wears minimal jewelry and a cotton hipcloth on the inside and the full costume over those minimal clothes on the outside. In addition, the larger figure takes the smaller person’s place when the scene moves from the inside to the outside of the sanctuary, especially in the composition of the Temple of the Cross. The scenes in all three temples emphasize the transformation of the tall figure from heir to king in the movement from inside to outside, and within this program the smaller figure is presented as the source of Chan-Bahlum’s claim to the throne—and that person was either Pacal, his father, or Bahlum-Kuk, the founder of his dynasty.
+<br>
+<br>(4) Finally, in the heir-designation event, the six-year-old child was not the main actor, either at Palenque or at Bonampak. The child was displayed as the heir, but the father, who was the acting king, oversaw that display. At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan went to war, not the child, and at Palenque, Pacal memorialized the thirteenth-haab anniversary of this heir-designation in the Tableritos from the Subterranean building of the Palace without mentioning Chan-Bahlum at all. Chan-Bahlum, the six-year-old child, was the recipient of the action in the heir-designation rites, but the source of those actions was his father, Pacal.
+<br>
+<br>The argument for identifying the smaller figure as Chan-Bahlum at his heir-designation has strengthened with the recognition that the two outer panels of the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun depict Chan-Bahlum at points in his accession rituals separated by at least ten days. The fact that Chan-Bahlum appears on more than one date, involved in more than one action on the outer panels, reinforces the possibility that he is shown at two different ages and in two different actions on the inner panel. Although we believe this latter interpretation to be less probable, it is a viable possibility that must also be kept in mind.
-Not only do humans “always act purposely”; our “ends can also be apprehended by reason as either objectively good or bad for” humans.[727] On Rothbard’s view, natural law theory provides a “science of happiness” that “elucidates what is best for man — what ends man should pursue that are most harmonious with, and best tend to fulfill, his nature.”[728] Rational deliberation is the essential feature of human beings that we are uniquely suited for and which constitutes our unique flourishing. “The function of a human being is activity of the soul accord with reason.”[729]
+[360] The Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Zinacantan in highland Chiapas still regard the Christian crosses at the base of their sacred mountains as the doorways to the Otherworld which contains their ancestors. The shamans of this community regularly commune with the supernatural at these holy places (Vogt 1976).
-Central to Rothbard’s natural law theory is his individualist ontology: it is only the individual human being “who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts.”[730] Humans are metaphysically independent. Only the individual human being can develop the virtues necessary for rational flourishing. Yet the possibility of living a virtuous life presupposes the ability, or the freedom, to act according to virtue, according to one’s own moral conscious. Attempts to compel virtue eliminate its very possibility. When people are coerced, they are taken “out of the realm of action into mere motion.” Individual autonomy, self-direction, and the freedom to choose are constitutive of virtue. “To be moral, an act must be free.”[731] The social conditions of freedom generate and sustain our very ability to act morally. “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”[732] The centrality of moral agency committed Rothbard to a kind of radical egalitarianism — an egalitarianism not directly committed to economic, social, or legal equality, but rather to equality of authority.[733] For Rothbard, liberty is a condition in which no human being exercises authority over another; i.e. exercises physical violence to subject another to one’s own ends. “[T]he specific equality of liberty ... is compatible with the basic nature of man.”[734]
+[361] See Schele and M. Miller (1986:76–77, 265–315) for a detailed discussion of the World Tree and its appearances in death and bloodletting iconography of the Maya.
-But what about external materials, objects which are unlike our body in that we don’t possess natural agency over them? A theory of rights that doesn’t account for the material world beyond our immediate bodies treats humans as “self-subsistent floating wraiths.” Because we are embodied and because we act in the physical world, our existence necessarily requires the ability to transform nature-given resources into usable and consumable objects. Human nature necessitates not only self-ownership, but also ownership of material objects to control and use.[735] Property rights are not tacked-on additions to but specific applications of the right of self-ownership. Long calls this the “incorporation principle,” according to which the alteration of external objects such that they become instruments of my ongoing projects transforms them into extensions of myself.[736] Incorporated objects become related to me such that no one can subject them to their purposes without subjecting me to their purposes.[737]
+[362] The aged god on the right has never been securely identified. Kelley (1965) suggested God M, but demonstration of his identification has not materialized. The only other portrait we have of this god appears on a small incised bone, probably from the Palenque region (see Crocker-Delataille 1985: Pl. 395). The composition of these two old gods bent under the weight of the throne precisely anticipates the display of captives on Late Classic stelae from the site of Coba (Thompson, Pollock, and Chariot 1932).
-Rothbard’s natural law theory doesn’t reject the Aristotelian insight that human nature is essentially social. On Rothbard’s view, self-ownership rights are merely the application of our social nature. Humans are metaphysically independent, but socially interdependent. Rothbard thought our social nature is best expressed by a scheme of self-ownership that enables social cooperation and protects people from being violently subordinated to others’ ends. It’s our social nature, and the freedom humans require to act on that social nature, that undergirds our obligation to respect the self-ownership rights of others.
+[363] God L is now recognized as one of the chief gods of the Maya Underworld. Most important, he is the deity shown presiding over the gods on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the day of the current creation (M.D. Coe 1973:107—109). Chan-Bahlum s repeated depiction of this god asserts the ability of the king to control the effects of God L and other Xibalbans in his community, and perhaps his ability as king to gain the willing cooperation of these gods in the affairs of the kingdom.
-Rothbard made a radical, dialectical case for the idea that humans were “not made for one another’s uses.”[738] He grounded such a theory in the centrality of individual autonomy, selfdirection, and freedom to choose for flourishing as rational and social beings. Natural law theory offers a system of compossible rights that are inherent in our humanity and which establishes just physical boundaries between moral agents such that agents can’t violently subordinate each other. This view has profoundly “radical and revolutionary”[739] implications for social and political thought.
+[364] This set of gods was first noticed by Berlin (1963), who gave it the name Palenque Triad” because it was in the Palenque inscriptions that he first saw them. Building on Berlin’s identification, Kelley (1965) identified their birth dates in the Group of the Cross and suggested associations between these Maya gods and other Mesoamerican supernaturals. Lounsbury (1976, 1980, 1985) sorted out chronological problems concerning their histories and recognized the names of their parents in the I ablet of the Cross. He has also made extensive arguments concerning their identities. In Maya art, these gods appear both singly and as a triad of gods at other Maya sites. Most important, GI and GUI, the first and second-born gods, are the beings most often depicted in the very earliest public images created by the Maya during the Late Preclassic period. They are not just Palenque gods.
-*** III. Individualist Anarchism
+[365] The text that records this event falls into a couplet which characterizes the action in two ways. In the first, the god yoch-te ta chan “entered into the sky. In the second, he dedicated a house named “wac-ah-chan xaman waxac na GI or raised up sky north eight house GI.” The first glyph naming the house consists of the number six prefixed to a sky glyph with two ah signs above it. The word for “six is wac. Barrera Vasquez (1980:906) lists a homophone, wac, as “cosa enhiesta” (enhestar means “to erect, to set up, to hoist [up], and to raise [up]“). Wac-ah chan is “raised up sky. i his proper name is followed by the glyph for “north” (xaman) and the portrait head of GI preceded by the number eight (waxac) and phonetic na (“edifice”).
+<br>
+<br>The most likely reference here is to the act of raising the sky from the primordial sea of creation, an act known to be part of many Mesoamerican origin myths. This house is further characterized as yotot xaman, “the house of the north. The same wacah chan phrase names the inner sanctuary of the Temple of the Cross and World T ree on its inner panel. The god’s action was to establish the primary axis of the world by setting the sky in its place and establishing its order. Since this is an action twice associated with the north, we suggest it corresponded in the Maya mind to the set of the polar star and the circular movement of the constellations around that axis. In the tropics, the polar star is much lower than in the temperate zone, and the movement of the constellations through the night is even more noticeable, resembling as much as anything the shifting of patterns around the inside of a barrel. This axial pivot of the sky creates the great pattern through which the sun and the planets move and it was a pattern created by GT 542 days or a year and a half after this era began (Scheie 1987e and n.d.a).
-Rothbard disagreed, not with the view that we’re social animals, but with the conventional implications of that view for political theory. Many political theorists see the state as a vehicle of collective decision-making in which the members of a given society come together in the pursuit of common goals. But where many see the state as a bulwark of social cooperation, Rothbard saw it as the epitome of social disintegration.
+[366] Floyd Lounsbury first deciphered the chronology of this difficult passage. The text begins with a Distance Number of 8.5.0, a birth verb, and then a series of glyphs recording 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the era date. Before Lounsbury proposed this solution, most researchers had assumed that the birth referred to the Initial Series event. In this interpretation, the Distance Number must be in error since the Initial Series date is 6.14.0 before 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, rather than the 8.5.0 written in the text. Lounsbury used known patterns of Mayan grammar to show that there are actually two different births given here, and that the name of the person born 8.5.0 before the era has been deleted from the text. The missing name, however, can be reconstructed—again by using known patterns of Mayan grammar—as the subject of the next event. The name in question is GT, the god who ordered the sky a year and a half after the era began. See Lounsbury (1980 and 1985) for a full discussion of the chronology and grammar of these passages and the identities of the gods of the Palenque Triad.
-A common defense of the State holds that man is a ‘social animal,’ that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of ‘atomistic individuals’ uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State. On the contrary, as we have indicated, the State is an antisocial instrument, crippling voluntary interchange, individual creativity, and the division of labor. ‘Society’ is a convenient label for the voluntary interrelations of individuals, in peaceful exchange and on the market.[740]
+[367] Lounsbury (1976) called this kind of numerology “contrived numbers.” Such numbers are composed of two dates: The earlier one is usually from a time previous to the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date, and the other is a historical date of significance in the present creation. The Distance Number (amount of time) that separates the two is contrived by using highly factorable numbers, so that both dates fall on the same point in time in several different cycles. The two dates manipulated by Chan-Bahlum, 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahau 18 Zee and 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahau 13 Pop, fall 9.8.16.9.0 or 1,359,540 days apart in the Maya Long Count. This number is 2<sup>2</sup> x 3<sup>2</sup> 5 x 7 x 13 x 83 yielding the following relationships:
+<br>
+<br>| 1,359,540 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 5,229 | (26) | gives the same day number |
+<br>| | 3,735 | (364) | computing years |
+<br>| | 1,734 | (780) | Mars period and three tzolkins (3 x 260) |
+<br>| | 1,660 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
+<br>
+<br>This puts Pacal s birth in relation to Lady Beastie’s on the same day in the tzolkin (8 Ahau), the same point in the Mars cycle, and during the time when the same Lord of the Night reigned. Most important, both persons were born twenty days after time moved into the south-yellow quadrant of the 819-day count. And both quadrants began on 1 Ahau.
-For Rothbard, the distinction between state and society is of primary importance. The state is merely a subset of society, a single institution among many. What distinguishes the state from other social institutions is its inherently compulsory and predatory nature. “Throughout history, groups of men calling themselves ‘the government’ or ‘the State’ have attempted — usually successfully — to gain a compulsory monopoly of the commanding heights of the economy and the society.”[741] Such predatory compulsion violates Rothbard’s radical egalitarianism of authority and goes against our and rational and social nature.
+[368] In the account of genesis given in the Popol Vuh, First Mother is a daughter of a lord of Xibalba. V hen the skull of First Father impregnates her by spitting in her hand, she is forced to flee to the world of humanity. As in Chan-Bahlum’s story, the First Mother spans the worlds.
-There are two aspects to the coercive, anti-social nature of the state. First, it’s a monopoly. That is, the state has unliterally designated itself as the sole provider of infrastructure, education, arbitration, defense, etc., within its territory. A crucial feature of the state’s monopoly status is its “control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts — the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts.” The state necessarily rests on physical coercion that precludes other people or groups of people from providing many of the goods and services it provides. The state’s monopoly over the use of violence is directly related to the second aspect of its coercive nature: taxation. “Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion.” Non-state entities in society (except criminal enterprises) obtain their income through voluntary trade and/or gifts, whereas states obtain their income by the use of physical coercion. This means that taxation is morally equivalent to theft, “even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”[742] Rothbard is heavily indebted to Spooner, who observed “that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: ‘Your money, or your life.’”[743]
+[369] The two births are: 12.19.11.13.0 1 Ahau 8 Muan (June 16, 3122 B.c.) for GT and 1.18.5.4.0 1 Ahau 13 Mac (November 8, 2360 B.c.) for GIL The elapsed time between them is 1.18.13.9.0 or 278,460 days. This sum factors out as 2<sup>2</sup> x 3<sup>2</sup> x 5 x 7 x 13 x 17 and gives the following patterns of cycles:
+<br>
+<br>| 278,460 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 1,071 | (260) | same day in the tzolkin |
+<br>| | 357 | (780) | same day in the Mars cycle and 3 tzolkins |
+<br>| | 119 | (2,340) | gives the same Lord of the Night |
+<br>| | 765 | (364) | computing year |
+<br>| | 153 | (1,820) | seven tzolkin/five haab cycle |
+<br>| | 340 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
+<br>| | 85 | (3,276) | same quadrant of the four 819-day sequence (east, red, and 1 Imix) |
+<br>
+<br>These cycles make the two births fall on the same day in the 260-day tzolkin, on days ruled by the same Lord of the Night, and on the same day in the same quadrant of the 819-day count. The First Father, GI’, was born in the last creation; his reflection in this creation is his child GII.
-Neither can a majority vote ground a voluntary relationship between any particular person and the state. Even if every state action were endorsed by a majority, this would simply amount to majority tyranny instead of any actual process of voluntary interaction. Popularity does not make the immoral moral. What of the act of voting itself? Has someone who votes in a state election thereby consented to the edicts that result from that election? Rothbard again turned to the work of Spooner, who argued that despite never consenting to the use of the ballot box, citizens are faced with the binary choice of not voting, and becoming a slave, or voting in selfdefense, and becoming a master.[744] Any such vote cannot be interpreted as consent.
+[370] The “fish-in-hand” glyph appears on Lintels 13, 14, and 25 of Yaxchilan with scenes of the Vision Serpent, while on Lintels 39, 40, and 41, the scenes depict Bird-Jaguar and two of his w ives holding Double-headed Serpent Bars. The action associated with this verb is the materialization of the Vision Serpent. Since the k’ul “holy” sign follows the “fish-in-hand” when it is inflected as a transitive root, the action is something done to the “holy” liquid of the body—in other words to “blood.” This action results in the appearance of the Vision Serpent. In those examples where it is not followed by the k’ul “holy” sign, God K appears in the object slot, although we do not yet fully understand what meaning is intended. Perhaps this association of God K with “fish-in-hand” reflects the frequent appearance of this god in the mouth of the Double-headed Serpent Bar. It is the vision often brought forth by the ritual. “To manifest a vision (or a divinity)” is an appropriate paraphrase to use for the present, although the final phonetic reading of the “fish-in- hand” glyph may refer to this action metaphorically or through the vision side of the rite.
-Rothbard drew heavily on Bastiat, who identified the conflation of state and society as the root problem of state socialism. “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society ... [E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.”[745] Hence, opposition to state education, infrastructure, arbitration, defense, etc. is interpreted as opposition to education, infrastructure, arbitration, defense, etc., per se, when in fact there exists a whole array of proposed alternatives to state monopolies such as voluntary trade, entrepreneurship, mutual aid, and decentralized cooperation. On Rothbard’s view, these services currently monopolized by the violent, invasive, parasitic, and corrupt state should, could, and would be better provided by unhampered market processes, a view we will consider at more length in the section below on Austrian economics.
+[371] Constance Cortez (1986) and others have identified this bird with Vucub-Caquix of the Popol Vuh. Cortez suggests that this bird represented the idea of order in nature. When it acted with hubris, imitating the glory of the sun, the natural world was out of order. In the story of the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins opposed Vucub-Caquix, and by defeating him, brought nature back into its proper balance and behavior once again. In this interpretation, the Celestial Bird represents an universe in which order is mediated by the king in his role as the avatar of the Hero Twins.
-Rothbard made a radical, dialectical case that all “external government is tyranny” and that it is necessary we abolish the state because individuals have the right to govern themselves.[746] States inherently depend on violence and prevent their subjects from cultivating virtue, engaging in social cooperation, and leading flourishing lives. Any suppositions of implied consent merely serve to disguise state violence. Yet to fully understand and resist statism, we must also understand the institutions states are intertwined with.
+[372] On the Tablet of the Cross, these events appear immediately behind Chan- Bahlum’s legs, linked to his accession by a Distance Number.
-*** IV. Liberal Class Theory
+[373] Lounsbury (personal communication, 1978) was the first to recognize that Jupiter and Saturn were frozen at their stationary points less than 5+ apart in the sky. He informed Dieter Diitting of the alignment in 1980 and then Diitting and Aveni (1982) extended the hierophany to include this quadruple conjunction with Mars and the moon also in close proximity on that day (July 20, 690, in the Julian calendar). They located the planets as follows:
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Planet</strong> | <strong>Longitude</strong> | <strong>Latitude</strong> |
+<br>| Mars | 219°.10 | — 2°. 18 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 221°.94 | + 0°.83 |
+<br>| Saturn | 225°.52 | + 2°.04 |
+<br>| Moon | 231°.80 | — 1°.80 |
+<br>
+<br>They describe the phenomena as follows: “... all four planets were close together (a quadruple conjunction) in the same constellation Scorpio, and they must have made quite a spectacle with bright red Antares shining but a few degrees south of the group as they straddled the high ridge that forms the southern horizon of Palenque. The night before 2 Cib 14 Mol the moon would have been just at the western end of the planetary lineup, but the night after it would have been well out of range to the east. The month before and after, Mars would have shifted appreciably away from Jupiter and Saturn. Therefore, the date of the inscription is the best one where the four were closest together.” Aveni continues, “Though conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn with given tolerance in separation are skewed to occur about five times a century, the inclusion of a third planet in the grouping reduces the frequency of occurrence to about once a century.’ Diitting and Aveni speculated that the Palencanos saw this conjunction as a replay of the birth of Triad gods with the moon representing their mother, Lady Beastie. This interpretation seems likely since Chan-Bahium carefully bridged from those births to this 2 Cib 14 Mol event.
+<br>
+<br>Perhaps the most remarkable new piece of information on this date was discovered independently by Stephen Houston and David Stuart (in a letter dated October 19, 1989) and Nikolai Grube (in a independent letter also dated October 19, 1989). The event on this day is written pili u waybil on the Tablet of the Sun and pili u chiltin in the other temples. Houston, Stuart, and Grube all identify way and its past participial waybil as the word meaning “nagual” or “spirit or animal counterpart.” In sixteenth-century Tzotzil (a language very close to the Choi spoken at Palenque), chi’il is “companion, familiar thing, friend” (Laughlin 1988:189).
+<br>
+<br>The verb, which is glyphically spelled pi-lu-yi, seems most closely related to the verb pi’len, which is glossed in Choi (Aulie and Aulie 1978:93) as “acompañar (to accompany)” and “tener relación sexual (to have a sexual relationship).” The second meaning is known to have been used by the Maya as a metaphor for astronomical conjunction, just the event recorded in this phrase. Grube suggested in his letter that the naguals of the Palenque Triad were in conjunction (or had come together) and that the Palencanos regarded the planets as the naguals (or spirit counterparts) of the Triad Gods. Merging his observation with Aveni’s interpretation gives new and important insight into how the Palencanos thought about the events they saw in the sky: The naguals of the three Triad Gods— Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars—were reunited with the nagual of their mother—the moon.
+<br>
+<br>This spectacular hierophany apparently was the trigger event for the house rites that followed over the next three days. However, this day is very near the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of Pacal’s accession, which took place only five days after this hierophany. Considering Chan-Bahlum’s preoccupation with the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, this anniversary must also have played a part in his calculations.
-Rothbard followed Oppenheimer in distinguishing between two fundamental modes of social interaction, two ways of acquiring resources and satisfying one’s desires: the economic means, which consists in relying on one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange thereof, and the political means, which consists in the physically coercive appropriation of the labor of others, and the organization of which we call the state.[747] Economic means logically precede the political means because production metaphysically precedes predation. Goods must be produced before they can be appropriated. Social cooperation is prior to states, which only emerge once there exists producers to prey upon; i.e. once conquest and exploitation become viable. Statism causes social disintegration by dividing society into two classes, one that thrives on force and one that thrives on freedom, one that subsists via violent expropriation and one that subsists via voluntary production.
+[374] There are several possible houses that may be the Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building. The Temple of the Cross is the most likely candidate because it contains the dynastic list that includes Bahlum-Kuk‘s name as the founder. However, the text behind Chan- Bahlum on the Temple of the Foliated Cross actually has the words pib nah and yotot following Bahlum-Kuk’s name in a passage that may refer to that temple. We suspect, however, that Chan-Bahlum referred to the entire Group of the Cross as the “Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building.” The last and most distant possibility is the Temple of Inscriptions. Mathews (1980) identified an Initial Series date over the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions with the 819-day count appropriate to the 2 Cib 14 Mol series of events. He suggested the date intended here was the hierophany, but it was just as likely to have been 3 Caban 15 Mol, with Chan-Bahlum’s dedication of Ins father’s funerary building as the event taking place. This last solution seems the least satisfactory of the four because of Chan-Bahlum’s deliberate linkage of the 3 Caban 15 Mol dedication event to the mythological dedication of GT. To us, it is more logical to assume he would have reserved such elaborate explanations for his own buildings.
-Rothbard argued the “ruling elite” consists in “the full-time apparatus — the kings, politicians, and bureaucrats who man and operate the State; and the groups who have maneuvered to gain privileges, subsidies, and benefices from the State.”[748] The ruling class encompasses both the state and the state-adjacent institutions that rely on expropriation for their continued existence. Rothbard lamented the “grave deficiency” of libertarians that “worship Big Business” and fail to realize that under the modern neo-mercantilist, neo-fascist corporate state, “bigness is a priori highly suspect, because Big Business most likely got that way through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges, and direct and indirect grants of monopoly protection.”[749] Rothbard argued the regulations thought to “reign in” big business were actually supported by big business in order to cartelize the economy.[750]
+[375] In the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun, a Distance Number of three days stands between 3 Caban 15 Mol and this bloodletting event. However, the 3 Caban 15 Mol event is not recorded at all on the Tablet of the Cross. In that context, the Distance Number must be counted from the date of the astronomical event, 2 Cib 14 Mol. This chronology places the bloodletting on 5 Cauac 17 Mol rather than 6 Ahau 18 Mol.
-Rothbard consequently took a revisionist approach to the Progressive Era, which he considered a period not in which an altruistic state rescued ordinary people from robber barons, but in which “right-wing collectivism based on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business” reasserted itself disguised in a “proindustrial and pro-general-welfare face.” Predatory robber barons were actually propped up at the expense of ordinary people. “The Old Order returned,” this time benefitting the army, bureaucracy, and corporations.[751] The dominance of the corporate, neo-mercantilist state heavily depended upon the existence of intellectuals in academia and journalism to foster a socio-cultural atmosphere conducive to statism, militarism, and corporatism.[752]
+[376] The only surviving pier reliefs are from the Temple of the Sun. The inscription is fragmentary but the date is indisputably 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab and the verb is the same. The Initial Series date and its supplementary data were on the south pier, while the verb and actor were on the north pier. The figures on both inner piers are badly damaged, but Pier C has a flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it. For the Maya, this Tlaloc iconography signals bloodletting and war, so that we can speculate with some certainty that the 5 Eb 5 Kayab event involved the taking and sacrifice of captives. We have lost the piers on the other two temples, but since the balustrades and sanctuary doorjambs in all three temples repeat the same basic information in the same discourse pattern, it is likely that the piers repeated the same information on all three temples.
-The Progressive Era reassertion of “right-wing collectivism” was not incidental for Rothbard. He argued that despite conventional categorization, socialism (of the statist variety) is best understood, not as a far left ideology, but a confused, middle-of-the-road ideology, trying to achieve the ends of freedom, dignity, peace, and progress (which were historically associated with left-wing liberalism) using the means of coercion, hierarchy, exploitation, and militarism (which were historically associated with right-wing conservatism). Socialism is conceptually unstable and doomed to fail because its conservative means are incompatible with its liberal ends.[753] Economic planning is not accidentally but inherently reactionary, modeled on feudalism and consisting in the militarization of economic activity itself.[754] Statism necessitates illiberalism.
+[377] Although astronomy plays an important role in the timing of the events of Chan-Bahlum’s history—he ended his accession rites on a maximum elongation of Venus and dedicated the Group of the Cross during a major planetary conjunction—the dedication of the pib na was not timed by astronomy. Like Ah Cacaw of Tikal, he went to Tlaloc war on an important anniversary.
+<br>
+<br>While the association is distant, the 5 Eb 5 Kayab dedication of the inner sanctum may also have been associated with a Venus cycle. The final event of his ten-day-long accession ritual occurred during a maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar. The dedication of the pib na took place almost exactly five rounds of Venus later, but the planet was twenty days from its elongation point on that day. Chan-Bahlum may have been observing Venus as well as the tropical year in timing the dedications of the pib na. although it is clear that Venus was not the primary factor.
-In this light, Rothbard’s turn to paleoconservatism could be seen as an odd deviation from much of his thought because he previously considered conservatism (excluding the more libertarian Old Right) the polar opposite of libertarianism, going as far as to call conservative-libertarian fusionism “illogical and mythical.”[755] After all, if state socialism is an incoherent middle position aiming at liberal ends via conservative means, then the reverse, aiming at conservative ends via liberal means, must also be an incoherent middle position. Only liberal means can achieve liberal ends.
+[378] Only one jamb panel is preserved from each sanctuary, and of these only the panel from the Temple of the Foliated Cross is complete. Since this panel formed a joint with the outer panel, the border on the outer panel continued onto the edge of the doorjamb. Using this pattern, we can ascertain that the surviving fragments are all from the right sides of the doors. It is possible, therefore, that the left doorjambs recorded the birth of the Triad Gods, but until additional fragments are discovered, we will not know the entire pattern.
-The military-industrial complex was central to Rothbard’s liberal class theory. He agreed with Bourne that “war is the health of the state.”[756] Rothbard went as far as to say the resources of big businesses bound up in America’s “imperialistic foreign policy” ought to be redistributed from the exploiter class back to the exploited class. “Eager lobbyists” and “co-founders of the garrison state” ought to be met with “confiscation and reversion of their property” over to homesteading workers, taxpayers, or both.[757] Rothbard considered capitalists who undertake foreign investments based on land theft against peasants no different than feudal landlords,[758] and argued the descendent of slaves were entitled to reparations[759] — though he rescinded his support for reparations after his turn to paleoconservatism.[760]
+[379] The clearest demonstration of the relationship of the central icon with the name of the sanctuary occurs in the Temple of the Foliated Cross. There the icon is a maize tree emerging from a monster with a kan-cross in its forehead while the name of the house is a tree sign over a kan-cross. Since this same relationship must hold for the other two temples, we can identify wacah chan as the name of the tree on the Tablet of the Cross. The Temple of the Sun is more difficult, but the glyph on the balustrade is a variant of the “new-sky-at-horizon” glyph that occurs as a name at Copan. Here it has Mah Kina preceding it, possibly as a reinforcement that the GUI shield in the icon of this temple represents the sun.
-Rothbard made a radical, dialectical case against the corporate state, the military-industrial complex, and the class stratification rooted in state violence on behalf of entrenched elites. But to fully understand what undergirded Rothbard’s liberal class theory, you must also understand the nature and potential of the market processes exploited by the ruling class.
+[380] The term used here is the T606 glyph which has been taken as “child of mother” (Schele, Mathews, and Lounsbury n.d.). David Stuart (n.d) has recently suggested a reading of u huntan for this glyph, citing glosses from the Motul dictionary of Yucatec for “to take care of a thing” and “to do something with care and diligence.” He suggests that the term refers to the child as the object of the mother’s care and nurturing. It is this sense, as “the objects of caretaking,” that the gods are related to the king—he cares for them like a mother.
-*** V. Austrian Economics
+[381] In this context, as with the 2 Cib 14 Mol conjunction event, the gods are named as the “cared-ones” of Chan-Bahlum. This same relationship between these gods and Pacal occurs on katun-ending dates in the Temple of Inscriptions. The glyphic terms, Tl.1.606:23, u huntan. identifies the king as the caretaker of the gods in the sense that a mother cares for her child. Since the Maya believed that the act of bloodletting literally gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a), we deduce that the king’s role as caretaker and nourisher took place in the context of bloodletting.
+<br>
+<br>The importance of this role as “nurturer of the gods” is illustrated in the Popol Vuh version of the genesis myth. The following passage describes the gods’ motivation for trying again to create humanity after the first attempt had failed.
+<br>
+<br>“The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth? We have already made our first try at our work and design, but it turned out that they didn’t keep our days, nor did they glorify us.
+<br>
+<br>“So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer.” (Tedlock 1986:79).
+<br>
+<br>The way a community provided sustenance to a king was through tribute, and in Quiche the word tzuqul, “provider,” means “nourish, support, raise, bud, sprout, be born, rear, and support by tribute” (Edmonson 1965:136). The way humanity sustained and nourished ihe gods was through bloodletting. When the king was in this role as “caretaker of the gods,” he became their mother by giving them birth and sustenance. It is this metaphor that Chan-Bahlum used on the doorjambs of the sanctuaries.
-Underlying Rothbard’s individualist anarchism and liberal class theory was his fundamental belief in the profound benefits of mutually beneficial economic exchange. Rothbard developed his economic theories using the praxeological analysis of his teacher Ludwig von Mises, but replaced Mises’s Kantian-rationalist epistemological foundations with Aristotelian-empiricist ones.[761] In the Austrian view, praxeology is the theoretical framework within which we make logical sense of human choices and thereby interpret the actions of others.[762] Praxeological analysis has its roots in Socrates’s insight that people are motivated by what they believe to be good.[763] Socrates thought actions can be explained in terms of the beliefs and desires of the agents who perform them. “Everyone always wants good things.”[764] In this way, Socrates discovered a necessary and conceptual truth about the logical structure of human action by articulating a specific internal relationship between means and ends.
+[382] Chaacal III evoked the accession of Lady Beastie in his own accession records to relate his own mother to the great founding deity of the Palenque dynasty. Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, was captured late in his reign by a ruler of Tonina. This political disaster apparently threw the succession into confusion. Chaacal III, the next king to come to the throne, chose his accession date so that it would fall into a contrived relationship of numerology with the accession of Lady Beastie (Lounsbury 1976:220–221). Even more interesting is the fact that the date of Lady Beastie’s accession, as written on the Tablet of the Cross, is in error. Two mistakes have been detected:
+<br>
+<br>1. The Distance Number that is written was calculated from the 819-day count date, 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’, rather than the Initial Series date, 8 Ahau 18 Zee.
+<br>
+<br>2. To find the Calendar Round reached by the Distance Number, the scribe used 20 calculating years (1.0.4.0 in the Long Count). Each time one calculating year is added to a Calendar Round, the tzolkin day stays the same, the day of the month stays the same, but the month drops back one as follows:
+<br>
+<br>1.12.19. 0. 2 9 Ik 0 Cumku + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 20. 4. 2 9 Ik 0 Kayab + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 21. 8. 2 9 Ik 0 Pax + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 22. 12. 2 9 Ik 0 Muan + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 23. 16. 2 9 Ik 0 Kankin + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 24. 0. 2. 2 9 Ik 0 Mac + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 25. 0. 6. 2 9 Ik 0 Cch + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>2. 0. 0.10 2 9 Ik 0 Zac + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>2. 1. 0.14. 2 9 Ik 0 Yax
+<br>
+<br>The Distance Number written in the text falls between 12.19.13.3.0 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’ (the 819-day count) and the ninth interval above. The Calendar Round written in the text is the eighth interval above, 9 Ik 0 Zac. The scribe stopped one interval short of the correct answer.
+<br>
+<br>The Maya knew they had made a mistake because in the very next notation they counted from interval nine, rather than interval eight. They may have left the erroneous Calendar Round in the text because they believed the gods had caused the error. When Chaacal contrived the numerological relationship between his accession and Lady Beastie’s, however, he used the erroneous Calendar Round rather than the correct one. Apparently. history as it was engraved in the stone, erroneous or not, became the gospel according to Chan-Bahlum.
-Economic analysis emerges from a distinguishing feature of individual human beings: purposeful action that employs scarce means to attain future ends, “economizing” resources by directing them towards one’s most valued desires. The existence of multiple individuals engaged in their own economizing gives rise to the possibility of interpersonal exchange as a means to satisfy ends. Mutual exchanges are exchanges in which all parties expect to benefit. The possibility of mutual beneficence is a product of the psychological, physiological, and environmental diversity across human beings, giving rise to situations wherein one party values goods and services they currently possess less than goods and services another party currently possesses, and vice versa. What emerges is a “highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges” facilitated by specialization under the division of labor.[765] Voluntary trade best embodies individuals’ demonstrated preferences, thereby maximizing social utility at any given time.[766]
+; CHAPTER 7: BIRD-JAGUAR AND THE CAHALOB
-The possibility for widespread mutual exchange leads to a highly interconnected social order of peaceful cooperation that encourages sympathy, solidarity, benevolence, and friendship.[767] Market processes also incentivize entrepreneurship — the “essence of production” attributable to both producers and consumers — and the efficient allocation of scarce resources through the profit/loss mechanism of the price system. Without price signals that “telegraph” consumers’ constantly shifting preferences to producers, it’s impossible to narrow the array of technologically feasible production projects down to the economically feasible ones.[768] Prices emerging from mutual exchange are knowledge surrogates that aid our imperfect cognitive abilities in discovering the most effective way to employ scarce resources.[769]
+[383] According to Teobert Maier’s (1901–1903) descriptions, the temples of Yaxchilân were painted white with a red band below the medial molding.
-Where mutual exchange is positive-sum, physical coercion is negative-sum, decreasing social utility[770] and encouraging hostility, violence, and war.[771] Society cannot subsist entirely on physical coercion because exploiters always needs a class of exploited on which to prey. The impossibility of total central planning is seen in the way socialist states, lacking prices that accurately reflect relative scarcities, rely on international and black-market prices to perform internal economic calculation. Rothbard extended Mises’s insights into economic calculation from socialist states to capitalist firms. Rational calculability disappears when external markets are absorbed within a single firm, creating increasingly large “sphere[s] of irrationality.”[772] Without external market prices, firms have only arbitrary symbols with which to allocate internal factors, implying a “definite maximum to the relative size of any particular firm on the free market.”[773] Without the support of the corporate state, these “islands of noncalculable chaos [that] swell to the proportions of masses and continents”[774] would likely suffer competitive losses, undergirding the Rothbardian a priori suspicion of big business.
+[384] Maudslay named the ruins Menché Tinamit after the Maya people he found living nearby. Maier (1901–1903:104) renamed the city using a combination ofyax, “blue” or “green,” and the word chilan, which he thought meant “that which lies or is scattered around,” referring to the fallen stones of the ruined buildings. Maier criticized Maudslay’s use of what he believed was an ersatz term, and then he proceeded to supply his own. Unfortunately, Maier’s coined name has stuck, although Maudslay’s name was more likely what the Indians living along the river called the old city.
-Crucial to the development of the corporate state was the central bank, which perpetuated the war economy and class stratification by redistributing resources to rent-seeking elites via new money before the emergence of inflation-adjusted prices.[775] Monetary expansion undertaken by central banks also causes business cycles by disconnecting interest rates from genuine savings, inducing widespread entrepreneurial error, and distorting the relative prices of labor, materials, and machines. This “boom” is not a free lunch, but an unsustainable, systematic distortion of the structure of production. During the “bust,” economic actors reassert their consumption and investment preferences and liquidate their malinvestments.[776] Fiscal and monetary stimulus designed to prop up prices and induce further investment merely prevents the necessary economic adjustments and prolong the contractionary period.[777] Rothbard envisioned a system of “free banking” and 100 percent gold reserves as the most effective alternative to central banks.[778]
+[385] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) published two detailed studies of the life of Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar. These two studies remain today the finest example of historical studies of the Maya inscriptions.
-Rothbard made a radical, dialectical case for extended social cooperation in the form of voluntary trade. Praxeological analysis shows that mutual benefit can be realized through mutual exchange and that central planning, whether undertaken by states or firms, is doomed to fail. There are other aspects to natural law theory, individualist anarchism, liberal class theory, and Austrian economics that I don’t have the space to touch on here. But I hope to have provided a sketch of Rothbard’s thought and shown how he synthesized these four traditions into a harmonious picture that seeks to achieve human flourishing and freedom.
+[386] In her study of the history of kingship and the physical orientation of buildings at Yaxchilan, Tate (1986b) identified a group of temples oriented toward the rising sun at summer solstice. Since many of the house dedication dates at Yaxchilan are on or near summer solstices, this orientation is not simply fortuitous.
-*** VI. What Other Anarchists Can Learn from Rothbard
+[387] This king’s name consists of a sign representing male genitals surmounting a jaguar head. The name was probably Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,” but his name was published as “Progenitor-Jaguar” in the National Geographic Magazine (October 1985).
-Many anarchists have historically exhibited hostility towards natural law theory, liberal class theory, and Austrian economics. They are deeply skeptical of the system of mutual exchange and property rights that Rothbard advocated. Where Rothbard saw the potential for peaceful cooperation and mutual sympathy, many anarchists instead see the potential for anti-social competition and insatiable greed. Chomsky considers Rothbard’s vision to be a dysfunctional world of hatred.[779] Rothbard’s approach is frequently written out of many understandings of the anarchist tradition. But this robs many anarchists of the insights offered by natural law theory, liberal class theory, and Austrian economics, and how those traditions can prove valuable elements of anarchist thought. Rothbardianism offers compelling alternatives to many aspects of contemporary anarchist theory.
+[388] David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first recognized the accession passage of Progenitor-Jaguar on Hieroglyphic Stair 1. This date is best reconstructed as 8.14.2.17.6 7 Cimi 14 Zotz’. The latest date known at Yaxchilan, 9.18.17.13.14 9 lx 2 Zee (April 13, 808), occurs on Lintel 10. a monument of the last king in the dynasty, Mah Kina Ta-Skull. Yaxchilan was certainly abandoned within fifty years of this date.
-Some anarchists object to natural law theory because they consider it an instance of coercive imposition and external authority. Bakunin maintained that,
+[389] The great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakofl’ published two seminal papers on her “historical hypothesis” demonstrating her belief that the contents of the Maya inscriptions were primarily historical. The first study (Proskouriakoff 1960) focused on the dynastic sequence of Piedras Negras to prove her thesis, but she did not give personal names to the Maya rulers she identified. However, in a paper published for a more general audience less than a year later, Proskouriakoff (1961a) described her methodology and gave names to these two great kings of Yaxchilan. as well as other personalities of Maya history.
+<br>
+<br>The six years between 1958 and 1964 were an extraordinary lime in Maya studies. Proskouriakoff’s work followed a study by Heinrich Berlin (1959) that had anticipated her results. Berlin had already identified the names of historical people on the sarcophagus in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque. David Kelley (1962) contributed his own study of the history of Quirigua less than a year later. With these seminal studies, we began to speak truly of Maya history as they themselves wrote it and meant it to be understood.
-the liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.[780]
+[390] The history we present here is based on several sources, including Proskouriakoff’s (1963–1964) papers, Carolyn Tate’s (1986a) study of Yaxchilan architecture and statecraft. Mathews’s (1975) work on early Yaxchilan history, and long-term conversationsand debate with Peter Mathews, David Stuart, Sandy Bardslay, and many of Scheie’s students, especially Ruth Krochock and Constance Cortes. After this chapter was finished, we received a copy of Peter Mathews’s (1988) dissertation on Yaxchilan and have added information from that source as it is relevant.
-Some anarchists, including those that later influenced Rothbard, embraced nihilism and viewed all moral claims, not just ones rooted in natural law theory, as unjustifiable impositions. Following Stirner, Tucker acknowledged only those obligations which have been voluntarily assumed.[781] Such a view immediately rules out the existence of natural rights because we are obliged to respect the natural rights of others whether we choose to or not. Moral obligations (including, but not limited to, natural rights) arise from the ongoing project we are all engaged in all the time: living life, pursuing projects, and interacting with others. Annas argues,
+[391] Shield-Jaguar’s birth is not recorded on any of the surviving Yaxchilan monuments, but Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) was able to reconstruct it from other glyphic information as having occurred within five years of 9.10.15.0.0.
-Happiness [in the eudaimonist sense] has the role of being, for each person, your happiness, the way you achieve living your life well. It is not some plan imposed on you from outside, or a demand made by some theory which has not arisen from your own thoughts about your life.[782]
+[392] The third and the eighth successors were also named Bird-Jaguar, which was probably Xtz’unun-Balam in Mayan. The father of Shield-Jaguar was the third Bird- Jaguar, and his grandson, the great Bird-Jaguar, was the fourth. We shall call the grandfather 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar because his name phrase invariably contains a 6-Tun glyph that is not included in his grandson’s name.
-On a eudaimonist view, it isn’t sensible to consider moral obligations unjustified external impositions.
+[393] Recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C of the Palace at Palenque. the event (an “ax” war and a “capture”) took place on 9.11.1.16.3 6 Akbal 1 Yax (August 28, 654). The Yaxchilan lord who participated in these events was Balam-Te-Chac, who is named ayihtah (“sibling”) of Shield-Jaguar, the ahau of Yaxchilan. This brother does not appear in Yaxchilan’s inscriptions, but at Palenque the context is clearly war and capture. Note that Shield-Jaguar had very likely already been designated heir to Yaxchilan’s throne. Why else would Pacal demonstrate the importance of the Yaxchilan visitor by naming him the sibling of an eleven-year-old who was not yet a king?
-Some anarchists accept the existence of moral obligations and rights but ground them in theories other than Aristotelian natural law theory. One option is to ground anarchism in the value of justice; i.e. respecting every individual’s inherent autonomy. Such theorists argue the authority of the state is unjust because it violates the autonomy of individuals.[783] Another option is to ground anarchism in the value of benefit; i.e. achieving the greatest consequences for the greatest number. Such theorists argue the authority of the state is harmful because it reaps bad consequences.[784] On the eudai- monist view, this is a false dichotomy. Focusing on justice alone obscures the moral relevance of benefit (and the ways in which the state is harmful), and focusing on benefit alone obscures the moral relevance of justice (and the ways in which the state is unjust). Our conceptions of justice and benefit stand in reciprocal determination, in a way similar to how “master” and “slave” are “relative to themselves.”[785] We can’t understand one isolated from the other, and vice versa. Long argues, “[J]ustice and benefit are conceptually entangled; their internal conceptual dynamic drives them into alignment with one another.” Therefore, “[s]emi-deontological considerations of justice play a role in determining what counts as good consequences; semi-consequentialist considerations of benevolence and prudence play a role in determining what counts as just.”[786] We don’t have to choose between justice and autonomy on the one hand, and benefit and good consequences on the other. States both violate autonomy and reap harmful consequences. Statism is bad because it’s both unjust and harmful.
+[394] The term used for the relationship, ihtan, is “sibling” in modern Chorti, but in the set of kinship terms used by many Maya people, “siblings” include the children of a father’s brothers as well as one’s own brothers and sisters. The Yaxchilan cohort may, therefore, have been the child of one of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar’s brothers, rather than his son.
-Bookchin views natural law theory as “basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic ‘natural rights’.”[787] Yet such rights are not “axiomatic” in the sense of being groundless. Natural law theory is grounded in the physical and social requirements for human flourishing. Natural rights constitute our duties to one another as social beings, for social relations gain their worth and meaning from being chosen. They uphold our metaphysical independence so that we have an autonomous space in which to engage in social interdependence. Instead of a static conception of community in which individuals are defined, directed, and determined by predefined roles, Rothbard’s natural law theory provides a dynamic conception of community in which different communities can be continually “formed, reformed, and modified.”[788] A society that consists in consensual relationships enables people to peacefully progress beyond old, harmful social relations and form new, beneficial ones. By rejecting any “ontological conflict” between “individualism and sociality,”[789] such an account of human nature avoids treating humans in either an “atomistic” manner (which conflates our metaphysical independence with social independence, reducing the community to a mere collection of individual entities) or an “organicist” manner (which conflates our social interdependence for metaphysical interdependence, dissolving individuals into a mere single communal entity).[790] We are both independent and interdependent beings.
+[395] On Lintel 45, Ah-Ahaual is named “the ahau of (yahau);’ the king of a domain named with a serpent segment with a phonetic ni attached. On Stela 19, this same location is spelled with the phonetic complements ma and na. Since this same serpent-segment glyph appears in the xaman, “north,” glyph with the value ma or man, we suggest the place was known as Man. This Emblem Glyph appears in several other contexts, including the name of Ruler B’s mother at Tikal (see Stela 5). No one has yet associated this Emblem Glyph with a particular archaeological ruin; but in light of Shield-Jaguar’s focus on this capture, the domain was important and prestigious in the Maya world.
-Natural law theory provides a useful tool for contemporary anarchist theory. For Rothbard, natural rights are the main bulwark against state oppression and reveal state violence for what it truly is. Natural law theory provides a principled justification for anarchist political ideals, whereas other justifications — nihilism, deontology, consequentialism, atomism, and/or organicism — leave anarchism on shaky ground. Not only that, Rothbard’s natural law theory spells out the norms to which a society must adhere in order to achieve, and maintain, freedom. It grounds the legal arrangements of a truly free society and a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation without the state. Natural rights are integral to any account of human flourishing and freedom.
+[396] This is a unique event in Maya history as we now understand it. Women were recorded in the historical inscriptions because of their roles either as wives or mothers of important Maya lords. Although two women ruled in their own right at Palenque, Temple 23 is the only major Maya monument known to have been dedicated by a woman for the express purposes of celebrating personal history. The rarity of this circumstance points to the extraordinary and pivotal importance of this woman in Yaxchilan’s history.
-Rothbard is also written out of many understandings of anarchism because he embraced markets. Anarchism has a long history of opposing markets. Guerin, Bookchin, and other influential anarchist theorists seem unaware of market-process literature and insist that anarchism must be anti-market.[791] On the conventional view, market processes are seen as unfair forces of restraint, authority, and inequality. Rather than facilitating a desirable allocation of scare resources or improving the well-being of the majority, markets are said to disproportionally reward the powerful and harm the marginalized. Many consider exploitation, privilege, power, and hierarchy inherent to markets.[792] Rothbard’s vision has been seen as a mere “pretense of statelessness” and “a cleverly designed and worded surrogate for elitist and aristocratic conservatism.”[793] Despite their contemporary unpopularity, markets aren’t completely foreign to the anarchist tradition. Rothbard’s integration of liberal class theory and Austrian economics with individualist anarchism led to a revival of the market anarchism that was pioneered by Molinari in the 1850s.[794] “Liberal anti-statism virtually disappeared” until Rothbard revived it in the late 1950s.[795] But disregarding market-process thought is a central mistake of contemporary anarchist theory.
+[397] At Yaxchilan, kings used two forums to display their political messages—the slab-shaped tree-stones erected in front of buildings and the lintel stones that spanned door openings into the interiors of temples. In the local tradition, tree-stones displayed two complementary scenes (Tate 1986a); A period-ending bloodletting rite was depicted on the temple side and a capture on the river side of the monument. The lintels, on the other hand, displayed only one scene; but since a building usually had several sculpted lintels, the various scenes and texts could be orchestrated into larger programs of information. The scribes favored two kinds of compositional strategies in these larger programs. They could place a series of different actions and actors in direct association within a single building or they could divide a ritual or text into parts, which were then distributed across the lintels of a building. By using these multiple scenes in various combinations, the king was able to construct compelling arguments for his political actions. He could interpret history by showing how individual actions were linked into the larger framework of history and cosmic necessity. Retrospectively constructed, these linkages between different rituals and events became the central voice of Yaxchilan’s political rhetoric.
-Traditional interpretations underrate the extent to which Rothbard’s market-process thought is deeply egalitarian. The right to exit any social relationship is a powerful check on interpersonal exploitation. Freed markets ultimately permit individuals to make their own decisions, facilitating “symmetrical” social relationships and “equality in the sense that each person has equal power” to make choices. Freed markets promote “self-responsibility, freedom from violence, full power to make one’s own decisions (except the decision to institute violence against another), and benefits for all participating individuals.”[796] Moreover, unhampered market processes — by taking the logic of separation of powers to its fullest possible extent — check authority, induce accountability, and disperse power far more effectively than arrangements that try to simulate market competition in monopolistic contexts.[797] For these reasons, it’s been suggested that Rothbard’s Power and Market should be renamed Power or Market.[798]
+[398] Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) reconstructed this date as 9.14.8.12.5, but Mathews (personal communication, 1979) has noted that this event recurs on Lintel 23 where the date clearly reads 9.14.14.13.17, a placement supported by the presence of G7 as the Lord of the Night on Lintel 26. We accept the later placement as the correct reconstruction.
-The truly exploitative society is one that systematically permits and enables physical coercion. Such a society is defined by asymmetrical power and hegemonic relationships. Unfree markets promote “rule of violence, the surrender of the power to make one’s own decisions to a dictator, and exploitation of subjects for the benefit of the masters.”[799] For Rothbard, the idea that trade is inherently exploitative and that “one party can benefit only at the expense of the other” (as in traditional Marxist class theories) follows fundamentally mercantilist logic, a view which ignores the consistent propensity for humans to engage in trade for mutual gain.[800]
+[399] There are three sequential narrative lines in these lintels: (1) the texts on the outer sides record three separate rituals in the dedication sequence of the temple (the side of Lintel 24 was destroyed when it was lightened for transport to England [Graham 1975- 1986, vol. 3:54]); (2) the texts on the undersides picture the sequence of historical events; (3) they also picture the three stages of the bloodletting rite which took place on each of those historical occasions. Thus, the sculptors let us understand the action sequence of the bloodletting rite and simultaneously that this ritual took place at three different points in time. See Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more complete descriptions of the iconography and rites depicted on these lintels.
-Rothbard recognized the “natural affinity between wealth and power” and the vicious cycle it creates in which wealth is used to obtain political power, which is then used to obtain more wealth, and so on.[801] But for Rothbard the source of that social power ultimately lies in the state. Rather than preventing exploitation, forceful interference into otherwise free and harmonious exchange is best understood as the cause of exploitation. Whenever anyone wielding force (the state, the mafia, democratic federations, etc.) intervenes into market processes, a conflict of interests emerges, creating a “scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser — to be part of the intervening team, as it were, rather than one of the victims.”[802] For Rothbard, economic exploitation emerges from violent intervention. Dismantling political power would dismantle economic power. It’s not so much that economic power is foreign to Rothbard[803] but that he adopted a different causal explanation, and therefore, a different normative analysis of economic power from the ones usually offered by contemporary anarchist theory.
+[400] A second glyph, which looks like crossed torches, can be seen in the background next to the serpent’s head. This is the glyph that occurs at Copan as a substitute for the lineage founder’s name in “numbered succession” titles. The presence of this glyph in the name phrase referring to the figure emerging from the serpent’s jaw identifies him as the founder Yat-Balam.
-Most anti-capitalist anarchists see decentralized economic planning in the form of democratic federations and the like as the only alternative that avoids the pitfalls of both markets and states. Small-scale, direct deliberation and cooperation is meant to replace the irrationality of impersonal market processes without establishing any sort of tyrannical dictatorship.[804] But abandoning economic freedom in favor of economic planning is counterproductive to many anarchist aims. Economic planning, whether centralized within a state or decentralized within democratic federations, would reap severe calculational chaos without an ounce of egalitarianism.
+[401] There is the possibility, of course, that other depictions once existed and are now destroyed. However, accession was not a favored subject for sculptural representation at Yaxchilan, although it was frequently recorded in glyphic texts. The only other picture of an accession known is Bird-Jaguar’s on Lintel 1.
-The knowledge that prices convey about differing technologies, production processes, factor combinations, etc., is generated by a process of entrepreneurial rivalry in which tacit judgements about subjective preferences, expectations, and plans are reflected through voluntarily bidding for resources. This is completely different than the political rivalry entailed by economic planning. Where entrepreneurial rivalry utilizes dispersed tacit knowledge and conveys information anonymously, political institutions (centralized or decentralized) involve a direct struggle for privilege. Where entrepreneurial rivalry provides useful signals to other market participants through price changes, political rivalry only facilitates new control over the apparatus of planning. Where entrepreneurial rivalry incentivizes satisfying the desires of others better than one’s rivals, political rivalry incentivizes intimidation and deception to gain and maintain control.[805] Without the price system, anti-market anarchism would lead to widespread impoverishment and starvation.[806]
+[402] The bloodletting on Lintel 24 took place exactly twenty-eight years (28 x 365.25) plus four days after Shield-Jaguar’s accession.
-Economic planning particularly harms the marginalized by privileging the majority and enabling the domination of sexual, racial, etc., minorities who don’t conform to the singular economic plan. Economic planning creates an “aristocracy of pull”[807] by tying the ability to live (and in what fashion) to one’s social standing, thereby privileging the popular, persuasive, and charismatic at the expense of the unpopular, awkward, and disliked. Perhaps such an arrangement would yield agreeable results when community printing presses are denied to avowed white supremacists, but when a trans person needs specific medical resources, wouldn’t the increased collective decision-making power of transphobes over the “community medical resources” pose a problem in need of a solution? That solution is freed markets, which provide an institutional escape valve for society’s most marginalized — a mechanism connecting the ability to live (and how) to one’s own independent effort.[808]
+[403] Ihe only other women to hold such prominent places are Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque and Lady 6-Sky of Dos Pilas who appears on the stela of Naranjo. The first woman was a ruler in her own right, while the second reestablished the lineage of Naranjo after a disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol.
-Economic planning amounts to an “ambitious aspiration of entirely replacing the competitive market system with a deliberate pre-coordination of all productive activity, incorporating it into a single hierarchical structure.”[809] In light of the market-process analysis of economic planning, we must ask if it can really achieve anarchist aims. If state socialism is a confused, unstable position aiming at liberal ends via conservative means, anarcho-communism is its slightly less confused sibling, aiming at liberal ends via some liberal means (voluntary association) but also some conservative means (economic planning). The conventional anti-capitalist anarchist vision of planning shares many of the undesirable features associated with statism; not only planning but also, and despite anarchist intentions, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and domination.
+[404] Mathews (1988:171) suggests that Lady Xoc, whom he calls Lady Fist-Fish, was probably buried in Structure 23 in Tomb 2. He describes nine carved bones found in the tomb and notes that six of them carry her name.
-Rothbardianism helps anarchists avoid the misguided temptation to try and leverage the reins of political monopolies for noble ends. Market competition, rooted in and reflective of the right to exit, is the remedy for exploitation because it is a levelling force that disperses socioeconomic power and provides people with more and better options to choose from.[810] Lavoie contends, “The citadels of power are in fact, whether they know it or not, more threatened by the spontaneous forces of the openly competitive market than by any other factor. Power thrives on coercive obstructions to market competition.”[811] This points the way towards a model of social change that takes seriously the potential for exit rights, spontaneous order, and economic exchange in helping to liberate marginalized people from institutions of domination.
+[405] The inscription records the dedication of an object written as pa.si.l(i). In Chorti (Wisdom n.d.), pasi is glossed as “open, open up, break open, make an opening.” The pasil is apparently the east doorway itself, which was perhaps opened up into the building to become the resting place of this lintel.
-Anarchists who reject market-process thought are missing out on a rich, robust account of human flourishing and freedom, on which a compelling case for anarchism heavily rests. Marketprocess thought is so important for contemporary anarchist theory precisely because it best explains how to avoid a society of violence and exploitation and how to create a society of peace and mutual gain. Moreover, market-process thought helps us imagine, and perhaps develop, effective institutional alternatives to statism. Anarchism, to be viable, beneficial, and widespread, must embrace the freedom to trade.
+[406] Toni Jones and Carolyn Jones discovered the important secrets hidden in this Lintel 23 text and presented them at the 1989 Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas.
-Rothbard’s primary contributions to contemporary anarchist theory lie in his integration of anarchism with (1) eudaimonist thought in the tradition of Aristotle, and (2) market-process thought in the tradition of Mises. Such a combination avoids the (1) analytic narrowness of nihilistic, deontological, consequentialist, atomistic, and/or organicist conceptions of anarchism, (2) impoverished models of Marxist class theory and economic planning, including statism now or federations later, and (3) impractical models of social change that discourage entrepreneurial direct action and instead devote resources to the impossible task of leveraging the state and other forms of economic planning for liberatory ends.
+[407] The main sign of the Calakmul Emblem Glyph (also known as Site Q) is a snake head. On Stela 10. exactly this main sign occurs with the female head and the word ah po. This is the form of the Emblem Glyph title used especially to designate women. The reader should also note that the identification of the snake Emblem Glyph is still questioned by several epigraphers. This particular version is the one Mathews identified with Site Q. It is also the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom allied to Caracol and Dos Pilas in the star wars history detailed in Chapter 5. It is interesting that the “batab” title in Lady Eveningstar’s name uses the directional association “east.” Berlin (1958) first suggested this title should be read “batab,” a documented title in Yucatec sources meaning “ax-wielder.” Although we now know the title refers to the god Chae rather than to the Yucatec title, epigraphers still use “batab” as the nickname of the title. Normal Yaxchilán versions of this title all have the “west” direction connected with their names. The change in directional association may reflect her status as a foreigner from the east.
-*** VII. Rothbardianism against Domination in All Forms
+[408] Bird-Jaguar was thirteen years old when the sculpture was dedicated and about seventeen at the time of the house dedication rituals.
-At the same time, if he were still alive Rothbard would have a lot to learn from other traditions of thought, particularly classical and contemporary anarchism. Rothbard and many of those he’s influenced haven’t shared the universal hostility to all forms of domination that has been historically characteristic of the anarchist tradition.[812] Rothbardianism provides a useful framework by which to approach moral, political, and economic analysis, but it’s also in search of a more comprehensive and holistic account of human flourishing and freedom. Samuels criticizes Rothbard for having an exceedingly narrow conception of interpersonal power and exploitation that blinds him to important injustices.[813] I think Samuels is correct in identifying this deficiency of Rothbar- dianism. But we need not jettison his core frameworks to save Rothbard from this objection. In fact, the core frameworks of Rothbardianism might prove themselves more complementary to the traditional anarchist opposition to domination in all its forms than both Rothbard and his detractors realize. In my view, Rothbard’s concern for equal liberty should extend to a rejection of interpersonal domination; specifically, the domination of women, queer people, racial minorities, children, and/or people with disabilities. A principled opposition to interpersonal domination in all forms could earn Rothbardianism that third cheer.
+[409] Other dates and events in Temple 23 texts include the dedication of the temple sculptures on August 5, 723; the dedication of Lintel 26 on February 12, 724; the twentyfifth anniversary of Shield-Jaguar’s accession on March 2, 726; and finally, the dedication of the temple itself on June 26, 726. (Note that this last date is very near a summer solstice [Tate: 1986b].) The inscriptions describing these events also specify that they took place next to the river, probably in or very near the location of Temple 23. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified glyphs naming specific topographic features within a polity. These topographic features can include witz, “mountain,” and nab, “water, lake, or river,” and they are often accompanied by a locative glyph called the “impinged bone.” Lady Xoc’s names on Lintels 24 and 25 end with a combination including T606 (perhaps another locative), the glyph for “body of water,” nab, and the main sign of Yaxchilán’s Emblem Glyph, a “split-sky.” These glyphs should refer either to the river itself or just as likely to the flat shelf next to the river on which Temple 23 was built.
-Rothbard focused his social analysis almost exclusively on violence, especially the violence of the state. But what about morally objectionable, yet non-violent, conduct and institutions? Rothbard discussed some institutions in league with the state that he opposed — especially the corporate state, the military-industrial complex, and their intellectual apologists. But he never extended that opposition to institutions that enforce hierarchies reflective of gender, sexuality, race, age, and/or disability. For much of his career, Rothbard denied any inherent relationship between opposition to physical coercion and other considerations; between the domains of politics and culture,[814] a position some Rothbardians still adopt today.[815] Sciabarra considers such a narrow concern for physical coercion insufficiently dialectical and therefore a form of “unanchored utopianism.”[816]
+[410] This marriage may have simply renewed an old alliance. The Early Classic lintels from Yaxchilán discussed in Chapter 5 record that an ambassador from the Calakmul king visited the tenth successor of Yaxchilán soon after he acceded to the throne. We suspect Yaxchilán was in alliance with Cu-Ix, the Calakmul king who installed the first ruler at Naranjo. He was surely allied to Caracol in the Tikal wars. The alliance of the Calakmul king with the Yaxchilán dynasty may have secured at least their agreement not to interfere, if not their active participation.
-Later, Rothbard still considered opposition to physical coercion logically separable from other considerations, but not psychologically, sociologically, or practically separable, a shift that led him to endorse a culturally conservative outlook.[817] Rothbard heavily criticized the Women’s Liberation Movement;[818] endorsed “racialist science”;[819] dismissed heterosexism, ableism, ageism,[820] and other “victimologies”;[821] and looked down upon “free spirits” who didn’t want to push others around or be pushed around themselves.[822] Some Rothbardians actively endorse institutions of interpersonal domination. Hoppe contends that societies “dominated by white, heterosexual males ... patriarchal family structures ... and aristocratic lifestyle[s]” are, in virtue of such domination, more successful, more non-violent, and more prosperous, and that this “Western” model of social organization ought to be “respected and protected.”[823]
+[411] Her name consists of a skull with an infixed ik sign that Lounsbury (personal communication, 1980) has identified as Venus in its aspect of Eveningstar. This component of her name precedes a sky glyph and usually a series of titles.
-By focusing almost exclusively on the political structures of physical coercion, Rothbard left a hole in his social theory. He should have been deeply concerned with non-violent domination because “if libertarianism is rooted in the principle of equality of authority, then there are good reasons to think that not only political structures of coercion, but also the
+[412] The inverted-L shape, next to the ankles of the shorter figure on the left, faces that figure and most likely identifies it as Shield-Jaguar. The composition presses this figure against the frame, giving it less space as well as a smaller size. The monument was commissioned by Bird-Jaguar, who apparently used the scale difference and compositional device to subordinate his father, even though at the time of the event shown, Shield-Jaguar was the high king.
-whole system of status and unequal authority deserves libertarian criticism.” Such a system includes not just physical coercion, but also ideas, practices, and institutions rooted in submission to authority figures such as superiors in one’s personal relationships, family, workplace, and community. Even a stateless society could feature pervasive submission to authority, in which everyone “voluntarily agree[s] to bow and scrape when speaking before the (mutually agreed-on) town Chief.” Assuming such behavior is only kept in line through verbal harangues, social ostracism, glorifying the authorities, etc., no one’s individual rights would be violated.[824] While not logically incoherent, a culturally conservative outlook is difficult to reconcile with the underlying reasons for libertarian equality: the value of autonomy, self-direction, and the freedom to choose.
+[413] The figures shown in the ancestral cartouches above the sky register may be the parents of either actor, but the protagonist of Stela 11 is clearly Bird-Jaguar. His parents (Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar) are named glyphically as the ancestral figures on the other side of the monument. We suspect the ancestors on this side represent Bird- Jaguar’s parents as well.
-If individuals matter so much that none can never be justly subjected to the ends of another via physical coercion, then it seems like they must matter enough that they should just never be subordinated to the ends of another, via physical coercion or otherwise. Non-physical coercion can take the form of subjecting another to one’s ends by threatening to deprive them of their human needs such as food, shelter, mental well-being, informed decision-making, social relationships, etc. One has power over another to the extent that one can get them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do because of their deprivation.[825] Situations of desperate need and deprivation, where no one has been physically coerced, can give rise to interpersonal domination. Opposition to the hierarchical power imbalances of interpersonal domination can be understood as relational egalitarianism, which aims to abolish all forms of oppression, exploitation, marginalization, and violence such that no one need “bow and scrape” before others as a condition of being afforded dignity. Achieving the goals of relational egalitarianism entails a “social order in which persons stand in relations of equality.”[826]
+[414] David Stuart (n.d.) has recently identified Great-Skull-Zero as the ichan of Bird-Jaguar’s son. This relationship term stands for mother’s brother in Choi, making him Lady Great-Skull-Zero’s brother and Bird-Jaguar’s brother-in-law. In fact, the relationships of Great-Skull-Zero and Lady Great-Skull-Zero to Bird-Jaguar’s son and future heir (who was not yet born at the time of this bloodletting) are featured in the two actors’ names. Here her name ends with the phrase “mother of the ahau.” Lord Great-Skull- Zero’s ends with yichan ahau, “the mother’s brother of the ahau.” In his name, the chan part of the yichan glyph is written with the head variant of the <verbatim></verbatim> sky glyph.
-Rothbardians and relational egalitarians alike might be asking if I could really be serious in suggesting that Rothbardianism is complementary with relational egalitarianism. The reason I see such potential in synthesizing the two is because I think, despite their resistance to one another, together they can offer a comprehensive, holistic account of human flourishing and freedom. Anderson rejects such a link on the grounds that the libertarian emphasis on exit over voice fails to enable people to shape their own social situations through discourse.[827] But Long argues this is a false dichotomy that ignores the way in which exit rights help guarantee voice. After all, a relationship in which all parties are completely free to leave at any time is bound to incentivize mutual listening and concern. Whereas a relationship in which one party has no choice but to acquiesce to the other party is bound to incentivize disregard and disrespect.[828] Physical coercion is best understood as a kind of unequal relationship in which one person denies another’s “status as a discursive being,” thereby subordinating them to their own ends.[829] Violence is a particular kind of domination, though an admittedly unique one.
+[415] Since both the woman and man hold Personified Perforators in their hands, they both apparently let blood in this rite.
-Coercion can come about through physical force or the leveraging of another’s unsatisfied needs. However, physical coercion is an unjust response to non-physical coercion because it’s still a kind of coercion; a kind of interpersonal domination. Domination encompasses physical coercion, which always entails one’s subordination to the ends of another but is not reducible to physical coercion and can exist without it. Freedom from physical coercion is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for freedom from domination.[830] Relational egalitarians should consider physical coercion a kind of domination and staunchly oppose both. In virtue of their opposition to interpersonal domination in all its forms, relational egalitarians are ultimately committed to Rothbardian anarchism.
+[416] The scenes on Lintels 15, 16, and 17 deliberately reproduce the same actions shown on Lintels 24, 25, and 26, which are: Lady Xoc materializing the dynasty founder at Shield-Jaguar’s accession; Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar letting blood to celebrate the birth of his heir; and their preparation for a battle on the occasion of the dedication of the building. Bird-Jaguar’s lintels show him and a wife letting blood to celebrate the birth of an heir; his capture of a noble shortly before his accession; and the vision quest of another of his wives, probably as part of the dedication rites of the building. He carefully echoes the compositions of the Structure 23 lintels, but substitutes ritual events important to his own political succession.
-Likewise, libertarians should consider physical coercion a kind of domination and staunchly oppose both. In virtue of his commitment to autonomy, self-direction, and freedom to choose, Rothbard was ultimately committed to relational egalitarianism. The same reasons that led Rothbard to oppose the involuntary authoritarianism of statism should have similarly led him to opposing Johnson’s “voluntary authoritarianism” of subservient, hierarchical social relations. Domination leaves no space for reflective deliberation nor the cultivation of virtue through one’s own volition. Human flourishing depends on fulfilling certain biological and psychological needs such that we have the “supplies” to actually achieve eudaimonia.[831] Moreover, domination, like physical coercion, undermines the humanity of the one doing the dominating. People who dominate others are not engaged in “reasoned and intelligent cooperation” any more than those being dominated are.
+[417] A detail of this stela was published in the National Geographic Magazine. October 1985:521.
-Neither a life of order-taking nor order-giving is fit for rational, social beings. Domination in any form is therefore incompatible with the rational and social requirements of human flourishing. Rothbard was right in seeing the state as a key cause of social power, but he was wrong in thinking it exhausted the existence of social power. The institutions that dominate women, queer people, racial minorities, children, and people with disabilities are not only mutually reinforcing with statism, but deeply unjust in their own right because they rob people of individual autonomy, self-direction, and freedom to choose. Moreover, systematic exclusion and deprivation of marginalized people prevents them from engaging in mutual exchange and improving their abilities through experience and education, thereby lowering prosperity and overall living standards for everyone. It’s worth talking specifically about at least some of these avenues of interpersonal domination, how they interact with statism, why they are worth opposing in their own right, and what they have to offer Rothbardianism.
+[418] Bird-Jaguar became a three-katun lord on 9,15.17.12.10, meaning that this stela could not have been carved until after that date. If it was originally erected in the temple where it was found, it had to have been carved after 9.16.3.16.19. It is a retrospective stela depicting this bloodletting event as a part of Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.
-Rothbard fervently opposed feminism and thought the Women’s Liberation Movement was characterized by bitter, neurotic, man-hating lesbianism.[832] His positions were not only dreadfully wrong but, to put it lightly, incredibly demeaning to women. I contend that Rothbard should have staunchly opposed patriarchy. Not only has patriarchy been a friend of the state, for “[d]espotism in the state is necessarily associated with despotism in the family,”[833] but it has also historically plagued women with “male entitlement, victim-blaming, and omnipresent gender roles” that enable pervasive violence, coercion, and abuse by men.[834] Patriarchy is an emergent institution consisting in various social practices that subject women to the oppression of men.
+[419] The other two lintels in this building date to April 2, 758, and June 29, 763. They depict Lady 6-Tun of Motul de San José and Lady Balam-Ix engaged in the “fish- in-hand” bloodletting rite on those dates. The Bird-Jaguar depiction is then a retrospective one, carved sometime after 763, to link the bloodletting rites of his wives to the earlier 9.15.10.0.1 ritual so important to his demonstration of legitimacy.
-It’s no coincidence that libertarianism and feminism share common intellectual roots in nineteenth-century radicalism.[835] Both are fundamentally emancipatory doctrines. One is seeking to liberate people from state supremacy; the other, from male supremacy. A feminist anarchism must dismantle the power relations embedded in the gender stratum,[836] teach “women to take care of one another,” and work with “self-help clinics, free schools, feminist radio stations, newspapers, and domestic violence shelters.”[837] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but anarcha- feminism.
+[420] Besides the three lintels depicting this ritual at Yaxchilán, similar rituals occur in detailed depictions in the murals of Bonampak and in several pottery scenes.
-A consistent feminism must not only oppose patriarchy, but cis-heteropatriarchy, which is the “institutionalization of heterosexuality, cissexual, dyadic, monogamous, and permanent relationships as the only possible and coherent sexuality.”[838] Queer people have been historically plagued by controls, rigid definitions, and legal boundaries that constrain diverse expressions of sexual and gender identity,[839] restricting people to narrow “boxes” of sexuality and gender.[840] Furthermore, the state’s power to “define, interrogate, restrict, and punish on the basis of gendered expectations” leads to both disproportionate police violence and bureaucracy that forces people, particularly trans people, through economically and psychologically burdensome legal hoops concerning doctors’ notes, birth certificates, state identification, passports, social security cards, etc.[841] Opposition to cis-heteropatriarchy is also an emancipatory doctrine. It seeks to emancipate queer people from cis-hetero-supremacy. An anarchism that opposes cis-heteropatriarchy must work to liberate “those who traverse gender and sex” from the “mental and physical constructs that manipulate us into subordination”[842] and use mutual aid to help “queer and trans people facing homelessness, immigration enforcement, criminalization, and other dire circumstances.”[843] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but queer anarchism.
+[421] This day was nine days after the summer solstice so that the sun rose within 1° of the solstice point. Venus was at 71.06° and frozen at the stationary point after its first appearance as Morningstar. The sun rose through Gemini, and Venus was poised near the Pleiades and the bright star we call Aldcbaran. We do not know what the Maya called this star.
-The same reasons that committed Rothbard to feminism and queer liberation also committed him to anti-racism. Rothbard did talk about racist oppression to an extent. He praised the Black Panthers for their ability to “aggravate the white police” and organize black youth,[844] and approved of revolutionary violence targeted at white mobs and police.[845] But he largely seemed concerned with racism only insofar as it was a political problem. Of course, racism is in fact a political problem. Over the course of centuries, state legislation and courts have created a superior class known as “whites” that benefit from “the best access to political power, property ownership, legal protection, social status, and so forth” while “other groups — namely Native Americans and African slaves — were denied access to these resources, as were most incoming immigrant groups.”[846] Focusing on the political character of racism helps illuminate the ways in which racism and statism are mutually reinforcing. But focusing solely on the political character of racism reduces the problem of racism entirely to a problem of statism. Racism also consists in various social practices that subject racial minorities to pervasive prejudice and disrespect, systematic discrimination, inferior treatment, and individual and mob violence.
+[422] Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s house, is named on Lintel 23 with an sun-eyed dog head. On Lintel 21, Temple 22 is named the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. both in its earlier version and in the later rebuilding dedicated by Bird-Jaguar. This ritual could have taken place anywhere in the city, but we are reconstructing it here because all of the representations of the 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting are distributed around Lady Xoc’s building. This spatial point was critical to Bird-Jaguar’s quest for the throne.
-Racial minorities have been historically plagued by displacement, enslavement, colonization, and oppression. Anti-racism, too, is an emancipatory doctrine. It seeks to emancipate racial minorities from racial supremacy. Anarchism can provide anti-racist politics with a lens outside of historically settler colonialist ideologies.[847] The concept of “whiteness” itself emerged as a tool to facilitate widespread land theft, dehumanizing exploitation, and the violent uprooting of entire societies.[848] An anti-racist anarchism must fight for the self-determination of racial minorities,[849] and “challenge white supremacy on a daily basis ... refute racist philosophy and propaganda, and ... counter racist mobilisation and attacks, with armed self-defence and street fighting, when necessary.”[850] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but black and indigenous anarchism.
+[423] Tom Jones (1985) provided convincing evidence that the Usumacinta was called Xocol Ha at the time of the conquest.
-The same reasons that committed Rothbard to feminism, queer anarchism, and anti-racism also committed him to anti-ageism. Despite dismissing ageism, Rothbard’s analysis often embodied the concept in applying natural law theory to people regardless of age (in fact, Rothbard extended his support for childhood independence to the misguided goal of abolishing child neglect laws[851]). Rothbard considered the compulsory schooling system to be a mass prison in which teachers and administrators functioned as wardens and guards.[852] The state legal system and state education system serve to rob children of fundamental rights and “stunt their free thought, self-expression, individuality, and creativity.” The result of state-enabled ageism has been “numbed minds, conditioned for obedience, servitude and, in turn, the perpetuation and magnification of state power.”[853] But if the authority of teachers and administrators over children is unjust, so must be the authority of all adults over children — including parents. While Rothbard maintained that children always have an inviolable right to run away from their parents, and even called the parent-child relationship a form of “class struggle,” he also considered small children “a kind of property,” and granted much latitude to the treatment parents may impose on children while they still live with them.[854]
+[424] Given that Lady Xoc was around twenty years old when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she would have been between forty-five and fifty years old when Bird-Jaguar was born and very likely beyond her childbearing years. Any of her own children who were still alive would very likely have been adults or adolescents at that time.
-Children have been historically plagued by “loss of individual autonomy, abridged freedoms, and little participation in decision making.” Like feminism and anti-racism, anti-ageism is an emancipatory doctrine. It seeks to emancipate children from adult supremacy. An anti-ageist anarchism must “formulate an anti-authoritarian theory of parenting, education and child-rearing, and to begin the process of liberating children from an oppressive society.”[855] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but youth liberationist anarchism.
+[425] At the time of this event, Shield-Jaguar was ninety-four years old (+ two years). Lady Xoc’s birth date is not known, but sixty-seven years passed between Shield-Jaguar’s accession (in which she had participated as an adult) and her death date on 9.15.17.15.14. Presuming she was at least eighteen when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she died around age eighty-five. At the time of this 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, she would have been in her late seventies. If she had given birth to Shield-Jaguar’s child around the time of his accession, that child would have been in his late sixties by the time of our event; grandchildren would have been in their forties; great-grandchildren in their twenties; and great-great-grandchildren in their early childhood. Since most Maya did not live beyond their forties (although the elite appear to have had considerably longer lives and better food resources than the common folk), we suspect that the problem in Yaxchilán’s succession may have been that the extremely long-lived Shield-Jaguar had outlived the sons he’d had by his principal wife and perhaps many of his grandsons from that marriage as well. If this was the situation, the rivalry here would have been between grandsons or perhaps great-grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar on one side and the son of Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar on the other. Both claims would be equally legitimate and interpretable as a direct descent from a king, although the claim of a son would have been the stronger, especially if Shield-Jaguar publicly favored that offspring.
-The reasons that committed Rothbard to feminism, queer liberation, anti-racism, and anti-ageism also committed Rothbard to anti-ableism. Disability can be understood both in medical terms, as “individual physical or mental characteristic[s] with significant personal and social consequence,” and in social terms, as “physical and mental characteristics [that] are limiting only or primarily in virtue of social practices that lead to the exclusion of people with those characteristics.”[856] People with disabilities have been historically plagued by contempt, dehumanization, and exclusion. They are regularly “stigmatized, othered, and marginalized” in the form of “society’s refusal to include them in the economic, social, familial, and political life of the community” and failure to “acknowledge the diversity of the human experience.”[857] Many medical professionals often subject people with disabilities to imprisonment, abuse, and neglect.[858]
+[426] The costume was worn by nobles who aided the king in scattering rites at Yaxchilán, by nobles who witnessed an heir-designation at Bonampak, and by emissaries who delivered gifts to kings. This last scene is depicted on a painted pot in the burial of Ruler A at Tikal.
-Neurodivergent people are significantly disadvantaged by the vast mazes of inscrutable bureaucracy and paperwork of state capitalism,[859] suffer disproportionate amounts of police violence, and are used as political scapegoats in discussions of crime and gun violence (despite being more likely to suffer harm than perpetrate it; one in four suffer sexual, physical, or domestic violence in any given year). Vee notes, “Our society treats those with mental illnesses as freaks at best, and criminals at worst.”[860] Like feminism, queer liberation, anti-racism, and anti-ageism, anti-ableism is an emancipatory doctrine. It seeks to liberate people with disabilities from ableist supremacy. An anti-ableist anarchism must “integrate disability justice into our workplace and community engagements” and accommodate the “physical and mental differences of those in social movements.”[861] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but anti-ableist anarchism.
+[427] We cannot know the exact sequence of the events which took place during these rites We have arranged the individuals sequentially as a narrative device, but it is also possible that all the principals drew blood at the same time. The other sequences—the dancers, the placement of the high king inside a building, the musicians, and so forth—are based on the lower register of Room 1 and Room 3 at Bonampak, and on Piedras Negras Lintel 3.
-Much of contemporary anarchist theory has integrated Frye’s birdcage analogy for understanding how oppressive structures often go unseen because they systemically reduce the choices of marginalized people in interlocking fashion.
+[428] Representations of people undergoing bloodletting rarely show pain, and eyewitness accounts of the ritual specifically mention that the participants do not react in pain. (See Tozzer 1941:114, note 552.)
-If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and [be] unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere ... There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere.[t]he bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.[862]
+[429] Exactly this sequence of events, including the change of headdresses, is shown on Stela 35.
-Such an analysis is (1) radical, a methodological approach that grasps things by their roots and favors systemic change over local fixes;[863] (2) dialectical, a methodological approach emphasizing the reciprocal interrelationships among different elements in society;[864] and (3) intersectional, a methodological approach emphasizing overlapping, mutually constituting processes that do not exist independently of one another.[865] This “integrated analysis of oppression” suggests that systems of domination “operate with and through each other.”[866] Rothbardianism offers an integrated analysis of state domination, but is sorely lacking in its analysis of non-state domination. Intersectional analysis is just the consistent application of the view that humans are metaphysically independent, but socially interdependent. Lord observes, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”[867] Intersectionality acknowledges the fundamentally individualistic insight that “no one’s experience of oppression is the same.”[868]
+[430] David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) first identified a set of glyphs on Lintel 14 (E3-D4) and on Stela 10 and 13 at Copan as the name of the Vision Serpent in the manifestation shown on the Yaxchilan lintel.
+[431] Stela 2 of Bonampak shows the king’s mother and his wife helping him in a sacrificial rite exactly as we have imagined in the Yaxchilan event.
-The intersectional approach pioneered by black feminists[869] is completely compatible with Rothbard’s four core frameworks. After all, the state is not some discrete, physical thing. It consists in vast webs of interrelated practices and norms. Every interaction between an agent of the state and a subject of the state is defined by their respective social roles. The identities of politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, etc., are social constructs that emerge from patterns of interaction, creating one group of people privileged with a monopoly on legitimate aggressive violence and another group of people excluded from, and subject to, that monopoly. The state is itself a system of interpersonal domination that violates relational egalitarianism and which operates with and through other systems of interpersonal domination. Statism is another bar in Frye’s birdcage.
+[432] We have reconstructed this scene from a stucco sculpture which was modeled on the rear of Temple 21 immediately behind Stela 35, which showed Lady Eveningstar in this very bloodletting rite. In the stucco relief, a large male sits in the center with another male and a female on his right and two females on his left. We propose these are the principals of the bloodletting ritual—Shield-Jaguar with Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great- Skull-Zero on his right and with Lady Xoc and Lady Eveningstar on his left.
-Most proponents of relational egalitarianism would view Rothbard’s ideas as anathema to their project, not just for his late embrace of paleoconservatism (an ideology with little concern for relational egalitarianism and a part of Rothbard’s thought I do not intend to integrate with relational egalitarianism), but for his life-long embrace of capitalism. Proponents of relational egalitarianism often consider capitalism to be another system of interpersonal domination. Williams argues, “Capitalism is premised upon having workers under the control of managers and owners,” putting them in a “disadvantaged position” and “experiencing a lack of empowerment, efficacy, autonomy, and self-management.[870] Indeed, the situation in which a majority of people spend a third of their time taking orders from authority figures like schoolchildren and prisoners seems directly at odds with the characteristically anarchist opposition to interpersonal domination.[871] Workers have been historically plagued by dehumanization, abuse, and inhumane conditions.
+[433] M. Miller and Houston (1987) first recognized that these scenes occur not in ballcourts, but against hieroglyphic stairs.
-According to Anderson, capitalist firms are analogous to dictatorial governments in which workers acquiesce to their bosses for lack of feasible alternatives.
+[434] On the day of the bailgame, October 21, A.D. 744, Venus was 46.218° from the sun and only five days away from its maximum elongation as Morningstar. As we have seen repeatedly, this kind of Venus date often provided the stimulus for ritual events, especially those involving war and sacrificial rites. See Lounsbury (1982).
-This government does not recognize a personal or private sphere of autonomy free from sanction. It may prescribe a dress code and forbid certain hairstyles. Everyone lives under surveillance, to ensure that they are complying with orders. Superiors may snoop into inferiors’ email and record their phone conversations. Suspicionless searches to their bodies and personal effects may be routine. They can be ordered to submit to medical testing. The government may dictate the language spoken and forbid communication in any other language. It may forbid certain topics of discussion. People can be sanctioned for their consensual sexual activity or their choice of spouse or life partner. They can be sanctioned for their political activity and required to engage in political activity they do not agree with.[872]
+[435] A total of thirteen panels make up this sculpted stoop, which is located immediately in front of the three doors of Temple 33. The center panel, depicting Bird-Jaguar at play, is the widest and is designed to be the pivot of the entire program. Steps I, II, and III show three women, one of which is Lady Pacal (Shield-Jaguar’s mother), holding Vision Serpents in their arms in rituals that perhaps began different ballgames. The fact that Bird-Jaguar’s grandmother is depicted suggests that these three women represent different generations, but the inscriptions are too badly effaced to identify the other two.
+<br>
+<br>The remaining ten steps portray males in the midst of the bailgame. The ball is frozen in flight, either to or from the hieroglyphic stairs. Again the badly eroded texts of some panels preclude identification of the actors pictured, but we can identify Shield-Jaguar on Step VI, Bird-Jaguar the Great on Step VII, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar HI, on Step VIII, and the cahal Kan-Toc on Step X. Presumably these steps represent different ballgames, since different generations are shown engaged in play. We may also assume that Bird-Jaguar used this step to bring together all the people, king and cahal, kinsmen and allies, who were important to his status as high king.
-The pervasive domination of workers is a deep injustice that discourages autonomy, selfdirection, and freedom to choose. Anti-capitalism is an emancipatory doctrine. It seeks to emancipate workers from capitalist supremacy. Rothbardians and anti-capitalists alike might be asking if I could really be serious in suggesting that Rothbardianism, named for someone who considered “capitalism the fullest expression of anarchism and anarchism the fullest expression of capitalism,”[873] is complementary with anti-capitalism. The reason I see such potential in synthesizing the two is because I think much, though not all, of the disagreement between capitalist anarchists and anti-capitalist anarchists rests on shared mistaken assumptions.
+[436] The verb is the so-called “scattering” glyph without the drops. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has recently suggested a reading of .ye for this hand. In proto-Cholan (Kaufman and Norman 1984:137),^e’ is given as “take in the hand.” Lomil, the glyph that follows, is the word for lances or other tall staffs. The actions may be another holding of the tall flapstaff. The first glyph of the highly eroded name phrase following the verbal phrases is “5 katun ahau,” a title exclusively used at Yaxchilan in Shield- Jaguar’s name phrase. We surmise, then, that the actor was the then-deceased Shield- Jaguar.
-Rothbard defined capitalism as the “right to unrestricted private property and free exchange.”[874] Yet private property, for Rothbard, didn’t necessarily entail the division between capitalists and workers that the relational egalitarian case against capitalism takes issue with. Rothbard defined private property as an “individual’s justified sphere of free action,”[875] which “emanate[s] from an individual’s fundamental natural right to own himself” and can take the form of either individual or collective ownership.[876] Rothbard didn’t consider capitalist hierarchy inherent to capitalism as such. He only considered it a useful organizational means of increasing overall economic efficacy.
+[437] It is possible of course that Bird-Jaguar fabricated this information after the fact and that in reality he had no authority to conduct any ritual at the time of this period ending. This history was, after all, recorded after his accession and is thus a retrospective creation. We suspect, however, that the record is a true one. When he erected this stela sometime after his accession, that particular period ending would still have been fresh in everyone’s mind. If he was required to recruit and retain alliances with cahal lineages in order to hold his throne, documenting a brazen lie would certainly, it seems to us, be a counterproductive strategy.
+<br>
+<br>For this reason we assume that, by that time, he had gained enough support to participate in, if not lead, the ritual. Therefore, in his reconstruction of the story, he could declare that this rite took place in what had become his kingdom on the later date.
-Rothbard viewed capitalist hierarchy as justified insofar as it reaps mutually beneficial exchange for all parties involved.[877] But if mutually beneficial exchange could be better facilitated without capitalist hierarchy, Rothbard would’ve had no substantial objections. In fact, Rothbard once praised experiments in transforming workers into equal, independent entrepreneurs, as well as the participatory democracy practiced by the New Left. He described such projects as “monumental contribution[s] to the age-old problem of reconciling organization with the maximum independence and fulfillment of the individual.”[878] However, this affinity for participatory democracy was short-lived,[879] as was most of Rothbard’s affinity for the New Left.[880] So, while Rothbard himself dismissed opposition to capitalist hierarchy, his philosophy doesn’t completely rule it out. It is possible to jettison the capitalist hierarchy aspect of Rothbard’s thought without radically altering the overall frameworks I’ve discussed.
+[438] Stela 11 was erected in front of Structure 40, a temple built next to an important Shield-Jaguar temple. Before that temple stood five stelae, four recording Shield-Jaguar’s greatest captures (Stelae 15, 18, 19, and 20) and the fifth recording the first flapstaff event. The proximity of the Stela 11 to Shield-Jaguar’s monument, and the prominent place of Bird-Jaguar’s accession in its texts (this information is recorded in the bottom register and on the edges of the stela), identify the flapstaff event and the captive presentations as events critical to Bird-Jaguar’s campaign demonstrating his right to the throne.
-Rothbard was guilty of what Carson calls “vulgar libertarianism,” the tendency to conflate an ideal vision of freed markets for actually existing capitalist hierarchy, treating the latter as somehow automatically built in to the former.[881] In his analysis of the corporate state and big business, Rothbard demonstrated some awareness of that same tendency when invoked by progressives against freed markets and capitalist hierarchy (Carson terms their error “vulgar liberalism”[882]), which indicates a comparatively less vulgar outlook than many of his fellow libertarians. Nonetheless, Rothbard never opposed capitalist hierarchy as such. In mistakenly identifying freed markets with capitalism, most capitalist anarchists engage in “vulgar libertarianism” and most anti-capitalist anarchists engage in “vulgar liberalism.” This conflation only serves to bolster the power of both the state and capitalism, “rendering genuine libertarianism invisible.”[883]
+[439] On Lintel 16, Bird-Jaguar designates this captive as the cahal of a king who ruled a site named by an unknown Emblem Glyph with a snakelike head as its main sign.
-By making the vulgar liberal assumption that freed markets naturally entail capitalism, anticapitalist anarchists mistakenly endorse economic planning, and by making the vulgar libertarian assumption, libertarians mistakenly endorse capitalist hierarchy. Anarchism needs an alternative to the conventional approaches offered by both capitalist and anti-capitalist anarchists. I believe Rothbardianism, properly modified to integrate a commitment to anti-capitalism, can provide such an alternative: freed-market anti-capitalism.
+[440] Ix Witz (Jaguar Mountain) is another unknown kingdom. David Stuart (1987b:21) first identified its Emblem Glyph.
-Freed-market anti-capitalism distinguishes between capitalism (rule by capitalists and workplace hierarchy) and markets (property and free exchange).[884] There is no reason to a priori think that freed markets promote specifically capitalist modes of economic organization, as opposed to, for instance, cooperatives, but also independent contracting, freelancing, micro-enterprises, community workshops, open-source design, desktop manufacturing, household production, mutual aid associations, and unions.[885] Johnson argues that freed-market competition would actually liberate workers from the constraints of capitalist hierarchy, and new, more experimental, autonomous, and horizontal forms of economic organization would emerge.[886]
+[441] GII is also known as the Manikin Scepter or by the name Kauil.
-Rothbard opposed cooperatives because he considered them subject to the same economic irrationality that afflicts economic planning. Worker ownership, according to Rothbard, would abolish external markets and reap calculational chaos.[887] But Prychitko notes that cooperatives can acquire non-labor factors not only by workers’ capital contributions, but also through purchasing, renting, or borrowing in external markets. Rothbard was wrong to conflate the cooperative model with economic planning. Worker cooperatives in no way demand the sacrifice of property rights, price signals, or profit/loss mechanisms and are, therefore, completely amenable to institutions of economic freedom. An Austrian market-process approach doesn’t rule out anticapitalist anarchism, only anti-market anarchism.[888] An anti-capitalist freed market would include horizontal modes of production, but would still have property ownership, contractual exchange, competition, entrepreneurial discovery, and spontaneous orders.[889]
+[442] These bundles were critical to the ritual lives of the Maya. In ethnohistorical sources, they hold the sources of the lineage power, and are olten described as having been left by the semi-divine ancestors who founded those lineages. The bundles are recorded as holding idols, jades, eccentric flints, and similar objects. Eccentric flints and eccentric obsidians were worked into irregular, nonutilitarian shapes that often included human or deity profiles. During the Classic Period, it’s fairly certain they were used to store idols such as the Manikin Scepter and the Jester Gods. A bundle has been found archaeologi- cally in the Lost World group at Tikal (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1986 and n.d.). Made of ficus-bark paper tied closed with a woven-fiber band, the bundle was inside a lip-to-lip cache made of an angle-sided plate with an identical plate inverted and set over it as the lid. The bundle inside held the remains of marine creatures and the thorns used in bloodletting. Other similar caches regularly contain bloodletting instruments such as thorns, stingray spines, obsidian, and flint blades. Archaeologists found human blood on one such flint blade discovered in a cache at Colha, Belize (Dan Potter, personal communication, 1987). Merle Robertson (1972) first proposed the association of these bundles with the bloodletting rite, a suggestion that has since been confirmed archaeologi- cally. This lintel at least partially confirms her hypothesis, for the verb written in the text over the woman’s head states that she will soon let blood.
-Rothbard argued the efficiency of capitalist hierarchy is demonstrated by the fact that so many workers decline the opportunity to form cooperatives, and instead work for someone who has already saved up productive resources in order to earn income in advance of the sale of their products.[890] On this view, capitalist hierarchy is merely the organic result of differing preferences in saving and consumption. But in this respect, Rothbard ignored the implications of his very own liberal class theory in which modern capitalism is understood as a system of neomercantilism that protects politically entrenched big businesses from the competitive effects of market processes, artificially limits the feasible economic alternatives, and impoverishes those dependent on the corporate state via land-use rules, building codes, zoning restrictions, eminent domain, capitalization requirements, trade protectionism, occupational licensing, excessive permits, price and wage controls, onerous regulations, inscrutable paperwork, irksome inspections, burdensome bureaucracy, and inflation and taxation that favors the politically connected.[891] Capitalist hierarchy reflects not organic variations in saving and consumption preferences, but coercive privilege that “depends at root upon threats of violence that condition socioeconomic relations in wider society.”[892] Capitalism is mutually reinforcing with statism.
+[443] The text records that she will let blood by naming Chanal Hun Winik Chan, the particular Vision Serpent she will manifest.
-Indeed, Rothbard’s framework is much more congenial to anti-capitalist modes of economic organization than he realized because such arrangements could offer more efficient alternatives to large firms currently benefitting from economic privilege under the corporate state. Rothbard ultimately underrated “the extent to which the large corporation, as an island of incalculability, is insulated from the market penalties for calculational chaos.”[893] Rothbard’s own insights into economic calculation help show that freed markets would incentivize more worker management of industry in order to overcome the calculational chaos of capitalist firms. As vertical integration increases, firms become more insulated from the price system and their diseconomies of scale grow larger and larger — a process heavily magnified by the state weeding out market competitors and favoring organizational bigness.[894]
+[444] The text on this lintel is very badly eroded, but based on a detailed examination ofthe original stone, Tate (1986a:336) has proposed readings of 9.16.6.11.0 3 Ahau 3 Muan or 9.17.6.15.0 3 Ahau 3 Kankin. We think this structure was built by Bird-Jaguar. The lintel, therefore, should be dated to the earlier of these two possibilities.
-Hierarchy, whether of the state or capitalist variety, comes with severe information and incentive problems, subjecting both arrangements to pervasive irrationality. On the Austrian view, cal- culational chaos is a product of separating entrepreneurial from technical knowledge. While collective ownership divorces economic decisions from entrepreneurial knowledge (since such knowledge only emerges from market processes), capitalist ownership divorces economic decisions from technical knowledge (since such knowledge only emerges from production processes).[895] In aiming to best utilize technical knowledge and more efficiently allocate scarce resources to better satisfy consumer preferences, firms in a freed market would likely grant more and more autonomy to workers. Competitive pressures would therefore incentivize avoiding “hierarchy as much as possible, and [internalizing] the costs and benefits of organizing production in the same decision-makers.”[896] Consistently upholding exit in the marketplace is the best way to secure voice in the workplace.
+[445] Tate (1986a:3O7) argues that the careless sculptural style and the lack of a date resembles the very late style used by the last documented ruler of Yaxchilân. However, since the building is part of Bird-Jaguar’s program to legitimize himself, we suggest that the scene depicts the first Shield-Jaguar flapstaff event that is also shown on Stela 50.
-Capitalism is a system of domination that lowers living standards through economic irrationality. But economic planning suffers the same problems. The sensible alternative that promotes both relational egalitarianism and shared prosperity is anti-capitalist freed markets. A freed-market anti-capitalist anarchism must entrepreneurially engage in horizontal alternatives to capitalist hierarchies such as cooperatives, independent contracting, freelancing, micro-enterprises, community workshops, open-source design, desktop manufacturing, household production, mutual aid associations, and unions,[897] along with practicing “direct action on the job”[898] to strengthen the bargaining power of workers, such as wildcat strikes up and down the production chain, sit-down strikes, walkouts, slowdowns, boycotts, anonymous whistleblowing, public information campaigns, sick-ins, and “working to rule” (following the rules of bureaucratic corporate mazes to the letter).[899] Such an approach is completely compatible with Rothbard’s core frameworks. Rothbard should have embraced not just anarchism, but freed-market anticapitalist anarchism.
+[446] This woman has the Ik Emblem Glyph in her name, like the woman on Lintels 15 and 39. Here, however, two different people seem to be named: on Lintels 15 and 29 the woman has the title Lady 6-Tun preceding the Emblem Glyph, whereas on Lintels 41 and 5 the woman has Lady 6-Sky-Ahau as her name. If these are separate women, then Bird-Jaguar is associated with four women—Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the mother of his child), Lady Balam of Ix Witz, and these two ladies from Motul de San José.
-*** VIII. The Future of Rothbardianism
+[447] The Lintel 42 name phrase of this cahal has the “captor of Co-Te-Ahau” title that appears consistently in this fellow’s name phrase.
-“Rothbardianism” consists in natural law theory, individualist anarchism, liberal class theory, and Austrian economics. Rothbard synthesized such disparate intellectual traditions into a single, coherent, and fruitful framework of social analysis. Together, the defining frameworks of Rothbardianism can provide contemporary anarchism with (1) a theory of morality that takes our rational and social nature seriously, providing a compelling alternative to the impoverished theories of nihilism, deontology, consequentialism, atomism, and/or organicism; (2) a theory of anarchism rooted in that rich conception of human nature, which lays the groundwork for both liberal class theory and marketprocess thought; (3) an account of class division that captures the nexus of political—economic—cultural power more accurately than traditional Marxist theories; and (4) an analysis of human action and human interaction that takes mutual exchange seriously, thereby better informing both a critique of the state and a vision for a stateless society. To the extent that they haven’t already, other anarchists ought to integrate these core Rothbardian insights into their thought.
+[448] Tate (1985) has argued this woman is the same Lady Balam of Ix Witz. However, since that lady had already appeared on Lintel 43 two days earlier, we think it more likely that Bird-Jaguar wished to associate yet another of his wives with this bloodletting sequence. We suspect she is the second wife from Motul de San José.
-Nevertheless, Rothbard’s social theory has a gaping hole in its lack of concern for interpersonal domination beyond bare force. A bright future for Rothbardianism depends upon incorporating a more comprehensive and holistic vision of human flourishing and freedom. Just as Rothbard sought to liberate people from unequal authority, he should’ve sought to liberate people from unequal relationships. Just as Rothbard sought to liberate people from violence, he should’ve sought to liberate people from domination. Just as Rothbard sought to liberate people from statism, he should’ve sought to liberate people from cis-heteropatriarchy, racial supremacy, ageism, ableism, and capitalism.
+[449] On lintels carved after the date of this capture, both men, whenever they named themselves, included the names of the captives in their titles. They did this regardless of whether or not the narrative action was set before or after the capture itself.
+<br>
+<br>The scene we are discussing here may not be the actual capture, for the captives are already stripped and wearing the cut cloth that signifies sacrifice. This event probably occurred after the capture when the victims are displayed and torture begins. See the fourth wall of Bonampak Room 2 for a graphic description of this phase of the ritual (M. Miller 1986b: 113–130, Pl. 2).
-Opposition to interpersonal domination is consistent, and mutually reinforcing, with (1) Rothbard’s natural law theory that emphasizes autonomy, self-direction, and free choice; (2) Rothbard’s individualist anarchist politics that consistently opposes the state, a primary purveyor and facilitator of interpersonal domination; (3) Rothbard’s liberal class theory that provides a robust explanation of social fracturing and corporate statism; and (4) Rothbard’s account of extensive social cooperation and mutual respect that occurs within market processes. Rothbardians ought to add relational egalitarianism as the fifth pillar of consistently applied Rothbardian thought. If Roth- bardianism incorporates a principled commitment to relational egalitarianism, maybe it can earn that third cheer.
+[450] The two protagonists are about the same height, but more important, the two scenes occupy an equal amount of compositional space. Bird-Jaguar is contrasted to Kan-Toe by the more elaborate detail of his costume and by the larger size of the text referring to his actions. Kan-Toe’s inscription is the smaller secondary text between the figures.
-A Rothbardianism that embraces and integrates the value of relational egalitarianism can advocate for social justice, the “branch of justice that evaluates systemic features of society in terms of their impact on social welfare generally, and on that of the least advantaged in particular.”[900] Opposition to statism, cis-heteropatriarchy, racial supremacy, adult supremacy, ableist supremacy, and capitalism are all social justice causes Rothbardians should take up in the name of flourishing and freedom. The consistent Rothbardian should completely reject the “illogical and mythical” fusion of conservatism and libertarianism,[901] especially Hoppe’s variety, which vainly tries to fuse libertarianism with the alt-right commitment to patriarchal white nationalism.[902] Trying to combine a philosophy of emancipation and progress with a philosophy of hierarchy and traditionalism can only serve to undermine the aims of the former and disguise the aims of the latter. “In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”[903] Rothbardianism needs a consistent means—ends framework, which only relational egalitarianism can provide.
+[451] Lintel 54 was over the center door, while Lintel 58 was on the left and 57 on the right.
-Rothbardianism, by maintaining its core frameworks of natural law theory, individualist anarchism, liberal class theory, and Austrian economics, but working to integrate the framework of relational egalitarianism and, thus, the liberation of women, queer people, racial minorities, children, people with disabilities, and workers, can offer a harmonious, radical, dialectical, and intersectional analysis of human flourishing and freedom. My hope is that Rothbard’s approach to anarchism, suitably modified and enriched, can continue to inform and stimulate anarchist research and praxis.
+[452] David Stuart (n.d.) first read the glyph for this relationship and recognized that it clarified the role Great-Skull-Zero played in Bird-Jaguar’s history.
+[453] Notice that Chel-1 e is represented on both lintels as approximately the same size as his father, in spite of the fact that he was five on 9.16.5.0.0 and fourteen on 9.16.15.0.0. His smaller scale is apparently designed to represent him as simply “child.”
-[717] Murray N. Rothbard, “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report 3.1 (Jan 1992): 5–14 [<verbatim>5</verbatim>].
+[454] This is the temple housing the western set of duplicating lintels, which include Bird-Jaguar and his cahal Kan-Loe at the capture of Jeweled-Skull; a bird-scepter ritual with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau; a basket-staff event with Kan-Toc; and a bundle/Manikin Scepter event with another wife. Temple 1 exalts the cahal Kan-Toc, very probably to seal his alliance to Bird-Jaguar during his life and to his son after Bird-Jaguar’s death.
-[718] Rothbard, Right-Wing 9.
+[455] The name of this person is a jaguar head holding a cauac sign in a paw raised beside its head. This position is one of the variants of the penis glyph in the founder’s name. This visitor appears to be named Yat-Balam, but obviously he cannot be the founder of Yaxchilán’s dynasty, who was long dead. Either he is a namesake, or the Piedras Negras lord is flattering the Yaxchilán lord by using the founder’s name for him.
-[719] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Transformation of the American Right,” Continuum (Summer 1964): 220–31 [<verbatim>31</verbatim>].
+[456] Proskouriakoff (1961a) first identified these figures as youths and suggested that this is an heir-designation rite.
-[720] John Payne, “Rothbard’s Time on the Left,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 19.1 (Winter 2005): 7–24.
+; CHAPTER 8: C O P Á N : THE DEATH OF FIRST DAWN on Macaw Mountain
-[721] Murray N. Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty (AL: Mises Institute 2016) Preface.
+[457] The name of the last great king of that community, Yax-Pac, means “First Sun-at- Horizon” or “First Dawn.” Mo’-Witz, or “Macaw Mountain,” was a sacred place in or near the community alluded to by several Late Classic kings there. The death of Yax-Pac was indeed the death of first dawn in the valley, for the contentious rivalry between the kings and their nobility was a key factor in the demise of the kingdom.
-[722] Murray N. Rothbard, “Do You Hate the State?” Libertarian Forum 10.7 (July 1977): 1–8 [<verbatim>1</verbatim>].
+[458] Many of the ideas presented in this chapter are the result of collaboration among Dr. William Fash, Barbara Fash, Rudy Larios, David Stuart, Linda Scheie, and many other people who have worked on the Copan Mosaics Project and the Copán Acropolis Project. William Fash (1983a; Fash and Scheie <verbatim>[1986];</verbatim> Fash and Stuart [n.d.]) first suggested that nonroyal lineages competing with the royal house of Copán contributed to the collapse of central power in the valley.
-[723] Murray N. Rothbard, “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory,” Libertarian Review 7.7 (August 1978): 18–24 [<verbatim>4</verbatim>].
+[459] Data on the history of the Copán Valley is drawn from William Fash’s (1983a) study of the process of state formation in the valley. Found in the deepest levels under Group 9N-8 (Fash 1985), the earliest deposit at Copán consisted of ceramics; obsidian; bones of deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary; burned earth; and carbon. Fash interpreted this as a seasonal camp. Viel, the ceramist for the Proyeto Arqueología de Copán, associates this early ceramic phase, Rayo, with the Cuadros phase of the Soconusco Coast and the Tok phase at Chalchuapa (Fash 1983a: 155). The pottery included brushed tecomates and flat- bottomed, flaring-walled bowls decorated with shell stamping, red slip, and hematite paint.
-[724] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (PA: Penn State UP 2000) 360.
+[460] William Fash (1985 and n.d.a) describes this cemetery in detail and associates its ceramics directly with the Middle Preclassic ceramics discovered by Gordon (1898) in the caves of the Scsemil region of the valley, which Fash interprets as part of a very early burial complex. He (1983a: 157–158) cites Middle Preclassic occupations in Group 9N-8, the Bosque, and in the Main Group, while cautioning that the full settlement pattern cannot be reconstructed from the present data. Of the rich burials containing jade, those referred to as Burials VHI-27 and IV-35, he comments that only Burial V at La Venta (Veracruz, México) rivals the Copán tombs in quantity and quality of jade. He takes the jade and the pottery incised with Olmec imagery to “indicate intimate familiarity with heartland Olmec ritual practices.”
-[725] Peter J. Boettke, “Economics and Liberty: Murray N. Rothbard,” Nomos: Series on the Austrian Free- Market Economists (Fall/Winter 1988): 29–50 [<verbatim>30</verbatim>].
+[461] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986: 70, 80, 104, 119, Pl. 17, 28–30) for a discussion of some of the jade and ceramics from this early period.
-[726] Rothbard, Ethics 7.
+[462] William Fash (1983a: 176) sees this growing density in settlement on the best agricultural lands as the result of social and political motivations which gradually usurped subsistence needs. As the dynasty established itself at the Acropolis, Copanecs found it advantageous to place their residential groups as near the king as possible, and thus gave over their best agricultural lands to the burgeoning population. Fash speculated that events taking place in the city were important enough to lure people into settling areas previously occupied by permanent agricultural settlements, in one of the zones of occupation, El Cerro de las Mesas, people deliberately chose inconvenient locations for settlement, perhaps for purposes of defense or for some as yet undetected religious or political reasons.
-[727] Rothbard, Ethics 7.
+[463] The noncalendric text on Stela 17 does not survive, but phrases in the 8.6.0.0.0 texts on Stela I (Smoking-Imix-God K) are repeated in the record of the same event on Stela 4 (18-Rabbit) (Stuart 1986b). The second event on Stela I is unfortunately destroyed, but the last glyph in the text records the main sign of the Copan Emblem Glyph with the “impinged bone” sign that identifies its function here as a location—the kingdom of Copan as a physical entity with a geographical location. This is equivalent to the locational forms of the Tikal Emblem Glyph we encountered on Tikal Stela 39 in Chapter 5. This reference appears to be to the founding of the kingdom itself (Scheie 1987b).
+<br>
+<br>Altar I’ also has an early date (Morley 1920:192) of 7.1.13.15.0 or October 9, 321 B.C., a date remarkably close to the beginning of Copan’s Late Preclassic decline. Unfortunately, the Copanecs did not record the event occurring on that date.
-[728] Rothbard, Ethics 12.
+[464] Excavations in the 1988 and 1989 seasons of the Copan Acropolis Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash have uncovered buildings and inscribed monuments contemporary to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s reign.
-[729] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. C.D.C Reeve (IN: Hackett 2014) 1098a1.
+[465] Sylvanus Morley in his Inscriptions of Copan (1920) worked out much of the chronology of Copan’s inscriptions. Later scholars, including David Kelley (1962; 1976:238–240), Joyce Marcus (1976), Gary Pahl (1976), Berthold Riese (n.d.; 1988; Riese and Baudez 1983), and David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Linda Scheie, and others in the Copan Notes have revised Morley’s chronology and identified a series of Copanec rulers. Peter Mathews (n.d.) first noted “numbered succession” titles at Yaxchilan and Copan, which Riese (1984) subsequently demonstrated had a wide distribution in the Maya inscriptions. The identification of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the founder began when David Stuart managed to identify his dates as belonging to the fifth century. Stuart communicated his finding to William Fash in a letter dated November 1985. Collaborative work between Stuart and Scheie (1986a and Scheie 1986b) led to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s identification as the dynastic founder. Later Copan kings reckoned the establishment of their dynasty from the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and gave themselves titles which reflected their numerical position in the line following him: for example, Smoke-lmix-God K called himself ‘the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” However, we also note that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the true founder of the kingdom, nor its first ruler. Stuart (personal communication, 1985) identified the notation of an even earlier king as a “first successor” on Stela 24.
-[730] Rothbard, Ethics 21.
+[466] See Carlson (1977) for a history of the astronomical conference interpretation of Altar Q and an evaluation of the evidence. David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first suggested that the dates on Altar Q are early, rather than contemporary with the altar itself. Joyce Marcus (1976:140–145) first suggested that the Altar Q figures are portraits of rulers, while Riese (n.d.) identified the entire composition as Copan’s sixteen rulers seated in the numerical order of their succession.
-[731] Murray N. Rothbard, “Frank S. Meyer: Fusionist as Libertarian,” Modern Age (Fall 1981): 352–63 [<verbatim>53</verbatim>].
+[467] The first event is a “God K-in-hand” event. This verb is associated with the display of scepters and is specified by a noun incorporated into the hand holding the scepter or appended to the rear of that hand. The second event is spelled ta.li, a verb which in Choi and Chorti (the language of the Copan region) means “to come” or “to arrive.” In both phrases, the glyph that follows the verb appears in later texts as a replacement for the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ in numbered successor titles. It appears to refer to the idea of “founder,” or perhaps “lineage,” in some way we do not yet understand.
-[732] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (NY: Dutton 1992) 1023.
+[468] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) has found this monument, broken into three parts and deposited in a building under Temple 10L-26, the building of the famous Hieroglyphic Stairs of Copan. The date on this monument is exactly the same as that on Stela J, 9.O.O.O.O. The front of the te-tun records the date and the king who reigned when this great period ending turned. David Stuart (in Stuart et al. 1989) found the fragmentary remnant of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s name on the last glyph block in this passage, thus confirming that he was reigning. The protagonist and owner of the te-tun, however, was his son, the second ruler in the Altar Q list. We have confirmation, therefore, from a monument carved during or soon after his lifetime that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was indeed a real historical person. Furthermore, this monument was treated with special reverence, carefully cached inside the temple before it was buried in preparation for the next stage of construction. When a later descendant evoked ancestral greatness by constructing the Hieroglyphic Stairs, he chose to put it in this location very probably because he knew a temple of the founder of his line lay deep under Temple 10L-26.
-[733] Roderick T. Long, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal” (Mises Oct 2001), [[https://mises.org][https://mises.org/library/equality-]] [[https://mises.org][unknown-ideal]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[469] In the interim nomenclature used by the Copán Acropolis Project, buildings are designated by bird names, substructures by colors, and floors by names of archaeologists and other persons. This early temple has been dubbed Papagayo (‘‘Macaw”) until the history and various levels of the main structure, 10L-26, are fully known and numbered.
-[734] Rothbard, Economic 627. Original emphasis.
+[470] Stromsvik (1952:198) published a drawing of a mask he found on a terrace under Structure 10L-26 (The Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs). He considered the terrace to be contemporary with the first Ballcourt. Investigations in the Copán Archaeological Project have refined the chronology dating the first phase of the Ballcourt and the earliest floors of 10L-26 to the last half of the Bajic phase (A.D. 300–400) (Cheek 1983:203). During the Copan Mosaics Project (1985-present), Dr. William Fash has continued Strómsvik’s work and found even earlier platforms and structures, some of which are decorated with massive stucco sculptures. They have also found predynastic levels, but the relationship of those levels to Papagayo Temple and other early levels of the Acropolis are still under investigation. Since Stela 63 was set in the floor when Papagayo was constructed, that temple can be dated to between 9.0.0.0.0 and 9.0.5.0.0 (435–440). It was constructed after Ballcourt I was in place, but throughout the subsequent history of the kingdom, the temple in this location (in whatever manifestation) was always associated with one or another of the various stages of the Ballcourt.
-[735] Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (AL: Mises Institute 2006) 36–7.
+[471] In the summer of 1989, Scheie talked with Rudy Larios, Richard Williamson, and William Fash about the architectural history of this early temple. Although analysis of the archaeological data has just begun, all three archaeologists agree that Stela 63 was set in the back chamber of this building when it was built. This dates the construction to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s son, who was presumably the second successor. At a later time, the fourth successor, Cu-Ix, then placed his step in front of the temple to associate himself with the founder. Larios also has clear evidence that the construction of Papagayo is atop another large platform, which may date to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Furthermore, that platform is atop yet another huge platform that must be from predynastic times. The excavations have not yet reached bedrock so that we anticipate finding even earlier structures during the next few field seasons.
-[736] Roderick T. Long, “A Plea for Public Property” (Panarchy 1998), [[http://www.panarchy.org][www.panarchy.org/rodericklong/]] [[http://www.panarchy.org][property.html]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[472] Papagayo Temple was uncovered during the 1988 field season of the Copán Mosaics Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash. The step sits in front of Stela 63, which had been erected in the rear chamber by the second ruler when the temple was built. The step has a now-damaged inscription consisting of thirty glyphs on top of the step and a single row on the front edge. The name of the fourth successor occurs on this edge and also on Stela 34, a fragment of which was found lying on the plaza just west of Stela J (Grube and Scheie 1988). The stela fragment had been recut and used (perhaps as a cache) in some as yet unidentified construction. We now know that Papagayo was open at least through the reign of the fourth successor and perhaps later.
-[737] Roderick T. Long, “Land-Locked: A Critique of Carson on Property Rights,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 20.1 (2006): 87–95 [<verbatim>1</verbatim>].
+[473] The dates and names in this historical reconstruction are drawn from analyses by David Stuart (1984 letter to Fash and 1987) and in the Copón Notes, a series of short research reports produced during the Copán Mosaics Project. Copies are on file in the Archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Tegucigalpa and Copán, Honduras, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Notes of particular interest to the dynastic history are Notes 6, 8, 14–17 from the 1986 season, and Notes 20–22 and 25–26 from the 1987 season, and Notes 59–67 from the 1989 season.
-[738] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (NY: Barnes & Noble Books 2004) 4.
+[474] The ritual demarcation of space to facilitate the entry of powerful people into the Otherworld spans Maya history from the Late Preclassic construction of the four-posted temple summits, such as Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, to the historical treatise of the early Colonial period called the “ritual of the bacabs” (Freidel and Scheie 1988; Roys 1965). Present-day Maya shamans continue this practice in their construction of “corrals” (Vogt 1976) and altars. The posts of the sacred spaces given in the prayers of the “ritual of the bacabs” are called acantun, “upright or set-up stones”; and acante’, “upright or set-up trees.” Stelae at Copán are specifically called te-tun or “tree-stone.” Smoke-Imix-God K departed from normal practice by using stelae to demarcate the entire core area of his kingdom, while under most circumstances Maya kings used stelae as the permanent markings of the central position held by themselves within the sacred space during their entry into the Otherworld.
-[739] Rothbard, Ethics 18.
+[475] William Fash (1983a:217–232) suggested that these outlying stelae were erected to mark the establishment of a state under Smoke-Imix-God K around A.D. 652. Much of the epigraphic evidence he cites in that study has since been replaced or reinterpreted. For example, the Early Classic history of Copan is far more detailed and regular than it appeared to be in 1983. While we now question if Smoke-Imix-God K changed the system at Copán as much as it once appeared that he had, he was still responsible lor placing inscribed monuments throughout the valley. Smoke-1 mix-God K also erected a stela at Santa Rita (Stela 23) and, at about this same time, the lords of Rio Amarillo (Schele 1987d) inscribed altars acknowledging the rule of Copán’s high king. While Smoke-Imix-God K may have inherited a polity that already qualified as a state, he extended its domain farther than it had ever been before.
-[740] Rothbard, Ethics 187.
+[476] David Stuart (1987a) first identified the name on Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix- God K. The record of the Copán king occupies the outer rim text, while another date and event are recorded in the interior. The interior date, 9.11.0.11.11, falls 231 days after the period ending. The event phrase includes the glyph ta yuc. I his termine is the Chorti word for “join things, unite, a joining, union” (Wisdom n.d.:771). Smoke-Imix may then have united or joined that polity to his own.
+<br>
+<br>This action explains why the first great ruler of Quiriguá, Cauac-Sky, recorded that he acceded u cab, “in the territory of” 18-Rabbit of Copán. Quiriguá was in the hegemony of Copán after 18-Rabbit’s predecessor “joined” it to the kingdom. Further evidence supporting the conclusion that Smoke-Imix actually brought Quiriguá under his hegemony comes from later rulers’ practice of citing themselves as “Black Copán Ahau and of claiming descent from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as their founder (Schele 1989c).
-[741] Rothbard, Ethics 161–2.
+[477] Etsuo Sato (1987) interprets the appearance of polychrome in the Valley of La Venta as evidence of elites who had access to exotic pottery. He sees these elites as being both heavily influenced by Copanecs and in contact with peoples at Naco and in the Sula Valley.
-[742] Rothbard, Ethics 162.
+[478] These monuments include the bifaccd Stela C (9.14.0.0.0), Stela F (9.14.10.0.0), Stela 4 (9.14.15.0.0), Stela H (9.14.19.5.0), Stela A (9.14.19.8.0 or 9.15.0.3.0), Stela B (9.15.0.0.0), and finally, Stela D (9.15.5.0.0). Stela C, the first monument in this set, dates to the same first appearance of Venus celebrated by Ah Cacaw on Stela 16 at Tikal (see Chapter 6). Stela C reflects this association with Venus by linking the period ending to a Venus date occurring before the beginning of this creation. Other analyses have placed Stela C at later dates, but the text specifies that the stela was erected (tz’apah) on 9.14.0.0.0.
-[743] Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority and a Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (CA: Pine Tree 1966) 17.
+[479] In the 1987 excavations, William Fash drove a tunnel into the rear of the platform directly under the temple. Although no cache was found, the excavation uncovered a muzzle stone exactly the same size and shape as the corner Witz Monsters that decorated the 18-Rabbit temple. With present data, we have no way of determining which king commissioned the earlier phase of the building, but clearly that earlier building displayed the same iconography as the later version. See Larios and W. Fash (n.d.) for a preliminary analysis of the final phases of Temples 22 and 26.
+[480] Two broken fragments with inscriptions were set in the step of the final phase of this temple. One records the first katun anniversary of 18-Rabbit’s accession (David Stuart personal communication, 1987) and the other is the death date of Smoke-Imix-God K (Schele 1987a). These two dates as well as the style of the God N sculpture found cached in the later building identify the time of the earlier building as the second half of the reign of 18-Rabbit.
-[744] Spooner, No Treason 26.
+[481] William Fash (1983a:236–237) cites Viel’s analysis of the source of Ulua polychrome as the Comayagua Valley, rather than the Sula Valley. Furthermore, caches found within the Early Classic phases of Structure 10L-26 (the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs) include greenstone beads and earflares identical in technical workmanship and design to the greenstone artifacts excavated at the central Honduran site of El Cajón by Kenneth Hirth (1988).
-[745] Frederic Bastiat, The Law (NY: Foundation for Economic Education 1998) 29.
+[482] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication) documents evidence for death rates higher than birth rates in the Copán pocket during the Late Classic period. 18-Rabbit had to recruit newcomers from outside the valley to keep the population growing, and his strategy apparently succeeded, for by the end of the eighth century, population exceeded the capacity of the Copán pocket to sustain them.
-[746] Benjamin R. Tucker, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ,” The Individualist Anarchists, ed. Frank H. Brooks (NJ: Transaction 1994) 77–89 [<verbatim>6</verbatim>].
+[483] Kelley (1962:324), following a suggestion by Proskouriakoff, pointed out the u cab expressions at Quiriguá, noting that cab means “town, place, and world.” David Stuart (1987a) first interpreted this passage to indicate that Cauac-Sky’s installation was under 18-Rabbit’s authority and perhaps even took place at Copán. This interpretation is in keeping with his identification of the protagonist of Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix-God K of Copán.
-[747] Franz Oppenheimer, The State (NY: Free Life Editions 1975) 24–5.
+[484] Morley (1915:221) first noted that this 9.15.6.14.6 6 Cimi 4 Zee date was important to Quiriguá’s history, while Kelley (1962:238) suggested that it referred to “a conquest of Quiriguá by Copán, or perhaps to the installation of a Copanec ruler at Quiriguá.” Proskouriakoff(1973:168) took the prominence of the date at Quirigua to indicate that the Quirigua ruler had the upper hand in the encounter. Following her mentor’s suggestions, Marcus (1976:134—140) pointed out that Cauac-Sky, the ruler of Quirigua, was the “captor of” 18-Rabbit, the king of Copan. She correctly identified the event as a battle in which Quirigua achieved independence of Copan.
+<br>
+<br>The verb associated with this date consists of an “ax” followed by the T757 auxiliary verb. This verb records “astronomical” events in the codices, and at Dos Pilas and other sites it appears with “star-shell” war events (see Scheie 1982:351 for a listing). In most of the examples from the Classic inscriptions, the event appears to be “battle,” but on pottery, the “ax” glyph is particularly associated both with scenes of decapitation and with the names of gods shown in the act of self-inflicted decapitation (one example occurs on the famous painted pot from Altar de Sacrificios). This association with sacrifice opens the possibility that the action recorded is execution by decapitation. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1989) and Jorge Orejel (n.d.) have both suggested a reading of ch’ak, “to decapitate,” for the glyph.
-[748] Rothbard, New Liberty 64.
+[485] The case of Copan is not entirely unique. Palenque suffered a similar disaster when Kan-Xul, the younger brother and successor of Chan-Bahlum, was captured by Tonina and presumably sacrificed. Palenque, like Copan, did not enter into a hiatus, but rather continued under the aegis of its old dynasty. The political reactions at both Copan and Palenque included, however, the emergence of the lesser nobility as players in the game of history. In both kingdoms, the kings struggled in vain to reassert the centrality of the dynasty.
-[749] Murray N. Rothbard, “Unpublished Letter” (Organization and Markets 2008), [[https://organizationsandmarkets.com][https://organizationsand]] [[https://organizationsandmarkets.com][markets.com/2008/08/06/rothbard-on-big-business/]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[486] Smoke-Monkey’s accession appears on the base of Stela N and on Steps 40 and 39 of the Hieroglyphic Stairs as 9.15.6.16.5 6 Chicchan 3 Yaxkin (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), a day on which Venus was 45.68° from the sun.
-[750] Murray N. Rothbard, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal,” Ramparts 6.11 (June 1968): 47–52 [<verbatim>1</verbatim>].
+[487] This date is recorded on the north panel of the east door of Temple 11 as 5 Cib 10 Pop or 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (the correct form of the Calendar Round). On this date, the Eveningstar was 7.09° beyond the sun, enough for first visibility after superior conjunction. The action recorded on this date is “it appeared, the Great Star.” Previously, Scheie (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:123) had placed this first appearance forty-six days after the accession of the next king, Smoke-Shell, but the Long Count used for that date was in error. Smoke-Shell acceded on 9.15.17.13.10 11 Oc 13 Pop or February 18, 749, fourteen days after Smoke-Monkey’s death.
-[751] Rothbard, New Liberty 12.
+[488] On the base of Stela N, the name of Smoke-Shell’s father follows an yune “child of” statement. In that phrase, he is named as a Turtle Shell Ahau (Scheie and Grube 1988). The turtle-shell glyph in this title is a variant of the God N (Pauahtun) glyph that names the lord whose accession is recorded in the north-south text-bands on the base. In that clause, the “Pauahtun Ahau” is clearly named as the former king, Smoke-Monkey. The fifteenth successor, Smoke-Shell, was therefore the child of the fourteenth successor, Smoke-Monkey.
-[752] Rothbard, Confessions 51.
+[489] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) holds open the possibility that Smoke-Monkey may have started some of the work on the final stage of Temple 26. Considering that six years passed between Smoke-Shell’s accession and the dedication of the building on 9.16.4.1.0 (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), the project may well have been begun during Smoke-Monkey’s reign.
-[753] Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1.1 (Spring 1965): 4–22 [<verbatim>15</verbatim>].
+[490] The date of this dedication event is recorded on the center strips on the eastern incline of the Ballcourt. Although reconstructing the date is problematic, it appears to record the Calendar Round 10 Ben 16 Kayab (or less likely 10 Kan 17 Kayab). The 10 Ben possibility falls on 9.15.6.8.13, a day only 113 days before 18-Rabbit’s death at Quirigua. 18-Rabbit’s accession is recorded in an Initial Series date in the same text, thus confirming that he commissioned the final phase of the Ballcourt (Scheie, Grube, and Stuart 1989). Rudy Larios (personal communication, 1989) has confirmed that Ballcourt III is associated with Structure 10L-26—2<sup>nd</sup>, the level under the final phase. This juxtaposition of the dedication date with the capture opens the possibility that 18-Rabbit may have been taken captive in a battle to secure sacrificial victims for his new ballcourt.
+<br>
+<br>The proper name of Ballcourt III is recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs on fragments now mounted in Step 44. These fragments include an unreadable date and the name of the Ballcourt as the Ox Ahal Em Ballcourt (Scheie and Freidel n.d.). The proper name translates as “Thrice-Made Descent” and relates to the mythological events recorded on the Bailgame Panel from Temple 33 at Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:7).
+<br>
+<br>The “thrice-made” event is recorded as a descent in this naming and as a decapitation sacrifice at Yaxchilan, but the references are the same. Both the descents and the sacrifices refer to the Popol Vuh myth. The first descent and sacrifice was of Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu, the first set of Twins. The second descent into Xibalba, which resulted in the second sacrifice, was made by the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They sacrificed each other in order to trick the Lords of Death into defeat. The third descent is that of the king in his guise as the avatar of the Hero Twins. This descent can be accomplished by two means—his own ecstatic journey through bloodletting or by the decapitation of a captive who goes as his messenger. The Ballcourt was then a portal to the Underworld as was the inner sanctum of the temple. The iconography of all three sets of Ballcourt Markers reflects this idea, for each shows the confrontation of the Hero Twins with a Lord of Death (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:251–252, 257) through a quadrifoil shape. This shape symbolized the mouth of the cave and the opening to the Otherworld from Olmec times onward. The playing alley was like a glass-bottomed boat with transparent windows opening on to the Underwater domain of Xibalba. There, the great confrontation of humanity with death played itself out in the myths that became the Popol Vuh. Captives played a losing game and were dispatched in the “thrice-made descent.” Ironically, 18-Rabbit himself may have been dispatched by exactly this means.
-[754] Don Lavoie, “National Economic Planning: What is Left?” (Washington, DC: Cato Institute 1985) 230.
+[491] It has about twelve hundred glyph blocks, but most of the blocks hold two or more words. There are generally thirty-five glyphs per step and a minimum of sixty-four steps. Some of the steps have figures in the center, which reduces the number of words per step, but recent excavation suggests there were more than the sixty-four reconstructed stairs. 2,200 is about the right count.
-[755] Rothbard, Transformation 31.
+[492] Marcus (1976:145) first noted the appearance of the Palenque Emblem Glyph on Copan Stela 8, a monument we now know records that Yax-Pac was the child of this woman. When she traveled to Copan, she apparently brought a royal belt inscribed with the names of family members, which her descendants at Copan inherited and passed down through their family. By an unknown process, this belt traveled to Comayagua, where it was bought from an Indian at the end of the nineteenth century and given to the British Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82, Pl. 21).
-[756] Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State,” Untimely Papers (NY: Huebsch 1919) 145.
+[493] William Fash (1983b) identified the household groups in the Copan with sian otot, the Chorti Maya patrilocal residential system documented in detail by Wisdom (1940). He posits that the ancient settlement pattern reflects a system similar to the modern one, thus identifying the numerous residential compounds as patrilineal residences.
-[757] Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” Libertarian Forum (June 1969): 3–4 [<verbatim>3</verbatim>].
+[494] William Fash (1983a: 192–195) gives a count of 1,489 structures (not including invisible structures or those washed away by the Rio Copan) within the 2.1 km<sup>2</sup> entered on the Ballcourt. He allows five people per structure and assumes that 84 percent of the total structures were residential, arriving at a density of 2,977 people per square kilometer. Webster (1985:24) accepts a figure of 15,000 to 20,000 for the Copan pocket and a density of 5,000/km<sup>2</sup> for the Sepulturas and Bosque zones. The rural zones were less densely settled with an overall density of 100/km<sup>2</sup>. Webster (1985:50) argued for a maximum population of 20,000 for the entire Copan drainage, and he communicates that Sanders believes that the densities near the Acropolis were too high to have been supported by any feasible agricultural methods available to the Copanecs in the eighth century. The hinterlands around Copan supported the dense populations in the pocket.
-[758] Rothbard, Ethics 70.
+[495] William Fash (1983a:3O5-3O8) calculates that the pocket’s capacity to support about 10,000 people was exceeded by a significant factor in the eighth century, forcing shorter fallow periods as well as massive deforestation. The loss of topsoil on the intramountain zones, he suggests, led to a depletion of the soils that was so permanent that only pine forest could survive in these highly acidic areas, even today. He further notes that deforestation affected local rainfall and exacerbated the problem further. All of this occurred simultaneously, exactly when the nucleated zone around the Acropolis was occupied by up to 15,000 people, 50 percent more than could have subsisted on the agricultural base within the pocket. It was a prescription for disaster.
-[759] Rothbard, Confiscation 4.
+[496] In the most recent tunneling under the East Court, Robert Sharer and Alfonso Morales (personal communication, 1989) have found a sharp division between buildings constructed with rough stone covered by thick plaster surfaces and those built with finely finished coursing covered with thin plaster. Sharer (personal communication, 1989) tentatively dates this building to the first half of the seventh century—that is, to the end of Butz’-Chan’s reign or to the first half of Smoke-Imix-God K’s. About this time, the Copanecs apparently switched from plaster to stone as the medium of architectural sculpture, thus suggesting that the wood necessary for making plaster had become a rare commodity. Certainly by 18-Rabbit’s reign, stone was the primary medium for architectural sculpture. Indeed, the building under his version of Temple 22 also used stone as its sculptural medium. If this is the correct interpretation, then the valley environs may have been seriously deforested by the beginning of the Late Classic period.
-[760] Murray N. Rothbard, “Big-Government Libertarians: The Anti-Left-Libertarian Manifesto,” Rothbard- Rockwell Report 4.12 (Dec 1993): 1–9 [3].
+[497] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication, 1987–1989) has documented severe stress in the Copan Valley populations, especially in the eighth century. This stress was indicated in skeletons found in elite contexts as well as those excavated from the lower strata of Copan society. She notes high death rates for people between five and sixteen, exactly the ages that should have had the lowest rate of death, and she has also found evidence of widespread anemia. In her words, the people who lived in the valley during the eighth century were sick and getting sicker, and this was true for the elite as well as commoners.
-[761] Murray N. Rothbard, “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism’,” Southern Economic Journal 23.3 (Jan 1967): 314–20 [<verbatim>18</verbatim>].
+[498] This is the earliest monument of Yax-Pac left to posterity. In light of its periodending association, it may well be his first foray into public history.
-[762] Murray N. Rothbard, “Man, Economy, and State” (AL: Mises Institute 2004) 1.
+[499] In 1985, David Stuart made a new drawing of the stair under Temple 11 at the end of a tunnel driven by Strdmsvik. He recognized that the text records the dedication of Structure 11-Sub 12, a temple that originally stood on a platform that was the same height as the floor of the West Court.
-[763] Roderick T. Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action: Praxeological Investigations,” Work in progress, [[http://praxeology.net][http://praxeology.net/wiggy-draft.pdf]] (last visited June 5, 2020) 135.
+[500] Mary Miller (1986:83–84; 1988; M. Miller and Houston [1987:59]) pointed out this association of bailgame scenes, hieroglyphic stairs, and sacrificial scenes, and identified the Reviewing Stands at Copan as the sides of a false ballcourt. She identified the location as underwater and the rising god on the stairway as Chac-Xib-Chac.
-[764] Plato, Hipparchus 227d, “Plato: Complete Works,” ed. D.S. Hutchinson and John M. Cooper (IN: Hackett 1997).
+[501] Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that Proskouriakoff commented on these crocodiles in the field notes she kept while working on reconstruction drawings for the Carnegie expedition under Strdmsvik.
-[765] Murray N. Rothbard, “Free Market” (Library of Economics and Liberty), [[http://www.econlib.org][www.econlib.org/library/Enc/]] [[http://www.econlib.org][FreeMarket.html]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[502] See Scheie (1987c) for an analysis of the chronology and events recorded in this inscription. The date and event is repeated on the west panel of the north door above in Temple 11, where Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s predecessor, appears as the protagonist. We suggested the event corresponded to his apotheosis and emergence from the Underworld after he had defeated the Lords of Death (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986:265–300).
-[766] Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises, ed. Mary Senholz (NJ: D. Van Nostrand 1956): 224—62 [<verbatim>51</verbatim>].
+[503] He dedicated the Reviewing Stand 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769) and Altar Z on 9.16.18.9.19 12 Cauac 2 Zac (August 21, 769). The last glyph in the altar text is ya. tz’itni, spelling the word yatz’in. It occurs in the name of a person (not the king) given in a second clause. Since yitz’in is “younger brother,” and since noyatz’ or yatz’in word with an appropriate meaning occurs in either the Yucatecan or Cholan languages, we suspect this glyph may identify this second person as the “younger brother of the king.”
-[767] Rothbard, Man 101.
+[504] 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahau 18 Cumku (January 24, 771) has long been known as an eclipse date from its appearance in the eclipse tables of the Dresden Codex. David Kelley (1977: 406) noted that the glyph recording “dark of the moon” for 9.17.0.0.0 on Quirigua Stela E is closely related to the glyph recording the same eclipse station on Dresden, page 51b at BL At Tikal, this solar eclipse darkened 20 percent of the sun beginning at 12:49 P.M. and ending at 3:09 P.M. (Kudlek 1978). It is registered in the inscriptions of Quirigua on Stela E and at Copan on the east panel of the south door of Temple 11. The first appearance of the Eveningstar is also recorded in Temple 11 (south panel, west door) on the day 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771). Venus was separated from the sun by 7.46+ and high enough to be observed above Copan’s mountainous horizon.
-[768] Rothbard, Man 645—7.
+[505] On 9.17.0.0.0, Yax-Pac also dedicated Altar 41, recording the dedication rituals on two of the edges of the flat slab, and the Cosmic Monster and a toad on the other two edges. This altar reflects the cosmic nature of this katun ending.
-[769] Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (AL: Mises Institute 1990) 15.
+[506] Temple 21 has fallen into the cut made by the Copan River along the eastern edge of the Acropolis. We have no information on its patron, but fragments found on the platform behind it include Tlaloc-war iconography among other motifs.
-[770] Rothbard, Reconstruction 252.
+[507] Although very little evidence survives, William Fash and I have surmised the north door was in fact carved as a monster mouth based on some of the fragments lying on the stairway below the temple. Principal among these fragments are huge stones carved with parallel curving lines that appear to represent the palette of an open mouth.
-[771] Rothbard, Man 101.
+[508] Both Bill and Barbara Fash argued in their comments on this chapter that we have proof for only two of these Pauahtun figures. One head is located under the huge ceiba tree that stands over the northeast corner of the building, and the other lies among the fragments in the Plaza below the temple. Since no evidence of Pauahtunob has been found on the south side, the design probably had the cosmic arch of heaven only on the northern facade that faced out toward the Great Plaza. Barbara Fash also pointed out to us that Proskouriakoff mentioned in her field notes seeing and recognizing segments of the reptilian body of the Cosmic Monster in the rubble associated with Temple 11.
-[772] Rothbard, Man 659.
+[509] A summary of the events as we understood them in 1985 appears in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123). In the 1987 field season, David Stuart worked extensively with these texts and supervised the reconstruction of several of the most important panels, particularly the two west panels in the north-south corridor. In November 1987, Scheie reconstructed additional parts of the north panel of the west door. These reconstructions and corrections have allowed a much more accurate understanding of the chronology and events, which are as follows:
+<br>
-[773] Rothbard, Man 613. Original emphasis.
+<br> a. North door, east panel. The accession of Yax-Pac on 9.16.12.6.16 6 Caban 10 Mol (July 2, 763).
+<br>
-[774] Rothbard, Man 614.
+<br>North door, west panel. The dedication of the Reviewing Stand and perhaps the apotheosis of Smoke-Shell on 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769). 9.14.15.0.0 (September 17, 726) continues to the south door, where the actor is recorded.
+<br>
+<br> b. South door, east panel. The finish of the 9.14.15.0.0 event with 18-Rabbit as the actor. The 9.17.0.0.0 period ending and eclipse.
+<br>
+<br>South door, west panel. The 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773) dedication of the Temple. David Stuart recognized the nature of this event in his 1987 work.
+<br>
+<br> c. East door, north panel. The first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar on 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (February 15, 747), an unknown event on 9.17.1.3.5 9 Chicchan 13 Zip (March 24, 772), and a repetition of the 9.17.2.12.16 event, but specified for the xay, “crossing,” of the interior corridors.
+<br>
+<br>East door, south panel. The 819-day count and Long Count for the dedication date, 9.17.2.12.16 (continues to west door).
+<br>
+<br> d. West door, north panel. Continuation of the date from east door and the dedication event. 9.17.5.0.0 period-ending ritual and the latest date in the building.
+<br>
+<br>West door, south panel. The dedication event and the 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771) first appearance of the Eveningstar.
-[775] Rothbard, Man 991.
+[510] The text and figures on this bench are described and analyzed in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123–125), but some new information of interest has surfaced since that analysis. Each of the twenty personages sits on a glyph, but in 1986 we thought the glyphs did not name any of Copan’s rulers. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has suggested the glyph under Personage 14 refers to the seventh successor, and that the one under Personage 15 is identical to the name of the eleventh successor. However, even with several glyphs associated with the names of particular rulers, the glyphs do not appear to record a series of personal names, but rather a continuous text. Furthermore, I had erroneously taken all ten glyphs on the left side to be in mirror image, signaling that the order of the figures unfolded outward from the central text. This interpretation is wrong. The glyphs under the first four personages on the left (Personages 1—4) read in the correct order. The left text is then broken into at least two clauses. One is written in proper reading order and records the dedication of the bench. The second one we do not yet understand, but we know it is related to the dynastic history of the kingdom. This new analysis does solve one problem in the previous interpretation—there are sixteen successors in the dynasty, including Yax-Pac, but twenty figures on the bench. With the separation of four of these figures and their glyphs into a separate clause, the number of dynasts depicted now becomes the correct one, sixteen.
-[776] Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (AL: Mises Institute 2000) 11.
+[511] The ambitious size of the building exceeded the technological capabilities of the Copanecs and caused problems almost immediately. The east-west gallery was simply too wide for the capability of a corbeled vault, especially with the weight of a second story above it. The new walls built by the architects to support the failing vault narrowed the interior corridor to half its former width and severely constricted the readability of the inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions appear to have been covered over, especially those on the west door.
-[777] Rothbard, Depression 186.
+[512] Ricardo Argurcia (personal communication, 1989), co-director of the Copan Acropolis Project, informed us that the building immediately under the final phase of Temple 16 faced east instead of west. He suspects that the entire West Court was not formulated architecturally until Yax-Pac built Temple 11 and 16. If his assessment is correct, then Yax-Pac deliberately created the primordial sea and the Underworld in this West Court as a part of his political strategy.
-[778] Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done yo Our Money? (AL: Mises Institute 2005) 44.
+[513] Williamson, Stone, and Morales (1989) have connected the iconography of Temple 16 to the Tlaloc-war imagery we have discussed throughout this book. Ricardo Ar- gurcia’s (personal communication, 1989) excavations of Temple 16 have proved beyond doubt that the last phase was built during Yax-Pac’s reign. This new dating clearly connects Temples 11 and Temple 16 as part of a unified project, very probably conceived and executed together. The iconography of the West Court with its death and Underwater imagery was intentionally created as a single statement, rather than accumulated through several reigns.
-[779] Noam Chomsky, “’Anarchism’ and ‘Libertarianism’,” Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel (NY: New Press 2002) 200.
+[514] William Fash (1983a:31O-314) first proposed that Yax-Pac used this kind of strategy in dealing with the factionalism evident in the archaeology associated with the latest phrase of Copan life. The epigraphic information upon which he based his ideas has changed drastically since his initial presentation, but our analysis of Yax-Pac’s strategy grows from his initial insights.
+<br>
+<br>The houses we talk about are the principal structures in large, multiple-court residential compounds. These particular structures have benches in them, as do a large number of buildings in the residential compounds, but in general they are large and more elaborately decorated than adjacent buildings. The function of these benches is debated, with some researchers asserting they were simply beds. Clearly, some functioned as sleeping platforms, but the Maya themselves called them chumib, “seat.” From pottery scenes, we deduced that the benches served a number of purposes, including sleeping, working, the conducting of business, audiences with subordinates, and a variety of rituals. The structures with these inscribed “seats” were very probably the rooms from which the lineage heads conducted the business critical to their peoples. They were called otot, “house,” by the Maya, but they are houses in the sense that modern people sometimes have offices in their homes. These structures were more than residential.
-[780] Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (NY: Dover 1970) 30. Original emphasis.
+[515] For a description of this group under its older designation CV-43, see Leventhal (1983).
-[781] Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Relation of the State to the Individual,” The Individualist Anarchists, ed. Frank H. Brooks (NJ: Transaction 1994) 22—7 [<verbatim>5</verbatim>].
+[516] This bench text begins with a date corresponding to the dedication of the building in which it is housed. The chronology leads to a future (at the time of the inscribing) enactment of the scattering rite by Yax-Pac on 9.17.10.0.0. The date of the dedication is difficult to decipher but 9.17.3.16.15 is one of the more likely possibilities. The event is the God N dedication event of a house by an offering which had something to do with Smoke-Shell. Since that ruler was long dead at the time of the dedication, we presume this was a offering “to” rather than “from” Smoke-Shell (Schele 1989a). The alternative explanation is that the date of the dedication fell within the reign of Smoke-Shell, but that it was not commemorated by the installation of this bench until shortly before 9.17.10.0.0. In this scenario, both kings would have been active participants.
-[782] Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: OUP 2011) 126. Original emphasis.
+[517] Altar W’ was set in this same group. Dated at 9.17.5.9.4, the text celebrated the dedication of that altar and names the lineage head as the “third successor” of a person named Skull, who was a ballplayer. Presuming this person was the founder of this particular lineage, he may have been the lord who built the structure with the monkey/God N scribe in the time of 18-Rabbit.
-[783] Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (CA: University of California 1998) 18.
+[518] Berthold Riese (in Webster, W. Fash, and Abrams 1986:184) had originally dated this monument to 9.17.16.13.10 11 Oc 3 Yax. Grube and Schele (1987b) proposed a different reading of the day as 11 Ahau and placed the Long Count at 9.19.3.2.0. Stuart, Grube, and Schele (1989) have proposed a new reading of the haab as 3 Ch’en rather than 3 Yax. This new combination gives 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Chen, a placement that is far more in keeping with the style of the carving and with the notation that Yax-Pac was in his first katun of reign when the house dedication occurred.
-[784] William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson 1793) 246.
+[519] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first identified the name phrase of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This man’s relationship to the king can be deduced from two monuments (Schele and Grube 1987a). The parentage statements of the king, given on Stela 8, and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s, given on Altar U, name the same woman of Palenque as their mother. Yax-Pac’s father is never given, but we deduce he was Smoke-Shell’s son, based on his position as the sixteenth successor. The younger half brother was, however, not the son of Smoke-Shell. Since Yax-Pac was under twenty at the time of his accession, and since his father reigned for less that fifteen years, we speculate that Smoke-Shell died while his wife was still young. She produced his heir in Yax-Pac, but after his death she remarried and produced another son by a different father, making Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac a half brother. On Altar U (Fig. 8:19), her name includes her status as the mother of the king.
-[785] Plato, Parmenides 133e, “Plato: The Parmenides,” trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan (IN: Hackett 1996).
+[520] Venus was 46.35° from the sun on the anniversary and 46.21° on the bloodletting five days later.
-[786] Roderick T. Long, “Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?” Alabama Philosophical Society Presidential Address (2002).
+[521] There are some important differences between the Altar ‘ figures and those on Altar Q, Altar L, and the bench from Temple 11. The latter three monuments depict human figures all wearing a particular kind of breast ornament which appears to be associated with ruling lords at Copán and, interestingly enough, with the noble whose portrait was carved on Stela 1 from Los Higos, one of the largest sites in the La Venta Valley to the north at the edge of Copán’s hegemony. The Altar T figures were a mixture of fully human representations and fantastic beasties on the sides. We do not know whether these figures are to be interpreted as a glyphic text or as beings called from Xibalba, but they are clearly not meant to be understood as ancestors. Furthermore, the four fully human figures on the front surface are not identified by names. We do not know which represents Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, or whether to interpret the four figures as ancestors or contemporary patriarchs. Regardless of our confusion, the imagery on the altar clearly evokes Altar Q and the Temple 11 bench, both of which were in place when Altar T was carved.
-[787] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (CA: AK 1995) 11.
+[522] Stuart (1986a) first identified the proper name of Altar U. See Schele and Stuart (1986b, 1986c) for analysis of the chronology and inscription on Altar U.
-[788] Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Myth of Atomism,” Review of Metaphysics 59.4 (June 2006): 841–68 [<verbatim>47</verbatim>].
+[523] The name is written Yax.k’a:ma:la.ya or Yax K’amlay. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1988) brought to our attention that the root k’atn in Yucatec means “to serve another,” as well as “obligation, offering of the first fruits, and offering.” K’amtesah is “administrator or he who serves” (Barrera Vasquez 1980:371). Chorti (Wisdom n.d.:607) has k’am as “use, service, value” and k’amp’ah as “be of use or value, serve, be occupied with.” If, as Grube suggests, -lay is a derivational suffix, then this man may have been known by the office he fulfilled—“First Steward (or Administrator).”
+<br>
+<br>In earlier analyses, we had taken this Yax-Kamlay glyph to be a title taken by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac upon his seating. However, in the summer of 1989, David Stuart found this same name on Stela 29, on the new altar from Temple 22a, and on a house model located near a residential building just south of the Acropolis. He convinced us that Yax-Kamlay and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac were, in fact, two different individuals. The relationship of Yax-Kamlay to Yax-Pac is less clear than that between the king and Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac. Nikolai Grube and Schele speculate that a glyph in his name on Altar U reading i.tz’Lta is an unpossessed form of “younger brother.” If this reading is correct, then he would have been a younger full brother of the king. At present, however, this reading is only a possibility. Confirmation of the proposed relationship must wait until incontrovertible evidence is found.
-[789] Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Myth 45.
+[524] On the eastern side of Stela 5, the Serpent Bar holds two tiny ancestral figures in its gaping mouths. On the northern, left side of the king, the ancestor holds a stingray spine, while on the southern, right side, another holds the bowl full of the blood that has brought him forth from the Otherworld.
-[790] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: Russian Radical (PA: Penn State UP 2013) 133.
+[525] We refer here to Stela 6, which was mounted in a small, unexcavated compound about a hundred meters west of Stela 5. From a point fifty meters to the south and equidistant from each, both tree-stones can be seen.
-[791] David L. Prychitko, “Expanding the Anarchist Range: A Critical Reappraisal of Rothbard’s Contribution to the Contemporary Theory of Anarchism,” Review of Political Economy 9.4 (1997): 433–455 [<verbatim>50</verbatim>].
+[526] Here we have Yax-Pac pausing after he has left the causeway that led west from the Acropolis to a large complex on the slope above and to the east of Stela 5. From his position, he would have seen the cast face of Stela 5, and after walking fifty meters to the west, he would have seen the west face of Stela 5 and the front of its nearby companion, Stela 6. The latter monument celebrated 9.12.10.0.0, a date which corresponded to a stationary point ending the retrograde motion of Venus after its heliacal rising as Morningstar. The same monument has the first historical record of a ritual action by 18-Rabbit, who was to become king after the death of Smoke-Imix.
-[792] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: HarperCollins 1991) 564.
+[527] This was the glyphic name of Temple 11 recorded on the west panel of the south door (Stuart, personal communication, 1988).
-[793] Warren J. Samuels, “Anarchism and the Theory of Power,” Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, ed. Gordon Tullock (VA: Center for Study of Public Choice 1974): 33–57 [<verbatim>49</verbatim>].
+[528] We are supposing Yax-Pac was standing on the west causeway due south of Stelae 5 and 6. On that day, January 25, 793, the sun would have risen above the far mountainous rim o’ the valley (about 8 of altitude) at 112° azimuth. From the vantage point we have taken, the sun would appear in a line directly between Temple 16 and Temple 11, but Temple 11 would have dominated the scene.
-[794] David M. Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Anti-statist Liberal Tradition: Part 1,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5.3 (Summer 1981): 263–290 [<verbatim>85</verbatim>].
+[529] The identification of Temple 22a is the result of brilliant work by Barbara Fash (1989 and B. Fash et al. n.d.). In working with the sculpture excavated in the fallen debris around Temple 22a, Fash associated the pop, “mat,” signs that were built into the entablatures of all four sides of the building with the ethnohistorical term for “council houses” documented in post-Conquest sources. Known as Popol Nah, these buildings were specifically designed for meetings of community councils. Fash points out that Temple 22a is the only major public building in the Acropolis that has a large front patio attached to the building. Since it provides more floor space than the interior, she suggests that the major lords of the Copán kingdom came here to counsel with the king in meetings that must have resembled the conciliar assemblage of lords that we have seen on Piedras Negras Lintel 3 (see Fig. 7.21).
+<br>
+<br>In the summer of 1989, she found even more remarkable evidence by asking Tom and Carolyn Jones to work with the fragments of huge glyphs that had been found around Temple 22a in recent excavations. They managed to reassemble enough of these glyphs to identify them as a series of locations. Later work by Fash confirmed the likelihood that beautifully carved figures sat in niches above these locations. Given the combination of richly dressed figures with a toponymic, it seems likely that the figures simply read “ahau of that location.” The Popol Nah then may have been graced not only by mat signs marking its function as a council house, but with representations of the ahauob who ruled subdivisions of the kingdoms (or principal locations within it) for the kings. It is not unlike a modern meeting of state governors who come to counsel the president.
+<br>
+<br>The dating of Temple 22a is more complicated. Barbara Fash and David Stuart managed to put together a series of glyphs that also went around the building above the mat signs. They are clearly day signs reading 9 Ahau, which should in this context and without any additional calendric information refer to an important period-ending date. The only 9 Ahau that falls on a hotun (5-tun) ending within the time that is archaeologi- cally and stylistically feasible is 9.15.15.0.0 9 Ahau 18 Xul (June 4, 746). This falls shortly before Smoke-Monkey’s death, so that the Popol Nah may be the only surviving construction from his reign. The sculptural style and the figures deliberately emulate Temple 22, the magnificent temple built by 18-Rabbit, but Smoke-Monkey seems to have elevated conciliar rule to new status at Copan by placing this building in such a prominent place. Perhaps he found such a change in the long-standing practice of governance to be prudent after 18-Rabbit’s ignominious end.
-[795] David M. Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Liberal Tradition: Part III,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 6.1 (Winter 1982): 83–104 [<verbatim>88</verbatim>].
+[530] This oddly shaped altar-bench was found in the rear chamber of Temple 22a during the 1988 field season. Four important dates are featured in its chronology. These include 9.18.5.0.0 4 Ahau 13 Ceh (September 15, 795, a day recorded with Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac here and on Altar U); 9.17.9.2.12 3 Eb 0 Pop (January 29, 780, the date Yax- Kamlay was seated); 9.17.10.0.0 (December 2, 789, an important period ending and anchor for the chronology); and 9.17.12.5.17 4 Caban 10 Zip (March 19, 783, the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s own accession). All three major actors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, Yax-Kamlay, and Yax-Pac are mentioned. It is interesting that the undated Stela 29 (Altar O’ under Morley’s designations), which is almost exactly the same size and style as this altar, also mentions Yax-Kamlay and Yax-Pac. It was found in the East Court and may originally have been paired with the Temple 22a stone (Scheie et al. 1989). W. Fash (personal communication, 1989) believes the wear pattern, the position, and the shape of the stone suggest it was part of a seat, perhaps the backrest.
-[796] Rothbard, Man 91.
+[531] The use of large zoomorphic altars at Copan was initiated by 18-Rabbit, but these altars were usually associated with stelae. Other altars, usually all glyphic, had been known since Smoke-Imix-God K’s reign, but those rarely combined inscriptions and figures. The first experiment utilizing this combined format was Yax-Pac’s Altar Q, but Altars U and T represent innovative experiments in both style and size. Since Quirigua rulers were experimenting with large boulder sculpture during the same period, Copan’s abandonment of the stela format may signify synergy between both the artists and rulers of the two sites.
-[797] Roderick T. Long, “Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism,” Anarchism/Minarchism, ed. Tibor R. Machan and Long (VT: Ashgate 2008) 133–154 [<verbatim>41</verbatim>].
+[532] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that bone, jade, and alabaster fragments were found inside the tomb, so it had definitely been occupied. Who occupied it, we don’t know. The stela commemorating Yax-Pac’s death was set in the corner formed by the west wall of the substructure and the wall that formed an entry gate to the East Court. It was juxtaposed to Temple 18 in a way that would be expected if Yax-Pac was buried there twenty years after the dates inscribed on the building. The tomb was constructed so that it could be entered after the building of the temple was completed. However, without inscriptions to identify the occupant, his identity will remain a matter of speculation.
-[798] Milton Shapiro, “Power or Market: Government and the Economy: A Review,” Libertarian Analysis 1.4 (1971): 22–29.
+[533] While it is true that kings are shown holding weapons on the Temple 26 stairs, there they are sitting on thrones in the passive mode. They are not actively going to or returning from battle.
-[799] Rothbard, Man 91.
+[534] Two other monuments can be dated to the twelve years between the end of Katun 18 and the king’s anniversary. Altar R, which was found on the platform in front of Temple 18, commemorates Yax-Pac’s accession and another event which took place on 9.18.2.8.0 7 Ahau 3 Zip (March 9, 793). The other monument, Altar F’, was found behind Structure 32 (Morley 1920:373) in a residential compound just south of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:11). This square altar has binding ribbons engraved around its perimeter and a text of sixteen glyphic blocks. It is a difficult text, which records the accession of yet another lineage head to an office which we do not yet understand (Scheie 1988a). All we can say about this office is that it was not the office of ahau. The accession took place on 9.17.4.1.11 2 Chuen 4 Pop (775 February 3, 775) and its twenty-fourth tun anniversary on 9.18.8.1.11 10 Chuen 9 Mac (September 30, 798). The text records that the anniversary ritual occurred in the company of Yax-Pac, who was in his second katun of reign.
-[800] Rothbard, Free Market.
+[535] We have already discussed a royal visit from Bird-Jaguar to Piedras Negras, but in general, the kings preferred to send ahauob as their representatives. See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of these visits and other patterns of interaction between Classic period kingdoms.
-[801] David Osterfeld, “Caste and Class: The Rothbardian View of Governments and Markets,” Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, ed. Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (AL: Mises Institute 1988) 286.
+[536] See Baudez and Dowd (1983:491–493) for the analysis of the iconography and inscriptions in Temple 18. Just below that building, the latest date associated with Yax-Pac was on Stela 11. Riese argues that the opening date in that text, which is written as 6, 7, or 8 Ahau, must be later than 9.18.0.0.0 based on the “3-katun ahau ’ title in Yax-Pac’s name. Since naked ahau dates are usually associated with period endings, the following Long Count positions are possible:
+<br>
+<br>9.16.15.0.0 7 Ahau 18 Pop
+<br>9.17.5.0.0 6 Ahau 13 Kayab
+<br>9.19.10.0.0 8 Ahau 8 Xul
+<br>
+<br>Since Yax-Pac’s numbered katun titles refer to katuns of reign, rather than to katuns of life as at most other sites (Scheie 1989b), they cannot be used to estimate his age. However, they do confirm the placement of the Stela 11 date. He was a 1-katun ahau between 9.16.12.5.17 and 9.17.12.5.17; a 2-katun ahau between 9.17.12.5.17 and 9.18.12.5.17; and, a 3-katun ahau between 9.18.12.5.17 and 9.19.12.5.17. Since the first dates fall before his accession, and the second within his second katun of reign, only the third date, 9.19.10.0.0, is a possibility.
-[802] Rothbard, Man 881.
+[537] Stuart (1984, 1988c) has made a direct connection between the imagery of Vision Serpents and the Double-headed Serpent Bar.
-[803] “An Anarchist FAQ,” The Anarchist Library, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][collective-an-anarchist-faq]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[538] On the sarcophagus of Palenque, the king Pacal falls into Xibalba with the same smoking image in his forehead as a sign of his transformation in death (Scheie 1976.17). Several people have noted the same smoking shapes with the figures on Altar L, but in that scene, the devices penetrate the turban headdresses. On the Palenque sarcophagus and Stela 11, the celts penetrate the flesh of the head itself.
-[804] Murray Bookchin, “Community Ownership of the Economy,” Green Perspectives 2 (Feb 1986): 6.
+[539] There is also a possibility that the text refers to a branch of the lineage deriving from 18-Rabbit-Scrpent, a name also recorded on Stela 6. The glyph between this 18- Rabbit’s name and Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is u loch, a term for “fork (as of a tree)” in Yucatec and “to fold or bend” in Chorti. We are presuming, for the present, that 18-Rabbit-Serpent is the same person as 18-Rabbit-God K, for this former name appears on Stela 6, dated just eight years before 18-Rabbit-God K’s accession. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has expressed doubts, however, that the two 18-Rabbits are the same person, and that possibility must remain open. In late 1989, another alternative occurred to us—that the I8-Rabbit-Serpcnt name phrase refers to the special Tlaloc-war Vision Serpent on the front of Stela 6 and presumably also on Stela 11. In this interpretation, the “fish-in-hand” verb in the Stela 6 text refers to the appearance of this particular Vision Serpent, while u loch, the phrase on Stela 11, also means “to hold something crosswise in the arms”—exactly the position of the Vision Serpent on both stelae.
-[805] Lavoie, National 135—6.
+[540] Grube and Scheie (1987a) identified this ruler and read his name glyph as U-Cit- Tok’, “the patron of flint.” The Calendar Round of his accession, 3 Chicchan 3 Uo, can fit into the dynastic sequence at Copan only at this Long Count position.
-[806] Murray N. Rothbard, “Anarcho-Communism,” Libertarian Forum 2.1 (Jan 1970): 1—4 [<verbatim>4</verbatim>].
+[541] The office into which U-Cit-Tok was seated does not appear in the text, but this may be the result of a historical accident. If we assume that the original intention was to carve all four sides of the monument, as is the case with most other altars at Copan, then the inscription would probably have continued onto one of the other sides. Since the carving was never finished, the text ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
-[807] Rand, Atlas 379.
+[542] Morley (1920:289) first suggested that Altar L is in an unfinished state, a conclusion Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1987) also made when she drew the altar. She was the individual who brought this to our attention.
-[808] Jason Lee Byas, “Toward an Anarchy of Production” (Center for a Stateless Society 2014), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.]] [[https://c4ss.org][org/content/52458 ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[543] Both William Fash and Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1986–1987) have described this incident to us.
-[809] Lavoie, National 44.
+[544] This estimate comes from Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1987), the physical anthropologist who is investigating the skeletal remains from the burials of Copan.
-[810] Roderick T. Long, “Free Markets and Private Property: The Road to Social Justice?” (Istanbul Bilgi University 2013).
+; 9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichén Itzá
-[811] Lavoie, National 240.
+[545] The Great Collapse of the ninth century is one of the major social disasters of Precolumbian history (see Culbert 1973). E. W. Andrews IV (1965; 1973) underscored the fact that the northern lowland states of the ninth and tenth centuries were enjoying prosperity and expansion in the wake of the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms. Recent discussion and analysis of the relative destinies of northern and southern lowland Maya (Sabloffand E. W. Andrews V 1986) points to a significant overlap in timing between the fall of the southern kingdoms, the rise of the northern kingdoms, and ultimately, the rise of the conquest state of Chichén Itzá.
-[812] Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” (Panarchy 1910), [[http://www.panarchy.org][www.panarchy.org/goldman/]] [[http://www.panarchy.org][anarchism.1910.html]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[546] The most famous architectural style of the northern lowlands is the exquisite Puuc veneer stone masonry (Pollock 1980), regarded by many scholars as the epitome of Maya engineering and masonry skill. This style emerges in the Late Classic and persists through the Early Postclassic period (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986). The north central peninsular region also displays a style called Rio Bec (Potter 1977); and between the central peninsular Rio Bec sites and the concentration of Puuc-style cities in the hills to the north and west, there are communities with architecture of another, related style called Chenes (Pollock 1970). The northern tradition includes the temple-pyramid complex of the southern kingdoms, but there is also an emphasis on constructing many-roomed structures atop large solid pyramids. This change in emphasis may reflect a particular focus upon activities and events involving assemblies of leaders as opposed to the cultic focus upon rulers expressed in temple pyramids (Freidel 1986a) seen in the Late Classic southern lowlands.
-[813] Samuels, Anarchism 51.
+[547] The Maya of the time of the Conquest were still literate in their own system of writing. The most famous aboriginal treatises are the Books of Chilam Balam (Edmonson 1982, 1986), which are principally records of the katuns and their prophecies. These books are named after the last great Maya prophet: chilam. “interpreter [of the gods],” and balam. “jaguar,” which was probably his family name. Roys (1967:3 and 182–187) suggested that Chilam Balam lived during the last decades of the fifteen century or perhaps during the first part of the sixteenth century and that his lasting fame came from his foretelling the appearance of strangers from the east who would establish a new religion. Roys (1967:3) says, “The prompt fulfilment of this prediction so enhanced his reputation as a seer that in later times he was considered the authority for many other prophecies which had been uttered long before his time. Inasmuch as prophecies were the most prominent feature of many of the older books of this sort, it was natural to name them after the famous sooth sayer.”
+<br>
+<br>The Books of Chilam Balam were recorded in the Yucatec Maya language, but written in Spanish script. The “prophecies” offered do have components that resemble the Western idea of fortune-telling, but the foretelling is based on detailed accounts of the major historical events and political struggles between competing communities and families from the late Precolumbian through the Colonial periods. Dennis Puleston (1979) argued that the fatalistic beliefs of the Maya and their acceptance of the essential cyclicality of time transformed such records of the past into rigid predictions of the future. We have tried to show in previous chapters that the Maya implementation of history as a guide to the future was subtle and politically imaginative. Bricker (n.d.) provides an elegant proof that some passages in the Books of Chilam Balam are direct transliterations of the glyphic originals. Archaeologists have been wrestling with these fragmentary historical accounts from the vantage of the record from excavation and survey for many years (Tozzer 1957; Pollock, Roys, Proskouriakoff, and Smith 1962; Ball 1974a; Robles and A. Andrews 1986; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).
-[814] Murray N. Rothbard, “Left-Opportunism: The Case of S.L.S, Part One,” Libertarian Vanguard 2.5 (February 1981): 10–12 [<verbatim>11</verbatim>].
+[548] As noted in Chapter 1, evidence from linguistic reconstructions and particular spellings in the Classic inscriptions indicate that Yucatec was spoken by the peoples occupying the northern and eastern sections of the Yucatán Peninsula. This zone included at least the modern regions of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Belize, and the eastern third of the Petén. Northern and southern lowlands were linked in the Preclassic period by means of shared ceramic styles and by trade materials such as greenstone and chert brought through the southern lowlands or from them. In return, the northern lowland peoples may have traded sea salt (Freidel 1978; E. W. Andrews V 1981) from beds along their northern and western coasts. The northern lowland Maya participated in the early establishment of the institution of kingship, as seen in the famous bas-relief carved into the mouth of the cave of Loltún, which depicts a striding ahau wearing the Jester God diadem and the severed jaguar head with triple plaques on his girdle (Freidel and A. Andrews n.d.). Stylistically, this image dates to the Late Preclassic period.
-[815] Walter E. Block and Ken Williamson, “Is Libertarianism Thick or Thin? Thin!” Italian Law Journal 3.1 (2017): 14.
+[549] Our story of Chichón Itzá is based on less secure data than the stories we have offered about the southern kings. The northern Maya cities, with the notable exception of Dzibilchaltún on the northwestern plain, have not enjoyed the extensive and systematic investigations aimed at cultural interpretation that have been carried out at several of the southern cities we have written about. At Dzibilchaltún, E. Wyllys Andrews IV conducted long-term and systematic research (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980). The settlement-pattern work at this site (Kurjack 1974) first alerted Maya scholars to the enormous size of some of these cities, a fact which took a long time to be accepted. Work of this quality and detail is only now in progress at sites like Cobá, Isla Cerritos, Sayil, Ek Balam, and Yaxuná.
+<br>
+<br>Furthermore, in spite of the efforts of many epigraphers over more than sixty years, the hieroglyphic texts of the north are not as well understood as those of the south, partly because they have a higher percentage of phonetic signs and their calligraphy is far more difficult to read. The first date to be deciphered in the Chichen inscriptions was the Initial Series date 10.2.9.1.9 9 Muluc 7 Zac (Morley 1915). During the following two decades, the Carnegie Institution of Washington conducted the excavations that uncovered the remainder of the presently known hieroglyphic monuments of the Chichón Itzá corpus (Martin 1928; Morley 1925, 1926, 1927, 1935; Ricketson 1925; Ruppert 1935). Hermann Beyer’s (1937) structural analysis laid the foundation for later epigraphic research on this body of texts, while Thompson (1937) was the first to explain the tun-ahau system of dating used at Chichón Itzá. Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) raised difficult questions about the presence of Maya inscriptions on “Toltec” architecture at the site.
+<br>
+<br>David Kelley (1968; 1976; 1982) has been working with the texts of Chichón Itzá and Uxmal for many years, and he must be credited with the identification of several key relationship terms in the complex and partially understood network of family ties among nobles of the Chichón community. His structural analyses and interpretations have pushed far beyond the work of previous researchers. He also identified the inscriptional name, Kakupacal (Kelley 1968), an Itzá warrior mentioned in the Books of Chilam Balam, as an ancient ruler of Chichón Itzá. His important work inspired Michel Davoust (1977, 1980), who vigorously pursued the hypothesis that Chichón Itzá was ruled by a dynasty whose names are preserved in the texts.
+<br>
+<br>James Fox (1984a, 1984b, n.d.) has made several major contributions to the unraveling of the Chichón Itzá texts; most notably, he correctly identified the Emblem Glyph of this capital. Jeff Kowalski (1985a, 1985b, 1989; Kowalski and Krochock, n.d.) has made substantial headway in the analysis of texts from Uxmal and other Terminal Classic communities of the north, including Chichón Itzá. Ian Graham, master of the Corpus of Hieroglyphic Writing Project at Harvard University, has generously allowed scholars to work with his drawings of northern lowland texts. David Stuart has contributed fundamentally to the interpretation of the political organization of Chichón Itzá, both in his publications (Stuart 1988a; Grube and Stuart 1987) and in his generous sharing of work in progress through personal communications. Stuart’s decipherment of the sibling relationship at Chichón is the cornerstone of an epigraphic interpretation of conciliar rule there.
+<br>
+<br>Finally, we draw heavily upon the work in progress of Ruth Krochock (1988) whose master’s thesis on the lintels of the Temple of the Four Lintels is a tour de force of method. It is a programmatic breakthrough in the interpretation of the political rhetoric of Chichón Itzá as focused upon the simultaneous participation of contemporary leaders in dedication rituals. Our attempts to push beyond Krochock’s interpretation are based upon intensive consultation with her and with Richard Johnson, Marisela Ayala, and Constance Cortez at the 1988 Advanced Seminar in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Austin and with Ruth, Jeff Kowalski, John Carlson, and others at the 1989 workshop. They are further based upon continued correspondence with Ruth Krochock. We appreciate her helpful advice and words of sensible caution. We also note that Virginia Miller (1989) has independently made many of the same associations between the Tlaloc-warrior of Classic period iconography and the Toltec warriors of Chichón Itzá.
-[816] Sciabarra, Total 200.
+[550] The actual extent of Chichón Itzá has never been documented, since only the central core of the city has been mapped. The description of the city’s limits we use here is an estimate attributed to Peter Schmidt by Fernando Robles and Anthony Andrews (1986). In the Atlas oj ) ucatán, Silvia Garza T. and Edward Kurjack provide an estimate of thirty square kilometers (Garza T. and Kurjack 1980).
+<br>
+<br>The traditional interpretation of the history of Chichen Itzá (Tozzer 1957) holds that the city was occupied several times by different groups of people, generally moving from a Maya “old” Chichen to a Toltec Mexican “new” Chichen represented in the great northern center of the city. We support the view, as recently argued by Charles Lincoln (1986), that Chichón Itzá was a single city continuously occupied through its history. As Lincoln points out, the notion of an early Maya Chichón makes little sense, for it would leave the city without a discernible spatial center. The Maya were quite flexible in their city planning, but no Maya capital lacks an easily identified center.
+<br>
+<br>Viewed as a single city, Chichón Itzá is strikingly diverse and cosmopolitan in its public and elite architecture, registering styles from both Maya country and from México. Traditionally, Chichón Itzá’s Mexican cultural expression has been attributed to a conquest of the northern lowlands by Toltec Mexicans operating out of their capital in Tula Hidalgo, México (see Diehl 1981 on Tula). George Kubler (1975) argued that Tula displays only a fraction of the political program and architectural design found at Chichón Itzá, and it is more likely that Chichón was the dominant community in the acknowledged relationship with Tula. To be sure, Maya groups collaborated with Gulf Coast and Mexican peoples, probably merchant-warrior brotherhoods of a kind that later facilitated the economy of the Aztec Empire; but the Maya civilization was the fundamental source of ideas and imagery in this new government. We believe that Kubler is correct and that Chichón Itzá developed into a truly Mesoamcrican capital, like Teotihuacán before it. This was perhaps the only time in Maya history that their culture stood center stage in the Mesoamerican world. Because we regard the great period of Chichón Itzá to be Mesoamerican and Maya, and not the product of a Toltec invasion, we use the traditional attribution of “Toltec” Chichón Itzá in quotations.
-[817] Rothbard, Big-Government 101.
+[551] We will generally avoid as much as possible any references to the histories and chronicles, collectively termed the Chilam Balams, passed down to the time of the Europeans. No doubt there is significant historical information in these texts, but despite the brilliant efforts of Joseph Ball (1974a; 1986) and other scholars who worked before the Chichón texts had been even partially deciphered, it will take much future work to coordinate, in any useful way, the evidence of archaeology and epigraphy with that of ethnohistory. These histories are fraught with metaphorical allusions and political manipulations. Some essential assertions of the chronicles are confirmed by archaeology, principally the fact that foreigners entered the northern lowlands and, in alliance with native nobility, established new states such as Chichón Itzá. Some key figures in the historical narratives can also be found in the ancient texts, figures such as Kakupacal of Chichón Itzá (Kelley 1968). Eventually, there will be an historical framework that accounts for all of these forms of evidence.
-[818] Murray N. Rothbard, “Continue The Struggle,” Libertarian Forum 1.8 (July 1969): 2–5 [<verbatim>2-3</verbatim>].
+[552] The timing of the rise of the Puuc cities relative to the southern kingdoms is still a matter of controversy. Most specialists feel comfortable in dating the beginning of the Puuc florescence at about 800 A.D. or a half century earlier (Robles and A. Andrews, 1986:77). This date would establish contemporaneity of at least half a century between the kings of the Puuc and those of the south.
-[819] Murray N. Rothbard, “Race! That Murray Book,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report 5.12 (Dec 1994): 1–10 [0].
+[553] Jeff K. Kowalski (1985a; 1985b; 1987) in his study of Uxmal has carried out the most extensive investigation of the political organization of the Puuc cities as revealed in iconography and epigraphy.
-[820] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Struggle Over Egalitarianism Continues,” [1991] Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor (Modern Age 1971).
+[554] These terms were popularized by J.E.S. Thompson (1970), who proposed that these were barbarian “Mexicanized Maya” who, through energetic trade, warfare, and diplomacy, penetrated the lowlands from their homeland in the swampy river country bordering the Maya domains on the west and established a new hegemony in the period of the Great Collapse. While the details are controversial, most scholars presently adhere to the general notion of a Putún or Chontai movement into the lowlands in Terminal Classic times (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986).
+<br>
+<br>At some point in their peregrinations, the Itzá, often regarded as one group of Putún Maya, established cities along the western coast of the Yucatán peninsula, at Chanpotón— Chan Putún—and elsewhere in Campeche. Edmonson (1986), in his translations of the Chilam Balam books, would place this Itzá settlement prior to their incursions into the center of the peninsula to establish Chichón Itzá. The archaeology of this western coastal region is intriguing, but poorly known. On the one hand, there is the city of Xcalumkin (Pollock 1980) with its veneer mosaic architecture; Late Classic hieroglyphic dates on texts; and use of the ahau-cahal relationship, an innovation which originated in the Western Rivers district of the south at kingdoms such as Yaxchilán. On the other hand, there is Chunchucmil, situated to the north and very close to the rich salt beds of the western coast (Vlchek, Garza, and Kurjack 1978; Kurjack and Garza 1981). This Classic period city covers some six or more square kilometers and has densely packed house lots, temples, and pyramids. Until we have better archaeological control over this region, we will be required to treat the garbled history of its occupation with great caution.
-[821] Murray N. Rothbard, “Kulturkampf!” Rothbard-Rockwell Report 3.10 (Oct. 1993): 1–10 [<verbatim>3</verbatim>].
+[555] Robles and A. Andrews’s (1986) review of the evidence for the settlement size and organization of Coba. See also Folan, Kintz, and Fletcher (1983) and Folan and Stuart (1977) for discussion of the settlement patterns at Coba.
-[822] Murray N. Rothbard, “Letter to Bergland,” Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (NY: Prometheus 2000).
+[556] Stone roads, sacbe, were built by Maya from the Preclassic period onward. Although these roads no doubt could have served prosaic functions, such as commerce and rapid mobilization of troops, all of our descriptions from observers after the Conquest (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) show that such roads functioned principally as pathways for ceremonial processions and pilgrimages among related nobilities. Such rituals were, in all the cases we have come across, political statements of obligation and responsibility. Kurjack and E. W. Andrews V (1976) establish the archaeological case for such an interpretation of settlement hierarchy linked by intersite roads. The roadways of Cobá have been extensively reported on by Antonio Benavides C. (1981).
-[823] Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Getting Libertarianism Right (AL: Mises Institute 2018) 55.
+[557] The original homeland of the Itzá is a matter of continuing dispute. They may have been speakers of a Maya language, probably Chontai, and the best guess places their original communities in the Chontalpa, a stretch of flat, swampy land to the east of the mighty Usumacinta and north of the Peten. The garbled histories of the Chilam Balam books give some reason to suspect that the Itzá established sizable communities along the western coast of the peninsula (perhaps even some of the Puuc-style communities on this coast were Itzá) before making their bid for hegemony in Yucatán by controlling the coastlands. The Maya of the Tabasco-Campeche coastlands were multilingual at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Many of them spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and they were astute, opportunistic merchants and warriors (Thompson 1970). Archaeological survey of the western and northern coasts by Anthony Andrews (1978) confirms the presence of coastal enclaves with pottery diagnostic of the Sotuta Ceramic Sphere associated with Chichén Itzá and the Itzá incursions. Certainly, the people who established Chichón Itzá as a great capital had adopted many ideas of governance from Mexico (Wren n.d.). Hence it is likely that they had Mexican allies in their adventures on the peninsula.
-[824] Charles W. Johnson, “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” Anarchism/Minar- chism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (VT: Ashgate 2008) 155–84 [76]. Original emphasis.
+[558] The pottery associated with Chichén Itzá, and its “Itzá” occupation, is called Sotuta Sphere. This survey work along the coast has been carried out primarily by Anthony Andrews (1978). Much of what follows is based upon the syntheses of Andrews and Fernando Robles (A. Andrews and Robles 1985; Robles and A. Andrews 1986). The wide range of Mexican sources of obsidian traded by the Itzá is documented at Isla Cerritos (A. Andrews, Asaro, and Cervera R. n.d.).
-[825] Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2.3 (July 1957): 201–15 [<verbatim>2–3</verbatim>].
+[559] This important site is undergoing long-term investigation by Anthony Andrews and Fernando Robles and their colleagues.
-[826] Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287–337 [<verbatim>12–13</verbatim>].
+[560] Izamal boasts one of the largest pyramids in the northern lowlands. Surface remains of monumental stucco masks which decorated the pyramid, along with the cutstone monolithic-block facading on its terraces, indicate that its major period of construction dates to the Early Classic, long before the Terminal Classic incursions of the Itzá (Lincoln 1980). In the absence of further field investigation, we cannot say how substantial the community may have been at the time of the incursion. Clearly, however, the great pyramid on this otherwise flat plain constituted a famous geographic marker which the Itzá could refurbish as a capital with little additional labor investment.
+<br>
+<br>David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has alerted us to the fact that ethnohis- torical documents (Lizana 1892: Chapter 2) describe Izamal as the capital of a lord named Hun-Pik-Tok, warrior captain of an army of “8.000 flints.” He also identified the same name, Hun-Pik-Tok, in the inscription of the Casa Colorada and on the lintel from Halakal. Hence there is both ethnohistorical and epigraphic evidence to support the hypothesis that Izamal was an established capital of the Itzá at the time of the temple dedications at Chichén Itzá. These dedications occurred during Katun 2 of the tenth baktun, the likely time of Chichén Itzá’s founding as the principal city of the Itzá. Hun-Pik-Tok and Kakupacal, a famous lord of Chichén Itzá mentioned several times in these dedication events throughout that city, are both mentioned on the Casa Colorada, so we can surmise they were contemporaries.
+<br>
+<br>Hun-Pik-Tok reappears on a monument from Halakal, a small satellite community of Chichén Itzá to the east of that city. Most interesting is the fact that Hun-Pik-Tok and another lord named on a lintel from the Akab Tzib from Chichén Itzá are both named as vassal lords of Jawbone-Fan, who was a K’ul Cocom (Grube and Stuart 1987:8–10).
+<br>
+<br>Archaeologically, Lincoln (1986) has noted the presence of Sotuta ceramics at Izamal.
+<br>
+<br>It may well prove significant that both Chichén Itzá and Yaxuná, the frontier community of the Coba state, are both roughly halfway between Izamal and Cobá. This is the zone of struggle between the Itzá and the kings of Cobá. As we have seen in the case of the great wars between Caracol, Tikal, and Naranjo, struggle between hegemonic Maya states could focus on the border communities between them—in their case Yaxha and Ucanal, which sat roughly halfway between Tikal and Caracol.
-[827] Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (MA: Harvard UP 1993) 160.
+[561] Calculation of the size of southern lowland kingdoms is still a tricky business (see Chapter 1). Peter Mathews (1985a and 1985b) posits that emblem-bearing polities constituted the principal states which claimed territorial domain over the smaller communities ruled by second-and third-rank nobility. On this basis, and taking into account exceptional conquest events such as Tikal’s incorporation of Uaxactún, the largest southern lowland hegemonies were on the order of 2,500 square kilometers in size. Recently (April 1989), Arthur Demarest and Stephen Houston have suggested in oral reports that the kingdom of Dos Pilas may have encompassed 3,700 square kilometers. This remains to be confirmed though field investigation. Calculation of the size of the Cobá state at the time when the great causeway linking it to Yaxuná was built is based upon Robles and A. Andrews’s map (1986: Fig. 3:4) and the following premises. First, Cobá controlled the coastlands directly fronting the kingdom on the east, some 25 kilometers distant from the capital. This information is based upon study of the distribution of distinctive ceramics of the Cobá Western Cepech Sphere relative to the distribution of Chichén-related Sotuta Sphere ceramics along that coast. Chichén Itzá evidently skirted the coast in front of Cobá when it established communities on the Island of Cozumel (see Freidel and Sabloff 1984; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).
+<br>
+<br>Second, this estimate of kingdom size is calculated by allowing for a corridor of 25 kilometers surrounding the great causeway along its entire route. This figure provides us with a minimal support population for labor, sustenance, and defense during the construction. The timing of the construction of the causeway is equally tricky relative to the war between Chichén Itzá and Cobá. Robles (1980) places its construction at the beginning of the Terminal Classic period, about A.D. 800. We believe that the war between Cobá and Chichén Itzá was under way in earnest by the middle of the ninth century, for the spate of dedications defining Chichén Itzá’s first major temples occurs between A.D. 860 and 880. Present evidence does not allow final resolution of the two possibilities: Either Cobá built the causeway in response to the incursion of the Itzá, as we have postulated in this chapter, or, alternatively, they built the causeway to declare a hegemonic kingdom prior to the Itzá threat. The latter possibility opens the intriguing prospect that the Itzá were posing as “liberators” of the central north, appealing to peoples already subjugated by Cobá. This was a tactic used frequently by conquerors in the ancient world. Sargon of Akkad “liberated” Sumer from rival indigenous hegemonic states in Mesopotamia.
-[828] Roderick T. Long, “Rothbard’s ‘Left and Right’: Forty Years Later” Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference (2006).
+[562] The regalia of some lords of the Yaxuná polity shows a striking resemblance to that of lords in tribute procession at Chichén Itzá.
-[829] Billy Christmas, “Social Equality and Liberty,” The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, ed. Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and Edward W. Younkins (MD: Lexington 2019) 275–292 [<verbatim>80</verbatim>].
+[563] Research at Dzibilchaltún (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980) documents a dramatic decline and eventual cessation of public construction with the arrival of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the city. E. W. Andrews and E. W. Andrews (1980:274) place that arrival at about A.D. 1000, but since these diagnostic ceramics occur in above-floor deposits of earlier buildings, they warn that the A.D. 1000 date may be too late for the change. Our own scenario would place the collapse of Dzibilchaltún about 100 years earlier.
-[830] Christmas, Social 83–4.
+[564] Recent excavations by the Centro Regional de Yucatán (of the Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México) show the presence of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the main plaza areas of Uxmal (Tomas Gallareta N., personal communication, 1987).
-[831] Aristotle, Nicomachean 1099b.
+[565] The interpretation of events at Yaxuná and, through the Yaxuná record, of Chichén Itzá’s wars with the Puuc cities and Cobá, is based upon ongoing research by Southern Methodist University, sponsored by the National Endowment lor the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and private donors (Freidel 1987).
-[832] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting it Straight,” Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (AL: Mises Institute 2000): 157–73 [<verbatim>69–70</verbatim>].
+[566] The Advanced Seminar on the Maya Postclassic at the School of American Research, Santa Fe (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986), concentrated attention on this problem. See especially the contribution by Charles Lincoln (1986).
-[833] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (NY: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation 1954) 161.
+[567] Tatiana ProskouriakofF (1970) firmly pointed out the fact that “Toltec” art was found in direct association with Maya hieroglyphic texts and questioned the then popular interpretation that the people who dominated Chichén Itzá at the time of the creation of this art were illiterate foreigners. There is no reason to suppose that any rulers of the Maya before the European Conquest were illiterate, for all of the Maya kings used the calendrics predicated upon literacy as a political tool (Edmonson 1986). Further, the gold disks dredged from the sacred cenote, clearly pertaining to the late or ‘ Toltec” period as identified by the iconography, have glyphic inscriptions (S. K. Lothrop 1952). A goldhandled bone bloodletter from the cenote (Coggins and Shane 1984) also carries a glyphic inscription. The fact that these objects are made from gold (a medium ignored by or unknown to Classic period kings) identifies them as late. Finally, Linca Wren (n.d.) and Ruth Krochock (1988) have reported the discovery of a portable hemispherical sacrificial stone from Chichón Itzá that carries a glyphic inscription. This stone also depicts a duplicate of the decapitation scenes that decorate the playing-wall panels of the Great Ballcourt, a clearly late Chichón building.
+<br>
+<br>But the matter of the literacy of the audience of late Chichón Itzá, the city that built the final temples and courts of the great platform, is far from secure. As Chariot pointed out (Morris, Chariot, and Morris 1931), processional figures in the great assemblies of the northern center often have glyphlike emblems floating above their heads. For the most part, these are not identifiable as Maya glyphs. Some look like Mexican glyphs and others are indecipherable. Were these portrayed peoples truly illiterate, or were they simply complying with the current customs of Mesoamerican elite public display, in which literacy played no part? We can pose the question, but we cannot answer it yet.
-[834] Kelly Vee, “Sex Slavery Revisited” (Center for a Stateless Society 2015), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/36760]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[568] Ruth Krochock (n.d.) must be credited with the fundamental identification of the simultaneity of participants in dedication rituals at Chichón, with particular reference to the lintels in the Temple of the Four Lintels. The family relationships posited in the following discussion are predicated principally upon the syllabic identification ofyitah, the “sibling” relationship glyph linking protagonists into single generations (Stuart 1988a: Fig. 54g-i; personal communication, 1988), and upon “child of mother” and “mother of” relationships discussed by Krochock (1988).
-[835] Roderick T. Long and Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” (2005), [[http://charleswjohnson.name][http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/#FN.19 ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[569] The technical name for this building is Structure 3C1 in the nomenclature of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Ruppert 1952:34).
-[836] Stacy Aka Sallydarity, “Gender Sabotage,” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, ed. C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano (CA: AK 2012): 43–62 [<verbatim>52</verbatim>].
+[570] This rather stunning insight was first presented in a graduate seminar on “Caching Rituals and Their Material Remains” held at the University of Texas at Austin, spring semester, 1989. Using the caches of the city as her clues and examining the archaeology of the High Priest’s Grave, Annabeth Headrick proposed that this temple and the seven- lobed cave under it are early in Chichen’s history and functioned as the prototype of later buildings to the north, such as the Castillo and the captive procession in front of the Temple of the Warriors.
+<br>
+<br>The inscription on one of the inner columns (Lincoln 1986:Fig. 5:1) of the temple accompanies the image of a captive rendered in the style of the Temple of the Warriors columns. The Long Count for the 2 Ahau 18 Mol Calendar Round has been interpreted as 10.8.10.11.0 because that date falls within a katun ending on 2 Ahau, the last glyph in the text. However, the 2 Ahau does not occur within the expected formula phrase for Yucatec-style dates. We think it may simply refer to the opening Calendar Round date and not Io the katun within which that date fell. In this alternative interpretation, the date of the column could as easily be 10.0.12.8.0 (July 3, 842) or 10.3.5.3.0 (June 7, 894). Furthermore, the earliest placement, 10.0.12.8.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, has the virtue of making the date of the High Priest’s Grave the earliest known date at Chichón Itzá. Headrick associated the cave under this temple with Chicomoztoc, the origin cave of seven lobes famous from Aztec myth. The presence of this cave points to the High Priest’s Grave as an “origin” building in the cosmic landscape of Chichón Itzá, exactly as the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán marks it as an “origin” temple (Heyden 1981).
-[837] Julia Tanenbaum, “Anarcha-Feminism: To Destroy Domination in All Forms,” Perspectives 29 (Institute for Anarchist Studies 2019).
+[571] This new fire, called suhuy kak, “virgin fire,” was described by Landa in his Relación de Yucatan (Tozzcr 1941:153 155, 158) in association with a number of different ritual occasions, including the New Year ceremonies and the Festival of Kukulcan at Mani.
-[838] Abbey Volcano, “Police at the Borders,” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, ed. C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano (CA: AK 2012): 33–42 [3].
+[572] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes a persuasive case for the association of such sacrifice with the images on the Four Lintels. In the Chilam Balam books (Edmonson 1986), a great serpent deity at Chichón Itzá, named hapay can, “sucking snake,” is said to have demanded many nobles from other communities as sacrificial victims.
-[839] Jerimarie Leisegang, “Tyranny of the State and Trans Liberation,” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, ed. C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano (CA: AK 2012): 87–100 [<verbatim>88</verbatim>].
+[573] James Fox (n.d.) recently identified this date as an important Jupiter date. In fact it is also a Saturn date, for Jupiter (253.81 + ) and Saturn (259.97 + ) had just begun to move after they had hung frozen against the star fields at their second stationary points for about forty days. This is the same hierophany recorded at Palenque on the 2 Cib 14 Mol house dedication and on Lady Xoc’s bloodletting (Lintel 24) at Yaxchilán. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) noticed that the glyph appearing with the 2 Cib 14 Mol event (pil or pul) also recurs in the Casa Colorada text. Unfortunately, there it is recorded with the 7 Akbal event, which has no obvious astronomical associations.
-[840] Sallydarity, Gender 55.
+[574] Karl Ruppert (1952) has described the architecture at Chichón Itzá and provides a map showing the survey squares that are the basis for this nomenclature.
-[841] Meg Arnold, “The Untenability of Libertarian Transphobia” (Center for a Stateless Society 2015), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/41183 ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[575] The Maya used stone axes in battle, but there are also abundant images documenting that the ax was also specifically a sacrificial instrument (Schele and M. Miller 1986).
-[842] Leisegang, Tyranny 97.
+[576] These knives are especially evident in the sacrificial scenes of the gold battle disks (S. K. Lothrop 1952).
-[843] Dean Spade, “Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer,” Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You, ed. Ryan Conrad (ME: Against Equality 2012): 1–11 [<verbatim>8</verbatim>].
+[577] The final three glyphs in the names of the three persons to the left of the drawing are uinic titles. These titles declare that these men are ulnic, that is to say, “men (in the sense of humans)” of a particular rank or location. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to read that rank.
-[844] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Panthers and Black Liberation,” The Libertarian 1.4 (1969): 3.
+[578] Patio Quad structures, also called Gallery Patio Structures, have several diagnostic features which can occur in varying combinations: (1) sunken central patios; (2) masonry shrines built against the back wall; (3) colonnaded front rooms; and (4) colonnades bordering the central patio. Generally, the plan of the building is square and the walls are of masonry. Based upon settlement location and associated excavated debris at Chichón Itzá, Freidel (1981b) proposed that these buildings are elite residences. These buildings occur rarely in the Maya area outside of Chichón Itzá. Examples are known at Nohmul in Belize (D. Chase and A. Chase 1982) and on Cozumel Island (Freidel and Sabloff 1984: Fig. 26a), but they also occur in the contemporary highland communities of Mexico (e.g.. in the Coxcatlan area, Sisson 1973).
-[845] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Negro Revolution,” New Individualist Review, ed. Ralph Raico (IN: Liberty Fund 1961): 467–77 [<verbatim>70</verbatim>].
+[579] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) pointed out some time ago that the association of glyphic texts with typical “Toltec” images in the case of this building suggests that the patrons of the latest artistic and architectural programs of the city were not illiterate foreigners.
-[846] Dana Williams, “From Top To Bottom, A Thoroughly Stratified World: An Anarchist View of Inequality and Domination,” Race, Class & Gender 19.3–4 (2012): 9–34 [<verbatim>23</verbatim>].
+[580] David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) pointed out to us a reference in Landa to a set of brothers who ruled at Chichón Itzá. They purportedly came from the west and built many beautiful temples in the city (Tozzer 1941:19, 177).
-[847] “Indigenous Anarchist Convergence: Report Back” (Indigenous Action 2019), [[http://www.indigenousaction.org][www.indigenousaction.]] [[http://www.indigenousaction.org][org/indigenous-anarchist-convergence-report-back/ ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[581] Ralph Roys (in Pollock et al. 1962) extensively discusses the political organization of the Mayapán Confederacy, which was ruled by this principle. Edmonson (1986) translates multepal as “crowd rule.” Barrera Vasquez (1980:539–540, 785) glosses multepal as “united government (or confederation) that was prevalent during the dominion of Mayapán until the middle of the fifteenth century when a great revolution resulted in the destruction of that city.” Mui is listed as “in combination, to do something communally or between many...” and “in a group.” Tepal is “to reign and to govern.”
-[848] “White Supremacy and Anti-Racism” (Black Rose Anarchist Federation n.d.), [[https://blackrosefed.org][https://blackrosefed.org/]] [[https://blackrosefed.org][points-of-unity/white-supremacy-anti-racism/ ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[582] Mayapán, although a relatively unspectacular ruin by Maya standards (J. Eric Thompson called it “a flash in the Maya pan”), has exceptionally well-preserved remains of buildings made with stone foundations and wooden superstructures. The Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pollock et al. 1962) carried out long-term work at the site, so we have a lot of information on its organization. Essentially, both Chichón Itzá and Mayapán show a central focus upon a four-sided pyramid associated with colonnaded halls. Although the halls at Mayapán are organized in a circle around the pyramid, while the halls at Chichón Itzá are to one side of its great northern central platform, neither of these arrangements is comparable to the vaulted masonry buildings found in Puuc cities and in the southern cities described in previous chapters. Contact-period colonnaded halls (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) functioned as assembly halls for men in public service, as schools for boys being trained in the arts of war and in the essentials of the sacred life, as dormitories for men fasting in preparation for festivals, and as quarters for militia. These halls were not the public residences of important people. Noble residences (Smith in Pollock et al. 1962) were to be found throughout the city of Mayapán. We have seen that the buildings which were equivalent to the colonnaded halls found in southern kingdoms, such as the Palace of Pacal at Palenque, were the public lineage houses of dynasties. Multepal, then, has its material expressions in the organization of the communities in which this form of government prevailed.
-[849] Aragorn! “Locating an Indigenous Anarchism,” Green Anarchy 19 (Spring 2005).
+[583] Ralph Roys (1962:78) gives the fall of Mayapán as occurring in a Katun 8 Ahau, ca. A.D. 1451.
-[850] Lorzenzo Kom’boa Ervin, “Anarchism and the Black Revolution,” Black Anarchism: A Reader (Black Rose Anarchist Federation 2016): 10–71 [<verbatim>12</verbatim>].
+[584] The cocom reading was first identified in the texts of Chichón Itzá by Grube and Stuart (1987:10).
-[851] Rothbard, Ethics 101.
+[585] James Fox (1984b) identified this combination of signs as the Chichen Itza Emblem Glyph.
-[852] Rothbard, New Liberty 146.
+[586] Our interpretation of the architectural and artistic program of the Temple of the Warriors complex draws heavily upon the skill and brilliance of Jean Chariot, an artist and iconographer. Chariot, along with Ann Axtel Morris and Earl Morris (Morris et al. 1931), published articles on the bold and comprehensive architectural excavations and restorations carried out in these buildings by the Carnegie Institution of Washington earlier in this century. Chariot proposed the hypothesis that the reliefs are attempts at public portraiture. He based this evaluation upon the fact that the artists depicted individualistic detail both in the warriors’ regalia and in their faces, where preserved. Chariot also noted the intriguing presence of glyphlike elements floating above a number of the individuals. These symbols are not recognizable as true Maya glyphs, but they do seem to distinguish these people one from another. It is perplexing that the artisans did not use known glyphs to convey such information, for the elite of Chichón Itzá were certainly aware of glyphic writing throughout the history of the city. Such late and diagnostic media as the gold battle disks and other gold artifacts from the cenote (S. K. Lothrop 1952) carry glyphic inscriptions.
-[853] Brian Dominick and Sara Zia Ebrahimi, “Young and Oppressed,” NO! Against Adult Supremacy 3 (Stinney Distro 2019).
+[587] Actual specimens of the throwing spears and the parry sticks were cast into the cenote at Chichón Itzá and were retrieved by modern scholars. They are housed in the museum in Merida.
-[854] Murray N. Rothbard, “Kid’s Lib,” Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (AL: Mises Institute 2000): 145–56 [<verbatim>8</verbatim>].
+[588] The Itzá Maya especially favored the goddess Ix-Chel, Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. The island of Cozumel was sacred to Ix-Chel at the time of the Conquest and was also a strategic sanctuary of an oracle of the goddess. Cozumel Island was controlled by the Itzá during the height of their power and the oracle may have originated during that time. The depictions of old women at Chichén include some with skull heads who are dancing with old Pauahtunob. These may well represent the goddess. The woman in this procession, however, is no doubt a real person just like the other portraits. Either she is a representative of the goddess, or possibly she is the matriarch of the principal sodality. Recall that the genealogies of Chichén Itzá describe the descent of the principal group of brothers from their mother and grandmother. In that case, the procession would have occurred in the time of the great captains who dedicated the lintels throughout the city.
-[855] Marc Silverstein, “Anarchism and Youth Liberation,” NO! Against Adult Supremacy 1 (Stinney Distro 2014).
+[589] Tozzer (1941:121) describes the binding of limbs with cotton-cloth armor in preparation for war.
-[856] Daniel Putnam, David Wasserman, Jeffrey Blustein, and Adrienne Asch, “Disability and Justice” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2013), [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disability-justice/ ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[590] This is the High Priest’s Grave. The seven-lobed cave was reached by an artificial shaft, sealed by seven graves filled with bones and a wealth of sacred objects, such as rock crystals, jade, shell, clay vessels, and more (see Thompson 1938; Marquina 1964:895–896).
-[857] “Disability Justice” (Black Rose Anarchist Federation n.d.), [[https://blackrosefed.org][https://blackrosefed.org/points-of-unity/able]] [[https://blackrosefed.org][ism/ ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[591] Landa in Tozzer (1941:93–94) describes this form of mock battle in the following way: “One is a game of reeds, and so they call it Colomche, which has that meaning. For playing it, a large circle of dancers is formed with their music, which gives them the rhythm, and two of them leap to the center of the wheel in time to it, one with a bundle of reeds [the shafts of throwing spears and arrows are so termed in this text], and he dances with these perfectly upright; while the other dances crouching down but both keeping within the limits of the circle. And he who has the sticks flings them with all his force at the second, who by the help of a little stick catches them with a great deal of skill.”
-[858] Dean Spade, “Afterword to the 2009 Edition,” Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (NC: Duke UP 2015): 165–171 [<verbatim>69</verbatim>].
+[592] This scenario is highly speculative, but it is also commensurate with the fact that the bound prisoners in processions at Chichén Itzá are usually displayed in full regalia and not stripped for sacrifice as in southern Classic depictions. One way to account for this iconography is to propose that there were ritual events that combined mock battle and formal sacrifice. The Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest practiced arrow sacrifice which indeed did combine elements of battle and sacrifice (Tozzer 1941:118), but here the victim was stripped naked in Classic Maya fashion before being tied to a post.
+<br>
+<br>The closest example of what we envision here is found at the Late Classic site of Cacaxtla in highland México (Foncerrada de Molina 1978; Kubler 1980). Here beautifully preserved polychrome-painted murals depict a sacrificial slaughter of battle captives. Some of the victims in this scenes are stripped, but others, including the leader of the losing side, wear full regalia and still carry shields. They are shown with gaping wounds in their flesh from knife and dart wounds and one is depicted dismembered at the waist. There is a sense of a dramatic public slaughter of captives taken in battle.
+<br>
+<br>Although the Cacaxtla murals are a long way from the Maya lowlands, their iconography and style show clear connections to the Maya and they are roughly contemporary to or slightly earlier than Chichen Itzá. Badly ruined murals from the Puuc site of Mulchic (Barrera Rubio 1980:Fig. 3) include not only battle scenes, but also sacrificial scenes in which knife-wielding lords bend over a victim who is wearing an elaborate headdress. The body of the victim is eroded, but this headdress suggests that he was in full regalia at the time of sacrifice. This example is close enough in space and time to the Chichén Itzá context to ofler encouragement that future discoveries of mural scenes in the northern lowlands will either confirm or disconfirm the existence of mock-battle sacrifice in the region. Meanwhile, we hold that the transformation of highborn captives from sacrificial victims to members of the confederacy is the most promising political hypothesis for the success of Chichén Itzá.
-[859] Vikky Storm, “It’s Time For Mad Anarchism” (Center for a Stateless Society 2017), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/]] [[https://c4ss.org][content/48510 ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[593] Arthur Miller (1977) coined these terms for the two major images in the murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars, one of the three buildings attached to the Great Ballcourt complex containing political imagery.
-[860] Kelly Vee, “Arm the Mentally Ill” (Center for a Stateless Society 2015), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/39669]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[594] We are accepting that the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá is equivalent to the “ancestor cartouche“ of Classic period iconography to the south. The conjunction of images that leads us to this conclusion is found especially in the upper registers of stela imagery in the Late Classic period. At Yaxchilán, figures identified glyphically and by image as the mother and father of the protagonist sit in cartouches (Proskouriakoff 1961a:18, 1963- 1964:163; Schele 1979:68; Stuart 1988:218–219) often shown wdth snaggle-toothed dragons in the four corners (see Fig. 10:2). In contrast to the Yaxchilán pattern, Caracol monuments show Vision Serpents emerging from bowls and sky bands in the upper register. Some of the people emerging from the open maw of these serpents are identified glyphically as the parents of the protagonists (Stone, Reents, and Coffman 1985:267–268). In Terminal Classic renditions, the serpent and the cartouche are replaced by dotted scrolls David Stuart (1984) identified as the blood from which the vision materializes. At Jimbal and Ucanal, the characters floating in these blood scrolls are the Paddler Gods and warriors carrying the regalia of Tlaloc war. At Chichén Itzá, the same spearthrower-wielding warriors emerge from Vision Serpents on the gold disks from the Cenote and from sun disks in the upper register of the Temple of the Warriors columns. To us, this consistent association of Vision Serpents, the Ancestor Cartouches, Blood/Vision Scrolls, and Warriors with spearthrower and darts form a cluster of ancestor-vision imagery, which includes Captain Sun Disk of the Chichén Itzá representations.
+<br>
+<br>Several other scholars have also dealt with this imagery, but none have proposed the argument we present here. In a discussion of Yaxchilán Stela 1, David Stuart (1988:181) noted the correspondence between the ancestor cartouches of the Classic period and the Central Mexican sun disk. However, Stuart did not associate those ancestral images with the sun disk and Tlaloc-warrior presentations at Chichén Itzá. Charles Lincoln (n.d.) noted the correspondence between the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá and the cartouches at Yaxchilán, but he argued that the disks at Yaxchilán are specifically dualistic and pertain to the sun and moon. Actually, Spindin (1913:91–92) got closest by associating the sun imagery of the Classic period ancestor cartouches with these sun disk icons from Chichén Itzá and suggested a Maya origin for both.
-[861] Disability Justice.
+[595] See Kelley (1982, 1983:205, and 1984) and Lincoln (1986:158) for arguments concerning these characters.
-[862] Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (NY: Crossing 1983) 5.
+[596] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes the persuasive case that the feathered serpent is, in fact, the Blood Vision Serpent of traditional Maya royal ritual. She suggests that the bird image connected with it might be related to the Principal Bird Deity, who is, in turn, linked with the World Tree. At the same time, there are strong associations between the eagle and heart sacrifice in Mexican religion.
-[863] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “What the Hell Has Happened to the Radical Spirit of Objectivism?” (Rebirth of Reason n.d.), [[http://rebirthofreason.com][http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Sciabarra/What_the_Hell_Has_Happened_]] [[http://rebirthofreason.com][to_the_Radical_Spirit_of_Objectivism.shtml]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[597] Mary Miller and Stephen Houston (1987) have documented the fact that ballgame sacrifice took place on grand stairways outside of ballcourts.
-[864] Sciabarra, Total 136.
+[598] This link between the bailgame and war was discussed in the context of Preclassic ballcourts at Cerros in Chapter 3. The people of Chichén Itzá and their enemies all used the bailgame as a metaphor for the wars they were fighting. At Chichén Itzá, a small ballcourt directly west of the Mercado Patio Quad hall has a bas-relief procession of warriors pushing captives before them (Ruppert 1952). This composition is nearly identical to a relief procession at the site ofX’telhu, one of the satellites ofYaxuná, which shows the warriors wearing the skin apron and tight leather belt of the ballgame in one of its forms. At Yaxuná, the Ballcourt Complex is the only original construction dating to the Terminal Classic period when the war was waged. The severed head of the victim of sacrifice in the ballcourt or in ballgame ritual was closely associated by all of the contenders with the image of a skull from which waterlilies emerge. This skull with emerging waterlilies was a symbol of fertility and renewal (Freidel 1987). This head is at the center of the baseline in the battle scene illustrated here.
-[865] Jen Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersection,” Quiet Rumors: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, ed. Dark Star (CA: AK 2012): 43–46 [<verbatim>3</verbatim>].
+[599] The skull-rack platform at Chichón liza has the standard form of such structures, but its walls are carved with the images of skulls set in rows. 1 ozzer (1957:218–219) associated this gruesome imagery with the practice of taking heads as trophies of war and relics of the dead, both of famous lords who died naturally and captives who died in sacrifice. The trophies from sacrificial rituals and battle were preserved on great wooden racks called tzompantli by the Aztec (Tozzer 1957:130–131) that were contrueted in the most important sacred spaces at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, and at Chichón Itzá, the capital of the Itzá Maya.
-[866] Chris Crass, Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy (CA: PM 2013) 5.
+[600] These relationships, evidently linking three male individuals, arc found on a monument from Uxmal described by Jeff Kowalski (1985b). He identified the glyph as a relationship, although Stuart’s itah decipherment was not then known.
-[867] Audre Lorde, “Learning From the 60s,” Harvard University (1982).
+; 10. The End of A Literate World and Its Legacy to the Future
-[868] Kelly Vee, “Individualism, Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality” (Center For a Stateless Society 2015), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/37870]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[601] Tozzer (1941:28) quotes from Gaspar Antonio Chi, Landa’s Yucatec informant: “They had written records of important things which had occurred in the past ... the prognostications of their prophets and the lives of their lords; and for the common people, of certain songs in meter ... according to the history they contained.
-[869] Hillary Lazar, “Until All Are Free: Black Feminism, Anarchism, and Interlocking Oppression” (Institute of Anarchist Studies 2016), [[https://anarchiststudies.org][https://anarchiststudies.org/until-all-are-free-black-feminism-anarchism-and-]] [[https://anarchiststudies.org][interlocking-oppression-by-hillary-lazar/ ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[602] The Maya of the Postclassic period did enjoy commercial prosperity and brisk trade with peoples beyond their borders. Their homes were well built and their technology was generally on a par with that of their ancestors, although, unlike the Classic period peoples, they used metal. The lords of the Late Postclassic Maya, however, simply did not have the command of the social energy of their people that the lords of the Classic period could bring to bear on public works, especially central monumental architecture. It is not that these people were less devout than their ancestors: They built many shrines and temples, but these were as frequently dedicated to gods as to ancestors and as frequently found in homes as in centers. Some Mayanists regard this change not as a dissipation of energy so much as a reorientation to other goals, particularly the material well-being of the rising mercantile cadres, the p’olomob. Be that as it may, the Postclassic Maya who greeted the Spaniards were at best between eras of greatness.
-[870] Williams, From Top to Bottom 20.
+[603] The first systematic study of the collapse was conducted as a School of American Research seminar (Culbert 1973). Several recent books have concentrated on the problem of the collapse from the viewpoint of Teotíhuacán’s collapse in the eighth century (Diehl and Berio 1989); from the viewpoint of Postclassic archaeology in northern Yucatán and the Petón (Sabloff and Andrews V 1986a); and as a worldwide phenomenon (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988).
-[871] Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto (SC: BookSurge 2010) 167–8.
+[604] The only such system to be excavated in the immediate vicinity of a center which rose and then collapsed, Cerros in Belize (Scarborough 1983), shows that the canals silted in beyond use within a century of the political abandonment.
-[872] Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) (NJ: Princeton UP 2017) 38.
+[605] This inscription includes the earliest known usage of a calendric name in a Classic Maya name phrase. This tradition of naming a child for the day in the tzolkin on which he was born was prominent among peoples of western Mesoamerica, such as the Zapotee, the Mixtec, the Cacaxtlanos, the Huastecs of El Tajin, and presumably, the Teotihuacanos, but the Classic Maya used an entirely different system. Since the clay in the pot came from the plain in front of Palenque, we suggest that the man whose accession is recorded in the text or perhaps the person who gave the vase to the Palencano lord in whose grave it was found was one of the Putún Maya.
-[873] Murray N. Rothbard, “Exclusive Interview with Murray Rothbard,” New Banner: A Fortnightly Libertarian Journal (February 1972).
+[606] Robert Rands (personal communication, 1975) discovered that the clay has chemical traces produced by the grasses out on the plain. It was manufactured in the region where the Putún Maya are thought to have lived.
-[874] Rothbard, New Liberty 28.
+[607] Lauro José Zavala (1949) reported finding this skeleton in the rubble of the west end of south gallery of the House AD in the Palace. He speculated that the man was accidentally caught in the collapse of the vault and never dug out.
-[875] Rothbard, Ethics 33.
+[608] The portrayal of the captive lords of Pomoná in their anguish is intensely personal and intimate, among the finest portraits ever achieved by Maya artists. The artists’s concentration on the victims leads Mary Miller to believe that they were vassals from the defeated town who were forced to carve this monument in tribute to their conquerors. If this was the case, then Pomoná at least survived as a place of skilled artisans until the opening of the ninth century A.D.
-[876] Rothbard, Ethics 55.
+[609] We met this Calakmul king in Chapter 4. He installed the first ruler of Naranjo on his throne and he apparently sent a visitor to participate in rituals conducted by the contemporary king at Yaxchilán, who may have been an ally.
-[877] Murray N. Rothbard, “Syndical Syndrome,” Libertarian Forum 3.5 (June 1975): 2—4 [<verbatim>3</verbatim>].
+[610] Demarest, Houston, and Johnson (1989) report that this log palisade was built around the central plaza of Dos Pilas during the last years of its occupation. They also report that Punta de Chamino, a site built on the end of a peninsula jutting into Lake Petexbatún, has massive fortifications across the neck of the peninsula. Warfare was endemic and highly destructive during the last years of the Petexbatun confederacy.
-[878] Murray N. Rothbard, “Liberty and the New Left,” Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1.2 (Autumn 1965): 35–67 [40–1].
+[611] Jeff Kowalski (1989) has traced the Itzá style up the Usumacinta to Seibal and this set of late sites in the highlands of Chiapas.
-[879] Murray N. Rothbard, “What Kind of ‘Purity’?” Libertarian Forum 6.2 (February 1974): 2–3 [<verbatim>2</verbatim>].
+[612] The Classic diaspora into the adjacent highlands is subject to continued interest and interpretation. See John Fox (1980, 1989) and David Freidel (1985a) for some consideration of the issues.
-[880] Murray N. Rothbard, “The New Left, RIP,” Libertarian Forum 2.6 (March 1970): 1–3 [<verbatim>1</verbatim>].
+[613] The notable community here is Lamanai (Pendergast 1986), an ancient center and community which not only survived the collapse but continued to flourish up to the Spanish Conquest. Although clearly participants in the Maya elite world of the Classic period, Lamanai rulers raised few stelae during their history. But there is no certain correlation of historical kingship and the success or failure of government in Belize: Altun Ha, another center of great antiquity and wealth, never raised stelae and yet it succumbed in the time of the collapse. The Belizean situation underscores the fact that historical kingship was a major strategy of Maya governance, but not the only one. Maya centers rose and fell throughout the lowlands without raising stelae or declaring other public inscriptions. Yet at the same time, the correlation between the collapse of lowland society and the failure of historical kingship demonstrates the centrality of this institution, despite the examples of survival beyond the silencing of the historical record. Nevertheless, there are many and complex relationships between historical kings and their nonhistorical counterparts to be worked out in the future (see Freidel 1983).
-[881] Kevin Carson, “Vulgar Libertarianism Watch, Part 1” (Mutualist Blog 2005), [[https://mutualist.blogspot.com][https://mutualist.blogspot.]] [[https://mutualist.blogspot.com][com/2005/01/vulgar-libertarianism-watch-part-1.html]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[614] Sabloff and Willey (1969) first suggested that Seibal’s late florescence resulted from the intrusion and takeover by non-Petén foreigners. Rands (1973) suggested that the ceramics associated with that intruding group are related to the Fine Paste wares from the Palenque-Tabasco region. These foreigners appear to have been Thompson’s Putún Maya (see note 18) who gave rise both to the Itzá of Yucatán and the invaders who took Fine Orange ceramics with them as they went up the Usumacinta River.
-[882] Kevin Carson, “Vulgar Liberalism Watch (Yeah, You Read It Right)” (Mutualist Blog 2005), [[https://mutualist.blogspot.com][https://]] [[https://mutualist.blogspot.com][mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/vulgar-liberalism-watch-yeah-you-read.html]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[615] The four-sided pyramid is a very old architectural design among the Maya, going back into the Preclassic period at such sites as Tikal and Uaxactún. Although it occurs periodically throughout the Classic period, it seems to have enjoyed resurgence to a position of special prominence in the Terminal Classic period. See Fox (1989) for a discussion of the quadripartite principle in the consolidation of segmentary lineages into new states in the Postclassic period.
-[883] Roderick T. Long, “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now” (Cato Unbound 2008), [[http://www.cato-unbound.org][www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-t-long/corporations-versus-market-or-whip-conflation-]] [[http://www.cato-unbound.org][now]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[616] David Stuart (1987:25–26) first read the verb in this passage as yilah. “he saw it,” and realized that the Seibal passage record a visit by foreign lords to participate in the period-ending rites conducted by Ah-Bolon-Tun.
-[884] Kelly Vee, “Anarcho-Capitalism vs. Market Anarchism” (Center for a Stateless Society 2015), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.]] [[https://c4ss.org][org/content/40654]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[617] See Jeff Kowalski’s (1989) very useful comparison of the Seibal iconography to that of Chichén Itzá. In particular, Kowalski identifies an element called the “knife-wing” in the headdress of one of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s stelae. This element is important in the serpent-bird of prophecy iconography of lintels at Chichén Itzá (Krochock 1988). This complex, in turn, ties into the Vision Serpent-ancestor iconography of Captain Sun Disk, described in this chapter.
-[885] Carson, Homebrew 171–303.
+[618] Sabloff and Willey (1967) proposed that the southern lowlands might have experienced invasion by barbarians moving up the Western Rivers district at the time of the Collapse. One impressive pattern was the introduction of fine-paste wares from the Tabasco region in conjunction with the barbarian Maya stelae at Seibal. Ihompson (1970:3–47) called these invaders Putún and proposed they were Chontal-speaking Maya who had lived in Tabasco for most of the Classic period. He suggested that they expanded upriver in the chaos at the end of the Classic period. Kowalski (1989) and Ball and Taschek (1989) accept Thompson’s scenario and have added new support to the hypothesis.
-[886] Johnson, Liberty 180–1.
+[619] Don Rice (1986:332) argued from ceramic, stylistic, and architectural evidence that the late occupants of Ixlú were intruders. Because the shape of the benches built inside the buildings at Ixlú resembles those of late Seibal, he (1986:336) suggested they migrated to Lake Petén-Itzá from Seibal.
-[887] Rothbard, Man 608.
+[620] Peter Mathews (1976) long ago showed the affinity of this Ixlú altar to a text on Stela 8 at Dos Pilas. This parallelism suggests that the Ixlú lords might have been refugees from the collapse of the Petexbatún state.
-[888] Prychitko, Expanding 448.
+[621] A column from Bonampak now in the St. Louis Art Museum names its Bonampak protagonist as the yahau, “subordinate lord,” of the king of Tonina.
-[889] Gary Chartier, “Introduction,” Markets not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, ed. Charles W. Johnson and Chartier (Autonomedia 2011).
+[622] Mary Pohl (1983) has reviewed the archaeological evidence for the ceremonial caching of owls, noting that pygmy owls were favored by the Maya. 1 he iconography of owls is not so specific as to require identification of the carved images as pygmy owls, but these are what the Maya deposited. Pygmy owls, according to Pohl, frequent the mouths of caves and hence inspire denotation as messengers from the Otherworld. These pygmy owls may refer to the bird of omen called cu/i in Yucatec, Choi, and Tzeltal and the owl of the spearthrower-shield-owl title we first encountered with Jaguar-Paw, the conqueror of Uaxactun.
-[890] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 20.1 (2006): 5–15 [<verbatim>12</verbatim>].
+[623] The Feathered Serpent could also be represented as a raptorial bird that tore out the hearts of sacrificial victims. The taloned-Kukulcan images that decorated the Temple of the Warriors display an ancestral head peering out from between its open beak, in an analog to Classic-period depictions of ancestors peering out of the mouth of the Vision Serpent.
-[891] Charles W. Johnson, “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It,” Freeman 57.10 (December 2007).
+[624] See the discussions by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Samuel K. Lothrop of these disks and their correspondences to southern lowland imagery and texts (Lothrop 1952).
-[892] Billy Christmas, “Libertarianism and Privilege,” Molinari Review 1.1 (Spring 2016): 24–46 [<verbatim>34</verbatim>].
+[625] Scholars have long recognized the significant impact of Maya influence on sites like Xochicalco and Cacaxtla. Now that we have recognized the place of Tlaloc warfare in Classic Maya imagery, we see that Chichcn Itza’s representation of war is clearly not inspired by the Toltec, but by the Maya past. Tlaloc warfare as it is represented at Cacaxtla seems also to be inspired by the Maya model rather than that of Teotihuacan. Furthermore, as George Kubler suggested, Tula, Hidalgo, the capital of the Toltec, may well have emulated the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza rather the reverse. Mary Miller (1985) has shown that the famous Chae Mool figure of Postclassic Mesoamerica derives from Maya imagery of captives and sacrificial victims.
-[893] Kevin Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (SC: BookSurge 2008) 219.
+[626] The word can also means “four” and “sky,” so that the name also might have meant “four-star” or “sky-star.” Avendano (Stuart and Jones n.d.) said that the name meant “the star twenty serpent.”
-[894] Roderick T. Long, “History of an Idea; or, How an Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Socialism Became an Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Capitalism” (Center for a Stateless Society 2008), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.org/content/9482 ]](last visited June 5, 2020).
+[627] The accounts of the Conquest of the Itza of Lake Peten-Itza were published by Philip A. Means (1917). Dennis Puleston (1979) was the first to connect the prophesies of the Books of the Chilam Balam with Can-Ek’s reaction and the newly recovered histories of the Classic period.
-[895] Kevin Carson, “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth,” Freeman 57.1 (June 2007).
+[628] The trip we describe here is a new entrada recorded in a manuscript George Stuart discovered in 1989. He provided us with a copy of the transcription, translations, and the commentary written by Grant Jones (Stuart and Jones n.d.) and has very graciously allowed us to use the events of the entrada and the description of Can-Ek contained in this document.
-[896] Carson, Organization 222.
+[629] The size difference between the elite and commoners is one that is documented from Preclassic times onward. Can-Ek’s light complexion may have resulted from a life-style that kept him out of the fierce tropical sun far more than his subordinates.
-[897] Carson, Homebrew 171–303.
+[630] The cloth of costumes in the Bonampak murals also have glyphs drawn on them, and the ahaus in the first room wear ankle-long white capes amazingly like Avendano’s description.
-[898] “Effective Strikes and Economic Actions” (Industrial Workers of the World n.d.), [[https://archive.iww.org][https://archive.iww.]] [[https://archive.iww.org][org/about/solidarityunionism/directaction/]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[631] Avendano (Means 1917:128) says, “We had to observe and wonder on some rocks or buildings on some high places—so high that they were almost lost to sight. And when we caught sight of them clearly, the sun shining on them in full, we took pleasure in seeing them; and we wondered at their height, since without any exaggeration it seemed impossible that work could have been done by hand, unless it was with the aid of the devil, whom they say they adore there in the form of a noted idol.”
-[899] Kevin Carson, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model” (Center for a Stateless Society 2010), [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.]] [[https://c4ss.org][org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/C4SS-Labor.pdf]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[632] This and all other direct quotations come from Avendano’s own description of this entrada as they were translated by Means (1917).
-[900] Roderick T. Long, “Why Libertarians Should Be Social Justice Warriors,” The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, ed. Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and Edward W. Younkins (MD: Lexington Books 2019) 235–54 [<verbatim>37</verbatim>].
+[633] Avendano’s description (Means 1917:137) is full of the irritation the Spanish felt at the uninvited and intimate attention.
-[901] Grant Babcock, “Fissionism: Why Libertarianism Should Extricate Itself from Conservative Entanglements” (Libertarianism 2014), [[http://www.libertarianism.org][www.libertarianism.org/columns/fissionism-why-libertarianism-should-extricate-itself-]] [[http://www.libertarianism.org][conservative-entanglements]] (last visited June 5, 2020).
+[634] This episode (Means 1917:140) recalls the threats presented by the Chacans in Avendano’s first visit.
-[902] Hoppe, Getting 82–89.
+[635] This episode is recorded in Means (1917:140).
-[903] Rand, Atlas 965.
+[636] This 12.3.19.11.14 I lx 17 Kankin date is March 13, 1697, in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, this day fell on 12.3.19.11.4 4 Kan 7 Kankin.
-** 13. Christian Anarchism
+[637] Dennis Puleston (1979) first connected this particular prophecy to Can-Ek’s surrender and tried to show that the katun prophecies of the Books of the Chilam Balam were derived at least partially from Classic and Postclassic history. He suggested that Can-Ek’s fatalism was characteristic of Prehispamc Maya historical thought also. The imminent arrival of Katun 8 Ahau was just as likely to have been the stimulus. 8 Ahau is repeatedly associated with the collapse of kingdoms and the change of governments.
-*Sam Underwood and Kevin Vallier*
+[638] See Tozzer (1941, 77–78) for discussion of the suppression of Maya native literature.
-*** I. Introduction
+[639] Martin was the director of the Proyecto Lingiiistico “Francisco Marroquin,” an organization started in the 1960s to train native speakers in linguistics so that they could record and study their own languages.
-Biblical Christian anarchists argue that the teachings of Jesus imply a unique form of anarchism. Christian anarchists believe that followers of Jesus are called to a life of nonviolence, love, and forgiveness. This life stands in stark contrast with the “ways of the world,” which are the ways of power, violence, and coercion. Therefore, according to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos,
+[640] Nicholas Hopkins and Kathryn Josserand also helped give the workshop. Nora England of the University of Iowa translated the English version of the workbook into Spanish with the help of Lola Spillari de López. Steve Eliot of CIRMA printed and reproduced the Spanish-version workbook and CIRMA provided support and a room for workshop sessions.
-the starting point for most Christian anarchists is not so much a critique of the state as an understanding of Jesus’s radical teaching on love and forgiveness which, when then contrasted with the state, leads them to their anarchist conclusion.[904]
+[641] In 1989, Linda Scheie returned to Antigua to give a second workshop. An extra day added to the workshop gave time to finish the full analysis of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs. The final session heard a translation of that inscription read in all the languages of participants—English. Spanish, Classical Maya, Chorti, Pocoman, Cakchiquel, Quiche, Achi, Ixil, Mam, Jalcaltec, and Kanhobal.
-The Sermon on the Mount is the primary biblical inspiration for the positions of many Christian anarchists. Christian anarchists contend that, if we take Jesus at His word in the Sermon on the Mount, and everyone acts as a peacemaker and accepts persecution, the consequence is an anarchist society because the state depends on violence and power for its existence. Tolstoy writes that “Christianity in its true sense puts an end to government. So it was understood at its very commencement; it was for that cause that Christ was crucified.”[905]
+[642] The correlation we have used throughout this book set 594,285 days between the zero date in the Maya calendar and the zero date in the Julian calendar, January 1, —4712. Although we believe this is the correct correlation, it is two days out of agreement with the calendars that are still maintained by the Maya of the Guatemala highlands. The correlation that brings the ancient and modern calendars into agreement sets 584,283 days between the two zero dates. In this second correlation, July 23, 1987, falls on 12.18.14.3.17 3 Caban 5 Xul.
-In what follows, we will explicate the primary claims of the main biblical Christian anarchists, paying particular attention to the expressly biblical arguments they give. In Section II, we consider Christian conceptions of anarchism and Christian anarchists’ views about whether anarchic political arrangements are feasible and desirable. In Section III, we explore Christian anarchist perspectives on nonviolence, for nonviolence has historically been a central element of articulations of Christian anarchism. Then, in Section IV, we examine Christian anarchist responses to two potentially problematic biblical passages: Romans 13:1–7 and Jesus’s instruction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” in Matthew 22:21.
+; Glossary of Gods and Icons
-In Section V, we review an unusual, recent branch of Christian anarchism, Christian market anarchism, where rights of private property are the primary structural features of political order and no state exists. Christian anarchists support both free-market capitalism and the abolition of the nation-state. Most biblical Christian anarchists have been sympathetic to socialism, though few had the economics background to give an account of how a socialist anarchist society would operate. The Christian market anarchists combine the anti-statist arguments of the mainstream biblical Christian anarchists with biblical arguments appearing to support private property rights and the value of markets. But they also much more frequently appeal to the language of natural law and natural rights, as well as to economic considerations—especially ones drawn from the Austrian school of economics—in outlining how political order should function. We conclude in Section VI by analyzing how Christian anarchists might resolve their dispute about which economic regime is aligned better to fit with Christian anarchism—capitalism or socialism.
+[643] See Cortez (1986) for a full discussion of the Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic contexts.
-Throughout, we rely upon the work of Christian anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, and Vernard Eller. We will also draw upon the work of Christian pacifists like John Howard Yoder and Walter Wink. Although these scholars do not identify as anarchists, their writings have exercised considerable influence in the world of Christian anarchism and so it is helpful to consider their arguments insofar as they have informed, and been frequently employed by, Christian anarchist writers. The Christian market anarchists are much less well known, but include Thomas E. Woods, Stephen W. Carson, and James Redford.
+[644] In this scene, Chac-Xib-Chac rises from the waters of the Underworld in a visual representation of the first appearance of the Eveningstar (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: Pl. 122). GI of the Palenque Triad, who shares many features with Chac-Xib-Chac, is also associated with Venus, principally through his birth date, 9 Ik, a day associated with Venus throughout Mesoamerican mythology. Hun-Ahau of the Headband Twins is yet another aspect of Venus for he shows up in the Dresden Codex as a manifestation of Morningstar. All three of these gods are thus associated with one or another apparition of Venus and may represent different aspects of the same divine being.
-*** II. Biblical Christian Anarchists on the Definition and Feasibility of Anarchism
+[645] Thompson (1934 and 1970b) thoroughly discussed these directional sets of gods and their associations. M.D. Coe (1965) associated this directional organization of gods with the functions and layouts of Yucatecan villages. He (Coe 1973:14–15) also demonstrated that the gods identified by Thompson as bacabs arc the Pauahtuns of the codices and ethnohistorical sources.
-What do biblical Christian anarchists mean by “anarchism,” and do they see “anarchy” as a feasible state of affairs? In this section, we examine the answers to these questions offered by three of the most influential Christian anarchist writers: Leo Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, and Vernard Eller. We will see that these authors represent distinct, but nevertheless related, perspectives on the nature and feasibility of anarchy.
+[646] This palace scene with the Young Goddesses of Two and the rabbit scribe is painted on a pot now in the Princeton University Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:115a). The creation on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku is depicted on the Pot of the Seven Gods (M.D. Coe 1973:106–109).
-**** A. Leo Tolstoy
+[647] See Taube (1985) for a full discussion of the Maize God and his place in Classic Maya iconography.
-According to Tolstoy, anarchism is the necessary political outcome of an ethic of radical nonviolence. Tolstoy argues that governments are fundamentally violent insofar as their power rests upon the violent enforcement of laws. Furthermore, he writes, violence is a form of slavery, insofar as to be enslaved is to be “compelled to do what other people wish, against your own will.”[906] Tolstoy maintains such slavery must be abolished, which is to say that the state must be abolished. The connection between anarchy and radical nonviolence, however, signals a significant difference between Tolstoy and the other anarchists of his day. Tolstoy explains this difference in the following way:
+[648] Examples of the Paddlers in the inscriptions of Copán represent the Old Stingray God with kin signs on his cheeks and the Old Jaguar God with akbal signs (Scheie 1987f).
-<quote>
+[649] The alphabetic designations of god images derive from a distributional study of gods and their name glyphs in the Dresden Codex. Not wishing to presume the meaning of the names, Schellhas (1904) used the alphabet as a neutral designation system.
-The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution.[907]
-</quote>
-Importantly, Tolstoy does not disagree with other anarchists about the possibility of anarchy. He does maintain a measured agnosticism regarding exactly what anarchy would look like, though. “To the question, how to be without a State ... an answer cannot be given,” he writes.[908]
+[650] See David Stuart (1987b:15–16).
-What is of more urgent concern, in Tolstoy’s view, is the refusal to resort to violent methods in the pursuit of anarchy. Rather, he argues, only if people nonviolently refuse to support, recognize, or participate in government violence can anarchy begin to take shape. “[I]t is time,” he writes,
+[651] David Stuart (1988c and 1984) outlined much of the evidence linking the Serpent Bar to the symbolism of the vision rites.
-<quote>
+[652] David Stuart (1988c) first outlined how this merging of images and functions is distributed in Maya images.
-for people to understand that Governments not only are unnecessary, but are harmful and highly immoral institutions, in which an honest, self-respecting man cannot and must not take part, and the advantages of which he cannot and should not enjoy.
-And as soon as people clearly understand that, they will naturally cease to take part in such deeds, i.e., cease to give the Governments soldiers and money. And as soon as a majority of people ceases to do this, the fraud which enslaves people will be abolished.[909]
+ References
-</quote>
-For Tolstoy, then, the way of anarchy is, we might say, the way of refusal rather than of revolt, and his emphasis on refusal allows him to avoid constructing a blueprint for anarchy. Revolutionaries need some clear notion of anarchy in mind in order to impose it on others. But anarchy will take shape on its own when we cease to call upon, or acknowledge the legitimacy of, the government. As David Stephens explains, “for Tolstoy, the State could only survive with the consent of the governed; a revolution to overthrow it had to take a personal rather than a political form.”[910] Since the revolution is personal, it can take shape spontaneously.
+<biblio>
+The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1. Oxford University. Aberle, David F.
-It should be noted, though, that Tolstoy does give some indications of what sorts of societies he thinks could take shape. He speaks favorably, for example, of Cossacks of the Urals, “who have lived without acknowledging private property in land. There was such well-being and order in their commune as does not exist in society where landed property is defended by violence.”[911] Furthermore, he writes, “I know too of communes that live without acknowledging the right of individuals to private property.”[912] In this, we can read the influence of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first thinker to call himself an anarchist, whom Tolstoy had the opportunity to meet. Proudhon famously argues that property is theft,[913] and in a letter from 1865, Tolstoy cites this position favorably, writing:
+Distinguished Lecture: What Kind of Science Is Anthropology? American Anthropologist 89(3):551–566.
-<quote>
+Adams, Richard E. W., Walter E. Brown, and T. Patrick Culbert
-the mission of Russia in world history consists in bringing into the world the idea of a socialized organization of land ownership. ‘Property is theft’ will remain a greater truth than the truth of the English constitution, as long as mankind exists ... This idea has [a] future.[914]
-</quote>
-Tolstoy’s ideas also remained in many significant ways consistent with some of the main currents of nineteenth-century anarchism. Like many other anarchists, Stephens explains, “Tolstoy’s political writings express an uncompromising rejection of Authority and all its trappings, a scathing criticism of Church and State, capitalism and Marxism, militarism and patriotism.”[915] It is his uncompromising rejection of violence that makes Tolstoy stand out from the rest of the anarchists of his day.
+Radar Mapping, Archaeology, and Ancient Maya Land Use. Science 213:1457- 1463.
-For Tolstoy, anarchy is the morally necessary negation of the violence of state, church, and capitalism. The exact forms of social organization will vary according to each community’s needs, but, in order for each community to be freed from violence and therefore able to achieve such selfdetermination, Tolstoy is convinced that we must refuse to recognize, support, or participate in government violence. This is the only way to build a new society within the shell of the old.
+Andrews, Anthony P.
-**** B. Jacques Ellul
+Puertos costeros del Postclásico Temprano en el norte de Yucatán. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1 1:75–93. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-Jacques Ellul’s anarchism shares much with Tolstoy’s. For both thinkers, anarchism is rooted fundamentally in a rejection of violence. As Ellul writes, “by anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.”[916] Like Tolstoy, then, Ellul consciously departs from any currents of anarchist thought which leave room for violent revolution. What does Ellul’s nonviolent anarchism look like? “If I rule out violent anarchism,” he explains,
+Andrews, Anthony P., Frank Asaro, and Pura Cervera Rivero
-there remains pacifist, antinationalist, anticapitalist, moral, and antidemocratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. All this is very close to Bakunin.[917]
+n.d. The Obsidian Trade at Isla Cerritos, Yucatán, México. Journal of Field Archaeology (in press).
-Ellul does indeed come close to Bakunin, for Bakunin was adamantly opposed to any revolution from above—that is, any revolution which would proceed by means of seizing political power— and instead advocated action from below. “The future social organization,” according to Bakunin,
+Andrews, Anthony P., Tomás Gallareta N., Fernando Robles C., Rafael Cobos P.
-should be carried out from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations, then going on to the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation.[918]
+Isla Cerritos Archaeological Project: A Report of the 1984 Field Season, Report submitted to the Committee for Research and Exploration, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.
-It is not only on the question of violence that Ellul departs from the mainstream of anarchist thought. “The true anarchist,” he writes, “thinks that an anarchist society is possible .... But I do not.” Ellul nevertheless maintains that “the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential.” This fight involves “the creation of new institutions from the grass-roots level.”[919] Through such bottom-up action, meaningful change is indeed possible, but, in Ellul’s view, the ideal of anarchy will always remain a pursuit rather than an accomplishment.
+Andrews, Anthony P., and Fernando Robles C.
-What Ellul and Tolstoy share is an uncompromising rejection of violence, as well as a deep suspicion of revolution, if by revolution we mean a violent attack on the existing system of social organization. Such an attack, in their view, can only result in the replacement of one system of violence with another. Christian anarchism is, rather, a call to live differently, to organize our lives anarchically, with no need for the state.
+Chichón Itzá and Cobá: An Itzá-Maya Standoff in Early Postclassic Yucatán. In The Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 62–72. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-**** C. Vernard Eller
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV
-Vernard Eller’s Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers relies heavily on Ellul’s work. Like Ellul, Eller views Christian anarchism as a nonviolent, non-revolutionary way of living according to the kingdom of God rather than the kingdoms of the world. For Eller, too, revolutionary action recognizes—and therefore reinforces—the worldly ways of endless struggles for power, or what he calls “arky politics.”[920] Anarchy, therefore, stands fundamentally opposed to revolution. According to Eller:
+Archaeology and Prehistory in the Northern Maya Lowlands: An Introduction. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 2, edited by Robert Wauchope and Gordon R. Willey, 288–330. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-<quote>
+The Development of Maya Civilization After Abandonment of the Southern Cities. In The Classic Maya Collapse, edited by T. Patrick Culbert, 243–265. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-‘revolution’ is not anarchical in any sense of the word. Revolutionists are very strongly opposed to certain arkys that they know to be ‘bad’ and to be the work of ‘bad people.’ However, they are just as strongly in favor of what they know to be ‘good’ arkys that are the work of themselves and other good people like them.[921]
-</quote>
-The Christian, according to Eller, has no such faith in the possibility of replacing a bad arky with a good, Christian one. For Eller, anarchy means “the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of, nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys.”[922] More than anything, then, the Christian anarchist is indifferent to worldly power and neither submits to it nor actively struggles against it.
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, and E. Wyllys Andrews V
-Furthermore, unlike both Tolstoy—for whom anarchy may indeed be a real possibility—and Ellul—for whom anarchy is not a real possibility—for Eller, the question of possibility is irrelevant. Christian anarchists, he writes, “have no opinion as to whether secular society would be better off with anarchy than it is with all its present hierarchies.. Christian anarchists do not even argue that anarchy is a viable option for secular society.”[923] Such anarchy is therefore not rooted in the same kind of antiauthoritarianism of Tolstoy and Ellul. Rather, it simply views human authorities as irrelevant to Christians. Whether these same authorities are necessary or legitimate for the non-Christian world is neither here nor there. The Christian’s goal is “the arky of God.”[924] To be sure, Eller is clear that he does not view God’s arky as authoritarian in the same way that human arkys are. “Rather than a heteronomous imposition,” he writes, “God’s arky spells the discovery of that which is truest to myself and my world.”[925] God’s arky is a struggle against earthly powers, but not through force, but the cross, self-givingness. Recognizing God’s authority therefore has much less to do with recognizing who is in charge, so to speak, and much more to do with recognizing the truth about reality. Anarchy is thus not a universally applicable socio-political vision, but is instead the proper way for the Christian to orient herself towards the worldly sources of power that try to claim her allegiance.
+Excavations at Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, México. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 48. New Orleans: Tulane University.
-Eller’s concerns about whether Christian anarchists should support any kind of order at all is a theme expanded upon by some other Christian anarchists. Mark Van Steenwyk addresses the question of authority in his works That Holy Anarchist and The unKingdom of God. The title of the latter already suggests Van Steenwyk’s basic argument: if Jesus’s “kingdom” is a kingdom of love, forgiveness, and nonviolence, as opposed to one marked by power and violence, does this not suggest that this “kingdom” is something more like an anti-kingdom or un-kingdom? Van Steenwyk writes that we “need to recognize that Jesus’ kingdom isn’t the sort that one holds with an iron fist. Rather, it is an unkingdom ... Jesus is calling for a loving anarchy. An unkingdom. Of which he is the unking.”[926] Jesus’s kingdom is in every way the opposite of what a human kingdom would be. To further support the view that Jesus does not claim for himself a traditional, hierarchical, or authoritarian kingship, Christian anarchists often point to the temptation of Jesus by Satan, in which Jesus refuses Satan’s offer of political power.[927] Accordingly, Nekeisha Alexis concludes that it is possible for Christian anarchists to “embrace God as Christians and reject masters as anarchists.”[928]
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, V
-*** III. Nonviolence
+Dzibilchaltún. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians 1, edited by Victoria Bricker and Jeremy A. Sabloff with the assistance of Patricia Andrews, 313–344. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-The Sermon on the Mount is central to the case for Christian anarchism. Dorothy Day writes, for example, that, for the Catholic Worker Movement, “the Sermon on the Mount is our Christian manifesto.”[929] The Sermon is taken as a blueprint for Christian living, and Christian living in accordance with this blueprint is understood to include living the way of peace and making peace with others, along with suffering persecution without resistance.[930] Most Christian anarchists insist that Christians are called to follow these teachings in their plain sense, no matter how difficult or impractical they may seem. Even though power and violence are the ways of the world, Jesus preaches peace and non-resistance, and Christians must take him at His word. As Leo Tolstoy insists, Jesus “meant neither more nor less than what he said.”[931] Thus, to follow the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount is to follow the way of radical nonviolence.
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff
-Historically, Christian anarchists have therefore been largely pacifists. Indeed, Christian anarchists often appear to have been led to anarchist conclusions precisely by their commitment to nonviolence. The place to begin understanding the biblical Christian anarchists’ commitment to nonviolence is with Jesus’s overturning of lex talionis, the Old Testament law of “an eye for an eye”: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.”[932] While some authors read Jesus’s instruction here as relevant for private or personal interactions, Christian anarchists and pacifists insist upon the significant social and political as well as personal implications of His words.
+Classic to Postclassic: A Summary Discussion. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 433–456. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Walter Wink argues that the verb translated as “resist” is best read as referring to “violent rebellion, armed revolt, sharp dissention.”[933] Such a reading complements Christian anarchist readings of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. According to Christoyannopoulos, in Jesus’s rejection of Satan’s offer to rule the kingdoms of the world,
+Andrews, E.Wyi lys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, editors
-Jesus is implicitly distancing himself from the Zealots and their method, a contemporary group of Jewish rebels who wanted to overthrow Roman rule in Palestine by taking power ... His contemporaries expected the messiah to overthrow political oppressors and restore the Jewish monarchy.[934]
+a Late Lowland Maya Civilization. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-In both passages, then, we see Jesus rejecting violence and domination not simply in personal situations but in political situations as well.
+Ashmore, Wendy
-Wink’s translation is supported, according to Kurt Willems, when we consider that “antistenai is the word repeatedly used in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible as ‘war-fare’ and is also used in Ephesians 6:13 in the context of active military imagery.”[935] Neither Wink nor Willems advocates Christian anarchism, but Christian anarchists look to such interpretations—Wink’s in particular[936]—to defend their view of Jesus as neither violent nor apolitical, but as an exemplar of revolutionary nonviolence.
+Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by W. Ashmore. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Christian anarchists argue that Jesus demonstrates the need to escape the cycle of violence, and the impossibility of doing so by violent means. Ellul, for example, appeals to Jesus’s saying that “All who take the sword will perish by the sword,”[937] from which Ellul concludes that “The law of the sword is a total law.”[938] Accordingly, Ellul writes, “violence begets violence—nothing else.”[939] For Christian anarchists, the endless cycle of violence can be broken only by nonviolent intervention.
+Aulie, H. Wilbur, and Evelyn W. de Aulie
-Christian anarchists believe that Jesus points the way beyond the cycle of violence. Immediately after overturning lex talionis, Jesus provides His listeners with a pointed example: “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”[940] According to Michael Elliott, by the victim’s refusal to engage in violence, “the cycle of violence is unexpectedly interrupted.”[941] Rather than legitimizing the attacker’s use of violence by responding in kind, Jesus challenges His listeners to— perhaps somewhat paradoxically—deny the attacker’s power precisely by offering the other cheek. As Ellul cautions, “once we consent to use violence ourselves, we have to consent to our adversary’s using it, too.”[942] Turning the other cheek is therefore seen by Christian anarchists as a radical refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of responding to violence with violence. As Tolstoy writes, “all attempts to abolish slavery by violence are like extinguishing fire with fire, stopping water with water, or filling up one hole by digging another.”[943] The cycle of violence cannot be escaped through violent means; thus, Jesus challenges His followers to disrupt this mutually accepted employment of violence.
+Diccionario Ch’ol-Español: Español-Ch’ol. Serie de Vocabulario y Diccionarios Indígenas ‘Mariano Silva y Aceves” 21. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
-The commitment to nonviolence sets Christian anarchists apart from most of their nonChristian counterparts.[944] However, Christian anarchists and pacifists often appeal to a prefigurative argument in support of nonviolence. Prefigurative considerations have long been central to anarchist arguments, so this appeal to prefiguration draws Christian and non-Christian anarchists closer together, even if, ultimately, they often remain separated on the question of violence. According to Nathan Jun, “[t]he ‘prefigurative principle’ demands coherence between means and ends. That is, if the goal of political action is the promotion of some value, the means and methods employed in acting must reflect or prefigure the desired end.”[945] Such coherence between means and ends is precisely what writers such as Tolstoy see as requiring nonviolence. Bart de Ligt—an anarcho-pacifist with a Christian background[946]—writes that “it is impossible to educate people in liberty by force, just as it is impossible to breathe by coal gas.”[947] Instead, he insists, “it is the task of the social revolution to go beyond this violence and to emancipate itself from it.”[948]
+Ayala Falcón, Marisela
-Prefigurative considerations thus play a central role in Christian anarchist defenses of nonviolence. It would be an oversimplification to say that any argument that relies on prefiguration is ultimately an anarchist argument. But Christian anarchists can at least claim that their nonviolence does not violate, but in fact attempts to satisfy, anarchist demands for prefiguration.
+n.d. El bulto ritual de Mundo Perdido, Tikal, y los bultos mayas. A MS in the possession of the authors.
-Christian anarchists also see in nonviolence possibilities for forgiveness and reconciliation that are foreclosed by violent methods. Shortly after His teachings on nonviolent responses to violence, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”[949] As Christoyannopoulos explains,
+Ball, Joseph
-non-resistance, and its concomitant willingness to suffer unjustly, clears the ground for reconciliation because it exposes the destructive violence of the situation and makes a moving plea to overcome it. It lays bare the cycle of violence and it refuses to prolong it.[950]
+a A Coordinate Approach to Northern Maya Prehistory: A.D. 700–1000. American Antiquity 39 (l):85–93.
-The nonviolence championed by Christian anarchists is therefore motivated not only by the anarchist desire for consistency between means and ends but also by the Christian desire for forgiveness and reconciliation.
+b A Teotihuacán-style Cache from the Maya Lowlands. Archaeology 27:2–9.
-This is not to say that Christian anarchism is simply the combination of otherwise independent Christian and anarchist concerns, however. Rather, Christian anarchists view the desire for reconciliation as deeply consistent with anarchism. For, according to the Christian anarchist perspective, it is precisely this kind of reconciliation that can provide a way out of the cycle of hatred and violence and into a more just and loving society. The state operates according to lex talionis—relying on tit-for-tat violence and choosing to identify and fight enemies rather than to forgive them or to seek reconciliation. As Christoyannopoulos concludes, “for Christian anarchists, therefore, on this account as well, the state is an unchristian institution.”[951] Christian anarchists see love of enemies as fundamentally anarchic.
+Southeastern Campeche and the Mexican Plateau: Early Classic Contact Situation. Actes du XXII Congrés International de Americanistes 8:271–280. Paris.
-Regarding the potentially problematic temple-cleansing episode in the Gospel of John, John Dear and Andy Alexis-Baker argue that the passage in fact does not depict Jesus as acting violently. Dear argues that Jesus’s acting violently “would be entirely inconsistent with the Jesus portrayed throughout John’s Gospel, as well as the Synoptics.”[952] Rather, Dear writes, “most scholars agree that John deliberately paints Jesus as a righteous prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah, who engaged in similar dramatic actions.”[953] This suggests that what is important about the scene as depicted by John is not the violence per se, but Jesus’s righteous anger. Furthermore, Alexis-Baker argues that a careful translation of the Greek would be the following: “he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.”[954] The word “both” is the linchpin here, as it limits “them” to the sheep and the cattle and no one else. Alexis-Baker concludes by also challenging the assumption that the passage shows Jesus violently attacking animals. He writes that “a makeshift whip of rope would hardly do much more than get them moving out the door.”[955] Accordingly, in the view of Christian anarchists and pacifists, the passage can be justifiably read in such a way that does not contradict the Christian ethic of nonviolence.
+Teotihuacán, the Maya, and Ceramic Interchange: A Contextual Perspective. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 125–146. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-*** IV. Romans 13 and Rendering unto Caesar
+Campeche, the Itzá, and the Postclassic: A Study in Ethnohistorical Archaeology. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 379–408. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-The two most commonly cited biblical passages that present potential problems for the Christian anarchist thesis are Romans 13:1–7 and Jesus’s instruction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” in Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25. Each passage can be read in such a way that it appears that Christians are called to be obedient, tax-paying citizens because God has ordained the governing authorities as instruments of His will. In other words, according to such a reading, a Christian cannot be an anarchist, for anarchists rebel against the legitimate authorities that God has put into power. This section will consider Christian anarchist interpretations of these passages. We will see that, for Christian anarchists, not only do these passages not seriously undercut Christian anarchist claims, but they in fact end up supporting the Christian anarchist perspective.[956]
+Ceramics of the Lowlands. A paper presented at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, “At the Eve of the Collapse: Ancient Maya Societies in the Eighth Century A.D.,” held on October 7–8, 1989.
-**** A. Romans 13
+Ball, Joseph, and Jennifer Taschek
-Romans 13:1–7 is often presented as quite self-evidently teaching Christians to submit to governing authorities. D.A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, for example, write: “Serving God does not mean, Paul cautions, that the Christian can ignore the legitimate claims that government makes on us (Romans 13:1–7).”[957] Some Christian anarchists do not dispute this reading, and argue simply that Paul was mistaken. For these thinkers, “Jesus is the important teacher, and Paul is just an erring follower who has been given too much kudos by the tradition.”[958] Accordingly, these Christian anarchists—Tolstoy among them—are simply not concerned with re-interpreting Paul’s teachings when they appear to contradict those of Jesus. If Paul appears to say something contrary to what Jesus said, Jesus’s words are to be given precedence. Other Christian anarchists and pacifists, however, seek rather to re-interpret Romans 13:1–7. This desire flows from the conviction that the New Testament exhibits anarchistic and/or pacifistic tendencies, which should not be ignored because of a mere seven verses.[959]
+Teotihuacán’s Fall and the Rise of the Itzá: Realignments and Role Changes in the Terminal Classic Maya Lowlands. In Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacan: A.D. 700–900, edited by Richard Diehl and Janet Berio, 187–200. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-One element of Romans 13 that Christian anarchists and pacifists find especially noteworthy is the fact that it follows immediately upon an apparent near-recitation of the Sermon on the Mount in Romans 12. Stanley Hauerwas emphasizes this fact, noting that the instruction “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” appears only after Paul exhorts his readers to “love one another,” “bless those who persecute you,” “live in harmony with one another,” “do not repay anyone evil for evil,” “live peaceably with all,” “never avenge yourselves,” and finally, “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”[960]
+Barrera Rubio, Alfredo
-Seen in that light, Romans 13 is not a betrayal of Jesus’ revolutionary Sermon on the Mount ... but actually an exegesis of it ... In the Sermon, Jesus calls for [H]is followers to love their enemies ... In Romans 12–13, Paul is doing the same, and applying Jesus’ commandments to the authorities.[961]
+Mural Paintings of the Puuc Region in Yucatán. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 173–182. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-From such a perspective, then, Christians are to be “subject” in the same way that they are to turn the other cheek or to give their cloak when asked for their coat: it is a way of frustrating the worldly ways of power and violence and instead overcoming evil with good.
+Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo
-Such “subversive subjection” is further strengthened by Paul’s words in Colossians 2:15[962] that Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” What does it mean to be subject to disarmed rulers? Vernard Eller writes that Paul’s instruction “is sheerly neutral and anarchical counsel of ‘not-doing’—not doing resistance, anger, assault, power play, or anything contrary to the ‘loving the enemy’ which is, of course, Paul’s main theme.”[963] From this perspective, the passage teaches indifference towards government more than anything else. And this is consistent with Jesus’s cautioning against the kind of violent revolution called for by Zealots. Christians are to deny the cycle of violence and power altogether, which means simply refusing to participate in the worldly ways of power, which are the ways of violently displacing one power for another. The Christian anarchist views Christianity as a call to live otherwise than fighting for power.
+Diccionario Maya Cordemex, Maya-Español, Español-Maya. Mérida: Ediciones Cordemex.
-However, Romans 13:1–7 appears to do more than simply present the Christian’s role as indifference towards authorities. The passage seems to go so far as acknowledging the legitimacy—indeed, God-ordained legitimacy—of the state and its violent enforcement of order. However, Christian anarchists and pacifists think that such a reading is, minimally, an oversimplification. John Howard Yoder, for example, argues that
+Baudez, Claude F., and Anne S. Dowd
-God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them ... Nor is it that by ordering this realm God specifically, morally approves of what a government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills; the librarian does not create or approve of the book she or he catalogues and shelves. Likewise, God does not take responsibility for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be.”[964]
+La decoración de Templo 18. In Introducción a la arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 447–500. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-Samuel 8 appears to affirm such a reading. As Nekeisha Alexis writes, “God makes it clear to Samuel and the Israelites that by choosing a king the Israelites have also rejected God and the freedom God provides from oppression, injustice, war and taxation.”[965] Christian anarchists therefore do not read Romans 13 as a statement of God’s approval of governing authorities; rather, these rulers “remain living evidence of humanity’s rebellion against God.”[966]
+Baudez, Claude F., and Peter Mathews
-Furthermore, Yoder writes that “the sword (machaira) is the symbol of judicial authority. It was not the instrument of capital punishment,” nor was it “the instrument of war.”[967] Not only this, but Yoder argues that “verses 3–4 did not include any services that the Christian is asked to render”;[968] rather, these verses describe the authorities as carrying out a function “which the Christian was to leave to God,”[969] meaning, in other words, that the role taken up by state authorities is one that can only rightly be claimed by God and therefore state authorities have no claim on the allegiance of Christians. According to such a reading, then, Christians are called to subjection not because of the legitimacy of the rulers but because of Christ’s teachings to love one’s enemies, to not be conformed to the ways of the world, and to overcome evil with good.
+Capture and Sacrifice at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 31–40. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.
-One more curious element of Romans 13:1–7 should be noted: Paul claims that “rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” Christoyannpoulos points out that Christian anarchists “never really seem to fully make sense of” this passage: “What they do point out, however, is that it cannot mean that these authorities do not persecute good people: they crucified Jesus, Paul himself was beaten by them, and Christians were being persecuted just as Paul was writing these words.”[970] What, then, might Paul mean by saying that rulers are a “terror” only to bad conduct? One possibility is that Christians are not to fear rulers, not because rulers will not persecute Christians, but rather because, for the Christian, human rulers are not legitimate sources of authority and so are not to be heeded when their laws conflict with the teachings of Christ. Why fear the authority of those whose authority is not recognized by God? If Christians are members of Christ’s kingdom, and His kingdom is “not of this world,” then Christians have no reason to concern themselves with human kingdoms.[971]
+Benavides C., Antonio
-**** B. Rendering unto Caesar
+Los Caminos de Coba y sus implicaciones sociales. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
-Jesus’s admonition to “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”[972] presents another possible problem for Christian anarchism. Despite Jesus’s apparently instructing His followers to pay taxes—giving to Caesar what is his, which could be taken further to imply acknowledging the legitimacy of His authority—Christian anarchists read this passage as supporting rather than undermining their anarchist position. Greg Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy point out in The Jesus Legend that “within Palestine coins were often printed without the customary representation of the emperor on them.in deference to [Jewish people’s] sensitivity to anything that could violate the second commandment.”[973] This suggests that Jesus may in fact have been pointing out the Pharisees’ potential violation of the Second Commandment. At issue in this episode, then, would not so much be the question of taxes as the question of to whom allegiance is to be given.
+Berlin, Heinrich
-Furthermore, as Jacques Ellul points out, it is with the coins that “the basis and limit of [the emperor’s] power” is revealed, for “whatever does not bear Caesar’s mark does not belong to him.” Most importantly, “Caesar has no right of life and death,”[974] for humans are made in God’s image, not Caesar’s. Dorothy Day, in her oft-quoted response upon being questioned on this passage, similarly says, “[w]hen you give to God what belongs to God, there is nothing left for Caesar.”[975] Therefore, Caesar can certainly claim no legitimate dominion over human life.
+El glifo “emblema” en las inscripciones mayas. Journal de la Société des América- nistes, n.s. 47:111–119. Paris.
-For many Christian anarchists, therefore, this passage, like Romans 13, displays an attitude of, at best, indifference to the governing authorities. It is not a call to obey, for the Christian does not owe obedience to human authorities. Neither is it a call to disobey. Indeed, in Eller’s view, tax evasion is unchristian not because of the legitimacy of taxes, but because “withholding the coin is the ‘revolution’ that stakes everything upon the contest of human arkys.”[976] Instead, the Christian should give Caesar’s coins back when asked and get back to the truly important work of pursuing Christ’s (un)kingdom.
+Glifos nominales en el sarcófago de Palenque. Humanidades 2(10); 1–8. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
-Thus, once again, we see Christian anarchism as a way of living differently which seeks to operate entirely outside of the political realm, characterized as it is by the endless struggle for power. Christian anarchists attempt to live according to the demands of the (un)kingdom of God.
+The Palenque Triad. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, n.s. 52:91–99. Paris.
-*** V. Christian Market Anarchism
+. Estudios Epigraphicos II. Antropología e Historia de Guatemala, vol. xx, no. I, 13–24. Guatemala: Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala.
-As we noted in the introduction, there are two kinds of Christian anarchists—those who defend anarchism primarily on biblical grounds, and those who defend it primarily by appealing to natural law and natural rights commonly associated with Christian theism (there are early figures with no clear commitments on this question, such as David Lipscomb).[977] The biblical anarchists tend to be socialists or friendly to socialism, rejecting property rights as fundamental natural or human rights insofar as they have a theory of property. (Alex Salter argues convincingly that they do not have one.[978]) The natural law anarchists tend to embrace capitalism by embracing natural property rights, arguing that states necessarily violate property rights and so should be abolished. They have rich economic theories, almost always drawn from the Austrian school of economics. They also provide detailed models of how an anarchist economic order would function, again in contrast to the socialists—even those who spoke to the issue briefly, like Tolstoy.[979]
+Miscelánea palencano. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, LIX:107–135.
-Importantly, though, Christian market anarchists only occasionally argue that Scripture favors their position. They instead offer more modest arguments that their view is compatible with Scripture, dogmatic theology, and in some cases, Catholic social thought. One might be tempted to conclude for this reason that the market anarchists are not true Christian anarchists because, while they are Christian and anarchist, their anarchism is seldom based in a developed understanding of Christian theology, and the arguments for anarchism are rooted in natural law and natural rights can presumably be given apart from revelation.
+Contribution to the Understanding of the Inscriptions of Naranjo. Bulletin de la Société Suisse des Américanistes 37:7–14. Translated by Christopher Jones.
-However, some market anarchists argue that certain biblical and theological commitments tell in favor of anarchism. Since this volume already contains several discussions of market anarchism and the arguments for it, we will not review those arguments here. Instead, we will examine how Christian market anarchists rebuff certain kinds of statist and anti-market commitments and arguments from Scripture, Christian theology, and Catholic social thought. In particular, we will analyze such discussions in the work of James Redford, Stephen W. Carson, Norman Horn, Thomas E. Woods, Jim Fedako, and Alex Salter.
+Signos y significados en las inscripciones mayas. Guatemala: Instituto Nacional del Patrimonia Cultural de Guatemala.
-The market anarchists agree with many of the arguments for Christian anarchism adopted by more familiar biblical, socialist anarchists, which we do not need to review. Where they differ is in defending a basis for natural property rights and markets in Scripture and Christian theology, which when combined with anarchist arguments jointly imply anarcho-capitalism. Redford and Carson, for instance, argue that passages like the Parable of the Talents[980] and the Parable of the Tenants[981] (Redford)[982] and the Mosaic Law (Carson)[983] seem to presuppose the legitimacy of private property independently of the state or any nation-state-style government. All three sources (Talents, Tenants, Mosaic Law) treat private property holdings as legitimate and violations as unjust, and they do so independently of any state convention or definition. In this, Carson, Redford, and others follow lines of argument advanced within Christian libertarianism more generally.
+Berlo, Janet
-Market anarchists also try to show that Jesus’s teachings on wealth are not incompatible with capitalism. Market anarchists sometimes argue that Jesus is primarily condemning riches garnered unjustly.[984] Carson advances the fascinating claim that, when God told the Israelites how to govern themselves, no mention is made of large-scale restrictions on property rights and certainly not the abolition of property.[985] Provision is made for the poor, but there is a notable absence of other powers associated with modern states. And commercial relations are treated as ordinary.
+The Teotihuacán Trapeze and Ray Sign: A Study of the Diffusion of Symbols. M.A. thesis. Department of the History of Art, Yale University.
-On top of this, the yearning for a state in 1 Samuel 8 is condemned as a rejection of God. Thus, if God opposed capitalism and favored the state, He would have said as much in seemingly embracing the private law anarchy found in the Book of Judges. The Israelites plainly have property rights and no state (“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”),[986] which is rather striking.
+Bernal, Ignacio
-There is also something to be said for the idea that the Old Testament generally acknowledges rights to property in agrarian, nomadic societies in which there existed no state to create or define or restrict property rights. Examples include interactions between early humans, such as those between different nomadic shepherds, and such as those between Abraham and other small tribes.
+100 Masterpieces of the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
-Redford focuses primarily on New Testament passages, arguing that Jesus condemned taxation and that Romans 13 should be read in a subversive way as undermining current Roman authority. Carson[987] and Norman Horn[988] argue more plausibly that Romans 13 only specifies when Christians are to obey government, and not the ideal form of government. There is no incompatibility between wanting to abolish or limit the state and having a duty to God to obey the state and its laws in the meanwhile. As Jim Fedako puts it,
+Beyer, Hermann
-As Christians, we are to obey the legitimate governing authority, but it does not follow that the authority must be the state. Paul’s instructions are the same no matter who is in charge. And in a market anarchist world, we would only be forced to obey the governing authorities whose properties we chose to enter.[989]
+Studies of the Inscriptions of Chichón Itzá. In Contributions to American Archaeology No. 21. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 483. Washington, D.C.
-Carson argues similarly, “Paul’s instruction to individual believers to submit to existing authorities does not preclude a people’s return to God being our only king under a just Law.”[990]
+Bricker, Victoria
-The work of Catholic market anarchists, first and foremost Thomas E. Woods, Jr., argues for the compatibility of Catholic social teaching with capitalism and the right to private property. While many Church teachings seem hostile to the market, Woods interprets those passages as a combination of an authoritative moral teaching with a non-authoritative application of the moral teaching to economic policy. So, there are authoritative moral teachings about helping the poor, but attempts by popes and other theological authorities to extend these teachings to economic policy to support, say, foreign aid, unions, and a living wage, are not authoritative because these teachings concern moral principles alone, and not their application to the economy based on economic science. The Church has no special expertise in economics, and economic science is in a certain sense value-free, whereas Church teachings are value-laden.
+A Grammar of Mayan Hieroglyphs. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 56. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University.
-Thus, while Woods does not defend market anarchism in his book on Catholic social teaching, it is not hard to see how a Catholic defense of market anarchism could proceed. Woods and others can acknowledge that moral principles in Catholic social thought are authoritative, and then argue that combining the moral principles with Austrian economics and, indeed, a good deal of basic economics more generally, shows that market anarchism is the best and most just economic regime because it is the best expression of Catholic moral teaching. On this point, Woods often stresses the Catholic teaching regarding subsidiarity, where power should be decentralized to local levels when that is feasible. And since libertarian economics and political science has shown that we can radically decentralize power, the principle of subsidiarity provides a defense of radical political decentralization, which can imply anarchism.
+n.d. The Last Gasp of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Chan Kan. In Word and Image in Maya Culture, edited by William Hanks and Don Rice. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (in press).
-Overall, then, we can generate a formula for justifying Christian market anarchism: (1) adopt Christian anarchist readings of the passages of Scripture that otherwise seem to favor the legitimacy and justice of the nation-state; (2) adopt interpretations of Scripture that favor pacifism and nonviolence, or something near enough; (3) argue that Scripture supports a natural right of private property and that this right is incompatible with socialism; and (4) show that other forms of Christian teaching, like Catholic social thought, the Church fathers, Jewish law, etc., are compatible with market anarchism. Christian market anarchists can then (5) draw on natural reason and natural law to ground a right to private property. Finally, they can (6) take economic insights, especially, perhaps, those embraced by the Austrian school of economics, to show that market anarchism is feasible, stable, and enormously productive in ways that make it superior to the state and anarcho-socialism, especially with regard to the poorest among us. In short, the case for market anarchism synthesizes the classical socialist anarchist critique of the state with the standard arguments offered for political libertarianism, with a dash of biblical exegesis devoted to vindicating property rights.
+Brown, Kenneth L.
-*** VI. Resolving the Capitalism–Socialism Disagreement between Christian Anarchists
+The Valley of Guatemala: A Highland Port of Trade. In Teotihuacán and Kami- naljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact, edited by William T. Sanders and Joseph W. Michels, 1–204. The Pennsylvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
-Christian market anarchists and socialist anarchists seldom engage one another. The most influential Christian socialist anarchists were largely unaware of the market anarchists, in particular since most died before market anarchism was articulated in the late 1970s and the 1980s. And, while market anarchists take on some socialist anarchist arguments against the state, they assume that anarchist socialists’ failure to provide a plausible theory of property means that their views on the topic are not authoritative and do not require refutation beyond the standard, non-religious arguments against socialism and anarchist socialism.
+Cabrera Castro. Rubén, Saburo Sugiyama, and George Cowgill
-But there are some passages in Scripture that might be used to settle the dispute. Salter has argued that the socialist anarchists like Ellul do not have a good explanation of Jesus’s use of violence in the temple cleansing.[991] Theorists like Ellul are pacifists, based on a fairly surface-level reading of Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.[992] But this raises the question of why Jesus made a whip to force the money-changers out of the temple. As Salter notes, “Christian anarcho-[socialists] are forced to confront the apparent inconsistency between Christ’s commandments in the Sermon on the Mount and His actions during the temple cleaning.”[993]
+Summer 1988 Discoveries at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. A paper presented at the 1988 Dumbarton Oaks Conference on “Art, Polity, and the City of Teotihuacán.”
-There isn’t an inherent contradiction here, but Jesus’s actions still raise a question for socialist anarchists, since their arguments are so heavily rooted in pacifism, and pacifism seems like it would allow for the formation of property relations, exchange, and so on, leading to anarchist capitalism of some sort. Socialist anarchists also don’t seem to have a clear and compelling response. Yoder[994] and Christoyannopoulos[995] think that Christ’s actions aren’t really violent, which seems mistaken. Ellul[996] argues that the temple cleansing just shows the supremacy of Christ’s teachings for us rather than His actions, but it is not clear why Ellul thinks we should prioritize one over the other. Oddly, Ellul doesn’t address the temple cleansing in Anarchy and Christianity. This might be because he thought that Jesus’s actions aren’t inconsistent with Ellul’s pacifism. But if that is what Ellul thought, he might have explained why, given the apparent tension.
+Carlson, John
-The market anarchist has an easy response: force is permitted to defend private property and avoid violations of property rights in exchange. Jesus’s violence is consistent with this. Jesus is defending His own house, the temple, against fraudulent money-changers. His use of defensive violence is thereby justified. Thus, one biblical argument for market anarchism over socialist anarchism is that market anarchism renders the Sermon on the Mount (condemning the initiation of force) consistent with the temple cleansing (permitting defensive force in a very specific case of defending private property). This is roughly the line Redford pursues.[997]
+Copán Altar Q: the Maya Astronomical Conference of A.D. 763? In Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony Aveni, 100–109. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-It is unclear, however, why Jesus didn’t single out defensive uses of violence as acceptable, so this argument strikes us as far from decisive. If we allow that Jesus’s actions were violent, this raises the question of the tenability of both socialist anarchism and market anarchism on the grounds that if Jesus used violence, He might assign some the authority to use violence in His name, which is essentially how Christians who favor the state have defended their position. One might go further than Jesus’s express teachings, and draw implications from other teachings. For instance, the Golden Rule[998] might license only defensive violence, since we may want to be able to defend ourselves against others, and so would not endorse the initiation of violence against others.
+Carr, H. S.
-On the flip side, socialist anarchists can appeal to Jesus’s consistent condemnation of wealthholding and of the rich to show that their position is more consistent with Scripture than market anarchism, insofar as capitalism is associated and even based on the goodness of wealthholding. Market anarchists see the tension and, as we noted, sometimes argue that the rich of Jesus’s day got their riches in ways that violate libertarian justice. The argument, then, is that Jesus is condemning not wealth or riches but ill-gotten wealth and riches. And yet, these are not the reasons Jesus cites. It is clear from the discussion with the rich young man[999] that wealth is a grave temptation that can set one against God. One cannot serve God and Mammon,[1000] even legitimately acquired Mammon. Thus, insofar as market anarchism depends on the legitimacy of allowing large economic inequalities between rich and poor, and socialist anarchism avoids these inequalities, socialist anarchism may be more consistent with Jesus’s teachings on wealth, as well as those elsewhere in the New Testament.
+a Faunal Utilization in a Late Preclassic Maya Community at Cerros, Belize. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University.
-A common response is that the Old Testament seems much friendlier to wealth-holding, as people are not required to give up all of their property, but rather to simply alleviate poverty, and in some cases, people seem blessed in virtue of receiving riches, as in Job’s compensation.[1001] But socialist anarchists can argue that New Testament teachings are more authoritative and direct and so should be decisive.
+b Preliminary Results of Analysis of Fauna. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Tol. 1, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel. 127–146. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-One way to rectify the tension between Christian market anarchism and Jesus’s teachings on wealth is to argue that, while market anarchism allows for economic inequalities, Jesus only condemns large-scale wealth-holding on ethical grounds. Natural justice may permit fairly large inequalities of wealth, but the rich are nonetheless ethically required to be generous, even if no one has the authority to force them to be generous. If this seems odd, just consider that Jesus’s teachings might in some ways go beyond natural justice, requiring Christians to do more than what is naturally required of them. This certainly seems to be the case with respect to Jesus’s teaching of unilateral forgiveness.[1002] Natural justice seems to only require forgiveness when the wrongdoer repents. Along the same lines, Jesus might require His followers to be generous, but think this goes beyond natural justice.
+Chase, Arlen F.
-This argument has some force. But market anarchists must still grapple with the force Peter appears to have wielded to kill Ananias and Sapphira,[1003] who refused to share their property with the community. The market anarchists will respond that Ananias and Sapphira had voluntarily agreed to become part of the early Church and that one of the conditions of the agreement was wealth-sharing, which does not indicate a rejection of capitalism.
+n.d. Cycles of Time: Caracol and the Maya Realm. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986, Vol. VII, edited by Merle Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
-It is also noteworthy that Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist held in high esteem by Christian market anarchists (though he himself was an atheist), argued that the apparent socialism in Acts is only a socialism of local people with respect to consumption goods, not capital goods.[1004] So even if there should be more sharing among Christians, this does not mean capital should be socially owned, as socialist anarchists demand. While one can doubt Mises’s skill at biblical exegesis, the general point stands that the Scriptures seem to speak to a local socialism of consumption goods alone.
+Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase
-Finally, it is an interesting feature of the Epistles that Paul never insists on enforcing a communist mode of economic life and exchange even within churches. Christians are of course required to care for one another, but the idea that everyone in each church must hold so much in common does not seem to be a theme of his writing. It is of course possible that he thought Christian churches simply took this for granted, but of all the problems Paul detects in the early Christian churches, failing to share on the extreme level of the Jerusalem Church does not seem to be among them. Perhaps the communal sharing of the Jerusalem Church had not gone well, and the disciples decided not to encourage it beyond what is required to care for the poor, such as Galatians 2:10, “Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.”
+a Investigations at the Classic Maya City of Caracol, Belize: 1985–1987. Pre- Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 3. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-We find these Scriptural arguments complex and inconclusive. But we do think there are at least Scriptural bases for Christian market anarchists and Christian socialist anarchists to settle their dispute one way or another.
+b Glimmers of a Forgotten Realm: Maya Archaeology at Caracol, Belize. Orlando: University of Central Florida.
+Chase, Diane Z., and Arlen F. Chase
-[904] Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Bible [Abridged Edition] (Exeter: Imprint, 2011) 31. Emphasis in original.
+Yucatec Influence in Terminal Classic Northern Belize. American Antiquity 47:- 596–614.
-[905] Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, trans. Constance Garnett (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2014) 123.
+Offerings to the Gods: Maya Archaeology at Santa Rita, Corozal. Orlando: University of Central Florida.
-[906] Leo Tolstoy, “The Slavery of our Time,” Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, ed. and intro. David Stephens (London: Phoenix, 1990) 145.
+Caracol Update: Recent Work at Caracol, Belize. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, held in Palenque, Chiapas, México, in June 1989.
-[907] Leo Tolstoy, “On Anarchy,” in Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, ed. and intro. David Stephens (London: Phoenix, 1990) 68.
+Cheek, Charles
-[908] Tolstoy, “Anarchy,” 68.
+Excavations at the Palangana and the Acropolis, Kaminaljuyu. Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact, edited by William 1. Sanders and Joseph W. Michels. The Pennsylvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
-[909] Tolstoy, “Slavery,” 149.
+Excavaciones el la Plaza Principal. Introducción a la Arqueología de Copón, Honduras. Tomo II, 191–290. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[910] David Stephens, “The Non-violent Anarchism of Leo Tolstoy,” in Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, ed. and intro. Stephens (London: Phoenix, 1990) 18.
+Cliff, Maynard B.
-[911] Tolstoy, “Slavery,” 143.
+Excavations in the Late Preclassic Nucleated Village. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 45–63. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-[912] Ibid.
+Closs, Michael
-[913] See Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, trans. Benj. R. Tucker (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1970). Available from [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org][http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-]] [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org][joseph-proudhon-what-is-property-an-inquiry-into-the-principle-of-right-and-of-governmen]].
+Venus in the Maya World: Glyphs, Gods and Associated Phenomena. In Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 147–172. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research Center.
+The Dynastic History of Naranjo: The Middle Period. In The Palenque Round Table Series, Vol. VII, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 65–78. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[914] Tolstoy, quoted in Stephens, 9.
+Coe, Michael D.
-[915] Stephens, 8.
+Archaeological Linkages with North and South America at La Victoria, Guatemala. American Anthropologist 62:363–393.
-[916] Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011) 11.
+A Model of Ancient Community Structure in the Maya Lowlands. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:97–114.
-[917] Ellul 13–14.
+The Maya Scribe and His World. New York: The Grolier Club.
-[918] Mikhail Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939), ed. Robert Graham (Montreal/ New York/London: Black Rose, 2005) 105.
+Lords of the Underworld: Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University.
-[919] Ellul, 19–20.
+Old Godsand Young Heroes: The Pearlman Collection of Maya Ceramics. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum.
-[920] According to Eller, “The ‘-archy’ root is a common Greek word that means ‘priority,’ ‘primacy,’ ‘primordial,’ ‘principle,’ ‘prince,’ and the like” (Eller, Christian Anarchy, 1). Furthermore, Eller notes, “in Colassians 1:18 Paul actually identifies Jesus as ‘the beginning,’ ‘the prime,’ ‘THE ARKY’” (ibid., Eller’s capitalization). Thus, for Eller, “Christian anarchy” could also be described as “theonomy—the rule, the ordering, the arky of God” (ibid., 3, Eller’s emphasis). Nevertheless, Christoyannopoulos concludes that “‘Christian anarchism’ probably remains the best way to name [Eller’s] interpretation of Christianity, because it immediately declares that for its advocates, the rejection of the state and the growth of a stateless society are inevitable political implications of Christianity.”
+Coe, William R.
-[921] Vernard Eller, Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1987) 3. Emphasis in original.
+Piedras Negras Archaeology: Artifacts, Caches, and Burials. University Museum Monograph 18. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
-[922] Eller, 2.
+a Tikal, Guatemala, and Emergent Maya Civilization. Science. 147:1401–1419.
-[923] Ibid., 12.
+b Tikal: Ten Years of Study of a Maya Ruin in the Lowlands of Guatemala. Expedition 8:5–56.
-[924] Ibid., 3. Emphasis in original.
+Tikal: A Handbook of Ancient Maya Ruins. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
-[925] Ibid., 3.
+Coggins, Clemency
-[926] Mark Van Steenwyk, That Holy Anarchist: Reflections on Christianity & Anarchism (Minneapolis, MN: Missio Dei, 2012) 14.
+Painting and Drawing Styles at Tikal: An Historical and Iconographic Reconstruction. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.
-[927] See Christoyannpoulos, Christian Anarchism.
+a A New Order and the Role of the Calendar: Some Characteristics of the Middle Classic Period at Tikal. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 38–50. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[928] Nekeisha Alexis-Baker, “Embracing God and Rejecting Masters: On Christianity, Anarchism, and the State,” The Utopian 5 (2006): 78.
+b Teotihuacán at Tikal in the Early Classic Period. Actes de XLI1 Congrés International des Américanistes 8:251–269. Paris.
-[929] Dorothy Day, “Our Stand,” Catholic Worker (June 1940, 1, 4): 1.
+An Instrument of Expansion: Monte Alban, Teotihuacán, and Tikal. In Highland- Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 49–68. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[930] Matt. 5:2–11.
+n.d. There’s No Place Like Hom. A paper presented at “Elite Interaction Among the Classic Maya,” a seminar held at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, October 1986.
-[931] Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe, trans. Huntington Smith (Guildford: White Crow, 2009) 16.
+Coggins, Clemency C., and Orrin C. Shane HI
-[932] Matt. 5:38-39a.
+Cenote of Sacrifice: Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichén Itzá. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[933] Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003) 13.
+Cortez, Constance
-[934] Christoyannopoulos, 76.
+The Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic Maya Art. M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
-[935] Kurt Willems, “Nonviolence 101—Resistance is Futile ... or the Meaning of avTiarqvai (part 2).” The Pangea Blog, Patheos.com (February 7, 2011), [[http://www.patheos.com][www.patheos.com/blogs/thepangeablog/2011/02/07/]] [[http://www.patheos.com][nonviolence-101-resistance-is-futile-or-the-meaning-of-%E1%BC%80%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B9%CF%]] [[http://www.patheos.com][83%CF%84%E1%BF%86%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B9-part-2/]] (last visited Aug. 21, 2019).
+Cowgill, George L.
-[936] See Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism.
+Teotihuacán, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R Willey, 51–62. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[937] Matt. 26:52. Our emphasis and Ellul’s.
+Crane, C. J.
-[938] Ellul, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, trans. Cecilia Gaul Kings (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011) 95.
+Late Preelassic Maya Agriculture, Wiki Plant Utilization, and Land-Use Practices. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1. An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 147–166. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-[939] Ibid., 100. Emphasis in original.
+Crocker-Delataille, Lin
-[940] Matt. 5:39.
+The Maya. In Rediscovered Masterpieces of Precolumbian Art. Boulogne, France: Editions Arts 135.
-[941] Michael Elliot, Freedom, Justice and Christian Counter-Culture (London: SCM, 1990) 33.
+Cui bert, T. Patrick
-[942] Ellul, Violence, 39.
+The Classic Maya Collapse, edited by T. Patrick Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-[943] Tolstoy, “Slavery,” 145.
+Early Maya Development at Tikal, Guatemala. In The Origins of Maya Civilization. edited by Richard E. W. Adams, 27–43. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press.
-[944] See, for example, Peter Gelderloos’ How Nonviolence Protects the State. 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Olympia, WA: Detritus, 2018).
+The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization. In The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, 69–101. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
-[945] Nathan J. Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012) 129.
+Davoust, M.
-[946] De Ligt served as a pastor in the Reformed Church of the Netherlands before ultimately moving away from Christianity towards universalism. For more on this, see “Bart de Ligt (1883–1938): Non-violent Anarcho-Pacifist,” available from [[http://www.satyagrahafoundation.org][www.satyagrahafoundation.org/bart-de-ligt-1883-1938-non-violent-anar]] [[http://www.satyagrahafoundation.org][cho-pacifist/]].
+Les chefs mayas de Chichón Itzá. A manuscript circulated by the author. Angiers, France.
-[947] Bart de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution (Winchester: Pluto, 1989) 72.
+Les premiers chefs mayas de Chichén Itzá. Mexicon 11(2), May. Demarest, Arthur A.
-[948] De Ligt, 168.
+The Archaeology of Santa Leticia and the Rise of Maya Civilization. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 52. New Orleans: Tulane University.
-[949] Matt. 5:43–44.
+Diehl, Richard A.
-[950] Christoyannpoulos, 41.
+Tula. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, gen. editor, Victoria R. Bricker; vol. editor, Jeremy A. Sabloff, with the assistance of Patricia A. Andrews, 277–295. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[951] Ibid., 52.
+Diehl, Richard A., and Janet C. Berlo, editors
-[952] John Dear, “Didn’t Jesus Overturn Tables and Chase People Out of the Temple with a Whip?” in Tripp York, Justin Barringer, Shane Claiborne, and Stanley Hauerwas (eds.), A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, pp. 184–191 (La Vergne, TN: Wipf and Stock, 2012) 189.
+Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacán: A.D. 700–900. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[953] Ibid., 188.
+Dillon, Brian
-[954] Andy Alexis-Baker, “Violence, Nonviolence and the Temple Incident in John 2:13–15,” in Biblical Interpretation 20 (2012): 94. Our emphasis.
+Bound Prisoners in Maya Art. Journal of New World Archaeology 5(l):24—45. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles.
-[955] Ibid. Dear agrees with this assessment, writing, “cattlemen and shepherds used cords and ropes to lead animals up the high stone walkways into the building. Jesus simply took those cords, which the cattle, sheep, and oxen would have recognized, and started to drive them outside” (189).
+Drane, John W.
-[956] We have not included a discussion of 1 Peter 2:13—25 in this section. This choice was made both in the interest of space and because the passage has received less attention in the Christian anarchist literature than the others. Christoyannopoulos notes that, “for Christian anarchists,” 1 Peter 2:13—25 “is actually just repeating the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 13” (156). For a more in-depth discussion of this passage, see Ellul’s Anarchy and Christianity, and Justin Bronson Barringer, “Subordination and Freedom: Tracing Anarchist Themes in First Peter,” in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Matthew S. Adams (eds.), Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume II, pp. 132—172 (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018). doi: [[https://doi.org][https://doi.org/10.16993/bas]].
+The Old Testament Story: An Illustrated Documentary. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers.
-[957] D.A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament. 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zonder- van, 2005) 392. N.T. Wright appears not to disagree entirely with this approach, but he does offer some important qualifications which bring him closer to the reading of Christian anarchists and pacifists. According to Wright, Paul views it as “vital that he steer Christians away from the assumption that loyalty to Jesus would mean the kind of civil disobedience and revolution that merely reshuffles the political cards into a different order.” (Paul: In Fresh Perspective, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005, 78). Such a reading is consistent with the Christian anarchist conviction that the cycles of violence and power cannot be escaped through violent or power-grabbing means. According to Wright’s reading, the kingdom of God is so totally other to the kingdoms of the world that the ways that the latter are established and maintained—viz., through power and violence—cannot possibly aid the coming of the former. “The church,” he concludes, “must live as a sign of the kingdom yet to come, but since that kingdom is characterized by justice, peace and joy in the Spirit (14.17), it cannot be inaugurated in the present by violence and hatred” (79).
+Dütting, Dieter, and Anthony F. Aveni
-[958] Christoyannopoulos, 149. Emphasis in original.
+The 2 Cib 14 Mol Event in the Palenque Inscriptions. Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologic 107. Branschweig.
-[959] It is worth noting that some commentators question the legitimacy of Romans 13:1—7. Moo explains that the “argument comes on the scene quite abruptly, with no explicit syntactical connection with what has come before it—and not much evidence of any connection in subject matter either. In fact, vv. 8—10, highlighting the centrality of love for the Christian ethic, seem to relate [to] vv. 9—21, which also focus on love and its outworkings. When we add to these points the allegedly un-Pauline vocabulary of the passage, we can understand why some scholars think that a redactor has added 13:1—7 to Paul’s original letter to the Romans” (790—791). Bernard Brandon Scott similarly argues that “Romans 13:1—7 sticks out like a sore thumb” and that “there are three good reasons to doubt that Romans 13:1—7 was part of the original letter.” First, “the abruptness with which it interrupts the pareneses”; second, “the lack of an eschatological or apocalyptic sense, something essential to Paul”; and third, the passage “does not really fit with Paul’s understanding of freedom” (“Romans 13 in Our Time,” Westar Institute, June 25, 2018. [[http://www.westarinstitute.org][www.westarinstitute.org/blog/romans-13-in-our-time/]]). It appears, however, that Christian anarchists and pacifists have not exploited this possibility, opting instead either to re-interpret the passage or else simply to read Paul as an imperfect follower of Christ who is therefore capable of being mistaken.
+Edmonson, Munro
-[960] Stanley Hauerwas, “God Talk: Religious Speech in Public Discourse.” Panel discussion at Duke University. Durham, NC. 5 Mar. 2007.
+Quiche-English Dictionary. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, Pub. 30. New Orleans.
-[961] Christoyannopoulos, 151.
+The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, Pub. 35. New Orleans.
-[962] Many commentators argue that Colossians was not in fact written by Paul, but rather by one of Paul’s followers. For example, Carson, Moo, and Morris write: “many recent scholars think that a follower of Paul rather than the apostle himself actually penned the book” (D.A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992, 332). However, they continue, “It is strongly urged by some that the actual authorship of the letter does not matter. It is agreed that there is a Pauline connection; at the very least the author must have come from the devoted followers of Paul, and he has given a Pauline viewpoint in this letter” (338). Similarly, James D.G. Dunn writes, “I have to confirm the strong likelihood that the letter comes from a hand other than Paul’s.” However, he writes, “the issue might not be quite so crucial for a full appreciation of the letter’s significance” (The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon: A Commentary on the Greek Text, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996, 35). It is beyond the scope of the present paper to discuss the matter further; suffice it to say for present purposes that it is reasonable to locate the source of Colossians in Paul’s thought even if Paul was not the author of the letter itself.
+The Ancient Future of the Itzá: The Book of Chilam Balam ofTizimin. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[963] Eller, 199.
+Heaven Born Mérida and Its Destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[964] John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994) 201. Emphasis in original.
+Eliade. Mircea
-[965] Nekeisha Alexis-Baker, 78.
+Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-[966] Christoyannopoulos, 153.
+Fahsen, Federico
-[967] Yoder, 203.
+A Glyph for Self-Sacrifice in Several Maya Inscriptions. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 11. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-[968] Ibid.
+a A New Early Classic Text from Tikal. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 17. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-[969] Ibid., 198.
+b Los personajes de Tikal en el Clásico Temprano: la evidencia epigráfica. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 47–60. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.
-[970] Christoyannopoulos, 152.
+Farris, Nancy M.
-[971] Does Paul’s behavior in Acts nevertheless suggest that he did, ultimately, view the Empire as worthy of affirmation? N.T. Wright argues that in Paul’s writings, “we should expect what we in fact find: that, for Paul, Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not” (Paul, 69). Wright thus views Paul’s behavior in Acts in the light of this conviction. Paul “is prepared to submit to the courts, but is also more than prepared to remind them of their business and to call them to account when they overstep their duty. He uses his own Roman citizenship when it suits the demands of his mission. But at the same time he is fearless in announcing, and living by, a different allegiance” (Paul, 70). This is consistent with the way that many Christian anarchists have read Romans 13—namely, as an admonition to live peaceably with all, including the governing authorities, while nevertheless recognizing that human authorities ultimately have no claim over the allegiance of the Christian.
+Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-[972] Mk. 12:13–17.
+Fash, Barbara
-[973] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Greg Boyd, The Jesus Legend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007) 109.
+n.d. Temple 20 and the House of Bats. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, México, June 1989.
-[974] Ellul, Anarchy, 60–61.
+Fash, Barbara, William Fash, Sheree Lane, Rudy Larios, Linda Schele, and David Stuart
-[975] Dorothy Day, quoted in Brad Spangler, “Give Nothing unto Caesar,” Center for a Stateless Society, 11 October 2010.
+n.d. Classic Maya Community Houses and Political Evolution: Investigations of Copán Structure 22A. A paper submitted to the Journal of Eield Archaeology. September 1989.
-[976] Eller, 11.
+Fash, William
-[977] David Lipscomb, Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation to It (Nashville, TN: McQuiddy, 1913); Ed Stringham, “The Radical Libertarian Political Economy of 19<sup>th</sup> Century Preacher David Lipscomb,” in Independent Institute Working Paper Number 66 (2006).
+a Classic Maya State Formation: A Case Study and Its Implications. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
-[978] Alexander Salter, “Christian Anarchism: Communitarian or Capitalist?” in Libertarian Papers 4 (2012), 151–162.
+b Deducing Social Organization from Classic Maya Settlement Patterns: A Case Study from the Copán Valley. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 261–288. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-[979] Christian socialist anarchists do occasionally pair their critiques of capitalism with some reflections on what a post-capitalist economy might look like (see, for example, Dorothy Day, “Our Brothers, the Communists,” or the “Capitalism” library entry on jesusradicals.com). But engagement in more detailed descriptions of an anarchist economy has not taken center stage in Christian anarchist writings up to this point. Perhaps this is simply because, in calling themselves “anarchists,” Christian anarchists are implicitly signalling their agreement with the economic vision of authors such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.—this appears to be the case, for example, with the favorable references to Proudhon and Bakunin by Tolstoy and Ellul, respectively—and so do not see a reason to devote special attention to the question.
+c Reconocimiento y excavaciones en el valle. Introducción a la arqueología de Copán, Honduras, 229–470. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-[980] Matt. 25:14–30.
+La secuencia de ocupación del Grupo 9N-8, Las Sepulturas, Copán, y sus implicaciones teóricas. Yaxkin VIII:135–149. Honduras: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-[981] Matt. 21:33–41.
+La fachada de la Estructura 9N-82: composición, forma e iconografía. In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-[982] James Redford, “Jesus Is an Anarchist” (December 4, 2011). Available at SSRN: [[https://ssrn.com][https://ssrn.com/]] [[https://ssrn.com][abstract=1337761 ]]or [[http://dx.doi.org][http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1337761]], 32–33.
+The Sculpture Facade of Structure 9N-82: Content, Form, and Meaning. In The House of the Bacabs, edited by David Webster. Washington, D.C.; Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[983] Stephen W. Carson, “Biblical Anarchism,” LewRockwell.com (June 7, 2011), [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrockwell.com/]] [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][2001/06/stephen-w-carson/no-government-but-god/ ]](last visited Aug. 20, 2019).
+n.d. A Middle Formative Cemetery from Copán, Honduras. A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 1982. Copy in possession of the authors.
-[984] Redford, 44–45. See also Yoder’s discussion of the Jubilee and Jesus’ condemnation of unrighteous wealth in The Politics of Jesus.
+Fash, William, and Linda Schele
-[985] Carson.
+The Inscriptions of Copán and the Dissolution of Centralized Rule. A paper given at the symposium on “The Maya Collapse: The Copán Case” at the Fifty-first Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, New Orleans.
-[986] Judges 17:6; Judges 21:25.
+Fash, William, and David Stuart
-[987] Carson.
+n.d. Interaction and Historical Process in Copán. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
-[988] Norman Horn, “New Testament Theology of the State,” LewRockwell.com (September 29, 2007), [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrockwell.com/2007/09/norman-horn/new-testament-theology-of-the-state/]] (last visited Aug. 20, 2019).
+Fialko, Vilma
-[989] James Fedako, “Romans 13 and Anarcho-Capitalism,” (February 25, 2010). [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrockwell.com/]] [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][2010/02/jim-fedako/romans-13-and-anarcho-capitalism/ ]](last visited Aug. 20, 2019).
+El Marcador de Juego de Pelota de Tikal: nuevas referencias epigráficas para el Clásico Temprano. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 61–80. Guatemala City: Asociatión Tikal.
-[990] Carson.
+Fields, Virginia
-[991] Matt 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–16.
+n.d. Political Symbolism Among the Olmecs. An unpublished paper on file, Department of Art History, University of Texas, Austin, dated 1982.
-[992] Matt 5:38–41.
+Folan, William J., Ellen R. Kintz, and Loraine A. Fletcher
-[993] Salter, 158.
+Cobá: A Classic Maya Metropolis. New York: Academic Press.
-[994] Yoder, 42–43.
+Folan, William J., and George E. Stuart
-[995] Christoyannopoulos, 85.
+El Proyecto Cartográfico Arqueológico de Cobá, Quintana Roo: Informes Interinos Números 1,2, y 3, Boletín de la Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán 4(22–23): 15–71.
-[996] Ellul, Violence, 17.
+Follett, Prescott H. F.
-[997] Redford, 33–34.
+War and Weapons of the Maya. In Middle American Papers. Middle American Research Series 4, edited by Maurice Ries, 373–410. New Orleans: Tulane University.
-[998] Matt. 7:12.
+Foncerrada de Molina, Marta
-[999] Matt 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30.
+La pintura mural de Cacaxtla. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 46. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-[1000] Matt. 6:24.
+Fox, James
-[1001] Job 42:10–17.
+a Polyvalance in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 17–76. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.
-[1002] Matt. 18:22.
+b The Hieroglyphic Band in the Casa Colorada. A paper presented at the American Anthropological Association, November 17, 1984, Denver, Colorado.
-[1003] Acts 5:1–11.
+n.d. Some Readings Involving Dates at Chichón Itzá. A paper presented at “The Language of the Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.
-[1004] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1951) 414.
+Fox, John W.
-* Part III: Legitimacy and Order
+Lowland to Highland Mexicanization Processes in Southern Mesoamerica. American Antiquity 45(l):43–54.
-** 14. Anarchism and Political Obligation; An Introduction
+Maya Postclassic State Formation: Segmentary Lineage Migration in Advancing Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-*Magda Egoumenides*
+On the Rise and Fall of Tuldns and Maya Segmentary States. American Anthropologist 91(3):656–681.
-*** I. Introduction
+Freidel, David A.
-Anarchists believe that relations of domination are immoral. The coercion and exploitation of one individual by another is unjustified, as is the control of the individual by a collective, such as the state. The values of freedom and equality are paramount. A strand of anarchism expresses these positions within the context of philosophical debates about political obligation, and this has a distinct impact on our approach to political institutions.
+Maritime Adaptation and the Rise of Maya Civilization: The View from Cerros, Belize. In Prehistoric Coastal Adaptations, edited by B. Stark and B. Voorhies, 239–265. New York: Academic Press.
-Anarchism is skepticism toward authority.[1005] Its unifying position is that not all forms of authority are justified, and we should refrain from any acceptance of them prior to their satisfactory justification. One form of authority that anarchists consider unjustified is the political authority of the state. Although “‘anti-statism’ does not define anarchism,” because anarchists challenge authoritative relations other than those constitutive of the state,[1006] the anarchist challenge involves opposition to the authority of the state, which focuses on the state’s special characteristics as “a specific form of government,” namely its being a “sovereign,” “compulsory,” “monopolistic,” and “distinct” body.[1007] But anarchism’s opposition to the state reflects its more general opposition to political authority and institutionalized coercion[1008] (see also my discussion of “the political” below), although not necessarily to a looser sense of organized society. So, at its core, anarchism objects to the authority of all political phenomena, institutions, and practices that institutionalize coercion.[1009] The features of legal and regulatory enforcement that make it an objectionable form of coercion are also features of the institutionalized coercion of the state.[1010] Opposition to the state’s right to rule, although a non-definitive anarchist concern, is common to all forms of anarchism and its proponents. Opposition to the state’s right to rule is a necessary condition of a position’s being anarchist, but various anarchist tendencies embrace additional defining characteristics as well. The rejection of the state’s right to rule relates to the stronger anarchist challenge to its right to exist. This challenge is the upshot of political anarchism, which maintains that the state must be resisted as an evil and a new social form must emerge that succeeds the state and constitutes an improvement on state-centered patterns of social organization. Thus, in order to pave the way for a complete evaluation of anarchism, including the project of political anarchism, it is helpful to examine the principled rejection of political authority that philosophical anarchism proposes and to detail the positive views, if any, that it expresses. My aim is to analyze this challenge as formulated within the context of the contemporary debate about political obligation.
+Cultural Areas and Interaction Spheres: Contrasting Approaches to the Emergence of Civilization in the Maya Lowlands. American Antiquity 44:6–54.
-In this chapter, I describe four basic forms of anarchism in order to clarify the theoretical perspective I defend—that of critical philosophical anarchism—and place it in the context of the current debate on anarchism. Then, I explain the problem of political obligation. Finally, I discuss the principal elements of my argument for critical philosophical anarchism. My aim is to prepare the ground for an assessment of the general contribution of philosophical anarchism to the problem of political authority.
+a Civilization as a State of Mind: The Cultural Evolution of the Lowland Maya. In The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by Grant D. Jones and Robert Kautz, 188–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-*** II. The Varieties of Anarchism: Defining Critical Philosophical Anarchism within the Context of the Current Debate about Anarchism
+b Continuity and Disjunction: Late Postclassic Settlement Patterns in Northern Yucatán. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 311- 332. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-I begin with the different forms of and divisions within anarchism. One division is that between gradualist and revolutionary anarchism, which refers to the path toward change that anarchists advocate. Another division is between pacifist and terrorist anarchism, drawn according to the methods that anarchists adopt (whether they use peaceful means, like social reconstruction, or violence, like some forms of propaganda by the deed, respectively). (Presumably one might admit the legitimacy of some kinds of force, and so not qualify as a pacifist, while rejecting the use of force against noncombatants, especially as a means of inducing fear, and so not qualify as a terrorist.) These divisions refer mostly to political anarchism, however, and the main logic of any such division remains the same: it primarily concerns the revolutionary methods and the form of economic organization that each school proposes.[1011] There is a huge debate around the forms of anarchism, and some favor an “anarchism without adjectives.” My focus is on the position that each form of anarchism adopts with regard to the two fundamental problems concerning the state: its right to exist and its right to rule. For the purposes of my argument, I want to distinguish between political anarchism and philosophical anarchism. While the second refers to a very specific debate in philosophy, the one I examine here, the first refers to practically everything else. The first can be further divided into individualist and communal (or social) anarchism and the second into positive (a priori) and negative (a posteriori) anarchism. As a result, we have four main forms of anarchism.
+c The Political Economics of Residential Dispersion Among the Lowland Maya. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 371–382. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-These categorizations serve mostly as clarifications of the main tendencies involved in the anarchist approach to the fundamental issue of political authority. The taxonomy is not exhaustive, and the overlaps are important. Political anarchists can be philosophical and vice versa, and, in the end, outside the specific debate over political obligation, the distinguishing characteristic of political anarchism is that it is also practical. The discussion below consists of a brief description of each form of anarchism in order to arrive at a basic account of the anarchist position that I discuss.
+Political Systems in Lowland Yucatán: Dynamics and Structure in Maya Settlement. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, 375–386. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-Political anarchism is primarily devoted to the task of demolishing the state. It sees this task as an immediate implication of the rejection of political authority. But this form of anarchism also views the state as a very bad form of social organization. The state’s badness is a reason for opposing it in addition to the reality that the state’s existence and authority remain unjustified. Correspondingly, this critique of the state is premised on a vision of social life without political institutions. Philosophical anarchism, on the other hand, concentrates on the critique of political authority and does not necessarily require the abolition of the state. This latter characteristic is reflected in the fact that philosophical anarchism is compatible with “a wide range of alternative political outlooks.”[1012] Many anarchists are both philosophical and political, but a philosophical anarchist may remain non-political.
+Polychrome Facades of the Lowland Maya Preclassic. In Painted Architecture and Polychrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, edited by E. Boone, 5–30. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Political individualist anarchism is marked by its emphasis on a central aspect of anarchism: the commitment to individual autonomy, or freedom, as a primary value, in the sense that each individual has a capacity and right to be “self-legislating,”[1013] to make and act on his or her own decisions—as long as these do “not violate the similar rights of others,”[1014] and “avoid causing dramatic social harm.”[1015] At the basic level, freedom can be conceived as the ability to make uncoerced choices on various issues of one’s life under circumstances of adequate knowledge and with an unimpaired capacity for rational deliberation. Anarchists understand freedom in opposition to domination and coercion. In individualist anarchism, absence of coercion is seen primarily as a lack of interference in the private sphere of individual life. The idiosyncratic classical anarchist Max Stirner puts forward a unique individual anarchist view of freedom which replaces freedom with what he calls “ownness.”[1016] And Crispin Sartwell provides a contemporary example of individualist anarchism.[1017] Generally, anarchism is committed to the ideal of self-determination understood as self-development under conditions of proper social relationships, where the subordination of some to others is replaced with mutual respect, equal active participation, and common flourishing. According to this general statement, the absence of subordination and coercion further requires rejecting domination, as well as engaging with aspects more comprehensive than the negative demands of individualist anarchism, which mostly promotes the idea that each individual has an “inviolable sphere of action” with absolute sovereignty.[1018] Individualist anarchism views social relationships as interactions among independent beings, able to lead their lives abstracted from their social environment and its impacts. This leads individualist anarchists to emphasize the importance of voluntariness in any relation to and interaction with others and to attack political obligation on the grounds that states are not based on voluntary relations. Thus, they see them as coercive, exploitative, and evil.
+s New Light on the Dark Age: A Summary of Major Themes. In Ike Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 285–309. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-Political communal (or social) anarchism has roots in socialism, but it nonetheless differs from other socialist ideologies, especially in its rejection of politically centralized forms of organization and control (see, for example, the split between Marx and Bakunin).[1019] Communal anarchism stresses “the social character of human life”: the value of community, mutuality, free cooperation, and, in the general case, social arrangements of a reciprocal character.[1020] Its proponents devote themselves to developing visions of society that involve cooperative enterprises in every aspect of social life (economic, cultural, educational, etc.), as alternatives to views of society that include the state as an essential element.[1021] These visions are accompanied by the (anarchist) rejection of coercive schemes and are based on reasonably optimistic views of human nature and accounts of morality—like Peter Marshall’s approach to the notion of human nature, its use in the anarchist tradition, and its role in anarchist theory.[1022] Marshall proposes abandoning the idea of human nature as a “fixed essence,”[1023] and viewing the human species in an evolutionary way, taking into account the continual interaction of its many aspects and their capacity for “self-regulation” within open possibilities.[1024] This view of human nature is compatible with the position developed here. On similar lines, but even more compatible with our position and more radical, is the view of the self as a “kernel of nothingness” serving as a canvas for constant self-creation, developed in the theory of Stirner and adopted and expanded by poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and the anarchist Saul Newman.[1025]
+a Terminal Classic Lowland Maya: Successes, Failures, and Aftermaths. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 409–430. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Moving to philosophical anarchism, I begin with some terminological points in order to arrive at the view I want to defend. Horton distinguishes between positive and negative philosophical anarchism.[1026] Positive anarchism is the stronger, since it provides an explanation for the moral impossibility of the state and thus of political obligation. Negative anarchism is weaker, for it relies merely on “justification by default.” That is, for negative anarchism, the failure of all attempts to provide supportive accounts of political obligation is taken to be reason enough for denying the existence of such an obligation, even though no “positive” analysis of why such attempts are bound to fail is provided.[1027] These terms correspond to a certain extent to Simmons’ notions of “a priori” and “a posteriori” anarchism. A priori anarchism states that the impossibility of legitimacy is inherent in the nature of the state, that some essential feature of the state makes it impossible for it to be legitimate. A priori philosophical anarchists are motivated by prior com- mitments—e.g., to voluntarism, to egalitarianism, or to communalism—that, on their view, the state fundamentally contradicts.[1028] In contrast, the claim of a posteriori anarchism that “all existing states are illegitimate” is based mainly on empirical observations of actual states, rather than on an argument that there is some inconsistency, or incoherence, in the possibility of a legitimate state, although this form of anarchism is pessimistic about such a possibility.[1029] This is a central reason why a posteriori anarchism does not necessarily lead to political anarchism, why its project is presented as mainly one of theoretical criticism and of enlightenment, and why it leaves room, in many cases, for obedience to particular laws and for the justification of particular obligations on the part of different individuals.
+b Introduction. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, xiii-xxii. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-I focus on the negative, or a posteriori, side of philosophical anarchism and intend to evaluate its contribution to the debate on political authority. For this, I adopt an alternative terminology: I define “critical philosophical anarchism” through a combination of the features of the definitions of Horton and Simmons above, which I find the most characteristic of this anarchist position. (Gans coins “critical philosophical anarchism” for the anarchist position that he explains as “the denial of the duty to obey the law which is based on a rejection of its grounds.”[1030] But the sense in which I use it is more comprehensive, technical, and specific. I give my own definition in the next paragraph.) From negative philosophical anarchism I keep the characteristic that it is a theoretical view grounded on criticisms of accounts of political obligation. Yet I believe that these criticisms are determined by a prior analysis of what is involved in an adequate justification. From a posteriori philosophical anarchism, I take this: Simmons argues that a posteriori anarchism is not based merely on justification by default, but that it is rooted “either in an ideal of legitimacy (which existing states can be shown not to exemplify) or in some account of what an acceptably complete positive attempt [to justify political obligation] would look like.”[1031] This feature works as a normative horizon for evaluating theoretical defenses of political obligation: a prior standard in reference to which a posteriori anarchism derives its negative conclusions about political obligation and political institutions. These conclusions stem from the failures of the defenses of political obligation and from what these failures reflect about reality.
+c The Monumental Architecture. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, 1–22. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-Given the above two features, I define “critical philosophical anarchism” as the view that examines the best candidates for moral theories of political obligation and derives from their failure, as a constructive conclusion of its own, the result that there is no general political obligation and that in this respect political institutions remain unjustified. Operative in this approach is a prior standard of theoretical criticism merged with some idea of what an ideal legitimate society should be like. The main input of this standard is to stress what political societies must not be like in order to be considered legitimate. Critical philosophical anarchism considers all existing states to be illegitimate insofar as they fail to meet this ideal, especially the demand for non-domination. In this, it is in line with political anarchism. Ultimately, the position of critical philosophical anarchism is a mix of philosophical and political anarchism.
+Yaxuna Archaeological Survey: A Report of the 1986 Field Season. Dallas: Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University.
-My aim is to examine this anarchist position as it figures within the debate about political obligation, in order to determine its contribution regarding our approach and relation to political institutions. I stress both its critical perspective and its ideal of legitimacy as the defining features of this position, incorporating elements of essential value in the arguments against political authority.
+n.d. The Monumental Architecture: Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 5. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (in preparation).
-These parameters are compatible with certain valuable features of social anarchism. In fact, this compatibility is not limited to social, or communal, anarchism. It is, to my mind, necessary in any anarchist vision that displays two features of communal anarchism, namely, on the one hand, its recognition of the social dimension of human beings and, on the other, its idea of free social relationships and decentralized, cooperative forms of social order along with an attention to matters of economic equality and distribution. Such perspectives are found in many contemporary anarchist writings. The essentially social character of human life is reflected both in anarchist proposals for free social relationships and in the claims regarding the defects of relations of domination. These claims have important implications for defenses of the state in light of its coercive character and its underlying corruption, as well as for considering the independence of “state actors.”[1032] Communal anarchism contains a positive project, namely the establishment of human cooperative relations free of both domination and exploitation. But its relation to coercion appears unclear and problematic, because it seems to re-introduce coercive structures, tactics, and attitudes in its visions of social reconstruction.[1033] The most demanding project of anarchist theory would consist of a combination of the communal anarchist ideal with the attack on coercion reflected in the exacting perspective and standard of legitimacy that critical philosophical anarchism defines. This chapter attempts to prepare the way for this combination.
+Freidel, David A., and Anthony P. Andrews
-Anarchism enters the debate on political obligation with a concern about freedom, which is immediately related to an attack on dominative authority. Anarchism concentrates on the importance of self-governance. But how can self-governance be compatible with external constraints? The respect for self-government and the rejection of constraints are characteristic anarchist tenets, each of which might take, and at times has taken, priority over the other within the anarchist tradition. Still, an anarchist can insist on the priority of freedom and criticize political institutions without any prior rejection of constraints in general. The anarchist is sensitive to the fact that most political constraints create problems for self-determination. It is with this realization that the critical philosophical anarchist criticizes the way traditional defenses of political institutions work. What he wants to point out is that, if these defenses start with a different perspective on political institutions, one that centrally involves a positive relation between institutions and selfdetermination, such defenses will more successfully address the difficulties they face in the effort to justify political reality. The debate, and with it our relation to the state, can then develop in a different light, which will provide more fruitful ways of assessing political authority.
+n.d. The Loltun Bas-relief and the Origins of Maya Kingship. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in press).
-At this point, I would like to refer briefly to certain categories of anarchist thought that continue to form the debate within the anarchist arena today and to which critical philosophical anarchism might be related in some significant way. This will help situate this latter form of anarchism within the current debate, preparing the way for more general current anarchist concerns.
+Freidel, David A., Maria Masucci, Susan Jaeger, Robin A. Robertson
-The first category is new anarchism, which is rooted in Errico Malatesta’s thought[1034] and appears today in the work of Noam Chomsky.[1035] Based on Bakuninian ideas and Kropotkinian orthodoxy, Malatesta’s critique of mainstream anarchism marked the transition from classical to new anarchism. Although greatly influenced by those major anarchist thinkers, Malatesta moved from their preoccupation with big ideas, their intellectual reverence for Marx, and their excessive revolutionary optimism (and the dogmatism related to it) to a more practical outlook that was pragmatically engaged with the realization of a just society.[1036] Despite criticisms that this activism encouraged intellectual incoherence and simplicity, new anarchists made theoretical advances and their thought prefigured the New Left and its reorientation toward social analysis and cultural critique. Emma Goldman’s anarchic-feminism is a characteristic example.[1037] At present, Noam Chomsky is the most representative contemporary new anarchist. He has not developed a general theory of anarchism, and he sees anarchism more as a historically developed trend, sharing Malatesta’s suspicion of the creation of big theoretical systems. Yet he has contributed a sharp social and political criticism to anarchism with his analysis of the role of propaganda in determining the opinions of people regarding economic issues, international relations, and war affairs. Above all, Chomsky has developed a profound critique of the propaganda of the media as a method of social control in “open” societies.[1038]
+n.d. The Bearer, the Burden, and the Burnt: The Stacking Principle in the Iconography of the Late Preclassic Maya Lowlands. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, Vol. VII, edited by Merle Greene Robertson. Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
-Chomsky offers a parallel at the practical level to the thorough criticism that, as argued here, critical philosophical anarchism offers at the theoretical level. The latter can also be compatible with the concerns of individualist anarchism, such as those of Marx Stirner[1039] and of our contemporary Herbert Read,[1040] who refers to the priority of the aesthetic development of the individual, of a creative individuality free of all forms of social oppression. Furthermore, critical philosophical anarchism can be inspired by postmodern anarchism, as it appears in the work of Todd May and Saul Newman, with a focus on social critique and change rather than just political or economic change.[1041]
+Freidel David A., and Jeremy A. Sabloff
-In my opinion, however, critical philosophical anarchism’s compatibility with social anarchism, and its concerns with the social and political implications of its criticism of obligation, can be seen better in its connection with another category of contemporary anarchist thought: the neo-classical eco-anarchism as it appears in the works of Murray Bookchin and Alan Carter. Critical philosophical anarchists can develop their own micropolitics of power. It is nevertheless important to examine the relation of critical philosophical anarchism to the most promising contemporary implementations of anarchist visions and practices rooted in the social anarchist concern with free and equal social relationships, to carry its principles even further to meet present demands and correct past prejudices. Bookchin’s theory is promising to this end. Since this theory also has its shortcomings, however, my proposal is that it should be evaluated with reference to the perspective of critical philosophical anarchism. One can apply the critical philosophical anarchist test of legitimacy to Bookchin’s account. During this project, it is also helpful to build on the ideas of Samuel Clark,[1042] Benjamin Franks,[1043] and Uri Gordon[1044] regarding existing anarchist practices that widen the contemporary anarchist utopian picture.
+Cozumel: Late Maya Settlement Patterns. New York: Academic Press.
-*** III. The Problem of Political Obligation
+Freidel, David A., and Vernon L. Scarborough
-**** A. The Correlativity Thesis
+Subsistence, Trade and Development of the Coastal Maya. In Maya Agriculture: Essays in Honor of Dennis E. Puleston, edited by K. V. Flannery, 131–155. New York: Academic Press.
-The problem of the existence and justification of political obligation is usually taken to be identical to the problem of the justification of political authority, which involves the establishment of the state’s (claim to the) right to rule. This right is most often seen as the logical correlate of an obligation to obey: when we assert the state’s right to rule, we automatically recognize that citizens have a political obligation to the state (the “doctrine of ‘logical correlativity’”).[1045] Alternatively, this correlativity of right and obligation can be conceived as a normative doctrine: if we have one, we should have the other. On this view, political obligation is understood as either a normative condition for or a normative consequence of political authority, although not identical to it. This means that either authority or obligation is already independently justified and becomes the ground of the other. Theorists are divided concerning whether to accept correlativ- ity in any of the above senses. Defenders of political obligation and philosophical anarchists usually adopt correlativity.[1046] This perspective might be explained to a significant extent by the fact that these theorists conceive political authority, or the right to rule, as something more than mere permission to coerce. For example:
+Freidel, David A., and Linda Schele
-<quote>
+a Kingship in the Late Preclassic Lowlands: The Instruments and Places of Ritual Power. American Anthropologist 90(3):547–567.
-What we really have in mind is a right to make laws and regulations, to judge and to punish for failing to conform to certain standards, or to order some redress for the victims of such violations, as well as a right to command.[1047]
-</quote>
-Also, “Authority on the part of those who give orders and make regulations is: a right to be obeyed. We may say, more amply: authority is a regular right to be obeyed in a domain of decision.”[1048] Characteristically, defenders of non-correlativity conceive authority as mere liability or permission to coerce, which is justifiably distinct from, and does not necessarily entail, a duty to obey; that is, political obligation.[1049] Green has a useful discussion of objections to logical and to normative correlativity.[1050] To the extent that political authority is understood as a complex right to exclusively and coercively make regulations, impose duties, and demand compliance (i.e., command and be obeyed, or, more inclusively, issue directives—“directives” is a wider term, more suitable than “command,” and covers all cases of authoritative utterance[1051]—and have them followed), then it is properly taken as correlative to a complex set of obligations constituting a general obligation to comply, i.e., political obligation. I take this correlativity as one central sense of legitimacy, whether in its logical or in its normative form. Since normative correlativity already involves substantive considerations about the nature of political authority and our relation to it, however, it is sufficient to focus on this form of correlativity for us to keep in mind that it is in the nature of the state’s claim-right to rule to generate obligations to it.
+b Symbol and Power: A History of the Lowland Maya Cosmogram. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 44—93. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-**** B. The Two Main Aspects of the Problem of Political Obligation
+n.d. Dead Kings and Living Mountains: Dedication and Termination Rituals of the Lowland Maya. In Word and Image in Maya Culture, edited by William Hanks and Don Rice. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (in press).
-Thus, the problem of political obligation is primarily the problem of finding a special justification for the various obligations imposed on citizens by their political institutions, which are correlative to a complex right of those institutions to rule those citizens. As Horton rightly points out, the question of justification is presupposed by the issues of the author and of the scope of political obligations, which are also central, and in general “has been taken to be the kernel of the philosophical problem of political obligation.”[1052] It is with regard to the question “Why should we obey political authority?” that I evaluate the anarchist position. The traditional philosophical discussion of political authority concerns attempts to account for de jure political authority, that is, authority that has the right to rule—or is exercised in accordance with a certain set of principles or rules— rather than for de facto political authority, namely one that claims to have this right and has this claim acknowledged by its subjects.[1053] Because no state has the right to rule, the anarchist demands the moral justification or, in other words, the legitimacy of de facto authority. This problem has also been identified as that of state legitimacy morally understood. I use “state legitimacy” interchangeably with “state authority” and “political obligation.”
+Furst, Peter T.
-Political obligation has traditionally been regarded as that notion through which we must understand a special relationship between individuals and the political institutions of their country of residence. There are two main features of the nature of the problem of political obligation:
+Fertility, Vision Quest and Auto-Sacrifice: Some Thoughts on Ritual Blood-letting Among the Maya. In The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part HI: Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 211–224. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-(a) The state, the law, and political institutions in general have a special character and status. This is described by four theses:[1054]
+Garber, James F.
- - The sources thesis: political institutions take their own validity from within the political/ legal structure, from legally defined criteria and standards.
+Patterns of Jade Consumption and Disposal at Cerros, Northern Belize. American Antiquity 48(4):800–807.
- - The particularity thesis: citizens are taken to have a special relationship with their own government as it determines by itself the conditions of membership within its territory. This means that political institutions have a particular constituency to which they apply and any justification of political obligation should provide a basis for obeying one’s own particular government with its own criteria for membership: “the particularity requirement.”[1055]
+The Artifacts. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 117–126. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
- - The coercion thesis: institutional requirements may be backed by coercion. The state is sovereign and monopolistic in the sense that it determines the rights and duties of its citizens in an authoritarian, permanent, and exclusionary way. With respect to this function, legal sanction, or coercion, is its primary means.
+Garza Tarazona de Gonzalez, Silvia, and Edward B. Kurjack
- - The independence premise: an account of political obligation should include criteria that show the independent nature of the “political” (as this nature is reflected in the elements of the three previous theses), and it is by appeal to this essentially political nature of institutions that political obligation should be justified. That is, the special commitment that such an obligation is supposed to express needs to be shown to be necessarily connected to its political nature. I call these four premises “the theses on the political.”
+Atlas arqueológico del estado de Yucatan, Tomo 1. Merida: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
-(b) The commands of political authorities are directed at the behavior of individuals in the public domain. This means that such commands have a direct effect not only on the beliefs of individuals, but also on their actions (such directives guide their practical reasoning and behavior). In this way they are reasons for action—normative requirements with the power to direct action. More importantly, political obligations are understood to be moral in character.[1056] They are the defining terms of a special moral relationship between citizens and their polity, a concomitant of the latter’s status as a normative power; that is, of its claim to a moral right to impose directives on its citizens. Yet the most convincing reason for requiring a moral ground is that it provides the most appropriate way of filtering political requirements in order to decide which of them can properly be attributed the status of obligation. Thus, it works as a criterion for distinguishing requirements that can be accepted as valid laws from unacceptable requirements. When, for example, individuals are presented with laws against bodily harm and laws discriminating against a specific group of people (such as immigrants), they need to be able to assert the acceptability of the former and exclude the latter by reference to a stable testing ground. Since institutions have a considerable effect on our lives, such filtering is necessary and valuable, because it demands that institutions need to be sufficiently motivated in doing so; there have to be convincing reasons in favor of their interference. A moral ground provides the strongest basis for normative requirements, creating a distance from our institutions that is beneficial to a critical assessment of their function and quality. These points express the second important aspect of the issue of political obligation as traditionally understood: a justification of political obligation must involve the provision of moral grounds for supporting political institutions.
+Gibson, Eric C., Leslie C. Shaw, and Daniel R. Finamore
-Together (a) and (b) say that an adequate justification of political obligation involves the recognition of the legitimacy of political authority qua political, on the basis of moral reasons. Following philosophical anarchists, I see the need to defend the existence of special obligations in the political domain with moral principles and arguments as inevitable. This is mainly because of the direct and dominant role that political institutions, with their requirements and present practices, play in our social lives and because they claim the right to do so. The demands of political institutions primarily affect individual self-determination and social equality, which gives rise to a constant requirement to put limits on these institutions rooted in individual life and morality. As the anarchist reminds us, domination and coercion can never be desirable in themselves. They are always a defect, needing to be counterbalanced by merits that are sufficiently strong to legitimate the agencies that incorporate them. The very fact that obligations are requirements, which involve a “pressure to perform,” makes explicit the tie between obligation, domination, and coercion, thus pressing the demand for proper justification.[1057] These points relate to the other central feature in the traditional understanding of the debate over political obligation: the attempt to ground the political qua political. To appeal occasionally (or even frequently) to moral reasons as justifications for compliance with particular laws does not constitute a moral recognition of the authority of the law.
+Early Evidence of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Kichpanha, Belize. Working Papers in Archaeology, No. 2. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.
-**** C. Quality- and Interaction-Based Evaluations of Political Institutions
+Gordon, George Byron
-Two central elements of the evaluation of states that are found in discussions of political obligation are quality and specific interaction. The former involves general positive qualities or accomplishments of institutions (such as justice and the supply of important goods), and it is a commonplace in moral arguments for their existence. The latter refers to “morally significant features of the specific histories of interaction between individual persons and their polities” (components such as actually giving one’s consent).[1058] These elements ground Simmons’ distinction between “generic” and “transactional evaluations.”[1059] I also apply, in relation to the first kind of evaluation, the term “institutional morality,” which is drawn from an analogous distinction between “theories of institutional morality” and “theories of emergence.”[1060] Judgments about the nature of political institutions, the qualities that might make them morally acceptable, provide a basic condition that institutions must satisfy, and in this respect they affect judgments about political obligation. (The basic idea here is that we cannot morally bind ourselves to immoral institutions.) Some of the theories of political obligation employ them more centrally, as grounds of that question. But the general moral relationship based on the nature of a state overall differs from the particular moral relationship that is the focus of the problem of political obligation. It is important to see whether the one can ground the other and, in general, to assess the role of institutional qualities in justifying political obligation. I see the problem of political obligation as concerned with grounding a special bond between individual and government through understanding “the relationship or transaction which could create” such a bond.[1061] In this paper, I stress the fact that political obligation is a special bond between a particular government and each particular citizen. Having such a particularized character, political obligation seems more likely to derive from very specific relationships, characterized by the actual and particular features of direct transaction, and it is doubtful that these can be captured by more generally described connections between states and subjects.[1062] Thus, political obligation appears more relevant to the category of transactional evaluation.
+Caverns of Copán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. I (5). Cambridge.
-Whether or not justification and legitimacy are separate dimensions of institutional evaluation and whether or not justification in terms of institutional qualities is directed primarily at the existence of the state, anarchism challenges political institutions with regard to both existence and obligation. This paper concentrates on its position with regard to the particular relationship of political obligation. Nevertheless, I believe that the critical philosophical anarchist perspective makes the problem of political obligation central for a broader evaluation of political institutions, and thus ultimately a challenge to their very existence.
+Graham, Ian
-**** D. The Conditions of Political Obligation
+Ihe Art of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, and New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc.
-The four theses that define the political nature of obligation and the demand for a moral ground are accompanied by certain formal conditions that have traditionally been used to determine theories of political obligation and that are pressed by anarchists. In the next few pages I will clarify which of these conditions remain operative, and introduce their role within the debate on political obligation.
+–1986 Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-Theories of political obligation, which attempt to morally justify a political kind of requirement, are constrained by four formal conditions: particularity, generality, bindingness, and content-independence. I call them “the conditions of political obligation.” These conditions appear as merely formal requirements, which a theorist of political obligation might find reasons to dispense with, against the anarchist standpoint. But their role is indispensable in the debate about political obligation, as is the way these conditions characterize the anarchist perspective, ultimately helping decide the anarchist contribution to this debate. They are justifiably offered as determinants of the link required between the political nature of obligation and its moral justification.
+Grove, David
-The particularity thesis, which defines a central part of the nature of the political, itself provides a first condition on how to attempt to assign moral weight to the bond of political obligation, namely that we show the moral significance of citizens being bound to their own states.
+Olmec Monuments: Mutilation as a Clue to Meaning. In The Olmec and Their Neighbors: Essays in Memory of Matthew W. Stirling. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.
-Being coherently in the nature of political institutions to address their requirements to a specific constituency, particularity is a natural and inevitable condition within the debate.
+Ancient Chalcatzingo. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-Two other general assumptions of a justification of political obligation involve the demand of “universality,” namely that moral justification applies to all subjects with regard to all laws, and the demand of “singularity in ground,” namely that all obligations are based on one and the same moral reason.[1063] Both of these assumptions have been questioned and rejected.[1064] For arguments against “universality” in particular, see Green.[1065]
+Grube, Nikolai
-Nevertheless, in order to justify political obligation, a sufficient amount of generality is necessary. I insist on generality and on the other three conditions of political obligation proposed by philosophical anarchists because they provide an appropriate (and perhaps the most suitable) way of ascribing to the traditional understanding of the problem of political obligation the significance that it has. Generality corresponds to the centralized and monopolistic character of political institutions. Also, it captures a central characteristic of the anarchist approach to accounts of political obligation, namely that we should be interested “in describing all moral requirements which bind citizens to their political communities.”[1066] Klosko[1067] and other defenders of the state recognize the necessity of generality, and it is in fact this aspect that has created the most difficulties for them. All accounts of political obligation proposed so far fail to justify political obligation for most of the people. Thus, the justification of a general political obligation has not yet been given.
+Städtegriinder und “Erste Herrscher” in Hieroglyphentexten der Klassischen Mayakultur. Archiv für Völkerkunde, 69–90. Wien: Museum für Völkerkunde.
-The other two conditions that work as proper formal constraints on accounts of political obligation become very explicit in the last facet of the problem to which I want to draw attention, namely our understanding of the character of the notion of political obligation. A good example is Raz’s proposal. Political obligation “is a general obligation applying to ... all the laws on all occasions to which they apply.”[1068] It is not an “incidental reason.”[1069] It is a reason to obey the law because it is the law; that is, “to obey the law as it requires to be obeyed.”[1070] As stressed above, political obligation is not only the obligation to obey the law but involves much more, such as the duties of citizenship, which involve supporting political institutions in other ways; for example, by participating in the defense of one’s country. Yet here I use Raz’s discussion to make a different point about the character of political obligation and I adopt his terminology only as part of that discussion. The point here is that political obligation involves the acceptance of the directives of the law not only with regard to their content, but also as far as the conditions or criteria by which they may be overridden are concerned. The law is not absolute, but the considerations under which it is defeated should be recognized by the law itself. Such considerations might be strong moral reasons that override the obligation to obey the law, but one’s acting according to them irrespectively of any recognition of their application by the law itself constitutes a violation of the law. Thus, although the application of the law does not imply that reasons other than those recognized by the law are less important, the law is “exclusionary” and “its rules and rulings are authoritative.”[1071] It is in the very nature of the law and it is its raison d’être that it functions as a conclusion of practical reason, already excluding certain considerations; this is what the law is. Given this understanding of political obligation, it is possible to recognize that what anarchists deny is a general obligation to obey political institutions as they require to be obeyed.[1072] These considerations are represented by the terms “content-independence” and “bindingness,” which designate the last two conditions of political obligation.
+Grube, Nikolai, and Linda Schele
-The upshot of the above discussion is that the four conditions of political obligation already provide defining features of the political nature of such obligations, which is a central aspect of the debate.
+^873 U-Cit-Tok , the Last King of Copan. Copán Note 21. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-In sum, the problem of political obligation concerns fundamentally: (a) an ethical relationship between people and the political community of which they are members; that is, one involving moral grounds for a special relationship to our polities. These grounds are strong, but neither absolute nor exhaustive. This issue is also (b) political in the sense that membership in a polity is characterized by the special features of its political nature as defined by the theses on the political and as reflected in the conditions of political obligation. The arguments introduced in the final part of this chapter are approached on the basis of accepting the debate over political obligation in these terms.
+b The Date on the Bench from Structure 9N-82, Sepulturas, Copán, Honduras. Copán Note 23. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hon- dureño de Antropología e Historia.
-*** IV. The Main Aspects of an Argument for Critical Philosophical Anarchism
+Cu-Ix, the Fourth Ruler of Copán and His Monuments. Copán Note 40. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-In this section, I present the main parts of my argument for critical philosophical anarchism in relation to the problem of political obligation. My argument is that the main perspective and ideas of critical philosophical anarchism can be appealing to anybody, whether they are anarchists or not. I myself am not a self-proclaimed anarchist. Nevertheless, my opinion is that the critical philosophical anarchist position on political obligation is correct and that the virtues of this view make an examination and acknowledgment of its contribution worthwhile.
+Grube, Nikolai, and David Stuart
-Critical philosophical anarchism has been criticized as a purely negative view, one that works as a denial of positive defenses of political institutions without offering an alternative positive proposition of its own.[1073] This criticism is anticipated by the usual understanding of philosophical anarchism as a view relying merely on justification by default (see the presentation of negative anarchism above). Without denying its theoretical function (which I retain and stress in my definition of it), I argue that this anarchist view involves something more positive than it first appears to do: the arguments of critical philosophical anarchism express a prior perspective. This perspective is characteristically anarchist in its motivating concerns and its proposals, one that is also indispensable for theorists of political obligation and necessary for the evaluation of institutions more generally. A closer analysis of anarchist arguments against defenses of political obligation is the first step toward this objective. The four conditions of political obligation that anarchists employ play a central role within the analysis and understanding of the anarchist perspective. These formal requirements define characteristic features of the political nature of the obligations in question: taken together “the conditions of political obligation” express this political nature itself, that is, the particularistic, coercive, centralist, permanent, and exclusive character of the institutions to which these obligations relate. They become useful vehicles for very valuable yet neglected elements of the anarchist position as their formality leads to wide-ranging moral conclusions. In part, the examination of anarchist criticisms of political obligation serves to establish (the role of) these conditions as definitive of the link between the political and the moral features of the problem of political obligation. This point can be employed to demonstrate the value of the philosophical anarchist perspective. The crux of my argument is that the anarchist perspective involves an insight that everyone needs to share. It indicates that the lack of a special relationship that characterizes political institutions (which exists when the conditions of political obligation are satisfied) raises a fundamental question as to whether they can exist and function at all.
+Observations on T110 at the Syllable ko. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing No. 8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-The anarchist ideal of legitimacy, as part of the definition of critical philosophical anarchism, is another aspect of this anarchist view which plays a central role in its positive contribution. Philosophical anarchists defend voluntarist, communitarian, egalitarian, and ecological visions of the ideal society. Because they are not dominating models of society, they serve as indications of the proper relations that institutions must have in order to be legitimate and justified in the eyes of human beings. Characteristically, these ideals are also in constant interaction with the social visions of political anarchism. The fact that such ideals underlie the arguments of critical philosophical anarchism provides another factor explaining the positive character of this form of anarchism. Both the anarchist social visions and the anarchist attacks on the state aspire to a better understanding of human nature and society and to an assessment of human actions, relations, and achievements compatible with the most commonly shared moral values. I endorse the claim that anarchists are concerned with “the quality of relations between people,” namely with defending and realizing within society direct and many-sided relations, characterized by reciprocity and equal authority and participation.[1074] This is a ground that can be shared by many anti- and non-authoritarian theorists (McLaughlin is right to stress that anarchism is nonauthoritarianism rather than an anti-authoritarian view, since it does not reject every form of authority as such)[1075] with or without anarchist convictions. Furthermore, the arguments that bring the defenders of the state and anarchists into conflict refer to issues of an explicitly social character. (A good example is provided by the argument from public goods. This argument focuses on the importance of coordinating activities in order to secure the production and distribution of goods vital for a decent life, and it reveals conflicting intuitions—those of anarchists on the one hand, and those of their opponents on the other.) The positive horizon defined by political social anarchism provides a suitable background for addressing these concerns. I want to argue that this horizon is compatible with and in fact already incorporated within the challenge of critical philosophical anarchism. Political social anarchists oppose the state not only because of its illegitimacy, but also because of its essentially dominative, coercive, corruptive, and therefore evil character. But this characterization of the state as evil is not an essential element of philosophical anarchism, although it may play a part in certain philosophical anarchist views. It is necessary to combine a diagnostic of what goes wrong in domination and coercion, as expressed in philosophical anarchist views, with an explicit prescriptive horizon of harmonious social relations. The required link might be found in a theoretical account that includes a properly articulated ideal of legitimacy that will set a standard, elements of which must be met by any vision of society.
+Hamilton, Rachel
-On reflection, we would all probably agree with the anarchist on the question of the values needed to defend obligation and institutions. In examining different theories of political obligation in their dialogue with the anarchist perspective, we should approach them with respect to different instances of the anarchist ideal of legitimacy. A related central aim is to carry the role of the ideal of legitimacy further: to examine how, more generally, it can make the task of the justification of political institutions harder. One can consider how the debate as defined by the anarchist and its results for political obligation might affect further defenses of constraints even within a background presupposing that we need, and remain with, political institutions. The extension of the role of the anarchist ideal of legitimacy is an analysis of the anarchist perspective’s effect on any justification of constraints. More precisely, the ideal standards, in the light of the failure to justify political obligation, help further evaluations of institutions by imposing the relevant moral criteria as principled conditions on existing and newly arising forms of domination. Thus, the anarchist contribution should be estimated both with regard to what it offers to the debate on political obligation itself and with respect to the implications of the results of this debate for more general evaluations of political institutions. In these functions, the ideal of legitimacy and the anarchist criticisms become two expressions of one comprehensive view.
+n.d. The Archaeological Mollusca of Cerros, Belize. Manuscript to be included in the final reports of the Cerros Project, dated 1988.
-This view states primarily that legitimacy is exigent because it is difficult to see how political institutions can meet the requirements of the moral forms of the standard of legitimacy. If the anarchist conclusions about political obligation are correct, both the four conditions that constrain accounts of political obligation and the ideals reflecting proper social relations that states fail to meet indicate something about the political that every theorist must attend to—and they provide the way for doing so. The defenders of political institutions assume what they should seek to prove: they focus on the merits of political institutions and attempt to derive political obligation from them. Instead, they should address the prior question about what institutions demand of us and whether these demands are justified. Political institutions cease to be viewed as lovable, and they need to be tested continually on the basis of the problems they create. This is a shift in our conception of our political relationships that will not, however, entail widespread disobedience and chaos. The reason for this is that we have to work with existing institutions and build the new in the shell of the old. Yet such a shift can radically affect our political relationships and lives. In my opinion, philosophical anarchism both requires drastic revision in our thinking about political relations and entails radical change in our political lives. I see this as a positive effect of the anarchist perspective.
+Hammond, Norman
-This claim leads to a conclusive point. The anarchist criticisms and ideal of legitimacy explain the link between philosophical and political anarchism: they remind us that the enduring deficiency of the state is a position that is initially shared by both forms of anarchism, and the moral criteria of philosophical anarchism are intended to be inherent in the society that political anarchism seeks to create. A demonstration of the compatibility of political anarchist social visions with the perspective and ideals of legitimacy of critical philosophical anarchism establishes continuity within the anarchist ideology. Such a demonstration is necessary as a test on both sides of anarchism. It would provide the required combination of a diagnostic of what goes wrong with political coercion and an explicit positive horizon of non-dominative harmonious social relations.
+Unearthing the Oldest Maya. National Geographic Magazine 162:126–140.
+n.d. Excavation and Survey at Nohntul, Belize, 1986. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.
-[1005] Paul McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007) 29–36.
+Hammond, N., D. Pring, R. Wilk, S. Donaghey, F. P. Saul, E. S. Wing, A. G. Miller, and L. H. Feldman
-[1006] McLaughlin 97.
+The Earliest Lowland Maya? Definition of the Swazy Phase. American Antiquity 44:92–110.
-[1007] David Miller, Anarchism (London: Dent 1984) 5, original emphasis.
+Hansen, Richard
-[1008] Miller 5.
+Excavations on Structure 34 and the Tigre Area, El Mirador, Petén, Guatemala: A New Look at the Preclassic Lowland Maya. A master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University.
-[1009] Cp. McLaughlin 74–80. Compare April Carter’s discussion of the state in relation to its “specific organs” and especially of the five factors of governmental action in modern states; see April Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London: Routledge 1971) [ch. 2.
+Las investigaciones del sitio Nakbe, Peten, Guatemala: Temporada 1989. A paper delivered at the Tercer Simposio del Arqueología Guatemalteca, Guatemala City, July 1989.
-[1010] See Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto 2008) 67–9.
+Harrison, Peter
-[1011] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975) 19; McLaughlin 2.
+The Central Acropolis, Tikal, Guatemala: A Preliminary Study of the Functions of Its Structural Components During the Late Classic Period. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
-[1012] John Horton, Political Obligation, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan 2010) 132.
+Architecture and Geometry in the Central Acropolis at Tikal. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, held in Palenque, Chiapas, México, in June 1989.
-[1013] Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper 1970) 14.
+Haviland, William A.
-[1014] Horton 115.
+Stature at Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Ancient Maya Demography and Social Organization. American Antiquity 32:316–325.
-[1015] A. John. Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton UP 1993) 267.
+Ancient Lowland Maya Social Organization. In Archaeological Studies in Middle America. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 26, 93–117. New Orleans.
-[1016] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: CUP 1995) 145–6, 154.
+Dynastic Genealogies from Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Descent and Political Organization. American Antiquity 42:61–67.
-[1017] Crispin Sartwell, Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (Albany: SUNY P 2008) ch. 5.
+Healy, P. F., J. D. H. Lambert, J. T. Arnason, and R. J. Hebda
-[1018] Miller 30.
+Caracol, Belize: Evidence of Ancient Maya Agricultural Terraces. Journal of Field Archaeology 10:773–796.
-[1019] James Joll, The Anarchists, 2d ed. (London: Methuen 1980) ch. 4; McLaughlin 158.
+Heyden, Doris
-[1020] Miller chs. 4, 12; Horton 119–20.
+Caves, Gods, and Myths: World-View and Planning in Teotihuacán. In Mesoamerican Sites and World-Views, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 1–37. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.
-[1021] Petr Al. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Shatz Marshall (Cambridge: CUP 1995); Petr Al. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (London: Allen 1974); Petr Al. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons 1955); Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose 1980); Murray Bookchin, “Libertarian Municipalism,” The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (London: Cassell 1997) 172–96.
+Hirth, Kenneth
-[1022] Peter Marshall, “Human Nature and Anarchism,” For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice, ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge 1989) 127–49.
+Beyond the Maya Frontier: Cultural Interaction and Syncretism Along the Central Honduran Corridor. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 297–334. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[1023] Marshall 138.
+Hopkins, Nicholas
-[1024] Marshall 139–44.
+n.d. Classic-Area Maya Kinship Systems: The Evidence for Patrilineality. A paper presented at the Taller Maya VI, San Cristóbal, July 1982.
-[1025] Stirner; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin 1991); Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2011).
+Hopkins, Nicholas, J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausensio Cruz Guzman
-[1026] Horton 124.
+Notes on the Choi Dugout Canoe. Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Vol. VI, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 325–329. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1027] Horton 124.
+Houston, Stephen
-[1028] Wolff, Defense; A. John Simmons, “Philosophical Anarchism,” For and Against the State: New Philosophical Readings, ed. John T. Sanders and Jan Narveson (Lanham: Rowman 1996) 20–1.
+Warfare Between Naranjo and Ucanal. Contribution to Maya Hieroglyphic Decipherment I, 31–39. New Haven: HRAflex Books, Human Relations Area Files, Inc.
-[1029] Simmons, “Anarchism” 19–39.
+An Example of Homophony in Maya Script. American Antiquity 49:790–805.
-[1030] Chaim Gans, Philosophical Anarchism and Political Disobedience (Cambridge: CUP 1992) 2.
+Houston, Stephen, and Peter Mathews
-[1031] Simmons, “Philosophical,” 36, n. 9.
+The Dynastic Sequence of Dos Pilas. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 1. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1032] Alan Carter, “Outline of an Anarchist Theory of History,” For Anarchism. History, Theory, and Practice, ed. David Goodway (London and New York: Routledge 1989); Alan Carter, “The Nation-State and Underdevelopment,” Third World Quarterly 16.4 (1995): 595—618.
+Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart
-[1033] Horton 122—3.
+The Way Glyph: Evidence for “Co-essences” Among the Classic Maya. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 30. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-[1034] Errico Malatesta, Anarchy, trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom 1984); Errico Malatesta and Vernon Richards, eds., Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas. Compiled and edited by Vernon Richards (London: Freedom 1965).
+Joesink-Mandevjlle, Leroy R. V., and Sylvia Meluzin
-[1035] Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Vintage Books 1973); Edward S. Hermanand Noam Chomsky, eds., Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books 1988); Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge, MA: MIT 1997); Peter Wilkin, Noam Chomsky: On Power, Knowledge and Human Nature (New York: Saint Martin’s 1997); Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto 1999); James A. McGilvray, The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (Cambridge: CUP 2005).
+Olmec-Maya Relationships: Olmec Influence in Yucatán. In Origins of Religious Art and Iconography in Preclassic Mesoamerica, edited by H. B. Nicholson, 89–105. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications and Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles.
-[1036] McLaughlin 160—1.
+Jones, Christopher
-[1037] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover 1969).
+The Twin Pyramid Group Pattern: A Classic Maya Architectural Assemblage at Tikal, Guatemala. Ph.D dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.
-[1038] Herman and Chomsky, “Propaganda Problem.”
+The Life and Times of Ah Cacaw, Ruler of Tikal. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphia Maya, 107–120. Guatemala: Asociación Tikal.
-[1039] Stirner.
+n.d. Patterns of Growth at Tikal. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
-[1040] Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Anarchism (London: Freedom 1940); Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Souvenir 1974).
+Jones, Christopher, and Linton Satterthwaite
-[1041] Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: PSU 1994); Newman.
+The Monuments and Inscriptions of Tikal: The Carved Monuments. Tikal Report No. 33: Part A. University Museum Monograph 44. Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
-[1042] Samuel J. A. Clark, Living Without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007).
+Jones, Tom
-[1043] Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh: AK/ Dark Star 2006).
+The Xoc, the Sharke, and the Sea Dogs: An Historical Encounter. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, Vol. VII, gen. editor. Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 211–222. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1044] Gordon.
+Joralemon, David
-[1045] A John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: PUP 1979) 58, 195—7; Simmons, “Philosophical,” 21, 36, n. 11.
+Ritual Blood-Sacrifice Among the Ancient Maya: Part I. Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part II, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 59–76. Pebble Beach, Calif: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-[1046] Simmons, Principles; Alan J. Simmons, “Justification and Legitimacy,” Ethics 109(4) (1999): 739—71; Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford: Clarendon 2008); Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon 1979); Joseph Raz, “Introduction,” Authority, ed. Joseph Raz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990); Joseph Raz, “Authority and Justification,” Authority, ed. Joseph Raz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990) 115—41; Gertrude E. M. Anscombe, “On the Source of the Authority of the State,” Authority, ed. Joseph Raz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 142—73; Horton; McLaughlin.
+Justeson, John, and Peter Mathews
-[1047] Raz, “Introduction,” 2.
+The Seating of the Tun: Further Evidence Concerning a Late Preclassic Lowland Maya Stela Cult. American Antiquity 48:586–593.
-[1048] Anscombe 144
+Kaufman, Terrence S., and William M. Norman
-[1049] David D. Raphael, Problems of Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan 1976); Robert Ladenson, “In Defense of a Hobbesian Conception of Law,” Authority, ed. John Raz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990) 32–55.
+An Outline of Proto-Cholan Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary. In Phoneti- cism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by Lyle Campbell and John S. Justeson, 77–167. Albany: Center for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
-[1050] Green 234–40.
+Kelley, David
-[1051] McLaughlin 54.
+Glyphic Evidence for a Dynastic Sequence at Quiriguá, Guatemala. American Antiquity 27:323–335.
-[1052] Horton 12–3.
+The Birth of the Gods at Palenque. In Estudios de Cultura Maya 5, 93–134. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-[1053] Wolff, Defense 2; Simmons, Moral 41–2, 196, 206; Simmons, “Justification” 746–51; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: OUP 1986) 18–19; Raz, “Introduction,” 3; McLaughlin 59.
+Kakupacal and the Itzás. Estudios de Cultura Maya 7:255–268. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-[1054] Saladin Meckled-Garcia, “Membership, Obligation and Legitimacy: An Expressivist Account” (Unpublished PhD diss., U College London 1998) 14–8.
+Planetary Data on Caracol Stela 3. In Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, edited by Anthony Aveni, 257–262. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1055] Simmons, Moral 31–5; Green 227–8.
+Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1056] Raz, Authority 244; Horton 13–5.
+a A Possible Maya Eclipse Record. In Social Processes in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson. New York: Academic Press.
-[1057] Simmons, Moral 7.
+b Maya Astronomical Tables and Inscriptions. In Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony Aveni, 57–74. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1058] Simmons, “Justification,” 764.
+Notes on Puuc Inscriptions and History. In The Puuc: New Perspectives: Papers Presented at the Puuc Symposium, Central College, May 1977, Supplement, edited by Lawrence Mills. Pella, Iowa: Central College.
-[1059] Simmons, “Justification,” 764, original emphasis.
+The Maya Calendar Correlation Problem. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in the Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard Leventhal and Alan Kolata, 157–208. Albuquerque; University of New Mexico Press.
-[1060] Meckled-Garcia ch. 2.
+The Toltec Empire in Yucatán. Quarterly Review of Archaeology 5:12–13.
-[1061] Simmons, Moral 4, emphasis mine.
+Kidder, Alfred, Jesse D. Jennings, and Edwin M. Shook
-[1062] Simmons, Moral 31–5.
+Excavations at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub.
-[1063] Jonathan Wolff, “Pluralistic Models of Political Obligation,” Philosophica 56 (2, 1995): 10.
+. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
-[1064] Simmons, Moral 35–7.
+Kirchhoff, Paul
-[1065] Green 240–7.
+Mesoamerica. Acta Americana 1, no. 1, 92–107.
-[1066] Simmons, Moral 37, 55–6.
+Knorozov, Yuri
-[1067] George Klosko, “The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation,” Ethics 97. 2 (Jan., 1987) 353—62.
+Ancient Writing of Central America. An unauthorized translation from Soviet- skaya Etnografiya 3:100–118.
-[1068] Raz, Morality 234.
+Kowalski, Jeff K.
-[1069] Raz, Morality 234.
+a Lords of the Northern Maya: Dynastic History in the Inscriptions. Expedition 27(3):5O-6O.
-[1070] Raz, Morality 236, emphasis mine.
+b An Historical Interpretation of the Inscriptions of Uxmal. In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Vol. VI, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Elizabeth P. Benson, 235–248. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1071] Raz, Morality 236–7.
+The House of the Governor: A Maya Palace at Uxmal, Yucatán, México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-[1072] Green 225–6.
+Who Am I Among the Itzá?: Links between Northern Yucatán and the Western Maya Lowlands and Highlands. In Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacán: A.D. 700–900, edited by Richard Diehl and Janet Berio, 173–186. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[1073] Jonathan Wolff, “Anarchism and Skepticism,” For and Against the State, ed. John T. Sanders and Jan Narveson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1996) 99—118.
+Kowalski, Jeff K., and Ruth Krochock
-[1074] Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: CUP 1982) 3, emphasis mine.
+n.d. Puuc Hieroglyphs and History: A Review of Current Data. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Meetings, Chicago, November 1987.
-[1075] McLaughlin 28–9, 33–6.
+Krochock, Ruth
-<br>
+The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Iconography of Temple of the Four Lintels and Related Monuments, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
-** 15. The Positive Political Economy of Analytical Anarchism
+n.d. Dedication Ceremonies at Chichén Itzá: The Glyphic Evidence. The Sixth Round Table of Palenque. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
-*Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela*
+Kubler, George
-<quote>
+Studies in Classic Maya Iconography. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences XVIII. Hamden: Archon Books.
-How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed toward establishing them?
-<right>
+The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
-Carl Menger[1076]
-</right>
-</quote>
-*** I. Introduction
+The Double-Portrait Lintels at Tikal. Aetas del XXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia del Arte España Entre el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico. Granada.
-Both the study of political economy and the study of anarchy are motivated by the same fundamental question: what are the institutional conditions under which it is possible to pursue the extensive gains from productive specialization and realize peaceful social cooperation without command? Understood this way, the study of anarchy is simply a subset of political economy; the two are distinct, though not mutually exclusive. Political economy as a positive and analytic study of governance employs two basic starting points as it seeks to explain why certain societies have grown rich while others have remained relatively poor. In the first, and standard, approach, a set of institutional arrangements is treated as exogenously given and a governing entity is assumed to have acquired a monopoly on legitimate force. The relevant institutional arrangements include well-defined and exchangeable private property rights and freedom of contract under the rule of law. Given such preconditions, the threat of force is utilized as a means to enforce private property rights, thereby establishing the framework that facilitates large-scale trade and capital accumulation, which are the prerequisites for economic development. If these preconditions are not in place, the presumption is that a society will be hopelessly caught in a violence trap,[1077] one in which violence remains the predominant means of accumulating wealth, either directly through private predation or indirectly through state predation. The implication of this approach is that the absence of government will generate a negative-sum societal outcome.
+Electicism at Cacaxtla. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978. Part 2, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 163–172. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-A second approach to political economy—and the focus of this chapter—neither takes rules as given nor assumes that monopoly enforcement of such rules occurs. We refer to this approach as analytical anarchism. This approach is concerned with a positive study of endogenous rule formation by individuals within a particular society.[1078] Such rules emerge out of the self-interest of these individuals, though not necessarily from any deliberate design. Grounded in economic reasoning, analytical anarchism requires neither an abandonment of the notion of scarcity (and hence of competition), nor does it require the benevolent transformation of human nature. Moreover, analytical anarchism is not a normative study[1079] of a world in which the threat of force is absent. Given the ubiquity of scarcity, competition will inevitably emerge as a way of resolving conflicts among ends, and, therefore, force will always remain as one among many forms of competition over resources. Analytical anarchism is thus not an assessment of whether or not coercion should or should not take place. Rather, it is an analysis of how rules emerge and under what conditions the discretionary use of force can be minimized in the enforcement of such rules.
+Kudlek, Manfred
-The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of the burgeoning literature concerning analytical anarchism. We begin, in Section II, by clarifying the presumption of social disorder that prevails among economists and other social scientists skeptical about the ability of anarchy to facilitate social order. In Section III, we outline some ambiguities and misconceptions in the analytical study of anarchy and discuss its importance for political economy overall. In Section IV, we outline and analyze two theoretical approaches that have been used to illustrate various historical cases of anarchism across time and place. We distinguish between an exclusionary approach to analytical anarchism and an inclusionary approach to analytical anarchism. Though these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, they are distinct from each other, in that they illustrate alternative mechanisms under which the conditions of anarchy can be relatively peaceful and productive. Section V concludes with implications for future research in political economy.
+Solar Eclipses Visible at Tikal, -1014 to +2038. A copy of tables run in Hamburg on December 14, 1978. Copy in possession of author.
-*** II. The Presumption of Social Disorder without the State
+Kurjack, Edward B.
-From a political economy perspective, it is impossible to understand the emergence of analytical anarchism in the second half of the twentieth century without first placing it in its appropriate intellectual context. By the mid-twentieth century, a presumption of market failure[1080] had come to dominate neoclassical economic theory, particularly in the field of public economics. Advocates of this presumption hold that market processes are exacerbated by inefficiencies—judged in relation to an ideal of perfection competition—associated with asymmetric information, externalities, monopoly power, public goods, and macroeconomic instability. Government intervention is treated as a necessary corrective for such market failures. Our purpose here is not to address the presumption of market failure, or the corresponding government failures associated with government intervention as a corrective to market failure, per se.[1081] Rather, we will focus on the principal critique of analytical anarchism in political economy—the presumption that a state monopoly on the use of coercion is necessary for social order to prevail. We will thus be concerned with the predominant economic justification for the role of the state, namely the provision of public goods, including the establishment of secure property rights and the enforcement of contracts. Our work reflects the recognition that challenges to public goods theory have provided the theoretical building blocks that analytical anarchists can use to illustrate anarchy across time and place.
+Prehistoric Lowland Maya Community and Social Organization: A Case Study at Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, México. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 38. New Orleans.
-Beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, economists such as Armen Alchian, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase[1082] began to critique the theory of public goods that served as the principal economic justification for belief in the state’s essential role. According to Paul Samuelson’s articulation of this theory, a public good, a good that is non-excludable and non- rivalrous, will unavoidably be suboptimally provided by the market for two reasons: (i) if private entrepreneurs are unable to exclude non-payers from the benefits of a good, large numbers of people will free-ride, declining to pay for their shares of the good, which will thus be underprovided; and (ii) the inability to establish property rights in public goods will keep entrepreneurs from using the price mechanism required to allocate these goods to their most valued uses.[1083]
+Kurjack, Edward B., and E. Wyllys Andrews V
-If a good is non-rivalrous, as public goods are said to be, the marginal cost of providing an additional unit of the good is zero. If a good is non-rivalrous, then, even if the price mechanism could be utilized to allocate the good, it would be suboptimal to charge a positive price for the good. This is because pricing the marginal consumption of an additional unit of a non-rivalrous good will result in suboptimal consumption of the good.
+Early Boundary Maintenance in Northwest Yucatán, México. American Antiquity 41:318–325.
-Among the examples of public goods provided by Samuelson were lighthouses.[1084] Since ships passing in the night could simultaneously benefit from the light provided by a lighthouse without being stopped for payment, free-riding would result in the inefficient provision of lighthouses.
+Kurjack, Edward B., and Silvia Garza T.
-James Buchanan provided one of the earliest critiques of Samuelson by developing a theory of club goods.[1085] According to Buchanan, the fact that a good is non-rivalrous doesn’t mean that it must also be non-excludable. For example, access to a swimming pool at a private country club may readily be restricted to members of the club. If a good is excludable, consumption of the good can be restricted; free-riding can thus be ruled out, and with it a Samuelson-style case for government provision of the good.[1086] For example, Coase challenged the notion that government financing and production of lighthouses,[1087] which had been “simply plucked out of the air to serve as an illustration,”[1088] was actually necessary. An empirical analysis of the operation of lighthouses in England and Wales prior to their nationalization in 1836 made clear that lighthouses could be privately constructed and financed and that non-payers of lighthouse services could be excluded from zero-price access to these services through the collection of fees, known as “light dues,” at ports.[1089] Therefore, lighthouses could qualify as club goods.
+Pre-Columbian Community Form and Distribution in the Northern Maya Area. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by W. Ashmore, 287–309. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Armen Alchian and William Allen posed one of the earliest challenges to the notion that national defense was a public good by challenging the assumption of non-rivalry. As they frame it, the standard treatment of national defense as a non-rivalrous public good assumes that this good “is shared by everyone. More of it for one person does not mean less for someone else.”[1090] As a result, on a common view, it qualifies as “a public good and should be provided via government taxes and operation.” In response, they ask the following question: “Does greater anti-missile defense for New York City mean greater defense for Houston, Texas?”[1091] Both Tyler Cowen and Chris Coyne use a similar illustration to point out that, when the marginal unit of analysis is properly defined, what might be regarded as a public good is in fact rivalrous (as when the good in question is defense and the unit of analysis is defense from individual missiles).[1092] As a result, additional resources allocated toward the defense of New York from missile attack come with rising opportunity costs of foregone defense against missiles targeted at Houston.
+Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro
-To be sure, Alchian, Buchanan, and Coase weren’t anarchists. None of them intended to contribute directly to the study of analytical anarchism. They simply sought to challenge the notion that certain goods were inherently non-rivalrous and non-excludable without empirical study, and thus to reject the idea that the market provision of such goods could be known a priori to be subject to market failure.[1093] However, their critique of the public goods justification for state action obviously raises questions about which goods, if any, must be provided by the government; it thus contributes important building blocks for analytical anarchism.
+Alternativas del Clásico Temprano en la relación Tikal-Teotihuacán: Grupo 6C- XVI, Tikal, Petén, Guatemala. A Dissertation for a Doctoral en Antropología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-The most direct origins of the explicit study of analytical anarchism can be traced back to the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.[1094] Beginning in the 1970s, public-choice economists began to analyze the capabilities of individuals to engage in peaceful social cooperation without government. Although the idea that this might be possible no doubt seemed new and radical, rigorous economic inquiry into the potential dynamics of social order without the state dated back to at least the work of economist Carl Menger. Due to the civil unrest that emerged during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Winston Bush undertook a radical re-examination of alternative institutional arrangements for governing society. This analytical inquiry into the prospects for anarchism resulted in publications such as Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy and Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy.[1095] As Bush observed,
+Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro, and Lillian Vega de Zea
-It is not surprising that ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchism’ have reemerged as topics for discussion in the 1960s and the 1970s, as tentacles of government progressively invade private lives and as the alleged objectives of such invasions receded yet further from attainment.[1096]
+Aspectos dinásticos para el Clásico Temprano de Mundo Perdido, 1 ikal. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya, 127–141. Guatemala: Asociación Tikal. Larios, Rudy, and William Fash
-Given the historical context in which they were writing, Buchanan, Bush, and most of the other contributors regarded anarchism with skepticism.[1097] They understood anarchy as a social condition characterized by the absence of law, involving banditry, violence, and general social disorder. These scholars uncritically identified government with governance. “The anarchists of the 1960s,” Buchanan supposed, “were enemies of order, rather than proponents of any alternative organizational structure.”[1098]
+Excavación y restauración de un palacio de la nobleza maya de Copán. Yaxkin VIII, 11–134. Honduras: Instituto Hondereño de Antropología e Historia.
-Scholars studying the possibility of social cooperation without the state have continued to raise questions about the prospects for anarchy. For example, using economic analysis to understand the Sicilian Mafia, Diego Gambetta has argued that organized crime can facilitate trust and third-party contract enforcement where other means of enforcing property rights and contracts are deficient or absent.[1099] However, on the basis of his empirical analysis, he concludes that the case of Sicily suggests that third-party enforcement of property rights and contracts under anarchy will ultimately be extortionary:
+n.d. Architectural History and Political Symbolism of Temple 22, Copan. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.
-<quote>
+Leventhal, Richard
-Anarchists have argued that the state ought to disappear altogether for there is no need for its services. But this view is entirely different from advocating the privatization of justice and protection services. Among the few authors who argue in favor of the latter is Murray Rothbard .... He seems oblivious to the fact that the society he is proposing exists already in Sicily and can hardly be described as a success.[1100]
-</quote>
-However misplaced Gambetta’s reference to Sicily as an example of anarchy may be, since it didn’t meet the conditions of anarchy in the first place,[1101] his criticism prompts two important observations not only about the positive and empirical study of anarchy but also about political economy in general. First, the historical observation of cases of anarchy is not synonymous with the analysis of anarchy itself. As Avinash Dixit notes, “case study [analysis] or empirical research should not treat each case as a mere narrative or description of an isolated situation; it should attempt to place it in an overall framework of other cases and theories.”[1102] The historical success or failure of anarchy, as compared with government, in facilitating social cooperation under the division of labor requires an explanation of facts, not merely a description. And an explanation requires the use of theory, the purpose of which is to understand why particular historical case studies illustrate the viability of social order without the state.
+Household Groups and Classic Maya Religion. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns:. Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, 55–76. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-Whether or not anarchy features peaceful social cooperation and exchange or whether it will degenerate into social disorder and violence is dependent upon to the viability and likelihood of voluntary institutional mechanisms that filter out individuals who promote social disorder and filter in individuals who are expected to contribute to social order. We will discuss these sorts of exclusionary and inclusionary mechanisms in Section IV. For now, we simply want to emphasize that analytical anarchism is fundamentally an empirical study of the endogenous formation of rules that facilitate cooperation without command. It is therefore a radical inquiry into the sources of the formation of such rules. As we argue in the next section, any inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth and poverty of nations requires, as an analytical starting point, the assumption of anarchy. Anarchy-focused inquiry is especially relevant if the social scientist is addressing the causes of relative success or failure of governments to secure property rights and facilitate contractual exchange as compared with anarchy.
+Leyenaar, Ted J. J.
-*** III. Why Assume Anarchy in Political Economy?
+Ulama: The Perpetuation in México of the Pre-Spanish Ball Game Ullamaliztli. Leiden, The Netherlands: Rijkmuseum voor Volkenkunde.
-The political economy of governance proceeds on two levels of analysis. A “higher” level of analysis focuses on the rules of the game and is concerned with both formal and informal institutions, as well as their enforcement. A “lower level” focuses on individuals’ interactions in pursuit of their goals. Understanding this dual level of analysis provides a useful framework for unpacking and clarifying particular misperceptions with regard to the study of anarchy.
+Lincoln, Charles
-The very mention of the word “anarchy” provokes an image of a world that is, at best, disorderly and chaotic, or, even worse, a Hobbesian jungle in which people are solitary and poor and life is nasty, brutish, and short. From this perspective, an anarchic society is one that is deeply deficient because, lacking government, it also lacks governance. But the absence of rulers need not mean the absence of rules. Anarchy can be understood as simply the absence of government— of the state, of a territorial monopoly on putatively legitimized force—rather than of governance. Misperceptions of or ambiguities inherent in anarchism as an analytical or normative project rest on the unwarranted conflation of anarchy understood as a particular set of outcomes and anarchy understood as an institutional form of governance. These two senses of anarchy are related but are nonetheless distinct from each other. The popular association of anarchy with chaos and disorder rests on the assumption that these are necessary features of social interaction in the absence of government, without which no rules for governance could exist. There are at least three reasons to doubt this assumption, implying that anarchy can be more peaceful and prosperous than the conventional wisdom suggests.
+A Preliminary Assessment of Izamal, Yucatán, Mexico. B.A. thesis, Tulane University.
-First, international commerce operates in a condition of anarchy. According to the World Trade Organization, the ratio of international trade in goods and commercial services to world gross domestic product (GDP) increased from just over 20 percent in 1995 to roughly 30 percent in 2014.[1103] This figure represents a tremendous amount of wealth that is generated outside the shadow of the state, roughly equivalent to the GDP of the United States. The institutional basis for international commerce can be traced back to the emergence of what is known as the Law Merchant, or the lex mercatoria. The Law Merchant was a set of customary laws that began to emerge during the eleventh century, at a time when international trade was beginning to increase in Europe.[1104] It emerged from independent sets of localized customs within particular jurisdictions that proved to be common across jurisdictions. Not only did the norms constituting the Law Merchant emerge voluntarily, though unintendedly, from the commercial interactions of merchants, but disputes regarding the application of these norms were adjudicated by private merchant courts to which the parties had voluntary recourse and non-violently enforced by threat of ostracism. The discipline of repeated dealing and the fear of the potential loss of future income because of boycotts by other merchants incentivized merchants to comply with merchant court rulings. Given that the politically fragmented nature of medieval Europe raised the transaction costs of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes across jurisdictions, a commonly accepted set of legal institutions emerged to reduce transaction costs, at least where state enforcement of international commerce was lacking.[1105] By the fourteenth century, many European governments had codified or begun to codify and enforce commercial laws that had initially formed elements of the Law Merchant. International commerce operates within an institutional framework that resembles the one that obtained in medieval Europe. Today, crossborder disputes among merchants are resolved under the umbrellas of arbitration associations similar to medieval merchant courts. According to the International Chamber of Commerce, among the largest of these associations, merchants voluntarily comply with its private arbitral decisions 90 percent of the time under threat of reputational pressures.[1106]
+The Chronology of Chichón Itzá: A Review of the Literature. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 141–196. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Second, the evident deficiencies of and the clear limits facing actually existing governments highlight the importance of treating anarchy as a baseline point of comparison, as argued by economist Raghuram Rajan. Without “assuming anarchy” as an analytic starting point, as well as building positive transaction costs into our analysis, “economic theory offers us little guidance on how strong institutions are created and nurtured.”[1107] The “blame for this neglect should be attached to the canonical model in economics: the complete markets model.”[1108] Though Rajan admits that “some abstraction is important, gross abstraction can make a model irrelevant. And for many situations, at least in the developing world, the complete markets model is too far distanced from reality to be useful.”[1109] The evidence provided by the Fragile States Index (FSI), an annual report compiled by the Fund for Peace, best illustrates Rajan’s point. Of the 178 countries measured in the FSI, roughly 31 countries are indicated under “alert,” implying that such countries have governments that are dysfunctional, predatory, and on the verge of collapse.[1110]
+n.d. Dual Kingship at Chichón Itzá. A paper presented at “Chichón Itzá: Recent Advances in Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Art History,” a symposium held at the 53<sup>rd</sup> annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, in Phoenix, Arisona, April 1988.
-Though a theoretical case can be made that a territorial monopoly on coercion can facilitate economic development, empirically it does not necessarily imply that (a) governments are able to effectively to monopolize coercion and/or that (b) such preconditions are necessary for relatively greater prosperity.[1111] Whether such claims hold will depend on empirical comparative institutional studies of a comparative institutional nature. Analytical anarchism, like political economy itself, is a study of comparative institutional arrangements, not a comparison between ideal statelessness and imperfect actually existing, imperfect states, and/or vice versa. Recent experience in Somalia nicely illustrates this point. Since the collapse of the predatory regime of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia has effectively been in a condition of anarchy. Perhaps unexpectedly, key elements of human welfare and economic development have improved during Somalia’s period of statelessness.[1112] To be sure, Somalia is still desperately poor. Thus, a critic might say, statelessness in Somalia does not illustrate the superiority of anarchy over the operation of a territorial monopoly on coercion. The critic’s claim implies that, if a monopoly government in Somalia were to credibly establish political constraints on predation, economic and social outcomes would prove superior to those that obtain under anarchy. This might indeed be the case if such a government were a live option in contemporary Somalia. “If ‘good government’ is not one of the options in Somalia’s institutional opportunity set, anarchy may be a constrained optimum. Among the options that are available, ultra-predatory government and statelessness, statelessness may be preferable.”[1113] The problems with the exogenous imposition of formal, Western liberal democratic institutions—without the rule of law—is particularly noted by Dutch legal scholar Michael van Notten, who married into and lived within the ambit of the Samaron Clan in Somalia. As he observes:
+Linne, S.
-<quote>
+Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacán, México. The Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New Series No. 1. Stockholm.
-A complicating factor in understanding Somali society is that, in the past 30 years, a million or more Somalis have emigrated to Europe and North America. From there, they have become a highly vocal political lobby in their country of origin. These Somalis are enjoying every advantage of the clan system while being spared most of its disadvantages. The advantages they enjoy are mutual support and comradeship. The main disadvantage they are spared is the clans’ destructive involvement in politics. While these Somalis of the diaspora see that the clan structure has become a system pitting all clans and even sub-clans against one another, they generally fail to detect the cause. They don’t see that the clan system only became such a monster with the introduction of democracy. They also overlook the fact that the essence of Somali society consists not in the clans, but in the customary law. Finally, they don’t understand that the ‘West’ owes its wealth not to democracy, but rather to the protection of property rights, and that democracy [without the rule of law] is undermining and destroying those rights.[1114]
-</quote>
-This raises what we regard as the more relevant question of analytical anarchism, and for a political economy in general: what is the endogenous process by which a society expands its institutional opportunity set to include governance that places credible constraints on coercion? The long process of economic development turns on the institutional transition “from subsistence to exchange,”[1115] a movement from small-scale trading and small-scale capital accumulation to medium-scale trading and medium-scale capital accumulation and, finally, to large-scale trading and large-scale capital accumulation. The trigger for the transition at each stage is the development of institutions that increasingly secure protection for people and their property from predation. Exogenous changes can undermine this endogenous, cumulative process of rule formation. In Somalia, this “transition is not easy and is far from complete.”[1116] This is because
+Mexican Highland Cultures. Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New Series No. 7. Stockholm.
-<quote>
+Lizana, Fr. Bernardo de
-the expectation, actively promoted by the United Nations, that a central government would be reestablished in the near future led clan militias and remnants of the former government into armed conflict, often in disregard of customary law and their elders. Each group manoeuvered to be in the most favorable position to capture the formidable array of powers of the future government.[1117]
-</quote>
-Third, perhaps the most important reason to assume anarchy as an analytical starting point in political economy is that collective action problems likely evident in a dysfunctionally anarchic society might prove worse in a society under the rule of a dysfunctional state. Since the 1990s, multiple events—including the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe, ethnic and religious fractionalization in the Balkans and the Middle East, and the exportation of liberal democracy to failed and weak states in the developing world—have demonstrated that effective governance depends on the endogenous formation of rules rather than their exogenous imposition. “Any proposal for change,” as Buchanan argued, “involves the status quo as the necessary starting point. ‘We start from here,’ and not from someplace else.”[1118] Buchanan’s point is not only more pressing with regard to failed and weak states today; it is also reinforced by Raghuram Rajan’s rationale for assuming anarchy:
+Historia Conquista Espiritual de Yucatan. El Museo Nacional de México. México: Imprenta del Museo Nacional.
-<quote>
+Lothrop, Samuel K.
-a better starting point for analysis than a world with only minor blemishes may be a world where nothing is enforceable, property and individual rights are totally insecure, and the enforcement apparatus for every contract must be derived from first principle[1119]
-</quote>
+Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichón Itzá, Yucatán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. X, No. 2. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
+Lounsbury, Floyd G.
-so that, from this analytic starting point, we can then understand how enforcement mechanisms emerge even in the most unlikely of cases.
+The Inscription of the Sarcophagus Lid at Palenque. Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part H, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 5–20. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-*** IV. Theoretical Approaches to Analytical Anarchism
+A Rationale for the Initial Date of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. In The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part HI: Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 211–224. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-From the perspective of analytical anarchism, problems of collective action affect not only anarchy, but also government. The market and the state are alternative institutional embodiments of governance. The market and the state in a given society emerge from the social interactions of the individuals constituting the society.[1120] When markets or states function well, they can harness the productive and creative abilities of heterogeneous individuals across time, place, race, creed, and gender.
+Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy. In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulson Gillispie, XV:759–818. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
-Social cooperation without the state is clearly possible among small numbers of homogeneous agents with low discount rates.[1121] But analysts skeptical about the viability of anarchy maintain that social disorder will emerge under anarchy whenever groups are large, agents are heterogeneous, and agents’ discount rates are high. On the skeptics’ view, in the latter situation, the provision of public goods will be undermined by non-cooperation in the form of free-riding or predation. Simply put, there are high costs to “filtering in” or including “patient” and cooperative individuals and “filtering out” or excluding “impatient” and non-cooperative individuals. And both kinds of filtering are necessary if property rights are to be protected, contracts enforced, and public goods provided.
+Some Problems in the Interpretation of the Mythological Portion of the Hieroglyphic Text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. In Third Palenque Round ¡able, 1978, Part 2, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 99–115. Palenque Round Table Series Vol. 5. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-The problem of heterogeneity, not just in ethnicity, religion, sex, or wealth but also in the capacity and willingness to use force, poses a serious problem not only for anarchic governance but, indeed, for any sort of governance. Buchanan and Tullock acknowledge that their
+Astronomical Knowledge and Its Uses at Bonampak, México. In Archaeoastronomy in the New World, edited by A. F. Aveni, 143–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-analysis of the constitution-making process has little relevance for a society that is distinguished by a sharp cleavage of the population into distinguishable social classes or separate racial, religious, or ethnic groups sufficient to encourage the formation of predictable political coalitions and in which one of these coalitions has a clearly advantageous position at the constitutional stage.[1122]
+Glyphic Substitutions: Homophonic and Synonymic. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 167–184. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.
-Focusing specifically on anarchy, Daniel Sutter emphasizes that there is a distinction between securing initial possession of goods and services and providing enforceable agreements, and that the former must proceed the latter. The emergence of secure property rights, however, will depend on the distribution of force in society.[1123] Because of the asymmetric distribution of force relationship between the protection agencies and individuals under a condition of anarchocapitalism “the resulting distribution of rights may be highly skewed, with no effective freedom of choice between agenc[ies].”[1124] Even scholars who have otherwise demonstrated the possibility of social cooperation without the state do not necessarily reject the necessity of government. While Robert Ellickson acknowledged that residents of Shasta County, California, were able to develop informal norms that served as preferable alternatives to legal rules and enforcement mechanisms,[1125] he maintains that individuals needed government to provide them with “the Brooklyn Bridge, lighthouses, relatively clean air, and welfare programs suited to a geographically mobile society.”[1126] Ellickson’s examples are typical of those commonly advanced in the course of economic arguments for monopoly governments.
+The Identities of the Mythological Figures in the “Cross Group” of Inscriptions at I alenque. In Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Vol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 45–58. San Francisco: Pre- Columbian Art Research Institute.
-In reality, however, the provision of public goods is a challenge not only for non-monopolistic social institutions but also for the state. To argue that the marginal cost of securing property rights by the state to an additional individual is zero, and therefore non-rivalrous, implicitly assumes homogeneity among individuals, and therefore assumes away the very problem of governance upon which the economic argument for the necessity of the state is characteristically premised. Recall that the state is supposed to be necessary, and anarchy to be non-viable, when, among other things, individuals are heterogeneous. But, when they are, scarce resources will be required to identify if in fact a given individual is “homogenous” with respect to her or his ability to cooperate with other individuals. The opportunity cost of each heterogeneous individual’s membership in a given society is the cost of the foregone resources needed (a) to secure the property rights of others in the society if that individual turns out to threaten them and (b) to secure that individual’s own property rights against others. Because of this foregone cost, the protection of such rights isn’t a public good: it’s rivalrous. Thus, institutional mechanisms for excluding non-cooperative individuals are endogenous and arise to reduce the transaction cost of acquiring information required to sort cooperative individuals from non-cooperative individuals.
+Lounsbury, Floyd G., and Michael D. Coe
-To rule out the possibility of anarchy on the basis of the existence of large groups of heterogeneous and uncooperative (i.e. high-discount-rate) individuals puts the cart before the horse. Analytical anarchism approaches the issue of whether or not social cooperation in anonymity is possible, absent the state, by (a) beginning, from an analytic starting point, with the challenges posed by the need for social order in a society that is already large, heterogeneous, and inhabited by potentially uncooperative people; and (b) focusing on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion available to such people.[1127] On the margin, the size and degree of homogeneity and the level of cooperation are not preconditions of peaceful and productive social interaction under anarchy, but by-products of institutional mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. “[I]t is far more likely that feelings of friendship and communion are the effects of a regime of (contractual) social co-operation rather than the cause.”[1128] Such institutional mechanisms emerge precisely because of their effectiveness in reducing the costs of identifying potential gains from trade, specifically by incentivizing the discovery of margins on which individuals are able to communicate about their willingness to engage in cooperative behavior.[1129]
+Linguistic and Ethnographic Data Pertinent to the “Cage” Glyph of Dresden 36c. Estudios de Cultura Maya 7:269–284. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-Among political economists working in the intellectual tradition of analytical anarchism, there are two distinct, though not mutually exclusive, approaches to illustrating how social cooperation can be facilitated without the state.
+Love, Bruce
-The first is the exclusionary approach, which stresses the role of ex ante mechanisms useful for “filtering out” untrustworthy and non-cooperative individuals from those who are trustworthy and cooperative. This approach emphasizes private provision of public goods, particularly the security of property rights, through mechanisms that make the exclusion of non-cooperators possible, in effect turning what is otherwise a public good into a club good.
+Glyph T93 and Maya “Hand-scattering” Events. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 5. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-The work of Edward Stringham exemplifies this approach. Stringham has illustrated the emergence and enforcement of rules governing stock exchanges in Holland and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively, in the absence of state enforcement of contractual obligations.[1130] Stockbrokers benefited from devising clear and predictable rules governing stock trading, but enforcing such rules posed a collective action problem for them. The potential loss of income suffered from fraudulent stockbrokers’ free-riding on the reputations of other stockbrokers incentivized the joint provision of governance as a club good, one that utilized ostracism as a key enforcement tool. For example, in the coffeehouses of London, where English stock exchanges had had originally emerged, acts of deliberate fraud, or even unintentional default, by particular brokers resulted in their names being written on a blackboard. This form of boycott encouragement helped to protect other brokers from the risks of dealing with untrustworthy peers. At the same time, it incentivized other brokers to behave honestly and reliably in order to safeguard their access to potential future income.[1131] The self-policing club arrangements Stringham has studied reveal the amazing creativity used by brokers, among others, to reduce the cost of excluding uncooperative individuals through ex ante sorting. The strategies Stringham describes exemplify the capacity of exclusionary mechanisms to transform large-group settings into more manageable small group settings, with the result that, even when a population pool is initially heterogeneous, those who are accepted into membership are more or less homogeneous on the margin that matters for the group—in this case, as in many others, with respect to honesty and trustworthiness.
+Lowe, Gareth W.
-The second, inclusionary, approach focuses on ex post mechanisms of “filtering in” potentially cooperative individuals. In effect, the non-rivalrous feature of public goods, according to this approach, is a by-product of inclusionary mechanisms that create margins of homogeneity among otherwise heterogeneous individuals. The result of the use of such inclusionary mechanisms is the evolution of generally applicable norms and rules from which all individuals can simultaneously benefit.
+The Mixe-Zoque as Competing Neighbors of the Early Lowland Maya. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 197–248. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-The work of Peter Leeson illustrates the exploration of this approach in various historical and cultural settings. For example, the extension of credit by producers of goods increased the costs of theft and the benefits of trade among middlemen in late precolonial Africa.[1132] Given that middlemen during this period were the sole suppliers of firearms to interior communities, the distribution of force favored their ability to plunder, rather than trade.[1133] However, credit served as a pre-contractual mechanism of inclusion that reduced the likelihood of predation. Credit allowed producers to trade with goods that did not yet exist, thus increasing the cost of theft for middlemen. In addition, by increasing the cost of theft for middlemen, who could not steal what had not yet been produced, this mechanism “filtered in” those individuals with lower discount rates, therefore incentivizing future repeated dealings, and “filtering out” those middlemen inclined to engage in violent theft. Thus, the extension of credit was a pre-contractual inclusion- ary mechanism capable of producing a public good—in this case self-governance—privately by eliciting a demand for trade among those middlemen patient enough to value the prospect of a future stream of income derived from trade rather than theft.
+MacLeod, Barbara, and Dennis Puleston
-Leeson’s work on pirate communities also defies the conventional wisdom with respect to the viability of anarchy.[1134] On pirate ships, large groups of heterogeneous agents,[1135] presumably with high discount rates, organized themselves under democratically elected captains and quartermasters constrained by constitutional rules (including ones, predating the formulation of the US Constitution, that mandated the separation of powers) and provided economic safety nets for the disabled.
+Pathways into Darkness: The Search for the Road to Xibalba. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Green Robertson, 71–79. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.
-Other inclusionary mechanisms facilitating peaceful social interaction between heterogeneous groups under anarchy include intermarriage between warring clans on the border between England and Scotland prior to their union[1136] and the adoption of customs, practices, and languages to signal credibility and trustworthiness among strangers attempting to trade.[1137] Such inclusionary mechanisms can enable people to overcome geographic and social distance in order to realize the gains from social cooperation under the division of labor.
+MacNeish, Richard S.
-*** V. Conclusion
+Second Annual Report of the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance. Andover, Mass.: Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.
-Analytical anarchism is a research program exploring the possibility of endogenous rule formation, governance in accordance with emergent rules, and thus of collective action emerging from the bottom up rather than dependent on top-down management. There are goods that are to one degree or another non-excludable or non-rivalrous or both, and that may thus not be produced, or not be produced at appealing levels, absent some sort of collective action. However, rules making possible the needed kinds of collective action can be created and sustained endogenously. Social-evolutionary processes must be cultivated in order to ensure that people can realize the benefits of social cooperation without command.
+Third Annual Report of the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance. Andover, Mass.: Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.
-This outcome can be achieved in the course of peaceful social cooperation featuring exclusionary and inclusionary mechanisms. Though the inclusionary and exclusionary approaches are analytically distinct, they are intertwined empirically in multiple settings. The availability of each helps to enable social cooperation among heterogeneous individuals by, among other things, reducing the payoffs to violent and uncooperative behavior.[1138] Thus, they provide convergent support for the occurrence of catallaxy.[1139] By calling attention to social mechanisms that create and sustain bottom-up social order, analytical anarchism helps in perhaps unexpected ways to teach the fundamental lesson of political economy. Political economy in general, and analytical anarchism in particular, help to show us how it is possible to convert potentially violent situations into ones in which people can and do engage in mutually beneficial exchanges. They also show how people can set in motion, as an unintended by-product, the evolution of rules facilitating the occurrence of such exchanges among anonymous traders without the use of force.
+Maler, Teobert
+–1903 Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumasintla Valley. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University II. Cambridge.
-[1076] Carl Menger, Investigations into the Methods of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (New York, NY: New York UP 1985) 146.
+–1910 Explorations of the Upper Usumasintla and Adjacent Region. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University IV. Cambridge.
-[1077] Gary W. Cox, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Violence Trap: A Political Economic Approach to the Problems of Development,” Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice 34.1 (2019): 3—19.
+Marcus, Joyce
-[1078] See Peter J. Boettke, “Anarchism as a Progressive Research Program in Political Economy,” Anarchy, State and Public Choice, ed. Edward Stringham (Northampton, MA: Elgar 2005) 206—19; Peter J. Boettke, “Anarchism and Austrian Economics,” New Perspectives on Political Economy 7.1 (2011): 125—40.
+Territorial Organization of the Lowland Maya. Science 180:911–916.
-[1079] Our empirical and analytical focus is not intended to reflect a dismissive attitude regarding important normative and theoretical contributions to the study of anarchy. An overview of analytical anarchism must acknowledge its precursors, including the works of Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, and David Friedman. Their contributions have influenced and inspired scholars engaged in the analytical anarchist project today. See Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies 1970); Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York, NY: Macmillan 1973); Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities 1982); Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable, 2d ed. (Auburn, AL: Mises 2011); David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 3d ed. (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 2015).
+Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands: An Epigraphic Approach to ‘Territorial Organization. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[1080] The term “market failure” was coined by economist Francis Bator, “The Anatomy of Market Failure,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 72.3 (1958): 351—79.
+Zapotee Writing. Scientific American 242:50–64.
-[1081] For a more complete discussion of this point, see Peter J. Boettke and Peter T. Leeson, “Introduction,” The Economic Role of the State, ed. Boettke and Leeson (Northampton, MA: Elgar 2015) xi-xxv.
+Marquina, Ignacio
-[1082] We draw attention to the work of Alchian, Buchanan, and Coase because, by pioneering the development of property rights economics, public choice economics, and law and economics, respectively, each of them redirected the analytical focus of economic analysis to questions related to choice over institutional arrangements rather than within institutional arrangements and the role of institutional entrepreneurship in devising institutional arrangements capable of providing public goods. See Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela, “Alchian, Buchanan, and Coase: A Neglected Branch of Chicago Price Theory,” Man and the Economy: The Journal of the Coase Society 1.2 (2014): 189—208; and Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela, “Rivalry, Polycentricism, and Institutional Evolution,” Advances in Austrian Economics 19 (2015): 1–19.
+Arquitectura prehispánica. México: Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México. Martin, Paul S.
-[1083] Paul A. Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 36.4 (1954): 387–9.
+Report on the Temple of the Two Lintels. In Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 2 7, 302–305. Washington, D.C.
-[1084] See Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 5<sup>th</sup> ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill 1961) 192–3; Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 19<sup>th</sup> ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill 2009) 37. Samuelson was not the first economist to justify government intervention in the financing of lighthouses on the grounds of non-excludability. John Ramsey McCulloch and, more notably, John Stuart Mill were among the earliest economists to assume that the potential of free-riding justified government involvement in the provision of lighthouses. See John Ramsey McCulloch, “On the Frequency of Shipwrecks,” Edinburgh Review 60 (1835): 338–53; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus 2004).
+Matheny, Ray T.
-[1085] See James M. Buchanan, “An Economic Theory of Clubs,” Economica 32 (1965): 1–14.
+Early States in the Maya Lowlands During the Late Preclassic Period: Edzna and El Mirador. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 1–44. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Precolumbian Studies.
-[1086] Harold Demsetz has also noted that there is a further distinction, obscured by Samuelson, between public goods and collective goods. Both are non-rivalrous. But only in the case of collective goods is it “impossible to exclude nonpurchasers” (emphasis original). See Harold Demsetz, “The Private Production of Public Goods,” Journal of Law and Economics 13.2 (1970): 254.
+El Mirador: An Early Maya Metropolis Uncovered. National Geographic Magazine, September 1987, 317–339.
-[1087] Ronald H. Coase, “The Lighthouse in Economics,” Journal of Law and Economics 17.2 (1974): 357–76.
+Mathews, Peter
-[1088] Coase 375.
+The Lintels of Structure 12, Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Northeastern Anthropological Association, Wesleyan University, October 1975.
-[1089] For an extension of Coase’s analysis to the case of lightships, see Rosolino Candela and Vincent Geloso, “The Lightship in Economics,” Public Choice 176.3–4 (2018): 479–506; Rosolino Candela and Vincent Geloso, “Coase and Transaction Costs Reconsidered: The Case of the English Lighthouse System,” European Journal of Law and Economics 48.3 (2019): 331–49.
+The Inscription on the Back of Stela 8, Dos Pilas, Guatemala. A paper prepared for a seminar at Yale University. Copy provided by author.
-[1090] Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen, University Economics: Elements of Inquiry, 3d ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1972) 250.
+Naranjo: The Altar of Stela 38. An unpublished manuscript dated August 3, 1977, in the possession of the authors.
-[1091] Alchian and Allen 250.
+Notes on the Inscriptions of “Site Q.” Unpublished manuscript in the possession of the authors.
-[1092] Tyler Cowen, “Public Goods Definitions and their Institutional Context: a Critique of Public Goods Theory,” Review of Social Economy 43.1 (1985): 53–63; Christopher J. Coyne, “Lobotomizing the Defense Brain,” Review of Austrian Economics 28.4 (2015): 371–96.
+The Stucco Text Above the Piers of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque. Maya Glyph Notes, No. 10. A manuscript circulated by the author.
-[1093] In “Public Goods Definitions,” Cowen builds on this point by arguing that the degree to which any good is non-rivalrous or non-excludable depends on its institutional context.
+a Maya Early Classic Monuments and Inscriptions. In A Consideration of the Early Classic Period in the Maya Lowlands, edited by Gordon R. Willey and Peter Mathews, 5–54. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
-[1094] For a more comprehensive overview of the relationship between the study of public choice and the study of anarchy, see Benjamin Powell and Edward P. Stringham, “Public Choice and the Economic Analysis of Anarchy: A Survey,” Public Choice 140.3–4 (2009): 503–38.
+b Emblem Glyphs in Classic Maya Inscriptions. A paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, Denver, 1985.
-[1095] Gordon Tullock, ed., Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg, VA: Center for the Study of Public Choice 1972); Gordon Tullock, ed., Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg, VA: University 1974).
+Late Classic Maya Site Interaction. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.
-[1096] Winston Bush, “Individual Welfare in Anarchy,” Tullock, Explorations 5.
+The Sculptures of Yaxchilán. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Yale University.
-[1097] An important exception was David Friedman, Assistant Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech between 1976 and 1980.
+Mathews, Peter, and John S. Justeson
-[1098] James M. Buchanan, “Reflections after Three Decades,” Stringham, Anarchy 192.
+Patterns of Sign Substitution in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing: “The Affix Cluster.” In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 212–213. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
-[1099] See Diego Gambetta, ed., Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Blackwell 1988); Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1993).
+Mathews, Peter, and Gordon Wieley
-[1100] Gambettta, Mafia 275n3.
+n.d. Prehistoric Polities in the Pasión Region: Hieroglyphic Texts and Their Archaeological Settings. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
-[1101] Though the Sicilian Mafia emerged because of the state’s failure to secure and enforce private property rights, this does not imply the complete absence of the state itself. It would be more precise to argue that the predatory nature of the state in Sicily created the conditions for its emergence of the Sicilian Mafia as a substitute mechanism of property rights enforcement in the early nineteenth century. See Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela, “Productive Specialization, Peaceful Cooperation, and the Problem of the Predatory State: Lessons From Comparative Historical Political Economy,” Public Choice, forthcoming; Rosolino A. Candela, “The Political Economy of Insecure Property Rights: Insights from the Kingdom of Sicily,” Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming.
+Maudslay, Alfred P.
-[1102] Avinash K. Dixit, Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Modes of Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2004) 22.
+–1902 Archaeology: Biologia Centrali-Americana. Vol. 1. London: Dulau and Co. Reprint edition, 1974, Milparton Publishing Corp.
-[1103] World Trade Organization, International Trade Statistics 2015 (Geneva: WTO 2015) 17.
+Means, Philip Ainsworth
-[1104] Bruce L. Benson, “The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law,” Southern Economic Journal 55.3 (1989): 644–61.
+History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzás. Papers of Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 7. Cambridge, Mass.
-[1105] Benson provides several reasons why the Law Merchant emerged during this period. The first reason is that state law did not recognize or enforce what merchant law acknowledged. For example, government courts typically would not consider disputes that included (i) contracts made in another nation, (ii) contractual agreements which involved the payment of interest, or (iii) books of account as evidence despite the fact that merchants held them in high regard. Second, merchant courts were chaired by judges from the relevant merchant community, who had specialized and particular knowledge of technical issues involved in merchant disputes. Therefore, merchant courts could generally adjudicate disputes in a more expeditious manner. See Benson 649–50.
+Miller, Arthur G.
-[1106] Peter T. Leeson, “One More Time with Feeling: The Law Merchant, Arbitration, and International Trade,” Indian Journal of Economics and Business 29 (2007): 29–34; Peter T. Leeson, “Anarchy Unbound: How Much Order Can Spontaneous Order Create?” Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics, ed. Peter J. Boettke. (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar 2010) 136–153; Peter T. Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think (New York, NY: CUP 2014).
+Captains of the Itzá: Unpublished Mural Evidence from Chichón Itzá. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, edited by Norman Hammond, 197–225. London: Academic Press.
-[1107] Rajan Raghuram, “Assume Anarchy?” Finance and Development, Sep. 2004: 56.
+Maya Rulers of Time: A Study of Architectural Sculpture at Tikal, Guatemala. Los Soberanos Mayas del Tiempo: Un Estudio de la Escultura Arquitectónica de Tikal, Guatemala. Philadelphia: the University Museum.
-[1108] Raghuram 56. Raghuram goes further to describe the complete markets model as one in which “everyone is fully informed; every eventuality is anticipated in contracts; all contracts are enforced by omniscient, incorruptible courts; and governments automatically take care of all the public goods and interfere in none of the private ones.”
+Miller, Jeffrey
-[1109] Raghuram 56.
+Notes on a Stelae Pair Probably from Calakmul, Campeche, México. In Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part I, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 149–162. Pebble Beach, Calif: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-[1110] See J.J. Messner, ed., Fragile States Index Annual Report 2019 (Washington, DC: Fund for Peace 2019).
+Miller, Mary E.
-[1111] Though not an anarchist, economics Nobel Laureate Douglass North has observed: “The existence of a state is essential for economic growth; the state, however, is the source of man-made economic decline.” See Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, NY: Norton 1981) 20.
+A Re-examination of Mesoamerican Chacmool. The Art Bulletin LXVII:7–17.
-[1112] Peter T. Leeson, “Better Off Stateless: Somalia before and after Government Collapse,” Journal of Comparative Economics 35.4 (2007): 698–710; Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford, and Alex Nowrasteh, “Somalia after State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 67.3–4 (2008): 657–70.
+a Copán: Conference with a Perished City. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by E. Benson, 72–109. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.
-[1113] Leeson, “Stateless” 707; see also Peter T. Leeson and Claudia Williamson, “Anarchy and Development: An Application of the Theory of Second Best,” Law and Development Review 2.1 (2009): 77–96.
+b The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-[1114] Michael van Notten. The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa, ed. Spencer Heath MacCallum (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea 2005) 9. Emphasis added.
+The Meaning and Function of the Main Acropolis, Copan. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 149–195. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[1115] P.T. Bauer, From Subsistence to Exchange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2000).
+Miller, Mary E., and Stephen D. Houston
-[1116] Van Notten 8.
+The Classic Maya Ballgame and Its Architectural Setting: A Study in Relations Between Text and Image. RES 14, 47–66.
-[1117] Van Notten 8.
+Miller, Virginia
-[1118] James M. Buchanan, Collected Works of James M. Buchanan 7: The Limits of Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund 2000) 101.
+Star Warriors at Chichón Itzá. In Word and Image in Maya Culture: Explorations in Language, Writing, and Representation, edited by William F. Hanks and Don S. Rice, 287–305. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
-[1119] Rajan 57.
+Millon, René
-[1120] See Richard E. Wagner, Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Northampton, MA: Elgar 2016); Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter J. Boettke, and Vlad Tarko, Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations (New York, NY: OUP 2019).
+Teotihuacán: City, State, and Civilization. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, Supplement 1, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff with the assistance of P. A. Andrews, 198–243. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1121] Janet T. Landa, “A Theory of the Ethnically Homogenous Middleman Group: An Institutional Alternative to Contract Law,” Journal of Legal Studies 10.2 (1981): 349—62; Avner Greif, “Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders,” Journal of Economic History 49.4 (1989): 857—82; Avner Greif, “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition,” American Economic Review 8.3 (1993): 525—48; Lisa Berstein, “Opting Out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond Industry,” Journal of Legal Studies 21.1 (1992): 115—57; Barak Richman, Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2017).
+The Last Years of Teotihuacán Dominance. In The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, 102–175. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
-[1122] James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P 1962) 80.
+Mitchum, B.
-[1123] Daniel Sutter, “Asymmetric Power Relations and Cooperation in Anarchy,” Southern Economic Journal 61.3 (1995): 602–13
+Chipped Stone Artifacts. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Tol. I, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 105–115. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-[1124] Sutter 604. On the issues discussed in the text relating to impact of the distribution of rights and the returns to violence on the viability of anarchy, see John Umbeck, “Might Makes Rights: A Theory of the Formation and Initial Distribution of Property Rights,” Economic Inquiry 19.1 (1981): 38–59; Jack Hirshleifer, “Anarchy and Its Breakdown,” Journal of Political Economy 103.1 (2005): 26–52; Rosolino A. Candela and Vincent Geloso, “Statelessness and the Endogeneity of Generalized Increasing Returns: Acadian Settlers and Native Americans Before 1755,” SSRN Working Paper, [[https://papers.ssrn.com][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_]] [[https://papers.ssrn.com][id=3028206]] (2019; last visited January 15, 2020).
+Moholy-Nagy, Hattula
-[1125] Robert C. Ellickson, “Of Coase and Cattle: Dispute Resolution Among Neighbors in Shasta County,” Stanford Law Review 38.3 (1986): 623–87; Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1991).
+Spatial Distribution of Flint and Obsidian Artifacts at Tikal, Guatemala. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 91–108. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.
-[1126] Robert C. Ellickson, “A Hayekian Case Against Anarcho-Capitalism: Of Street Grids, Lighthouses, and Aid to the Destitute,” New York University Journal of Law and Liberty 11.1 (2017): 372.
+Molloy, John P., and W. L. Rathje
-[1127] See Boettke, “Anarchism” 125–40. Emphasis original.
+Sexploitation Among the Late Classic Maya. In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 430–444. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1128] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand 1962) 85.
+Morley, Syl vanus Griswol d
-[1129] See Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela, “Rivalry, Polycentricism, and Institutional Evolution,” Advances in Austrian Economics 19 (2015): 1–19.
+An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphics. New York: Dover Publications. 1975 reprint.
-[1130] Edward Stringham, “The Emergence of the London Stock Exchange as a Self-Policing Club,” Journal of Private Enterprise 17.2 (2002): 1–19; Edward P. Stringham, “The Extralegal Development of Securities Trading in Seventeenth Century Amsterdam,” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 43.2 (2003): 321–344; Edward P. Stringham, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (New York, NY: OUP 2015).
+The Inscriptions at Copan. The Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 219. Washington, D.C.
-[1131] Stringham, “Emergence” 6–7.
+The Chichén Itzá Project. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 259–273. Washington, D.C.
-[1132] Peter T. Leeson, “Trading With Bandits,” Journal of Law and Economics 50.2 (2007): 303–21;
+Archaeology. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 231–240. Washington, D.C.
-[1133] Leeson, “Trading” 306.
+Inscriptions at the Caracol. In The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454, edited by Karl Ruppert. Washington, D.C.
-[1134] Peter T. Leeson, “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization,” Journal of Political Economy 115.6 (2007): 1049–94; Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2009).
+Morris, Earl H., Jean Chari ot, and Ann Axtell Morris
-[1135] Black and white sailors served together on pirate ships, and the proportion of black sailors was generally higher on pirate ships than on conventional merchant ships (see Leeson, Hook 157).
+The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Vols. 1 and 2. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 406. Washington, D.C.
-[1136] Peter T. Leeson, “The Laws of Lawlessness,” Journal of Legal Studies 38.2 (2009): 471–503.
+Nakamura, Seiichi
-[1137] See Peter T. Leeson, “Endogenizing Fractionalization,” Journal of Institutional Economics 1.1 (2005): 75–98; Peter T. Leeson, “Social Distance and Self-Enforcing Exchange,” Journal of Legal Studies 37.1 (2008): 161–88.
+Proyecto Arqueológico La Entrada, Temporada 1986–1987: resultados preliminares e interacción interregional. A paper presented at IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondurena, held in La Ceiba, Altántida, Honduras, June 22–26.
-[1138] See, for example, John Umbeck, “The California Gold Rush: A Study of Emerging Property Rights,” Explorations in Economic History, 14.3 (1977): 197–226; Terry L. Anderson and P.J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2004); David Friedman, “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case,” Journal of Legal Studies 8.2 (1979): 399–415; and David Skarbek, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (New York, NY: OUP 2014). Though we have used Leeson’s work to illustrate the inclusionary approach, he also offers an example of the exclusionary approach similar to Stringham’s in “Governments, Clubs, and Constitutions,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80.2 (2011): 301–8.
+Oakland, Amy
-[1139] For further discussion of the meaning of catallaxy, see F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1976) 108.
+Teotihuacán: The Blood Complex at Atetelco. A paper prepared for a seminar on the transition from Preclassic to Classic times, held at the University of Texas, 1982. Copy in possession of author.
-** 16. Moral Parity Between State and Non-State Actors
+Orejel, Jorge
-*Jason Brennan*
+n.d. An Analysis of the Inscriptions of the Petex Batun Region. A paper prepared for the graduate seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, University of Texas, 1988.
-*** I. Introduction
+Pahl, Gary
-Suppose I believe that people are too fat, so I storm 7-Eleven with a gun and declare, “From now one, no one may purchase Big Gulps!” Suppose I believe Americans should not live high while people die, so I hack into upper-middle-class and rich people’s bank accounts and redistribute their wealth to poor people. Suppose I believe Americans should support one another and prioritize each other’s welfare over the welfare of foreigners. So, I arrive at a BMW dealership while brandishing a gun and tell customers, “You may buy German, but only if you give $1,500 to Detroit autoworkers.” Suppose I believe space exploration is a vital project. So, I build elaborate and expensive spaceresearch equipment, which I pay for by hacking into Americans’ bank accounts.
+Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Copán: A Catalogue and Historical Commentary. Ph.D dissertation, University of California. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.
-If I did any of these things, you would probably call the police and demand I be arrested. The police would indeed show up and arrest me, or perhaps even kill me.
+Parsons, Mark
-Yet, while you would think my actions are criminal, our own governments do these same things. Governments regularly issue commands, backed with threats of violence, about what we may and may not eat, what we may buy, and how much of our income we must redistribute to others or spend on supposed public goods. Many people think there is no problem with that— they believe that governments are permitted to do things ordinary people are forbidden from doing. This leads to a philosophical puzzle: What, if anything, explains why governments and the agents of government have a special moral status in which they are exempt from ordinary moral rules and prohibitions? What, if anything, can explain why government agents may do what I or others may not?
+Three Thematic Complexes in the Art of Teotihuacán. A paper prepared at the University of Texas. Copy in possession of author.
-For the purposes of this chapter, let’s define a statist as a person who advocates installing and maintaining a government. (I’m not using the word “statist” as a pejorative here.) Following the philosopher Gregory Kavka, I understand a government to be the subset of a society which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion, and which has coercive power (more or less) sufficient to maintain that monopoly.[1140] An anarchist is a person who rejects government so defined; i.e., a person who believes that social order and peace can be properly maintained without relying on a monopoly of coercive violence. Anarchists often believe that governments are unjust. Or, more weakly, many anarchists simply believe non-governmental mechanisms for protecting rights and property, or for maintaining public goods, are all things considered superior to governmental mechanisms.
+Pasztory, Esther
-One way to illustrate the difference between statists and anarchists concerns their view of government and non-governmental actors. Statists generally believe that government actors have at least four special moral powers and privileges:
+The Iconography of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 15. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-. Legitimacy/Special Enforcement Powers: The special moral permission to create and enforce rules over certain people within a geographic area. For example, a government may forbid adults from smoking marijuana and may send police to violently apprehend marijuana users.
+The Murals of Tepantitla, Teotihuacán. New York: Garland Publishing. Pendergast, David M.
-. Authority: A special moral power to create, in others, a moral obligation to obey the rules and commands certain government agents issue. For example, when a government issues a law forbidding you from using marijuana, you thereby acquire a moral obligation to refrain from smoking pot because the government said so.
+Evidence of Early Teotihuacán-Lowland Maya Contact at Altun Ha. American Antiquity 35:455–460.
-. Special Immunity: When government agents act unjustly, we are not permitted to defend ourselves or others from their unjust actions. For example, even if marijuana criminalization is unjust, you may not fight back against a police officer who arrests you for pot possession. You must instead submit to arrest and accept punishment.
+Lamanai, Belize: Summary of Excavation Results 1987–1980. Journal of Field Archaeology 8(l):29–53.
-. Punishment: The government has the legitimacy and authority to punish people who ignore its commands or violate its rules. For example, if the cops catch you smoking pot, the government can throw you in jail, take some of your money, and issue a public proclamation that you are a criminal.
+Stability Through Change: Lamanai, Belize, from the Ninth to the Seventeenth Century. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic. Edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 223—249. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-To be more precise, statists believe that government agents, in virtue of being government agents, possess these moral powers and privileges more extensively than ordinary civilians do. For instance, if I order you to stop smoking pot, the statist would say my “order” confers upon you no duty to stop. But if the Drug Enforcement Agency issues that exact same order, the statist holds that you thereby acquire a duty to comply.
+Pohl, Mary
-Now, most statists, except for totalitarians, believe there are limits on what the state may do and on how expansive these four moral powers and privileges are. Most people believe that the state has limits on what rules it may issue and how it may enforce those rules, that you might not have a duty to obey certain highly unjust commands or laws, and that you might have some right to resist government injustices. Nevertheless, statists generally hold that you owe greater respect, deference, and subservience to government agents than you do to private actors.
+Maya Ritual Faunas: Vertebrate Remains from Burials, Caches, Caves and Cenotes in the Maya Lowlands. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 55–103. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-In contrast, anarchists generally hold that government agents and private civilians are on par morally speaking. Call this the Moral Parity Thesis: government agents and private civilians are fundamentally morally equal; government bodies and civilians are fundamentally morally equal. Anarchists tend to hold that government agents, despite their legal offices, do not have any special right to create and enforce rules, do not have any special right to punish, do not have any special right to be obeyed, and do not have any special immunity against being resisted when they act unjustly.
+Pollock, H.E.D.
-The anarchist issues the statist a challenge: identify some property or set of properties which (some) governments (tend to) possess and which civilians lack, which plausibly explain why governments would have some extra degree of legitimacy, authority, special immunity, or right to punish. First, I discuss anarchist responses to various arguments which purport to show states have legitimacy and authority. Second, I discuss general responses to the issue of whether state agents enjoy special immunity. Third, I cover the question of whether the state, and only the state, can punish. My goal here is not to settle these issues—indeed, each topic is itself a subject of hundreds of books—but rather to illustrate precisely what it means for anarchists to hold that governmental and non-governmental agents are morally on par.
+Architectural Notes on Some Chenes Ruins. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61, edited by William R. Ballard, Jr., 1–87. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
-*** II. The Huemer Test
+The Puuc: An Architectural Survey of the Hill Country of Yucatán and Northern Campeche, Mexico. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 19. Cambridge.
-In The Problem of Political Authority, anarchist philosopher Michael Huemer examines a wide range of arguments which purport to establish that some governments have legitimacy and authority.[1141] The statist has to identify some special feature or set of features F that at least some governments tend to have and which civilians tend to lack, which explains why governments and their agents acting ex officio would possess these two special moral powers and privileges.
+Pollock, H.E.D., Ralph L. Roys, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and A. Ledyard Smith
-When the statist offers a candidate for F, Huemer then asks two questions:
+Mayapán, Yucatán, Mexico. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 619. Washington, D.C.
-. Is F plausible in its own right?
+Potter, David F.
-. Is it possible for a civilian or private agent also to possess F? If a civilian, private agent, or group of private agents possessed F, would we also conclude that the civilian/private agent had legitimacy, authority, or whatever other special status the statist attributes to government?
+Maya Architecture of the Central Yucatán Peninsula. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 44. New Orleans.
-We might call questions 1 and 2, taken together, the Huemer Test. When the statist offers an account of why the government or its agents possess some privileged moral status, we should accept that account only if it passes the Huemer Test; that is, only if the statist has satisfactory answers to both of these questions.
+Proskouriakoff, Tatiana
-In a sense, part 2 of the Huemer Test is a test of moral parity. It is meant to examine whether the statist believes that government and civilians are in principle on par, or whether the statist instead believes that government is somehow special. Many times, after the statist has offered some account of F, Huemer constructs a parallel case in which civilians also possess F. Yet in almost all of these cases, we would conclude the civilians do not have legitimacy and authority, despite possessing the special features that supposedly explain why governments have legitimacy and authority. This shows that the statist’s purported theory of legitimacy and authority is mistaken, or perhaps that the statist inadvertently believes (for unknown reasons) that government and civilian agents are not morally on par.
+A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 593. Washington, D.C.
-Let’s illustrate this with a cartoon case. Suppose someone said that the reason US government agents have legitimacy and authority is because they work in or near Washington, DC. First, we would ask, is that even a plausible explanation for why the US federal government would have authority? Obviously not—that’s why I’m using it as a cartoon illustration here. (I’ll examine a more plausible case below.) Second, we can then ask whether it’s possible for non-governmental agents (such as I, Jason Brennan) to possess or instantiate the feature of “working in or near DC.” Of course, they can. So we might draw a parallel: Jason Brennan and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) bureaucrats both work in DC; thus, they both can and do possess the special feature meant to explain why government agents have legitimacy and authority. However, if Jason Brennan ordered you not to smoke pot and threatened to throw you in jail for doing so, you would conclude both (a) that you had no duty to obey his commands and (b) that he had no permission to enforce his command.[1142] Accordingly, “working in or near DC” cannot be the special property or feature that explains why the DEA is authoritative and legitimate. Both I, Jason Brennan, and the DEA instantiate that property, but no one would think that makes the DEA authoritative.
+Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American Antiquity 25:454–475.
-Again, that is a silly example meant to illustrate the general principle. Let’s now examine how a popular and far more plausible theory fails the Huemer Test.
+a Lords of the Maya Realm. Expedition 4(1):14—21.
-*** III. Fair Play and the Huemer Test
+b Portraits of Women in Maya Art. Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, edited by Samuel K. Lothrop and others, 81–99. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
-To review, governments generally claim to possess two special moral powers:
+–1964 Historical Data in the Inscriptions of Yaxchilán, Parts I and II. Estudios de Cultura Maya 3:149–167 and 4:177–201. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
-. Legitimacy: The permission to create and enforce rules over certain people within a geographic area.
+On Two Inscriptions at Chichón Itzá. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 67, edited by William R. Ballard, Jr., 459—467. Cambridge.
-. Authority: The ability to create in others a moral obligation to obey those rules.
+The Hand-Grasping-Fish and Associated Glyphs on Classic Maya Monuments. In Mesoamerican Writing Systems, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 165–178. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Legitimacy is the power that could make it permissible for the government to tax you. Authority is the power that could make it impermissible for you to refuse to pay your taxes. Legitimacy makes it okay for the police to arrest you.
+Puleston, Dennis
-Let’s briefly examine how one prominent theory of legitimacy and authority fails the Huemer Test. I do not have space to cover all such theories here (and other chapters in this volume may provide more depth). My goal in doing so is to illustrate how morality parity appears to exist between state and non-state actors.
+The People of the Cayman/Crocodile: Riparian Agriculture and the Origins of Aquatic Motifs in Ancient Maya Iconography. \n Aspects of Ancient Maya Civilization, edited by François-Auguste de Montequin, 1–26. Saint Paul: Hamline University.
-One major theory of legitimacy and authority, devised by H. L. A. Hart, holds that legitimacy and authority arises out of a duty of fair play:
+The Art and Archaeology of Hydraulic Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, edited by Norman Hammond, 449–469. London: Academic Press.
-<quote>
+An Epistemological Pathology and the Collapse, or Why the Maya Kept the Short Count. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 63–71. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-<center>
-The Fair Play Theory
-</center>
-When a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to those restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission.[1143] Further, in such cases, it is permissible to coerce others to comply with this duty.
+Rathje, William L.
-</quote>
-The idea here is that when some people incur a sacrifice in order to produce public goods that benefit all, the other people who benefit have a duty to contribute to the production of those goods as well. It would be unfair of them to free-ride on the provision of these goods when others are sacrificing to provide them.
+The Origin and Development of Lowland Classic Maya Civilization. American Antiquity 36(3):275–85.
-The philosopher Robert Nozick notes that at least in some cases, this line of argument seems implausible. He illustrates at least one case with his “public address system” thought experiment. He asks you to imagine that your neighbors create a public entertainment system, with loudspeakers throughout your neighborhood. Each neighbor takes turns playing songs, reciting poetry, conducting interviews, or whatnot. You enjoy the system. One day, let’s say Day 138, they come to you and say that it’s your turn to spend the day entertaining people. Must you do so? Most people conclude no—even though you benefited from the system, you aren’t dutybound to participate in it and it would be wrong to force you do to so. Part of the reason for this judgment seems to be that you had no good way of avoiding receiving the benefits—you couldn’t opt out without great expense to yourself. But this seems to hold for most of the benefits the state provides as well.
+Rattray, Evelyn
-However, perhaps there are other fair play cases where it’s plausible there is a duty to contribute to some common good. Here is one such case from Huemer:
+A Gulf Coast-Maya Enclave at Teotihuacán. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.
-<quote>
+Recinos, Adrian
-You are in a lifeboat with several other people. You are caught in a storm, and the boat is taking on water, which needs to be bailed out. Other passengers take up containers and start bailing. The other passengers’ efforts are clearly sufficient to keep the boat afloat; thus, no large negative consequences will result if you refuse to bail. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that you should help bail water. Intuitively, it would be unfair to let the others do all the work.[1144]
-</quote>
-The public-address-system and lifeboat cases are both instances where the fair play principle applies, but it only the latter seems obligatory. This shows at the very least that Hart’s Fair Play Theory is incomplete, since it does not distinguish between the two cases. The difference, Huemer says, is that in the lifeboat case the others are genuinely doing something useful, the costs they assume are necessary to produce the common good, you do indeed receive a fair share of the benefit being produced, your participation would indeed help produce the good, the costs to you of participating are reasonable and fair, and, finally, your participation does not stop you from doing something more important.[1145] In the public-address-system case, your participation comes at the expense of other important things you could do with your life.
+Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya. Translated by Delia Goetz and S. G. Morley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-Now, Hart intends the Fair Play Theory to explain both why government may coerce us into “doing our fair share” and why we would have a duty to obey the government’s commands, edicts, and laws. Hart and others who endorse the Fair Play Theory claim that obedience to the law is morally analogous to helping to bail water out of the lifeboat.
+Rice, Don S.
-Huemer subjects the theory to part 2 of the Huemer Test. He notes that governments do not simply demand that we, say, pay a small amount of taxes to maintain peace and public order. They instead impose and enforce a wide range of other rules, such as laws requiring you to go through thousands of hours of training before you can braid others’ hair for money, laws forbidding you from smoking pot, or laws requiring you to turn in escaped slaves. Huemer then asks us to imagine that a private person did something similar in the lifeboat case:
+The Peten Postclassic: A Settlement Perspective. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 301–344. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<quote>
+Ricketson, Oliver G., Jr.
-Obedience to the law, according to advocates of the Fair Play [Theory], is analogous to helping bail water out of a lifeboat. But in view of the aforementioned laws, a closer analogy would be as follows. The lifeboat is taking on water. The passengers gather and discuss what to do about the problem. A majority (not including you) want [fellow passenger] Bob to devise a solution. Bob thinks for a minute, then announces the following plan:
-i) All passengers shall start bailing water out of the boat;
+Report on the Temple of the Four Lintels. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 24, 267–69. Washington, D.C.
-ii) They shall pray to Poseidon to ask for his mercy;
+Ricketson, Oí iver G., and Edith B. Ricketson
-iii) They shall flagellate themselves with belts to prove their seriousness; and
+Uaxactún, Guatemala: Group E 1926–1931. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 477. Washington, D.C.
-iv) They shall each pay $50 to Sally, who helped Bob get elected.
+Riese, Berthold
-You know that item (i) is useful, item (ii) useless, and items (iii) and (iv) harmful to most passengers. Nonetheless, most other passengers participate in all four parts of Bob’s plan. If you refuse to pray, self-flagellate, or pay Sally, do you thereby act wrongly? Do you treat the other passengers unfairly?[1146]
+Hei hieroglyphs. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 263–286. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
-</quote>
-Here, Huemer asks us to imagine that Bob is playing the role the state does. Bob, like actually existing states, is in a position to coordinate other people’s behavior. He has some enforcement power. Like real states, he does not merely prescribe that we abide by rules necessary to protect our lives and welfare, but also issues a number of other seemingly irrelevant, useless, harmful, counterproductive, or unjust rules. Huemer then notes that it seems implausible that Bob has the legitimacy to enforce rules (ii)—(iv) and it is further implausible that the passengers would have any duty to abide by (ii)—(iv). If so, the Fair Play Theory does not explain why a state would have the legitimacy or authority to create and enforce rules such as prohibitions on prostitution, marijuana use, and so on.
+Epigraphy of the Southeast Zone in Relation to Other Parts of Mesoamerica. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 67–94. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Now, Huemer might well concede that if a state were necessary to ensure peace and sufficient level of rights protection, then we should instantiate a state. But, again, he argues this is compatible with moral parity between state and non-state actors. Consider: in the lifeboat case above, Huemer would agree that Bob may coerce others to bail out the water. Similarly, if the state may coerce us to pay taxes to fund the police (assuming, generously, that this is the only and best way to maintain the peace), it is not because the state has some special property individual agents necessarily lack.
+n.d. Notes on the Copan Inscriptions. On file in the archives of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan, Copán, Honduras.
-*** IV. Self-Defense and Defense of Others against Government Injustice
+Riese, Ber thold, and Claude F. Baudez
-Consider the following sets of cases:
+Esculturas del las Estructuras 10L-2 y 4. In Introducción a la Arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 143–190. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-A. A masked man starts firing at people in the park.
+Robertson, Merle Greene
-B. John sincerely believes marijuana is bad for us. He captures anyone he sees who possesses marijuana and, after holding a public trial for them in his living room, locks them in his basement for thirty days.
+The Ritual Bundles of Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the symposium on “The Art of Latin America,” Tulane University, New Orleans. Copy in possession of author.
-C. A hacker takes control of American drone bombers and uses one to kill a known terrorist, in the process knowingly killing hundreds of innocent civilians nearby.
+An Iconographic Approach to the Identity of the Figures on the Piers of the Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IT edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 129–138. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.
-Most people would judge that in cases like A—C, you would be permitted to use violence, even deadly violence, to stop the perpetrators of these acts. You have a right of self-defense and a right to defend others from injustice. English common law holds that people have a right to protect themselves and others against threats such as assault, battery, rape, and murder.[1147] According to the common law doctrine of self-defense, one person (the “killer”) may justifiably kill another (the “adversary”) when:
+The Temple of the Inscriptions. The Sculpture of Palenque, Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-. The killer is not the aggressor, and
+Robertson, Robin
-. ereasonably believes he (or someone else) is in imminent danger of severe bodily harm from his adversary, and
+Functional Analysis and Social Process in Ceramics: The Pottery from Cerros, Belize. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 105–142. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-. He reasonably believes that killing is necessary to avoid this danger.[1148]
+n.d. Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, The Ceramics. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (forthcoming).
-Note that the common law regards meeting these conditions as justifications, not merely excuses, for homicide. The distinction is that, when one has an excuse, the law considers the homicide wrongful, but one’s liability may be reduced. When one is justified in killing another, the act of killing is not wrong at all.
+Robertson, Robin A., and David A. Freidel, editors
-Now consider a different set of cases:
+Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I, An Interim Report. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-D. A police officer pulls over a minivan full of kids. Inexplicably, even though there is no sign the mother driving the van is armed, he immediately begins shooting at the van’s windows as soon as he emerges from his car.[1149]
+Robiscek, Francis, and Donald Hales
-E. State leaders decide to criminalize marijuana, despite the overwhelming evidence it is far less dangerous than alcohol.[1150] They order cops to capture anyone who possesses marijuana, and, after holding a trial for them in a fancy courthouse, lock those people in the courthouse’s basement for thirty days.
+The Maya Book of the Dead. The Ceramic Codex. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Museum. Distributed by the University of Oklahoma Press.
-F. The US President orders American drone bombers to kill a terrorist, in the process knowingly killing hundreds of innocent civilians nearby.
+Robles C., Fernando
-On their face, cases D—F seem roughly analogous to cases A—C, except that in D—F the wrongdoers are government officials acting ex officio rather than private civilians. (If you wish, to make the cases more analogous, imagine the actors in both sets of cases have the same motives and information.) Yet most people, especially the most strongly statist, would judge it impermissible to use violence in self-defense or defense of others in cases D—F, even though they would judge it permissible in the analogous cases A-C.
+La secuencia cerámica de la región de Cobá, Quintana Roo. M.A. thesis, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, D.F.
-The standard or prevailing statist view is that government agents enjoy a special or privileged status when they commit unjust actions. The standard view holds both that government agents have a special permission to perform unjust actions—actions that we would judge evil and impermissible were a non-government agent to perform them—and also that these agents enjoy a special right against being stopped when they commit injustice. Government agents somehow may perform unjust acts, and we’re supposed to stand by and let them. We may later complain when government agents act badly. We may demand that other government agents punish their colleagues for their colleagues’ bad behavior. We might protest, write letters to newspaper editors and senators, and vote for better candidates.[1151] But, statists generally think, we’re not supposed to stop injustice ourselves.
+Robles C., Fernando, and Anthony P. Andrews
-Thus, many people subscribe to what I call the Special Immunity Thesis.[1152] The Special Immunity Thesis holds that there is a special burden to justify interfering with, trying to stop, or fighting back against government agents who, acting ex officio, commit injustice:
+A Review and Synthesis of Recent Postclassic Archaeology in Northern Yucatán. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 53–98. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<quote>
+Rovner, Irwin
-<center>
-The Special Immunity Thesis
-</center>
-Government agents—or at least the agents of democratic governments—enjoy a special immunity against being deceived, lied to, sabotaged, attacked, or killed in self-defense or defense of others. Government property enjoys a special immunity against being damaged, sabotaged, or destroyed. The set of conditions under which it is permissible, in selfdefense or defense of others, to deceive, lie to, sabotage, attack or kill a government agent (acting ex officio), or to destroy government property, is much more stringent and tightly constrained than the set of conditions under which it is permissible to deceive, lie to, sabotage, attack or kill a private civilian, or destroy private property.
+Pre-Columbian Maya Development of Utilitarian Lithic Industries: The Broad Perspective from Yucatán. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 41–53. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.
-</quote>
-In contrast, one might reject the Special Immunity Thesis in favor of the Moral Parity Thesis:
+Roys, Ralph L.
-<quote>
+The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatán. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 548. Washington, D.C.
-<center>
-The Moral Parity Thesis
-</center>
-The conditions under which a person may, in self-defense or defense of others, deceive, lie to, sabotage, attack, or kill a fellow civilian, or destroy private property, are also conditions under which a civilian may do the same to a government agent (acting ex officio) or government property.
+The Political Geography of the Yucatán Maya. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 613. Washington, D.C.
-</quote>
-The Moral Parity Thesis holds that justifying self-defense or the defense of others against government agents is on par with justifying self-defense or the defense of others against civilians. Or, strictly speaking, the Moral Parity Thesis, as stated, allows that it could be easier to justify selfdefense against government agents than against private civilians.
+Literary Sources for the History of Mayapán. In Mayapán, Yucatan, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 619. Washington, D.C.
-If the Moral Parity Thesis is true, this would have radical implications. It would allow that you could use violence to resist arrest for a wrongful or mistaken law, or to break out of jail after a mistaken or wrongful conviction. You could kill a cop who uses excessive violence. You could assassinate a president or general who starts or leads an unjust war. You could destroy government property being used to violate civil or economic rights. You could lie to wrong-doing government agents.
+Ritual of the Bacabs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-Defenders of the Special Immunity Thesis thus need to identify some morally significant feature that governments possess, which civilians lack, which might explain why we would lack a right of self-defense against government wrongdoing though we would have a right to defend against civilians acting the same way.
+The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-One might think there is an easy argument here. Governments, the statist might claim, have legitimacy and authority, while civilians do not. Governments have permission to create and enforce rules and have a right to be obeyed when they do so. Civilians lack such moral powers.
+Ruppert, Karl
-But there are two major problems with this kind of reasoning. First, as the discussion above illustrated, there are serious flaws with all the theories of government authority and legitimacy; we seem to have excellent grounds for being skeptical that governments have authority at all. But even if one thinks that governments have some authority—e.g., that you have a duty to pay your fair share of taxes and obey the speed limit—that will not be enough to justify the Special Immunity Thesis. Defenders of this thesis must argue that governments specifically have the authority to commit severe injustices and evils, the very injustices and evils we would be permitted to resist (using deception, sabotage, or violence) if private civilians perpetrated them. It’s one thing to argue that the government has a right to be obeyed when it creates and tries to enforce a socially beneficial rule that promotes justice. It’s far from clear anyone has shown that. But it takes even more work to show that a government has a right to be obeyed when it creates and enforces bad rules that promote injustice, or when its agents act in horrible ways.
+The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454. Washington, D.C.
-One might instead argue that government agents enjoy special immunity for these other reasons:
+Chichén Itzá, Architectural Notes and Plans. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub. 595. Washington, D.C.
-. The anti-vigilante principle: We are not supposed to take justice into our own hands when a fair and reliable public system of justice is in place.
+Ruz Lhuillier, Alberto
-. The good-faith objection: Government agents often act in good faith and are following orders, doing what they believe to be right.
+Exploraciones en Palenque 1952. In Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia VT.82–110. México; Secretaria de Pública.
-. The fall-out objection: If citizens resist government officials, other government officials might respond by ramping up their degree of injustice. For instance, if you were to shoot police officers who are in the process of killing a subdued, unarmed, prostrate man, a SWAT team would come and start shooting people.
+El Templo de las Inscripciones. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Colección Científica, Arqueología 7. México.
-But these other purported reasons to believe government officials enjoy special immunity are also problematic for two major sets of reasons.
+Sabloff, Jeremy A., and E. Wyllys Andrews V
-First, these reasons do not really distinguish between government and civilian cases. We can illustrate that by employing the Huemer Test: imagine an analogous case involving civilians, and then see whether the case seems plausible or different there. For instance, if the anti-vigilante principle supposedly forbids us from acting in self-defense against government wrongdoing, why would it not also forbid us from acting in self-defense against civilian wrongdoing? The objection offers no principled difference. Similarly, suppose a civilian, through a bizarre set of circumstances, comes to rationally but mistakenly believe that I am a terrorist en route to destroy the new World Trade Center. He tries to apprehend me with deadly violence. Though he acts in good faith, I am still allowed to defend myself against him. So, we can ask the person who offers the good-faith objection, what makes government agents who act wrongly but in good faith any different? Finally, if I resist the Mafia or a local criminal gang’s injustice, they might also retaliate. The fall-out objection, if successful, implies not only that government agents have special immunity, but also that criminals with the power to retaliate also enjoy special immunity. It offers us no principled account of why governments are different.
+Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Of course, the believer in special immunity could bite the bullet and say that governments are not in principle different. He could say that, yes, in some cases, civilian wrongdoers also enjoy special immunity; the difference is that government agents are statistically more likely to enjoy special immunity than, say, Mafia hitmen or muggers. But this brings us to the second problem: none of these objections seems particularly plausible as a reason to refrain from self-defense or defense of others.
+Sabloff, Jeremy A., and Gordon R. Willey
-For instance, the anti-vigilante principle is usually invoked to argue that you should not unilaterally punish wrongdoers or police crime yourself, but instead allow impartial courts and professional police or well-trained private security forces to do so. It does not mean that, if a would-be rapist tries to assault you, you are not allowed to resist or defend yourself. Accordingly, since the plausible version of the principle allows self-defense against civilian wrongdoers, it is unclear why it would not also allow self-defense against governmental wrongdoers.
+The Collapse of Maya Civilization in the Southern Lowlands: A Consideration of History and Process. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 23(4):311–336.
-Similarly, the fall-out objection seems to hold that you lose your right to defend yourself or others provided the wrongdoer credibly threatens (implicitly or explicitly) to commit further wrongs in response to your otherwise justifiable self-defense. Suppose a would-be rapist tries to assault you, and you start to defend yourself. Suppose he responds, credibly threatening, “If you don’t allow me to rape you, I hereby promise I will retreat and then rape four other women instead.” It seems implausible, or at least very controversial, to hold that this would remove your right of self-defense. Why, then, would it be any different if the government issued a similar threat?
+Sanders, William T., and Joseph W. Michels, eds.
-There are of course other arguments for special immunity, and I cannot review them all here. However, this section has illustrated the problem with the Special Immunity Thesis and summarized some of the major issues anarchists and others of a broadly liberal mindset might have with it. Many of the major arguments for the Special Immunity Thesis seem, on further consideration, implausible in their own right, and they further fail to give us a principled distinction between government and civilian actors.
+Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact. The Penn- svlvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
-*** V. The Question of Punishment
+Santley, Robert S.
-In day-to-day parlance, we say that private agents might “punish” one another for their transgressions. For example, perhaps your angry spouse “punishes” you for forgetting your anniversary by demanding you sleep on the couch. But states claim for themselves the right to inflict far more than social sanctions. The law forbids your spouse from punishing you by imprisoning you, forcibly taking away your money or property, inflicting physical pain upon you, or depriving you of life and liberty. In contrast, most states claim the legal power to punish you in these ways. What, if anything, explains the difference?
+Obsidian Trade and Teotihuacán Influence in Mesoamerica. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 69–124. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Contractarian philosopher John Locke famously argued that the state’s right to punish ultimately is an extension of a private right to punish held by all civilians. He argues that, in the state of nature (i.e., anarchy), people are still bound by various moral laws and extra-legal conventions. Every individual has the right to punish any other person who violates others’ rights or breaks certain moral rules. However, Locke claims, the problem with private punishment is that we individuals tend to be biased judges, too lenient on ourselves and too harsh on those who harm us. Private punishment thus creates various “inconveniences,” and our disagreements over private punishment could lead to violent conflict. Locke argues we should resolve this problem by instituting (as best we can) an impartial, public system of justice, which will correct those inconveniences and overcome our biases. Once that system is established, we should defer to it. We alienate our private right to punish.[1153]
+Sato, Etsuo
-On Locke’s theory, the government possesses no special power or status which individual civilians necessarily lack; rather, it receives its power and status through (what Locke believes is) a voluntary transfer. On Locke’s view, at least, government agents and civilians are on morally on par.
+Resultados preliminares del análisis de la cerámica en el Valle de La Venta, La Entrada. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.
-In contrast, statist philosopher Alon Harel claims that punishment is a kind of symbolic expression that, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, can only be performed by governmental agents.[1154] He does not mean that it should only be done by the appropriate agent. Rather, he argues that it is literally impossible, as a metaphysical matter, for private prison wardens and guards to punish prisoners.
+Scarborough, Vernon L.
-Harel rejects private prisons not because they are corrupt or overly violent or because they mistreat prisoners. Rather, he claims they are unjust because such prisons fail to punish prisoners.
+A Late Preclassic Water System. American Antiquity 48:720–744.
-While private prisons can lock up prisoners, beat them, execute them, feed them, make them perform manual labor, provide them with vocational training, give them moral and religious instruction, and do all of the various daily activities of public prisons, none of this counts as punishment, according to Harel. Only when state employees perform these activities do they qualify as aspects of punishment. Harel argues that imprisonment counts as punishment only when the prison guards and wardens are direct employees of a state. Since justly convicted criminals ought to be punished, he claims, then such criminals ought to be sent to public rather than private prisons.
+Drainage Canal and Raised Field Excavations. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 75–87. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-Harel thus needs to identify some special feature (or set of special features) F that public prisons can have that private prisons necessarily lack, where F is some property one might plausibly believe is a necessary condition for being able to administer punishment. He needs to explain why getting a paycheck directly from the government is so crucial in determining whether a prison guard is really punishing a prisoner or just engaging in a sham imitation of punishment.
+Scarborough, V. L., B. Mitchum, H. S. Carr, and D. A. Freidel
-Harel says he needs to show that the only agent capable of realizing the important value of punishment is the state.[1155] Through his book Why Law Matters, Harel offers a number of hypotheses about just what F could be, including:
+Two Late Preclassic Ballcourts at the Lowland Maya Center of Cerros, Northern Belize. Journal of Field Archaeology 9:21–34.
-. To engage in punishment, the agents of punishment must defer to the sovereign and act in accordance with its will independently of what they happen to judge to be in the public interest.[1156] They must execute the sovereign’s official decisions; they “suppress” their own judgments and pursue the sovereign’s judgment instead.
+Schele, Linda
-. The punishing agents must be not inadvertently substitute their own judgment for that of the sovereign; they must engage in a deliberative practice by which they coordinate their understanding of the rules and laws, as well as how to punish others, with other agents engaging in the same practices.[1157]
+Accession Iconography of Chan-Bahlum in the Group of the Cross at Palenque. The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part III. Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 9–34. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-. The punishing agents must engage in an “integrative practice.”[1158] That is, for agents to act in the name of the public (or of the state or the sovereign), rather than in their own name, the official activities of law-making politicians need to be integrated into the agents’ processes of decision-making. There needs to be a special connection between the general interest as seen by politicians and the individual agents who execute the judgments.
+Genealogical Documentation in the Tri-Figure Panels at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 41–70. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.
-. Public prisons, but not private prisons, have a “Hohfeldian liability to the power of public officials to place them under a duty to act in certain ways.”[1159] The idea here is that public prison workers are duty-bound to accept the sovereign’s orders, while private prison workers are not.
+Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
-But Harel faces two sets of problems with each of these purported differences. First, it seems plausible both that (a) public prisons can and do fail to realize 1—4, while more importantly (b) private prisons can and do sometimes realize 1—4. For instance, a private warden and private prison guards can suppress their own judgments in favor of the sovereign’s. They can and often do engage in deliberative practices by which they coordinate their understanding of the rules and laws, as well as how to punish others, with other agents engaging in the same practices. They can and do integrate their decision-making with that of the lawmakers. Further, if you believe that governments have authority, as Harel does, then you must hold by extension that private prison workers have a moral duty to obey the government’s orders. Keep in mind Harel is not trying to make the empirical claim that public prisons are more likely to obey the sovereign than private prisons; he’s claiming that private prisons as a matter of metaphysical necessity lack some essential property needed to perform genuine punishment. Yet he does not offer a plausible candidate for what that property could be, since every candidate property he identifies can and is sometimes realized by private prisons.
+Maya Glyphs: The Verbs. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-More fundamentally, though, from the anarchist’s perspective, Harel’s theory seems to beg the fundamental question. Harel presumes (without much argument) that, in order for imprisonment, deprivation of liberty, monetary fines, or the infliction of pain to count as punishment, such punishment must be ordered by a sovereign law-making and law-enforcing agency, which he presumes must be a state or government in the Kavkaian sense. For Harel, punishment is “an expressive or communicative act of condemnation” that must come from a public agent.[1160] In his view, in the Lockean state of nature, it is simply impossible for anyone to punish anyone else, because there is no sovereign. But, an anarchist might wonder, why is it important that there be a sovereign so defined? Why not instead hold that the rules of social life can be suitably public provided that they (a) are widespread and widely recognized social conventions or (b) are widespread and widely recognized moral rules, rather than (c) laws in the strictly governmental sense?
+a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by E. P. Benson, 7–48. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-In short, Harel presumes anarchism is false from the get-go and then tries to argue that we can’t have private prisons. But he does not seem to have a neutral ground for this position that would actually mediate the dispute between statists and anarchists.
+b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
-*** VI. Conclusion
+a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by Elizabeth Boone, 7–49. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Anarchists tend to presume that civilian and governmental actors are morally on par. Government agents do not, in virtue of being government agents, magically acquire special moral privileges, exemptions, or status. If governments tend to have various rights and powers that civilians normally lack, this must in some way be derived from rights and powers that civilians could in principle possess.
+b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
-The idea of moral parity can be used as a kind of test of various theories of state legitimacy, authority, immunity, or power. The anarchist asks the statist to identify some special feature or set of features F which the state’s agents purportedly possess and which explain why state agents enjoy a special moral status. The anarchist then constructs a parallel case in which the civilians also possess F, and then asks the statist if in that parallel case the civilians would possess the special powers the statist attributes to the state. If the statist answers no, this shows the statist’s explanation fails—F is not why the state has whatever special status it has. If the statist answers yes, this shows that fundamentally civilians and the state are on par. At most, state actors are statistically more likely to possess F than civilians are.
+a Balan-Ahau: A Possible Reading of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a Title at Palenque. Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Tol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 59–65. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
+b Some Suggested Readings of the Event and Office of Heir-Designate at Palenque. Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, 287–307. Albany: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
-[1140] Gregory Kavka, “Why Even Morally Perfect People Would Need Government,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 2. I insert the qualification “more or less” because no government in history has literally stopped all private violence.
+c The Hauberg Stela: Bloodletting and the Mythos of Classic Maya Rulership. In Fifth Palenque Round Table 1983, Fol. VII. gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 135–151. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1141] Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority (New York: Palgrave 2013).
+a Architectural Development and Political History at Palenque. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 110–138. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.
-[1142] You might think you have an independent moral duty not to smoke pot, but you would not think that my ordering you not to matters morally speaking.
+b The Founders of Lineages at Copan and Other Maya Sites. Copán Note 8. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1143] H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64 (1995): 185.
+c Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies. University of Texas.
-[1144] Huemer 84.
+d Yax-K’uk’-Mo’ at Copán: Lineage Founders and Dynasty at Ancient Maya Cities. Copón Note 8. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1145] Huemer 84—5.
+a A Possible Death Date for Smoke-Imix-God K. Copón Note 26. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1146] Huemer 87.
+b Stela I and the Founding of the City of Copán. Copón Note 30. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1147] Wayne LaFave, Criminal Law, 4<sup>th</sup> ed. (Washington, DC: Thomson-West 2003) 570.
+c The Reviewing Stand of Temple 11. Copón Note 32. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1148] This summarizes and paraphrases LaFave 569—574.
+d Notes on the Rio Amarillo Altars. Copón Note 37. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1149] David Ferguson, “New Mexico Cop Fired for Shooting at Minivan Full of Kids,” Raw Story (Raw Story Media, Dec. 7, 2013), [[http://www.rawstory.com][www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/07/new-mexico-cop-fired-for-shooting-at-minivan-]] [[http://www.rawstory.com][full-of-kids/]] (last visited Jan. 13, 2019).
+e Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
-[1150] Jason Brennan, “Marijuana,” Social Issues in America, ed. James Ciment (Armonk: Sharpe 2006) 1044—54.
+f New Data on the Paddlers from Copán Stela 7. Copón Note 29. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1151] See, for example, Eric Beerbohm, In Our Name (Princeton: Princeton UP 2012).
+a Altar F’ and the Structure 32. Copón Note 46. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1152] See Jason Brennan, “When May We Kill Government Agents? In Defense of Moral Parity,” Social Philosophy and Policy 32 (2016): 40—61; Jason Brennan, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton: Princeton UP 2018).
+b The Xibalba Shuffle: A Dance After Death. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 294—317. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-[1153] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Indianapolis: Hackett 1980) 11—4.
+a A House Dedication on the Harvard Bench at Copán. Copón Note 51. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1154] Alon Harel, Why Law Matters. (New York: OUP 2014).
+b The Numbered-Katun Titles of Yax-Pac. Copón Note 65. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1155] Harel 81.
+c Some Further Thoughts on the Copán-Quiriguá Connection. Copón Note 67. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-[1156] Harel 82.
+n.d.a House Names and Dedication Rituals at Palenque. In Visions and Revisions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (in press).
-[1157] Harel 89.
+n.d.b The Demotion of Chac-Zutz’: Lineage Compounds and Subsidiary Lords at Palenque. In the Sixth Round Table of Palenque, gen. ed., Merle Green Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
-[1158] Harel 91 (my italics).
+n.d.c The Tlaloc Heresy: Cultural Interaction and Social History. A paper given at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.
-[1159] Harel 93.
+n.d.d Blood-letting: A Metaphor for “Child” in the Classic Maya Writing System. A manuscript prepared in 1980 for an anthology in honor of Floyd G. Lounsbury.
-[1160] Harel 96–7.
+n.d.e Brotherhood in Ancient Maya Kingship. A paper presented at the SUNY, Albany, conference on “New Interpretation of Maya Writing and Iconography,” held October 21–22, 1989.
-<br>
-** 17. Economic Pathologies of the State
+Schele, Linda, and David Freidel
-*Christopher Coyne and Nathan P. Goodman*
+n.d. The Courts of Creation: Ballcourts, Ballgames, and Portals to the Maya Other- world. In The Mesoamerican Ballgame, edited by David Wilcox and Vernon Scarborough. Tucson: University of Arizona Press (in press).
-*** I. Introduction
+Schele, Linda, and Nikolai Grube
-What is the appropriate role of the state? The list of desired activities that many people want the state to perform is potentially endless and includes national defense, policing, dispute resolution, healthcare, humanitarian aid, welfare, environmental regulation, the funding of scientific research, immigration control, financial regulation, monetary policy, park maintenance, health and safety regulation, and drug prohibition, among many others. Proponents of these and other roles for the state tend to assume that the state’s taking on a task guarantees that it will achieve the desired end. From this perspective, if the right people are in charge and they have the appropriate resources and “political will” to accomplish a task, they can succeed. Where markets and voluntary association may fail, the state can fill the gap, provided its leaders are good, resolute people with the right ideas and resources to implement their plans.
+a The Brother of Yax-Pac. Copan Note 20. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-This deus ex machina view of the state, however, ignores crucial insights from economics. It is our contention that, before deciding what the state should do, it is imperative to consider what the state can do. Determining the limits of what state machinery can and cannot accomplish is crucial if we want to avoid encouraging the wasting of scarce resources and the imposition of harm on the very people the state purports to assist. To understand what tasks states can and cannot accomplish, we seek to answer two general and interrelated questions. First, do political leaders have the relevant knowledge to accomplish the desired task? Second, do they have the right incentives to do so? It is our contention that economics is central to answering these questions and thus to understanding the limits on what state action can achieve.
+The Father of Smoke-Shell. Copón Note 39. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-Economics is the science of human action. Economists study how individuals make decisions about alternative uses of scarce resources. These decisions are shaped by the knowledge individuals can access regarding the alternative uses of resources and by relevant incentives and constraints. Knowledge and incentives, in turn, are shaped by the institutions—the formal and informal rules governing human life—within which individuals operate. Individuals face different institutional constraints when they are competing in the market than when they are competing in the political arena. Different institutional arrangements lead to variations in the knowledge individuals can access and the incentives they face as they act on that knowledge.
+Schele, Linda, Nikolai Grube, and David Stuart
-Within markets shaped by the institutions of property, contract, and consent, individuals receive feedback in the form of prices, profits, and losses that tells them whether the goods and services they produce are valued more than the inputs they use. This prompts a tendency to use scarce resources in a manner that improves the welfare of other members of society and offers people incentives to produce goods and services that others desire. In the political arena, feedback and incentives capable of playing similar roles are either weak, distorted, or altogether absent. The state is therefore plagued with two persistent and systemic pathologies: (1) political actors often lack the relevant knowledge to accomplish desired goals, and (2) public policy goals are often not compatible with the incentives of those in political power. These problems are systemic features of state institutions and are not dependent on the characteristics of the people wielding power.
+The Date of Dedication of Ballcourt III at Copán. Copán Note 59. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-In subsequent sections we will discuss these two economic pathologies of the state.[1161] The first, the knowledge problem, discussed in the next section, arises from the fact that non-market actors cannot access the economic knowledge that arises from the market process. Attempts by state actors to engage in planning will, therefore, tend to waste resources because planners lack the knowledge and feedback necessary to ensure that scarce resources are used in a manner that maximizes their value. Moreover, economies, and the societies within which they are embedded, are complex systems that political actors lack the knowledge to control. Therefore, state interventions are likely to produce an array of unintended consequences that may harm both the intended beneficiaries of policies and those that fall outside of this target group.
+Schei e, Linda, and Peter Mathews
-After exploring the knowledge problem, we will discuss the power problem. This problem arises because those with political power often have incentives to act against goals deemed socially desirable. Rather than improving outcomes, the state can instead give powerful people incentives to act in predatory and exploitative ways. Finally, after discussing the power problem and the knowledge problem, we conclude, in Section IV, with a discussion of the significance of these two pathologies of the state for political theory and policy analysis.
+n.d. Royal Visits Along the Usumacinta. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
-*** II. The Knowledge Problem
+Schele, Linda, Peter Mathews, and Floyd Lounsbury
-Resources are scarce. While humans have potentially unlimited desires, we have only limited resources with which to pursue them. This means that people need to make choices, and that these choices will involve trade-offs, because one use of scarce resources precludes another. Economic actors must decide: should a good or service be produced at all? If the answer is yes, how much of the good or service should be produced? And what is the least costly means of producing that good or service? The answers to these questions are not given. Instead, they must be discovered.
+n.d. Parentage Expressions from Classic Maya Inscriptions. Manuscript dated 1983.
-Market prices provide guides that help individuals navigate the dizzying array of choices available. Should you build train tracks with steel or platinum? The use of either material may be technically feasible, but in a society with market prices you know not to use platinum because doing so will be prohibitively expensive. Consider another example: what would happen if a tin mine collapsed?[1162] The supply of tin would fall, and the price of tin would therefore rise. In turn, this would raise the price of goods that involve tin, encouraging consumers to use less of it. Meanwhile, the high price would encourage new producers of tin, and substitutes for tin, to enter the market. The consumers who buy less tin and the producers who enter to provide substitutes might know nothing about the mine collapse. The price change would nonetheless provide them with the economic knowledge needed for them to make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. The knowledge needed to solve economic problems is context-specific and dispersed across many minds. Prices allow for the communication of this knowledge even though it is not accessible to any single mind.[1163]
+Schele, Linda, and Jeffrey H. Miller
-An entrepreneur purchases, at market prices, the inputs needed to make a given product on the view that the final product will sell for a profit. This is a forecast, however, and not a given. The entrepreneur’s conjecture must be subjected to the market test of profit and loss. If the goods a firm produces are valued more highly than the inputs that went into producing them, the revenue generated by the sale of the outputs will exceed the price of the inputs. In other words, a firm that creates value will make a profit. This profit signals to entrepreneurs that consumers value what they are producing relative to alternative uses of the scarce resources used to produce the relevant goods. On the other hand, if consumers value a final good less than the inputs that went into producing the good are valued, the revenue from the outputs will be lower than the price of the inputs. In other words, a firm that destroys value by turning valuable inputs into a less valued output will experience losses. Entrepreneurs will reduce, or altogether cease, the production of the good based on the loss signals they receive. Firms that ignore these signals will ultimately fail. Profit and loss therefore not only provide incentives to produce goods and services that people value, they also provide feedback that indicates whether a business is creating or destroying value.
+The Mirror, the Rabbit, and the Bundle: Accession Expressions from the Classic Maya Inscriptions. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-This communicative role of prices and profit and loss makes them essential for economic cal- culation—“the decision-making ability to allocate scarce capital resources among competing uses.”[1164] Many of these insights about the vital role of prices in economic calculation were developed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek,[1165] who argued that economic calculation was impossible under a system of central planning. Socialists advocated abolishing private property in the means of production in order to rationalize economic activity to overcome the ills of capitalism. Mises and Hayek pointed out that, without private property rights in the means of production, there would be no market in the means of production. Without market exchange, no prices for the means of production would emerge. Without prices as guides, planners would lack the knowledge needed to compare alternative uses of the means of production. In other words, they would be unable to engage in economic calculation and determine the best use of scarce resources. This is the essence of the knowledge problem.
+Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller
-Why does the knowledge problem matter? The main reason is that state planners cannot allocate scarce resources in a manner that maximizes their value from the standpoint of members of society. This raises two key issues associated with the opportunity cost of scarce resources.
+The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
-The first issue arises in relation to particular goods and services delivered or funded by the government. If the political process determines that a trillion dollars are to be spent on medical care, decisions still need to be made about how the money should be allocated among an array of possible medical care alternatives. Decisions need to be made about who should be eligible for care and for what procedures and other activities payment should be available. Further, in determining for what procedures and other activities payment should be available, planners must determine appropriate quantities and qualities. The goods and services delivered or funded by the government are not homogeneous, and marginal decisions need to be made about the quantities and qualities of these goods and services.
+Schele, Linda, and David Stuart
-The second issue arises in connection with choices among different categories of goods and services. How do state planners know that a trillion dollars spent on medical care is better, from the perspective of the welfare of private actors, than splitting that money across some mix of medical care, education, roads, environmental protection, or other services? The knowledge problem is multifaceted when it comes to government activities. Absent economic calculation, there is no way for state planners to make such decisions in a manner that takes into account the values of scarce resources to putative beneficiaries.
+a Te-tun as the Glyph for “Stela.” Copón Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-In the absence of rational economic calculation, planners often rely on output measures to gauge success. For many years, economists widely believed that the economy of the Soviet Union had surpassed the economies of Western capitalist countries in significant ways.[1166] But this view was wrong because output statistics can be misleading. There had indeed been increases in output, but these mostly reflected spending on large-scale government projects such as hydroelectric dams, the space program, and military buildups. These large projects exerted impressive impacts on statistics measuring total output in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). But they concealed the reality that people’s standards of living were languishing.[1167] Aggregate measures, such as GDP, do not differentiate between increased output that is wasteful and increased output that is value-added from consumers’ perspectives.
+b The Chronology of Altar U. Copón Note 3. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-Economists and historians made similar errors in evaluating the effect of World War II on the American economy, widely believing that World War II ended the Great Depression.[1168] While unemployment fell substantially, this was mostly a result of military conscription, which forced young men to take on “substantial risks of death, dismemberment, and other physical and psychological injuries.”[1169] Similarly, GDP rose, but this was a result of producing weapons, not goods or services that consumers valued. In stark contrast, people’s consumption of most goods was regulated through state control and rationing. While large-scale government projects increase output, they do not necessarily increase the output of goods and services that people value. Relying on output data alone can tell one what products are being produced. But determining whether increased output creates goods and services consumers value requires rational economic calculation.
+c Paraphrase of the Text of Altar U. Copón Note 5. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-The knowledge problem is starkest in socialist economies that attempt to comprehensively, centrally plan their entire economies. However, it is present in all endeavors administered by the state rather than the market. The difference between the comprehensive planning advocated by state socialists and the non-comprehensive planning associated with other state activities is one of degree, not of kind. Genuine socialist states attempt comprehensive central planning, trying to plan almost all economic activity. Most states, on the other hand, attempt to plan particular projects while leaving markets at least relatively free to plan others. This non-comprehensive planning still faces the knowledge problem, because political actors are operating in a non-market context and therefore cannot rely on property, prices, and profits and losses to render their plans rational. “[E]ven the more modest and popular attempts to steer the Market toward particular outcomes are really blind and dangerous obstructions of the very source of that knowledge which is essential to rational economic decision-making.”[1170]
+Schele, Linda, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, and Floyd Lounsbury
-This applies even to government programs supported by some avowed anti-socialists. State- provided military goods and services, for example, suffer from the knowledge problem because the government selects and delivers goods and services outside of the market context.[1171] Absent the ability to rely on economic calculation, there is no rational way for state planners to determine the highest-valued use of scarce resources allocated toward the provision of security, or what resources should be allocated toward the provision of security in the first place.
+A New Inscription from Temple 22a at Copán. Copán Note 57. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-Even relatively market-oriented economists, who are extremely critical of state planning in other areas of life, typically favor the state provision of military goods and services. This is partially because they see the provision of these goods and services as a public good.[1172] A putative good qualifies as a public good when (1) it is hard to exclude people from using the good, and (2) one person’s consumption of the good does not reduce the ability of others to consume the good. Because of these characteristics, economists predict that, because of free-riding, public goods will be severely underprovided on the private market relative to the optimal amount that would maximize social welfare. The solution proposed by most economists is for the state to either subsidize the production of public goods or to provide public goods through coercive taxation in order to make up for the underprovision that would otherwise occur.
+Schellhas, Paul
-At first blush, the provision of military goods and services appears to fit the requirements of a traditional public good quite nicely. It is hard to protect my neighbor from a foreign military invasion or a missile strike without also protecting me. Meanwhile, protecting me from foreign aggressors does not make my neighbor any less secure. Because the good has these properties, there is an incentive to free-ride off defensive services paid for by others. Therefore, most economists argue for state coercion to make people pay for military goods and services.[1173] It is true that this method can provide more military goods and services than would be provided without the state. However, the free-rider argument for the state provision of these goods and services is that less-than-socially-optimal quantities of these goods and services would be produced if their production were left to the market. The central question is: how can state planners know the optimal quantities of military goods and services to produce outside of the market? The answer is that they cannot, for the reasons discussed above.
+Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 4(1). Cambridge.
-Planners need to decide both whether to spend money on military goods and services and whether to provide additional units of military-related production. They also need to make choices between different types of military goods and services. For each dollar of military spending, someone must choose whether it should be used to fund a missile defense system, a drone, a tank, body armor, the employment of an additional soldier, or something else entirely. Without market prices as guides, state planners are groping in the dark. They do not know what type of military spending will best use scarce resources to maximize the welfare of private people. For some people, such as pacifists, certain types of military spending may entirely lack value. Yet they too are forced to pay for spending on wars and weapons that they don’t value at all and which they would, in fact, strongly prefer were entirely absent.
+Seler, Eduard
-The economy is a complex system that incorporates dispersed knowledge inaccessible to any single planner or political body. This not only precludes the formulation of rational plans to maximize social welfare; it also means that coercive interventions to achieve the goals of planners are likely to generate an array of undesirable and unforeseen consequences. To understand these “dynamics of intervention,” consider the example of state-imposed price controls.[1174]
+Die Stuckfassade von Acanceh in Yucatán. In Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 47:1011–1025.
-Suppose planners place a price ceiling on milk to make it more affordable for poor consumers.[1175] At the artificially lower price, more consumers will want to purchase milk, but fewer producers will want to bring milk to market. This will create a milk shortage, the opposite of what the state planners intended. Not realizing the cause of the shortage, political leaders may respond by subsidizing milk production. Yet these subsidies will divert resources from elsewhere in the economy, creating new unintended hardships. Additional interventions may be introduced to address these hardships. If policies that distort prices are to remain in place, they require ever more regulations and policies to achieve desired outcomes. Each of these subsequent interventions distorts the ability of people to engage in rational economic calculation.
+Service, Ei man R.
-Beyond price distortions, government interventions can also destroy local norms, customs, and patterns of trust that are central to facilitating social harmony.[1176] For example, if government welfare programs crowd out mutual aid or alter social norms in poor communities, they may exacerbate poverty rather than alleviating it.[1177] The unintended consequences that result as social norms change in communities may then be used as justifications for additional government programs. Further, by changing, and potentially destroying, local norms and customs, government intervention may undermine the ability of private, local actors to engage in self-governance, including experimentation with local solutions to social problems.[1178]
+Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
-In general, state interference in a complex system, whether in the price system or in a broader social system, will yield unintended and unforeseen consequences.[1179] These unintended consequences will create rationales for additional interventions, and each intervention will increase the scope of decisions made by political actors who are unable to engage in rational economic calculation or to fully understand the nuances of complex orders in which they intervene.
+Sharer, Robert J.
-The nuances of the knowledge problem exist even when well-intentioned, other-regarding state actors are in power. But what happens when we weaken the assumption of benevolence and consider the incentives that political actors face? The next section explores the answer to this question.
+Early Maya Kingship and Polities. A paper presented a the IV Texas Symposium, “Early Maya Hieroglyphic Writing and Symbols of Rulership: The Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence for Maya Kingship and Polities,” March 10, 1988. Austin: the University of Texas.
-*** III. The Power Problem
+Sheets, Payson D.
-Even if we assume that political actors have the knowledge they need to improve the welfare of private persons, there is another important question to ask: are the incentives of state actors aligned with those of the people they purportedly intend to benefit? The stated goals of public policies, goals almost always framed in terms of improving the welfare of private people, are often incompatible with the incentives of the politically powerful. If politicians are not benevolent despots, but rather human beings who pursue their own interests, then incentives matter in politics. This basic insight regarding the “symmetry of assumptions” is the core of public choice theory, a subfield of economics that analyzes how incentives operate in non-market settings.[1180]
+The Terminal Preclassic Lithic Industry of the Southeast Maya Highlands: A Component of the Proto-Classic Site-Unit Intrusions in the Lowlands? In Mava Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 55–69. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.
-Politicians, like all people, seek to pursue their own goals and interests. Of course people’s interests, both in the private and public sectors, are diverse and can be narrowly inward focused, outwardly focused on assisting others, or some mix of both. But the same people inhabit both private spheres of action and public spheres of action. While the people are the same, the institutional environments, and the incentives created by those institutions, vary and therefore produce different outcomes.[1181]
+Shook, Edwin M.
-One particularly important incentive in democratic politics that shapes political behavior is the desire to be reelected. In order to be reelected, politicians must appeal to voters. Unfortunately, voters have very weak incentives to learn about the details and nuances of political activities. To understand this dynamic, consider the contrast between decision making in democratic politics with decision making in private markets.[1182]
+The Temple of the Red Stela. Expedition l(l):26–33.
-In a market, there is a tight link between a consumer’s decision about which car to purchase and the outcome. Consumers can customize the cars they choose and internalize the benefits and costs of their choices. Because benefits and costs are internalized, consumers face strong incentives to research and compare cars prior to purchasing them. Incentives in democratic politics are very different. It is very rare that an election is decided by a single vote.[1183] Therefore in most elections the outcome will be the same regardless of how an individual votes. So, while it is beneficial to research cars before purchasing, there is practically no benefit to researching politicians before voting.
+Sisson, Edward B.
-The problem of political ignorance is made even worse by the fact that voters can never directly compare politicians. It is fairly straightforward to compare cars under similar circumstances, through direct pre-purchase testing or relying on the experiences and evaluations of other experts or consumers who have purchased the vehicle. No such option exists in politics. We will never know what would have happened had a given election turned out differently. Different instances of ignorance might cancel each other out if voters chose their beliefs randomly. But they don’t: they are biased, and they are biased toward mistaken beliefs about economics. Voters tend to overstate the harm and understate the benefits of trade, immigration, labor-saving innovations, and markets.[1184] Politicians therefore have incentives to pander to rationally ignorant voters with strong prejudices against activities and institutions that drive economic progress. Their willingness to do so sows the seeds of wealth-destroying policies. The ignorance of voters also makes it all too easy for politicians to act opportunistically, using their power to benefit themselves and their friends. After all, what incentives do voters have to carefully research and resist such opportunism?
+First Annual Report of the Coxcatlan Project. Tehuacán Project Report No 3. Andover, Mass.: R. S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.
-There are two other issues that weaken the effectiveness of democratic elections as a check on political opportunism. One is the time between elections. The fact that elections are periodic means that voter influence is limited. Consider that each US voter, over each six-year period, casts a maximum of nine votes over four national-level general elections.[1185] The minimal feedback provided by each voter leaves significant space for factors unrelated to voters’ expressed preferences to influence politics and for political participants to engage in opportunism. This poses a problem because, by the time regularly-timed elections do occur, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to undo the undesirable outcomes brought about by opportunists in the interim.[1186]
+Smith, A. Ledyard
-A second factor which reduces the effectiveness of voting is bundling: each voter casts a single vote for an official who will represent the voter across numerous, complex issues. For example, if a voter agrees with a candidate’s position on abortion, but strongly disagrees with the candidate about foreign policy, the voter cannot make choices to separate these two policies from the overall bundle of policies that the candidate represents. These factors further incentivize rational ignorance and limit the ability of voters to provide feedback to political actors regarding specific policies.
+Uaxactún, Guatemala: Excavations of 1931—1937. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 588. Washington, D.C.
-The prospects for beneficial state intervention become even more dismal when we look at the incentives faced by bureaucrats. In the private sector, competition selects for firms that maximize profits.[1187] Profits, as discussed earlier, reflect whether the goods and services produced are valued more than the resources employed. However, in a state bureaucracy there is no analogous process. So what do bureaucrats maximize?
+Sosa, John, and Dorie Reents
-Public choice economist William Niskanen argued that bureaucrats seek to maximize their discretionary budgets.[1188] If an agency’s budget is cut, that means fewer resources are available for the bureaucrats and their colleagues to use to accomplish their goals. It also means that the employees are more likely to be fired. This all creates incentives for bureaucrats to spend more. In a private firm, saving money and resources means that profits increase. In a government bureaucracy, a residual budget at the end of a fiscal year sends a signal that the budget is too large and can be cut. Bureaucrats want to be able to credibly tell legislators that they need larger budgets to accomplish policy goals. Budget-maximizing bureaucrats therefore, have an incentive to spend resources even if their spending is wasteful. Even if some amount of government spending is known to optimize social welfare, political incentives will tend to result in spending that exceeds that amount.
+Glyphic Evidence for Classic Maya Militarism. Belizean Studies 8(3):2-ll. Spjnden, Herbert J.
-In addition, there are significant problems with information transmission in any government bureaucracy. Gordon Tullock illustrates this problem using the “whispering down the lane” game.[1189] In this game, information is passed between individuals within a bureaucratic hierarchy, with the message becoming more distorted at every step along the way. The longer the transmission chain becomes, the more noise and errors are introduced. This differs from the knowledge problem, because whispering down the lane involves transmitting known information, while the knowledge problem is about discovering as-yet-unknown knowledge.[1190] As bureaucracies become larger—e.g., national rather than local—we should expect issues of communication within bureaus to become increasingly plagued by noise. This noise creates problems for producing goods and services which comport with the desires of the people whose interests bureaucrats are supposed to serve.[1191]
+A Study of Maya Art, Its Subject Matter and Historical Development. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, EL Cambridge.
-State power also generates perverse incentives for private businesses, not just for state actors. Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer identified two means of acquiring wealth: the political means and the economic means.[1192] Someone gains wealth using the economic means when she acquires resources through voluntary exchange. Someone gains wealth using the political means, in contrast, when she acquires resources by coercing others. While the economic means are productive or positive-sum, the political means are zero- or negative-sum.
+Spuhler, James N.
-When state power is present, there are incentives for business interests to seek to use it for their own narrow gain. This can take the form of seeking transfers such as subsidies and bailouts, or of lobbying for regulations that suppress competition. Attempting to gain these types of state privileges means expending resources on seeking political favors rather than on developing better products for consumers. Economists refer to this striving for privileges as “rent seeking.”[1193]
+Anthropology, Evolution, and “Scientific Creationism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 14:103–133.
-Rent seeking, in turn, breeds cronyism, which involves institutionalized relationships between favored business interests and political elites.[1194] This undermines the dynamism of markets by enabling entrenched interests to preserve their established positions and keep out new innovators.[1195] It also shifts resources to those with political power at the expense of ordinary people. In a free- market system, positions of economic power are contestable. The dominant firm of one year can find itself displaced by a new competitor the next. Historically, innovations may displace entire industries through “creative destruction.”[1196] Entrenched firms, when allied with the political elite, can suppress this process by preventing entrepreneurs from entering the market and eroding their market shares. The resulting political capitalism is the product of a proactive, interventionist state which allows businesses to manipulate and distort the unhampered market process.[1197]
+Stephens, John L., and Frederick Catherwood
-Can democracy solve the problem of special interests’ engagement in rent seeking? At best, the democratic process provides only very weak protection from exploitation by special interests. Rational ignorance is especially relevant here. The harm caused by a regulation or subsidy is typically dispersed across a large population, with the result that each person incurs only a small cost. For example, sugar tariffs increase food prices for American consumers, but only by a few cents per purchase. The time it would take a voter to study sugar tariffs, much less speak with a politician about them, is more valuable to the voter than the cost imposed on the voter by the tariff. Meanwhile, the benefits conferred by the tariff on a domestic sugar farmer are big, which means that the farmer has a strong incentive to pay attention to sugar tariffs, organize an interest group with other farmers, and lobby politicians. Because benefits are concentrated and costs dispersed, organized interest groups use government force at the expense of the public.
+Incidents of Travels in Central American, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Harper and Brothers, New York. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1969.
-Yet another issue is that elections are focused on choosing legislatures while many regulations are designed and implemented by bureaucrats who are not subject to direct elections. In the ideal model of democracy, legislators, who represent voter interests, would select and monitor bureaucrats to ensure that they produced goods and services that improved social welfare. This ideal model does not hold in practice, however, and democratic politics is plagued by principal-agent problems in virtue of which the putative principals (private actors) are unable to effectively monitor and punish their agents (legislators and bureaucrats), who are thus free to engage in relatively unchecked opportunism.[1198]
+Stone, Andrea, Dorie Reents, and Robert Coeiman
-Even if public-spirited voters are paying attention to an issue, they may actively support an intervention that enhances the privileges of private interest groups. To understand this dynamic consider the “Bootleggers and Baptists” model of state regulation.[1199] State laws that banned alcohol sales on Sundays were supported by Baptists for moralistic reasons. But bootleggers supported these laws as well, because the laws suppressed their competitors one day each week. Similar coalitions between public-spirited reformers and private interests seeking to profit from state intervention are pervasive.
+Genealogical Documentation of the Middle Classic Dynasty of Caracol, El Cayo, Belize. In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. FI, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 267–276. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-For example, many people support medical licensing laws to protect patient safety by barring incompetent doctors from the market. But, by restricting the supply of medical providers, licensing laws raise prices. The fact that they do so provides a strong incentive for doctors to support tighter restrictions. Doctors organize through groups like the American Medical Association to secure strict licensing requirements. This raises their wages and increases healthcare costs for everyone else. Similarly, to practice medicine in America, doctors are legally required to complete residencies within the United States. The number of residencies is set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which is largely run by doctors, who can thus reduce competition by controlling the number of available residency slots.[1200]
+Storey, Rebecca
-To economists, an arrangement for producers to control supply is a textbook case of a cartel. Similar licensing cartels are operated by professionals who have even weaker consumer safety rationales for licensing restrictions, including florists and interior designers.[1201] As Adam Smith noted long ago, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”[1202] However, without an enforcement mechanism, a contrivance to raise prices will be unstable because cartel members will have incentives to lower their prices and thereby attract customers away from their higher-priced competitors. Moreover, the high prices the enforcement-free cartel seeks to maintain will provide an incentive for new competitors to enter the market.
+Mortalidad durante el Clásico Tardío en Copán y El Cajón. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.
-The state provides a convenient mechanism for the enforcement of cartel agreements because it can use its coercive powers to exclude competitors and punish existing businesses that deviate from the dictates of the agreements. Business cartels thus support state intervention for selfinterested reasons, just like the bootleggers supported Sunday closing laws. They are often joined by public-spirited voters and reformers, akin to the Baptists, who think that regulations that suppress competition will also protect the public interest. The result is often the adoption of regulations that reduce the welfare of private persons.
+Strómsvik, Gustav
-At the core of public choice theory is the assumption of behavioral symmetry—the same types of actors but operating in different institutions. The problems discussed so far do not depend on agent type and do not assume that politicians, bureaucrats, or politically connected business owners are necessarily any worse than other people in society. Instead, public choice assumes that people have the same motivations in politics as they have in private settings. From this starting point, the focus is on the incentives facing actors in the political arena with an appreciation for how these incentives differ from those within the marketplace. However, it is important to note that political institutions also include selection mechanisms that impact who tends to secure positions wielding political power. The assumption of behavioral symmetry, while a useful analytical tool, may therefore understate the likelihood of bad outcomes in “real world” politics. In practice, who will tend to rise to positions of political power? Economists Frank Knight and F.A. Hayek offered some insight into the answer to this question.
+The Ball Courts at Copan. Contributions to American Anthropology and History 55:185–222. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
-Knight noted that, to centrally plan an economy, authorities would have to “exercise their power ruthlessly to keep the machinery of organized production and distribution running” and that “[t]hey would have to enforce orders ruthlessly and suppress all disputation and argument against policies.”[1203] He further argued that “the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master on a slave plantation.”[1204] In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek made a similar argument, contending that within a regime of central planning the worst people will tend to rise to the top.[1205] The reason why is that central planners must be given significant discretionary power to implement plans and deal with unforeseen circumstances. Who will tend to be most attracted to such power and discretion over other human beings? Hayek argued that “the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful” in this system.[1206] A system that gives leaders unconstrained discretionary power is likely to attract people who feel comfortable exercising power over others.
+Stuart, David
-While Knight and Hayek were discussing attempts to implement comprehensive planning, their insights are applicable to politics in general.[1207] As Robert Higgs notes, “the observation applies to the functionaries of less egregious governments,” because “nearly all governments, even those of countries such as the United States, France, or Germany, jokingly described as ‘free,’ provide numerous opportunities for ruthless and unscrupulous people.”[1208] As F.G. Bailey argues, political
+a Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. RES 7/8, 6–20.
-[l]eaders are not the virtuous people they claim to be; they put politics before statesmanship; they distort facts and oversimplify issues; they promise what no one could deliver; and they are liars.... [L]eaders, if they are to be effective, have no choice in the matter. They could not be virtuous (in the sense of morally excellent) and be leaders at the same time.[1209]
+b Epigraphic Evidence of Political Organization in the Usumacinta Drainage. Unpublished manuscript in possession of the authors.
-These arguments are grounded in an appreciation of the incentives and selection mechanisms inherent in political institutions. Given the immense power concentrated in such institutions, who is likely to rise to the top? Those who feel comfortable wielding power over others and those with the skill to capture and maintain such power are unlikely to be the most noble and other-regarding people in a society. If virtuous people enter positions of power, they will face numerous perverse pressures.
+a The Inscription on Four Shell Plaques from Piedras Negras, Guatemala. In The Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 175–184. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-First, they will face the incentive to bend their principles to maintain their positions of power. If they are unwilling to bend their principles, this will likely lead less squeamish leaders to rise through the ranks and replace them. In a democratic society, for instance, liars and demagogues outperform their principled opponents in elections.[1210] Second, once someone is in office, those who desire special privileges will actively seek to suborn her. She will be subject to multiple blandishments; and even if she’s relatively principled this may prompt her to favor special interests. Finally, very virtuous, principled office-holders may be tempted, not so much to hand out favors to special interests, but simply to use power in authoritarian fashion to do what they take to be good.
+b A New Child-Father Relationship Glyph. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, 1 & 2, 7–8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-The combination of selection mechanisms and incentives makes centralized political power very dangerous indeed. The relevant dangers reflect not only the potential for waste and dysfunction in politics, but also the risks that follow when a significant amount of power, backed by coercion, is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. This kind of power can be used to impose significant harm on the very people the state purports to serve. The costs of centralized power are likely to fall on the most marginalized members of society precisely because they lack the voice and ability to avoid abuses of state power.[1211]
+a The Hieroglyphic Name of Altar U. Copan Note 4. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-*** IV. Conclusion
+b The Chronology of Stela 4 at Copán. Copán Note 12. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-The state is plagued by two pathologies: the knowledge problem and the power problem. Political leaders persistently and clumsily intervene in the complex system that is the economy. Because they cannot access the knowledge provided by prices, they are blind to the opportunity costs of their actions. Their blindness limits their ability to allocate, and reallocate, resources to their highest-valued uses to ensure that people’s preferences are optimally satisfied. Political power also comes with perverse incentives, encouraging a variety of wasteful, destructive, and exploitative behavior. In virtue of these pathologies, states will tend to act in ways that are costly and counterproductive.
+c The Classic Maya Social Structure: Titles, Rank, and Professions as Seen from the Inscriptions. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.
-If centralized state power is so dangerous, what is the alternative? How can people provide rules, public goods, and other things that people generally want the state to provide? Nobel Laureate economist James Buchanan proposed constraining states using constitutions. By establishing rules that bind political leaders and limit their power, Buchanan hoped to empower the “protective state” and “productive state” while limiting the “predatory state.”[1212] Yet Buchanan’s proposal suffers from an obvious difficulty: it’s unclear how to enforce the constitution.[1213] If political leaders can benefit by violating the constitution, it seems likely that they will do so.[1214] How can we deter this type of exploitation?
+d The “Lu-bat” Glyph and its Bearing on the Primary Standard Sequence. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya,” a conference held in Guatemala City in August 1986.
-One solution is polycentricism.[1215] According to Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren, a system is polycentric if it features “many centers of decision-making that are formally independent of each other.”[1216] When a system is polycentric, this enables some amount of competition that can check political power.
+e A Glyph for “Stone Incensario.” Copán Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-One key advantage of polycentricity is that it enables exit, which is crucial to a competitive market. A restaurant has an incentive to serve a satisfying meal, because an unsatisfied customer is likely to take her business elsewhere.
+a Nuevas interpretaciones de la historia dinástica de Copán. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureño, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.
-Some political scientists suggest that some of the benefits of polycentricity become available when jurisdictions are smaller, even if they continue to control particular geographic territories.
+b Ten Phonetic Syllables. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 14. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-After all, smaller jurisdictions make exit easier. It might be difficult for someone to move away from the United States, but comparatively easy for them to move from one town in Northern Virginia to another. In principle, this means smaller jurisdictions should have stronger incentives to satisfy their customers than larger jurisdictions. Competition among jurisdictions is a mechanism that economists often support as a means of constraining government. James Buchanan favorably terms this “competitive federalism,”[1217] while Barry Weingast similarly praises what he calls “market preserving federalism.”[1218]
+a Letter dated February 10, 1988, circulated to epigraphers on the ihtah and itz’in readings.
-The benefits of federalism arise in large part from the ways choices among jurisdictions in a federal state resemble choices in markets, but it is important to remember that federal states are not markets. They are merely quasimarkets. Political quasimarkets are highly imperfect, and they are often significantly less competitive than public choice models of federal and similar structures often assume. Quasimarkets suffer from three types of failure which weaken, if not altogether undermine, their theoretically desirable properties: (1) government monopoly failure, (2) political information failure, and (3) unintended consequence failure.[1219]
+b Letter to author dated March 8, 1988, on the iknal/ichnal reading.
-Government monopoly failure occurs when there are barriers to competition among jurisdictions. For example, land-use regulations increase housing prices in some jurisdictions, which increases the cost of moving between jurisdictions. Another example is the fact that quasimarkets for governance are not contestable. It is unlawful for regions to secede, and there is often no easy path for people to establish a startup jurisdiction. The number of firms in a market does not determine whether the market is competitive; contestability does. The fact that political quasimarkets are not contestable implies that they are not competitive.
+c Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 175–221. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-One alleged benefit of jurisdictional competition, even when jurisdictions are territorial, is that people can compare the service packages offered by different jurisdictions and engage in “yardstick competition.”[1220] Yet this assumes people know what packages are offered. In practice, they often do not, which creates political information failure. This ignorance should not be surprising to public choice theorists, who emphasize the rational ignorance of voters. This rational ignorance exists at all levels of state operation.
+n.d. Kinship Terms in Mayan Inscriptions. A paper prepared for “The Language of Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.
-Unintended consequence failures occur when the sorting allowed by polycentricity enables results that policymakers or analysts find undesirable. For example, people who value racial segregation may take advantage of the choice polycentric systems offer in order to sort into racially segregated services. This criticism is often used as an objection to school choice, for example, because one concern is that it will result in racial segregation. “[W]hen the dimensions citizens value most clash with the ones that quasimarket creators—public policy creators—intend citizens to sort along, an important problem from a public policy perspective results.”[1221]
+Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, and Linda Schele
-While many who note these failures encourage state consolidation as a solution, there is another solution: take the “quasi” out of quasimarkets by opting for genuine, nonterritorial polycentricity. In other words, move from a system in which the state provides such services as law and policing to a situation in which these services are provided by private individuals and voluntary associations. This reduces the perverse political incentives that cause quasimarket failures.
+A New Alternative for the Date of the Sepulturas Bench. Copan Note 61. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-Removing governance from state control means that people bear the market costs of their decisions, and therefore have incentives to learn. Rational ignorance, which drives political information failure, is driven by political incentives. Moving toward private governance also makes exit and competition with respect to law and related services genuinely possible. It would therefore eliminate government monopoly failure by ending government monopoly. Governance would become contestable. People could form new voluntary associations to provide governance. They would have the right to secede, all the way down to the individual level. There would also be no state to, for instance, implement zoning laws that raise the cost of moving.
+Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, Linda Schele, and Floyd Lounsbury
-Governance without the state could be provided through a system of clubs, voluntary associations that privately produce goods that have significant public good characteristics.[1222] Clubs have stronger incentives to effectively enforce their constitutions than governments do.[1223] Clubs are privately owned, and if patrons choose to exit a club, then the club’s owners lose revenue. Moreover, the market for clubs is contestable. Because individuals can start new clubs if they wish to do so, “[t]here are [roughly] as many governance organs as individuals demand.”[1224] Moreover, in a system of clubs, people will tend to join clubs that suit their preferences. This leads to clubs that consist of many like-minded members. Enforcing the constitutions of such clubs is much easier than enforcing the constitutions of monopolistic states, because like-minded members can more easily coordinate threats to leave if constitutions are violated.
+Stela 63: A New Monument from Copán. Copán Note 56. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-Edward Stringham has documented many instances of private governance provided by clubs.[1225] Many of these examples relate to contract enforcement and fraud prevention, such as the private governance arrangements used in early stock exchanges and in online payment systems like PayPal. However, he also explains how private police departments operated in San Francisco. Such departments flourished before a governmental police department was established, and even afterward because of the persistent corruption of the governmental police force.[1226]
+Stuart, David, and Stephen Houston
-If it is hard to exclude non-payers from receiving a particular good, this creates a free-rider problem. But this problem can be mitigated by tying the good with another good that it is easier to exclude non-payers from.[1227] Many people think of policing as necessarily delivered in a way that would ensure that a private police force would be impossible to maintain, because many people would free-ride on police services paid for by others. However, Stringham shows how San Francisco’s private police force was able to avoid this problem through bundling.[1228] By bundling police services with other products such as real estate, they were able to overcome free-riding.[1229] Similar tying and bundling arrangements enable the private production of public goods in a variety of cases.[1230]
+n.d. Classic Maya Place Names. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
-A system of private governance provides a viable solution to both the knowledge problem and the power problem. When governance is provided by voluntary associations grounded in private property rights, it is embedded within a market. In a market, decision makers can access the knowledge provided by prices. Like other private firms, private providers of governance receive the feedback and discipline associated with profit and loss. Unlike political leaders, they can engage in economic calculation.
+Stuart, David, and Linda Schele
-Similarly, private governance tames the power problem. It provides private persons with effective exit options to respond to abuse and exploitation by their rulers. By allowing individuals to choose which specific governance arrangement they prefer to live under, it weakens their incentives to be ignorant and biased. And by limiting the discretion of rulers, private governance mitigates the tendency for the worst to get on top.
+a Yax-K’uk’-Mo’, the Founder of the Lineage of Copán. Copán Note 6. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-Understanding the economic pathologies of the state may at first seem like a depressing exercise. However, it is crucial for placing constraints on our utopias by delineating what can and cannot be accomplished in the realm of politics. State actors cannot access the knowledge required to maximize social welfare. They also often face perverse incentives, which drive a wedge between their interests and those of private persons. Perhaps most importantly, the awesome powers centralized in the hands of state actors have historically been used to impose significant costs and damage on innocent people.[1231]
+b Interim Report on the Hieroglyphic Stair of Structure 26. Copán Note 17. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-However, studying these pathologies also helps us understand the possibilities of governance and institutions that do not face such problems. In order to avoid these problems, we should consider governance provided by voluntary associations. That is, we should consider anarchy.
+Stuart, George
+n.d. Search and Research: An Historical and Bibliographic Survey. In Ancient Maya Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press (in preparation).
-[1161] The concepts of the “knowledge problem” and the “power problem” in the context of both comprehensive and non-comprehensive state planning were identified by Don Lavoie, National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (Arlington, VA: Mercatus 2016).
+Stuart, George, and Grant Jones
-[1162] F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35.4 (1945): 519—30.
+n.d. Can Ek and the Itzas: New Discovered Documentary Evidence. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in preparation).
-[1163] Hayek, “Use”; Esteban F. Thompson, Prices and Knowledge: A Market-Process Perspective (London: Routledge 1992).
+Sugiyama, Saburo
-[1164] Peter Boettke, “Economic Calculation: The Austrian Contribution to Political Economy,” Advances in Austrian Economics 5 (1998): 131—58.
+Burials Dedicated to the Old Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacán, México. American Antiquity 54(l):85–106.
-[1165] Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Auburn, AL: Mises 1990 [1920]); Hayek, “Use”; Thompson; Peter J. Boettke, Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy (London: Routledge 2001).
+Taladoire, Eric
-[1166] David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Escape from Democracy: The Role of Experts and the Public in Economic Policy (New York, NY: CUP, 2013): 110–127.
+Les terrains de jeu de balle (mesoamérique et sud-oest des Etats-Unis). Etudes Mesoaméricaines Série 11:4, Mission Archaeologique et Ethnologique Française au Mexique.
-[1167] Christopher J. Coyne, Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2013): 76.
+Tambiah, Stanley J.
-[1168] Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” Journal of Economic History 52.1 (1992): 41–60.
+The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 293:69–97.
-[1169] Higgs, “Prosperity” 43.
+Tate, Carolyn
-[1170] Lavoie 56–7.
+Las mujeres de la nobleza de Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Internacional de Mayistes,” a conference held in Mexico, D.F.
-[1171] Christopher J. Coyne, “Lobotomizing the Defense Brain,” Review of Austrian Economics 28.4 (2015): 371–96; Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Don Lavoie, “National Defense and the Public-Goods Problem,” Journal des Econmistes et des Etudes Humaines: Bilingual Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 5.2–3 (1994): 363–77.
+a The Language of Symbols in the Ritual Environment at Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
-[1172] Christopher J. Coyne and David S. Lucas, “Economists Have No Defense: A Critical Review of National Defense in Economics Textbooks,” Journal of Private Enterprise 31.4 (2016): 65–83.
+b Summer Solstice Ceremonies Performed by Bird Jaguar III of Yaxchilán, Chiapas, Mexico. Estudios de Cultura Maya XVI:85–112. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
-[1173] In reality, many aspects of national defense appear excludable. For example, a missile defense system can defend one metropolitan area and not another. The resources used for that missile defense system can also only be used to defend one city. This means that New York’s defense involves the use of resources that could otherwise have been used to defend Los Angeles. Various aspects of defense are therefore not public goods, especially on the national level.
+Taube, Karl
-[1174] See Ludwig von Mises, A Critique of Interventionism (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington 1977); Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, CA: IHS 1977); Sanford Ikeda, Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism (New York, NY: Routledge 1996).
+The Classic Maya Maize God: A Reappraisal. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, Vol. VII, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 171–181. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
-[1175] Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom and Twelve Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian 1974) 22–4.
+a A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel. Journal of Anthropomorphic Research 44-- 183–203.
-[1176] Sanford Ikeda, “Urban Interventionism and Local Knowledge,” Review of Austrian Economics 17.2–3 (2004): 247–264.
+b A Study of Classic Maya Scaffold Sacrifice. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 331–351. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-[1177] Ikeda, “Interventionism.”
+n.d. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Cult of Sacred War at Teotihuacán. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.
-[1178] Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P 1997).
+Tedlock, Dennis
-[1179] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1999).
+Popo! Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of God and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster.
-[1180] Previous economists had romanticized the state, treating it as a benevolent despot that can solve market failures. Public choice theorists like James M. Buchanan analyzed “politics without romance.” See James M. Buchanan, “The Constitution of Economic Policy,” American Economic Review 77.3 (1987): 245–50; James M. Buchanan, “Public Choice: Politics Without Romance,” Policy 19.3 (2003): 13–18.
+Thompson, J. Eric S.
-[1181] The assumption of symmetry of agent type between private and public sector is just that—an assumption— and not meant to be descriptive. As discussed further below in the text, in practice politicians are not randomly selected members of the population, and this means that their dispositions may be predictably different from those of other people in various ways. They may, for instance, be selected for ambition and lack of principle. Robert Higgs, “Public Choice and Political Leadership,” Independent Review 1.3 (1997): 466.
+Sky Bearers, Colors and Directions in Maya and Mexican religion. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 436, Contribution 10. Washington, D.C.
-[1182] James M. Buchanan, “Individual Choice in Voting and the Market,” Journal of Political Economy 62.4 (1954): 334–43; Richard E. Wagner and Deema Yazigi, “Form vs. Substance in Selection through Competition: Elections, Markets, and Political Economy,” Public Choice 159.3–4 (2014): 503–14.
+A New System for Deciphering Yucatecan Dates with Special Reference to Chichón Itzá. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 483, Contribution 22 Washington, D.C.
-[1183] Cecil Bohanan and T. Norman Van Cott, “Now More than Ever, Your Vote Doesn’t Matter,” Independent Review 6.4 (2002): 591–5; Jac C. Heckelman, “Now More than Ever, Your Vote Doesn’t Matter: A Reconsideration,” Independent Review 7.4 (2003): 599–601; Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Aaron Edlin, “What Is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a Difference,” Economic Inquiry 50.2 (2012): 321–6.
+The High Priest’s Grave. Chicago: Field Museum of Chicago.
-[1184] Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2007).
+The Fish as a Maya Symbol for Counting. Theoretical Approaches to Problems No.2. Cambridge, Mass.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Division of Historical Research.
-[1185] Donald J. Boudreaux, “Was Your High School Civics Teacher Right After All? Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure,” Independent Review 1.1 (1996): 111–28.
+Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 589. Washington, D.C.
-[1186] Robert Higgs, Delusions of Power: New Explorations of the State, War, and the Economy (Oakland, CA: Independent 2012) 34–46.
+A Blood-Drawing Ceremony Painted on a Maya Vase. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1:13–20. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
-[1187] Armen A. Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58.3 (1950): 211–21.
+A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-[1188] William A. Niskanen, “Nonmarket Decision Making: The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy,” American Economic Review 58.2 (1968): 293–305; William A. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government. (Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton 1971); William A. Niskanen, “Bureaucrats and Politicians,” Journal of Law and Economics 18.3 (1975): 617–43; William A. Niskanen, “Bureaucracy,” The Elgar Companion to Public Choice, ed. William F. Shughart II and Laura Razzolini (Cheltenham: Elgar 2001) 258–70.
+a Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-[1189] Gordon Tullock, “The Politics of Bureaucracy,” Selected Works of Gordon Tullock 6: Bureaucracy, ed. Charles Rowley (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty 2005 [1965]) 241–416.
+b The Bacabs: Their Portraits and Glyphs. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61 edited by William R. Bullard, Jr. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
-[1190] Peter J. Boettke, “Information and Knowledge: Austrian Economics in Search of Its Uniqueness,” Review of Austrian Economics 15.4 (2002): 263–74.
+Maya Hieroglyhic Writing: An Introduction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-[1191] For one application of Tullock’s insights to the contemporary issue of postwar nation-building, see Christopher J. Coyne, “The Politics of Bureaucracy and the Failure of Post-War Reconstruction,” Public Choice 135.1–2 (2008): 11–22; Christopher J. Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP).
+The Hieroglyphic Texts of Las Monjas and Their Bearing on Building Activities. In Las Monjas by John Bolles. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
-[1192] Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically (New York, NY: Huebsch 1922).
+Thompson, J. E. S., H. E. D. Pollock, and J. Charlot
-[1193] Gordon Tullock, “Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft,” Western Economic Journal 5.3 (1967): 224–32; James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock, eds., Toward a Theory of the RentSeeking Society (College Station, TX: Texas A&M UP 1980); Robert D. Tollison, “Rent Seeking: A Survey,” Kyklos 35.4 (1982): 575–602.
+A Preliminary Study of the Ruins of Coba, Quintana Roo. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 424. Washington, D.C.
-[1194] Randall G. Holcombe. Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power Is Made and Maintained. (New York, NY: Cambridge UP 2018).
+Tozzer, Al fred M.
-[1195] Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1982); Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2013); Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (New York, NY: Basic 2014); Randall Holcombe, “Political Capitalism,” Cato Journal 35.1 (2015): 41–66.
+Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. XVIII. Reprinted with permission of the original publishers by Kraus Reprint Corporation. New York, 1966.
-[1196] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, NY: Harper 1942)
+Chichón Itzá and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporaneous Maya and Toltec. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, XI and XII. Cambridge.
-[1197] Randall Holcombe, “Crony Capitalism: By-Product of Big Government,” Independent Review 17.4 (2013): 541–59; Holcombe, Political Capitalism.
+Turner, B. L., II
-[1198] Robert J. Barro, “The Control of Politicians: An Economic Model,” Public Choice 14.1 (1973): 19–42; John Ferejohn, “Incumbent Performance and Electoral Control,” Public Choice 50.1 (1986): 5–25; Timothy Besley, Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government (New York, NY: OUP 2006).
+Comparison of Agrotechnologies in the Basin of Mexico and Central Maya Lowlands: Formative to the Classic Maya Collapse. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G.Miller, 13–47. Washington, D C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-[1199] Bruce Yandle, “Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist,” Regulation 7.3 (1983): 12–6; Fred S. McChesney, Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1987); Adam Smith and Bruce Yandle, Bootleggers and Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Policy (Washington, DC: Cato 2014).
+Turner, B. L., II, and Peter D. Harrison
-[1200] Dean Baker, “The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries,” Politico (Capitol News, Oct. 25, 2017), [[http://www.politico.com][www.politico.]] [[http://www.politico.com][com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-disparities-000557 ]](Jan. 8, 2018).
+Prehistoric Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Pulltrouser Swamp, Northern Belize. Science 213:399–405.
-[1201] Megan McArdle, “Licensing Interior Decorators? Let’s Nix State-Approved Cartels,” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2016, [[http://www.chicagotribune.com][www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-unnecessary-occupational-licens]] [[http://www.chicagotribune.com][ing-20160522-story.html]] (Jan. 8, 2018).
+Valdés, Juan Antonio
-[1202] McArdle; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Nelson 1827) 54.
+Uaxactún: recientes investigaciones. Mexican 8(6):125–128.
-[1203] Frank Knight, “Lippman’s The Good Society,” Journal of Political Economy 46.6 (1938): 868–9.
+Los mascarones Preclássicos de Uaxactún: el caso del Grupo H. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphía Maya, 165–181. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.
-[1204] Knight 869.
+Vlchek, David T., Silvia Garza de Gonzál ez, and Edward B. Kurjack
-[1205] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1944).
+Contemporary Farming and Ancient Maya Settlements: Some Disconcerting Evidence. In Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, edited by Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, 211–223. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-[1206] Hayek, Road 135.
+Vogt, Evon Z.
-[1207] For an application of this logic to foreign policy, see Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, “Empire State of Mind: The Illiberal Foundations of Liberal Hegemony,” Independent Review 21.2 (2016): 237–250.
+The Genetic Model and Maya Cultural Development. In Desarollo Cultural de los Mayas, edited by E. Z. Vogt and A. Ruz, 9–48. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
-[1208] Robert Higgs, “Public Choice and Political Leadership,” Independent Review 1.3 (1997): 466.
+Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
-[1209] F.G. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1988) 174.
+n.d. Indian Crosses and Scepters: The Results of Circumscribed Spanish-Indian Interactions in Mesoamerica. A paper presented at “Word and Deed: Interethnic Images and Responses in the New World,” a conference held in Trujillo, Spain, December 12–16, 1988.
-[1210] Bailey.
+Walker, Debra S.
-[1211] See, for example, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, “Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and the Impact on Minority Groups,” Peace Review 28.2 (2016): 165–170.
+n.d. A Context for Maya Ritual at Cerros, Belize. A paper presented at the Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Austin, Texas, March 21, 1986.
-[1212] James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1975); Peter J. Boettke, “Economics and Public Administration,” Southern Economic Journal 84.4 (2018): 938—59; Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter J. Boettke, and Vlad Tarko, Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective (New York, NY: Oxford UP 2019).
+Wauchope, Robert
-[1213] Anthony de Jasay, The State (New York, Basil Blackwell 1985).
+Modern Maya Houses: A Study of Their Significance. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 502. Washington, D.C.
-[1214] Christopher J. Coyne, “The Protective State: A Grave Threat to Liberty,” In, Peter J. Boettke and Solomon Stein, eds. Buchanan’s Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of James M. Buchanan (Arlington, VA: Mercatus 2018).
+Webster, David
-[1215] Paul D. Aligica and Vlad Tarko, “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 25.2 (2012): 237—262.
+Defensive Earthworks at Becan, Campeche, Mexico: Implications for Maya Warfare. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 41. New Orleans.
-[1216] Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 55.4 (1961): 831—42.
+Warfare and the Evolution of Maya Civilization. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 335–371. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-[1217] James M. Buchanan, “Federalism and Individual Sovereignty,” Cato Journal 15.2—3 (1995/1996): 259—68.
+Cuca, Chacchob, Dzonot Ake: Three Walled Northern Maya Centers. Occasional Papers in Anthropology Number 11. Department of Anthropology. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University.
-[1218] Barry Weingast, “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 11.1 (1995): 1—31.
+Recent Settlement Survey in the Copán Valley, Copán, Honduras. Journal of New World Archaeology V(4):39–63.
-[1219] Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne, and Peter T. Leeson, “Quasimarket Failure,” Public Choice 149.1—2 (2011): 209–44.
+Webster, David L., William L. Fash, and Elliot M. Abrams
-[1220] Boettke, Coyne, and Leeson 214.
+Excavaciones en el Conjunto 9N8: Patio A (Operación VIII). In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-[1221] Boettke, Coyne, and Leeson 215.
+Willey, Gordon R.
-[1222] James M. Buchanan, “An Economic Theory of Clubs,” Economica 32 (1965): 1–14.
+The Artifacts of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Tol. 64(1). Cambridge.
-[1223] Peter T. Leeson, “Governments, Clubs, and Constitutions,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80.2 (2011): 301–8. See also Bruno S. Frey, “Functional, Overlapping, Competing Jurisdictions: Redrawing the Geographic Borders of Administration,” European Journal of Law Reform 5.3–4 (2005): 543–55.
+The Classic Maya Hiatus: A Rehearsal for the Collapse? In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 417—130. London: Duckworth.
-[1224] Leeson 304.
+Excavations at Scibal, Department of Peten, Guatemala, Number 1, Artifacts. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Vol. 14. Cambridge.
-[1225] Edward Peter Stringham, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (New York, NY: OUP 2015)
+Willey, Gordon, and Richard Leventhal
-[1226] Stringham 117.
+Prehistoric Settlement at Copán. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 75–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[1227] Harold Demsetz, “The Exchange and Enforcement of Property Rights,” Journal of Law and Economics 7 (1964): 11–26.
+Williamson, Richard, Donna Stone, and Alfonso Morales
-[1228] Stringham. See also Bruce J. Benson, To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice (Oakland, CA: Independent 1998); Edward P. Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (Oakland, CA: Independent 2007); Bruce J. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State (Oakland, CA: Independent 2011).
+Sacrifice and War Iconography in the Main Group, Copán, Honduras. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.
-[1229] Stringham.
+Wisdom, Charles
-[1230] Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: IHS 1970); Daniel B. Klein “Tie-Ins and the Market Provision of Public Goods,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 10 (1987): 451–74; Fred S. Foldvary, Public Goods and Private Communities: The Market Provision of Social Services (Cheltenham: Elgar 1994); Robert H. Nelson, Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government (Washington, DC: Urban 2005); David Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alex Tabarrok, eds., The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P 2002).
+The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-[1231] See R.J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New York, NY: Routledge 1994); Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1999). For one theoretical framework for understanding these empirical realities, see Higgs, Delusions 11–24.
+n.d. Materials on the Chorti Languages. Collection of Manuscripts of the Middle American Cultural Anthropology, Fifth Series, No. 20. Microfilm, University of Chicago.
-<br>
+Wren, Linea
-** 18. Hunting for Unicorns
+n.d. Elite Interaction During the Terminal Classic Period of the Northern Maya Lowlands: Evidence from the Reliefs of the North Temple of the Great Ballcourt at Chichón Itzá. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
-*Peter T. Leeson*
+Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, editors
-*** An Unusual Safari
+The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
-In ancient legend a unicorn is a horse-like creature with a single, spiraled horn sprouting from its forehead. Today this creature is universally regarded as a fantasy, and the term “unicorn” is used to derisively describe phenomena thought equally impossible.
+Zavala, Lauro José
-In political economy such phenomena are often anarchic. Conventional wisdom acknowledges the prospect of cooperation without government under ideal social conditions—anarchic cooperation that is fragile. But everyone knows that cooperation without government under worst-case social conditions—robust anarchic cooperation—doesn’t exist.
+Informe personal de exploraciones arqueológicas: segunda temporada 1950. An unpublished report provided by Alberto Ruz Lhull.
+</biblio>
-Except, everyone is wrong. This chapter hunts for anarchic unicorns and finds them.[1232] There is robust cooperation in anarchic reality.
+ Index
-Conventional wisdom eschews investigating anarchic reality because an important theory, the “logic of continuous dealings”—or rather the stringent assumptions on which that theory is based—seemingly preordains what one will see: the solitary and poor, the nasty and brutish, and the short. In its most effective incarnation the logic of continuous dealings amounts to a society-wide boycott of people who misbehave: cheat someone today and no one will deal with you tomorrow, or indeed ever again. In principle this is a powerful punishment whose threat can induce you to behave without any government at all. But for that threat to be powerful in practice, society must exhibit numerous uncommon features.[1233] Here are a few:
+<biblio>
+agriculture. 39–40, 56, 62, 93–94, 255. 433–434. 439
- - Society must consist of people who are culturally similar. To see why, suppose people speak different languages. In that case, communicating a cheater’s identity to others is difficult, so learning about who should be boycotted is too. Cheating is shunned by only a few, so many find it worthwhile to cheat.
- - Society must consist of people of similar strengths. If people have different violent capacities, the threat of boycott is meaningless. Weak people can announce their intentions never to deal again with cheaters, but strong people can simply take what they want from the weak and so cheat nonetheless.
- - Society must consist of “good apples,” people who care enough about the distant future for the distant future to weigh significantly on their current decisions. Consider “bad apples,” people who care little about the distant future. If they care little enough, what they gain by cheating, which is enjoyed now, exceeds what they lose by being boycotted, most of which is sacrificed only down the road. So in a society full of rotten apples, people cheat.
-Conventional wisdom is therefore correct that anarchic cooperation reliant only on the logic of continuous dealings is fragile. But this does not imply the impossibility of robust anarchic cooperation for a simple reason: the logic of continuous dealings isn’t the only mechanism of cooperation without government on which people may rely. Other mechanisms are available that augment or substitute for the logic of continuous dealings, mechanisms that aren’t sensitive to the social conditions that pose a problem for that logic.[1234]
-I present to you three anarchic unicorns observed in the wild:
- - Unicornis diversus: cooperation without government when society is culturally diverse.
- - Unicornis violentus: cooperation without government when some people are strong and others are weak.
- - Unicornis criminalis: cooperation without government when society is populated exclusively by bad apples. In each case the logic of continuous dealings is present but takes a back seat to alternative mechanisms of social order that permit self-governance to flourish where it “should not.”
-Come, let’s go a-hunting.
-*** Unicornis Diversus
-Our first anarchic unicorn inhabits precolonial Africa, where a large number of culturally diverse people existed and where government that could oversee their relations often did not.[1235] The basic problem these people faced was straightforward. To realize gains from widespread cooperation, they needed to venture outside their own communities. But interacting with people outside their own communities was risky: outsiders were unknown and thus so was how outsiders might behave.
-Within communities, where people were culturally similar, information about how individuals behaved flowed freely. But between communities, where people were culturally different, it did not. Thus, while a cheater might be boycotted by the community to which his victim belonged, he probably wouldn’t be boycotted by others. The boycott would be limited rather than societywide.
-Limited boycotts limit the punishment with which the logic of continuous dealings threatens cheating. And that limits outsiders’ incentive to cooperate. Since the risk of being cheated by outsiders remains high, people don’t venture outside their own communities. Gains from widespread cooperation go unrealized.
-It’s a good thing no one told precolonial Africans that this was their fate. Otherwise, they might not have proved that it wasn’t. “[I]ntensive social interaction between various ethnic groupings” and “extensive credit arrangements often between total strangers from different tribes” flourished in precolonial Africa. In other words, there was widespread cooperation with- [1236]
-out government.
-Precolonial Africans achieved this by supplementing the logic of continuous dealings, which is based on punishing cheaters ex post, with the logic of signaling, which is based on sorting outsiders ex ante according to the likelihood that they’ll cheat.[1237] The basic strategy followed by the members of a community was simple. Require an outsider who wants to trade with someone in the community to make a costly, specific, upfront investment, the value of which he can recoup only if he behaves. If he misbehaves, boycott him, driving the value of his investment to zero.
-The investment needed to be costly—to matter to the outsider—so that its loss would be punishing to him. The investment needed to be specific—have value to the outsider only in facilitating cooperation with the community requiring the investment—so that if that community boycotted him, he would lose his investment. And the investment needed to be upfront—made by the outsider before anyone in the community would trade with him—so that he had an investment he could lose once trade commenced.
-For outsiders who intended to behave, making such investments was worthwhile. Since continued cooperation meant continued opportunity to interact with the community, they expected to recover the cost of their investments over time. For outsiders who intended to misbehave, the opposite was true. Since an act of cheating resulted in boycott, they expected to be banned from interacting with the community before they could recover the cost of their investments.
-Members of the community requiring the investment could therefore use the fact that an outsider had made the investment, or had not, to discern what kind of trading partner he would make. If the outsider was willing to make the investment, he would make a safe partner, so the community would trade with him. If the outsider was unwilling, partnering with him was risky, so the community stayed away. In other words, costly, specific, upfront investments functioned as signals.
-What kinds of investments did precolonial Africans use for this purpose? The kind that reduced cultural diversity—social distance—between them. Outsiders adopted the costly social customs and practices of the communities with whose members they desired to trade.[1238]
-Some converted to the “religions” of outsiders with whom they wanted to trade, joining their cults and fraternal societies, such as the Ekpe, Okonko, and Ogboni, which performed quasireligious (and judiciary) functions in precolonial African communities. Sometimes joining a fraternal society required paying an actual “membership fee,” imposing a financial cost on newcomers. In other cases “cult membership was open to any who wished to join”—as long as newcomers adopted the society’s customs and practices. For example, joining the society might require surrendering one’s goods to spirits, behavioral and dietary restrictions, and recurrent participation in society-related activities.[1239]
-In addition to being costly, these investments were specific, granting a newcomer “membership” in only the religious society he paid to enter or whose customs and practices he followed. They were also upfront. Access to the society first required payment or demonstrated commitment to onerous religious rules and rituals. As a result, religious adoption was an effective signal of an outsider’s intention to cooperate.
-Other precolonial Africans adopted the property practices of outsiders with whom they wanted to trade. Precolonial communities didn’t own the land they used in the sense that they could sell it to others. But they did exercise some control over who could use the land they currently occupied and how it could be used. Often this function fell to “Earth Priests,” community leaders representing links to the historical first user of the land.
-Earth Priests established ritual customs and taboos relating to this property, which was believed to have mystical properties. To gain access to the community, outsiders had to respect those customs and taboos—to invest significantly in reducing the social distance between themselves and the community’s members.
-Such investments were costly. For example, an Earth Priest’s taboos might prohibit cultivating more fertile land in the area because of its sacred status, requiring newcomers to work less productive soil. An Earth Priest might also require newcomers to make a customary gift to him or to the community “as an expression of goodwill.”[1240]
-These investments were specific to the Earth Priest and hence to the land-using community in question. Because they were required before an outsider was permitted to join that community, they were also upfront. Only by remaining in good standing in the community could an outsider recoup his gift’s cost or the cost of cultivating less fertile ground. Thus, only outsiders who intended to behave cooperatively would adopt community members’ ritual land customs and taboos, making such adoption an effective signal of credibility.
-Precolonial Africans took a feature of their broader society that threatened to prevent anarchic cooperation—cultural diversity—and turned it to their advantage. They leveraged their social differences to supplement the logic of continuous dealings with signaling, facilitating widespread cooperation without government.
-*** Unicornis Violentus
-Our second anarchic unicorn also inhabits precolonial Africa. But to find it we need to narrow our sights on the west-central part of the continent where in the nineteenth century a trade flourished in beeswax, ivory, and wild rubber destined for export to Europe.[1241] On one side of this trade were African middlemen and the Europeans who hired them to procure goods for export. On the other side were the goods’ indigenous producers from whom the middlemen procured wax, ivory, and rubber.
-Middlemen operated from European (typically Portuguese) outposts overseen by crown- appointed governors stationed near the coast. Middlemen were highly mobile, usually armed, and traveled in large caravans. Producers inhabited the remote interior of west-central Africa. In contrast to middlemen they were highly immobile, usually unarmed, and lived in small villages. Some villages were parts of African “kingdoms.” But from a contemporary perspective at least, these kingdoms were hardly governments. Most important, no government at all—African, European, or otherwise—wielded authority over both sides of the export trade. Thus producermiddleman interactions were anarchic.
-For producers in particular, this situation posed a serious problem. They had the goods that middlemen were looking for. And middlemen were strong enough, and producers weak enough, for the middlemen to simply seize what they wanted. Why, then, should middlemen pay for it? Force dominated trade as middlemen’s means of procurement.
-If communities of producers could refuse to interact with middlemen, they could avoid being plundered. But since most communities were stationary and unarmed, refusal wasn’t an option. Who, then, could protect producers from middlemen’s plunder?
-Not “who,” it turns out, but “what”—and a what of the most unexpected kind. To incentivize middlemen to prefer peaceful exchange to violent plunder, producers offered to trade with them on credit.[1242] Ordinarily credit is a source of opportunism, not its solution. Separation of payment and provision makes creditors vulnerable to their debtors. In the context of producermiddleman relations, however, this separation supported anarchic cooperation between the strong and the weak. Here’s how:
-At time t, a community of producers wouldn’t produce anything that middlemen sought; the community left wax, ivory, and rubber unharvested. Thus, when a caravan of middlemen came along, there wasn’t anything the caravan wanted to take. This was an unhappy situation for middlemen, since traveling from the coast to the interior was arduous and expensive; it took time, and money, and men. Going home empty-handed meant taking a large loss.
-Middlemen could avoid that loss, however—indeed, they could profit—if they accepted this proposition from producers: they should pay the producers now—usually offering “immediate consumables,” such alcohol, tobacco, and cloth, which were the goods that producers wanted— and the producers would harvest the goods the middlemen sought after the caravan departed. At a specified future date, time t+1, the promised goods would be ready for pick-up; the middlemen could come back and collect what they were owed. This was an ingenious way for the weak to facilitate cooperation with the strong: it’s impossible to plunder goods that haven’t yet been produced, but credit makes it possible to trade them.
-As one nineteenth-century observer described it, “the trader sees himself forced to give credits, and this is indispensable for anyone who takes the risk of trading in such a region, if he wants to do it with any success.”[1243] In the words of another, “The native would be little inclined to gather the products of his country, were he not given the payment in advance.” Middlemen “can buy some products in the interior, these being brought to them by the natives and paid” on the spot.
-In general, however, they cannot purchase very many commodities in this way but instead give the native credit. Where rubber occurs in the forest, and where the elephant occurs, the [middleman] gives payment in advance to the elephant hunter for so and so many tusks, and to the one who wants to bring rubber or beeswax payment for so and so many pounds of rubber or wax. These people then have to wait for months and years until their debtors satisfy them.[1244]
-Still, debtor-producers had to satisfy them eventually, since their creditor-middlemen were stronger and could punish them violently if they did not—the reason credit in this context didn’t pose the problem of debtor opportunism.
-That’s not all. By indebting themselves to their creditor-middlemen, producers created an incentive for those middlemen to abstain from abusing them—and to ensure that other middlemen didn’t use violence against them either. To repay what they owed, producers needed to be alive and capable of work. Credit thus linked the financial health of creditor-middlemen to the physical health of their debtor-producers. It transformed the latter from targets of the former’s violence into valuable assets the former wanted to protect.
-When middlemen returned to a community of producers to collect what they were owed, the only goods available for plunder were their own—the goods owed them. If the middlemen wanted more, they could renew their credit contract. If not, they could go home with their goods for export. What they couldn’t do was return in the future and plunder the producers, since if they returned without having renewed their credit agreement they would again find no wax, ivory, or rubber to take. Given the cost of traveling to the interior, middlemen frequently went with the first option, perpetuating a cycle of credit-supported cooperation without government between the strong and the weak.
-*** Unicornis Criminalis
-To find our final anarchic unicorn we depart from Africa—in fact, from land entirely. We turn to the eighteenth-century Caribbean pirates. These notorious rogues included men like Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach; “Calico” Jack Rackam, the likely inspiration for Johnny Depp’s character in Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise; and the “pirate philosopher” Sam Bellamy.
-Popular pirate fiction makes it easy to forget, but Caribbean pirates were criminals. Thus, they couldn’t rely on government to facilitate cooperation between them. This presented a significant problem for pirates because successful piracy required significant cooperation. There was no such thing as a one-man pirate crew; a single person couldn’t pirate at all. Maritime marauding necessitated living and working together with many others, packed like sardines into creaky ships for months at sea. Making matters worse, it wasn’t the cooperation of just anybody that pirates had to elicit to make their criminal enterprise possible. It was the cooperation of other murderers and thieves—apples as rotten as they come, from the first man to the last.
-The necessary ingredients of such cooperation were two. First, if they were to jointly assault and steal from merchant ships—pirates’ prey—pirate crewmembers, on average about eighty men, had to abstain from assaulting and stealing from one another. Second, pirate crewmembers needed to empower officers for their ships, such as captains, whose military leadership was required to direct attacks, and simultaneously to restrain those officers from abusing their authority for private gain at the crew’s expense.
-The logic of continuous dealings by itself offered little help. On the one hand, refusing to interact with a crewmember who, say, stole a fellow seadog’s share of the loot wouldn’t mean much, since once a pirate ship was away at sea, crewmembers were more-or-less trapped together until the next landfall. Boycotting the cheater after that could be effective, but in the meantime simple shunning wasn’t practical.
-On the other hand, since pirates were, well, pirates, and since the typical pirate’s lifespan was rather short, it’s probable that the distant future, hence the future losses associated with being boycotted, did not figure prominently in pirates’ current decisions. Or at least they did not figure prominently enough for the prospect of being boycotted alone to dissuade all misbehavior.
-To address these difficulties pirates developed a system of constitutional democracy.[1245] More than half a century before America’s Founding Fathers devised a similar system of government for the United States, the Caribbean’s most infamous rotten apples did so to secure cooperation among themselves without any government at all. Consider the constitution that governed the pirate crew aboard the Royal Fortune:
-I. Every Man has a Vote in the Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at Pleasure, unless a Scarcity make it necessary, for the Good of all, to vote a Retrenchment.
-II. Every Man to be called fairly in Turn, by List, on board of Prizes, because, (over and above their proper Share) they were on these Occasions allowed a Shift of Cloaths: But if they defrauded the Company to the Value of a Dollar, in Plate, Jewels, or Money, Marooning was their Punishment. If the Robbery was only betwixt one another, they contented themselves with slitting the Ears and Nose of him that was Guilty, and set him on Shore, not in an uninhabited Place, but somewhere, where he was sure to encounter Hardships.
-III. No person to Game at Cards or Dice for Money.
-IV. The Lights and Candles to be put out at eight a-Clock at Night: If any of the Crew, after that Hour, still remained enclined for Drinking, they were to do it on the open Deck.
-V. To keep their Piece, Pistols, and Cutlash clean, and fit for Service.
-VI. No Boy or Woman to be allowed amongst them. If any Man were found seducing any of the latter Sex, and carry’d her to Sea, disguised, he was to suffer Death.
-VII. To Desert the Ship, or their Quarters in Battle, was punished with Death or Marooning.
-VIII. No striking one another on board, but every Man’s Quarrels to be ended on Shore, at Sword and Pistol.
-IX. No Man to talk of breaking up their Way of Living, till each shared a 1000 l. If in order to this, any Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionately.
-X. The Captain and Quarter-Master to receive two Shares of a Prize; the Master, Boatswain, and Gunner, one Share and a half, and other Officers one and a Quarter.
-XI. The Musicians to have Rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six Days and Nights, none without special Favour.[1246]
-These pirate “codes,” as they’re popularly known, or “articles,” which is what pirates called them, facilitated cooperation among bad apples in three central ways. First, they instituted laws against behaviors that threatened the collective interest of the crew, such as theft and violence, and stipulated punishments for crewmembers who broke those laws—punishments that were immediate and often corporeal in nature. Aboard the Royal Fortune, for instance, Article II of the crew’s constitution prohibited theft from a fellow pirate and punished that crime with “slitting the Ears and Nose of him that was Guilty,” afterward marooning him.
-These features of piratical punishments addressed the problem that pirates’ typically short time horizons posed for boycott alone in eliciting cooperation among bad apples. Immediate punishments are felt immediately, not in the distant future, and corporeal punishments are more severe than simple shunning. Piratical punishments thus imposed higher present costs on misbehavior than boycott alone could impose, effectively deterring misbehavior among the kind of people whose cooperation required the threat of especially high present costs.
-In a sense, marooning was a boycott: a marooned lawbreaker was a pirate with whom his crew wouldn’t interact again. But it was the kind of boycott that permitted pirates to avoid the problem of being trapped on a vessel with a cheater. Marooning was also lethal since the lawbreaker would likely perish of starvation if his circumstance didn’t compel him to take his own life first.
-Second, pirate constitutions established democracy as a crew’s method of collective decision making. “Every Man has a Vote in the Affairs of Moment,” as Article I of the Royal Fortune’s constitution put it. Most important among such affairs was the selection of the crew’s officers. Pirates elected their captains and quartermasters popularly. Whereas the former officers wielded command in times of battle, the latter wielded command in “peacetime”—pirates, like all good constitutionalists, showed prudent concern for the division of power. The quartermaster was in charge of administering constitutionally specified punishments to lawbreakers and distributing victuals and shares of loot.[1247]
-Just as pirate democracy called for the popular election of pirate officers, it called for their popular deposition—whenever and for whatever reason crewmembers wanted. An officer’s deposition could result solely in his removal from office, for instance if he simply proved inept at the task. Or, if an officer abused his authority, for instance by defrauding the crew, deposition could result in his removal from office followed by marooning. Threatened by such punishment, pirate officers—even myopic ones—were incentivized to behave, to use their authority for the benefit of their crews. And if for some reason an officer nevertheless abused his power, his crew wouldn’t be stuck with him for its duration at sea; it simply replaced him.
-Last but not least, pirate constitutions ensured their own enforcement. Pirate articles were written down and all crewmembers assented to them before going “on the account.” It was therefore clear to each crewmember which behaviors were legitimate and which were not, and clear to him that it was also clear to everyone else. This made the threat of being punished for misbehavior credible, as the lawbreaker knew his actions would be seen as law-breaking by the entire crew, which would support his punishment—whether he was an ordinary pirate or an officer.
-Thus, an ordinary crewmember who, for instance, stashed a piece of eight from the quartermaster’s view knew that his behavior would be seen as theft and punished by the quartermaster, supported—in fact, demanded—by all his colleagues. Likewise, a quartermaster who, say, distributed to a crewmember less than his constitutionally specified share of booty, or a captain who, say, usurped authority granted to the quartermaster by pirate law, knew that the whole crew would see his action as overstepping and thus depose him—potentially worse. The result was anarchic cooperation in floating societies comprised exclusively of rotten apples, facilitated by a system of constitutional democracy designed by rotten apples.
-*** Organizing Your Own Safari
-There you have it, three bona fide anarchic unicorns, or at least their silhouettes, observed in the wild. A few tips for arranging your own safari:
- - Anarchic unicorns aren’t going to just walk up to you and neigh because you’d like them to. To find them you need go out into the wild in search of them. That doesn’t mean you have to open a bed-and-breakfast in Mogadishu (though you could).[1248] But it does mean you need to engage anarchic reality. Study some historical research. Conduct some fieldwork. Watch a documentary. Do something that exposes to you the incredible variety of ways that real people, past and present, have lived without government.
- - You’re not that clever, but the people who have to find ways to cooperate without government under less-than-ideal social conditions are. Stated differently, the incentive of such people to find solutions to their particular obstacles to anarchic cooperation is much stronger than yours. This means that successful hunts will almost always start with the empirical, with the facts of the matter: “What do/did these people do?” Only after you’ve established that will it ordinarily be fruitful to move to the theoretical side of things: “Why does the thing they do/did work, or not, to facilitate anarchic cooperation in their environment?” Tying to conjure up solutions to problems of anarchic cooperation in a vacuum makes finding anarchic unicorns much harder.
- - Don’t be discouraged by people who will mock your open-minded engagement with
-anarchic reality as, well, hunting for unicorns. I’ve given you at least a little reason to be skeptical of their skepticism. Besides, many of these people are engaged in the most quixotic hunt of all: the hunt for omniscient benevolent government. So why should you listen to them?
-*** Acknowledgement
-This chapter is based on, and draws on discussions in, my previously published work, referenced below.
-[1232] For a more complete discussion of the anarchic realities this chapter considers, as well as others, see Peter T. Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better than You Think (Cambridge: CUP 2014).
-[1233] See Peter T. Leeson, “Coordination without Command: Stretching the Scope of Spontaneous Order,” Public Choice 135.1–2 (2008): 67–78.
-[1234] See Peter T. Leeson, “Pirates, Prisoners, and Preliterates: Anarchic Context and the Private Enforcement of Law,” European Journal of Law and Economics 37.3 (2014): 365–379.
-[1235] See, for example, Paul Bohannan, “Stateless Societies,” Problems in African History, ed. Robert Collins (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1968) 170–2; Philp Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times to Independence (New York, NY: Longman 1995).
-[1236] Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns (Berkeley, CA: U of California P 1969) 6.
-[1237] Peter T. Leeson, “Social Distance and Self-Enforcing Exchange,” Journal of Legal Studies 37.1 (2008): 161–88.
-[1238] Peter T. Leeson, “Endogenizing Fractionalization,” Journal of Institutional Economics 1.1 (2005): 75–98.
-[1239] Elizabeth Colson, “African Society at the Time of the Scramble,” The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870—1914 1: Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, ed. L.H. Gand and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: CUP 1969) 59.
-[1240] Colson, “African Society” 54.
-[1241] Before 1836, this trade also included slaves.
-[1242] Peter T. Leeson, “Trading with Bandits,” Journal of Law and Economics 50.2 (2007): 303—21.
-[1243] Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho, Expedicao portugueza ao Muatianvua 5: Ethnographia e historia tradicional dos povos da Lunda (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional 1890) 700.
-[1244] Paul Pogge, Im Reich des Muata-Jamvo (Berlin: Reimer 1880) 16.
-[1245] Peter T. Leeson, “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization,” Journal of Political Economy 115.6 (2007): 1049—94. See also Peter T. Leeson, “The Calculus of Piratical Consent: The Myth of the Myth of Social Contract,” Public Choice 139.3—4 (2009): 443—59; Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2009).
-[1246] Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (New York, NY: Dover [1726— 1728] 1999) 211–2.
-[1247] Infractions whose punishments were not specified fell to the quartermaster’s discretion or to a vote of the crew.
-[1248] On anarchic cooperation in Somalia, see Peter T. Leeson, “Better off Stateless: Somalia before and after Government Collapse,” Journal of Comparative Economics 35.4 (2007): 689–710.
-<br>
-** 19. Social Norms and Social Order
-*Ryan Muldoon*
-*** I. Introduction
-Once a social group becomes suitably large, it can become difficult to harmonize and coordinate people’s behavior. Interests will conflict, disputes will arise, and there is thus a reason to embrace a shared set of rules that can ensure that people, despite moral disagreements, can engage in peaceful social cooperation. Philosophical anarchists argue that one prominent means to solve this coordination problem—formal political institutions that have some coercive power—is illegitimate. Depending on the particular account of anarchism, this can be for different reasons, but generally the failure of legitimacy stems from a lack of proper consent of the governed, or from problems associated with the bare exercise of coercion at all.
-Let us suppose that there is no good way to overcome the anarchist’s challenge to formal political institutional arrangements. One hope for a way forward in the face of the challenge of harmonizing and coordinating behavior is through the use of informal institutions such as social norms. Social norms have the advantage of being driven by communities rather than by rule-making on the part of separate entities like states. But social norms have a number of features that may make them less desirable from the point of view of reducing coercion. In particular, social norms can be arbitrary, overly punitive, and difficult to change. These qualities can make norms an unappealing way to coordinate behavior. However, I argue that norms can accomplish much of what we want if we foster communities that are more hostile to easy norm creation. In particular, in more diverse, dynamic settings, we should expect that the norms that can survive are those that can facilitate valuable cooperation and coordination, and encourage tolerance.
-*** II. Social Norms: A Definition
-Social norms are informal institutional arrangements that help groups coordinate on particular rules of behavior. A social norm is a behavioral rule R that applies in a particular context C within a given population P.[1249] An individual A within this population prefers to follow the rule conditional on their expectation that enough other people in P will follow R in C (empirical expectations), and their expectation that enough other people in P expect A to follow R in C, and may punish A for failing to comply (normative expectations).
-This is a reasonably abstract definition, so let’s think about its elements and then consider an example. The first element is the fact that the social norm picks out a particular rule. This rule can be either permissive—“people can say whatever they want”—or restrictive—“no one can hit anyone else.” Permissive rules help make clear what we have some entitlement to do and when an encroachment on that entitlement would be wrong. Restrictive rules concern the boundaries of action—what people are not allowed to do. Sometimes one can just straightforwardly reframe a permissive rule as a restrictive rule or vice versa, but in other instances this becomes difficult. For instance, when there are several possible actions, and the rule aims to coordinate behavior, it will usually be easier to understand the rule as restrictive. An example of this would be “Always drive on the right side of the road.” Driving on the left would be equally fine, but the point of the rule is to pick out a behavior to coordinate on: the value of the rule isn’t in which behavior is selected but in the fact that some particular behavior is selected.
-Rules are generally not applicable in all places and times and for all people, and so a social norm picks out when a given rule applies and to whom. That is, it picks a context and a population. Perhaps I think the rule that “people can say whatever they want” is great for the public square, but not so useful in a movie theater, where people might just want to be able to watch movies uninterruptedly. So we can identify either situations in which a given rule does not apply (when it is otherwise generally applicable), or we specify the contexts in which it does in fact apply (“drive on the right side of the road” makes sense for public roads but probably not for your backyard). Likewise, we might think that rules apply to some people and not other people. Members of a club might have rules for themselves that don’t apply to non-members. People who hold particular jobs might have rules that govern how they ought to conduct themselves in their various professions. Religious communities might have rules for themselves that don’t apply to others. And so on.
-So far, we’ve considered the structural features of norms—they are rules that apply in particular contexts to the members of particular populations. But issues related to individual-level considerations are of particular philosophical interest.
-So, let’s consider a person who takes herself to be a member of the relevant population, and is trying to determine what to do. Social norms involve a conditional preference to follow particular rules—someone will follow a given rule if she believes enough of the other members of the group are following it and expect her to do so, too. So she has empirical expectations, beliefs regarding what other people will do. These beliefs are usually formed by looking around and seeing what people in fact do; of course, they are sometimes informed by what people proclaim that they will do in the future.
-Likewise, someone will likely have normative expectations, beliefs about what others think she ought to do. Normative expectations are second-order beliefs, and so are more prone to error than empirical expectations.
-So, for there to be a social norm, a person follows a rule in a particular context because she thinks that most other people are also following the rule, and she believes that they want her to follow the rule as well. Note that this is quite different from a community’s adhering to a common set of values in accordance with which all of its members act. For instance, if Alice helps a stranger because she thinks it is the right thing to do, and Bob helps a stranger because he also thinks it is the right thing to do, they are not following a social norm at all. They are each taking an individual action that just happens to be the same. That they do so might stem from the fact that they both had common moral upbringings, but in their actions neither Alice nor Bob were relying on social cues regarding what to do.
-Social norms are not just common behaviors or common values. Instead, social norms are shared rules that people follow when they believe others are following them and when they think that others think they should. The existence of a given social norm is entirely compatible with a situation in which all a community’s members personally endorse the norm and think it coheres perfectly with their values—but also with a case in which few people endorse the norm and most members of the community regard it as counter to their values but in which most members nonetheless feel socially compelled to follow it. This is in part because failures to comply with social norms frequently result in punishments. Some social norms may stay in place simply because people genuinely want to meet others’ expectations. Others may stay in place because people fear punishment if they don’t comply or because people anticipate social rewards for compliance.
-What can we take away from this account of social norms? Social norms in a given community are maintained in place by an epistemic equilibrium within the community: people will continue to follow rules if they think others will follow the rules and if they think others want them to follow the rules. Social norms are not merely common sets of behaviors stemming from common values, but are instead fundamentally social mechanisms for rule enforcement.
-Social norms can be created with intentional collective decision-making, or by a more social evolutionary process.[1250] And norms can emerge with no coordination or collective intention.[1251] As I will argue later, it can be useful to consider the process by which norms are created when we evaluate their moral status.
-*** III. The Virtues of Social Norms
-Social norms have a number of virtues. For our present discussion, norms are most obviously useful as an alternative to formal state institutions. Norms can effectively regulate behavior. They are consistently evident in our normal lives, so each of us has a reasonably good understanding of how they work. They can do this regulatory work quite apart from the kind of social regulation in which the state or other formal institutions do or don’t engage. In general, norms emerge from private interactions and collections of individual judgments. Norms come from the communities that are bound by them; in that sense, the authority of the rules is clearer because they are not externally imposed. In this way, norms play clear roles in self-governance. It is quite difficult to impose a norm externally on a community if the community does not welcome the norm.
-A real appeal of social norms as tools for social regulation is that they can be less aggressive than ones imposed by states. Communities can often solve coordination problems without draconian measures or threats of coercive violence. An eye-roll in response to a disapproved behavior is often sufficient punishment to encourage someone to abide by a community rule. Because the community itself enforces a norm, there is more leeway for context sensitivity as regards whether violations are punished, and if so, how severely. At their best, social norms can slowly ratchet up punishments if doing so is needed, relying as much as possible on markers of social esteem to do the work of maintaining social order.
-Social norms can also play important roles in clearly embodying sets of rights or entitlements that people can possess in a given society. Abstract laws or legal commitments are often nicer in theory than in practice. It is easy to find examples of states failing to constrain themselves in the way that the law requires. Even minor infractions of the law come with an implicit—and sometimes actual—threat of state-sanctioned violence, but fear of punishment doesn’t necessarily motivate positive behaviors by citizens. And the state can frequently fail to uphold the law by leaving protections unenforced, as a result either of a lack of state capacity or of simple apathy.
-Social norms, on the other hand, can feature both positive and negative reinforcement mechanisms. Norm adherents can enjoy community esteem, while violators can be punished on sliding scales. Social rules and associated behaviors can more clearly demonstrate the commitments of a shared social morality than legalistic state-driven alternatives because the main mechanism enabling a social norm to take root is public norm-following. So a norm of tolerance remains in place when we all see evidence of people’s tolerance of others. A rule against littering is maintained when people collect trash, not just when they issue tickets. Social norms are built out of social expectations, and those expectations are most successfully reinforced by visible behaviors that support or comply with relevant rules. Social norms are thus grounded in concrete manifestations of the values that they aim to support. They can serve to exemplify a community’s values, rather than just describing them.
-Social norms are powerful tools, both because they sometimes emerge as solutions to communities’ problems as those problems arise and because a deliberating community can sometimes choose a rule for itself and decide how to enforce the rule in a way that is sensitive to the community’s particular needs and circumstances. Monitoring conformity to norms and punishing divergence from them can become aspects of those areas of life specifically in need of regulation. Successful informal institutions can, for instance, incorporate social monitoring of the potential misuse of a common pool resource into the activities involved in using the resource.[1252] There is then no extra action needed by a community, and no need for any extra set of enforcement personnel or agencies. If we are all seen following a given rule, our observable behavior further cements following the rule as the thing to do. If someone breaks a rule that others generally follow, the violation will be noticed by others and quickly rebuked.
-Combining the ideas of exemplifying a community’s values and responding aptly to specific problems, governance by social norms can at its best be a light-touch means of maintaining social order. Social norms can address those particular practices that actually need regulation, and can do so in a way that’s consistent with people’s values and sensitive to the contexts in which people live. Ground-level self-governance using social norms can ensure that communities have the rules they need to function—but no more. This is an appealing ideal. The prospect of social norms or other informal institutions playing these kinds of regulatory roles opens up the space of possibilities for minimally coercive communities. Social norms serve regulatory functions and may involve positive or negative sanctions, but they can be lighter-touch and more context-sensitive than state-made and state-enforced laws and regulations. The availability of social norms as means of maintaining social order renders the existence of communities free of formal coercive institutions, even in the predictable absence of perfect or morally pure community members, a live possibility.[1253]
-*** IV. Reasons to Worry about Social Norms
-While one can straightforwardly envision an ideal community governed by light-touch social norms that enjoy community (and individual) support, the existence and operation of this kind of community are far from assured. Indeed, social norms can just as easily be sources of unjust, harsh, and arbitrary coercion. Social norms may not be desirable as our primary means of social coordination, especially if we embrace the concerns of the philosophical anarchist.
-In particular, I’d like to focus on four features of norms that make them potentially undesirable for someone worried about ensuring the appropriate grounding of coercive authority. First, social norms can be arbitrary. That is, they may exist not because they provide an important social function, but instead just because they arose accidentally in the course of normal social interaction. A second concern is that norms can be arbitrarily punitive. Even with a fixed, agreed-upon level of punishment, norm enforcement may be the work of a variable number of punishers, so the severity of punishment can depend on factors outside the collective control of a community’s members. Third, in the absence of norms that restrain intrusiveness, a community’s norms can be far more invasive than state-made laws. Finally, norms can be very hard to change or eliminate. While in a liberal legal system there is a clear mechanism by which laws can be changed or eliminated with immediate effect, no such system can reliably eliminate a norm.
-**** A. Arbitrariness
-Social norms can be arbitrary. Norms frequently come about in the absence of any individual or collective intention to create a new rule.[1254] Indeed, a norm can emerge as a kind of collective mistake: our general desire to coordinate behavior with others when needed can lead us to believe that there are rules that others expect us to follow when in fact we are over-responding to social evidence. Because of this kind of error, some rules come to be only because of our mistaken belief in their prior existence. Because norms are epistemic equilibria, we can accidentally lock in new behavioral rules in light of mistaken prior beliefs. Consider the basic dynamic in play: many social rules go unstated, so we scrutinize our environments for rules that we might not know about. If we happen to see a few people doing something similar in a given context, we may treat their behavior as evidence for the possible existence of a rule. As a result, we may begin to follow the rule we believe ourselves to have discovered, and our doing so provides extra evidence for others, and so forth—until there really is a rule in place, even if it came into existence purely because of a cascading series of epistemic errors. Once the rule obtains, it is just as much in force as any other.
-This is troubling: the basic dynamic of norm-generation can yield an arbitrarily large number of arbitrary rules, especially in a more-or-less fixed population. If we merely pause and reflect on our social world, especially in smaller, less diverse communities where there is less population “churn,” it is easy to see this dynamic play out. We are over-run with social rules, so much so that it is hard even to notice them. Rules specify the color and style of clothing it is appropriate to wear in particular seasons and on particular occasions. Rules govern hair length, facial hair, armpit hair, and leg hair. Rules determine how we use utensils, even identifying the hand in which one should hold a fork—not “merely” the kind of fork appropriate for a given course of food. Rules govern the settings in which and the people for whom wearing hats is appropriate. Rules govern the ways in which we maintain our lawns and the frequency with which we water them. And so on. This is hardly an exhaustive list of arbitrary social rules, of course, but the enumeration I’ve offered should underscore the utter triviality of many such rules, and the degree to which they regulate areas of life in which there’s no particular need for coordination. Nothing is at stake in most of the domains governed by the kinds of rules I’ve mentioned (except in water-scarce locations, in which watering practices may be significant). None of the kinds of norms to which I’ve referred likely stems from state action. Indeed, state regulation may simply codify pre-existing social norms. Nonetheless, rules like these—and many other, similarly arbitrary ones—emerge; and people all too frequently feel little compunction about regulating each other’s behavior on the basis of such rules. If anything, many people view doing so as fun.
-Many social norms come into existence through social evolution. That they do can leave people with the impression that norms probably play valuable functional roles. Perhaps, people suppose, such norms characteristically solve coordination problems, prevent costly outcomes, or facilitate the occurrence of socially beneficial developments in cases in which the pursuit of short-term individual gains might otherwise make these developments less likely. (Consider Hume’s argument for the evolution of property rights: despite the fact that at any given moment we might gain from taking someone else’s property, we all gain from everyone agreeing to refrain from doing so.[1255]) And indeed, it’s quite plausible that such explanations are available for some instances of coordination on fixed rules. But the same dynamics can obtain even when there’s no genuine coordination problem to be solved. Contingent events, beliefs, and passions can shape social behaviors just as easily as substantial structural challenges. As a result, a social norm can emerge as a solution to a nonexistent problem—a “solution” that is in fact a contingent, arbitrary way of coordinating responses to a set of arbitrarily clustered possible options, none of which actually presents a problem requiring coordination. We could likely get by just fine without social norms regarding the wearing of white before or after Memorial Day (or any other day of the year). A whole host of our social rules just don’t need to exist at all, even if—because we’ve lived with them for so long—they’ve taken on some sort of meaning for us.
-All of this is not to say that social norms are useless or bad. Rather, these norms are neutral with respect to most things we might care about normatively. The structure of social norms, and the dynamics by which they come into existence, give us no reason to expect the norms reliably to favor normatively desirable rules over undesirable ones. Social evolution depends on selection pressures, and those pressures need not consistently lead to the emergence of norms that foster liberal emancipation, or any other aspect of flourishing. Instead, the norms that result from selection pressures are likely to encourage the growth of norms that reflect just whatever the people involved happen to favor and the ways in which they happen to understand the social interactions in which they participate. Despite the fact that these norms are incredibly contingent, they can still dramatically shape the agency of the people who follow them.[1256] So social norms can be expected to sustain some very good rules, and some fine rules, and, probably, some rather bad rules as well, as judged from whatever normative standpoint you favor. Social norms are, on their own, broadly going to be contingent and arbitrary, and different in different communities.
-**** B. Punitive Character
-A second, related worry about arbitrariness concerns punishment. Consider a case in which there is a well-established norm that calls for violations to be punished by the community. Imposing a sanction in response to the violation of a social norm is rarely the responsibility of a specified punisher, as it might be where a violation of state-made law is concerned. While it is possible for a punishment to be collectively administered, it’s quite common for punishments to be doled out by individuals. When punishment decisions are individual, there is little ability to coordinate amongst individuals to make sure that the total amount of punishment to which a violator is subjected is proportionate to the offense.
-Collectively-delivered punishment might take a variety of forms. Her community might ostracize a violator for some period of time, or deny her access to some local public good or common resource. This sort of punishment can be scaled to the offense and can take past (mis-) behavior into account fairly straightforwardly. But if punishment is carried out by individuals, its scale will depend not on some kind of rationalized sense of proportionality but rather on the number of people who happen to pile on.
-For instance, imagine a community with a social norm calling for church attendance on Sundays. If an individual fails to attend, many—perhaps most—members of the community may choose independently to impose a punishment. Even if the punishment is mild—the retraction of a party invitation, a scolding, or perhaps even just a pointed eye-roll—those mild punishments add up. There is both the aggregate cost of all of the various punishments and the sense of being broadly attacked by one’s community. This isn’t terribly different from, say, middle school behaviors: a student commits what her peers perceive as a faux pas—and suffers ridicule far out of proportion to the putative transgression. The cost includes not only the totality of the punitive injuries but also the exclusion and subordination effected by the pile-on itself. An obvious variant on this phenomenon is apparent on social media platforms like Twitter. The sheer scale of participation in a popular platform is such that a single disfavored tweet can lead to mountains of vitriol. Even if the tweet merited a rebuke, there is no way to scale the rebuke to match the offense—if anything, as more people pile on, additional would-be punishers find the prospect of joining in attractive. The social media example is extreme, of course, but it highlights the possibility that there can be significant and unrestrained harms that flow from the mechanisms of norms enforcement.
-**** C. Invasiveness
-John Stuart Mill notes that there are two kinds of tyranny: the familiar tyranny of the sovereign— when the state uses its monopoly on violence to enforce unjust laws—and the tyranny of the majority—when society itself imposes punishments on those who deviate from prevailing opinion and practice. Mill considered this latter kind of tyranny especially pernicious.
-Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.[1257]
-The powerful idea here is that (at least absent modern surveillance technologies) it is easy enough to evade monitoring by the state. There simply aren’t enough agents of the state, and, at least under liberal regimes, the scope of state activity is limited and reasonably well defined. By contrast, unless one gives up on sociality, there is no escape from one’s neighbors. Social monitoring is constant. Social rules are frequently arbitrary, and there is no reason to believe that their content will be subject to limits on scope; the only constraint on the emergence or the substance of new social rules is the existence or content of old social rules.
-Social coordination by means of social norms and conventions can be incredibly stifling. A thousand petty tyrants, all relishing the opportunity to impose their wills on others, can belong to any community. And, indeed, petty tyranny is just what we frequently observe in smaller, stable, and more homogeneous communities. The kind of environment that is often described as high in “bonding capital” and thus rich in community solidarity and trust is also the kind of environment likely to feature robust common attitudes, beliefs, and practices. The commonality of these attitudes, beliefs, and practices isn’t coincidental. Instead, they are, broadly speaking, socially mandated.
-If your values and interests happen to be well aligned with those of the rest of the community, the rich set of norms requiring the behaviors associated with these values and interests will be a source of comfort. Those norms help the dispositions supporting the relevant behaviors to remain stable while quickly suppressing attempts at deviation. But, of course, if you find yourself out of step with these norms, then there really are “fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.” The existence of social connections means the existence of abundant opportunities for careful social monitoring and sanction. Thus, as Mill observes, social norms can be particularly pernicious sources of coercion. Any given social sanction may be quite small; but the overall effect can easily be crushing.
-**** D. Absence of Intentional Control
-A last worry with social norms is that there aren’t good tools for exercising intentional control over them. A legal system features mechanisms that instantiate Hart’s Secondary Rules—the rules of recognition, the rules of change, and the rules of adjudication. The rules of recognition ensure that there’s a straightforward way to identify the rules. The rules of change outline the mechanism for adding new rules and modifying or eliminating existing ones. And the rules of adjudication outline procedures for determining whether a rule has been violated, and, if so, what sanctions or remedies should follow. These rules help define the formal conditions for a reasonable system of rules: you should know what the rules to which you will be subjected are, there should be a process to determine whether you’ve broken the rules, and there should be a way to change the rules. It is easy enough to see how these rules can be satisfied within formal institutions, but each of these secondary rules is harder to satisfy in an environment in which the primary rules are social norms.
-The rule of recognition is difficult to satisfy in a norm-governed environment because communities don’t ordinarily maintain lists of the norms they enforce—they just enforce these norms. A newcomer will only slowly get a sense of what the relevant rules may be by observing what others do and how people react to particular behaviors. The rule of adjudication doesn’t apply cleanly where norm-violations are concerned, since individuals are empowered to judge violations of their communities’ rules and punish them as they see fit. That they are means that punishments won’t be clearly specified and makes it impossible to ensure that punishments are predictable or proportionate. And it is hard to see how there could be an articulated rule of change in an environment governed by social norms rather than formal laws.
-While social norms certainly come and go, and while these norms sometimes are created by collective agreements, there is nothing close to a mechanism for norm change that is comparable to familiar mechanisms legal change. Laws can be difficult to change. But there are clear procedures for altering them. In the United States, for instance, if a bill amending an existing law gets the required number of votes in Congress and is signed by the President, the law has been changed. There is no comparable kind of formal procedure for changing a social norm. The members of a community can deliberate collectively and pledge to eliminate or change a norm, perhaps even agreeing to punish conformity to a now rejected norm, but the community’s doing these things does not ensure the old norm’s elimination. If people still believe that others expect the behavior for which the old norm called, it will persist.
-The same is true where creating a new social norm is concerned. We can all announce our intentions to behave differently and to expect others to behave differently, but our doing so doesn’t mean we will all adopt new behaviors. Collective behavior change is remarkably difficult to bring about, even when all of a community’s members agree that their behavior should change. Because social norms are epistemic equilibria, people need to be quite confident that past behavior is no longer a guide for future behavior.
-*** V. A Way Forward
-Social norms are double-edged. On the one hand, they provide the social tools necessary for achieving non-state social cooperation on a sustainable basis. On the other hand, social norms can be even more coercive than state-maintained laws and regulations. What’s more, the kind of coercion they effect is harder to control because of the distributed nature of norm enforcement, and it is very hard to eliminate social norms once they come into being. This tradeoff—less state-driven coercion in exchange for arbitrary and unbounded coercion by one’s neighbors— will strike most people as thoroughly unattractive. Maintaining social order using social norms avoids state coercion, but it need not yield a reduction in interference or coercion full-stop. Being free of the state does not necessarily mean being free simpliciter.
-However, there is a way forward. We can make a pattern of social order maintenance rooted in social norms more appealing by finding ways to weaken norms, and in particular, to make arbitrary norms more difficult to establish. How can we draw on the theory of norms to create environments in which truly coordinating norms can take hold, while more contingent norms that merely stifle individual expression lose (or never acquire) vitality? Broadly speaking, the answer is: by fostering an environment hostile to the development of too much bonding capital but friendly to the development of bridging capital. What we want, in short, is a diverse community, ideally with a reasonable amount of churn in the population and with deep bonds limited to relative intimates.
-Homogeneous populations, and ones in which most people are united by cultural, ideological, ethnic, or similar characteristics, are fecund breeding grounds for the emergence of contingent and often irrational social norms. The more a (temporary) behavioral commonality obtains, the easier it is for us to perceive that a social rule is present, and the more likely an arbitrary norm will emerge. By contrast, in a social environment featuring a wide variety of different behaviors, it will be harder for one of these many behaviors to be perceived accidentally as a social rule and thus to evolve in to a real (but unreasonable) social rule. Population churn likewise makes social rules more difficult to establish because it is much more difficult to establish stable, mutual social expectations when the population shifts significantly on an ongoing basis. Every new entrant will need to learn relevant rules, and while they are doing so their non-conforming behaviors will weaken norms that aren’t already being strictly followed.
-While diversity and population churn work to create a relatively hostile environment for arbitrary norms, they are less hostile to actually useful coordinating norms. The kinds of rules we really need if we are to live together—basic agreements on what rights people can claim against each other, mechanisms for dispute resolution, norms of promise-keeping, and so on—possess selection advantages in any community no matter what the makeup of the community’s population. No matter who belongs to a community, its members will always have reasons to want rules of this sort. It is in everyone’s interest for settled rules to exist. The incentives for the adoption of such rules are not sufficient on their own to lead a community’s members to select just one particular set of social rules, but they will eliminate a number from contention. The scope of arbitrary restrictions on individual freedom will be much smaller when rules must emerge in an environment in which diverse people want very different things from life. Rules in this kind of environment will more closely resemble the sorts of rules needed to effect an “open society”—rules that foster tolerance.
-If rules like these are in effect, a variety of goods may prove harder to achieve—after all, fewer people will robustly embrace the same moral views—but coercion will also be substantially less likely. The characteristics one can expect a society to exhibit, given such rules, are likely to be those evident in, for instance, high-trade locations like port cities: tolerance, respect for robust negative rights, and greater dynamism and experimentation. The occurrence of these characteristics does carry costs—notably the absence of the rich set of social interconnections possible in high-bonding-capital communities. Community rules could not be used to pursue communitarian ideals or pressure people to embrace particular perfectionist ideals. A more diverse environment featuring more minimal rules will encourage more individualized values and, plausibly, a greater focus on material cultural, since material culture is more easily shared amongst diverse people.
-Homogeneous communities governed by social norms can all too readily adopt arbitrary coercive norms, just as monocultures in farming are vulnerable to pests and disease. Too much similarity allows for harmful norms to take root easily. A more diverse society can respond more robustly to the kinds of harms likely to result from greater ease of coordination—in part because such a society is more inhospitable than a more homogenous one to any sort of coordination. The only coordinative rules likely to survive are ones that can be recognized as advantageous from a variety of perspectives. Social norms thrive in parochial environments; in less parochial settings, therefore, far fewer norms can take hold.
-*** VI. Conclusion
-Social norms are incredibly powerful social tools. They are viable alternatives to more formal institutional arrangements. But social norms can be even more coercive than formal, state-made laws, and even more arbitrary. Social norms are also more resistant to change. If we are to succeed in moving away from formal institutional arrangements, we need to foster robustly diverse communities, so we can more easily mitigate against the harmful excesses that can occur when a society relies on social norms to maintain order. Social diversity makes social norms far more difficult to entrench, so encouraging diversity in a society can help to ensure that the norms that persist are genuinely valuable.
-[1249] See Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society (New York: CUP 2006).
-[1250] See Ryan Muldoon, “Understanding Norms and Changing Them,” Social Philosophy and Policy 35.1 (2018): 128–48.
-[1251] For mechanisms in virtue of which this can take place, see Ryan Muldoon et al., “On the Emergence of Descriptive Norms,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 13.1 (2012): 3–22; and Ryan Muldoon, Chiara Lis- ciandra, and Stephen Hartmann, “Why Are There Descriptive Norms? Because We Looked for Them,” Synthese 191 (2014): 4409–29.
-[1252] See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: CUP 1990).
-[1253] For one classic argument to this effect, see Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: CUP 1982).
-[1254] Cp. Muldoon et al. and Muldoon, Lisciandra, and Hartmann.
-[1255] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978 [1739]) 490.
-[1256] See Ryan Muldoon, “Perspectives, Norms and Agency,” Social Philosophy and Policy 34.1 (2017): 260–76 for a more detailed account.
-[1257] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Scott 2011 [1859]) 8, [[http://www.gutenberg.org][www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/]] [[http://www.gutenberg.org][34901-h.htm]].
-<br>
-** 20 Anarchy and Law
-*Jonathan Crowe*
-*** I. Introduction
-Can there be law without the state? The notion strikes many people as odd or counterintuitive. Law is so closely associated in the contemporary mindset with the promulgations of government authorities that it is hard to disentangle the two ideas. I begin this chapter by exploring the conception of law that underpins this mindset, as reflected in legal positivism, the dominant school of thought in contemporary legal philosophy. The most influential version of legal positivism, I argue, does not necessarily rule out law without the state. However, it favours a centralised or systematic view of legal institutions, due mainly to the link it draws between the notion of legal validity and the normative practices of legal officials. The acceptance of this kind of connection in contemporary social and political discourse partly explains why law under anarchy is hard for people to imagine.
-I go on to explore three alternative understandings of law that are more conducive to the idea of legal order without state authority. The first is the idea of consensual law, embodied not only in contracts and other voluntary legal and social agreements but also in common forms of dispute resolution, such as arbitration and mediation. The second is the concept of emergent law, which conceptualises law as a form of spontaneous order, analogous to the price system or the norms of language. The third is the notion of natural law, which focuses on shared normative inclinations attributable to facts about human nature and developed over time in response to the social environment. Each of these conceptions, I argue, represents a form of law-like social ordering that does not depend on recognition by centralised legal authorities. The convergence of these three ideas therefore offers a compelling picture of how law might operate under anarchy.
-I conclude by discussing three challenges commonly posed to the notion of law without the state. The first concerns obedience and enforcement: why would people obey the law in the absence of state coercion? The second concerns the potential for gaps in the law: how would law under anarchy deal with lawbreakers, outlaws, and vulnerable members of the community? And the third concerns the rule of law: how would law uphold important constitutional values such as consistency, prospectivity, and coherence without centralised institutions? I suggest that a picture of law under anarchy that draws on the three forms of law discussed previously—consensual law, emergent law, and natural law—offers a credible response to these potential challenges. Law under anarchy would not be perfect, but it is certainly feasible—and offers some advantages over what we have now.
-*** II. Legal Positivism
-Legal philosophy today is dominated, for better or worse,[1258] by legal positivism—the view that the only necessary factor in determining whether something counts as law is recognition by social sources.[1259] Early versions of legal positivism contained a strong bias towards statist conceptions of legal authority. John Austin, widely viewed as the founder of legal positivism,[1260] famously defines law as the command of a sovereign, backed up by sanctions.[1261] Austin’s notion of a sovereign is premised on the notion of a single, dominant source of legal authority within a given jurisdiction. The sovereign is defined as that authority whom everyone habitually obeys and who, in turn, habitually obeys nobody.[1262] Austin’s theory is therefore unable to accommodate less centralised forms of legal order, including those found in international and customary law. These normative orders, according to Austin, are not law “strictly so called”; rather, they are forms of “positive morality.”[1263]
-The limitations of Austin’s definition of law were famously critiqued by H. L. A. Hart, generally acknowledged as the central figure of contemporary analytical jurisprudence. Hart’s theory of law deliberately abandons Austin’s emphasis on the commands of the sovereign in favour of an analysis of law as a system of social rules.[1264] People comply with these rules not primarily because they fear sanctions, but rather because they treat them as conferring obligations.[1265] Legal rules are distinguished from other social rules (such as rules of morality and etiquette) by reference to an overarching rule of recognition that designates those social sources capable of conferring legal validity. The rule of recognition is itself a social rule stemming from the practices of legal officials.[1266] Essentially, something counts as law, for Hart, because legal officials within the jurisdiction recognise it as arising from the kind of source (and being enacted by means the kind of procedure) needed to confer legal status upon it.
-Hart’s theory of law (unlike Austin’s) is not necessarily incompatible with non-state forms of legal order, such as legal regimes rooted in contract or custom. Contractual legal norms can be recognised as stemming from the kinds of processes that enable them to count as legally binding if their status is acknowledged by the secondary rules of the relevant jurisdiction. Indeed, Hart views his theory’s ability to accommodate the binding nature of contracts and other legal agreements as one of its main advantages.[1267] The legal force of a commercial or marital contract, he points out, does not come directly from the sovereign (as Austin’s theory might appear to suggest), but rather from the voluntary agreement of the parties, which is then recognised as binding by legal officials.[1268] A similar point applies to laws that arise from social mechanisms other than authority or agreement. An appropriately inclusive rule of recognition, for example, could recognise customary norms as legally valid.
-Hart’s analysis nonetheless remains less than ideally suited to accommodate the notion of law without the state. This is for four interrelated reasons. None of these reasons, on its own, is fatal to the concept of law under anarchy, but together they show the limitations of Hart’s perspective. First, Hart’s analysis of law as a species of social rule relies heavily on state-based examples. The paradigm case of law, for Hart, is clearly a law promulgated, recognised, or enforced by a state authority, such as a legislature or judge.[1269] His theory of law seems primarily intended to explain these kinds of cases. The problem posed by contract law, for example—a problem that Austin’s theory fails adequately to answer—is framed primarily in terms of explaining the nature of the rules applied by state officials in recognising certain kinds of contracts as valid and others as unenforceable.[1270] The main exception to Hart’s focus on traditional state-made law is his discussion of international law (which he sees as the body of law governing relationships between states).[1271]
-Second, Hart’s theory tends to emphasise law’s centralised or systematic character. The rule of recognition supplies a generic source-based test for legal validity. The legal status of individual norms then depends on whether they have been posited by social sources recognised as authoritative in accordance with this overarching rule. The rule of recognition, to be sure, may be complex and multifaceted,[1272] recognising a diversity of authoritative legal sources. It is therefore compatible with a limited form of legal pluralism. Nonetheless, the idea that the validity of all laws within a given jurisdiction can be traced back to a single overarching rule—no matter how complex—fits most neatly with the paradigm of state-made law, in accordance with which all laws enjoy the imprimatur of a single dominant institution. It is less well adapted to deal with genuine cases of legal pluralism, involving multiple independent (and perhaps competing) sets of legal norms operating within the same or overlapping jurisdictions.[1273] It therefore sits uneasily with purely consent-based or customary legal orders, which may emerge organically from diverse sources.
-Third (and relatedly), Hart’s theory struggles fully to accommodate the notion of customary law. The rule of recognition in a given community could accept certain types of customary norms as binding law if they are recognised as such by the practices of legal officials. However, Hart doubts that a purely customary set of primary norms is capable of qualifying as law in the full sense of the term.[1274] It would, he claims, face serious problems stemming from its lack of an overarching rule of recognition (as well as secondary rules of adjudication and change).[1275] Law, for Hart, must be systematised in order to function effectively—at least to the extent required in order for there to be stable and reliable rules governing the exercise of legal powers. Hart seems to assume that resolving this issue requires a significant degree of centralisation of legal authority.[1276] This strongly suggests, even if it does not strictly require, a coordinating role for state institutions.
-Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Hart’s account of the rule of recognition places heavy emphasis on the practices of legal officials. The rule of recognition, for Hart, depends on what would be regarded as authoritative legal sources not by members of the community at large but by the officials tasked with administering and enforcing the rules.[1277] Hart seems to doubt whether the normative practices of the community at large would be coherent enough to yield a determinate set of criteria for legal validity,[1278] with the result that he focuses instead on the practices of officials. Hart does not say anywhere that the legal officials in question must be government officials; they could, in theory, be church officials or other recognised social authorities.[1279] Nonetheless, he seems clearly to have state officials in mind. Furthermore, this aspect of his theory seems to rule out radically dispersed forms of legal ordering that do not depend on any centralised source of authority (such as the consensual and emergent forms of law I discuss later in this chapter). Hart’s conception of the rule of recognition is therefore less than fully hospitable to law under anarchy.
-The general contours of Hart’s form of legal positivism are, I think, reflected in popular assumptions about the nature of law and legal validity. The idea of law is closely associated in everyday social and political discussions with the pronouncements of state authorities, such as executive officers, legislators, and judges. People often seem to think about law as something that emanates from the state and its legitimating institutions (such as the constitution from which the state purports to derive its authority); they therefore habitually defer to government agents for authoritative statements of legal sources and contents. This popular view of law is readily explained by political realities. The state’s hegemony over political and social power may well lead people to feel that they have little choice but to accept the state’s claim to ultimate authority over law’s sources and contents. Hartian legal positivism has the merit of explaining how people think about law under these conditions, but it arguably lacks the radical potential other conceptions of law may exhibit for undermining or interrogating the state’s hold on power.
-*** III. Decentralising Law
-I have argued that Hart’s interpretation of the legal positivist outlook tends to encourage the view that recognition by state sources is central—if not essential—to the notion of legal validity.
-His emphasis on the role of the rule of recognition and its foundation in the practice of legal officials, while not strictly limited to state institutions, favours a more or less centralised and systematic conception of legal authority. I now want to explore three alternative understandings of law that are more conducive than Hart’s theory to the idea of law under anarchy; I will them call consensual law, emergent law, and natural law respectively. Law in a stateless society may not feature centralised legal institutions or a unified rule of recognition, but it could nonetheless be expected to feature stable and reliable legal norms and institutions arising from these three kinds of legal ordering.
-A stateless society, in other words, could be ordered by the following non-centralised and non-coercive mechanisms: (1) people’s voluntary consent to be bound by contracts and other kinds of agreements, as a way of both forming primary obligations and creating secondary institutions (consensual law); (2) the normative, psychological, and sociological pull exerted by evolved legal and social norms, formed and entrenched over time through a process of spontaneous order (emergent law); and (3) the normative, psychological, and sociological impetus provided by human normative dispositions, derived from a combination of biological and social causes, and refined through individual and collective decision processes (natural law). These three processes would combine to provide a normative framework for social interaction. The following sections examine these ideas in turn.
-**** A. Consensual Law
-Hart’s account, as we have seen, relies on the idea that law gains its validity from recognition by the normative practices of legal officials. However, the notion of consensual law rejects this assumption. Rather, it views law as a body of norms freely agreed upon by members of the community to order their conduct with respect to one another. This need not involve recognition by any centralised form of legal authority. Consensual law is far from an abstract notion that could only be expected to exist under conditions of anarchy. It plays a central role in most contemporary legal systems. Every time two or more people make a contract or agreement that they accept as legally binding, they create legal norms that order their conduct with respect to one another. Agreements of this sort might involve exchanges of goods and services, interpersonal relationships such as marriages, or settlement of existing disputes.
-Hart, as we have seen, emphasised his theory’s ability to explain how these kinds of agreements can be recognised as binding by legal officials through the application of the relevant secondary rules.[1280] However, as far as the parties to the agreement are concerned, what matters most is not whether legal officials are prepared to recognise their agreement as legally binding, but whether they themselves recognise it as binding with respect to each other. One reason, to be sure, why parties might see an agreement as binding is because they know (or predict) that it will be enforced by the courts if required. However, most contractual agreements are highly unlikely ever to be litigated. Consider, for example, the agreement I make with the local grocery store when I buy a packet of chewing gum for $2.00. This agreement is an effective mechanism of social ordering in the most direct and obvious sense: namely, it serves to ensure that I end up with the gum and the store ends up with $2.00. The likelihood that this kind of agreement will end up in court is extremely low.[1281]
-Similarly, two people who marry each other in their local church (or, for that matter, in their backyard) typically make a series of commitments that carry serious weight between them. These commitments are legally binding in the most important sense: they order the conduct of the parties concerned. It may be important to them, for various reasons, that their marriage is recognised by the state, but typically what matters more to them is that it is recognised by each other. The role of the state in each of these cases is a secondary one: if the state ceased to exist tomorrow, there would still be contracts of sale and marriage in much the same way as before. They would still effectively order the conduct of the parties. Why, then, should we think the legal validity of such agreements depends on official acknowledgement?
-The notion of consensual law can be extended beyond interpersonal agreements to institutional mechanisms. A number of existing models show how voluntary legal institutions might operate. Most commercial disputes are already resolved by negotiation, mediation, or arbitration rather than by the courts. Family law disputes about matters such as separation and parenting are also often resolved by mediation. Indeed, the proportion of social disputes actually resolved in the formal court system is extremely low. These methods could continue to operate in much the same way without the state. There are also examples of how different sets of legal institutions can resolve potential conflicts. International law is primarily based on the consent of states to be bound by treaties between them (although the role of customary international law complicates this picture somewhat). International courts, tribunals, and other enforcement methods are also traditionally consent-based.[1282]
-What role does state-made law play in these kinds of dispute resolution mechanisms? It is often said that mediation and other forms of dispute resolution take place in “the shadow of the law,”[1283] meaning that parties bargain against the implicit baseline of what they think they would receive in court. However, recent empirical studies caution against placing too much weight on this assumption.[1284] Other factors may matter far more to the parties than their perceived legal entitlements, including maintaining business relationships, moving on with their lives, or staying true to their cultural or religious values. Furthermore, even where parties road-test proposals by reference to their legal positions, this may depend less on official state-made law than on the “folk law” they absorb from other members of their communities.[1285]
-**** B. Emergent Law
-Consensual law represents one way in which recognisably law-like methods of social ordering can emerge without relying on the acknowledgement of any centralised legal authority. A second way in which this might occur is through what I call emergent law. Emergent law is a set of customary legal standards that emerges as a form of spontaneous order. The leading contemporary account of emergent law is perhaps that found in the writings of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek argues that many of our most fundamental legal rules, like those against murder or in favour of keeping contracts, cannot be traced back to any originating act by a legislator, a judge, or another official.[1286] Rather, legal rules of this kind emerged organically over time as ways for members of a community to coordinate their behaviour and live harmoniously together—coming into existence well before their codification. In this respect, they resemble other customary social norms, like norms of grammar, spelling, and etiquette.
-What, then, is the process by which customary social norms arise? A compelling answer to this question can be found in the notion of spontaneous order that is central to evolutionary theories of law and economics. The customs governing a spontaneous order are not planned in advance. As the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson puts it, “many human institutions are the result of human action, but not ... of any human design.”[1287] However, this does not mean that the relevant rules are purely random. Rather, they develop over time through processes of trial and error conducted in the course of repeated social interactions. The price system in economics offers an instructive example.[1288] Prices aggregate the information available to discrete actors in an economic market and expressed in individual transactions. They enable this information to be communicated between participants in the market, sending signals about the relative supply and demand of various goods and services.
-The price system is highly dynamic—it adjusts constantly as players in the market take account of new information and use it to guide their choices. This mechanism cannot be expected to lead to perfect coordination of preferences under actual market conditions, but it arguably plays this role more effectively than any other method available, given the deep challenges presented by economic coordination.[1289] The idea that prices play a coordinating function without any deliberate planning is famously expressed in Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand.[1290] Prices are not arbitrary, but reflect the flow of information in the market, aggregated through an iterative process involving large numbers of individual transactions. This makes them look planned, but in fact it is precisely their unplanned character that makes them effective sources of order. Hayek describes the price system as a tool that humans have “stumbled upon it without understanding it.”[1291]
-The mechanisms of spontaneous order are not confined to economics. Smith argues that moral norms can likewise be understood as unintended but desirable consequences of the interactions of members of a community. Our natural desire for mutual sympathy, Smith contends, means we continually imagine ourselves in the positions of others.[1292] The consequent realisation that others do not always share our priorities leads us to temper our self-interest so that our motivations attract general approval. This desire to bring our priorities into harmony with the expectations of others leads us to adopt something like the perspective of a disinterested bystander.[1293] The system of moral norms arising from this procedure will tend to support social harmony, since it aggregates the preferences of many individuals. Social interaction can therefore produce normative consensus in roughly the same way in which economic markets produce agreements regarding prices.[1294]
-In a spontaneous order, then, people adopt the practices they think will best enable them to pursue their individual goals and coexist with others in society. If the practices people adopt do not work, they are abandoned in favour of others. In this way, people across a community will come by processes of trial and error to accept common social rules. A trial-and-error process of rule-formation is by no means infallible, but neither is it arbitrary. Law as spontaneous order—or what I am calling emergent law—thus has the potential to serve as a stable, predictable, and adaptive mode of social ordering. It does so, however, without necessarily relying on the imprimatur of the state or any other centralised legal authority. Indeed, Hayek argues that attempts by political authorities to improve customary law are often counter-productive because of the inherent limitations of human knowledge and foresight.[1295]
-Hayek regards the common law system as another example of spontaneous order.[1296] Judges in the common law tradition are bound by the doctrine of stare decisis to follow prior decisions. They look at the underlying principles in previous cases to decide what outcome is most consistent with social expectations. The common law method involves making decisions about individual disputes rather than trying to formulate abstract rules intended to apply to diverse future scenarios. Hayek argues that the common law approach brings stability to the law by ensuring that it tracks underlying social norms. The law changes gradually, through the development of precedent, rather than suddenly, through fundamental or radical change.
-The common law method thus ensures that law reflects aggregated information about actual disputes rather than being based on simplified models of social interaction. Importantly, however, the common law operates in this way not because the judges who develop it happen to be state agents but rather because it is a form of spontaneous order. Voluntary dispute resolution mechanisms of the type discussed in Subsection III.A. could embody this kind of process just as well as state courts, provided only that the adjudicators (or the parties, in the case of non-adjudicative processes) explicitly or implicitly seek coherence with evolved social expectations. It is likely that they would do so—to the same or perhaps a greater extent than state-appointed judges—primar- ily because the legitimacy in the eyes of the community of the decisions reached by the adjudicators (or parties) would depend upon their doing so. I return to this point later in the chapter.
-**** C. Natural Law
-Consensual law and emergent law both order social conduct in stable, reliable, and non-arbitrary ways without necessarily invoking the imprimatur of the state. Natural law plays a similar role. The idea of natural law, as I use it here, is the notion of a set of idealised normative inclinations characteristic of humans by virtue of their shared nature. This definition requires some unpacking.
-“Normative inclinations,” as I use the term here, involve two components: a disposition to act in a specific way and a disposition to believe that the action in question is worthwhile or required.[1297] Every person possesses a wide range of normative inclinations, so defined. However, there are certain kinds of normative inclinations so widely shared by humans across different cultural contexts as to be aptly described as characteristic of humans as members of a species. The existence of these shared normative inclinations can plausibly be explained by certain facts about human nature.
-My use of the term “human nature” is meant to encompass a range of natural facts about humans (roughly, the kinds of facts that can be analysed by the natural and social sciences).[1298] I include in this term both facts about human biology and facts about the human social condition. An example might help to illustrate the role these facts play in natural law theorising. Humans across a wide range of different cultural contexts both act in such a way as to preserve familial and neighbourly bonds and believe that such bonds are inherently worthy of preservation. The value of friendship or social connectedness, in other words, is a widely recognised human good (at least at a familial or local level).[1299] This normative inclination can plausibly be explained by a combination of facts about human biology (for example, the evolved biological drive to protect one’s family and tribe[1300]) and facts about the human social condition (for example, the desirability of cooperating with one’s immediate familial and social unit to secure food, shelter, and personal safety).
-A theory of natural law cannot, however, be simply a description of human normative inclinations. This is for two interrelated reasons. First, at an a priori level, a theory of natural law that aims to have moral weight must do more than simply recount empirical facts about human behaviour. Otherwise, it would fall foul of David Hume’s famous injunction against deriving moral propositions from factual observations (the “is-ought gap”).[1301] Second, at an a posteriori level, there are many normative inclinations that are plausibly characteristic of humans that one would not wish to include within a moralised conception of natural law. For example, humans across a wide range of cultural contexts show a disposition to treat out-group members (such as members of other racial or cultural assortments) less favourably than in-group members, and believe they are justified in doing so.[1302] This normative inclination can be explained by reference to human biological and social conditions, but it nonetheless sits poorly with many people’s considered moral principles.
-It is for this reason that I described natural law at the beginning of this section as a set of idealised normative inclinations. A theory of natural law, in other words, must provide some method for distinguishing those normative inclinations that serve us well, morally speaking, from those that do not. The suggestion I have made elsewhere is that a theory of natural law is an attempt to capture those normative inclinations that we would hold under ideal conditions of full imaginative immersion.[1303] Imaginative immersion, in this sense, involves reflecting on the ultimate ends that humans are disposed to value; considering the roles of these goods in one’s practical deliberations; extrapolating each deliberation to a range of other contexts; considering what it would be like to both enjoy the good and experience its privation; and considering what it would mean, in diverse circumstances, to treat the good as valuable both for oneself and for others. This process may be expected to yield a fuller understanding of what is truly valuable for humans given their nature and what it means to respond appropriately to what is valuable.
-This conception of natural law, despite the idealisation it involves, is nonetheless salient for human social ordering. This is because something like the full imaginative immersion that forms part of this conception is employed (albeit imperfect) in actual human decision procedures. First, individual humans approximate imaginative immersion when they reflect on the reasons for their practical decisions, considering the implications of these decisions for other cases and situating them in relation to wider explanatory principles and theories, either on their own or (more commonly) in dialogue with others. Second, dispute resolution procedures approximate imaginative immersion when they bring the interests of the parties into dialogue with each other and seek acceptable resolutions. This may occur in an adjudicative process when the decision-maker considers both sides of the story before reaching a decision. It may also occur in a non-adjudicative process, such as a mediation, through direct or mediated communication between the parties.
-Third, human societies approximate imaginative immersion—on a diachronic, as opposed to a merely synchronic, level—when they draw upon emergent social norms as guides to ethical action and dispute resolution. Emergent social norms, as I observed in the previous section, aggregate the experiences of a wide range of social agents over time. Their dispersed and diachronic character counteracts, to some extent, the idiosyncratic biases of individual agents or social groupings. This is not to deny, of course, that emergent social norms will still reflect the entrenched biases of society as a whole, potentially including discriminatory attitudes of multiple varieties. They therefore remain imperfect. But they are nonetheless important sources of aggregated social knowledge about the kinds of normative inclinations that survive generalisation over a variety of different cases and generations.
-Every human community possesses a store of practical knowledge—we might call it a tradition[1304]— about the forms of life that are best suited to enable members of the community to flourish in their natural and social environment. This body of knowledge typically reflects all three of the mechanisms outlined above: normative reflection and discussion, communal dispute resolution (in both adjudicative and non-adjudicative forms), and normative social evolution. The resulting folk theory of human flourishing approximates, albeit imperfectly, the ideal conditions for natural law theorising. It therefore carries defeasible normative weight. Natural law, in this socially embodied sense, represents an important source of social ordering that supplements and supports the consensual and emergent mechanisms I discussed previously. It guides human conduct in stable and constructive ways without necessarily relying on centralised legal authority.
-*** IV. Law without the State
-I began this chapter by asking whether there can be law without the state. I then discussed the bias towards centralised legal authority found in contemporary legal positivism, before examining three alternative conceptions of law: consensual law, emergent law, and natural law. When combined, these three conceptions offer a rich account of varied ways in which law can exist without the state. They show how law-like forms of order can emerge, adapt, and persist in a complex society without relying on the state or any other form of centralised institution. In the remainder of this chapter, I develop this suggestion further, exploring how these three forms of law might combine to address three commonly posed challenges to the notion of law under anarchy.
-I will begin by exploring some issues relating to obedience and enforcement. Would people obey the law in a stateless society? How would legal norms be enforced without centralised institutions? Next, I will consider the issue of gaps in legal institutions. How would law under anarchy deal with lawbreakers, outlaws, and vulnerable members of the community? Aren’t there risks that people in these categories will fall outside the legal system without some centralised authority to close the gaps? Finally, I will consider some issues posed by the notion of the rule of law. Could law in a stateless society respect the rule of law? Doesn’t the rule of law presuppose some level of centralisation that ensures consistency and coherence? I will suggest that, taken together, the three forms of non-state law canvassed previously in this chapter supply a robust foundation for responding to each of these challenges.
-**** A. Obedience and Enforcement
-A stateless society might reasonably be expected to feature the three kinds of legal ordering discussed above: consensual law, emergent law, and natural law. Why, though, would people obey the legal norms arising from these sources? Wouldn’t they only do so when it suits them? The answer to this question partially depends on the more general issue of why people obey the law. It is tempting to assume that the effectiveness of law depends upon the availability of coercive sanctions. However, we should be wary of overstating the importance of fear in motivating obedience to the law. Empirical evidence suggests that people’s most powerful motive for obeying the law is not the fear of being caught but rather the perception that the law is legitimate and therefore warrants their allegiance.[1305] The vast majority of people in developed Western nations obey the law the vast majority of the time.[1306] However, it’s hard to explain this by pointing solely to formal enforcement. The total proportion of the population likely ever to subjected to criminal prosecution is fairly low, but most people who have never been in court nonetheless follow the law.
-It might be said that it is the threat of legal action that keeps people in line rather than actual punishment. However, there are plenty of opportunities to commit crimes in everyday life without much risk of being caught. Petty theft, for example, remains relatively uncommon, despite the frequency with which people leave their belongings unattended in public settings. The vast majority of people simply pass up the repeated opportunities they confront to commit crimes. Hart sought to explain this phenomenon by emphasising the role of social pressure in securing compliance with legal rules. He famously argued that law does not get its force from the threat of punishment but rather from the sense of obligation it imposes.[1307] We do not obey the law because we are forced to do so, as suggested by earlier theorists such as Austin. Rather, we obey it mainly because we feel a sense of social obligation. Social pressure to comply with law gives rise to a critical, reflective attitude in relation to our own behaviour.
-Hart’s analysis (which seems to enjoy empirical support) suggests that people would tend to obey the law even in the absence of centralised or coercive institutions. The most important factor in obedience to law is not the harshness of the sanctions attached to legal rules but rather the stability and perceived legitimacy of the associated social norms. A consensual or customary legal order without formal institutions might still be widely respected if there were consistent social pressure to comply with the relevant rules. The existence of such pressure seems to depend more on whether people see the law as procedurally fair than whether they fear coercive sanctions.[1308] Legal obedience, then, does not necessarily depend on formal enforcement mechanisms. It will, however, be bolstered if legal norms and processes are seen as complying with the requirements of procedural justice, such as giving each party to a dispute a fair and equal hearing.[1309]
-It is important to note, in this respect, that a stateless society is unlikely to totally lack formal legal institutions. It will lack the centralised institutions maintained by the state, but a range of consent-based institutions might be expected to arise.[1310] This might happen on an ad hoc basis when people engage a security firm to ward off a specific threat, or an arbitrator or mediator to resolve a particular dispute. However, it also seems likely to occur on a more organised and systematic basis. People might, for instance, decide to pay a fee to subscribe to a local security or dispute resolution agency rather than only employing such an agency when they encounter particular problems. A market for security and dispute resolution services would thus be likely to emerge. There might be several options available in a community. Firms that provide efficient, reliable, and procedurally fair dispute resolution options would enjoy market advantages over those that did not. Competing firms would have incentives to make agreements regarding the resolution of disputes between their clients. A firm linked by stable agreements with other leading dispute resolution providers would enjoy additional appeal in the market.
-What rules would these dispute resolution providers apply in resolving disputes? Law without the state seems likely to exhibit pluralistic tendencies, as multiple security and dispute resolution service providers are likely to arise in any given community.[1311] The infrastructure costs involved in providing such services are not obviously such as to create the likelihood of natural monopolies, although economies of scale might cause the number of providers to decrease over time. Different security agencies and dispute resolution services might choose to recognise different legal rules. People might choose to subscribe to particular agencies based at least partly on the rules different agencies chose to recognise. People might also choose their places of residence based on the rules prevailing in the local community. There are some obvious advantages to this. Legal rules could be responsive to local conditions or community values. People could exit communities with inefficient or unfair rules and move elsewhere, creating a competitive market in legal regimes.
-On the other hand, it also seems likely that legal systems under anarchy would converge on a set of common basic rules. Dispute resolution providers would want their processes to be generally accepted and perceived as legitimate. They would therefore have reason to apply existing social norms—arising from consensual, emergent, and natural law sources—rather than inventing their own arbitrary rules.[1312] The theories of spontaneous order offered by authors such as Hayek suggest that trial and error tends to lead communities to settle on shared rules of conduct over time. Ineffective and unfair legal rules are likely to be modified or abandoned, especially if they are subject to competition from more effective and equitable approaches. Convergence between different legal regimes would also make interaction between different dispute resolution providers easier (and ease of interaction among providers would surely be attractive to consumers). Providers would therefore have an incentive to standardise their rules and, in particular, to recognise the norms of conduct embraced by wider social institutions.
-**** B. Lawbreakers and the Vulnerable
-What if a person refused to join any of the available security or dispute resolution services (even when involved in disputes with others), preferring to rely on her own means of protection and remain outside the reach of the law? A person like this would be a free rider, as she would benefit from the social stability provided by security and dispute resolution services without paying the services’ fees. However, the existence of such free riders would not need to present a serious problem so long as they remained uncommon when compared to fee-paying subscribers.[1313] Security groups could make their own decisions about how to deal with those who declined their services. This might include choosing not to protect such people from aggression. Services’ unwillingness to provide protective services to non-members would create strong incentives for individuals to join available security services. Outlaws would probably be uncommon, since existence as an outlaw would likely be perilous. However, if enough people declined to subscribe to local security services, their unwillingness to do so could encourage providers to be more responsive to local needs.
-There might well be some organised groups that would flout community laws and rely on their own means of protection. These outlaw gangs could pose threats to social order. However, there’s no obvious reason this problem would be more pronounced in a stateless society than it is under the state. Outlaw gangs present significant social challenges now. The state is far from immune to this problem. Indeed, the state arguably exacerbates the problem by aggressively pursuing drug prohibition and other forms of regulation, thereby increasing both the potential gains from illegal conduct and the risks of escalating tensions between organised criminal elements and state law enforcement agencies. People already marginalised by the state, such as undocumented immigrants and unlicensed business operators, are vulnerable in ways that encourage organised criminal activity. The overall incentive structures for outlaws might be significantly different in a stateless environment.
-There is another potential concern about law in a stateless society. Even those who are sympathetic to the market provision of legal services often worry about vulnerable people falling through the gaps. What about those who can’t afford to pay for protection and dispute resolution? Market incentives offer a partial response to this problem by encouraging service providers to innovate and fill gaps in the market. Services might be expected to be available at a variety of price points in response to local community needs. People might voluntarily subsidise those unable to afford legal services through cooperative and pro bono programs. Subscribers to security and dispute resolution services in a given community would also generate positive externalities for the vulnerable by increasing the general security and orderliness of the community. And it is important to remember that, as I noted above, legal obedience does not depend solely on the availability of formal enforcement. Nonetheless, there would still be gaps and inequalities in access to legal services in a stateless society. But the occurrence of these gaps and inequalities also poses a serious challenge for state-run institutions.[1314] No known legal system is immune to this problem.
-**** C. The Rule of Law
-Would a legal system of the kind I imagine in this chapter support or undermine the rule of law? Lon L. Fuller’s influential theory identifies eight indicia of the rule of law: generality, promulgation, prospectivity, clarity, consistency, observability, constancy, and congruence.[1315] The overarching point of these requirements, according to Fuller, is to ensure that law fulfils its purpose of ordering human conduct in accordance with rules.[1316] Hayek offers an extended argument to the effect that a decentralised legal system emphasising customary norms is better placed to play this role than one based on the operation of centralised institutions.[1317] The top-down character of centralised law, for Hayek, makes it likely to contain prescriptive, detailed rules reflecting the plans and preferences of legislators. Emergent law, by contrast, is likely to emphasise general, end-independent rules compatible with a range of different value preferences and life plans. This kind of law is thus better suited to provide a stable, reliable guide to action for all members of a community.
-Hayek doubts that legislators can access the depth and breadth of knowledge needed to solve complex social problems. Centralised law is therefore likely to prove inefficient and in need of constant change. Decentralised law, by contrast, runs less risk of locking in undesirable rules.[1318] It allows for innovation and competition in legal norms, leading to more predictable and stable legal rules in the long run. Hayek further contends that a system of law based on spontaneous order tends to advance the value of liberty, understood as freedom from arbitrary coercion.[1319] Any legal system restricts liberty by prohibiting people from violating its rules.[1320] Hayek acknowledges that “in defining coercion we cannot take for granted the arrangements intended to prevent it.”[1321] However, a system of general, open-ended rules provides a stable structure within which individuals can live without the need for ongoing, complex discrimination between competing preferences.
-Hayek’s theory of emergent law, then, rests on the idea that a stable set of general rules outlining the personal sphere of each individual services as the social framework best suited to advance both knowledge and liberty. It helps expand the limits of human knowledge by allowing evolved social norms to direct economic and social action. It also facilitates human flourishing by allowing people to live their lives without the constant threat of arbitrary interference. Hayek contends that this framework is best realised by a classical liberal model of government involving a minimal state constrained by reliable and transparent constitutional rules. Emergent law can evolve and flourish within such a framework.
-However, Hayek’s position assumes that it is possible to keep state power within reliable constitutional boundaries. There are both historical and conceptual reasons to doubt this assumption. The historical evidence can easily be seen by examining the modes of governance prevailing in modern constitutional democracies. There is not a single case of a modern state in which constitutional government and the rule of law have prevented the imposition of a vast array of administrative regulations.
-A compelling explanation for the fact that the creation of the state leads inexorably to an expansion of its power can be found in James Buchanan’s influential work with Gordon Tullock on the economics of public choice.[1322] Buchanan and Tullock point out that political actors can be expected to respond to incentives in the same ways as other agents. They will be subject, like everyone else, to the human tendency to pursue individual self-interest.[1323] They will wish to gain benefits for themselves and people like them while externalising the costs of their choices onto others in the community. The predictable outcome is “overinvestment in the public sector when the investment projects provide differential benefits or are financed from differential taxation.”[1324] The separation of powers allows judges to check legislatures, but authors like Robert Dahl and Mark Graber have noted that judges themselves are subject to incentives that make them likely to back political elites or strike politically expedient compromises in order to safeguard their own institutional power.[1325]
-The state, then, poses an inherent challenge to the rule of law, essentially because its activities necessarily involve and encourage the concentration of power. The concentration of power creates incentives for people to try to gain control of the system in order to promote their own interests. The end result is a system of laws at least partly tailored to furthering the values and priorities of particular privileged groups. A system of social order based on consensual law, emergent law, and natural law, on the other hand, disperses power. It is still vulnerable to capture by special interests, insofar as it relies upon security and dispute resolution services to administer and enforce norms. However, the power of these service providers can be expected to be less coercive and monopolistic than that of the state—if only because they do not have the benefit of the state’s entrenched monopoly on violence. Law under anarchy would no doubt face its own problems of stability, compliance, and power imbalances. However, it’s doubtful whether these would be any worse than the equivalent problems that currently beset state institutions.
-*** V. Conclusion
-A stateless society might reasonably be expected to feature the three kinds of legal ordering discussed above: consensual law, emergent law, and natural law. People would make agreements with others in order to trade, cooperate, and resolve disputes; they would then have incentives to keep those agreements in most cases. Their agreements would be supplemented and reinforced by evolved social, legal, and economic norms developed by the relevant communities in order to facilitate social coexistence and cooperation. And these agreements would be further supplemented and reinforced by the normative dispositions exhibited by community members in virtue of their shared human nature, refined through reflection, discussions, and negotiations with one another. These three mechanisms would combine to provide a stable and reliable (albeit imperfect) framework for social interaction.
-Law without the state is certainly possible—not only conceptually, but also in reality. Would a stateless society produce a better variety of law than what we currently enjoy under the state? It’s hard to be sure. However, the possibility is not as outlandish as most people initially think. Law under anarchy offers ways of dealing with the problems posed by obedience and enforcement, lawbreakers and the vulnerable, and the rule of law—and holds the potential to outperform the state in at least some of these areas. There is value in thinking through the possibilities and challenges presented by law in a stateless society; if nothing else, such an exercise can help us understand the failures of state-made law and think creatively about alternatives. We shouldn’t simply assume that our current centralised model of law is the only possible option. There are other forms of law capable of promoting social order—and, in some respects, they could well serve us better than the form we have now.
-[1258] I say for worse. See, for example, Jonathan Crowe, Natural Law and the Nature of Law (Cambridge: CUP 2019); Jonathan Crowe, “Natural Law Theories,” Philosophy Compass 11.2 (2016): 91—101; Jonathan Crowe, “Law as an Artifact Kind,” Monash University Law Review 40.3 (2014): 737—57; Jonathan Crowe, “Between Morality and Efficacy: Reclaiming the Natural Law Theory of Lon Fuller,” Jurisprudence 5.1 (2014): 109–18.
-[1259] Crowe, “Natural Law” 92–3.
-[1260] Cp. H. L. A. Hart, “Introduction,” John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London: Weidenfeld 1954) xvi.
-[1261] Austin Lecture 1.
-[1262] Austin 193–4.
-[1263] Austin 140–1.
-[1264] H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994) 56–7.
-[1265] Hart, Concept 82–91.
-[1266] Hart, Concept 94–5.
-[1267] Hart, Concept 27–8, 33–4.
-[1268] Hart, Concept 41, 96.
-[1269] Hart, Concept 97–8.
-[1270] Hart, Concept 28, 33–4.
-[1271] Hart, Concept [ch. 10.
-[1272] Hart, Concept 263–8.
-[1273] For discussion, see Jonathan Crowe, “The Limits of Legal Pluralism,” Griffith Law Review 24 (2015): 314, 321–3.
-[1274] Hart, Concept 91–9.
-[1275] Hart, Concept 76–7.
-[1276] Hart, Concept 97–8.
-[1277] Hart, Concept 113–5.
-[1278] Hart, Concept 114. I believe he was mistaken. Cp. Crowe, “Law.”
-[1279] Roger Cotterrell, Law, Culture and Society (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) 37.
-[1280] Hart, Concept 27–8, 33–4, 41, 96.
-[1281] Of course, disputes may still arise in such cases: I may get sick from the gum, and sue the store for selling me an unfit product. However, whether or not something like that happens, the transaction itself still involves a legally valid agreement.
-[1282] For discussion, see Jonathan Crowe and Kylie Weston-Scheuber, Principles of International Humanitarian Law (Cheltenham: Elgar 2013) 143–63.
-[1283] Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce,” Yale Law Journal 88 (1979): 950–97.
-[1284] See, for example, Jonathan Crowe et al., “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Folk Law: Expanding the Concept of the Shadow of the Law in Family Dispute Resolution,” Sydney Law Review 40.3 (2018) 319–38; Becky Batagol and Thea Brown, Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Family Mediation (Sydney: Federation 2011).
-[1285] Crowe et al.
-[1286] Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1983) 1:72–144.
-[1287] Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London: Cadell 1793) pt III, sect. II.
-[1288] Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35:4 (Sept. 1945): 526.
-[1289] Hayek, “Knowledge” 527.
-[1290] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Strahan 1776) bk IV, ch. 2.
-[1291] Hayek, “Knowledge” 528.
-[1292] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: OUP 1976) 9. For helpful discussion, see James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge: CUP 2002).
-[1293] Smith, Theory 69—71.
-[1294] Cp. Otteson, Marketplace 114.
-[1295] Hayek, Law 1:8—71.
-[1296] Hayek, Law 1:72—144.
-[1297] Jonathan Crowe, “Natural Law and Normative Inclinations,” Ratio Juris 28 (2015): 55—6.
-[1298] Cp. Tyler Burge, “Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950—1990,” Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 31—2.
-[1299] For discussion, see Crowe, “Inclinations” 62—3. See also John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: OUP 2011) ch. 6.
-[1300] See, for example, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, “The Evolution of Subjective Commitment to Groups: A Tribal Instincts Hypothesis,” Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, ed. Randolph M. Nesse (New York: Russell Sage 2001) 186—220.
-[1301] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1978) 469—70 [bk III, pt I, § I]. For discussion, see Finnis 33—6; Jonathan Crowe, “Existentialism and Natural Law,” Adelaide Law Review 26 (2005): 55.
-[1302] Marilyn B. Brewer, “In-Group Bias in the Minimal Intergroup Situation,” Psychological Bulletin 86.2 (1979): 307—24; Donald M. Taylor and Janet R. Doria, “Self-Serving and Group-Serving Bias in Attribution,” Journal of Social Psychology 113.2 (1981): 201—11.
-[1303] Crowe, “Inclinations” 59—60.
-[1304] Cp. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: U Notre Dame Press 2007) 222.
-[1305] See, for example, Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Princeton: Princeton UP 2006); Tom R. Tyler, “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy and the Effective Rule of Law,” Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 283—357; Tom R. Tyler, “Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy and Legitimation,” Annual Review of Psychology 57.1 (2006): 375–400.
-[1306] Cp. Tyler, People ch. 4.
-[1307] Hart, Concept 82–91.
-[1308] Tyler, People ch. 5.
-[1309] Tyler, People 6.
-[1310] For useful discussion, see David Friedman, “Anarchy and Efficient Law,” For and Against the State, ed. John T. Sanders and Jan Narveson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1996) 235–54.
-[1311] Cp. Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order (Cambridge: CUP 2013) 244–8.
-[1312] They may also adopt dispute resolution processes, such as mediation, which are interest-based, rather than rule- governed. Cp. Jonathan Crowe, “Two Models of Mediation Ethics,” Sydney Law Review 39 (2017): 161–5.
-[1313] Cp. James M. Buchanan, “What Should Economists Do?” Southern Economic Journal 30 (1964): 220.
-[1314] See, for example, Rebecca L. Sandefur and Aaron C. Smyth, Access across America: First Report of the Civil Justice Infrastructure Mapping Project (Chicago: American Bar Foundation 2011).
-[1315] Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1969) ch. 2.
-[1316] Fuller, Morality 96. For discussion, see Crowe, “Morality” 112–3.
-[1317] Hayek, Law 1:35–54.
-[1318] Hayek, Law 1:35–71.
-[1319] Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1960) 134–5.
-[1320] G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: CUP 1995) 55–6.
-[1321] Hayek, Constitution 139.
-[1322] See, for example, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 2004).
-[1323] Buchanan and Tullock 26.
-[1324] Buchanan and Tullock 162.
-[1325] See, for example, Robert A. Dahl, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker,” Journal of Public Law 6 (1957): 279–95; Mark A. Graber, “The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary,” Studies in American Political Development 7.1 (1993): 35–73.
-** 21 Anarchism, State, and Violence
-*Andy Alexis-Baker*
-*** I. Introduction
-For many people, “anarchy” means “unfettered violence.” Media stereotype anarchists as hooligans bent on destroying property and civil society. The authors of a recent New York Times story, for instance, note that “some anarchists espouse nonviolence,” but they still focus on anarchist violence: sucker-punching fascists, smashing windows, arson, and more. Anarchists are “the left’s unwanted revolutionary stepchild”[1326] who wear black so they can intimidate people.[1327]
-But states wage war. Twentieth-century wars caused hundreds of millions of casualties. Fifty to eighty million people died in World War II alone. States are fighting seventeen ongoing wars across the planet—in Syria, Somalia, Darfur, and Myanmar, to name a few locations. More states are acquiring nuclear weapons, with the result that the threat of nuclear annihilation looms over the planet just like climate catastrophe. The Syrian civil war has claimed around a half million lives. The Second Congo War is estimated to have killed three million people. U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war in Yemen, and other conflicts contribute to an estimated 300,000 ongoing, war-related deaths per year as of 2014, according to the United Nations.[1328]
-Rather than condemning state warfare, however, intellectuals and the media habitually support state violence. “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,” gushed MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams in 2017 when he saw video of the U.S. Navy launching Tomahawk missiles into Syria because Donald Trump claimed to believe that Syria had used chemical weapons on its civilians. “They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments,” he continued, “making what is for them a brief flight over to this airfield. What did they hit?”[1329] According to Syrian state media, the missiles killed nine civilians, including four children. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” rhapsodized CNN host Fareed Zakaria.[1330] A few months later, Newsweek accused Trump of being America’s laziest president; at the same time, however, the magazine praised the attack on Syria and urged Trump to build an international war coalition to “remove” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.[1331]
-By contrast, anarchists have long denounced the state as a war machine. “The State denotes violence, rule by disguised, or if necessary open and unceremonious violence,” declared Mikhail Bakunin. “The State, any State—even when it is dressed up in the most liberal and democratic form—is necessarily based on domination, and upon violence.”[1332] Peter Kropotkin wrote: “State is synonymous with war.”[1333] Randolph Bourne declared that “war is the health of the state.”[1334] Voltairine de Cleyre argued that the state “finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.”[1335] Almost all anarchists would agree with Gustav Landauer that “the struggle against war is a struggle against the state.”[1336] Anti-war activism has been a hallmark of twentieth-century anarchism. Only some anarchists, however, have been pacifists. Both Bakunin and Kropotkin thought that a revolutionary war would be necessary to stop the military state. Some anarchists fought in armies against the state in Spain and Russia. Because the modern state had disguised its violence under mythologies of consent piety, and democracy, and the state had become sacred as a peacemaker, Bakunin and Kropotkin thought that anarchists should unmask state violence by showing what happens when people challenge state oppression. This meant provoking the state through multiple varieties of dissent.[1337] Consequently, a few anarchists embraced “propaganda by the deed,” assassinating and terrorizing political leaders and capitalists in the hope of inspiring revolutions, a tactic Bakunin and Kropotkin disavowed. Though only representing only one set of anarchist tendencies, these anarchists fueled the misleading stereotype of anarchism as a whole. Anarchism became synonymous, despite its anti-military and anti-war stances and its desire for a peaceable society, with violence.
-Notwithstanding the willingness of a narrow subset of anarchists to engage in violence, the contrast could hardly be starker: “fringe” anarchists are denounced as violent while presidents are actively encouraged to wage war. Twenty-first-century black-clad anarchists breaking windows are violent, even though they haven’t been responsible for mass killings. Presidents, generals, soldiers, and police personnel, who collectively kill hundreds of thousands of humans annually, defend freedom. Trying to untangle this contradiction requires looking at the process of reasoning that shapes modern thinking about violence.
-Part of this thinking is mythological. Myth is a specific type of story that relates to sacred things. Prominent modern myths shroud the state’s violence with a sense of sacredness, making critiques of the state a kind of heresy. But the specific modern “technical” way of thinking makes the problem of responding to the state and its violence particularly intractable. Anarchists of various stripes have offered critiques of state violence and the myths that underlie it, and have offered another way.
-*** II. The Myths We Live By
-**** A. What Is Myth?
-It might seem odd to begin a chapter about anarchism, the state, and violence by writing about myth and the sacred. In modern parlance, “myth” means “spurious history.” To put the point bluntly: myths are lies. In the age of science and reason, facts dispel myths, making room for more rational discourse and action. But this superficial view masks myth’s modern function. Western people think that technological societies are rational in contrast to irrational primitive people. This belief allows a sense of superiority to seep into the mindset of the modern Western person. Westerners have the truth. With truth, the West can liberate others from stupidity and ignorance. For several hundred years, Western people have been conditioned to see their society as unquestionably reasonable, something any rational person would choose.
-But the Greeks who coined the term “mythos” originally used it to mean “word” or “speech,” a synonym for logos (which can generally be translated as “word,” “speech,” or “reason”).[1338] Rhetoricians trained students to use both mythos and logos in arguments: even Plato and Aristotle use myth in their philosophies. Greeks could hold together several kinds of beliefs— beliefs modern people see as contradictory—because they viewed life as developing along many different levels, each requiring its own kind of truth. A myth was true in virtue of the mode in which it was utilized.[1339] Myth was a type of speech, but not false speech. In viewing myths as tall tales, modern people have ignored how discourses of truth operate subtly to form and shape people’s worldviews, possibilities, and actions.
-A more nuanced view sees myths as deeply held stories that shape how people see the world— and that, in fact, construct worlds. According to Mary Midgley, myths consist in “imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”[1340] As society’s deep-rooted stories, myths structure how people see everything, giving order and meaning to the chaos of everyday life. Jacques Ellul says that myths represent “fundamental image[s] of [the human] condition and the world at large.”[1341] Through myth, Ellul argues, people orient themselves in a world formed by what they experience as sacred. For example, in the modern world, constant chatter and news overload people with information, making it hard to focus on any one thing for very long. The largely trivial information served up by the mass media helps to obscure crucial, and often troubling, features of the contemporary situation. Myth, by contrast, unifies the spatial and temporal fragments of our experience, helping individuals and societies orient themselves with regard to features of reality they take to be sacred. Myth is thus “the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system.”[1342] Myths explain everything and give life coherence and meaning.
-Myths do not refer to “facts.” Ludwig Wittgenstein notes, for example, that when someone kisses a loved one’s photograph, the kisser does not believe the kiss will affect the person in the photograph. The action “aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”[1343] The meaning and action of kissing the photo are the same: love takes the form of kissing the photograph. Humans perform numerous ceremonies and rituals that have no relationship to “right and wrong” because they do not try to describe “facts” as many modern people assume. Myths do something. They shape us. They form us. For Ellul, they form a communication network within a sacred topography and orient us within it.
-In particular, modern myths about the state form our relationship to the state and its violence. Myth’s world-constructing character makes it difficult to dislodge people’s trust and faith in the state and its violence. For anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel,
-A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.[1344]
-Myths, Sorel explains, express the longings and convictions of a people quite apart from the feasibility of these convictions and the results of attempts to act on them. Because of this, “people who are living in ... [a] world ... [shaped by] myths are secure from all refutation.”[1345] Argument using facts to challenge a person’s mythological formation is futile because utilitarian and intellectual arguments for action are insufficient since such abstract concepts usually fail to motivate people. The attitudes of people who believe that the state is necessary to make people be civil with one another have been shaped by a myth. More than likely, no facts about state violence will shake their faith. Within the mythological universe that sustains it, the state is immune to fundamental critique in most people’s thinking.
-**** B. The State Myth
-So, what are the myths that justify state violence?
-Myths fuse with the sacred. But Ellul argues that to see the sacred requires that we work through myths.[1346] In Western states, the most pervasive myth justifying state power and violence is the social contract. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, established the state by telling a story about humanity’s natural condition where isolation as individuals predominates.
-For Hobbes, individuals in the original condition covet what others have. Individuals live in fear, therefore, that others will harm them. To end the perpetual warfare of “all against all,” individuals agree to exchange their freedom (including the freedom to harm each other) for the protection of the state, a state they fear because it protects but also threatens each individual if they disobey.[1347] John Locke tells a related story. In people’s natural condition, natural law limits individual violence. However, people quarrel over property and become violent. So, if a person wants to take away another’s freedoms and property, Locke says, “it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e., kill him if I can.”[1348] Then vendettas and feuds pervade and “a state of war” ensues since people lack a sovereign to arbitrate conflicts. So, people contract with a state to protect their natural property rights. For Locke and Hobbes, violence impels individuals to exchange their natural condition for the state’s protection. “To avoid this state of war ... is one great reason of men’s putting themselves into society, and quitting the state of nature.”[1349]
-In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant also posited a social contract. In a natural condition, “individual human beings, peoples, and states can never be secure against violence from one another, since each has its own right to do what seems right and good to it and not to be dependent upon another’s opinion about this.”[1350] Therefore, people must “leave the state of nature” and form a society. So fear of violence from other individuals justifies the state, and once states are formed they act like individuals in the state of nature, so there must be an even larger transnational state to govern them. In addition, even if violence does not pervade our natural condition, the situation would be unjust because justice can only come through a “judge competent to render a verdict having rightful force”;[1351] that is, through a state with the perceived legitimacy to overwhelm people. Society must compel people to enter the social contract and obey the state: “Hence each may impel the other by force to leave this state and enter into a rightful condition.”[1352] As with Locke and Hobbes, humanity’s original state is disharmonious individuals at war with one another. Only a state based on a contract can end the violence.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau posited an even more radical individualism in the state of nature. On Rousseau’s view, in this condition isolation is so complete that persons cannot recognize their own mothers because they have no lasting relationships. Living in isolation means that people do not fight one another. They form a social contract and create a state once they leave their natural isolation because, once they do, violence becomes so endemic that they need to submit to the will of everyone else to have peace. Rousseau claims that individuals form the state to “defend and protect the person and goods of each associate.”[1353] For every early contract theorists, therefore, rational people agree to a necessary, overarching, violent state that can protect them from each other.
-These theories arose as Europeans committed genocide against native people in the “New World” and colonized the land. As the Europeans encountered native people in the Americas, jurists developed property theories based on social contracts that disallowed communal property: individuals who contract hold property; nobody owns common property. Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf pioneered these legal theories. Locke built upon them. Europeans routinely described native people as irrational and engaged in pointless, endless wars. But the real importance of social contract theory was to describe indigenous people as lacking sovereignty because they did not own land or work it properly. Hobbes drew upon this common view in his description of the natural condition:
-<quote>
-In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the live of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[1354]
-</quote>
-Hobbes clearly supposes that “the savage people in many places of America”[1355] live in what he takes to be humanity’s natural condition. When Locke and others took these issues up, they argued that because indigenous people did not “enclose” land and engage in European-style agriculture, the land was actually “vacant.”[1356] So, social contract mythology warned Europeans that common property ownership would degenerate into the “war of all against all” like “the savages” of the Americas. The myth also justified European aggression. State violence, therefore, lies at the historical heart of social contract myth.
-One of the most potent aspects of the social contract myth lies in the way the state takes on a messianic role as the savior of all people from their perpetual warring. The state saves people from endless violence. The state, as the most powerful and fearful entity in a given society, ends the fear of violence and liberates people from the “danger of violent death,” as Hobbes puts it.
-While the state saves people from irrational violence, the state saves people for property ownership. For Locke, even though God gave all humanity the earth, private land ownership is the best way to preserve the gift. Human preservation means that there are natural property rights, even if others live on the land. So Locke justified seizing land native people occupied because they kept the land as “an uncultivated waste.”[1357] The right to pursue possessions coincides with the state’s salvation from violence. The power to own property and consume products is the outcome of a state within the social contract mythology. The soteriological justification for the state imagines a transformed state of nature in which individuals pursue their self-interests through accumulation. This transubstantiation happens magically as the state grows.
-State violence is rational. Therefore, people call what the state does “force,” not violence. Violence lacks legal justification. Force has it. Very few journalists would describe police shooting a suspect as violence. The police used “force.” The state has, in Max Weber’s famous words, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.[1358] But anarchists reject the distinction political theorists make between state “force” and private “violence.” Ellul states,
-I refuse to make the classic distinction between violence and force. The lawyers have invented the idea that when the state applies constraint, even brutal constraint, it is exercising ‘force’; that only individuals or nongovernmental groups (syndicates, parties) use violence. This is a totally unjustified distinction. The state is established by vio- lence—the French, American, Communist, Francoist revolutions. Invariably there is violence at the start.[1359]
-Violence founds the state, and states rule through everyday practices of violence: “economic relations, class relations, are relations of violence, nothing else.”[1360] He writes of “administrative violence” and the “violence of the judicial system.”[1361] There is also “psychological violence,” which “is simply violence, whether it takes the form of propaganda, biased reports, meetings of secret societies that inflate the egos of their members, brainwashing or intellectual terrorism.”[1362] Anarchists have largely agreed with Ellul’s analysis.[1363]
-Yet for most people, deluged with statist propaganda, the state has a legitimate monopoly on force. The social contract myth begins to show why. The state has a monopoly on violence so that its violence can redeem and save people from the fear and threats of violence that engulf them when they lack the protection of Leviathan.
-Contract mythology plays its part in “a mythical system”; without this system, the social contract myth cannot function effectively.[1364] For many of its defenders, the state is grounded in something like pure Kantian reason. This kind of reason functions automatically: two is always greater than one; three is always greater than two. In war, nuclear weapons must be fought with nuclear weapons; chemical weapons with chemical weapons. The choices people make are technical, contradictions are disallowed, even though they proliferate in the process.
-The mythology of the state develops through multiple stages, according to Ellul: rationality, artificiality, automatism, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.[1365] Rationality and artificiality emerge through the ways in which the social contract myth subtly pushes the hearer to think of herself as an isolated person apart from the natural or social world. Rather than an unavoidable sacred domain, the natural world is a field of scarce resources over which people compete. It is marked by war. The individual has objectified the natural and social worlds by thinking of herself apart from both and imposing a concept of them as pure threats (stripping them of life-giving power and thus desacralizing them). The myth then bids hearers to eschew ways of thinking about the world (as a living body, for example) and society (as a body unified though and following Christ, for example) as irrational and incapable of ending violence between people who now think of themselves as radical individuals. The rational, secularized state becomes the only way to achieve peace in these circumstances. The choice to view the state as the solution to any conceivable social problem becomes automatic (automatism). All other modes of organizing communal life are eliminated in favor of the state, which because it has a monopoly on legitimate violence is a peacemaker. The state becomes humanity’s savior. As Bourne says, “As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of men, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation.”[1366] The state’s violence—and only its vio- lence—is redemptive. Those who enact that violence are its saints and, not infrequently, its martyrs. To decline to “support the troops” or the state’s police becomes a kind of modern heresy against “war orthodoxy” within the mythological world of modern statism.[1367]
-**** C. The Sacred State
-The process of technical reasoning and the mythology Ellul describes lie at the roots of one of the most pervasive reasons for people’s uncritical acceptance of state violence in contrast with their denunciation of petty anarchist violence. The state is treated as sacred. This does not mean the state has a sacred “essence.” Rather, it functions as sacred in specific ways. People experience and act in certain ways in relation to sacred entities. Emile Durkheim argued that “anything at all, can be sacred.”[1368] The term “sacred” does not denote a quality of gods or religious things but rather a feature of “things set apart and forbidden.”
-Every society, Ellul argues, has sacred poles, which elicit intense passions and occasion intense experiences and are subject to rituals and liturgies. These poles are valued not for utilitarian reasons, but because people believe the sacred provides them with meaning and order that are independent of their individual lives. The sacred removes people from quotidian concerns and inducts them into a meaningful existence.[1369] Moreover, as an inescapable reality the sacred both threatens and protects life. The sacred imposes order, reimagining time (a cycle of holy days) and space (places of special meaning); and from the vantage-point afforded by the mythology they embrace, people distinguish between the sacred and the profane, the permitted and forbidden. The sacred provides a map for movement through the threat and protection which it itself provides.
-For Ellul, “self-augmentation” names the process by which the state has expanded into people’s lives to such a degree that people depend on the state and cannot imagine life without it. The state’s regulatory agencies, personnel, and programs and its control of the flow of goods entangle it in modern life, making human existence almost unimaginable without its services. The state colonizes people’s imaginations. All of its agencies, symbols, and activities form a monolithic whole (monism). The state then expands across the globe to such a degree that to be “stateless” means living in the state of nature in which violence reigns. The mythology that supports the state constrains our thinking about state action in ways that allow the state to reach its full sacred status by becoming unmoored from the “contract” that supposedly grounds it. The state comes to be its own reason for action. Bakunin also notes the state’s autonomous morality, mocking those who think Christian morality can tame state violence when the only criterion of good becomes the state itself. When “all that is instrumental in conserving, exalting, and consolidating the power of the State is good, ... whatever militates against the interests of the State is bad,” the slogan “reason of state” suffices to justify any action, no matter how violently horrific. In social contract mythology, Bakunin notes, “the good” begins with the state that saves humanity from its own wickedness,[1370] so that no external moral critique of state action is ultimately possible.
-People cannot imagine life without the state because it claims to protect, threatens, and gives life order and meaning. It transcends everyday experience yet remains immanent in daily life through symbols and totems, especially flags and police personnel. The state organizes time. The work week and annual holiday cycle mold the citizen’s sense of time. The high holy days celebrating the state’s salvific violence—President’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day, to name a few U.S. holidays—mark time and link people’s experiences with American patriotism and memorial blood sacrifice. People narrate history from the state’s standpoint: most national or world history courses revolve around the state’s wars, which function as mass ritual sacrifices. Globally, states transform the earth into a pattern of bordered territories that recreate the “natural condition” of the mythology: each state does (roughly) whatever it wants and creates an international system marked by war of all against all.[1371] Within the United States, land is divided into towns, counties, and states, all represented by state symbols and containing state memorials spaced for pilgrimage or constant reminder. Thus, the state shapes people’s everyday lives by controlling time and space. Yet the state transcends the average person’s reach, with the capitol buildings of most U.S. states and Washington DC explicitly emulating Roman civic and ecclesiastical structures, for example. One author calls Washington DC “a myth in stone.”[1372] In virtue of its immanence and transcendence, the state exhibits many of the features of the sacred.[1373]
-The way in which Americans orient rituals around their government’s flag helps clarify the sacred and its violence. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle discuss the rituals, symbols, and emotions that fuel the American state. They argue that American nationalism entails ideas about the sacred: totemic taboos, rituals, and symbols structure the American experience of the sacred. Nationalism, they claim, “is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries.”[1374] The American flag is a transcendent symbol that embodies the nation’s ideals and ideologies, unites heterogeneous people into a homogenous nation, combines past and present, and invites the continual willing sacrifice—blood sacrifice that defines the nation-state and keeps the totemic system in place—for the nation’s putative benefit.
-Congressional debates in 2001 about outlawing flag-burning illuminate the conclusions reached by Marvin and Ingle.
-To fight and die for the flag is to fight and die for the cause in which we believe.. We love and we honor and respect our flag for that which it represents.
-Since the creation of the American flag, it has stood as a symbol of our sacred values and aspirations. Far too many Americans have died in combat to see the symbol of what they were fighting for reduced to just another object of public derision. Simply
-put, it is a gross insult to every patriotic American to see the symbol of their country publicly desecrated. They will not tolerate it, and neither will I.
-It [the flag] is a solemn and sacred symbol of the many sacrifices made by our Founding Fathers and our Veterans throughout several wars as they fought to establish and protect the founding principles of our great Nation. Most Americans, Veterans in particular, feel deeply insulted when they see our Flag being desecrated. It is in their behalf, in their honor and in their memory that we have championed this effort to protect and honor this symbol.
-Human beings do not live by abstract ideas alone. Those ideas are embodied in symbols. And what is a symbol? A symbol is more than a sign. A sign conveys information. A symbol is much more richly textured. A symbol is material reality that makes a spiritual reality present among us.... Burning the flag is a hate crime, because burning the flag is an expression of contempt for the moral unity of the American people that the flag symbolically makes present to us every day.[1375]
-The flag, therefore, is a sacred object that needs protection from profanation because it purportedly “makes present” the moral unity of the United States and because people have and will kill and die for it.
-The state, Ellul writes, “is the ultimate value which gives everything its meaning.”[1376] Fused with notions of nationhood in which individuals find purpose and meaning as members of a group, the nation-state becomes “the criterion of good and evil.. It is good to lie, kill, and deceive for the nation.”[1377] Other anarchists agree. Bakunin argues that the “elastic, at times so convenient and terrible[,] phrase reason of State” excuses actions that would otherwise be considered criminal.[1378] Here the state reaches the apex of technical reasoning, which excludes all ends outside of itself. The state alone determines life and death and judges right and wrong. Religion’s supposedly private “ends” do not constrain state action. The survival, development, and expansion of the state become people’s unquestioned and presupposed ends. To refuse to cooperate with the state becomes immoral and heretical. People kill and die for the state; they experience ecstatic frenzy at the national anthem sung just right, and become angry at the slightest insult to the “land of the free.”[1379] To suggest a life without the state makes about as much sense as suggesting to a stereotypical medieval Catholic that life without Christ would be good.
-The state is set apart from the quotidian private conflicts so that those who work as state agents can judge and authorize violence in order to impose order. The state claims to be an arbitrator capable of resolving disputes that would otherwise be settled through violence. The state is, therefore, a peacemaker. But the state requires citizens to kill and die for it as the sacred institution that makes life tolerable. What seems contradictory is necessary for the state as sacred. It gives and takes life. It bestows meaning through blood sacrifice. The state is “the god of war and of order.”[1380] The state offers people security from conflicts that arise as the “many” compete for resources and dominance. The state, therefore, needs conflicts to justify its existence. It becomes essential for any imaged life within a way of seeing society shaped by the secular/religious and public/private dichotomies.
-*** III. Anarchism and Violence
-Anarchists do not see the state as sacred. It has no right to take life or declare that somebody’s life is not worth respecting. Anarchists do not believe that individuals are incapable of living peacefully and cooperatively together or that they need the state to keep them safe. Rather, most anarchists—even those who have no problem with defensive violence when attacked— have insisted on the possibility of a peaceable life together organized not through threats of violence from a heavily armed organization that claims moral superiority to do what is forbidden to everyone else, but through practices of mutual aid, compassion, and care for the other that reveal the possibility of a different kind of world, without a sacred god-state to order people around. So, first and foremost, anarchists tell a different story than the one embedded in statist mythology.
-To be sure, some anarchists, like iconoclasts of old, have declared their intent to “smash the state.” But in doing so they have sometimes only reaffirmed the sacred pretensions that underlie state violence. Undeniably some anarchists have murdered and committed terrorist acts against state and capitalist officials. In 1885, German anarchist Johann Most published his pamphlet Science of Revolutionary Warfare, instructing readers on how to make bombs, commit arson, stab, and poison people, and extolled the psychological impact such violence would have on the ruling classes, the “property-monsters,” praising the way in which such violence could be expected to “inflict surprise, confusion and panic on the enemy.”[1381] Under the banner of “propaganda by the deed,” anarchists killed numerous public figures, including Czar Alexander II of Russia (1881); Sadi Carnot, the President of France (1894); Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1897); Elisabeth of Bavaria, the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary (1898); King Umberto I of Italy (1900); U.S. President William McKinley (1901); King Carlos I of Portugal (1908); Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin (1911); and King George I of Greece (1913). These killings, along with numerous attempted assassinations and other acts of deadly violence, fueled the popular misconception that anarchists were in principle violent, bomb-throwing miscreants bent on destroying peaceful society.
-Most anarchist authors, however, distanced themselves from individual acts of violence. Emma Goldman, de Cleyre, and Landauer denied that anarchist ideas inspired the assassins. Each focused on the wretched conditions capitalist society creates as the primary culprit in creating men willing to murder. Goldman contended that “the tremendous pressure of conditions, making life unbearable to their sensitive natures” and “the wholesale violence of capital and government” impelled some to acts of violence to stop the repressions.[1382] “The hells of capitalism create the desperate,” wrote de Cleyre, “the desperate act,—desperately!”[1383] Landauer argued that anarchist assassins envision a good life, but cannot escape the brutal realities in which “they cannot even feed themselves and their children.”[1384] Immersion in these realities has disastrous consequences. “Gradually, many elements of their personality die: reflection, consideration, empathy, even their sense of self-preservation,” and they become obsessed with revenge until they finally lash out.[1385] Many anarchists, therefore, saw assassinations and acts of terrorism as desperate and hopeless actions in which hatred and revenge took hold of the person. In that sense, the assassins were weak, merely lashing out. This type of violence would seem to cede to the state all the power it desires as a sacred, since its action is completely bound up with the state and reinforces the state in a kind of dialectic.
-Errico Malatesta suggested that the people carrying out assassinations and engaging in other kinds of propaganda-by-deed serve collectively as a source of warning to all anarchists. These people joined anarchism because they wanted to respect and love others and saw in anarchism the potential for a peaceable world. But they began to justify the opposite of anarchist ideals in order to try to establish anarchism. Having embraced the authoritarian impulses that characterize most political movements, they justify their actions by appealing to the brutality of the regime and minimizing their own violence. In doing so, however, they have entered “on a path which is the most absolute negation of all anarchist ideas and sentiments.”[1386] These anarchists, Malatesta claims, show all anarchists the kind of abyss into which they can fall if they are not careful about violence and do not purge themselves of hatred and retaliation. Violence, he claims, cannot establish anarchism:
-<quote>
-For us violence is only of use and can only be of use in driving back violence. Otherwise, when it is used to accomplish positive goals, either it fails completely, or it succeeds in establishing the oppression and the exploitation of the ones over the others.[1387]
-</quote>
-Anarchists’ violent actions arise out of a sense of self-righteousness: the state is so evil, and the anarchist cause so transcendent and ideal, that a kind of holy war must be waged to destroy the state and establish anarchism.[1388] This type of justification is a secularized form of the justification too often advanced for holy wars, and so of many instances of war carried out by the state. Such a view recreates the hierarchies it opposes, Malatesta argued.
-In parallel with Malatesta’s denunciation of non-defensive anarchist violence as a kind of authoritarianism, Ellul offers a helpful analysis. Following sociologists who have studied the sacred, Ellul argues that every sacred entails its opposite pole, a sacred of transgression. The sacred of respect and the sacred of transgression function as a kind of dialectic, in which each responds to the other. Revolution is the sacred of transgression for the nation-state. Historically, Ellul notes, revolutions have established states through the execution of the sovereign, which is a kind of founding sacrifice.[1389] Revolution thus reintegrates the revolutionary into the sacred, just as festivals functioned to release tensions and reintegrate transgressors into the sacred order of the Middle Ages. Marxist revolutionaries revolt not to destroy the state but to reintegrate themselves into the state. The goal of transgression against the sacred is to be reestablish the sacred. While anarchists seek the state’s destruction, far too often the kind of violence some anarchists perpetrate only strengthens state power as the state responds by finding new ways to control people more efficiently. The terrorist is integrated into the state’s dominant mythology: the anarchoterrorist, whether assassinating public figures yesterday or breaking bank windows today, is the irrational perpetrator of violence from whom the state will save people. The state remains sacred as the object of adoration by the masses and hatred by the heretics. Violent transgression against the state only reinforces the state because the state, as a sacred reality, depends on such transgressions and cannot exist without it. The transgression is just another means, ironically, of reinforcing the state’s sacredness.
-Many anarchists reject violence. Leo Tolstoy taught Christian anarchist pacifism, called for nonviolent resistance to oppression, and urged youth to resist the Russian military draft. Prefiguring the practices and thought of many modern anarchists, Tolstoy extended this nonviolence and nondomination to other animals and advocated vegetarianism as a practice of peaceableness. Ellul espoused an anarchism that entailed “an absolute rejection of violence.” He aligned himself with “pacifist, antinationalist, anticapitalist, moral, and antidemocratic anarchism” (since most democracies are shams [and are majoritarian]) and advocated creating “small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves.”[1390] Despite disagreeing with Bakunin about the appropriateness of violence, Ellul thought his position was very close to Bakunin’s. Landauer declared that “not war and murder—but rebirth” must be the basis of the anarcho-socialist practices he favored since the most difficult task for anarchists is to abandon their own desires to dominate others.[1391] He saw the state as “a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.”[1392] “Anarchy exists,” he wrote, “wherever one finds true anarchists: people who do not engage in violence.”[1393]
-The twentieth century demonstrated that disciplined movements engaged in boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, refusal to cooperate with authorities, sabotage of industry and state machinery, and other creative actions can halt even powerful empires. Mohandas Gandhi, leading massive and successful nonviolent actions intended to end British imperialism in India, dreamed of a world organized into “enlightened anarchy” where people would find more creative ways to live together than violence entails.[1394] Gandhian communities were meant to point the way toward this ideal. The ideal of “doing no harm” or “compassion” (ahimsa) guides a way of living that focuses not simply on avoiding state domination but also on nourishing the multiple opportunities for equitable and peaceable relationships that obtain outside the sphere of violence. Gandhian thinking fits well with Ellul’s and Landauer’s understandings of anarchist action and thought—understandings that emphasize the positive value of peaceful, voluntary cooperation rather than reempowering the state by putting (too-often hate-filled) opposition to its violence on center-stage (even as Ellul, Landauer, and the Gandhians recognize that the state must be opposed and resisted).
-Ward Churchill, Derrick Jensen, and Peter Gelderloos have argued, by contrast, that Gandhian nonviolence merely strengthens the state. Because violence is part of the political process, any attempt to establish and maintain anarchist institutions will necessarily involve the use of violence. In response, Andrew Fiala has pointed out that these thinkers align themselves with conservative realist political views in accordance with which the state simply is violent because all political action is violent. Violence, for the realists, needs no justification. Violence—or, to boil things down to its most basic, murdering and oppressing others—is just the way of the world.[1395] It is hard to see how this thinking could lead to a deeper anarchism that would not be a sacred of transgression as Ellul describes it.
-Despite the anti-technology bent of Jensen’s reasoning, his approach doesn’t really seem to break from the kind of technical reasoning that Ellul argues characterizes modern thinking. The rhetoric seems to move to a high level of abstraction very quickly. And Landauer’s critique seems applicable. How, he asks, can anarchists kill other people? He explains:
-<quote>
-When they kill, they do not kill human beings but concepts—that of the exploiter, the oppressor, the representative of the state. This is why those who are often the kindest and most humane in their private lives commit the most inhumane acts in the public sphere.[1396]
-</quote>
-The process of abstraction is completely bound up with technical reasoning and debases life— treating abstractions as more important than actual people. Landauer suggests that anarchists who are willing to kill
-<quote>
-do not feel; they have switched off their senses. They act as exclusively rational beings ... are the servants of reason; a reason that divides and judges. This cold, spiritually empty, and destructive logic is the rationale for the death sentences handed down by the anarchists. But anarchy is neither as easily achievable, nor as morally harsh, nor as clearly defined as these anarchists would have it. Only when anarchy becomes, for us, a dark, deep dream, not a vision attainable through concepts, can our ethics and our actions become one.[1397]
-</quote>
-Moreover, violence does not seem to be a very effective tool. Anarchist violence will always be co-opted by the state’s myth-makers. Every violent action is simply an example of the chaos, the war of all against all, that threatens the peace that the state is supposed to create and maintain. Because of this ongoing threat, the state must now expand; it must institute new ways of suppressing the irrational, violent offenders, be they unreasonable religious fanatics or anti-social anarchists. The state will then be able not only to use its redemptive violence to reaffirm its sacred power but also to become even more powerful. The surveillance, the violence, the repressive technologies it employs, are necessary; and, the state’s advocates suppose, it is irresponsible and reckless not to use every tool at the state’s disposal to effect security and therefore peace in the face of threats of irrational violence. The state must survive and expand by any means necessary. Propaganda by the state feeds the state.
-To engage in nonviolent direct action, by contrast, is to avoid feeding statist mythology by removing the violent anarchist bogeyman as a rationale for state violence. There is a certain sense in which all nonviolent direct action denies the state its sacred status as the giver and taker of life while liberating revolution from the statist dialectic. Although numerous movements have shown that nonviolent direct action has the potential to damage and overthrow governments, many anarchists maintain that nonviolence is not about efficiency and rationality. To focus just on efficiency and rationality is to underwrite the technical reasoning of the violent state that war is our only source of security. Nonviolent anarchism, Landauer argues, is not about creating the future but about living in this time and place and doing one’s best in the present to enact ideals of peaceful, voluntary cooperation. Causing cracks in the wall that surrounds and protects the status quo, he argued, can do far more than a bullet.
-[1326] See Farah Stockman, “Anarchists Respond to Trump’s Inauguration, by Any Means Necessary,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 2017, [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/anarchists-respond-to-trumps-inauguration-by-]] [[http://www.nytimes.com][any-means-necessary.html]] (accessed November 27, 2017).
-[1327] Rick Paulas, “What to Wear to Smash the State,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2017, [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.nytimes.com/]] [[http://www.nytimes.com][2017/11/29/style/black-bloc-fashion.html]] (Nov. 29, 2017).
-[1328] See Alexandre Marc, “Conflict and Violence in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century: Current Trends as Observed in Empirical Research and Data,” United Nations, [[http://www.un.org][www.un.org/pga/70/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/01/Con]] [[http://www.un.org][flict-and-violence-in-the-21<sup>st</sup>-century-Current-trends-as-observed-in-empirical-research-and-statistics-Mr.-]] [[http://www.un.org][Alexandre-Marc-Chief-Specialist-Fragility-Conflict-and-Violence-World-Bank-Group.pdf]] (Dec. 12, 2017).
-[1329] Margaret Sullivan, “The Media Loved Trump’s Show of Military Might. Are We Really Doing This Again?” Washington Post, Apr. 8, 2017, [[http://www.washingtonpost.com][www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-media-loved-trumps-show-]] [[http://www.washingtonpost.com][of-military-might-are-we-really-doing-this-again/2017/04/07/01348256-1ba2-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.]] [[http://www.washingtonpost.com][html?utm_term=.5f9c92d1a193]] (Aug. 10, 2017).
-[1330] Kevin Drum, “Donald Trump Is No More Presidential Today Than He Was Yesterday,” Mother Jones, Apr. 7, 2017, [[http://www.motherjones.com][www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/04/donald-trump-no-more-presidential-today-he-]] [[http://www.motherjones.com][was-yesterday/ ]](Aug. 10, 2017).
-[1331] Alexander Nazaryan, “Trump, America’s Boy King: Gold and Television Won’t Make America Great Again,” Newsweek, Aug. 1, 2017. [[http://www.newsweek.com][www.newsweek.com/2017/08/11/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-gop-]] [[http://www.newsweek.com][white-house-potus-bannon-643996.html]] (Aug. 10, 2017).
-[1332] Mikhail Bakunin, “The Modern State Surveyed,” The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (London: Free 1953) 211 (italics original).
-[1333] Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom 1946) 42.
-[1334] Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State,” Untimely Papers (New York: Huebsch 1920) 141, 145.
-[1335] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Direct Action,” Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist, Anarchist, Genius, ed. Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell (Albany: SUNY 2005) 275.
-[1336] Gustav Landauer, Rechenschaft (Berlin: Cassirer 1919) 159. My translation.
-[1337] See Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “Anarchist Ambivalence: Politics and Violence in the Thought of Bakunin, Tolstoy and Kropotkin,” European Journal of Political Theory 18.2 (2019): 3—8.
-[1338] For an etymology of mythos, see Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque: Histoire Des Mots (Paris: Klincksieck 1984) 718—19.
-[1339] See Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1988).
-[1340] Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (New York: Routledge 2003) 1.
-[1341] Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Vintage 1965) 116.
-[1342] See Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World (Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016) 67.
-[1343] Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” Philosophical Occasions: 1912—1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordman (Indianapolis: Hackett 1993) 123.
-[1344] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: CUP 1999) 29.
-[1345] Sorel 30.
-[1346] See Ellul, New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Crossroad-Seabury 1975) 121.
-[1347] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: OUP 1996).
-[1348] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New Haven: Yale UP 2003) 108 (Second Treatise, ch. 3).
-[1349] Locke 109.
-[1350] Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (New York: CUP 1996) 90 [6:312] (italics original).
-[1351] Kant 90 [6:312].
-[1352] Kant 90 [6:312]. It is important to clarify, however, that Kant rejected the idea of European colonialism since arguments in its favor “sanction any means to good ends.” Kant 53 [6:266].
-[1353] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: CUP 1997) 49.
-[1354] Hobbes 84 (Part 1, ch. 13).
-[1355] Hobbes 85.
-[1356] See James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (New York: CUP 1997) 150—1.
-[1357] Locke 116 (Second Treatise, ch. 5).
-[1358] See Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett 2004) 38.
-[1359] Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (New York: Seabury 1969) 84.
-[1360] Ellul, Violence 86.
-[1361] Jacques Ellul, In Season, Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul, trans. Lani K. Niles (New York: Harper 1982) 131.
-[1362] Ellul, Violence 97.
-[1363] Of course, calling economics and other such things “violent” can easily lead to justifying physical acts of violence since the two are viewed as equivalent. This is a weakness in Ellul and others who broaden the term “violence” so widely.
-[1364] See Ellul, Demons 96—97.
-[1365] See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage 1965) 79—147. In the rest of the paragraph, I use David Lovekin’s way of describing rationality and artificiality and apply it to social contract myth. For the full technical cycle, see David Lovekin, “Technology as the Sacred Order,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 3 (1980): 203–22.
-[1366] Bourne 141.
-[1367] See Bourne 143.
-[1368] Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: OUP 2009) 36.
-[1369] See Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1986) 52.
-[1370] Bakunin 143.
-[1371] See Bakunin 138.
-[1372] See Jeffrey F. Meyer, Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington D.C. (Berkeley: U of California P 2001) 50.
-[1373] See Ellul, Subversion 52.
-[1374] Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64.4 (1996): 767.
-[1375] Congressional Record 147.99 (United States Government Printing Office), [[http://www.gpo.gov][www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-]] [[http://www.gpo.gov][2001-07-17/pdf/CREC-2001-07-17-pt1-PgH4043.pdf]] (Aug. 2, 2017).
-[1376] Ellul, Demons 80.
-[1377] Ellul 82.
-[1378] See Bakunin 14–2. Original emphasis.
-[1379] Recent outrage and American football players refusing to stand, place their hands on their hearts, and sing the national anthem while facing the American flag illustrates the religious nature of nationalism quite well. It also illustrates the potential violence in this statist nationalism.
-[1380] Ellul, Demons 81.
-[1381] Johann Most, Science of Revolutionary Warfare (El Dorado: Desert 1978) 11.
-[1382] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover 1969) 92, 107.
-[1383] Voltairine de Cleyre, “McKinley’s Assassination,” Rebel 302.
-[1384] Gustav Landauer, Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM 2010) 81.
-[1385] Landauer, Revolution 81.
-[1386] Errico Malatesta, “Violence as a Social Factor (1895),” Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939)1, ed. Robert Graham (Montreal: Black Rose 2005) 161.
-[1387] Errico Malatesta, “Revolution in Practice,” The Method of Freedom: An Enrico Malatesta Reader, ed. David Turcato (Oakland: AK 2014).
-[1388] The petty violence of those participating in Black Bloc actions might fall into this category of holy violence as well. One cannot help but hear Malatesta denouncing it—hyper-masculine, hyper-righteous, and hyper- despairing—as full of the hate it seeks to abolish.
-[1389] See Ellul, Demons 85.
-[1390] Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1991) 13—4.
-[1391] Landauer, Revolution 89.
-[1392] Landauer, Revolution 214.
-[1393] Landauer, Revolution 86.
-[1394] See Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Enlightened Anarchy,” The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee (New York: Penguin 1996) 79.
-[1395] Andrew Fiala, “Anarchism and Pacifism,” Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill 2017) 168.
-[1396] Landauer, Revolution 91.
-[1397] Landauer, Revolution 91.
-<br>
-** 22 The Forecast for Anarchy
-*Tom W. Bell*
-*** I. Introduction: The Future of … Nothing?
-Though defined largely by what it is not—the state—anarchism may end up defining what the future of government is. A rising chorus claims that political territorialism, as a business model for the governing services industry, has reached the late bubble stage. And when it pops? Some foretell a violent explosion, others a mere catastrophic collapse.
-Social disorder always haunts the edges of civilization, and the void left by a dying government might draw forth all sorts of malice. But anarchy does not have to mean chaos. Call them dreamers or visionaries as you see fit, but many current thinkers foresee a softer-than- usual (r)evolution this time around. On this model, written up first in the form of speculative fiction and now written up in computer software, the state not so much explodes as dissolves, its subjects lured away from politics into more distributed and consensual forms of selfgovernance.
-This process less recalls a balloon going pop! than soap lather, melting away under a rush of clean water. Popping balloons make toddlers cry, whereas rinsing soap away cleans hands. The parallels thus hold up nicely. For, while overturning governments cannot help but cause upset, and often leaves matters much worse off, outgrowing governments offers the prospect of a smooth path to a safer, better environment.
-After the outline and prefatory comments of this Introduction, the next section reviews some notable past forecasts for anarchy, the sources ranging from scientific socialism to scientific fiction. Section III surveys the ominous signs that statism, in the form and at the scale currently practiced, cannot continue. But will it explode or slowly slump? Section IV explains why some predict that blockchain-based, distributed, crypto-economic networks offer a soft landing, if not for the state itself, then at least for those under its power and protection. Section V concludes by summarizing the findings: the future of government looks less statist than at present, and much more rich in consent. Regardless of what you call it, that represents a form of government worth welcoming.
-<center>
-<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
-</center>
-Before launching the discussion proper, it bears taking a moment to talk about ... the A-word: “anarchy.” The word inspires everything from terror to contempt, with a good stretch of ideological ardor and confusion in-between. Defining anarchy is not a question of arid semantics but a vital preliminary to the task at hand: predicting the future of the self-same thing.
-Anarchy haunts political philosophy with a great and terrible void. It represents not merely a critique of the state, but its negation. Into this ideological vacuum have rushed a great many ideas, from the ridiculous to the brilliant. Yet anarchy itself, as an idea, remains empty, defined not so much by what it includes as what it excludes: an administrative body that credibly claims the exclusive right to initiate coercion within a particular geographic area—a state.[1398] That makes predicting the future of anarchism, the goal here, a bit tricky. How could anyone forecast the future of ... nothing?
-Methodological individualism at first appears to offer an easy dodge: deny that the state exists in the first place.[1399] The most hard-core of those who take this position recognize only the acts of individual persons, dismissing the state as little more than a mass hallucination.[1400] If the state does not exist, its negation can hardly have more substance. With no present, it can have no future. QED.
-Problem solved? Not quite. To simply deny that the state exists will not satisfy anyone genuinely curious about what sorts of social behaviors humans will exhibit pursuant to their beliefs about the state, be it actual or fictional. Methodological individualism, while a useful corrective against reifying political institutions, offers no shortcuts around the task at hand.
-Most anarchists recognize the state as something substantial enough to fight against, granting it as much metaphysical heft as the corporations, churches, and other institutions they sometimes also target.[1401] Most anti-statists leave what they mean to fight for, however, only lightly sketched. Only a few fulfill the popular stereotype of masked bombers raging against all forms of social order.[1402] Anarchists proper (supposing such a phrase is not oxymoronic) have no problem with order. It is being ordered they so dislike. Anarchists, at least as here understood, oppose not rules but rulers. They desire, create, and support social institutions that govern behavior. Why? How? and What kind? remain questions open to debate—which anarchists welcome enthusiastically.
-Anarchy is not simply a counterweight to the state; it by definition constitutes the space, literal and metaphorical, that surrounds, pervades, and ultimately sustains that peculiar species of social order.[1403] States have many other features, but most notably, and in sharp contrast to institutions in anarchist societies, they claim the exclusive power to administer the law coercively within a specified territory. Absent the doctrine of statism, no secular jurisprude would excuse the threats, beatings, and worse doled out by the machinery of the state. Its singular selfexception from the usual rules of social behavior marks the state (as in darker days it also marked the Church) as something unique. It claims a pass on the respect for rights that marks more liberal, humane, and egalitarian societies. The state aspires to greater goods, and toward that end commits greater wrongs, than any merely anarchic society would want or dare.
-So goes a positive description of anarchism: the condition of non-statism. Normatively, mileage varies widely. This chapter concludes that, if you favor human freedom, prosperity, and well-being, and if you disfavor institutionalized coercion as compared to mutual consent, you should welcome these trends. To one with those values, at least, the forecast for anarchy looks bright.
-*** II. Some Former Futures of Anarchy
-What have others forecast for anarchy? This section does not pretend to offer a comprehensive critique of every theory born of fevered imagination; the limits of time, space, and patience would forbid. Instead, it gives a fair taste of a few of the most popular predictions of what might follow in a world without states.
-This sampler offers three flavors of anarchy. First, in Subsection II.A., comes a reminder that Marxism began as avowedly and stridently anarchist doctrine, predicting freedom and plenty in the absence of the state, before taking a fast revolutionary U-turn toward totalitarian socialism.
-Subsection II.B. offers a quick survey of anarchist forecasts from a distinctly different school of thought: “market-friendly” libertarianism. Because the most colorful portrayals of the future, and arguably the most accurate, come from speculative fiction, Subsection II.C. looks there to find a whole new collection of predictions about anarchy.
-**** A. Marxist Statism, Anti- and Anti-Anti-
-Though now more often associated with totalitarian statism, Marxism pronounced itself at birth and thereafter repeatedly as an avowed anarchist doctrine. “Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another,” proclaimed The Communist Manifesto.[1404] With no classes, there can be no class oppression. With no class oppression, there can be no political power. And with no political power, there can be no state. In its place will arise, claimed Marx and Engels, a society organized along emphatically non-oppressive, non-political, non-statist principles. And arise it will, like it or not, as a matter of economic determinism. They predicted that, “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.”[1405]
-Exactly how Marx and Engels foresaw a communist anarchist society organizing itself remains unclear. Perhaps the details had to await further technological developments, such as the distributed trustless tokenized crypto-economic blockchain networks that so tantalize present-day anarchists.[1406] At all events, the founders of communism had some firm ideas about what their idealized society would not be: capitalist. Marx and Engels criticized the alienating division of labor characteristic of capitalist society and offered this oft-quoted description of how their projected communist utopia would abolish labor, or at least the kind.
-[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and other tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.[1407]
-Engels returned to the same theme in Anti-Dühring, where he claimed (without apparent irony, though also without the benefit of historical hindsight) that after the workers “tak[e] possession of the means of production in the name of society,” the state will gently pass into history. The route to anarchy that Engels described—abolishing private property—does not seem likely to lead to less statism, but the destination that Engels described could easily have come from a cryptoanarchist of recent vintage:
-<quote>
-State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out.[1408]
-</quote>
-After the death of Marx in 1883, Engels continued developing his late comrade’s theories. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels observed that the state “has not existed from all eternity” because it arose only with the division of society into classes.[1409] The first claim cannot be seriously contested. The second claim can scarcely be taken seriously. Hierarchies pervade not just human societies but even, as a reliable mark of their ubiquity, animal ones.
-Nonetheless, having taken a running start at this looming gap between fact and theory, Engels dared to attempt one of the great leaps of Marxist faith:
-<quote>
-We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Alone with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.[1410]
-</quote>
-It made for lovely rhetoric. In practice, though, and as exemplified in Lenin’s later reinterpretation of Engels, the attempted abolition of classes led only to a resurgent state—indeed, a newly all-powerful one. In State and Revolution, Lenin explained why the political institutions in his grip would by no means wither away soon.
-Engels says that, in taking state power, the proletariat thereby ‘abolishes the state as state.’ ... As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletarian revolution ‘abolishing’ the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution.[1411]
-Notice what he did there? Splitting Engels’s “state” into bourgeois and proletarian versions allowed Lenin to insert “socialist revolution” in the gap. Like a wedge hammered into a log, the military order required to overthrow the old ruling elite, driven by the vanguard of the proletariat, with Lenin at its head, would keep splitting a wider and wider gap between the abolition of the bourgeois state and the withering away of proletarian one. And even then Lenin caviled, explaining that, if ever the proletarian state did wither away, it would do so only through “slow, even, gradual change, [in the] absence of leaps and storms, or ... of revolution.”[1412]
-With this move, Lenin pulled a revolutionary U-turn, redirecting communism from a cry against politics into a paean to a new, all-powerful, all-consuming state. And he did not hide what sort of government people should expect from Leninist communism. He proclaimed, with brutal candor, “no state is free or is a people’s state.”[1413]
-Whatever future anarchism had in Soviet communism died with Lenin. The totalitarians who followed in his wake did nothing to revive anarchy (except perhaps in the sense of chaos, which they sowed in plenty). It is not the sort of thing to make communist anarchism look very attractive, all told.
-Perhaps, though, it is not fair to blame Marx and Engels for the crimes of their nominal followers. Indeed, the two revolutionaries arguably erred only in foreseeing the future too early. Some of the rosier pictures they painted of working for fun in a stateless society find echoes today in the white papers spewed forth by crypto-economic startups seeking token buyers. But, then again, that perhaps says less about the foresight of Marx and Engels than it does about the timeless charms of imagined freedom from want and compulsion.
-**** B. Academic Anarcho-capitalism
-Only a fairly hefty tome could reasonably aspire to survey every forecast for anarchy, so this chapter rests content with sampling some wildly varying popular accounts. The prior subsection canvassed Marxism’s wending story about what will happen when—or, as it turned out in practice under communism, if—statism melts away (which, as it turned out in practice under communism, it did not). This subsection offers a summary of anarchist forecasts from a distinctly different direction: libertarian. It begins with Robert Nozick’s critique, albeit one offered from a sympathetic point of view, of the whole idea of libertarian anarchism, and then considers more appreciative takes on the idea from David Friedman and Randy E. Barnett.
-Robert Nozick famously used a forecast of sorts to argue against anarchism on the grounds that it could not last, but instead would inevitably lapse into statism. His book Anarchy, State, and Utopia lays out his thought experiment.[1414] It begins with an idealized system of governance based on respect for personal freedom and property rights so unstinting that it forbids even taxation. Into this anarcho-capitalist Eden, Nozick introduces the problem of conflicting standards for administering justice.
-With no state settling the debate, says Nozick, those who interpret and enforce the law, whether individuals or (more likely) the private protection agencies they hire to enforce the law, will disagree on what procedures to apply. Some will disparage alternative procedures as unreliable or unfair, and refuse to allow themselves or those under their protection to suffer mistreatment in accordance with such procedures.
-You might think that here as in other markets, albeit with perhaps some sharper jostling, the various protection services would work things out. Violence is not usually a profitable business model.
-Instead, Nozick argues that one agency will inevitably come to dominate any given market for protection services.[1415] That structural assumption leads Nozick to conclude that a single standard for justice will likewise come to prevail over other contenders. This happens even in what begins as an anarchical society and inevitably ends in the emergence of the functional equivalence of a state. Nozick declares this, so to speak, an immaculate conception—one free of original sin—from the point of view of rights violations, and offers its putative purity as the core of his “invisible-hand” justification of the state.[1416]
-This is not the place to criticize Nozick’s attempt to justify the state; others did that long ago, and well.[1417] Here, it suffices to offer his views as a notable account of why anarcho-capitalism might be thought unable to subsist. On that view, the future of anarchism leads to ... statism. Unsurprisingly, other libertarian anarchists offer different views of the future of their preferred social order.
-David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom does not offer a comprehensive picture of how a future stateless society might work so much as a mosaic of how people in such a world might solve each of many separate, difficult, crucial problems.[1418] Friedman explains, for instance, how voluntary exchange could deal with education,[1419] immigration,[1420] pollution,[1421] law,[1422] and national defense.[1423] Almost in passing, Friedman also answers a question that libertarians face with eye-rolling frequency: “Who will build the roads?”[1424] On Friedman’s account (and in sharp contrast to Nozick’s), anarchism represents not a transient ideal but the general condition of humankind, historically speaking, and a more practical solution than statism to the greatest challenges of social life.
-Though ordinarily limiting himself to the sort of sober academic prose that befits a law professor of some repute, Randy E. Barnett ventures a brief fictional forecast of a stateless legal order in his book, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law.[1425] His sketch focuses on legal rather than political, social, or economic features. On Barnett’s model, consumers generally arrange to have their legal rights defended not by states but by private RMOs (rights maintenance organizations) modeled on the health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that already provide medical care to so many consumers.[1426] Private judges decide cases under terms not much different from those that already apply in arbitrations, and private organizations issue a variety of non-binding codes and commentaries that consumers and service providers adopt or not, as they see fit.[1427] Barnett even spins out a disaster scenario—in which private law enforcement agencies battle for dominance in a distinctly state-like way—to show how the system could self-regulate its way back to peaceful competition between non-monopolistic governing services.[1428] All told, Barnett makes anarchism sound like a perfectly reasonable framework for suburban subdivisions, corporate parks, big-box stores, and even law firms.
-**** C. Anarchy in Poly-Sci-Fi
-Fiction writers have often and famously pictured futures choked with statism. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World[1429] and George Orwell’s 1984[1430] come foremost to mind for many. Contemporary readers might think of the wildly popular Hunger Games series, set in a dystopia wherein where whole populations suffer under the whims of a distant ruling elite.[1431] The series ends with the emergence of an incipient government, but leaves readers’ imaginations to carry on the story.[1432]
-Writers of fiction have much less frequently attempted actually to portray anarchies, at least in the sense of making them conscious plot devices. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth arguably describes an anarchy of sorts, granted. Tolkien himself certainly had a sympathetic view of statelessness, noting in middle age: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.”[1433] Despite its deeper lessons about the lust for power, though, a fantasy about hobbits, dragons, and wizards is not likely to reveal much about the future of anarchy in this world, where technology rather than magic works the wonder. For that forecasting job, speculative fiction (to use the term its writers typically prefer; science fiction or sci-fi, in popular parlance) offers a better resource.
-The original anarchist world that Robert Heinlein vividly portrayed in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress[1434] exerted a large influence on readers and writers. The book describes a lunar society oppressed by the Authority, an Earth-based governing entity that controls and exploits its satellite colony. Heinlein’s characters explain the “Rational Anarchist” society of the Loonies; they unspool the whys and hows of their inevitable (and, per the genre, inevitably successful) revolution. Heinlein delivers plenty of setbacks, plot twists, and other trappings of stagecraft as only he can, of course. But far more than the style, the ideas in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress influenced the political science-flavored science fiction (poli-sci-fi as a wag might have it) that followed.
-J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night forecasts an America collapsing from the economic effects of an inflated currency and the political effects of a grotesquely overgrown police state.[1435] The protagonist, Elliot Vreeland, helps the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre overthrow the state and launch a free-market, individualist-anarchist society in its place. Regardless of its merits as literature or political philosophy, it makes anarchism seem cool, fun, and totally doable, man.
-Vernor Vinge’s entry in this sampler of notable anarchist sci-fi, The Ungoverned,[1436] zeroes in on a problem especially salient in anarchist thinking: how to defend a stateless society against statist attack. Set in a post-United States America, the story finds the Republic of New Mexico invading a peaceful anarcho-capitalist society in neighboring (areas making up what was formerly known as the state of) Kansas. Though the clever technological tricks deployed by the prickly defenders play vital roles in driving away the attackers and achieving justice, Vinge takes care to show that good business relations and basic human decency do what mere gadgets cannot: preserve self-governance against enemies within and without.
-Neal Stephenson offers a notably well-realized, theoretically robust, and vastly entertaining species of the poly-sci-fi genus. Though never set forth explicitly and in full, Stephenson’s vision of the future of government appears in the background of several separate and largely unrelated stories, all of which evidently take place in roughly the same fictional universe.[1437] In this universe, rising inflation encourages the widespread abandonment of fiat currency in favor of new, untraceable, digital alternatives. States find it impossible to tax online transactions and, starved of revenue from the largest and most vibrant part of the economy, collapse. In the place of states grows a patchwork of voluntary governments, some standalone and built from the bottom-up, some organized as franchise-organized quasi-national entities (FOQNEs), and many assembled into the First Distributed Republic.[1438]
-Inquiring minds can only wonder whether Stephenson has private notes detailing his forecast and explaining its theoretical foundations—one can only wonder, and hope. In the meantime, he offers an evocative picture of life in his braver, newer world. Consider this scene from his breakout novel, Snow Crash. Stephenson presents the scene from the point of view of the novel’s heroine, Y.T., a 15-year-old Kourier—a freelance delivery ninja who rides a powered, smartwheeled skateboard-ish plank. Y.T. has been kidnapped and held hostage by L. Bob Rife and his henchman, Tony. They wait within a repurposed Soviet helicopter, its blades powering up for take-off. The gunship sits on the Enterprise nuclear aircraft carrier, now a privately owned and operated yacht/warship.
-Another man duck-walks across the flight deck, in mortal fear of the whirling rotor blades, and climbs in. He’s about sixty, with a dirigible of white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
-“Hello, everyone,” he says cheerfully. “I don’t think I’ve met all of you. Just got here this morning and now I’m on my way back again!”
-“Who are you?” Tony says.
-The new guy looks crestfallen. “Greg Ritchie,” he says.
-Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. “President of the United States.”[1439]
-Greg Ritchie disappears from the story a few pages later when a horde of Kouriers, summoned by Y.T., drags the helicopter out of the sky with electromagnetic harpoons before “overwhelming and disarming” the President.[1440] You can always count on Stephenson to put on a show. Here, he sends a message, too. The President of the United States, in former times the most powerful man on Earth, falls prey to pacifying children in this future anarchy.
-In both Snow Crash and his later book, Diamond Age,[1441] Stephenson describes distributed republics— fluid governments that range across the world, occupying many various places at various times and following wherever their citizen-customers go. He presents these as for-profit enterprises, such as Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchise,[1442] or as shattered remnants of former nation-states, such as the leftover bits of the former United States, now known as Fedland. Stephenson portrays the former as tough but fair and, perhaps more important, good value for the crypto-buck. He depicts the latter as a pathetically shrunken relic, psychotically obsessed with false order.
-In Snow Crash’s future Los Angeles, Fedland occupies an area that “used to be the VA Hospital and a bunch of other Federal buildings; now it has condensed into a kidney-shaped lozenge that wraps around the 405.”[1443] Over the course of several pages, as if to a soundtrack of kazoos, Stephenson replicates a lengthy memorandum, straight from the administration of Fedland, detailing intra-office policies for bathroom tissue distribution units (i.e., BTDUs, aka “rolls”).[1444] Lesser authors criticize via numbing bombast; Stephenson kills with mordant humor.
-As he describes Fedland, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, and other FOQNEs, Stephenson offers a veritable bestiary of governing entities. He shows them in their natural environments, jostling for market share against a backdrop of raw, ungoverned, and spectacularly cinematographic lawlessness. Anarchy, at least in these early days of Stephenson’s post-state world, is not at all peaceful. But then again, neither is the world—adroitly depicted in Stephenson’s superlative Cryptonomicon—in which states still run things.[1445]
-It matters more, once you strip out the engaging characters, gripping incidents, and special effects, that Stephenson depicts a plausible route from here to anarchy-ish (the qualifying suffix added in recognition that states still survive, though much diminished, in his version of the future). Stephenson moreover makes a fair case that life would go on, in many ways better than before, and at all events in a much grander style, in a world with a lot less statism. If anarchy does that well in the real world, we might end up both better off and better entertained.
-*** III. Statism as Speculative Bubble
-No less than tulip bulbs or shares in the French Mississippi Company, no less than dot-com initial public offerings (IPOs) or blockchain-based initial coin offerings (ICOs), the state qua institution has entered the late stages of an expansion—collapse cycle. Subsection III. A. documents the reality that governments have in recent decades done and promised far beyond what they can afford, resulting in overweening authoritarianism and inevitably unsustainable debt. Subsection III.B. discusses factors that might prick the statist bubble—cryptocur- rencies, most likely—and the form of its demise—more of a rapid and largely controllable slump than a violent explosion.
-**** A. The Expansion of Statism
-More than a few theorists have proclaimed the end days of statism. The most ambitious such forecasts have not been completely borne out, to put it mildly. Marx’s prediction of an international communist revolution leading to a classless and therefore stateless utopia provides a case in point.[1446] Informed and focused forecasts have done rather better at anticipating government train wrecks, however. And sometimes the signs of a crash loom so large that nobody can miss them.
-Ronald Reagan correctly not only predicted the downfall of the most statist empire on Earth but also named the cause, maintaining that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”[1447] That was an extreme case, as the subsequent dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated. Do the evident tremblings of the global body politic presage another political upheaval?
-Statism in general certainly seems to have reached new heights of power. For decades, states have wielded armaments sufficient by most accounts to kill billions and disrupt if not destroy modern civilization.[1448] The United States routinely monitors the supposedly private communications of its citizens with little regard for supposedly inalienable constitutional rights.[1449]
-States abroad show even less regard for their subjects. The government of India has in apparent disregard of its own Supreme Court compelled residents to undergo biometric identification in order to link each to a taxable identity.[1450] China’s monitoring programs go even farther, including surveillance of public spaces using automated real-time recognition programs and social credit ratings that punish or reward even minor dissent by limiting access to public and private services.[1451] The People’s Republic also employs mass detention, re-education, and work camps to house tens of thousands of people the government regards not as explicitly guilty of any crime but merely as insufficiently devoted to the state.[1452] Other governments doubtless watch with interest, attracted to the prospect of letting machines take over the troublesome business of compelling their subjects’ obedience to official edicts.
-At the same time that the state grasps for new powers, its financial foundations crumble. To judge from the United States’ own cold, hard numbers, the strongest government on Earth will soon go broke. The Governmental Accountability Office (GAO), which serves as something like the financial conscience of the U.S. government, explains why current spending levels are “unsustainable”: “Debt held by the public [i.e., federal debt] increased from $15.8 trillion (or 77 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)) at the end of fiscal year 2018 to $16.8 trillion (or 79 percent of GDP) at the end of fiscal year 2019. By comparison, debt has averaged 46 percent of GDP since 1946.The debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to surpass its historical high of 106 percent,” racked up by spending on World War II, a bit after the year 2030 on the GAO’s accounting.[1453]
-Around 2030, even if taxes managed to capture 100 percent of all wealth generated in the United States, not enough would come in to pay down the federal debt. From there, the slippery slope leads ever downward to fiscal ruin. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concurs, pegging 2028 as the year in which federal debt held by the public will exceed GDP.[1454] Among the unhappy consequences:
- - Federal spending on interest payments on that debt will increase substantially, especially because interest rates are projected to rise over the next few years.
- - Because federal borrowing reduces total saving in the economy over time, the nation’s capital stock will ultimately be smaller, pulling down productivity and total wages.
- - Lawmakers will have less flexibility to use tax and spending policies to respond to unexpected challenges.
- - The likelihood of a fiscal crisis in the United States will increase. Investors will become less willing to finance the government’s borrowing unless they are compensated with very high interest rates; if that happens, interest rates on federal debt will rise suddenly and sharply.[1455]
-Granted, matters have not quite yet reached the point of crisis. But who believes that U.S. politics will change so much between now and 2030 as to inaugurate a new era of long-term, prudent, financially sound planning? Nor is the United States alone in facing a grim fiscal forecast; the National Intelligence Council (NIC) foresees the same sort of economic ruin for governments across the developed world.[1456] The private, non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics sums up the consensus:
-<quote>
-That government debt will grow to dangerous and unsustainable levels in most advanced and many emerging economies over the next 25 years—if there are not changes in current tax rates or government benefit programs in retirement and health care—is virtually beyond dispute.[1457]
-</quote>
-That “if” clause offers a way to dodge disaster, of course. But again, internationally as well as domestically, does anyone reasonably expect the current generation of states to swear off buying votes through deficit spending? The recent and enduring riots among les gilets jaune in France and elsewhere throughout the European Union suggests only one answer: Non.[1458] Everybody wants something for nothing. But those who demand more benefits and lower taxes from fiscally failing states stand to get nothing at all—except more trouble, as states lash back at protesters. Thus begin vicious cycles, and thus rise the sorts of social whirlwinds that race before great storms of social change.
-**** B. The Collapse of Statism
-Suppose that governments worldwide face severe financial crises in the next few decades. What will finally prick the expanding bubble of public debt? And when it does pop, will statism explode with fatal effect or gently slump into irrelevance?
-Most forecasters foresee the next revolution taking place not so much in the streets as on the network; tomorrow’s revolutionaries will succeed not by taking over the government but by leaving it behind. Stephenson offers a characteristically entertaining version of how the next revolution might happen—or at least how it might get going—in “The Great Simo- lean Caper.”[1459] The caper involves a family in peril, rival brothers, a conspiracy by the U.S. government, a counter-conspiracy by the First Distributed Republic, and a scheme to convince the public to abandon fiat money in favor of CryptoCredits, an untaxable virtual currency. The story ends before that great virtual exodus begins, but Stephenson’s later books make clear what his version of the Promised Land looks like (hint: not very statist).[1460]
-Employing a style more functional than entertaining, the NIC offers a remarkably similar forecast in one of several possible scenarios—the one for “Nonstate World”—that it projects as a possibility for 2030.[1461] In the NIC’s forecast, “[t]he nation-state does not disappear, but countries increasingly organize and orchestrate ‘hybrid’ coalitions of state and nonstate actors which shift depending on the issue.”
-Despite the scenario’s name, states have not disappeared in “Nonstate World.” They remain and, though they face new struggles, only the baddest (because authoritarian) and biggest (because too unwieldy) face existential threats. Smaller jurisdictions do rather nicely in “Nonstate World.”[1462] The net result, at least compared to the more dire alternatives considered by NIC: “The world is ... more stable and socially cohesive.”[1463]
-To judge from trends already well under way, “Nonstate World” (more accurately, “Less- State World”) looks rather more likely than a blandly smooth continuation of the present-day world of relatively large and cohesive states. As documented in Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations, special jurisdictions have for some decades been turning formerly uniform countries into complicated skeins of overlapping and sometimes mutually exclusive rules.[1464] In nearly 75 percent of all countries, and in at least 4,000 locations worldwide (arguably more than 10,000), these special jurisdictions have splintered the authority of the state, creating venues for the express purpose of trying out better methods of governance.[1465] Prompted by economic migrants seeking asylum as refugees, moreover, states have increasingly begun splitting their borders, and now also their interiors, into special international zones, creating areas within their territories geographically, but outside the scope of many of their laws.[1466] The result: an environment ripe for rapid change.
-What will trigger the most rapid and turbulent, if not violent, phase in the collapse of the state? The late Timothy C. May, Intel scientist and industry sage, long ago (in Internet years) foretold that technological developments—advances in computer networks and specifically encryption—would inevitably doom the state:
-A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner … Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering … These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.[1467]
-Though May did not exactly rue these developments, he viewed his preferences as irrelevant to their inevitability.
-The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration .... But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.[1468]
-May hedged his bets on when the events he projected would take place[1469] and said little more about the mechanism than that cryptography would hide virtual lawbreakers from local law enforcement so that “a kind of ‘regulatory arbitrage’. [could] be used to avoid legal roadblocks.”[1470] More recent analysts offer up-to-date and fuller versions of the story, but the overall narrative remains the same: high-tech will outcompete old statism in the market to serve citizen-customers, initiating an exodus from centralized coercive governments to distributed and consent-rich ones.[1471]
-At one time, it seemed that Bitcoin might offer a fast escape from fiat currency and statist rule.[1472] The bloom has faded on that particular rose, but new and potentially better cryptogovernance services continue to appear. The next section sketches the sort of world these might create.
-*** IV. Anarchism from the Bits Up
-How would a world with less and less statism work? Locally, the same human nature that works now to keep families, peer groups, and private institutions going would continue to do so. But at larger scales the crypto-anarchist world promises to outgrow—one might say transcend—statism. How? To summarize the views of a various commentators in their own favored terminology: What central planners do in the state using coercive force, open-source protocols will do in permissionless networks using distributed ledger databases and public key cryptography.
-That packs a lot of technical assumptions into a few obscure words. In practical effect, it would most likely mean using digital telecommunications devices to buy governing services such as vehicle registration, business formation, and (crucially) banking from an open network of providers, instead of having those services provided in real space by a provider that monopolizes services within a defined geographic territory. That kind of crypto-anarchist utopia would not differ much from the present world in outward appearance. Functionally, though, it would run on entirely different code, computer and legal.
-Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies already challenge the state’s monopoly on money. Newer blockchain-based services offer private alternatives to other state functions, including dispute resolution,[1473] registration of property interests,[1474] and even citizenship of a sort.[1475] Computer code has begun entering terrain formerly reached only by legislative code. How far will the process go?
-Edan Yago predicts “semi-independent alternatives to the nation-state itself.”[1476] And he is hardly alone. Max Borders foresees “an upgrade to our social operating system” and calls on us “to imagine jurisdictions as being pulled away from terra firma and standing armies. It’s cloud governance and thus also cloud community.”[1477] Melanie Swan sums up the emerging (virtual-) world view: “Blockchain-based governance systems could offer a range of services traditionally provided by governments, all of which could be completely voluntary, with user-citizens opting in and out at will.”[1478]
-This revolution eschews violence, and does not even directly challenge existing institutions. It instead aims to grow alongside state structures, interfacing only when and if necessary and then on terms that serve the network. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, says he aims to build a “completely parallel kind of world that’s totally separate from the existing one.. [T]he goal is definitely to help improve the mainstream world, but we’re on a different track.”[1479] Toward that end, the Ethereum network offers the prospect of a governance system in the cloud with payments made in the local cryptocurrency, Ether, and services including identification, banking, and even health care. States hardly enter the picture—very much by design.
-Bitnation claims to offer a software package that would-be “Citizens” can download and use to join the “Decentralized Opt-In Jurisdiction” of a purely online “nation” (or to create an entirely new one from scratch).[1480] As the capitalization and quote marks suggest, Bitnation gives these terms special (and much diluted) meanings. There is little reason to think that a Bitnation “Passport” would get a “Citizen” of any virtual “Nation” through any traditional port of entry. Bitnation also claims to offer services such as party identification and reputation scoring, peer-to- peer arbitration, and notarization of legal documents.[1481] These services do not seem to have seen significant use, leaving Bitnation’s generous promises and bold predictions largely untested. Despite those caveats, the project offers a vision of how distributed governance might actually work and has begun crawling toward making it a reality (inasmuch as reality properly applies to an entirely virtual community). Whatever the first real distributed non-state government looks like, it probably will include parts not radically different from those painted in Bitnation’s pretend version.
-All that assumes, of course, that distributed governments in the cloud do not, like clouds themselves in the physical world, melt into thin air. That seems the likely fate of many cryptochallengers to the state. Consider, for instance, the first digital autonomous organization (Genesis DAO). A coding bug threw Genesis DAO into a governance crisis so severe that the protocol’s founders had to split the community into two separate and irreconcilable parts by implementing a “hard fork” in the underlying protocol.[1482]
-Recall, too, that all the many glowing predictions of governments sustained solely by bits assume these new polities will not fall prey to the same sorts of problems that have long troubled more solid ones. It may turn out, to the surprise of people who have grown more accustomed to staring at screens than into eyes, that computer code cannot do all the things necessary for human governance. Perhaps working communities need more than telecommunication to create friendships, defy orders, detect treason, show mercy, and do all the other things, good and bad, that shape human governance.[1483]
-Another caveat: visions of crypto-anarcho-capitalist utopias tend to downplay the efficacy of nation-states in combating competitors. States of one form or another have been around for millennia; modern ones for about 500 years. Statists count the world’s richest and wisest among their number. They have powerful incentives to resist challenges to their rule. The People’s Republic of China has only begun to explore the potential of technologies designed to control whole populations. Technology can serve crypto-anarchists or uber-statists. Who will control the future of governance remains uncertain.
-*** V. Conclusion: The Government of the Future?
-Brazil’s bright but seemingly elusive potential earned it a label at once both uplifting and wistful: “The country of the future.”[1484] Unwilling to let irony speak for itself, some wags feel compelled to add “and it always will be.”[1485] The same label might well describe anarchy: “The government of the future.” Must anarchy always remain, like Brazil in the eyes of the wags, nothing more than an imaginary ideal? No; anarchy exists here and now.
-Anarchy is not an ideal form of government too good for our imperfect world. Quite the contrary. When understood as the absence of statism, anarchy pervades social life. It appears in the countless voluntary acts of courtesy, kindness, and grace, from the trifling to the heroic, that fill the better part of human relations.[1486] The food that parents place before their children; the gifts that friends exchange on special (or even ordinary) occasions; the tidings shared between neighbors, co-workers, and strangers—these kinds of connections, far more than regulation, taxation, or conscription, make social life sociable. These alone give social life ... life.
-Humans once lived in anarchy only—anarchy both in the sense of statelessness and of chaos. They left both conditions in one move, entering the servitude of statism to escape the chaos of human and natural violence. Those who formed the first states instituted governments powerful enough to kill or to save. Some doubtless meant well; many likely meant ill. Regardless, states rose and persisted. But recent thinking suggests that statism is not the only way to mitigate human wickedness and natural disaster. It may well turn out, despite the seeming paradox, that anarchy offers a more harmonious, peaceful, and orderly way of life.
-The interesting question is not whether humans can live together without the threat of institutionalized coercion looming in the background. They did so long before the state arose, have continued doing so since, and will keep at it if ever statism disappears. Anarchy is not the government of the future only, but of the past and present, too.
-<center>
-<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
-</center>
-This chapter addressed the question “What is the future of anarchy?” As the discussion revealed, the forecast for anarchy is not a question of if but of how much; not a question of when but how quickly; and not a question of why in any sense at all. In answer to those questions, the chapter concludes with this prediction:
-<quote>
-Anarchy in the sense of stateless governance will increase gradually in scale and scope until around 2030, at which time many and major states will fail financially. They will consequently abandon many former powers and services, some of which consent-rich distributed economic systems will adopt. Despite political turbulence and scattered local outbreaks of chaos, this process will generate significant and widely distributed improvements in human freedom, prosperity, and well-being.
-</quote>
-Even beyond the usual caveats that should accompany any prediction—including the limits of human cognition, an uncaring and capricious nature, and the vagaries of fate—two wild cards bear particular note. First, because simple math foretells that the great statist bubble must pop around 2030, the moment of crisis will tend to work its way backwards, from the future to the present. Panic will arise when pressure to avoid the looming disaster overwhelms the exits, so to speak. This will cause its own disaster, like those crushed in a crowd fleeing a burning assembly, sometime before 2030.
-Second, given that many of the fiscal woes of nation-states can be traced back to states’ promises to support increasingly elderly populations, the advent of age-reversing therapies might alter extant political bargains enough to throw guesses about future trends to the wind.[1487] Saving humans, the greatest resource,[1488] from senescence, the universal scourge of humankind, would generate wealth, financial and cultural, beyond measure. In that happy event, statism would not have to crash in financial ruin. It might crash or wither just the same, of course, but for other reasons and by means of other, presumably less violent, means.
-Finally, to answer the question “What is the future of anarchy?” in less clinical terms: “Most likely, and with any luck, more.” In other words, we might reasonably hope that the future will bring less institutionalized coercion and more mutual consent, less hate, and more love.
-*** Acknowledgements
-Thanks go to Gary Chartier, Alec Isaac, Sarah Skwire, Eric Hennigan, Boris Karpa, Fred Curtis Moulton, Jr., James Stacey Taylor, Anselm Hook, Matt Gilliland, Tennyson McCalla, Zoe Miller, Monty Cosma, and Rob Nielsen. The views expressed here do not represent those of any principal, associate, or agent of the author.
-[1398] See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A. M. Henderson and Parsons (Oxford: OUP 1947 [1922]) 154 (offering the standard definition of the state).
-[1399] See Joseph Heath, “Methodological Individualism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information 2015), [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/]] [[https://plato.stanford.edu][archives/spr2015/entries/methodological-individualism/]].
-[1400] See, for example, John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (Farnham: Ashgate 2008) 111—32.
-[1401] See, for example, Michael Bakunin, “Critique of the Marxist Theory of the State,” Michael Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage 1971) 327, available at [[https://libcom.org][https://libcom.org/files/Bakunin%]] [[https://libcom.org][20on%20Anarchy%20(1971).pdf]] (“We, the revolutionary anarchists .... are the enemies of the State and all forms of the statist principle.”)
-[1402] Those qualify more as philokaosists (lovers of chaos) than anarchists (opposers of rulers).
-[1403] See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale UP 2010); James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale UP 2018).
-[1404] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday 1959) 29.
-[1405] Marx and Engels 29.
-[1406] See Section IV, below.
-[1407] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Excerpts from The German Ideology,” Feuer 254.
-[1408] Frederick Engels, “Socialism Utopian and Scientific,” trans. Edward Aveling, Feuer 106. Original emphasis.
-[1409] Friedrich Engels, “Excerpt from The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Feuer 394.
-[1410] Engels, “Excerpt from The Origin.”
-[1411] Vladimir Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Essential Works of Marxism, ed. Arthur P. Mendel (New York: Bantam 1961) 113 (quoting Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). Original emphasis.
-[1412] Lenin 112—3.
-[1413] Lenin 115. Original emphasis.
-[1414] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic 1974).
-[1415] Nozick 15–7.
-[1416] Nozick 119.
-[1417] See, for example, several articles collected in the special issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (Winter 1977) by Randy E. Barnett, Roy A. Childs, John T. Sanders, and Murray Rothbard. See also George H. Smith, “Justice Entrepreneurship In A Free Market,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3 (Winter 1979): 405–26.
-[1418] David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 3d ed. (Charleston: CreateSpace 2015).
-[1419] Friedman 53–60.
-[1420] Friedman 67–9.
-[1421] Friedman 99–100.
-[1422] Friedman 110–6.
-[1423] Friedman 131–9.
-[1424] Friedman 70–2.
-[1425] Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law, 2d ed. (Oxford: OUP 2014).
-[1426] Barnett 284–5.
-[1427] Barnett 286–90
-[1428] Barnett 294–7.
-[1429] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper 1998 [1932]).
-[1430] George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet 2008 [1949]).
-[1431] Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic 2008); Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic 2009); Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic 2010).
-[1432] See Marlon Lieber and Daniel Zamora, “Rebel Without a Cause,” Jacobin, Jan. 16, 2016, [[http://www.jacobinmag.com][www.jacobin]] [[http://www.jacobinmag.com][mag.com/2016/01/hunger-games-review-capitalism-revolution-mockingjay-suzanne-collins]] (arguing that the heroism of the lead character, Katniss, “ultimately rests not on her bow and arrow skills or her role in the rebellion, but in her total rejection of politics”).
-[1433] J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to Christopher Tolkien, Nov. 29, 1943 [no. 52], Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (New York: Houghton 1995) 63.
-[1434] Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Putnam 1966).
-[1435] J. Neil Shulman, Alongside Night (New York: Crown 1979).
-[1436] Vernor Vinge, The Ungoverned (Wake Forest: Baen 1985), [[http://www.baen.com][www.baen.com/Chapters/1416520724/]] [[http://www.baen.com][1416520724___4.htm]].
-[1437] Neal Stephenson, “The Great Simolean Caper,” Time, March 1, 1995, [[http://web.archive.org][web.archive.org/web/]] [[http://web.archive.org][20071226061705/www.time.com:80/time/magazine/article/0,9171,982610–1,00.html]]; Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam 1995); Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Del Rey 1992).
-[1438] “The Diamond Age,” Wikipedia, [[https://en.wikipedia.org][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age]] (May 24, 2020).
-[1439] Stephenson, Crash 506.
-[1440] Stephenson, Crash 541.
-[1441] Stephenson, Crash.
-[1442] Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchise is the “grandaddy” of the FOQNEs. Stephenson, Crash 54.
-[1443] Stephenson, Crash 208.
-[1444] Stephenson, Crash 335—40.
-[1445] Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon 1999).
-[1446] See Subsection II.B., above.
-[1447] Ronald Reagan, “Ronald Reagan Address to British Parliament” (June 8. 1982), The History Place, [[http://www.historyplace.com][www.]] [[http://www.historyplace.com][historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-parliament.htm]].
-[1448] For a survey of the estimates of the effects of an all-out nuclear war, see “Nuclear Holocaust,” Wikipedia, [[https://en.wikipedia.org][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust]].
-[1449] Patrick Toomey, “The NSA Continues to Violate Americans’ Internet Privacy Rights,” ACLU National Security Project, August 22, 2018, [[http://www.aclu.org][www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/nsa-con]] [[http://www.aclu.org][tinues-violate-americans-internet-privacy]].
-[1450] Vindu Goel, “‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances,” New York Times, April 7, 2018, [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/technology/india-id-aadhaar.html]]; “India’s Biometric Identity Scheme Should Not Be Compulsory,” The Economist, April 15, 2017, [[http://www.economist.com][www.economist.com/lead]] [[http://www.economist.com][ers/2017/04/15/indias-biometric-identity-scheme-should-not-be-compulsory]].
-[1451] “China Has Turned Xinjiang into a Police State Like No Other,” The Economist, May 31, 2018, [[http://www.economist.com][www.]] [[http://www.economist.com][economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turned-xinjiang-into-a-police-state-like-no-other]].
-[1452] Maya Kosoff, “China’s Terrifying Surveillance State Looks a Lot Like America’s Future,” Vanity Fair, July 2018, [[http://www.vanityfair.com][www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/china-surveillance-state-artificial-intelligence]].
-[1453] Government Accounting Office, “The Nation’s Fiscal Health,” [[http://www.gao.gov][www.gao.gov/assets/710/705327.pdf]] (March 2020).
-[1454] Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2018—2028 (April 2018): [[http://www.cbo.gov][www.cbo.gov/]] [[http://www.cbo.gov][system/files/2019-03/54918-Outlook-3.pdf]].
-[1455] Congressional Budget Office, Outlook 6.
-[1456] National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2012) 42, [[http://www.dni.gov][www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf]].
-[1457] Joseph E. Gagnon and Marc Hinterschweiger, The Global Outlook for Government Debt over the Next Twenty- Five Years: Implications for the Economy and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute 2011) 2, [[https://piie.com][https://piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/6215/iie6215.pdf]].
-[1458] See “‘Gilets jaunes’: le gouvernement face a la mobilisation,” Le Figaro, [[http://www.lefigaro.fr][www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/]] [[http://www.lefigaro.fr][dossier/hausse-des-carburants-manifestation-des-gilets-jaunes]] (visited 17 Dec. 2018) (collecting stories relating to the Yellow Vest movement).
-[1459] Stephenson, “Caper.”
-[1460] See Subsection II.C., above.
-[1461] National Intelligence Council xiv.
-[1462] Though the NIC does not go quite that far, it foresees “increasing designation of special economic and political zones within countries” (131).
-[1463] National Intelligence Council xiv.
-[1464] Tom W. Bell, Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations (Cambridge: CUP 2018) 14–27.
-[1465] Bell, Government 23, Figure 1.2–2; Bell, Government 24, Figure 1.2–3.
-[1466] Tom W. Bell, “Special International Zones in Practice and Theory,” Chapman Law Review 21 (2018) 273–302, [[http://www.chapman.edu][www.chapman.edu/law/_files/publications/clr-22-1-Bell.pdf]].
-[1467] Timothy C. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2001) 62, [[https://monoskop.org][https://monoskop.org/images/4/42/Ludlow_Peter_]] [[https://monoskop.org][Crypto_Anarchy_Cyberstates_and_Pirate_Utopias.pdf]].
-[1468] Ibid.
-[1469] Timothy C. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” Ludlow 75 (“I am making no bold predictions that these changes will sweep the world anytime soon.”).
-[1470] May, “Crypto Anarchy” 70.
-[1471] Max Borders, The Social Singularity (Austin: Social Evolution 2018) 51–54, 72.
-[1472] See, for example, Vijay Boyapati, “The Bullish Case for Bitcoin,” Medium, May 2, 2018, [[https://medium.com][https://medium.]] [[https://medium.com][com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 ]](“[A]s fiat monies continue to follow their historical trend toward eventual worthlessness, Bitcoin will become an increasingly popular choice for global savings to flee to,” making it a “generally accepted medium of exchange.”).
-[1473] See Kleros, [[https://kleros.io][https://kleros.io/(offering]] blockchain-based dispute resolution services).
-[1474] Andrew Nelson, “De Soto Inc.: Where Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain,” Blockchain Magazine, March 5, 2018, [[https://bitcoinmagazine.com][https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/de-soto-inc-where-eminent-domain-meets-]] [[https://bitcoinmagazine.com][blockchain/]]
-[1475] See Bitnation, [[https://tse.bitnation.co][https://tse.bitnation.co/]].
-[1476] Edan Yago, “Bit by Antiquated Bit, Democracy is Being Replaced by Crypto,” Wired, Dec. 19, 2018, [[http://www.wired.co.uk][www.wired.co.uk/article/crypto-democracy-oligarchs]].
-[1477] Borders 117.
-[1478] Melanie Swan, Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly 2015) 48.
-[1479] Nick Paumgarten, “The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust,” New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2018, [[http://www.newyorker.com][www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/the-prophets-of-cryptocurrency-survey-the-boom-and-]] [[http://www.newyorker.com][bust]].
-[1480] Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof et al., Pangea Jurisdiction and Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT), April 2017, [[https://github.com][https://github.com/Bit-Nation/Pangea-Docs/blob/master/BITNATION%20Pangea%20Whitepaper%]] [[https://github.com][202018.pdf]].
-[1481] Tempelhof et al. 5.
-[1482] See Samuel Falkon, “The Story of the DAO—Its History and Consequences,” Medium, Dec. 24, 2017, [[https://medium.com][https://medium.com/swlh/the-story-of-the-dao-its-history-and-consequences-71e6a8a551ee]]; The Attacker, “An Open Letter,” Pastebin, June 18, 2016, [[https://pastebin.com][https://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG]]. See also Eliza Mik, “Smart Contracts: Terminology, Technical Limitations and Real World Complexity,” Law, Innovation and Technology 9.2 (2017): 269–300 (voicing skepticism that networks of smart contracts will avoid the problems that plague typical economic and legal systems).
-[1483] Marcella Atzori, Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: Is the State Still Necessary?, Dec. 1, 2015, [[https://ssrn.com][https://ssrn.com/abstract=2709713]].
-[1484] See, for example, Stefan Zweig, Brazil: Land of the Future (New York: Viking Press, 1942).
-[1485] “Talk:Brazil,” Wikiquote, Feb. 28, 2017, [[https://en.wikiquote.org][https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Brazil]].
-[1486] See Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: OUP 2004).
-[1487] Bhupendra Singh et al., “Reversing Wrinkled Skin and Hair Loss in Mice by Restoring Mitochondrial Function,” Cell Death & Disease 9.735 (July 20, 2018), [[https://doi.org][https://doi.org/10.1038/s41419-018-0765-9]].
-[1488] See Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton: Princeton UP 1998).
-* Part IV: Critique and Alternatives
-** 23. Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property
-*Jesse Spafford*
-<quote>
-Authority dresses itself in two principal forms: the political form, that is the State; and the economic form, that is private property.
-<right>
-Sébastien Faure[1489]
-</right>
-</quote>
-*** I. Introduction
-While anarchists stand uniformly opposed to the state, opinions diverge when it comes to what form the economy should take.[1490] Within the world of contemporary analytic political philosophy, proponents of anarchism tend to be either individualist anarchists or anarcho-capitalists, with both varieties of anarchists maintaining that individuals can (a) unilaterally acquire full private property rights over natural resources (though some individualist anarchists exclude land from this category) and (b) exchange goods and services in a market. However, outside of academic philosophy, the majority of self-identified anarchists endorse some variety of social anarchism that rejects both markets and the private property rights on which they rest.[1491]
-This rejection of private property and markets cleanly demarcates social anarchism from its market-friendly counterparts. However, one might wonder whether the position is genuinely distinct from the socialist views to which social anarchism was supposed to serve as a libertarian alternative. After all, Marxists have been heavily influenced by Friedrich Engels’ insistence that a communist society would be a stateless one.[1492] And, while most socialists do envision the state playing a prominent role in managing the economy, there are several influential exceptions who argue that socialism is best realized via the dissolution of top-down state control in favor of radically expanded, bottom-up democracy—a vision that many social anarchists similarly endorse.[1493]
-This chapter argues that even when socialists and social anarchists affirm the same conclusions, the latter arrive at those conclusions in a distinctively anarchist way. Specifically, the chapter presents an argument against private property that begins from premises that all varieties of anarchists should be tempted to embrace, namely, those advanced by Michael Huemer in his recent argument for anarchism (or, more precisely, anarcho-capitalism).[1494] It then uses these premises— coupled with Huemer’s intuition-driven approach to ethical reasoning—to demonstrate that the non-consensual appropriation of unowned resources is theoretically unacceptable. In doing so, it provides a novel path to anti-capitalist conclusions that both expresses and defends the social anarchist philosophical position.
-*** II. Huemer’s Anarchism
-Huemer’s argument against the state begins with the premise that the use of coercion—which Huemer stipulatively defines as the use or threat of physical force—demands special justification.[1495] Given that the laws imposed by the state are backed by the threat of force, it then follows that special justification must be given to legitimate these laws. To illustrate this point, Huemer considers the case of the private individual who takes it upon herself to start levying taxes on her neighbors, coercively regulating their behavior, and waging war against other neighborhoods.[1496] He argues that the vigilante’s behavior is intuitively impermissible, as there is no adequate justification for her coercive behavior. However, most people see there being no moral problem when these same actions are carried out by an agent of the state. Thus, Huemer suggests that most people tacitly assume that there is something special about the state (as opposed to its actions) that justifies its use of coercion.[1497]
-This special property is the state’s presumed possession of political authority—a moral status that grants its possessor both a right to coercively rule and a right to be obeyed.[1498] Specifically, Huemer suggests that these rights are governed by five principles: the rights are general in the sense that they apply to (almost) all citizens; the rights are particular to the citizens and residents of the governed territory; the rights obtain independently of the content of the laws enacted (excluding, perhaps, seriously unjust laws); the rights are comprehensive in the sense that the authority has the right to govern a wide array of activities; and the state is supreme such that no other agent has these same rights.[1499] It is this pair of fairly unrestricted rights that the vigilante lacks and the state purportedly possesses, with this supposed difference explaining why only the state can permissibly use coercion to tax, regulate, and wage war.
-But what could ground these supposed rights? In virtue of what fact would the state’s use of coercion be permissible given the impermissibility of identical acts by private individuals? As Huemer notes, it is not easy to answer these questions, as many stock justifications for coercion seem, upon reflection, to be insufficient:
-<quote>
-If you have a friend who eats too many potato chips, you may try to convince him to give them up. But if he won’t listen, you may not force him to stop. If you admire your neighbor’s car, you may offer to buy it from him. But if he won’t sell, you may not threaten him with violence. If you disagree with your coworker’s religious beliefs, you may try to convert him. But if he won’t listen, you may not punch him in the nose. And so on. In common sense ethics, the overwhelming majority of reasons for coercion fail as justifications.[1500]
-</quote>
-However, while these quick justifications for the right to coerce fail, the history of political philosophy features many more sophisticated and elaborate defenses of the state’s right to coerce. In the face of this array of purported grounds for political authority, Huemer’s argumentative strategy involves identifying the most plausible and influential suggestions and arguing against each of them in turn, typically by presenting counterexamples where the purported ground of political authority obtains but the authority figure in question still seems to act impermissibly in employing coercion. Given the apparent failure of the posited accounts to ground political authority, Huemer concludes that the state thereby has no more right to be obeyed and/or enforce its edicts than a non-state actor has. Finally, he moves from this position of philosophical anarchism (i.e., the denial that the state has authority) to a defense of political anarchism wherein he argues for the abolition of the state.
-Huemer’s political anarchism rests on the proposal that all the valuable functions of the state (e.g., the provision of security) can—and should—be taken over by private associations and firms funded by voluntary market exchange rather than taxes. He, thus, expounds a distinctly anarchocapitalist version of anarchism wherein the rejection of the state’s authority is accompanied by an affirmation of private property rights. However, this chapter will argue that the same considerations and argumentative approach that lead Huemer to reject state authority also militate against the conversion of natural resources into private property via purported acts of initial appropriation. Specifically, the following sections will mimic Huemer’s argument, beginning with a discussion of the coerciveness of private property before considering—and rejecting—the most plausible posited grounds for the right to coercively enforce property claims. Given the apparent absence of an adequate ground for the right to property, the chapter concludes that those moved by Huemer’s argument against political authority ought to be social anarchists, rejecting private property along with the state.
-*** III. Private Property and Coercion
-As noted above, Huemer’s starting premise is that the activities of the state require special justification because they are coercive, with all laws resting on the threat that physical force will be employed against non-compliers. However, the same is also true of private property claims: to assert that one has the right to some object or land is to maintain that one has the right to exclude others, where that right implies the permissibility of coercive enforcement. Indeed, when the purported owner of some object says, “This is mine, you can’t touch it,” this expression includes a tacit “or else,” where what is threatened almost always includes physical force of the kind that makes her claim coercive in Huemer’s sense.
-Further, just as the state’s use of coercion demands special justification, so, too, does the enforcement of property rights. Recall that Huemer illustrates his claim about the need for special justification by drawing attention to the intuitive unacceptability of coercive state activities when those activities are carried out by a non-state actor. However, one can appropriate this strategy to highlight the troubling aspects of coercive property rights enforcement. Indeed, just as the actions of the state seem impermissible when carried out by a non-authority figure, the enforcement of property rights claims by a non-owner seems similarly unacceptable.
-To illustrate this point, consider the case of a cruise ship that docks at a previously undiscovered island. The passengers are excited to spend the day exploring the island, but, before they have a chance to disembark, one passenger runs to the end of the gangplank and declares,
-Sorry, but I have decided that this island is for my personal use only! I forbid any of you from setting foot on it—unless, of course, you pay me $50 and take off your shoes before getting off the boat.
-When the first passenger in line ignores this edict and walks onto the island, the declaration— issuer’s friends rush over and seize the “trespasser” and begin binding her wrists and ankles. She struggles a bit, but after they spray sunscreen in her eyes, she stops resisting and is carried back onto the ship and locked in one of the cabins until she agrees to stay off the island.
-If someone behaved like the declaration-issuer, she would be widely viewed as a menace and kidnapper who wrongfully denies people the freedom to go where they wish. However, when a property owner does the same thing—that is, relies on violence and the infliction of harm to protect some sphere of influence—most people don’t see any moral problem. Thus, just as people tolerate coercion when it is employed by purported authorities, they also seem willing to tolerate the coercive acts carried out by purported property owners.
-Further, note that the rights popularly ascribed to property owners strongly resemble the rights of authority ascribed to the state: they are general in the sense that they apply to all other persons who come into contact with the owner’s property (just as an authority claims to govern all those who enter its territory); they are comprehensive in the sense that the owner has the right to fully determine what happens with her property; they are particular in the sense that the property owner gets to regulate only those who come into contact with her property; and the owner is supreme in that no other agent has the same rights as she does with respect to her property. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, the rights are content-independent: whether or not a person holds a property right does not depend on what she does with the claimed resource (within the bounds of respecting others’ rights) or what effect her possession of the resource has on others. This independence doesn’t have to be absolute; for example, it may be the case that one has rights over a thing just in case no serious harm will befall others as a result of their exclusion. However, one cannot be said to genuinely own a thing if, for example, one’s rights over that thing are contingent on using it in a way that is maximally efficient or furthers some other moral end.[1501]
-For proponents of property rights, the fact that such rights share both the form and the coercive element of political authority represents something of a problem given that, as Huemer notes, it is difficult to find adequate justifications for coercion beyond consent and self-defense.[1502] Indeed, Huemer goes through the prominent proposed justifications for state coercion and argues that each fails, thereby demonstrating just how hard it is to find an adequate ground for permissible coercion. Of course, proponents of property rights have provided their own set of arguments purporting to demonstrate that property owners have the right to coercively exclude others. However, as this chapter will now argue, even the most promising of these accounts fail to adequately justify the coercion associated with private property. Thus, just as Huemer judges the state to be lacking in authority, the chapter will conclude that no one has the right to coercively enforce property claims.[1503]
-*** IV. Transformation and Control
-While it isn’t possible to consider every proposed ground for property rights, there are several popular proposals that have received the endorsement of prominent defenders of private property. If it can be shown that these accounts do not succeed, that will at least be suggestive that no such grounds can be found (though, as with proposed bases for political authority, it is possible that a successful justification might one day be found). Specifically, this chapter will consider three influential accounts of how persons acquire the right to exclude others from previously unowned natural resources, beginning with a Lockean “labor-mixing” view championed by Edward Feser.[1504] The chapter will then turn to discussing compensation-based accounts and an alternative labor-mixing account in sections V and VI.
-According to Feser, a person gains rights over previously unowned natural resources by either (a) gaining control of or (b) sufficiently modifying those resources.[1505] Thus, a homesteader who tills the soil of some unowned patch of land or builds a sizeable fence around its perimeter would thereby come to own that land. However, consideration of other cases casts doubt on Feser’s proposal. Consider, for example, the case of a person who deliberately starts a wildfire that scorches an entire forest, blackening thousands of acres of trees and earth. Suppose that a hiker then tries to enter the forest to survey the damage. May the fire-starter have the hiker imprisoned or threaten to shoot her if she does not leave the burned area? Surely not. Thus, the mere modification of land and objects seems insufficient to render coercive exclusion permissible.
-Why does Feser think otherwise? To defend his thesis, he considers various cases of resource modification and argues that the more significant the modification of the resource, the more plausible an associated ownership claim becomes. For example, he suggests that whittling a piece of driftwood plausibly grants ownership in a way that blowing air on it does not. Similarly, while pouring a can of tomato juice into the sea does not plausibly generate ownership rights, Feser contends that, in the case where one pours a large quantity of nuclear waste into a body of water such that it begins to glow bright green, “it would not be implausible in such cases to say that I have come to acquire the sea.”[1506]
-It does not seem charitable to take Feser’s contention to be that making the sea glow an irradiated green makes it plausible that one owns the sea, as this judgment would seem to run quite contrary to commonsense intuitive judgments. Rather, he is better understood as claiming that it is more plausible that one owns the sea in this case than in the tomato juice case. Indeed, the comparative nature of his claim is more clearly evinced in his description of a third case wherein he suggests that, while it would be “absurd” to think that the United States government owns Pluto (which no person has ever set foot on), it “would not be absurd for the United States government ... to claim ownership of the area of the moon’s surface on which Apollo 11 landed.”[1507]
-The claim, then, seems to be that if modification and/or control increases the plausibility of ownership, then a suitably extensive amount of modification/control is sufficient for ownership. However, an additional problem with this argument—beyond the counterexample discussed above—is that if some fact obtaining enhances the plausibility of a proposition, that might merely show that the fact is a necessary condition of that proposition being true rather than a sufficient condition. For example, the claim that someone has memorized Tolstoy’s War and Peace would be much more plausible if they had read the book at least once than if they had never heard of it. However, it does not follow that having read the book is a sufficient condition for having memorized it. Alternatively, judgments of plausibility might not track anything of moral relevance. For example, it seems much more plausible that the King of Thailand is the legitimate ruler of that country than a pediatrician from Texas. However, it does not follow that the rules of royal succession ground political authority (they are neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of such authority).
-The suggestion that control might ground the permissibility of coercive exclusion—where “control” denotes the physical ability to determine what happens to a thing (e.g., via the building of a fence or the deployment of guard dogs)—also seems to run contrary to commonsense morality.[1508] Suppose that the pushy passenger in the island case was able to quickly get ashore and repeatedly knock back the gangplank, thereby preventing other passengers from accessing the island. It does not seem that this success entitles her to then deploy violence against anyone who does manage to make it ashore. Indeed, the conclusion that she is so entitled seems to rest on an unacceptable inference from de facto to de jure control of resources. Alternatively, one might note that the right to coercively exclude is a right to use force to control a space, with this method of establishing control being what demands justification. Given this, it is unclear how appealing to the fact that control has been established via force—as Feser does when he cites the deployment of guard dogs as one means of establishing control—can ground its own permissibility.[1509]
-In response to this objection, the defender of Feser might suggest that it is the non-coercive control of some resource that grounds the permissibility of coercive control of that resource. In this way, his claim about control could be largely sustained without the problematic assertion that states of affairs can be self-justifying. However, first, the gangplank case casts doubt on the inference from non-coercive control to rightful ownership. And, second, note that the use of force to control some resource is only necessary if non-coercive forms of control prove inad- equate—i.e., one has not established control of the resource through non-coercive means alone. In other words, even if one grants that the non-coercive control of resources entails the permissibility of coercive control of those resources, any use of coercion entails the absence of such non-coercive control. Thus, there can be no instance of coercive exclusion that is permissible in virtue of there being prior non-coercive control of the resource.
-Why think that control—either coercive or non-coercive—grounds property rights? Feser provides two arguments to support this contention. First, he makes the comparative plausibility argument discussed above, citing the moon lander case as evidence that establishing control is a plausible form of initial appropriation. However, as discussed above, such comparative assessments do not establish the desired conclusion. Second, Feser argues that control is what grounds people’s self-ownership—i.e., the rights they have to use their bodies, exclude others from using their bodies, transfer these rights to their bodies, etc. He posits that what grounds these intuitively plausible rights is that we exercise control over our bodies; indeed, a person gains the rights over her body by “just ‘showing up’ and being the first to ‘take possession’” of it, with coercive enforcement of those rights then becoming permissible.[1510] Further, if establishing control is how one gains ownership rights of one’s body, why wouldn’t establishing control of a natural resource also give one rights over that resource?[1511]
-There are three quick responses that can be made to this argument. First, the argument rests on an equivocation between the kind of control one has of one’s body and the kind of control Feser associates with initial appropriation. In the case of the body, the agent exercises direct control over the body in the sense that she can manipulate the body simply by willing it to do certain things; by contrast, the control over resources Feser describes involves physically keeping others from being able to manipulate those resources, e.g., by building a fence or placing armed guards around a patch of land.[1512] However, if agential control is what makes the thesis of selfownership plausible, it is unclear why physical control would make resource ownership plausible.[1513]
-Second, even if one grants that both forms of control are equally relevant to establishing ownership, Brian McElwee persuasively argues that the plausibility of the self-ownership thesis stems not only from the fact that one controls one’s own body, but also from the facts that one feels pain and pleasure through one’s body, one needs one’s body, and one’s body is irreplaceable when it comes to satisfying this need.[1514] If these conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for having ownership of an object, then mere control of a natural resource will not suffice to establish ownership of that resource.
-Finally, if one takes seriously Feser’s control thesis, then it would seemingly follow that parents own their children. After all, assuming that agency emerges in children sometime after birth, the parents of a child are the first people to “show up and take possession” of its body. Thus, they would seemingly have the right to that body, with the agent who comes to inhabit that body being analogous to the latecomer who arrives at a patch of land that has already been fenced in.[1515] This implausible conclusion would seem to be a reductio of Feser’s argument.[1516]
-*** V. Compensation
-Rather than ground property rights in modification or control, many defenders of private property contend that some resource can be converted into private property if the exclusion is to the benefit of the excluded—or, at the very least, leaves them no worse off than they would have been in some relevant baseline scenario. Most famously, John Locke suggests that appropriation of natural resources could occur if “enough and as good” is left for others (and certain other conditions are met).[1517] Similarly, Robert Nozick argues that an act of appropriation can occur if it leaves others no worse off than they would have been in a world without private property rights.[1518] And David Schmidtz argues that appropriation of resources can occur when it prevents the destruction of the commons, as such appropriation leaves the excluded (and latecomers in particular) better off than they would have otherwise been in terms of access to those resources.[1519]
-Alternatively, many defenders of property rights appeal to the benefits that all persons derive from a system of private property, with initial appropriation then sanctioned because it is necessary for bringing about such a system. For example, Loren Lomasky argues that, given that human beings are inclined toward the pursuit of projects—and the pursuit of projects requires de facto control rights over land and resources—the possession of private property rights is a necessary condition of living a rich and meaningful life.[1520] He maintains that it is only through sustained control of claimed property that a person can effectively develop her talents, realize her plans, and express herself and her vision. Similarly, Eric Mack argues that the sustained discretionary control of natural resources plays a key role in “individuals’ living their own lives in their own chosen ways” via purposive activity.[1521] Bas van der Vossen argues that the control of resources is necessary for both “securing the necessities of life” and pursuing projects that are “central to a full and meaningful life.”[1522] And Jason Brennan, in addition to endorsing Lomasky’s proposal, argues that owning property is crucial to feeling “at home” in the world and protecting the owner’s sentimental attachments to the particular resources that she has incorporated into her life.[1523]
-However, the fact that coercion ultimately benefits some other person would not seem to be an adequate justification for that act. As an illustration of this point, consider the case of two castaways stranded on an island with minimal resources. After a few months of bare subsistence, something fortunate happens: a small motorboat washes up onto the beach. However, when the castaways attempt to climb into the boat, they quickly discover that the boat can only carry one of them, as the weight of both causes the bow to submerge. Thinking quickly, one castaway says to the other,
-You have to get out of the boat. There is only room for one of us, and I’m taking it.
-I can’t live my life here; I have goals to achieve and a family back home. I’m sorry, but you need to get back on the beach.
-Unwilling to be cowed by her pushy companion, the second castaway refuses to move, crossing her arms defiantly. In response to this refusal to comply, the first castaway declares that the second “has left her no choice” and punches her in the face, physically knocking her off the boat and leaving her bloodied on the beach. Stubbornly, the beaten castaway staggers back to the boat and again tries to climb aboard, but the first pushes her back down and quickly binds her arms and legs, as it is clear this is the only way to keep her from the boat.[1524] “I’m sorry it had to come to this,” the pushy castaway says, “But, ultimately, this is for your benefit! If I were to stay on the island, there would be many fewer resources to go around; indeed, my departure effectively doubles your wealth! So, you really have no basis for complaint here.” She then fires up the engine and motors off toward civilization.
-Does the fact that the pushy castaway leaves her companion (significantly) better off in the long run render her use of coercion permissible? Seemingly not. Repeatedly punching and temporarily confining another remains impermissible, even if those actions leave her better off all things considered. It seems clear in this case that the pushy castaway acted impermissibly. However, this assessment would apply equally to the coercion deployed by those property rights claimants: the fact that one person exercising control over some resource would make another’s life much better does not make it permissible for the former to threaten, attack, or imprison the latter as a means of controlling that resource.
-Note that this conclusion holds even when coercion generates significant benefits for both the coercer and the coerced. Indeed, in the island case, both parties benefit significantly from the
-pushy castaway’s employment of coercion, yet the described use of force still seems impermissible. Additionally, consider what Huemer says about mutually beneficial coercion:
-<quote>
-Normally, it is wrong to threaten a person with violence to force compliance with some plan of yours. This is generally true even if your plan is mutually beneficial and otherwise morally acceptable. Thus, suppose you are at a board meeting at which you and the other members are discussing how to improve your company’s sales. You know that the best way to do this is to hire the Sneaku Ad Agency. Your plan will be morally unobjectionable and highly beneficial to the company. Nevertheless, the other members are not convinced. So you pull out your handgun and order them to vote for your proposal. This behavior would be unacceptable, even though you are acting for everyone’s benefit and even though your plan is the right one.[1525]
-</quote>
-While Huemer intends this case to call into question a purported justification for state authority, it seems to apply equally to the coercive enforcement of property rights: it is wrong to use the threat of violence to force people to act in a certain way with respect to natural resources, even if that plan is otherwise unobjectionable and to everyone’s significant benefit.
-In addition to the Sneaku case, Huemer’s arguments against paternalistic coercion also bear directly on this proposed ground for property rights. Specifically, Huemer considers the case of a person who threatens another with a gun in order to get the latter to stop eating potato chips that were contributing to premature death due to heart disease. In this case, Huemer contends that the use of coercion is “indefensible” despite the fact that it would prevent significant harm from befalling the chip-eater.[1526] In other words, he takes coercion to be impermissible even if it provides a very large benefit to the coerced party. Given that the benefits of private property are almost always smaller than those accrued by the chip-eater (namely, being saved from a painful premature death), the fact that the latter cannot justify coercion implies that the former cannot either.
-Granted, Huemer also presents a case that seems to elicit the opposite intuition from his paternalism case, namely a case where coercion is used to keep a lifeboat from sinking. In this case, he suggests that the benefit of everyone not drowning justifies a person using coercion to force everyone else to bail water.[1527] However, first, one might think that there is an important disanal- ogy between lifeboat-style cases and the case of private property: while the absence of coercion in the lifeboat case results in everyone suffering severe harm, the absence of private property merely results in foregone material benefit (albeit, potentially significant benefit). Second, even if one thinks there is an analogy between the disaster that comes from not bailing water and the disaster of not having property rights, note that the general principle most plausibly derived from the lifeboat case is that coercion is permissible if (a) it is necessary to avoid severe harm and (b) that harm is much worse than the coercion and its effects. However, very few private property claims meet these jointly sufficient conditions. Thus, the most that the defender of property rights could derive from the lifeboat case is the conclusion that one could use coercion to exclude others from the bare quantity of resources necessary to ensure their survival—and only when such exclusion did not similarly imperil those excluded.
-Further, one might reasonably deny that the permissibility of coercion in such cases implies that the coercer has a genuine property right over the resources in question. Recall from Section II that one of the defining features of a property right is that it is content-independent—i.e., the right obtains largely irrespective of one’s use of the owned resource or others’ relations to it. However, if this is a defining feature of a property right, then permissible exclusion grounded in necessity will not qualify as such, as the right to coerce would immediately vanish if either (a) the coercion was no longer necessary to avoid severe harm or (b) the coerced party would suffer comparable harm from being coerced. Given that the principle of severe harm avoidance makes the permissibility of coercive exclusion contingent on a fairly narrow set of circumstances obtaining, it cannot ground any sort of genuine property right.
-*** VI. Expropriation of Labor
-The final proposal to be considered here is another neo-Lockean labor-mixing view wherein it is held that coercive exclusion is permitted when persons have labored on some natural resource. Specifically, a popular suggestion is that once a person labors on a resource, any unpermitted use or appropriation of that resource amounts to the expropriation of that person’s labor. It is then maintained that the laborer has a prior right against such expropriation, with this right grounding the permissibility of her coercively excluding others from the resource. For example, Mack argues that taking—and, presumably, using without permission—something in which a person has invested her labor is an expropriation of that labor and thereby a violation of her right to self-ownership.[1528] Indeed, he argues that taking a created thing is the same kind of expropriation of labor as forcing another to make something for one’s own benefit.[1529] Similarly, John Simmons argues that when a person works on a resource, she incorporates it into her plans such that any unpermitted use of that resource would be “a violation of [her] right to govern [herself].”[1530]
-There are two problems with this account. First, some of the same counterexamples that plague the transformation account can be repurposed to raise doubts about invested labor as a grounds for permissible coercion. Consider the forest fire case, but add in the stipulation that the fire-starter expends significant effort to start that fire—e.g., by gathering a large pile of shredded bark and kindling that she finally ignites after hours of intense labor rubbing sticks together. Now, suppose that someone seeks to hike through the scorched territory, only to be stopped by the fire-starter who, with gun drawn, says,
-If you walk through this land, that’s equivalent to you having forced me to go through all that effort for your benefit! I refuse to let you enslave me in this way, so I’ll shoot you if you set foot on the product of my labor.
-In this case, the appeal to invested labor seems inadequate to render exclusionary coercion permissible.
-It might be suggested that the fire-starter’s demand is unreasonable because the hiker moving through the forest does not preclude the fire-starter from enjoying the fruits of her own labor. Indeed, it seems more like the hiker is free-riding on the efforts of the fire-starter rather than forcing the latter to labor for her benefit. By contrast, if the hiker were to somehow take the forest away from the fire-starter, the latter would have a better claim to having been wronged in a way that warrants the use of coercion to prevent that outcome from obtaining. However, even if one were to affirm this suggestion that the fire-starter is wronged by expropriation—though not by mere free-riding—it would still be the case that an appeal to expropriation could ground only a very limited set of property rights, where those rights included a right against expropriation but not a full exclusion right (as there would be no right to exclude when others’ use of the owned thing does not preclude use by the owner).
-Further, it is unclear that invested labor makes it permissible to use coercion to prevent expropriation. Suppose, for example, that the hiker attempted to carry away some of the charcoaled byproducts of the fire. Would the fire-starter’s efforts make it permissible for her to threaten the hiker with imprisonment if the latter did not immediately return the blackened wood? Again, the answer seems to be no.
-In addition to this apparent counterexample, there is a circularity problem for any account of property rights that appeals to labor investment to ground the permissibility of coercive exclusion.
-To see this, consider the case of a vandal who receives permission from a car owner to repaint the latter’s rightfully owned car. However, suppose that, upon completing the paint job, the vandal tries to forcibly prevent the owner from driving away in the car, arguing that the owner is taking her labor, where such expropriation amounts to her having been forced to paint the car for the owner’s sole benefit. In this case, it seems clear that the vandal’s claim lacks merit and her use of coercion is impermissible.
-Why does her claim lack merit? The obvious answer is that claims about expropriation are made against a background of property rights, where those rights constrain what counts as expropriation. In this case, the car owner has both the right to exclude the vandal from laboring on her car and the independent right to use her car. Thus, while the owner waives her exclusion right, her use right persists, meaning that she acts fully within her rights when she drives away in the painted car. Given that the action that precludes the vandal from enjoying the fruits of her labor is an action to which the owner has a right, the vandal has no legitimate basis for a complaint of expropriation.[1531]
-However, if rights-protected action cannot be expropriative (as the vandal case suggests), then the expropriation justification for property rights becomes circular. Note that the proposed account maintains that some person has a right to exclude others from a labored-on resource— i.e., owns the resource in virtue of the fact she has labored on it—(if and) only if their use of that resource would expropriate the labor she has invested in that resource. But, given that property rights constrain what counts as expropriation, the other parties would be expropriating the person’s labor only if they have no right to use the resource. Further, presuming that, in the absence of property rights the world is unowned and all are at liberty to use the available natural resources, those others would lack a right to use that resource only if the original person owned the labored-on resource. Thus, on the expropriation account, it follows that some person owns a labored-on resource only if they own that labored-on resource. Given this vicious circularity, the expropriation account ought to be rejected.
-To this point, it might be objected that the vandal case involves labor on an owned object (the car) while the purported acts of initial appropriation involve labor on unowned land and resources. However, note that ownership is not a single unitary right but, rather, a bundle of rights including the rights to use, exclude, transfer, etc. Further, note that when some resource is said to be “unowned,” this means that all persons may permissibly use that resource—i.e., they have a right to use that resource. Thus, the term “unowned” is somewhat misleading, as it implies that all persons have (very) partial ownership of the resource, where such ownership involves possessing a use right but none of the other rights that come in the “full ownership” bundle. However, this means that an unowned resource is relevantly analogous to the car in the vandal case, as there the car owner has waived her exclusion right, leaving her with the same kind of partial ownership that all persons have over unowned resources. Granted, the car owner still retains some additional rights beyond the right to use (e.g., a transfer right). However, the intuitive judgment stays the same even if one modifies the case by stipulating that all such rights had been previously waived: the vandal still has no basis for complaint when the (partial) owner of the car drives off with her labor. Given this, the person who labors on some “unowned” natural resource would equally seem to have no basis for complaint when one of its many partial owners walks off with it.
-*** VII. The Anarchist Society
-The previous sections of this chapter have attempted to extend Huemer’s argument against political authority to indict private property as well, adopting his argumentative strategy and core premises to show that the coercive exclusion associated with private property is impermissible. Specifically, it has considered three of the most influential defenses of private property and argued that none succeeds in grounding the permissibility of its associated coercion. However, if this conclusion is correct, one might wonder about the specific political implications of this normative result. After all, Huemer concludes his book with a lengthy discussion of how a society might function in the absence of a state; thus, one might reasonably ask how a society might function without private property.
-In order to answer to this question, one must first determine whether all coercive control of resources is impermissible or whether certain instances of coercion are permissible, just not the kind associated with the content-independent control posited by defenders of property rights. Some egalitarian-minded social anarchists might be inclined to think that coercive exclusion from resources is permissible if it is the only way to ensure that all persons live equally good lives (barring, perhaps, inequalities that result from certain sorts of negligent choices). To see what is appealing about this position, consider the case of two castaways stranded on an island lush with peanut plants. One castaway is allergic to peanuts but good at catching fish, whereas the other lacks the arm strength and coordination needed to catch fish. The net result of these differences is that the two are able to live equally good lives, one fishing and sleeping on the beach while the other forages for food inland. However, suppose that one day the allergic castaway begins clearcutting the densest area of peanut plants so that she has a place to play soccer. Further, suppose that the destruction of these plants would impose a great hardship on the uncoordinated castaway, as she would then have to spend many more tedious and difficult hours each day foraging for the scarce peanuts that remain.
-Given these stipulations, would it be permissible for the uncoordinated castaway to use coercion to prevent the allergic castaway from destroying the plants on which her quality of life depends? Some egalitarian anarchists might answer in the affirmative, contending that the permissibility of the coercion is grounded in the fact that it is necessary to ensure that the uncoordinated castaway doesn’t live a worse life than her companion (due to no fault of her own). In other words, they would endorse a limited and content-dependent right to coercively exclude others, where the permissibility of any act of coercion is determined by some egalitarian principle of distributive justice.
-If one adopts this view, then the social anarchist political prescription is fairly straightforward: each person should limit her holdings to just the resources assigned to her by the relevant egalitarian principle of distributive justice (e.g., the resources that will allow her to live as good of a life as everyone else). If others are hoarding more than their fair share, she may take the appropriate portion of those resources.[1532] And, if others try to take her portion, she may fend them off so long as she operates within the constraints of proportionality. Further, people may band together to form whatever organizations help them to obtain and protect their just shares.[1533]
-Of course, many empirical questions remain regarding what holdings realize the egalitarian ideal and how those holdings can best be brought about. However, the defender of the normative position can remain agnostic about what kinds of actions and institutional arrangements will best advance this end. While it will eventually be necessary to answer these questions, she can insist that her view simply articulates the moral boundaries that constrain all proposed institutions, namely that such institutions may only make use non-consensual coercion if that coercion is necessary for bringing about or sustaining an egalitarian arrangement.
-Alternatively, some social anarchists might reject the intuition that coercion is permissible in the peanut case. Given this rejection, they would insist that the coercive control of resources is always impermissible, except when it has been consented to by the victim or, perhaps, when such control is necessary to avoid some sort of moral catastrophe. This position imposes stricter limits on what forms society can permissibly take. Specifically, it would sanction only two forms of resource management, each with its own drawbacks, but both of which avoid the coercion that is omnipresent in regimes of private property (and that persists in a more limited form in the egalitarian anarchist society).
-The first form of resource management would be an arrangement of free resource use: all persons could do what they wanted with resources so long as they didn’t act on one another’s bodies in the process. Of course, absent the right to control these resources, there would be limited incentive for self-interested producers to improve those resources, as others would be free to come and carry off the fruits of their labor. Thus, one might expect the radical anarchist society to be much poorer than its capitalist or egalitarian counterpart (though the ratio of production done for the sake of self-interest vs. community benefit would also be much lower—a result that many social anarchists would find favorable).[1534]
-To mitigate this incentives problem, a producer in a social anarchist society might opt for an alternative form of resource management wherein she acquires the right to coercively exclude others from her products by obtaining their consent. A low-cost version of this approach would involve getting the consent of just those individuals who are geographically and epistemically positioned to take her products. While this would not give her the right to coercively exclude the people who she did not consult, she might be willing to gamble that these people will not attempt to take her product. For example, she has little need to worry about people living hundreds of miles away coming to take her product, particularly if those people do not know that such production is occurring. Thus, she may reasonably decide the cost of obtaining their consent is greater than the risk of them learning about her product and traveling a long distance to take it.
-Alternatively, producers seeking greater security could pursue universal consent via a federated decision-making structure where local councils reach decisions about how society ought to be arranged via consensus—i.e., by getting each of their members to consent to the proposed decision. Each council would then send a representative to a central council to advocate for the arrangement approved by her local council. This central council would then use a consensus procedure to settle on some negotiated position, with representatives then returning to their local councils to get final approval (again, via consensus). Once such approval has been given, the arrangement in question will have received universal consent. Thus, a federated decision-making system would allow coercively enforceable holdings to arise through the granting of consent by all potentially affected parties.[1535]
-This is only a quick sketch of how universal consent could be achieved, with the subject deserving a more thorough critical discussion than can be given here. However, even absent a careful examination of institutional design, it seems reasonable to conclude that any procedure capable of generating universal consent will be unwieldy and significantly less efficient than a system of non-consensual private property enforcement. This may simply be the price of living in a society that does not tolerate the casual use of coercion to coordinate human affairs. After all, one of the advantages of coercion is that it allows people to carry out their projects without having to go through the trouble of consulting others, as their resistance can be suppressed with violence. However, as Section V has argued, this convenience and efficiency is not sufficient for rendering that coercion permissible.
-This conclusion about the form society ought to take is admittedly a radical one. Further, even absent society-wide acceptance of the anarchist normative position, the view still has a radical implication when it comes to one’s everyday behavior, namely that it is wrong to use coercion to sustain control of one’s holdings (with a possible exception being made if those holdings represent one’s “fair share” of the available natural resources). What this chapter has attempted to show is that while these conclusions are radical, they follow from eminently plausible premises about what does and does not justify the use of coercion. Thus, absent an equally radical reconsideration of when coercion is permissible, there is little choice but to follow the argument where it leads, namely to the social anarchist rejection of state and private property.
-[1489] As quoted by Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper Perennial, 1992) 43.
-[1490] I am indebted to Jason Lee Byas for his numerous helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
-[1491] As Roderick Long notes, social anarchists often deny that anarcho-capitalists are genuine anarchists, and vice versa. However, Long rejects this view in favor of a unified conception of anarchism that includes both groups. Roderick Long, “Anarchism and Libertarianism,” Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy, ed. Nathan Jun (Boston: Brill, 2018) 286. For a well-known example of the social anarchist rejection of anarcho-capitalism, see Iain McKay et al. “Section F—Is Anarcho-Capitalism a Type of Anarchism?” An Anarchist FAQ, 11 November 2008, available at [[http://anarchism.pageabode.com][http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secFint.html]].
-[1492] Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” The Marx Engels Reader, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., ed, Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 711—3. Paul Thomas similarly notes that abolishing the state “is a goal anarchists have shared with a good many Marxist and other nonanarchist revolutionaries.” Paul Thomas, “Review of Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis by Alan Ritter,” Political Theory 10.1 (Feb. 1982): 141–4.
-[1493] See Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso 2010). For an example of social anarchist endorsement of this sort of vision, see Murray Bookchin, “Anarchism: Past and Present,” Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. H. J. Erhlich (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996) 19–30. For a contemporary example in analytic philosophy that suggests anarchism involves the bottom-up democratic management of most resources, see Nicholas Vrousalis, “Libertarian Socialism: A Better Reconciliation between Equality and SelfOwnership,” Social Theory and Practice 37.2 (Apr. 2011): 211–26, at 221–3. (While Vrousalis refers to such management as “libertarian socialism” rather than “anarchism,” his citation of Proudhon and Kropotkin as paradigmatic libertarian socialists suggests he considers the first term to be largely synonymous with the second.)
-[1494] Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (London: Palgrave 2013).
-[1495] Huemer 8.
-[1496] Huemer 10–11.
-[1497] Huemer 11.
-[1498] Huemer 5.
-[1499] Huemer 12–3.
-[1500] Huemer 10. Original emphasis.
-[1501] Note that one could attach a similar qualification to the content-independence of authority maintaining that authorities cannot oblige their subjects to inflict serious harm on others.
-[1502] Huemer 10.
-[1503] Kevin Vallier has also noted that Huemer’s argument threatens to undermine private property. See Kevin Vallier, “On the Problematic Political Authority of Property Rights: How Huemer Proves Too Much” Bleeding Heart Libertarians, 12 August 2013, available at [[https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com][https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/08/on-]] [[https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com][the-problematic-political-authority-of-property-rights-how-huemer-proves-too-much/]]. However, Vallier takes this to be reason to reject Huemer’s argument as part of a modus tollens inference; by contrast, this chapter affirms Huemer’s argument and infers via modus ponens that property rights must be rejected.
-[1504] Edward Feser, “There is No Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22.1 (2005): 56–80. Feser later moves away from this view and presents a new philosophical foundation for a more limited set of property rights. While many of the proposed grounds might be classified with those accounts discussed below, Feser’s effort to ground his argument in the “classical realist” tradition (associated with Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas) makes such a grouping a bit tendentious. Unfortunately, addressing his updated view with all of its underpinning metaphysical assumptions goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Those interested in his revised view should see Edward Feser, “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” Social Philosophy and Policy 27.1 (2010): 21–52.
-[1505] An earlier version of this claim is advanced by Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: NYU Press, 1998) 34. While Rothbard is more influential than Feser, the discussion here will focus on Feser’s account, as he provides a more robust defense of his view relative to Rothbard, who seems primarily focused on explicating the position.
-[1506] Feser 65. The tomato juice example is a nod to Nozick’s contention that a person who pours a can of owned tomato juice into the sea seems to have lost ownership of her juice rather than gained ownership of the sea. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) 175. Original emphasis.
-[1507] Feser 65. Original emphasis.
-[1508] Feser 69.
-[1509] Feser 69.
-[1510] Feser 66.
-[1511] There is another species of argument that argues that the right to self-ownership supports a right to private property because external objects are actually a part of the body one owns, even if those objects are both detached from one’s “main” body and cannot be manipulated simply via the will. While addressing these arguments is beyond the scope of this chapter, interested readers should see Samuel C. Wheeler, “Natural Property Rights as Body Rights,” Nous 14.2 (May 1980): 171—93; Daniel Russell, “Embodiment and SelfOwnership,” Social Philosophy and Policy 27.1 (2010): 135—67.
-[1512] Feser 65.
-[1513] That agential control is what does the work is reflected in the intuition that it is wrong to act on even unowned objects that an agent is wielding as a direct extension of her body (e.g., an object she is holding or an artificial leg).
-[1514] Brian McElwee, “The Appeal of Self-Ownership,” Social Theory and Practice 36.2 (Apr. 2010): 213—32.
-[1515] Susan Moller Okin defends this claim at greater length and detail in the context of arguing against Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice. See Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989) 79–85.
-[1516] Feser might reply that when agency emerges within the child, this emergence strips the parents of any property rights they might have over her body. However, it is unclear why this should be so. Is the child’s relation to her body not analogous to a latecomer’s relation to already-appropriated natural resources? Granted, the child might need her body in order to pursue her projects or even survive, but the same might equally be true of the latecomer vis-à-vis appropriated resources. Further, Feser’s argument from self-ownership rests upon the claim that self-ownership is established by being the first to show up and take possession of something, with this serving to explain why it is that a person gains ownership of external resources the same way. However, given that it is a person’s parents who are actually the first to show up and take possession of the body, Feser faces a dilemma: he must either grant parents continuing ownership of their child’s body or admit that there is some basis for latecomers arriving and stripping owners of the property rights they had gained via being the first to transform and control some resource.
-[1517] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2005) § 27. Retrieved June 18, 2019 from [[http://www.gutenberg.org][www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm]].
-[1518] Nozick 177–81
-[1519] David Schmidtz, “When is Original Appropriation Required?” The Monist 73.4 (Oct. 1990): 504–18.
-[1520] Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: OUP, 1987).
-[1521] Eric Mack, “The Natural Right of Property,” Social Philosophy and Policy 27.1 (2010): 53–78, at 62. See also Eric Mack, “Self-Ownership and the Right of Property,” The Monist 73.4 (1990): 519–43.
-[1522] Bas van der Vossen, “Imposing Duties and Original Appropriation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23.1 (2015): 64–85 at 77–8.
-[1523] Jason Brennan, Why Not Capitalism? (New York: Routledge, 2014) 75–82.
-[1524] The goal here is to describe the various cases in such a way that the force used is the minimum necessary to prevent a stubborn party from using the claimed resource. Thus, if the use of force in a case is judged to exceed this threshold, it should be re-imagined with less force used. However, the suggestion here is that such modification will do little to diminish the intuition that the use of coercion in the case is impermissible.
-[1525] Huemer 94. Original emphasis.
-[1526] Huemer 97.
-[1527] Huemer 94.
-[1528] Mack, “Natural Right,” 72. Mack does not think that laboring on a thing is the only way to establish a property right; however, the expropriation justification for gaining a property right is particular to labor. Mack’s other methods of claiming property appeal to property’s ability to facilitate a person living her life, as discussed in Section V.
-[1529] Mack, “Natural Right,” 72.
-[1530] A. John Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: CUP, 2001) 262.
-[1531] Herbert Spencer makes a similar argument against the appropriation of land via appeal to the case where a trespasser makes improvements to someone else’s owned house. However, his argument differs in two important respects from the argument here. First, he assumes full ownership of the house while, in the vandal case, the ownership of the car is only partial (more on this point at the end of this section). Second, he takes the home-improver to have a claim to the added value to the house, though not the house itself. However, the vandal case casts some doubt upon this conclusion. Does the car owner really owe the vandal compensation for her unsolicited efforts? Perhaps, but much more would need to be said on this point. See Herbert Spencer, Social Statistics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: George Woodfall and Son, 1851) 118—9.
-[1532] This suggestion echoes Peter Kropotkin’s claim that people have a “right to possess the wealth of the community—to take the houses to dwell in, according to the needs of each family; to seize the stores of food and learn the meaning of plenty, after having known famine too well,” as well as his assertion that the core principle of social anarchism is “take what you need.” Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (Mineola: Dover, 2011) 28, 33.
-[1533] One might wonder about how the production of new goods would occur in the egalitarian anarchist society. Wouldn’t it be irrational to produce goods if others have the right to immediately make off with them? Not if one adopts overall quality of life as the “currency” of egalitarian justice as posited immediately above. To see this, suppose a producer is able to make a set of goods that can improve people’s lives by a total quantity of Q; however, to produce these goods, she must incur cost C (where C is a reduction in her quality of life). Suppose, then, that the goods—or, more precisely, the benefits generated by these goods—are split up equally between her and all other persons, where the total number of persons is n. Given these stipulations, all other persons would see their lives improve by a quantity of Q=n. However, the producer’s life would improve by a quantity of Q=n — C, where this “improvement” may actually leave her worse off depending on the size of C. Assuming a baseline of equality, it follows that equal distribution of benefits without any compensation for incurred costs would result in an unequal outcome. Indeed, to reach an equal outcome, the producer would have to be fully compensated for the costs of production with the remaining benefits then being distributed equally between everyone—i.e., the producer receives whatever share of her produced goods give her a benefit of C + ((Q — C) =n) while everyone else receives a share yielding a benefit of (Q — C)=n. Thus, in a world where people adhere to an egalitarian principle of justice, it will always be rational to produce goods, as one will be receive full compensation for one’s efforts plus some additional benefit, albeit not the full benefit produced.
-[1534] That said, if normative views have shifted to the point where social anarchist principles are being widely implemented, it is unclear that either of the following assumptions would still be true: (a) self-interest remains a primary—or even significant—motivation for production and (b) other people will seize a person’s products for self-interested reasons. Thus, the worry that an absence of property rights entails stifled production may be unfounded.
-[1535] For a discussion of what pattern of holdings might arise via a process of universal consent, see Alan Gibbard, “Natural Property Rights,” Nous 10.1 (1976): 77—86 at 80—2.
-<br>
-** 24. The Right Anarchy; Capitalist or Socialist?
-*Michael Huemer*
-*** I. Introduction: Two Forms of Anarchism
-**** A. Definitions
-There are two main varieties of anarchism: the socialist variety (aka “social anarchism” or “anarcho-socialism”) and the capitalist variety (“anarcho-capitalism”).[1536] In this chapter, I argue that anarcho-capitalism is preferable to anarcho-socialism.
-First, some definitions. Anarchists hold that the ideal form of society would be one lacking any central government, and that we can and should move toward such a system.[1537] A government is, roughly, an organization that makes laws, imposes them by force on the rest of society, and holds a coercive monopoly (it forcibly prevents anyone else from competing with itself).
-Physical capital (aka “capital goods”) is a type of good used (repeatably) for producing other valuable goods and services. For example, a clothing factory and the equipment in it qualify as (physical) capital. Dump trucks used to construct buildings are capital. However, raw materials that consumer goods are made of, such as cotton or grain, do not count as capital in the standard sense.
-Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production—physical capital—is owned by private individuals. Socialism is a system in which physical capital is collectively controlled, either by the government or by groups of workers.
-Socialists are people who endorse socialism. The term “capitalist” (unlike “socialist”) has two senses: it is sometimes used to refer to a person who endorses capitalism as a desirable social system, and sometimes used in a quite different sense, to refer to a person who derives income from owning capital. Capitalists in the latter sense are sometimes referred to collectively as “the capitalist class”.
-Socialist and capitalist anarchists agree in opposing central government. But they disagree about ownership of capital goods: the capitalists want to retain individual ownership of capital goods, whereas socialists want to abolish it.
-**** B. Socialist Anarchism
-Socialist anarchists believe that those who work to produce consumable goods and services should also collectively own the capital goods they use for this purpose, rather than these goods being owned by a separate class of people (“the capitalists”).[1538]
-Contrary to what the name might suggest to some, anarchists do not oppose all order, nor do they hold that individuals should act entirely free of social constraints. Socialist anarchists envisage a system in which all businesses are run by the workers, and major decisions are made democratically by worker assemblies. Many variants of this basic scheme are possible. The worker assemblies might include all the workers in some small territory, or be specific to a single business; they might make decisions directly, or elect officials to make most decisions, or rotate decision-making positions among the group; they might seek to make decisions through consensus-building, or through majority vote; they might or might not seek to abolish wages and money.
-One might wonder why such a system should be called “anarchy”, rather than simply a form of small-scale, democratic government. The system is said to be anarchic because (i) all individuals would have equal power, or as nearly equal as practically possible, and (ii) individuals would voluntarily choose the cooperative or commune that they wished to work in (with the consent of the group) and would be free to leave the group at will. Both of these features allegedly make the system importantly different from all modern states. One might dispute whether this system is truly “anarchic”, but it is best to avoid such semantic questions. My interest is in whether the system is good or bad, not what it should be called.
-There are three central, closely-related motives for socialist anarchism. First, there is the value of equality. In a traditional nation-state, a small minority of society has almost all the political power. Even in a democratic country, there is a class of political elites, along with lobbyists and political donors, who have much more power than the average citizen. The radically decentralized nature of socialist anarchism would make it possible for all to participate in decision-making on a nearly equal basis. Similarly, in a capitalist economy, a small minority of society controls most of the wealth. This is largely due to the ability of individuals to accumulate capital. Anarchist socialists expect income and wealth to be much more nearly equal in their system, with everyone’s needs being provided for by the collective.
-Second, there is the related value of freedom. In a capitalist, government-dominated society, individual workers are not free due to the coercion imposed by the state and the high degree of control that employers exercise over their workers. The inequality in wealth and power inherently inhibits freedom, because the elites with more wealth and power use their advantages to compel those with less wealth and power to obey the will of the elites.
-Third, there is the opposition to exploitation. Socialists commonly see the capitalist class as exploitative: the capitalists collect a large portion of the value that is produced by businesses, not because the capitalists are doing a great deal of valuable work, but simply because they claim rights over the tools that are needed to produce that value. The capitalists are thus able to live off the productive work of others.
-**** C. Capitalist Anarchism
-Anarcho-capitalists, by contrast, have no objection to individual ownership of capital per se. Individuals should be free to organize worker cooperatives if they wish, but traditional, capitalist-owned businesses are equally acceptable. The anarcho-capitalists’ central goal is to expand the free market system as much as possible, so that it supplants the state. They believe that all functions of the state should be either privatized or eliminated. The functions of protection and dispute-resolution, currently provided by government police and courts, should be taken over by competing, private businesses. The functions of, for example, business regulation, forcible wealth redistribution, and foreign wars should be eliminated.[1539]
-Thus, in the anarcho-capitalist society, individuals or organizations would subscribe to security agencies, similar to present-day security guard companies, to provide protection from murderers, thieves, and the like. People would not be forced to subscribe; they would merely have the option to purchase services from any of many competing agencies. Businesses would probably hire security to protect their employees and customers, and local homeowners’ associations would hire security to protect their residents and guests. This would replace the current system of government-controlled police.
-Individuals who had disputes with one another—including disputes in which one person accuses another of a crime—would hire private arbitrators to resolve these disputes. Since no security agency wants to be responsible for protecting a customer who gets in fights and then refuses to have them peacefully resolved, security agencies would require their customers to agree in advance to settle disputes by arbitration. Arbitrators would compete with each other to develop reputations for devising solutions to disputes that appeared to observers to be as fair and generally satisfactory as possible. This system of competing arbitration companies would replace government courts.
-Law in an anarcho-capitalist society would be common law. That is, it would rest on precedents set by arbitrators attempting to decide cases in accordance with prevailing moral norms. Arbitrators write down the reasons for their decisions, which are then consulted by other arbitrators in future cases. This would obviate the need for a legislature.
-There are two main motivations for anarcho-capitalism. The first is a libertarian conception of individual rights. Most anarcho-capitalists hold that all governments violate the rights of individuals. Governments force us to purchase their services (via taxation), whether we want to buy their services or not. More generally, governments make rules and forcibly impose those rules on everyone. This might be acceptable if their rules served simply to enforce the moral rights that all individuals possess. But in fact, governments frequently make unjust, exploitative, or harmful rules.
-Governments also coercively prevent competing organizations from offering the same services; for instance, a private business may not set up a competing police force or legal system. This is unjust: either the services the government provides are morally permissible, or they are not. If they are not permissible, then the government must cease providing them. If they are permissible, then it is wrong to forcibly prevent other people or groups from providing those same services. Either way, it is wrong to maintain a coercive monopoly. Anarcho-capitalists deem it permissible to provide protection (by force) of individuals’ moral rights, and thus hold that private businesses should be able to provide this service.
-Second, there is the value of economic efficiency, or human wellbeing more broadly. Anarchocapitalists are impressed by the general ability of competitive markets to provide an adequate supply of relatively high-quality, low-priced goods and services. Goods and services that are provided by coercive monopolies, by contrast, tend to suffer chronic shortages, degenerating quality, and exploding prices. This describes all or most things provided by the government. There are theoretical explanations for this phenomenon that are well-known in economics, and these explanations apply equally to the services of security and dispute-resolution as to other goods and services. Hence, we should expect better, cheaper, and more plentiful security and disputeresolution services once a free market is introduced.
-**** D. The Right Anarchy
-As I have indicated, I aim in what follows to defend anarcho-capitalism as against anarchosocialism. Here, however, is what I will not do: I will not be defending either form of anarchism against statism. Arguments in favor of government have been addressed numerous times in other work, by myself and other anarchists.[1540] Those other works have also explained how a stateless society might work, and the arguments in its favor, at length.
-Suppose, then, that we reject the state. Given that, what is the best form of anarchism: socialist or capitalist? I shall contend that anarcho-capitalism is superior for three reasons: (i) anarcho-capitalism has a better response to crime, (ii) anarcho-capitalism embraces the economic contributions of capitalists, (iii) anarcho-capitalism would be more stable than anarcho-socialism.
-*** II. The Crime Problem
-When the topic of anarchism arises, the first objection most people think of is that crime would run rampant in an anarchic society. In this discussion, by “crime” I (obviously) do not mean “things prohibited by the state”. Rather, I refer to behaviors that wrong others, such that other people have a morally legitimate complaint about them. For example, vandalism, robbery, rape, and murder: these behaviors are wrong whether or not a state prohibits them. A key question for any form of anarchism is what would be done, by whom, to prevent such behaviors, or to address them after the fact.
-**** A. A Capitalist Solution
-Anarcho-capitalists have a well-known answer. It is that individuals, businesses, and other organizations hire private security companies to protect people and their property. Where there is a dispute about whether someone committed a crime, a private arbitrator decides on a resolution. The arbitrator can be chosen jointly by the parties to the dispute, e.g., by alternately crossing names off a list of available arbitrators. Anarcho-capitalists expect criminals to be forced to make restitution to their victims (or the victims’ families), the amount of required compensation being decided by the arbitrator, with enforcement by the victim’s security agency. Criminals who are sufficiently dangerous might be exiled or even executed.
-Notice some important features of this answer that mark it as reasonable and non-utopian. First, the theory includes an account of what motivates the agents within the system to behave as they are supposed to behave; it does not merely assume that they will behave as the theorist desires. The security companies apprehend criminals and enforce judgments against them, because they are paid to do so by the people they are protecting. They attempt to do this well, without too many errors, because otherwise they may lose customers to competing agencies. Individuals submit disputes to arbitration because they are required to do so by the contracts they signed with their security agencies. The agencies require this because arbitration is the least costly way of resolving disputes. The arbitrators attempt to resolve disputes fairly, in accordance with the values of most of society, because they seek to establish reputations for fairness, so that future disputants will not quickly cross their names off the relevant lists.
-Second, no changes in human nature are required by this theory. Since the theory relies on ordinary human self-interest, there is no need for speculation about how human behaviors, personalities, or desires will change once anarchy arrives. There is no need to hypothesize that criminal motives will evaporate with the abolition of the state. There is no need for any particularly optimistic account of humans’ “true nature”.
-Third, the theory does not require all or most people in society to adopt some presently- controversial belief system. The agents in the capitalist anarchy do not, for example, need to all adopt a libertarian political ideology. Once the system exists, it is in the interests of each individual to act in the way they are supposed to, regardless of their philosophical ideals—indeed, regardless of whether they have any particular philosophical ideals. (This is important because in fact, most human beings have little interest in abstract political or philosophical theories.)
-**** B. Overcoming Crime through Socialism
-The social anarchist solution to crime is surprisingly elusive. Many left-wing defenses of anarchism neglect to mention the problem, or address it only very briefly and vaguely.[1541] When they do address the problem of crime, socialist anarchists have two main ideas: first, that crime would be greatly reduced under socialist anarchy, because most crime is caused by government and capitalism. Second, that for the few criminals who remain, there would be community-controlled security forces to apprehend them and bring them before popular tribunals to adjudicate their [1542]
-cases.
-Begin with the first point, that crime would be much lower under socialist anarchy. This claim is important, because the smaller the crime problem is, the more plausible it is that the problem could be dealt with without a professional, government-like criminal justice system. Why believe that crime would be much lower?
-One reason is something that capitalist and socialist anarchists agree on: a good deal of crime is caused by the laws concerning “vice crimes”, especially recreational drug use, prostitution, and gambling. Many individuals are directly imprisoned for such victimless crimes. While in prison, they tend to acquire worse criminal tendencies from fellow inmates. In addition, many property crimes are committed by addicts to support their habits, because the drug laws have driven up the prices of drugs to exorbitant levels. The drug laws (and, to a lesser extent, other vice laws) enrich violent, criminal organizations by guaranteeing that criminal organizations will control the industry. The drug trade is fraught with violence because only criminal organizations are available to distribute the product and provide protection for those involved in the trade.
-An anarchist society (whether socialist or capitalist) would probably have no vice crime laws, and would thus eliminate a large source of crime. How large? In the United States at present, about 17% of jail and prison inmates are incarcerated for a drug crime, as their most serious offense.[1543] So the enormous prison population would be reduced by at least that proportion if drug laws were eliminated. Optimistically, perhaps we might guess that a similar number of people who in fact committed more serious, non-drug crimes would not have done so if not for the drug laws, for the reasons suggested in the previous paragraph. Obviously, we cannot make a reliable quantitative estimate here; I aim only to point toward a vague sense of the magnitude of benefit we might reasonably expect. We should not, for example, wishfully assume that 90% of crime would be eliminated by removing vice crime laws; that would be utopian.
-Socialist anarchists suggest several other reasons why crime would be reduced in their society: all individuals would have their needs provided for by the collective, thus reducing the need to commit property crimes; children would be raised in a cooperative, loving community, which would teach them pro-social values; first-time criminals would receive counseling in humane rehabilitation programs; the greater justice of the society would cause members to feel more community spirit.
-These last arguments, I believe, are wishful and unrealistic. They might justify us in expecting a slight decrease in crime, but not an enormous decrease. This is because crime has much more robust roots than socialists are willing to recognize: many human beings are selfish and aggressive by nature. Of course, I cannot prove this here (nor do socialists attempt to prove their own views about human nature). I can only briefly gesture toward the sort of reasons why I hold a pessimistic view of crime.
-Briefly, I believe that human beings are by and large genetically predisposed to selfishness and competition (seeking a higher position within a social hierarchy), and that young males in particular are biologically predisposed toward aggression. This has come about because, in our evolutionary past, those of our ancestors who sacrificed their interests for the good of society were, by definition, less successful than those who served their own interests at the expense of others. Therefore, these selfish ancestors left behind more offspring carrying their genes.[1544] This is compatible with the fact that humans are also naturally cooperative. Social cooperation does not entail selflessness; it only requires the ability to work with others when doing so is to one’s own advantage. Selfish people very often find ways to cooperate to mutual advantage. Importantly, selfishness is not an artefact of some disordered social structure, nor is it something children are taught by our society. Children become less selfish as they are socialized, and human beings have become much less prone to violence in modern society than in primitive societies.[1545] That is because selfishness and violence are natural. It is moral decency that is artificial.
-Some people, however, cannot learn moral decency. About 1% of the population are psychopaths, and these individuals make up a large portion of the prison population.[1546] (About 3% of people have antisocial personality disorder, of whom about a third are sufficiently antisocial to qualify as full psychopaths. Those with antisocial personality disorder pose problems similar to those posed by psychopaths.) Psychopaths are not people who commit crimes because no one has shown them love, or because they are angry about the injustice of capitalism, or because they are driven to desperation by poverty. They are people who were literally born with no capacity for moral reasoning, no capacity to empathize, no capacity to care the slightest bit for anyone else. They tend to be highly skilled manipulators who use their skills to get themselves released from prison early, whereupon they victimize more innocent people. This condition is largely genetic, and treatment is extremely difficult, expensive, and unreliable at best.[1547]
-Indeed, one might think that anarchists of all stripes should recognize the natural drive of (at least some) humans to dominate or exploit others—after all, humans all over the world have set up governments. It is not as though some domineering alien species landed on a planet full of selfless, egalitarian humans and forced us to set up hierarchies and governments. We human beings created the status quo because we wanted to dominate each other.
-All of this is to explain why I do not accept the socialists’ predictions of a radical reduction in criminal tendencies once socialism arrives. If radical crime reduction were as easy as utopian socialists portray it—if it were as simple as teaching people community spirit, or adopting rehabilitation programs—we would already have done it.
-Socialists sometimes point to the well-established correlation between poverty and crime to argue that people are driven to crime by poverty, and therefore that, once poverty is eliminated by socialism, there will be much less crime. This assumes that socialist anarchy would be highly economically productive. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this. (See Section III below.) Note also that the crime-poverty correlation may be partly explained by character traits (high time preference, impulsiveness, low respect for social norms) that contribute to both poverty and crime. Eliminating poverty would not eliminate these traits.
-Anarcho-capitalists are less prone to wishful thinking about crime: anarcho-capitalists typically assume that crime is caused by selfishness, and they do not claim to be able to educate people into giving up selfishness; they simply seek to make it not in one’s interests to commit crimes.
-Of course, anarcho-socialists accept this to some degree as well: they recognize the need, when they address the problem of crime at all, for some use of force on behalf of the community to restrain criminals. As I shall presently argue, however, their unrealistic views of human nature make even this part of their solution to crime problematic.[1548]
-**** C. Community Security Forces
-Socialist anarchists can generally be prompted to concede that some sort of armed, militia- or police-like force is needed to restrain violent criminals. Indeed, this is common to all serious approaches to the problem of crime, whether anarcho-capitalist, anarcho-socialist, or statist.
-Once such a force exists, however, so does the potential for abuse of power—exactly the problem that leads anarchists to reject the state to begin with. Who will prevent the community security force from dominating and abusing the rest of the community? It will not suffice to stipulate or hypothesize that the security force will serve the community; we must be able to describe a realistic mechanism that would ensure this result, while taking into account natural human selfishness.
-Suppose there is some organized group that directs the security force and pays their salaries. Perhaps, for example, there would be a council of officials elected by popular vote of the community. This council could monitor the popular security force and fire anyone found to be behaving improperly. But this just recreates representative government. The problem here is not semantic—the problem is not that the socialist anarchist loses the right to the name “anarchist”. The problem is that there were certain central reasons for opposing the state—the problems inherent in establishing a group with power over the rest of society—which now apply to the socialist “anarchist’s” proposed solution to crime. Whoever controls the security force has power over the rest of the community.
-Suppose, on the other hand, that there is no organized group directing the security force. In the event that the force becomes abusive, it is up to the community in general to spontaneously revolt. This is also unsatisfactory. Community members would face a public goods problem: any individual who tries to resist the abusive security force will personally bear the risk of reprisals from a group trained and equipped for capturing violent criminals. This would leave the community in a situation analogous to that of modern-day societies under a government.
-It may seem that the problem is insoluble. If we have no armed security force, we are at the mercy of criminals. If we have a security force, we are at the mercy of the security force. If we establish another group to protect us from the security force, then we are at the mercy of that group.
-The anarcho-capitalist has a solution. It is to have multiple security forces, side by side in the same area, offering the same services. If one security agency starts to grow abusive, a customer can switch to a competing agency. The threat of losing clients restrains the agencies from behaving badly. We may call this the competitive solution, as contrasted with the monopolistic solution (where there is only one security force) proposed by statists and socialist anarchists.
-The competitive solution is superior to any monopolistic solution, for three reasons. First, when there is a single security force, it is impossible for community members to know how badly the force is doing, since they have no alternatives to compare it to. They cannot know how much less expensive the service could be, how much better at identifying criminals, and so on. The best way to determine these things is to have multiple competing organizations, each attempting to do the best at satisfying clients.
-Second, in a competitive system, customers have a greater self-interested motive to form well- informed, rational opinions about their security agency, because they have the ability to switch to another agency if they find one that is better. In a democratic system, individuals have little incentive to seek rational or well-informed opinions, since it is extremely difficult to change election outcomes even if one correctly determines who the best candidate is. If I discover that candidate A is better than B, I cannot simply hire candidate A; I must first convince the majority of other voters to agree with me. The only case in which my vote makes a difference is the case in which the other voters are exactly tied, so that I cast the tie-breaking vote. Since this virtually never happens, voters rationally spend little effort on deciding how to vote.[1549] By contrast, in a competitive market, a customer can unilaterally switch to a different provider.
-Third, in some cases, an entire organization is problematic—filled with corruption, incompetence, or other problems. In such cases, the democratic mechanism for correcting the situation is extremely cumbersome and unreliable. In a democratic system, one must mount a separate campaign to remove each problematic official. Since there are normally multiple unelected bureaucrats working under any public official, one must then hope for the new elected officials to change the bureaucratic staff. If not, one must wait for the next election cycle to elect yet more public officials. By contrast, in a competitive market system, one can immediately drop the entire organization and switch to another one.
-These points explain why governments generally fare worse at serving their “customers” than businesses in a competitive industry do. Socialist anarchists recognize the poor performance of governments (even democratic ones) but fail to identify the root causes. The root causes of government failure lie in natural human selfishness, together with the perverse incentive structure of democracy. The competitive market turns that selfishness to better purpose by giving people a selfish interest in monitoring their protectors, and giving the protectors a selfish interest in satisfying their customers.
-A final word about selfishness. The difference between anarcho-capitalists and anarchosocialists is not a matter of how much each values altruism or community spirit. The difference lies in how much each is willing to admit the descriptive facts about human beings. It would of course be wonderful if human beings were naturally altruistic, or if they could be taught to be such. But that doesn’t mean we should assume that either of those things is the case. If you don’t want it to rain, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bring an umbrella when you go out; you should bring an umbrella if the forecast calls for rain, regardless of how much you may want it to be sunny.[1550] Similarly, if you don’t want people to be selfish, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t plan for people to behave selfishly; you should plan for humans to behave selfishly if that is what the evidence in fact predicts, regardless of how much you may want people to be selfless. Aligning incentives so that people profit by helping society does not cause people to be selfish, any more than umbrellas cause it to rain.
-*** III. The Need for Capitalists
-Why do business owners (“capitalists”) make more money than their workers? The owner of a factory does not, as such, appear to be doing any productive work, yet he will typically make many times more money than the factory workers who are doing the actual work of producing valuable goods. On the face of it, it might seem that the capitalist must somehow be extracting value produced by the workers—hence the charge of exploitation.
-Notice that this charge does not appeal to a specifically left-wing value. Though they rarely use the word “exploitation”, those on the political right generally agree that individuals ought to be rewarded for their own productive activity, and ought not to free ride on the productive work of others. If it is true that capitalists are free-riding, right-wing thinkers should condemn them.
-**** A. Risk Acceptance
-In truth, the capitalist serves at least three functions in a modern economy that are crucial to productivity. The first is that of risk acceptance. In a modern economy, all business ventures are risky. About half of businesses close down within five years of starting.[1551] When a business fails, there will typically be a significant economic loss, which must be borne by someone. Nevertheless, a dynamic, productive economy requires new businesses. Therefore, society needs individuals or groups who are willing and able to risk significant amounts of money. Those who provide the startup funds for a business lose that money if the business fails. Their motive for taking that risk is the promise that, if the business succeeds, they will gain large profits. If, when one provides money to start up a business, the business immediately becomes the property of those who work for it (who did not contribute to the startup funds), then few if any people will be willing to start businesses.
-So far, this point is compatible with a form of socialism, for the money needed to start a business could be provided collectively by the workers who are to work in that business. There is nothing theoretically wrong with this arrangement. In fact, however, relatively few workers wish to take that sort of risk. When one looks for a new job, one does not generally want to have to pay a large amount of money up front to help start the business, and risk losing that money if the business fails. (Notice, by the way, that if employees join a business after it has already started, it would be necessary to charge them money for joining; otherwise, they would gain a benefit that the original workers had to pay for, without themselves paying. This would discourage people from starting a business, or from hiring new workers after doing so.) Only a small minority of society is willing to risk large amounts of money in that way.
-It is also true that most workers today cannot afford to contribute significant startup funds to a business. This, however, is not the central issue; most people would not start new businesses even if they could. When we dream of winning the lottery, we imagine retiring to Tahiti; we do not imagine taking the money and contributing investment capital to a startup. Thus, even if ownership of all existing businesses were suddenly transferred to the current employees of those businesses, the great majority of employees would swiftly set about selling their shares. The people who would buy those shares would be people with a higher appetite for risk—and they would be providing a valuable service to the sellers, enabling the workers to get hard cash with a known value, which would be safe even if the business should fail, in place of a risky investment.
-**** B. Delayed Gratification
-In addition to risk aversion, a second factor that prevents most people from investing in a business is time preference: human beings in general prefer to enjoy benefits in the present or the near future, rather than later. But in order for an economy to grow, there must be savings and investment. This is not a feature of capitalism; it is a feature of human life. Economic growth requires that someone, rather than consuming whatever resources are available now, uses their resources to attempt to increase the stock of goods that will be available in the future. The motivation for doing this would be the hope of receiving back a larger amount of value than the value one put in.
-Individuals vary in their degree of time preference. Some value $100 today about as much as $200 next year. That is a very high time preference, and it means that one would save and invest money only if the expected rate of return on the investment was at least 100% per year. Other individuals, however, have a low time preference; they might, for example, value $100 today about as much as $105 next year. These individuals will save and invest money as long as the expected return is at least 5% per year. In modern society, the majority of people save and invest little, because (in addition to risk aversion) the expected rate of return is not high enough to overcome their time preference. Economic growth depends on unusually low-time-preference individuals.
-There is, again, nothing in principle contrary to socialism here. Ordinary workers could in theory provide most savings and investment. In fact, however, few workers have a low enough time preference for this to make sense.
-**** C. Resource Allocation
-At any given time, society has finite resources—finite land, savings, natural resources, labor, and so on—and there are indefinitely many ways that these resources could be used. Some mechanism must determine how to allocate these limited resources. In the case of labor, for example, the allocation in a free market is decided by employers and employees in a decentralized way: each employer decides how much he is willing to pay for a specific kind of work, each employee decides how much he is willing to accept for each kind of work he is willing and able to do, and the scarce labor winds up being allocated to uses that satisfy these preferences reasonably well.
-Of particular interest is the allocation of investment capital. Investment capital (not to be confused with physical capital) is money that people have saved and are prepared to invest. Allocating investment capital in a satisfactory manner is not a simple task. Of all the millions of products present in a modern economy, as well as the indefinitely many more possible products, it is far from obvious which products are worth creating a new business, or expanding an existing business, to produce. Most possible uses of investment capital would be failures—the business project would use up resources without ever producing enough value to make up for its costs—and most people are unable to identify which projects would succeed and which would fail. On the other side, some existing uses of wealth are worthy of being curtailed or eliminated. Some mechanism must decide when a business is using up too many resources for the value it is producing, and therefore needs to be downsized or eliminated so as to free up its resources for more valuable uses. If we do not have such mechanisms, then our economy cannot grow and may even shrink as businesses that have, for whatever reason, become inefficient continue to operate.
-Capitalists play a key role in the allocation mechanism in market economies. Capitalists, as such, own investment capital and therefore decide to which projects that capital should be given. The capitalists provide this investment capital in exchange for ownership stakes in the businesses or a share of their profits. In an anarcho-socialist society, this would be somehow disallowed— that is the central point of socialism. Thus, the socialists would need some other mechanism for allocating financial resources to businesses. Perhaps the anarcho-socialist community would set aside some portion of the total income of all businesses for investment purposes, and would then vote on how to use this investment capital. Or perhaps the community would elect officials to direct investments and decide when resources should be reallocated.
-These socialistic mechanisms of allocating financial resources are inferior to the capitalistic mechanism, for three major reasons. The first reason is the incentive structures. In the capitalist system, the individuals allocating capital stand to gain personally if they allocate funds to businesses that turn out to be highly productive, and stand to lose if they allocate funds to failing businesses. They therefore have incentives to devote time and effort to ensuring that they make wise choices. By contrast, the allocation mechanisms acceptable to socialists do not similarly align incentives. If all members of the community must vote on how to allocate investment capital, no individual has the incentive to expend the considerable time and effort to evaluate possible uses of funds, since the individual knows that her own efforts will almost certainly make no difference to what the community decides. If, on the other hand, the community elects an “investment official” to make the decisions, this official will have at most weak incentives to try to make good decisions. In addition, voters will lack adequate incentives to choose the official wisely, if a wise choice requires significant expenditure of time and effort.
-The second problem is that most individuals lack the competence to make wise investment decisions, even if they were willing to devote time and effort to the task. The capitalist system has a built-in mechanism for dealing with this problem. Those who are bad at making investment decisions lose their money and therefore are forced to stop making investment decisions (or must make fewer and less-consequential ones). On the other hand, those who are good at evaluating business ideas make money, and thereby wind up in a position to make more and larger investment decisions in the future. In the anarcho-socialist system, by contrast, average people are empowered to make decisions about the investment of the community’s money. But average people are incompetent at such choices; thus, the community will lose money. Alternately, the average people may elect a presumed expert to invest the community’s money. This, however, is more likely to result in the selection of the best politician rather than the selection of the best businessperson.
-A third problem is that, as I have hinted above, there is often a need to remove resources from existing businesses, and not merely to allocate new funds to new businesses. If no such mechanism existed, we would still be producing the same number of videotapes, typewriters, and Atari computers as we did in the 1980s. There would still be Blockbuster Video stores in most cities, providing a service that almost no one wants. (Except that perhaps we would never have started producing any of those products, because we would all still be working on farms.) The reallocation of capital can occur because of technological advances, changes in the plans and preferences of consumers, changing trade opportunities with other societies, deterioration of a particular business’ ability to satisfy customers, and so on.
-In the capitalist system, this reallocation occurs because, when a business becomes inefficient or obsolete, or for any other reason its product becomes less desirable relative to other products, the expected future profits of that business decline, relative to alternatives. When the value of the business’ expected profit stream drops below the value of the business’ assets (including the money, land, physical capital, and other goods owned by the business), an incentive is created for the capitalists to liquidate the business. The assets are then freed up for more highly valued uses.
-In a socialist system, the decision to shrink or liquidate a business must be made democratically, either by a direct majority vote or by elected representatives. Such decisions are almost always unpopular. Even when a business is losing money, most people’s instinct is to try to keep the business in operation, so as to “save jobs”. The individuals who would be laid off by the business are easily identifiable, and their short-term suffering highly visible. The overall, longterm cost to society of continuing to employ resources in an inefficient manner are less visible, less immediate, less quantifiable. When a business is losing money, this is a signal that the business is destroying value—that is, the value of the inputs the business is consuming is greater than the value of the outputs it is producing. But few ordinary people think in these terms. Thus, a socialist society is likely to accumulate inefficient businesses, even businesses that impose net costs on the rest of the community.
-Admittedly, this reasoning relies on the market value of goods and services as a measure of their social utility; that is, how much total good they produce for people. For various well- known reasons (diminishing marginal utility of money, unequal initial distribution, mistakes by buyers and sellers), market value is a highly imperfect measure of social utility. Yet even this highly imperfect measure is superior to no measure. More precisely, an economic system that systematically tends to approximate to maximizing total market value is superior to a system that has no mechanism for even approximating the maximization of any measure of social utility. The socialist system, for reasons just discussed, cannot be expected to approximate to maximizing market value, and there is no reason to think that it would come close to maximizing any other, even very imperfect measure of social utility.
-**** D. Fair Pay
-In sum, capitalists serve genuine economically valuable functions. There remains the question of how much capitalists and workers should be paid. You may agree that capitalists deserve something for their contributions but still think that, intuitively, they are reaping unfairly large rewards in the capitalist system, compared to average workers.
-There is no principled reason, however, to believe that capitalists are systematically overpaid or workers systematically underpaid by the market. In a free market, employees of a business are paid approximately according to their marginal product. That is, a business should be expected to pay a given worker approximately the amount of money that the business itself would lose if that employee were to stop working for the business and not be replaced. The reason for this is that if the market wage of employees in the industry is less than the value that a single employee produces for the business, then the business should (from the standpoint of self-interest) hire more employees, until this is no longer true. If the market wage is more than the value that a single employee produces for the business, then the business should (from the standpoint of selfinterest) lay off employees until this is no longer true. So the only stable situation is that in which the market wage is approximately equal to the value that the business obtains from a single employee. These are uncontroversial implications of standard price theory, which is the most well established and least controversial part of economics.
-Economics, of course, cannot tell us what is fair. But, reflecting philosophically, the following seems to be a plausible normative principle:
-<quote>
-Fair Pay Principle: Fair compensation for one’s contribution to a productive activity is no greater than one’s marginal product.
-</quote>
-An individual cannot reasonably ask to be included in a cooperative endeavor on terms that render the individual’s presence a net cost to the group. In particular, if you work for a business, you cannot reasonably expect to be paid so much that the business would be better off without you. If you are, that is unfair to the rest of the people involved in the business.
-Because employee compensation in a free market economy approximates to the employee’s marginal product, it cannot be said that employees are systematically underpaid. By and large, they are paid the most that could reasonably be asked; if they were paid significantly more, this would in fact be unfair.
-Similar principles apply to the rewards received by capitalists for the services they provide. Capitalists’ expected (time-discounted) rewards are in general approximately equal to the market value of their contributions to business productivity. (Note: this assumes a free market; in actual, modern societies, government policy may unjustly skew the market in favor of larger profits for capitalists.) The main reason for the seemingly “unfairly” high rewards reaped by some capitalists is the very large contribution to productivity that they are able to make. When we see a business owner making fifty times more money than an ordinary worker, this strikes us as maladjusted, since the owner is not, for example, working fifty times harder or fifty times more hours than the worker. But these are not the correct measures of one’s contribution. The correct measure of one’s contribution to a business venture is one’s marginal product, that is, how much more value is produced by the business because of one’s own presence, keeping the other participants fixed. It is entirely plausible that one individual can make a contribution, in that sense, that is fifty times greater than that of an ordinary worker. This is possible because an individual can add something that enables a large number of other people to be more productive—for example, correctly identifying what is or is not a good business plan. Because capitalists contribute to the efficient employment of resources and labor by many other people, a capitalist’s contribution can be many times more economically valuable than that of a single ordinary employee.
-*** IV. The Stability Problem
-Any reasonable proposal concerning the structure of society must address the issue of stability: there must be a plausible account of how, once the proposed social structure is in place, it would be able to persist over time in realistic conditions, without changing into some quite different social system. This account should not require the assumption of near-total ideological commitment to the system. In all societies, human beings have conflicting values, conflicting desires, and conflicting beliefs about what is the best way to structure a society. Therefore, a social system must be robust in the face of these kinds of differences among people. The only societies in which large disagreements are not expressed are totalitarian societies.
-In the case of socialist anarchism, there must be an account of how a society filled with worker-controlled firms would avoid being taken over by capital-controlled firms, without relying on government-like coercion. There are three reasons why worker-controlled firms would be likely to be replaced by capital-controlled firms.
-**** A. Capitalist Competition
-The first major challenge for a worker-controlled business would be competition from capitalist- structured businesses. Even in a society dominated by worker cooperatives, some people will attempt to start capitalist-structured businesses. That is, some individuals or groups will attempt to acquire goods that can be used for producing other goods and services, and will offer to pay other people to perform specific tasks leading to the production of useful goods and services (without giving these other people an ownership stake in the physical capital).
-State socialists have an answer to this: the government sends police to shut those people down. Anarchist socialists cannot give anything like that answer, since they reject all centralized authority. In the absence of a central authority structure, there is no one to stop capitalist acts between consenting adults. The only coherent, anarchist answer the socialist can give is that the market, for some reason, simply will not favor capitalist businesses.
-Why might this be? Perhaps socialistic (worker-controlled) businesses will simply be more economically efficient than capitalistic businesses; that is, they will produce more valuable goods and services (measured in terms of market prices) per unit of labor and resources used. If so, capitalist businesses would, by and large, be driven out of the market by fair competition.
-Convenient as this might be, there is no obvious reason to believe it. Worker-controlled businesses can be, and sometimes are, set up in our current society, but they do not in general out- compete traditional, capitalist businesses. The major reasons are explained in Section III above— capitalists serve economically useful functions. Even in a mostly socialist society, there will be some individuals who are better suited to performing those functions than the average worker. Those individuals would be able to start capitalist businesses that would be, on average, more productive and successful than the socialist businesses. This would create the possibility for personal profit, which would motivate those individuals to make the attempt. Once started, these businesses would tend to expand, while the socialist businesses would shrink, due to normal marketplace competition.
-Another answer on behalf of the socialist is that capitalist-structured businesses would have difficulty attracting employees. Why would anyone submit to “wage slavery” (as traditional work is often called), when one has the option to live in a commune, or work for a socialist business, that will provide for all of one’s needs?
-This question has a simple answer: more money. Most human beings do not merely wish for their needs to be met. Most prefer to have much more than they need. This is a robust feature of human nature that will not change simply because we create worker-controlled businesses. Socialist businesses—if they operate as socialists hope—would have much more egalitarian payment schemes than capitalist businesses; that is, there would be smaller differences (perhaps no differences) between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. By implication, there would be smaller differences in pay between the most productive and the least productive workers. That is good news for the less productive. But it is bad news for the most productive. And it means that the most productive workers in a socialist business would be the ones most likely to leave in favor of a capitalist business, where highly productive people are capable of earning much greater pay.
-Perhaps, one might think, people would remain with socialist businesses for ideological reasons—that is, out of a moral belief in the value of equality, the exploitativeness of wage labor, and so on. This argument, however, is unrealistic. To begin with, it is unrealistic to postulate such ideological uniformity as would prevent there from being some capitalist businesses. At a minimum, the committed right-wing libertarians who exist today (this author included) would surely continue to support capitalism, even if a socialist society were created. In addition, there would probably continue to exist a large majority of society who are essentially non-ideological and who prioritize personal interests over political and philosophical ideals.
-Once capitalist businesses exist, it is implausible that their expansion will be stopped by a widespread refusal of people to work for them or to patronize them for ideological reasons. Consider that in our society today, it is already possible to join a commune or a worker cooperative. It is not illegal to do so, nor will capitalists send an army to shut down your commune. Yet very few people make any effort to join such groups. Even among the strongest left-wing ideologues, almost none attempt to join a commune, and almost all continue to work for essentially capitalist businesses and to buy products from other capitalist businesses. Why do they do this? Self-interest. Working for The Man pays better than working on a commune. This suggests that, even if many socialist businesses were available, the overwhelming majority of people, who are less ideological, would be willing to work for capitalist businesses, provided the pay was competitive.
-Again, for the most talented, productive people, the pay in the capitalist world would exceed the pay available in socialist communities. Thus, the socialist businesses, already suffering from lower productivity for the reasons cited in Section III, would find themselves systematically losing their best workers, with their least productive workers left behind. This would force them to lower their wages or raise their prices, thus accelerating the problem. Eventually, most would fold under the pressure of competition from capitalist businesses, and we would be left with a world of mostly capitalist firms.
-To be clear, the anarcho-capitalist does not favor prohibitions on socialistic activity. If a group of people wished to start a commune or a worker-controlled business in an anarchocapitalist society, they would be welcome to do so. But they would be unable to force anyone to join them, and they would face competition from capitalistic businesses and communities. In all probability, only a small number of committed ideologues would join such communes or businesses.[1552]
-**** B. Internal Dissolution
-The second major threat to the socialist business model would come from within: workers within a socialistic business might decide to convert their business to a capitalistic form. To start with, suppose that each worker owns a tradeable stake in the company, saleable to anyone inside or outside the company. In that case, workers with a relatively high time preference or risk aversion (see subsections III.A. and III.B.) would sell their shares to people with lower time preference or higher risk tolerance. Since in fact, most workers have relatively high time preference and are relatively risk averse (compared to capitalists), such sales would be common. This would convert the business to a traditional capitalistic business.
-Suppose, on the other hand, that workers do not have tradeable shares. They are entitled to vote on company policy, with no authority higher than the workers, per the socialist ideal. But suppose that the company bylaws specify that one cannot sell one’s stake in the company to anyone outside the company, perhaps not to anyone at all. Nevertheless, the workers could vote to change that. Since there is no authority above the workers, there is no one to prevent them from doing so. Furthermore, it would be in the economic self-interest of each worker to vote in favor of allowing workers to sell their ownership stakes in the company, because such a rule would immediately give every worker an economically valuable asset. They could trade that asset for money if they wished, or hold on to it if they valued it more than the money. If the workers initially owned stakes that could only be traded to other workers in the business, it would be in their interests to vote to change that rule so that their stakes could be sold to anyone, within or without the business. The reason is that this would increase the value of everyone’s shares (an increase in potential buyers, with the same supply, entails an increase in price)—thus, each employee’s net worth would immediately grow as soon as the rule was adopted permitting sale to outsiders.
-Doubtless some worker-run businesses would resist the temptations to capitalize, out of a philosophical commitment to socialism. But again, it is not realistic to assume that all or most people would place ideological commitment to socialism ahead of their economic self-interest.
-Another possibility is that the workers in a socialist business might vote to collectively offer ownership stakes in the company for sale to the public (otherwise known as making an IPO, or initial public offering). The reason for doing this would be that it would generate a large influx of cash into the company, which could be used to increase worker salaries, expand the business, pay off business debt, and so on. If a business did this, it would have a competitive advantage over businesses that refused to sell shares due to a philosophical commitment to socialism. Thus, it is likely that this would occur often.
-**** C. Social Welfare
-One more problem would threaten the stability of socialist anarchy. Socialist anarchists envision a system in which a community would provide for the needs of all members, regardless of their ability to pay. The socialists would provide free education for the young, and free housing, food, medical care, and so on for the old and the sick. At the same time, socialist anarchists believe in complete negative freedom of association, meaning that anyone has the right to quit any association at will.
-Now suppose that a socialist community is providing free social welfare programs, as described, to its neediest members. These programs must somehow be paid for by the other members—perhaps workers will receive lower pay, or the products they produce will have higher prices, than they would if there were no such social welfare programs. Meanwhile, next to the socialist community is a capitalist community in which there are no free social welfare programs. The socialists shake their heads in disapproval, but since they do not believe in aggressive wars, they must let the benighted capitalists continue in their individualistic ways.
-Now, in addition to the reasons cited earlier, there is one more incentive for some people to leave the socialist community. In the socialist community, some people are net beneficiaries of the social welfare programs, while others are net payers—that is, they pay more to support the programs than the economic value that they receive from the programs. The greatest net payers would be healthy young adults, without children, who possess skills that are highly economically valuable. These individuals would not use the social welfare programs, but their labor would go to support the programs. The net payers will recognize that if they move to the capitalist community, they will be much better off, since they will no longer have to support other people’s education, health care, and so on. Some of them decide to do so. This puts a financial strain on the socialist community, which now must support its social welfare programs without the help of some of its formerly most productive members. When the remaining net payers see this, more of them are tempted to follow suit.
-Thus, the socialist community finds itself with too many people who need social services and not enough people to support them. The capitalist community finds itself filled with highly economically productive people who have fewer needs, or who are able and willing to pay for their own needs. Capitalist communities will thus grow and prosper under anarchy while socialist communities struggle.
-One might suggest that productive individuals would choose to remain in the socialist society because they know that they might fall ill one day, in which case the community would support them without charge, whereas the capitalist society would do no such thing. From the standpoint of self-interest, however, it would make more sense for individuals to simply purchase insurance, which would be for sale in the capitalist society, against the possibility of such an illness. The cost of insurance for low-risk individuals (those who are young, have healthy lifestyles, and so on) would be lower than the amount required if one must pay an equal share for the support of all the old and infirm.
-Alternately, one might hope that highly productive individuals would remain in the socialist society due to charitable impulses. Perhaps they would enjoy helping needy members of their community, or perhaps they would simply have a philosophical belief that one ought to help.
-In fact, even such generous people would have no reason to prefer the socialist community. For once one moves to a capitalist community, one is hardly debarred from helping others. Capitalist societies would host a variety of voluntary charities, such as already exist in today’s society. One charity might support research on muscular dystrophy, another aid the poor in Bangladesh, and another help protect endangered species. In an anarcho-capitalist community, those with charitable impulses may freely give to whichever charities they choose. Charitably minded individuals should be better satisfied with the capitalist community, because it leaves them free to choose, individually, which of many causes to support, depending on their own preferences. In the socialist community they would be required to give to whatever the majority of the community voted for, thus leaving them with less to spend either on themselves or on their preferred charities. Thus, regardless of whether one is selfish or charitable, the capitalist community is the more rational choice for relatively productive people.
-We should not overstate the point. The socialist communities would not necessarily disappear. Some people would remain in them due to inertia, or due to a general philosophical belief in socialism. But over time, capitalist communities would come to comprise most of society, even if we began from a predominantly socialist world.
-Of course, the same factors that explain why socialism would be likely to evolve into capitalism also explain why it is unlikely that a country dominated by anarcho-socialist communities would ever come about to begin with. If we ever manage to abolish the state, it is most likely that we would transition directly to anarcho-capitalism, without any detour through socialism.
-*** V. Conclusion
-The capitalist version of anarchism is preferable to socialist versions for three main reasons. First, anarcho-capitalism has a superior solution to the problem of crime. The idea of teaching people to be highly selfless is utopian, and there is no evidence that anyone knows how to do this. The idea of creating a community security force, on the other hand, simply reproduces the problems of traditional government. The only solution that genuinely alters the logic that leads to government abuse, while at the same time opposing dangerous criminals with adequate force, is the free market solution of a collection of competing protection agencies. The operation of this solution does not depend upon any idealistic assumptions about how altruistic human beings are, about how much human nature can change, or about the prospects for society-wide philosophical agreement.
-The second reason for preferring anarcho-capitalism over socialism is that capitalism preserves the valuable functions of capitalists. Socialists mistakenly view capitalists as parasites whose incomes derive from skimming off value produced by workers. In fact, capitalists provide the economically valuable functions of (i) bearing the financial risk inherent in business, (ii) trading short-term consumption for long-term increases in productivity, and (iii) evaluating the promise of businesses and allocating resources accordingly. The high pay of capitalists relative to workers results from the fact that an individual’s efficient performance of these functions can make a much greater difference to economic productivity than an ordinary worker’s skillful performance of his job. In a market economy, the pay of an individual worker approximates to the worker’s marginal product, which is the most that any individual can reasonably ask to be paid.
-The final reason for preferring anarcho-capitalism over socialist anarchism is the greater stability of capitalism. In a society with both capitalist and socialist communities or businesses, we should expect capitalist businesses and communities to grow through peaceful marketplace competition until they dominate the landscape. One reason is that capitalist businesses will be more productive on average, due to the valuable functions served by capitalists, as well as the ability to attract the most talented individuals by paying them more than socialist businesses are willing to pay. Another reason is that it would be in the economic self-interest of workers in a socialist community to vote to allow themselves to sell shares of the company (or allow the company to issue stock) to outsiders, thus providing the workers with an immediate financial benefit and reduced financial risk. Finally, socialist communities would be disadvantaged by their policies of providing free social welfare benefits. Those who benefit less from a socialist community’s social programs than average would be better off moving to a capitalist community or company, where they would receive greater net pay. Even those with charitable impulses would be best served by moving to anarcho-capitalist communities, where they could choose which causes to direct their charitable dollars to.
-The bad news is that socialist anarchy would function poorly. The good news is that it would not last long. In the absence of a state to enforce socialistic constraints, the system would peacefully evolve, by and large, to the more efficient, capitalistic variety of anarchy.
-[1536] Aside: the common term “social anarchism” is infelicitous, since it suggests that alternative forms of anarchism are not social. Of course, anarcho-capitalism is social (it involves people living in cooperative groups); it merely fails to be socialist.
-[1537] This view is sometimes called “political anarchism”, to distinguish it from “philosophical anarchism”. Philosophical anarchism holds that individuals do not have an obligation to obey laws merely because they are laws; see A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979). In this chapter, I focus solely on political anarchism, which is how “anarchism” is usually understood in popular discourse.
-[1538] See, for example, Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, trans. and ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York, NY: Knopf, 1972); Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York, NY: Vanguard, 1926); Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, 2 vols. (Chico, CA: AK, 2007), available at [[http://www.anarchistfaq.org][www.anarchistfaq.org]] (accessed April 4, 2019).
-[1539] See Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 2d ed. (Auburn, AL: Mises, 2006); David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 3d ed. (New York, NY: Chu Hartley, 2014); Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2013).
-[1540] See notes 3—4 above. A number of questions and objections are also addressed by Bryan Caplan, Anarchist Theory FAQ, version 5.2, [[http://econfaculty.gmu.edu][http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm]] (1994; accessed April 4, 2019).
-[1541] For example, Bakunin; Kropotkin; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, trans. Benjamin Tucker (Princeton, NJ: Wilson, 1876).
-[1542] See Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective, “The Anarchist Response to Crime”, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][https://theanarchistli]] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org][brary.org/library/scott-of-the-insurgency-culture-collective-the-anarchist-response-to-crime ]](2010; accessed March 21, 2019); Emerican Johnson, “How Do Anarchist Police and Military Work?”, [[http://www.youtube.com][www.youtube.]] [[http://www.youtube.com][com/watch?v=Hmy1jjRnl8I ]](2018; accessed March 21, 2019); McKay, section I.5.8.
-[1543] Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019”, Prison Policy Initiative, [[http://www.prisonpolicy.org][www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html]] (March 19, 2019; accessed March 26, 2019).
-[1544] See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: OUP, 2016). The reason for the greater aggression of males is that in the past, aggressive males killed other males and thereby gained more mating opportunities for themselves. The same did not occur with females, because women are incapable of reproducing more than once in nine months, regardless of how many partners they may have; see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997) 494—8, 509—20.
-[1545] See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York, NY: Viking, 2011).
-[1546] Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman, “The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics”, Jurimetrics 51 (2011): 355—97. Somewhere between 15% and 25% of the prison population are psychopaths; thus, psychopaths are fifteen to twenty-five times more likely to wind up in prison than nonpsychopaths.
-[1547] Psychopathy has traditionally been viewed as untreatable. Kiehl and Hoffman, however, discuss recent innovations that appear to produce significant improvements in behavior for psychopaths, albeit at large expense. On the genetic source of psychopathic personality, see Henrik Larsson, Henrik Andershed, and Paul Lichtenstein, “A Genetic Factor Explains Most of the Variation in the Psychopathic Personality”, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 115 (2006): 221—30.
-[1548] The problem isn’t simply an unrealistic view of human nature. More precisely, socialist anarchists tend to recognize the problems of human selfishness and the drive to dominate others when thinking about the state, but to forget these tendencies when thinking about the socialist utopia.
-[1549] For some elaboration, see Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007); Jason Brennan, Against Democracy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2016).
-[1550] This analogy is from Friedman (133—4).
-[1551] U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Entrepreneurship and the U.S. Economy”, Chart 3, [[http://www.bls.gov][www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/bdm_chart3.htm]] (2016; accessed April 4, 2019). But note that not all of these are business failures; 29% of these businesses are viewed by their owners as successes at the time of closure (Brian Headd, “Redefining Business Success: Distinguishing between Closure and Failure”, Small Business Economics 21 [2003]: 56).
-[1552] I use “ideologue” in a descriptive, non-pejorative sense here: ideologues are simply people who prioritize philosophical and political ideals over more personal concerns.
-<br>
-** 25. Anarchist Approaches to Education
-*Kevin Currie-Knight*
-“‘Why do you not say how things will be operated under Anarchism?’ is a question I have had to meet thousands of times. Because I believe that Anarchism cannot consistently impose an iron-clad program or method on the future.”[1553] Emma Goldman wrote this in an essay defending anarchism as a vision for social organization. If anarchism is about allowing people the freedom to organize their affairs as they see fit, as Goldman argues, this understandably makes it difficult for anarchist writers to sketch a substantive vision of how children’s education should be organized. This may be, why, in anarchist philosopher Judith Suissa’s estimation, “very little has been written, from a systematic philosophical point of view, about the educational ideas arising from anarchist theory.”[1554]
-Indeed, while there exist some book-length treatments of primary and secondary education by anarchist authors,[1555] anarchists have tended to treat education as an ancillary issue, to be dealt with in short essays or sections of larger works. From these works, though, we can distill some common themes running through anarchist treatments of education. These themes are of two broad types. Themes of one sort in anarchist writings about education are practical, and concern how education might be provided without the state. The other set of themes is more pedagogical, and concerns what forms of education are most consistent with anarchist principles.
-Within this first (practical) set of concerns, anarchists are understandably most united in their opposition to state involvement in education. Insofar as anarchists see the state as a way for the ruling class to subjugate the people, state education is viewed as a way for the state to create willing subjects by means of state propaganda. In William Godwin’s words: “[T]he data upon which their [the ruling class’s] conduct as statesmen is vindicated, will be the data upon which their instructions are founded.”[1556] Voltairine de Cleyre similarly cautioned:
-<quote>
-If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never intrust [sic] that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.[1557]
-</quote>
-Anarchists have tended to see education as a propaganda tool for whatever views the state seeks to inculcate. Anarchists have generally agreed, of course, that the state has a strong interest in educating the young to respect the state. But anti-capitalist anarchists have also tended to see education as indoctrinating the young into support of capitalism. And anarchists with strong commitments to scientific atheism (like Bakunin) have often seen the state as an engine for indoctrinating the young into (state-endorsed) religion.[1558]
-If anarchists wanted to end the state’s control of schools, how would education be provided to the people? Here, many anarchists have been understandably vague: the answer couldn’t be much more specific than allowing the people to create and decide on the forms of education they themselves wanted. Proudhon, for instance, suggested that workers’ federations would create their own ways (likely, schools) to provide education to the young, while offering parents the option of utilizing some other form of education if they chose.[1559] Auberon Herbert articulated his voluntaryist vision of education this way:
-<quote>
-It is plain that the most healthy state of education will exist when the workmen, dividing themselves into natural groups according to their own tastes and feelings, organize the education of their children without help, or need of help, from outside.[1560]
-</quote>
-Similarly, Leo Tolstoy believed that education wasn’t truly free until “the classes which receive the education ... have the full power to express their dissatisfaction, or at least, to swerve from the education which instinctively does not satisfy them,—that the criterion of pedagogics is only liberty.”[1561]
-This, of course, leaves wide scope for people to choose diverse forms of education. Some families might choose for their children to attend schools with strict curricular standards. Others might choose more libertarian schools that leave students comparatively free to explore based on their own interests.
-On pedagogical matters—questions like what curricula the young should be taught and how teaching should be approached—anarchists were quite diverse. Some, like Proudhon and Herbert, said nothing about these matters, trusting that allowing individuals to choose the approaches that worked best for them and their children would be enough. For these anarchists, we might suppose, there could have been a perceived tension between advancing a philosophy that prizes individual freedom of choice and offering substantive ideas about what educational form is best for people.
-Several anarchists, however, did offer substantive ideas on what features education should have in an anarchist social order. Perhaps the one that flows most obviously from basic anarchist principles is that education should leave children as free as possible from teacher (and adult) coercion—physical, social, and emotional. To the extent that anarchism is a theory motivated by opposition to unjust hierarchies, it can be argued that teacher/student hierarchies, like adult/child hierarchies more generally, are problematically coercive.
-Perhaps the first author to write about the issue of educational hierarchy from an anarchist perspective was William Godwin. Godwin’s book The Enquirer[1562] extended arguments he’d made in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice into the realm of education and child rearing. In Enquiry, Godwin argued against political systems based on coercion in light of his belief that individuals should be free to follow their own reasoned human judgments. We can and should attempt to persuade, argued Godwin, but we should never force. The Enquirer was largely an attempt to argue that the same principle should hold true for the education of children. Whenever possible— whenever force wasn’t necessary to preserve someone’s physical safety—children should be left free to learn through their own experience. Parents and teachers could, of course, attempt to persuade children through reason and argument, but should not attempt to force or manipulate by extrinsic threat of punishment or promise of reward.
-Other anarchists were similarly sensitive to the importance of children’s freedom. In the essay “The Child and its Enemies,” Emma Goldman cautioned parents and educators that the existing conventional “ideas of education and training [of children] ... in the school and the family— even the family of the liberal or radical—are such as to stifle the natural growth of the child.”[1563] Like Godwin, she favored much more freedom for children to develop in their own ways (as opposed to ways demanded by adults).
-Other anarchist writers were convinced that conventional methods of teaching too often treated students as passive memorizers, whose duty was to obey teachers’ authority. For instance, Leo Tolstoy founded a “school for peasants” in Russia around 1860 (the date is uncertain) near his home at Yasnaya Polyana. The school was organized largely around student freedom: students could, but did not have to, attend formal classes, and teachers were to seduce students into learning by persuasion rather than force.[1564]
-Voltairine de Cleyre, who taught briefly at a Chicago school founded on anarchist principles, wrote eloquently of her concern for student liberty in schools in which teachers exercised unjust authority. She offered a powerful and mocking comparison between teaching (as it existed in conventional schools) and the less coercive act of gardening:
-<quote>
-Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy, beautiful, and fruitful plants by outraging all those plants’ instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as his reward— sickly plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead plants. He will not do it; he will watch very carefully to see whether they like much sunlight, or considerable shade, whether they survive on much water or get drowned in it, whether they like sandy soil, or fat mucky soil; the plant itself will indicate to him when he is doing the right thing. And every gardener will watch for indications with great anxiety. If he finds the plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But what he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground all just alike, with equal chances of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant everything together without discrimination,—mighty close together!—saying beforehand, ‘If plants don’t want to thrive on this, they ought to want to; and if they are stubborn about it, they must be made to.’[1565]
-</quote>
-Because anarchists were most often concerned with the fate of the working classes at the hands of the state, several anarchists made suggestions regarding ways in which education in an anarchist society could best aid and strengthen those classes. One suggestion, made by such anarchists as Pyotr Kropotkin and Francisco Ferrer, was to ensure that everyone be taught thoroughly about science and scientific ways of thinking. Ferrer, who founded the Escola Moderna (Modern School) in Italy on anarchist principles, insisted that the school teach students contemporary science using only the best texts written from a scientific (as opposed to a religious) point of view. Unlike Tolstoy’s school, which afforded students a high degree of choice regarding the activities in which they engaged, Ferrer was committed to the conviction that all students needed thorough grounding in science.[1566] Kropotkin[1567] and Bakunin[1568] held similar views about the importance of science education.
-The reason for this emphasis was twofold. First, these anarchists viewed science largely in contrast to religion. Religion, they thought, encouraged the teaching of superstition and obedience to a divine authority that could (and often did) foster servile relationships to the state. Science, on the other hand, was rooted in a willingness to challenge superstition and authority, a habit of thought that the vulnerable could use to challenge the authority of the more powerful classes.
-The second reason these authors stressed science education is that, drawing on scientific work performed by Kropotkin and others, they also believed that a proper understanding of science led to anarchistic conclusions. Building on the biological idea that human nature was naturally cooperative and didn’t require government to organize society, and focusing on the apparent ubiquity of non-hierarchical spontaneous orders in the natural world, they supposed that, if students were taught a proper understanding of science and scientific thinking “by means of an extensive system of popular education and instruction, ... the question of liberty ... [would] be entirely solved.”[1569]
-Another contribution anarchist writers envisioned that education might make to the liberation of the working class was to oppose curricula embodying the conventional split between intellectual and physical work. In conventional schools, these writers observed, some students were taught intellectual curricula and others were educated for manual labor, an educational practice that served to create a caste system. These anarchists argued that, when schools properly fused intellectual and physical labor into instruction for all, not only would an end would be put to this artificial hierarchy, but people would learn to become more independent and to produce things for themselves, hence being less dependent on potentially coercive authority figures. Kropotkin envisioned schools in which
-we shall arrive at teaching everyone the basis of every trade as well as of every machine, by laboring ... at the workbench, with the vice, in shaping raw material, in oneself making the fundamental parts of everything, as well of simple machines as of apparatus for the transmission of power, to which all machines are reduced.[1570]
-Voltairine de Cleyre’s vision of an “ideal school” was “a boarding school built in the country, having a farm attached, and workshops where useful crafts might be learned, in daily connection with intellectual training.” The ideal school’s fusion of physical with intellectual training would enable students to
-learn to use their limbs as nature meant, feel their intimate relationship with the growing life of other sorts, form a profound respect for work and an estimate of the value of it, [and] wish to become real doers in the world, and not mere gatherers in of other men’s products.[1571]
-[1553] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth 1910) 49.
-[1554] Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: PM Press 2010) 16.
-[1555] Wiliam Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson 1797); Francisco Ferrer, The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Watts & Company 1913); Goodman, Paul, Compulsory Mis-Education, and The Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Murray Rothbard, Education: Free & Compulsory (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute 1999).
-[1556] William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: And Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson 1793) 304.
-[1557] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism and American Traditions.” Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, ed. Alexander Berkman (Mother Earth 1914) 126.
-[1558] Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (Indore: Modern Publishers 1920).
-[1559] Shi Yung Lu, The Political Theories ofP.J. Proudhon (New York: M. R. Gray 1922) 138—139.
-[1560] Auberon Herbert, “State Education: A Help or Hindrance?” The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, ed. Eric Mack (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1978) 58.
-[1561] Leo Tolstoy, “On Popular Education.” The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy: Pedagogical Articles, trans. Leo Weiner (Boston: Dana Estes and Co. 1904) 29.
-[1562] Godwin, The Enquirer 1797.
-[1563] Emma Goldman, “Child and Its Enemies.” Mother Earth 1:2 (April 1906) 7.
-[1564] Leo Tolstoy, “The School at Yasnaya Polyana.” The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy: Pedagogical Articles, trans. Leo Weiner (London: Dana Estes and Co, 1904) 225—360.
-[1565] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Modern Educational Reform.” Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, ed. Alexander Berkman (New York: Mother Earth 1914) 324—325.
-[1566] Ferrer, The Origins and Ideals.
-[1567] Peter Kropotkin, “The Reformed School.” Mother Earth 3:1 (1908).
-[1568] Bakunin, God and the State.
-[1569] Bakunin.,God and the State 32.
-[1570] Kropotkin, “The Reformed School” 261.
-[1571] De Cleyre, “Modern Educational Reform” 339—40.
-<br>
-** 26. An Anarchist Critique of Power Relations Within Institutions
-*Kevin A. Carson*
-*** I. Introduction
-Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the popular understanding of anarchism this is most commonly associated with the anarchist critique of the state. But the anarchist critiques of the authority principle as it involves the state are just as applicable to authority relations within institutions.
-Just as in society as a whole, authority within hierarchical institutions serves primarily to promote the interests of those who possess it at the expense of those who do not. Authority shifts costs, effort and negative consequences downward, and shifts benefits upward; as such, it is a form of privilege. And like all forms of privilege, it creates fundamental conflicts of interest.
-These conflicts of interest, in turn, result in all sorts of related inefficiencies and irrationalities. They take the form, in particular, of distorted information flows and perverse incentives.
-*** II. Distorted Information Flows and Irrationality
-When power intrudes into human relationships it creates a zero-sum relationship between superiors and subordinates. In such an environment, it is impossible in principle for those in authority to receive accurate information about the state of affairs within an organization from those subject to their command. According to anarchist writer Robert Anton Wilson,
-A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to ser- vile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave ‘intelligently.’
-The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and- communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up).... In less extreme ... form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.[1572]
-Wilson, writing with Robert Shea, developed the same theme in a fictional format in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. “A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger.”
-Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers.[1573]
-This inability of organizational leadership to obtain sufficient or accurate information from below, and the hostile perception of superiors by subordinates, mean that those in the lower echelons of an institution hoard information and use it as a source of rents. The zero-sum relationship resulting from the power differential means that the organizational pyramid will be opaque to those at its top. As organization theorist Kenneth Boulding put it,
-There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.[1574]
-In Seeing Like a State James C. Scott makes the concept of metis (i.e. distributed, situational, job- related knowledge) do much the same work as distributed or situational knowledge did in Friedrich Hayek’s “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.” And like Wilson, he associates it with mutuality—“as opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordination.”[1575] Although Scott’s primary focus is on the state’s attempts to render society legible and subject to its control, the same principles apply to organizational leadership (“seeing like a boss”). Scott’s follow-up to Seeing Like a State was The Art of Not Being Governed, on the reciprocal effort by lower orders to render themselves illegible to governing authorities, and hence ungovernable. This is equally true of subordinates within an organization who attempt to render themselves illegible to their superiors in order to evade control and exploitation. The information-hoarding evoked by authority is directly at odds with the effective use of knowledge. For metis to be effectively brought to bear within an organization, there must be two-way communication between equals, where those in contact with the situation—the people actually doing the work—are in a position of equality with those making the decisions, or actually make the decisions themselves.
-Not only had Wilson previously noted this connection between mutuality and accurate information in “Thirteen Choruses,” but (like Scott) he alluded to Proudhon:
-<quote>
-[Proudhon’s] system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality.
-The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law—that is … effective communication running one way only. The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract—that is, mutual agreement—that is, effective communication running both ways.
-</quote>
-An institutional hierarchy interferes with the judgment of Hayek’s “people-on-the-spot,” and with the aggregation of dispersed knowledge of circumstances, in exactly the same way a state does in society at large.
-Hierarchical organizations are, to use the phrase of Martha Feldman and James March, systematically stupid.[1576] They are incapable of making effective use of the knowledge of their members, so that they are less than the sum of their parts. Because a hierarchical institution is unable to aggregate the intelligence of its members and bring it to bear effectively on the policy-making process, policies have unintended consequences. Once policies have been made, organizational leadership cannot obtain accurate feedback as to its effects. It’s not that the top echelons of a hierarchy are made up of people who are especially dumb; it’s that hierarchy, by its very nature, makes anyone in those positions dumb. The members of a hierarchy are smarter as individuals than they are collectively. Nobody—not Bill Gates, not Jeff Bezos, not even the Randian superman John Galt—is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization or make it function rationally. As Matt Yglesias put it,
-the business class, as a set, has a curious and somewhat incoherent view of capitalism and why it’s a good thing. Indeed, it’s in most respects a backwards view that strongly contrasts with the economic or political science take on why markets work.
-The basic business outlook is very focused on the key role of the executive. Good, profitable, growing firms are run by brilliant executives. And the ability of the firm to grow and be profitable is evidence of its executives’ brilliance. This is part of the reason that CEO salaries need to keep escalating—recruiting the best is integral to success. The leaders of large firms become revered figures.... Their success stems from overall brilliance....
-The thing about this is that if this were generally true—if the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were brilliant economic seers—then it would really make a lot of sense to implement socialism. Real socialism. Not progressive taxation to finance a mildly redistributive welfare state. But ‘let’s let Vikram Pandit and Jeff Immelt centrally plan the economy—after all, they’re really brilliant!’
-But in the real world, the point of markets isn’t that executives are clever and bureaucrats are dimwitted. The point is that nobody is all that brilliant.[1577]
-No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy insulates those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and makes their intelligence less usable.
-*** III. Irrational Incentives and Conflicts of Interest
-Because the senior management of large institutions don’t live under the effects of their policy, and they are insulated from negative feedback from those who do suffer, the CEO of one organization will happily inform their counterparts at other organizations of how wonderfully their organization’s new “best practice” worked out. One of the central functions of a hierarchy is to tell naked emperors how great their new clothes look.
-When someone operates on the assumption that they will internalize the consequences of their own actions, they have an incentive to anticipate what could go wrong. And they continually revise their decisions in response to subsequent experience. Normally functioning human beings—that is, those of us who are in contact with our environment and not insulated from it by our own authority—are constantly correcting our courses of action.
-Authority short-circuits this feedback process. Because it shifts the negative consequences of decisions downward and the benefits upward, decision-makers operate based on a distorted cost— benefit calculus so that it benefits them to adopt policies whose net social effects are negative. And because it blocks negative feedback, the leadership of an institution is subject to the functional equivalent of a psychotic break with reality.
-This is a principle that operates fractally. If institutional leadership is able to adopt policies and practices beyond the point of net negative returns, on a societal level entire industries, or institutional complexes, are able to follow organizational models centered on such counter-productive practices.
-Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, used the term “second watershed” to refer to the adoption of technologies, organizational approaches, policies, etc., beyond the point of “net social disutility” or “counter-productivity.” The first threshold of a technology or tool results in net social benefit. But beyond a certain point, increasing reliance on that technology results in net social costs and increased disempowerment and dependency to those who rely on it. Rather than being a service to the individual, the technology reduces them to an accessory to a machine or to a bureaucracy.[1578]
-The classic example is the automobile. The cheap motorcar originally served those in areas of low population density, like farmers, who were underserved by in-town transit systems or intercity rail. But as towns and cities were redesigned around “car culture” (i.e. monoculture residential suburbs and big-box stores or strip malls linked by freeways replaced mixed-use communities where work and shopping were within foot, bike or public transit range of home), the automobile became a necessity for everyone. And most towns and cities continue to follow the urban design approach of the mid-twentieth century which created that state of affairs, even when that approach is clearly counter-productive and exacerbates social pathologies. The orthodox prescription for traffic congestion is to build new subsidized freeways, which only generate even more traffic as new subdivisions and strip malls spring up around the newly-built cloverleafs.
-What Illich failed to recognize was the role of authority relations in going beyond the second watershed and creating counter-productivity. Indeed, he framed such results as the inevitable trajectory in adoption of a technology if society did not actually resort to the authority principle to prevent it. But in fact the social pathologies of the second watershed are possible only when some are in a position of privilege from which they can use power to force the negative externalities of a given decision on others while appropriating the benefits of it for themselves. Privilege— coercive authority—is a mechanism for separating the good and ill effects of a policy or practice from each other, and diverting them to different persons or classes. Because of such authority, the privileged individual does not fully internalize all the positive and negative consequences of their behavior on a single balance sheet. When people deal with one another as equals, on the other hand, no one is able to adopt a technology beyond its net negative effects because no one is in a position to externalize the negative effects on others.
-Where authority exists, dominant institutions are able to flourish well past the point at which they’re a net drain on society. Although they are failures from the standpoint of the majority of people in society, their performance is entirely a success from the standpoint of those who collect the CEO salaries and bonuses. Large institutions are “successful” at achieving goals that are largely artificial—goals defined primarily by the interests of their governing hierarchies, rather than by their ostensible customers or those directly responsible for serving customer needs.[1579]
-Hierarchical institutions treat not only front-line production workers, but also customers or clients, as means to management’s ends. Edgar Z. Friedenberg coined the term “conscript clienteles” to describe this phenomenon.
-A large proportion of the gross national product of every industrialized nation consists of activities which provide no satisfaction to, and may be intended to humiliate, coerce, or destroy, those who are most affected by them; and of public services in which the taxpayer pays to have something very expensive done to other persons who have no opportunity to reject the service. This process is a large-scale economic development which I call the reification of clienteles....
-Although they are called ‘clients,’ members of conscript clienteles are not regarded as customers by the bureaucracies that service them, since they are not free to withdraw or withhold their custom or to look elsewhere for service. They are treated as raw material that the service organization needs to perform its social function and continue in existence.[1580]
-Taken together, a large proportion of the labor force [he estimated about a third] employed in modern society is engaged in processing people according to other people’s regulations and instructions. They are not accountable to the people they operate on, and ignore or overlook any feedback they may receive from them.[1581]
-Friedenberg limited his use of the term largely to bureaucracies directly funded with taxpayer money, and those like schools and prisons whose “clients” were literally unable to refuse service. The public schools, for example.
-It does not take many hours of observation—or attendance—in a public school to learn, from the way the place is actually run, that the pupils are there for the sake of the school, not the other way round.[1582]
-This, too, is money spent providing goods and services to people who have no voice in determining what those goods and services shall be or how they shall be administered; and who have no lawful power to withhold their custom by refusing to attend even if they and their parents feel that what the schools provide is distasteful or injurious. They are provided with textbooks that, unlike any other work, from the Bible to the sleaziest pornography, no man would buy for his personal satisfaction. They are, precisely, not ‘trade books’; rather, they are adopted for the compulsory use of hundreds of thousands of other people by committees, no member of which would have bought a single copy for his own library.[1583]
-School children certainly fulfill the principal criterion for membership in a reified clientele: being there by compulsion. It is less immediately obvious that they serve as raw material to be processed for the purposes of others, since this processing has come to be defined by the society as preparing the pupil for advancement within it.... Whatever the needs of young people might have been, no public school system developed in response to them until an industrial society arose to demand the creation of holding pens from which a steady and carefully monitored supply of people trained to be punctual, literate, orderly and compliant and graded according to qualities determining employability from the employer’s point of view could be released into the economy as needed.[1584]
-In so doing he significantly underestimated the prevalence of institutions managing conscript clienteles. He neglected, for one thing, those in the private sector whose clients are nominally free to refuse their services, but likely won’t because competition is restricted by cartels or oligopoly markets of one kind or another. Consider, for example, the number of goods that are designed by one stovepiped R&D bureaucracy for sale to the stovepiped procurement bureaucracy of another institution, to be used by people to whom neither bureaucracy is remotely accountable; this is the reason the enterprise “productivity” software foisted on employees by corporate IT departments is so godawful, and why patient care equipment sold to hospitals is so poorly designed. Likewise when intellectual property restrictions prevent competition in design quality, or worse yet poor design is permanently institutionalized via path dependency even after patents expire.
-The zero-sum relationship between superiors and subordinates within a hierarchy also results in irrationalities because, given the fundamental conflict of interest, those in direct contact with a situation cannot be trusted to act on their own judgment and initiative. Because the institution does not exist as a vehicle for the goals of its members, there is no intrinsic connection between their personal motivation and their roles in the organization. Institutions must therefore resort to standardized work rules, job descriptions, and all the rest of the Weberian-Taylorist model of bureaucratic rationality. Those who know most about a situation and are the best judges of alternative courses of action have no interest in common with the leadership of the organization. Because someone might use her initiative in ways detrimental to the interests of the organization, a set of rules must be set in place to prevent anyone from doing anything at all. Unlike selfmanaged organizations and horizontal networks, which treat the human brain as an asset, hierarchical rules systems treat it as a risk to be mitigated.
-But this is entirely rational, from the perspective of those involved. Because of the fundamental conflict of interest built into the authority relations of a hierarchy, workers have absolutely no incentive to contribute their judgment to improving work processes, and every incentive to sabotage efficiency. They know that any contribution they make to increased productivity will be expropriated by management in the form of downsizings, speed-ups and increased management compensation. Hence workers commonly engage in “satisficing,” or doing the minimum necessary to keep their jobs, and management must spend enormous amounts of money on front-line supervisors or monitoring and surveillance technologies to protect themselves from a workforce whose interests are fundamentally at odds with their own.
-Job descriptions and union work rules are the other side of the coin to Taylorist work rules. Management cannot be trusted with the discretion to make the most efficient use of labor because it will inevitably abuse that discretion to its own benefit. Work rules, whether imposed by management or by labor, result from mutual distrust within a hierarchy. Power, to repeat, creates zero-sum relationships by definition. Superiors attempt to externalize effort on subordinates and skim off the benefits of increased productivity for themselves. Because subordinates know their contributions to organizational productivity will be expropriated by management, subordinates rationally minimize their expenditure of effort and do the minimum necessary to avoid getting fired. Both superiors and subordinates filter or hoard information of benefit to the other party, and attempt to maximize the rents from keeping each other ignorant. In this zerosum relation, where each side can only benefit at the expense of the other, each party seeks mechanisms for limiting abuses by the other.
-Paul Goodman illustrated the need for such constraints on individual initiative, in directly adopting the most common-sense and lowest-cost solutions to immediate problems, with a seemingly minor example from the New York City public school system:
-<quote>
-To remove a door catch that hampers the use of a lavatory requires a long appeal through headquarters, because it is ‘city property.’ ...
-An old-fashioned type of hardware is specified for all new buildings, that is kept in production only for the New York school system.[1585]
-</quote>
-<quote>
-When the social means are tied up in such complicated organizations, it becomes extraordinarily difficult and sometimes impossible to do a simple thing directly, even though the doing is common sense and would meet with universal approval, as when neither the child, nor the parent, nor the janitor, nor the principal of the school can remove the offending door catch.[1586]
-</quote>
-The problem with authority relations in a hierarchy is that, given the conflict of interest created by the presence of power, those in authority cannot afford to allow discretion to those in direct contact with the situation. Systematic stupidity results, of necessity, from a situation in which a bureaucratic hierarchy must develop arbitrary metrics for assessing the skills or work quality of a labor force whose actual work they know nothing about, and whose material interests militate against remedying management’s ignorance.
-Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it.
-Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.
-Arbitrary work rules result of necessity when performance and quality metrics are not tied to direct feedback from the work process itself. They’re a metric of work for someone who is neither a creator/provider nor an end user. A bureaucracy can’t afford to allow its subordinates discretion to use their common sense, because in a zero-sum relationship any discretion can be abused.
-*** IV. How Can This Irrational System Survive?
-So why is this state of affairs able to continue? With all this dysfunction, how are authoritarian institutions able to survive at all, let alone function in even the most minimal manner? The answer is that, while the authority principle results in irrationality, it also shields those in authority from the negative consequences and instead forces their subordinates to bear the brunt of dealing with them. In addition, the organization itself is part of a larger, interlocking macrosystem of authority that protects it from many of the negative external consequences of its authority.
-Such institutions are able to survive only under special circumstances. First, they must exist in an artificially simple and stable environment. As an institution becomes larger and experiences increased overhead and bureaucratic ossification, it simultaneously becomes more and more vulnerable to fluctuating conditions in its surrounding environment, and less able to react to them. To survive, therefore, the large institution must control its surrounding environment.
-In regard to the large mass-production corporation, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, the longtime horizons for product development and the enormous up-front commitment of capital meant that a firm required a reasonable degree of predictability regarding things like wages and prices. And the outlay of capital required some reassurance—some guarantee—that the product would be bought in sufficient quantity to amortize the investment when it came off the assembly line.
-[Machines and sophisticated technology] require ... heavy investment of capital. They are designed and guided by technically sophisticated men. They involve, also, a greatly increased lapse of time between any decision to produce and the emergence of a salable product.
-The large commitment of capital and organization well in advance of result requires that there be foresight and also that all feasible steps be taken to insure that what is foreseen will transpire.[1587]
-[I]n addition to deciding what the consumer will want and will pay, the firm must make every feasible step to see that what it decides to produce is wanted by the consumer at a remunerative price..It must exercise control over what is sold..It must replace the market with planning.[1588]
-Barry Stein, a heterodox economist specializing in decentralism and economies of scale, characterized Galbraith’s solution as “suppressing turbulence”: “to control the changes, in kind and extent, that the society will undergo.”[1589]
-In concrete terms, this means coordinated action at a societal level by giant corporations and the state to provide the stable environment required for the survival of the large organization. Each industry must be dominated by few enough oligopoly firms to engage in administered pricing to pass on the costs of R&D and capital investment to the consumer, without any disruption by significant competition in price. And those firms must coordinate the introduction of major technological improvements so that earlier investments can be phased out in an orderly manner without competitive disadvantage to any of the leading firms. As Paul Goodman characterized it, a handful of firms “competing with fixed prices and slowly spooned-out improvements.”[1590] To achieve this the state introduced regulations to create stable oligopoly markets and restrict the level of competition, pursued fiscal and monetary policies to maintain sufficient levels of aggregate demand (up to and including the creation of a permanent war economy), and even created entire new industries through its own direct investment (for example, large-scale civil aviation, and the Interstate Highway System with its attendant rebuilding of cities around car culture). In regard to the regulatory state that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, New Left historian Gabriel Kolko described the policy objective as “political capitalism.”
-Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security—to attain rationalization—in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.[1591]
-Beyond a certain tipping point, large hierarchical institutions become hegemonic: that is, they become the defining institutional type for society as a whole, and create entire ecology of interlocking and mutually-supporting institutions that choke out competing institutional “species.” As Paul Goodman characterized it:
-<quote>
-[T]he genius of our centralized bureaucracies has been, as they interlock, to form a mutually accrediting establishment of decision-makers, with common interests and a common style that nullify the diversity of pluralism.[1592]
-</quote>
-A system destroys its competitors by pre-empting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.[1593]
-And because all the “competing” firms in an industry actually exist in an oligopoly environment with cost-plus markup and administered pricing, and all share the same pathological institutional cultures, they suffer little or no real competitive penalty for their bureaucratic irrationality.
-Second, even within this protected environment they depend unofficially on the initiative of those who break the rules. Despite every effort of industrial engineers like Andrew Ure and Frederick Taylor to separate labor from skill, reserving the latter to the managerial-technical strata and transform workers into easily replaced appendages of machines, discretion cannot be entirely removed from any process. James Scott writes that it’s impossible, by the nature of things, for everything entailed in the production process to be distilled, formalized or codified into a form that’s legible to management.
-[T]he formal order encoded in social-engineering designs inevitably leaves out elements that are essential to their actual functioning. If the [East German] factory were forced to operate only within the confines of the roles and functions specified in the simplified design, it would quickly grind to a halt. Collectivized command economies virtually everywhere have limped along thanks to the often desperate improvisation of an informal economy wholly outside its schemata.
-Stated somewhat differently, all socially engineered systems of formal order are in fact subsystems of a larger system on which they are ultimately dependent, not to say parasitic. The subsystem relies on a variety of processes—frequently informal or antecedent—which alone it cannot create or maintain. The more schematic, thin, and simplified the formal order, the less resilient and the more vulnerable it is to disturbances outside its narrow parameters....
-It is, I think, a characteristic of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that formal order. Much of this might be called ‘me tis to the rescue. A formal command economy.is contingent on petty trade, bartering, and deals that are typically illegal..In each case, the nonconforming practice is an indispensable condition for formal order.[1594]
-In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.[1595]
-David Graeber referred to this as “the communism of everyday life.” State bureaucracies and corporations are parasitic on communistic institutions outside the cash nexus:
-<quote>
-Every society in human history has been a foundation built out of this everyday communism of family, household, self-provisioning, gifting and sharing among friends and neighbors, etc., with a scaffolding of market exchange and hierarchies erected on top of it.
-</quote>
-But beyond that, the parasitic institutions are internally dependent on the cooperative relationships between actual producers and creators that keeps the world running, despite their irrationality.[1596]
-Most production jobs involve a fair amount of distributed, job-specific knowledge, and depend on the initiative of workers to improvise, to apply skills in new ways, in the face of events which are either totally unpredictable or cannot be fully anticipated. Although—given the fact that any increase in productivity will be expropriated by management—workers generally do no more than necessary, they nevertheless have an incentive to do the minimum necessary to keep the organization staggering along and performing its ostensible mission at at least the minimal level required to keep their paychecks coming. To do this, they bend or break the rules and exercise initiative in order to get the job done and go home. This is why, despite their bureaucratic irrationality, and despite the enormous unnecessary overhead and waste, American corporations and Soviet state-planned industry were nevertheless able to churn out some non-negligible quantity of consumer goods that worked most of the time. When workers withdraw this initiative, the organization’s function comes to a standstill. This is why the traditional labor directaction tactic of working-to-rule is so devilishly effective.
-*** V. Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin
-This dependency of the large organization on artificial stability, and on the initiative and active cooperation of its work force, is the basis of its unsustainability.
-Barry Stein argued forty years ago, in the context of his remarks above regarding large firms’ dependence on suppressing uncertainty for their survival, for the superiority of a lean enterprise integrated into the local community and responding quickly to changing circumstances.
-[I]f firms could respond to local conditions, they would not need to control them. If they must control markets, then it is a reflection of their lack of ability to be adequately responsive.[1597]
-Consumer needs, if they are to be supplied efficiently, call increasingly for organizations that are more flexibly arranged and in more direct contact with those customers. The essence of planning, under conditions of increasing uncertainty, is to seek better ways for those who have the needs to influence or control the productive apparatus more effectively, not less.
-Under conditions of rapid environmental change, implementing such planning is possible only if the “distance” between those supplied and the locus of decision-making on the part of those producing is reduced ...
-[The problem of large firms’ vulnerability to environmental uncertainty] is to be solved not by the hope of better planning on a large scale.but by the better integration of productive enterprises with the elements of society needing that production.
-Under conditions of rapid change in an affluent and complex society, the only means available for meeting differentiated and fluid needs is an array of producing units small enough to be in close contact with their customers, flexible enough to produce for their demands, and able to do so in a relatively short time.
-It is a contradiction in terms to speak of the necessity for units large enough to control their environment, but producing products which in fact no one may want![1598]
-Of course, Galbraith’s unstated assumption—in contrast to Stein’s—was that the survival of the mass-production corporation was an end in itself, and the surrounding society and people in it were all means to be subordinated to that end. He assumed likewise, on very questionable grounds, that the large, capital-intensive mass-production firm was technologically necessary to produce the kinds of goods and services consumers desired. Stein denied this.
-As to the problem of planning—large firms are said to be needed here because the requirements of sophisticated technology and increasingly specialized knowledge call for long lead times to develop, design, and produce products. Firms must therefore have enough control over the market to assure that the demand needed to justify that timeconsuming and costly investment will exist. This argument rests on a foundation of sand; first, because the needs of society should precede, not follow, decisions about what to produce, and second, because the data do not substantiate the need for large production organizations except in rare and unusual instances, like space flight. On the contrary, planning for social needs requires organizations and decision-making capabilities in which the feedback and interplay between productive enterprises and the market in question is accurate and timely—conditions more consistent with smaller organizations than large ones.[1599]
-Almost ninety years ago, Ralph Borsodi argued (in The Distribution Age) that craft production with cheap, electrically powered general-purpose tools near the point of consumption was more efficient than mass production with expensive product-specific machinery, when the added costs of batch-and-queue production, long-distance distribution and marketing were taken into account. In fact, advocates of industrial decentralization (e.g. Pyotr Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops) had been arguing the same thing since the start of the Second Industrial Revolution.
-The problem was that the state’s subsidies and protections were sufficient to compensate for the inherent inefficiency of large-scale production, so that the potential of decentralized community manufacturing was coopted and enclosed within the preexisting framework of dark satanic mills.
-But in any case, continuing technological advances have reduced the necessary capital outlays for manufacturing by additional orders of magnitude since then, and at the same time exacerbated the crisis tendencies of corporate capitalism. The development of a generation of much smaller and cheaper CNC (computer numerical control) tools led to the rise of distributed cooperative micro-manufacturing on the Emilia Romagna/Bologna model in the 1970s, and Chinese jobshop production in the 1980s and 1990s. And the open hardware and maker movements have taken it even further, scaling high-quality production down to tabletop machinery in neighborhood garage factories.
-At the same time, the imploding money cost of capital investment for industrial production is exacerbating capitalism’s chronic crisis tendencies towards insufficient profitable investment outlets to absorb all the propertied classes’ idle capital. It takes greater and greater levels of state intervention to absorb surplus capital and guarantee consumption of industrial output, driving government towards larger chronic deficits, in the process described by James O’Connor in Fiscal Crisis of the State. Eventually industry’s need for state intervention exceeds the state’s resources.
-And as technological change destroys the capital-intensiveness of production, it undermines the material basis for large organizational scale and hierarchy. The factory system and wage system originally came about because of the Industrial Revolution’s technological shift from affordable craft tools owned by individual workers or small groups to expensive machinery that could only be purchased by groups of rich capitalists who then hired wage laborers to work their machinery. We’re now seeing a shift back to a much higher-tech form of craft production, with computer-controlled general-purpose craft tools that small groups of workers can afford. This raises the threat of skilled labor with cheap high-tech tools simply seceding from the economy and undertaking direct production for use.
-To counter this threat, capital and other concentrations of power are increasingly shifting away from a model of surplus extraction based on physical control of the means of production, and instead relying on artificial legal barriers controlling the circumstances under which people are allowed to produce even using their own means of production. In the informational and cultural realm this refers, obviously, to the use of copyright to prevent use of the desktop computer as a craft tool for software design, publishing and music production in competition with the old gatekeeping corporations. In the physical realm it means using zoning laws and safety codes to prevent the use of spare capacity in ordinary household goods in home-based micro-breweries or micro-bakeries, cooperative neighborhood childcare and eldercare arrangements, etc. In services it means the use of taxicab medallions or proprietary, walled-garden corporate apps like Uber to suppress cooperative ride-sharing services. And in manufacturing, it means the use of proprietary digital designs and patent law to suppress competition from neighborhood garage factories.
-But the same technological advances that are rendering the large organization obsolete for production are also rendering the artificial legal barriers unenforceable. In the information sector, what file-sharing has done to the movie and music industries is common knowledge, even in the face of draconian legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and questionably legal enforcement efforts shutting down websites wholesale via civil forfeiture.
-In manufacturing, patent enforcement in the mass-production age depended on the low transaction costs prevailing when a handful of oligopoly corporations produced a small number of designs for sale in a handful of national retail chains. In an environment of hundreds of thousands of garage factories producing stuff for neighborhood use with pirated CAD/CAM (computer-aided design and manufacturing) files, the costs of enforcement are insurmountable.[1600]
-And simultaneously with this process of cheapening means of production, “human capital”— the social relationships and skills of the producing classes—has surpassed physical capital as the primary source of value and productivity. This human capital increasingly extends outside the workplace, the basis of what autonomist Marxists like Toni Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford call the “social factory.” So our human relationships are becoming the most important means of production at the same time as even the physical means of production are becoming amenable to ownership and control by small cooperative groups. This sets the stage for what Negri and Michael Hardt, in Multitude and Commonwealth, call “exodus”—simply taking our productive relationships and tools and seceding from capitalism.[1601]
-*** VI. Conclusion: The Superiority of Self-Organization
-For every one of the enumerated inefficiencies of hierarchy above, there is a corresponding efficiency of self-organized and self-managed institutions. Where authoritarian institutions render the intelligence of their members less usable, their libertarian counterparts render their members’ intelligence more so. If conflicts of interest render hierarchical organizations opaque to their leadership despite futile efforts at panoptic surveillance, self-organized and self-managed work within horizontal institutions is fully legible to all who participate in it. To quote Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives:
-<quote>
-The capacity to cooperate is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Thus, projects are open to all comers provided they have the necessary skills to contribute to a project. These skills are verified, and communally validated, in the process of production itself.
-This is apparent in open publishing projects such as citizen journalism: anyone can post and anyone can verify the veracity of the articles. Reputation systems are used for communal validation. The filtering is a posteriori, not a priori. Anti-credentialism is therefore to be contrasted to traditional peer review, where credentials are an essential prerequisite to participate.
-P2P projects are characterized by holoptism. Holoptism is the implied capacity and design of peer to [peer] processes that allows participants free access to all the information about the other participants; not in terms of privacy, but in terms of their existence and contributions (i.e. horizontal information) and access to the aims, metrics and documentation of the project as a whole (i.e. the vertical dimension). This can be contrasted to the panoptism which is characteristic of hierarchical projects: processes are designed to reserve ‘total’ knowledge for an elite, while participants only have access on a ‘need to know’ basis. However, with P2P projects, communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system.[1602]
-</quote>
-In a prison—governed by panopticism—the warden can see all the prisoners, but the prisoners can’t see each other. The reason is so the prisoners can’t coordinate their actions independently of the warden. Holopticism is the exact opposite: the members of a group are horizontally legible to one another, and can coordinate their actions. And “everyone has a sense of the emerging whole, and can adjust their actions for the greatest fit.”[1603]
-The unspoken assumption is that a hierarchy exists for the purposes of the management, and a holoptic association exists for the purposes of its members. The people at the top of a hierarchical pyramid can’t trust the people doing the job because their interests are diametrically opposed. It’s safe to trust one another in a horizontal organization because a common interest in the task can be inferred from participation.
-If the authoritarian institution is characterized by one-way communication, the libertarian one is characterized by two-way communication among equals, enabling the kind of constant feedback process necessary to adjust action rationally to its results.
-Much of what conservatives frame as negative tendencies of “human nature” is actually the result of coercive intervention to prevent direct communications between human beings, because exploitation depends on keeping the exploited classes divided among themselves. It’s telling that the zero-sum results of Prisoner’s Dilemma gaming, and the pathological behavior elicited in the Milgram Experiment, both depended on isolating each individual subject under the panoptic supervision of those in authority, and prohibiting any authentic direct communication.
-If the exploitative purposes of the authoritarian organization create conflicts of interest between superiors and subordinates, so that those most familiar with the situation cannot be trusted to use their own judgment, the libertarian organization—because it exists only for the purposes of its members—can trust the full use of individual initiative and self-direction. Such organizations are frequently characterized by modular or stigmergic coordination, with a high degree of self-direction and the self-selection of tasks.
-Self-managed and user-owned organizations have always had these significant advantages over authoritarian hierarchies. But stigmergically organized activity on the commons-based peer production model, which came about in response to the possibilities offered by networked communications in the Internet era, takes the advantage an order of magnitude further. Stigmergic projects like Wikipedia or free and open-source software design require far less, if any, coordination than more traditional forms of consensus-based management like those in cooperative enterprises.
-“Stigmergy” is a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which social insects like termites coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any recourse to a central coordinating authority.[1604] The term was carried over to the social sciences to describe networked forms of organization associated like wikis, group blogs and “leaderless” organizations with networked cell architectures. Yochai Benkler uses software development to illustrate the permissionless nature of stigmergic organization.
-Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utility—if it is simple enough—or some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely available to others, with its source code ... When others begin to use it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add.... The person who has found the bug.may or may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software fix. Nevertheless, he reports the bug.in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to fix the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the first person did, and release a new version of the software with the fix or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three people—the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it. This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, license. This enables some of its users to identify problems without asking anyone’s permission and without engaging in any transactions.[1605]
-Because networked or stigmergic organization is permissionless and highly granular, it is capable of aggregating many small contributions without significant transaction costs—unlike projects organized by traditional hierarchical means, which require everyone to be on the same page before anyone can do anything. For example, a traditional encyclopedia like Britannica cannot be published until the directors of the project have determined what articles will be included, and contracted out the writing of each article to some scholar or other. It’s an all-or-nothing project. In contrast, anyone can note the lack of any Wikipedia article on some topic they consider important, and immediately write a stub for it. Anyone else with knowledge of that topic, or some sub-field of it, who stumbles across the stub can contribute a sentence, a paragraph, or one or more sections. If the hierarchical institution is less than the sum of its parts, the stigmergic organization is more.
-Also, because they are permissionless, and can act without submitting proposals for central approval, they are also better at reacting to the surrounding environment than hierarchies. Any innovation developed by a single member or cell in the network immediately becomes part of the available toolkit for the entire network, which any member can apply in circumstances they consider appropriate.
-To use a term from military theorist John Boyd, networks go through the OODA process— Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—much faster than hierarchies.[1606] They “get inside the OODA loop” of hierarchies—they act faster, and force the hierarchical institutions to react to them. They innovate, act, evaluate the results, and innovate and act again, with much faster iteration cycles than the hierarchies arrayed against them. As a result, networked insurgencies can go through multiple generations of tactical innovation with the speed of replicating yeast while hierarchies like the Transport Security Administration or the music industry are still fighting the last war, ponderously formulating a response to first-generation practices. It’s the speed with which networks go through generational innovation, enabled by their permissionlessness, that is the key; they may fail much of the time, but they fail faster.
-[T]he primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing, orienting, planning, or acting better. The primary determinant to winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning, and acting faster. In other words, how quickly one could iterate. Speed of iteration, Boyd suggested, beats quality of iteration.[1607]
-OODA loops lengthen or shorten mainly as informational friction increases or decreases between each step in the OODA process. At one end of the spectrum the actor is empowered to directly implement changes in actions based on their own observation of the results of previous action. As barriers are erected between the different sub-processes of the OODA loop—like policymaking procedures within a hierarchy—and feedback is hindered, information-processing and reaction time will slow down.
-Since the rise of agriculture and the subsequent development of ruling classes to feed off surplus production, there has been a millennia-long arms race between the productivity created by human initiative and cooperation, and the various methods developed to enclose this productivity for the extraction of rent by temple priesthoods, latifundia owners, feudal landlords, capitalists and state bureaucrats. Sometimes—e.g. fourteenth-century Europe, with the fixing of customary rents and the near-independence of the free towns—the forces of productivity have gained the advantage. At others—like the “long sixteenth century” during which the new absolute states conquered the towns and landed oligarchs abrogated customary peasant land rights, rack-rented and evicted them, and enclosed the open fields for pasturage—the forces of enclosure and extraction came out ahead. With the rise of cheap micro-manufacturing tools, intensive horticulture techniques and networked communications, we are approaching the takeoff point at which the productivity of cooperative labor achieves permanent victory over the forces of enclosure. Postscarcity technologies are growing in productivity faster than rentiers can enclose them. Postcapitalist transition is the end of humanity’s childhood.
-[1572] R. A. Wilson, “Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis,” Coincidance—A Head Test (Grand Junction, CO: Hilaritas 2018 [1988]) [[http://www.deepleafproductions.com][www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-marquis.html]]. Original emphasis.
-[1573] Robert Shea and R. A. Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (New York, NY: Dell 1975) 498.
-[1574] Kenneth Boulding, “The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics,” American Economic Review 56.1—2 (March 1966): 8.
-[1575] James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1999) 6—7.
-[1576] Martha S. Feldman and James G. March, “Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol,” Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (April 1981); it should be noted, in fairness, that Feldman and March were attempt- ing—unsuccessfully in my opinion—to defend corporations against the charge of systematic stupidity.
-[1577] Matthew Yglesias, “Two Views of Capitalism,” Yglesias, Nov. 22, 2008, [[http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org][http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/]] [[http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org][2008/11/two_views_of_capitalism/]]. Original emphasis.
-[1578] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York, NY: Harper 1973) xxii-iii, 84—5.
-[1579] On the other hand, organizational structures like networks, which are based on two-way feedback between equals, result in high rates of “failure.” As Clay Shirky puts it, open-source software is a threat because it outfails proprietary systems. It can experiment and fail at less cost. Because failure is more costly to a hierarchy, hierarchies are biased “in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes.” Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York, NY: Penguin 2008) 245. Failure also reflects the empowerment of workers and customers; most products in the corporate economy are only considered “good enough” because customers are powerless.
-[1580] Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes (Garden City, NY: AnchorDoubleday 1976) 1—2. Original emphasis.
-[1581] Friedenberg 18.
-[1582] Ibid. 2.
-[1583] Ibid. 6.
-[1584] Ibid. 16.
-[1585] Paul Goodman, People or Personnel, in People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province (New York, NY: Vintage 1964, 1966) 52.
-[1586] Goodman 88.
-[1587] John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York, NY: Signet 1967) 16.
-[1588] Galbraith 34–5.
-[1589] Barry Stein, Size, Efficiency, and Community Enterprise (Cambridge: Center for Community Economic Development 1974) 43.
-[1590] Goodman 58.
-[1591] Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900—1916 (New York, NY: Free Press 1963) 3. Original emphasis.
-[1592] Paul Goodman, Like a Conquered Province, in People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province 357.
-[1593] Goodman, People or Personnel 70.
-[1594] Scott, Seeing Like a State 351—2.
-[1595] Ibid. 310.
-[1596] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, NY: Melville House, 2011) 95.
-[1597] Stein, Size, Efficiency, and Community Enterprise 4.
-[1598] Ibid. 44.
-[1599] Ibid. 58.
-[1600] The above material is a brief summary of the argument of my book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (np: BookSurge 2010).
-[1601] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2009) 152.
-[1602] Michel Bauwens, “The Political Economy of Peer Production,” Ctheory.net, December 1, 2005, [[http://www.ctheory.net][www.]] [[http://www.ctheory.net][ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499]].
-[1603] Alan Rosenblith, “Holopticism,” March 5, 2010, [[http://www.slideshare.net][www.slideshare.net/AlanRosenblith/holopticism]].
-[1604] Mark Elliott, “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work,” M/C Journal, May 2006, [[http://journal.media-culture.org.au][http://]] [[http://journal.media-culture.org.au][journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php]].
-[1605] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2006) 66–7.
-[1606] Col. John R. Boyd, USAF. “Patterns of Conflict,” presentation (December 1986), [[http://www.ausairpower.net/][www.ausairpower.net/]] JRB/poc.pdf, 5–7.
-[1607] Jeff Atwood, “Boyd’s Law of Iteration,” Coding Horror, February 7, 2007, [[http://www.codinghorror.com][www.codinghorror.com/blog/]] [[http://www.codinghorror.com][2007/02/boyds-law-of-iteration.html]]. Original emphasis.
-<br>
-** 27. Anarchism for an Ecological Crisis?
-*Dan C. Shahar*
-*** I. Introduction
-According to “green” theorists, humanity is on the brink of catastrophe. Our civilization has chased material abundance through the domination of nature, and in so doing we have eroded key planetary systems on which we depend. Moreover, the culture of mass consumption that has grown up around our industrial development has left us spiritually stunted and disconnected from the landscapes we inhabit. Now, looking toward the future, we face serious ecological challenges as well as a deeper struggle to recover richness in our lives.
-One influential group of green writers traces these problems to a common source: the scale of modern social arrangements. These authors claim our salvation can be found in smaller communities, smaller systems of economic production, and smaller impacts on the natural world. Such views have been advanced under various names—green anarchism,[1608] bioregionalism,[1609] social ecology[1610]—but they are unified by a conviction that our circumstances demand a radical and transformative program of decentralization.
-The visionary proposals laid out by these authors contrast sharply with the social, political, and economic status quo, and for this reason we must decide how we want to receive them. Most cynically, we can see them as little more than impractical machinations of people who would rather dream of utopias than find workable solutions to our problems. Alternatively, we can regard them as efforts to point the way to self-purification, with greens laying out plans to abandon mainstream society and establish outposts of rectitude while the world crumbles around them.[1611] Yet the works of decentralist green authors often seem genuinely interested in describing an approach to social organization that would rescue humanity if only it were embraced.[1612] Their earnestness invites us to ask: Have these greens actually identified a compelling and radical alternative to existing arrangements?
-The purpose of this chapter will be to investigate this matter with an eye particularly to the practical suitability of decentralization as a tool for addressing an ecological crisis. We will find, ultimately, that in a world where environmental impacts can so often be traced to beliefs and priorities that do not align with green views, greens’ decentralist prescriptions would be unlikely to resolve our ecological challenges. We will see that the project of decentralization can be partially rescued by shifting its focus from mitigating environmental changes to adapting to them. However, even this would require giving up on some of the most distinctive elements of the greens’ vision. In the end, then, we will find that avoiding the most serious pathologies of greens’ proposals would require adjusting them in ways that would purge them of their radical and transformative character. This might not be such a bad thing, for even moderate greens may have a great deal to teach us about how to live well on our planet. Yet to the extent that green theorists have sought to forge a radical break from the status quo,[1613] this chapter will argue their efforts have missed the mark.
-*** II. Why Decentralization?
-Greens’ calls for decentralization can be traced to serious concerns about modern society. For one thing, greens worry that the unprecedented economic achievements of recent centuries have been made possible only by wreaking havoc on the biosphere. Our ever-growing gross domestic products (GDPs) have come alongside emerging crises of ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and global climate change. If these trends continue, greens fear we will soon face a reckoning that undoes much of our progress and yields widespread suffering, loss, and dislocation. As Jim Dodge bluntly puts it, “we cannot survive if the natural systems that sustain us are destroyed. That has to be stopped if we want to continue living on this planet. That’s not ‘environmentalism’; it’s ecology with a vengeance.”[1614]
-Making matters worse, greens argue that our economic prosperity has come at a grave spiritual price. Modern societies prioritize economic performance over other values,[1615] impelling us to embrace lifestyles inimical to our flourishing[1616] and cutting us off from the richness of the natural world.[1617] Thus, our attempts to dominate the planet have been largely self-defeating, yielding a world filled with “poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death.”[1618]
-Decentralist greens are skeptical that these problems can be resolved through governmental action. For existing liberal democracies have become “welded to the industrial direction of society”[1619] and are thus more likely to perpetuate our dangerous trajectory than to divert it.[1620] As Peter Berg sees it, our national leaders
-aren’t open to accepting sustainability as a serious goal. They seem barely able to hear outcries against obvious large-scale destruction of the planetary biosphere from merely reform-minded environmentalists now, and aren’t likely to take bioregionalists seriously until the District of Columbia itself becomes totally uninhabitable.[1621]
-Kirkpatrick Sale agrees, and urges greens to look beyond
-the business-as-usual politics of all the major parties of all the major industrial nations, not one of which has made ecological salvation a significant priority, not one of which is prepared to abandon or even curtail the industrial economy that is imperiling us.[1622]
-Instead of looking to our “inherently greedy, destabilizing, entropic, disorderly, and illegitimate”[1623] governments to solve our problems, these writers seek to empower us to take the future into own hands through a shift toward an ecologically oriented form of anarchism. They insist that they can only go so far in describing how such transformations would play out in practice, since ultimately major decisions would be left to communities to make for themselves.[1624] But many of them envision a future in which traditional national boundaries are gradually dissolved in favor of smal- ler-scale communities delineated along biophysical lines. Objective ecological characteristics like vegetation types, soil characteristics, river basins, and mountain ranges would be used to define distinct “bioregions” to serve as the basis for the civil order.[1625] The resulting communities would be intentionally small, never reaching the scales typical of modern metropolitan cities, in order to ensure the possibility of a rich community life built around direct democratic participation.[1626] They would also seek to achieve a large degree of self-sufficiency,[1627] which would enable them to “not be in vassalage to far-off and uncontrollable bureaucracies or transnational corporations, at the mercy of whims or greeds of politicians and plutocrats.”[1628]
-Leaving communities free to determine their own fates would foster “of necessity a more cohesive, more self-regarding, more self-concerned populace, with a developed sense of community and comradeship as well as the pride and resiliency that come with the knowledge of one’s competence, control, stability, and independence.”[1629] Bioregional publics would also have the opportunity to “reinhabit” the landscapes in which they live, developing deep and intimate connections to their natural environments and cultivating a rich sense of place.[1630] These new attitudes in turn would help to drive changes in economic behavior that helped local economies fit more comfortably within ecological limits.[1631] Decentralist greens hope that communities reconstructed along these lines could scale back the most ecologically damaging features of modern civilization while restoring richness and meaning to the lives of their members.
-*** III. Obstacles in the Path
-The foregoing discussion might seem to suggest that green writers believe embracing a program of decentralization would resolve our ecological predicament as a matter of course. Yet things are not so simple. For one thing, decentralization is not always conducive to increased ecological efficiency. For example, as William Meyer has pointed out, large cities often boast a variety of environmental advantages over their less concentrated counterparts:
-<quote>
-They lessen pressure on ecological systems by confining [environmental impacts] in space, they slow population growth, and they make the consumption of major natural resources more sparing and efficient. Though they concentrate many forms of pollution, they often reduce the total pollution load and can better control emissions.[1632]
-</quote>
-Likewise, there is evidence that when it comes to corporate enterprises, larger firms produce lower impacts per unit of output relative to smaller firms.[1633] This suggests that decentralized societies would not necessarily be more environmentally friendly, and they might even produce greater impacts on the natural world.
-Another danger is that citizens of smaller, more autonomous communities might not embrace the goals and priorities favored by greens. Although green writers sometimes seem to take for granted that sensible people will share their convictions,[1634] in reality they have never decisively won the battle of ideas. Many people—indeed, many communities in their entirety—regard even greens’ most foundational claims with suspicion.[1635] Greens’ priorities have particularly struggled to gain traction in communities facing poverty and other pressing sources of insecurity.[1636] There is little reason to expect that decentralization would bring an end to this diversity in perspectives and priorities. Thus, providing communities with additional autonomy could potentially lead some to even starker deviations from greens’ preferences than we already see.
-One further layer of complications comes from the fact that many ecological challenges are transboundary problems that can be brought under control only through coordination across large scales. It might be easy to envision how a local reorientation of social life could facilitate progress on small-scale threats facing individual communities, but it is harder to see how it could foster solutions to global dangers like climate change. Indeed, insofar as greens’ decentralist proposals would have us dismantle the very governmental apparatuses that now enable the enforcement of global political agreements, they might seem like precisely the opposite of what is needed to properly address an ecological crisis.
-*** IV. Additional Keys to Success
-To their credit, decentralist greens have not failed to appreciate concerns like these. On the contrary, many of their accounts have revolved around overcoming them. For one thing, green writers have emphasized that decentralization cannot be expected to deliver ecological salvation on its own. Rather, its role in resolving the impending crisis is to empower communities to transform themselves in environmentally friendly directions. As Graham Purchase explains:
-<quote>
-The anarchist-environmental r/evolution implies much more than a mere transfer of political power from one group of people to another. It requires, rather, an allencompassing mini-revolution in every city, suburb, town, and village. Even after the political liberation of all these communities is achieved ... the more important task of deconstructing and reconstructing daily life according to communally and environmentally sound principles will remain. This implies that each district must conduct its own r/evolution and apply the ideas of eco-anarchism to itself.[1637]
-</quote>
-We have already seen that such self-transformations would likely take different forms in different communities. Yet greens hope that groups would be able to converge on certain commonalities that would facilitate favorable environmental outcomes. As Kirkpatrick Sale puts it, “any region true to bioregional principles would necessarily respect the limitations of scale, the virtues of conservation and stability, the importance of self-sufficiency and cooperation, and the desirability of decentralization and diversity.”[1638] Sale imagines that such foundational commitments could be reinforced by civil and social structures designed to build unity and discourage errant behavior. Thus, he prescribes arrangements where:
-<quote>
-an individual normally feels part of the web of nature and is accorded a particular role and value within it; where bonds of community are strong and social forms supportive and nurturing; where material needs and desires are for the most part fulfilled; where individual or even community actions transgressing bioregional standards are known to everyone and their unfortunate consequences visible to all; and where individual acts of violence or disharmony are perceived as contrary to both communal and ecological principles.[1639]
-</quote>
-Sale hopes that systems like these could facilitate needed environmental outcomes while allowing people “to be people, in all their variousness—and that includes being wrong on occasion, and errant and even evil.”[1640] In the last resort, he also adds that in virtue of their small size, bioregional communities could ensure that harmful decisions are “channeled and compartmentalized, constricted by scale, so [they] cannot do irreparable damage beyond narrow physical limits.”[1641]
-Of course, not every environmental problem can be contained by shrinking the scale at which harmful decisions are made. Global climate change, for example, is caused by the cumulative impacts of countless decisions whose individual effects are tiny. To resolve problems like these, greens’ decentralized communities would need to find some way to coordinate with one another across large geographical scales. To this end, some green writers have emphasized that decentralization must not be construed in isolationist terms:[1642] on the contrary, a decentralized society would need to be rich with cooperation, with small-scale communities entering voluntary confederations to tackle common problems.[1643] As Purchase explains:
-<quote>
-Social anarchists.do not call for complete self-sufficiency or community isolation; rather, they recommend that society be organized from the bottom up, based upon the natural biogeography of the Earth. Any resulting federations would be voluntary associations of local groups formed to address common needs and problems. This principle lies at the heart of anarchist organization: in place of centralization, anarchism calls for the federalization of all dimensions of human activity—cultural, social, economic, political, recreational, and environmental.[1644]
-</quote>
-These elaborations help to show how green proponents of decentralization believe the obstacles of the previous section can be overcome. Decentralization would not be expected to ensure favorable outcomes all on its own; rather, its role would be to facilitate a broader program of societal transformation. Greens would not expect every individual to eagerly embrace these changes; rather, they would achieve desired results through social arrangements that promoted social unity, discouraged harmful actions, and confined deviant behaviors to small scales. Nor would greens expect the largest-scale environmental problems to simply disappear; rather, they would achieve cooperation across communities through voluntary forms of confederation.
-*** V. Remaining Difficulties
-These responses go some way toward addressing the concerns raised in obstacles we have discussed for greens’ vision of decentralization. However, it is doubtful they can fully vindicate the green decentralist program, for none of them takes seriously the likelihood that green views will be resisted not just by scattered individuals but also by dominant majorities in many communities. It is conceivable that in a world where the bulk of citizens embraced green views, an ecological crisis could be forestalled through communal self-transformations and voluntary confederations. But such outcomes are much more difficult to envision in a world where many individuals and communities emphatically reject green views. In this latter kind of world—that is, in the kind of world we actually inhabit—it seems unlikely that following greens’ advice would ameliorate our ecological challenges.
-To see why, begin by imagining that greens are able to secure sufficient influence around the world to start implementing their decentralist agendas. Thus, greens embark on a program of empowering communities to determine their own futures and urging national leaders to relinquish their grips on public affairs.[1645] (This is a far-fetched scenario, to be sure. But it hardly seems worth exploring the practical merits of decentralization as a response to an ecological crisis unless we are willing to grant at least the possibility that something like this could be achieved.)
-In line with our discussion so far, green leaders around the world work with their neighbors to reshape communities around ideals of self-sufficiency and ecological harmony. Yet even if we grant that greens have secured enough clout to effect decentralization in the first place, we should not expect them to be successful in setting the trajectory of every community. For as we have seen, green perspectives and priorities are controversial among the global population, and there is little reason to expect that this state of affairs will disappear.[1646] In some areas, then, we might expect green ideas to win out and become entrenched in foundational political, social, and economic structures. In others, greens will be resisted and pushed aside, leaving other perspectives to shape community arrangements instead. Thus, as the process of decentralization unfolds, we should expect to find some ecologically conscientious green communities living alongside other communities that organize themselves in ways that subordinate the long-term integrity of the biosphere to alternative ends like economic growth and material prosperity.
-It would go too far to suppose that if this happened, the non-green communities would simply obliterate the environment in every way they could. Such behaviors often yield direct harm to the communities that engage in them, and this would provide obvious reasons for bringing them under control. Yet it is still plausible that communities of non-greens would be inclined to undertake many environmentally impactful activities. In particular, we might expect them to be attracted to actions that were advantageous for their own members and primarily costly to far- off individuals, future generations, and non-human nature (e.g., emitting massive quantities of greenhouse gases to fuel rapid economic growth).
-What would stop non-green communities from engaging in such externality-intensive patterns of behavior whenever they found it convenient? The green authors’ appeals to a transformation in social conscience and norms cannot provide the answer, since in the relevant communities these transformations will not have occurred. Yet it is unclear that voluntary confederation can provide the answer either. Yes, communities of non-greens could form associations with their green neighbors to mitigate large-scale ecological challenges. But why would we expect them to choose to enter into such associations, especially on terms that would obstruct them from achieving the goals prioritized by their members?
-It is difficult to see how greens could provide a satisfactory answer to this question within the bounds of their theoretical commitments. It might be possible for green communities to control their non-green neighbors by exercising coercion over them, perhaps through the overt use of force, or perhaps through other kinds of political or economic sanctions. Alternatively, greens could try to preserve some of the overarching political mechanisms that allow governments to impose needed measures on resistant communities today.[1647] Yet these approaches would come with significant theoretical costs. Greens’ rhetoric regarding universal self-determination[1648] would be rendered hollow by the concession that dissenting communities should be coerced into compliance. And allowing the preservation of centralized mechanisms for political control would raise questions about how and whether green decentralism actually differs from the liberal democratic tradition it claims to abandon. A society that empowers local communities to govern themselves, but only under the umbrella of a central government that handles issues of large-scale concern, would not represent a radical break from the status quo. On the contrary, it is the exact system of government that is described in The Federalist[1649] and embodied to varying degrees in liberal democracies around the world.
-This leaves us with the apparent conclusion that the truly radical program of decentralization described by green writers could only be expected to forestall an ecological crisis in a world free from widespread resistance to green views. Only in such a world could it be reasonably thought that global challenges like climate change can be ameliorated entirely in the absence of coercion or centralized political control. For when one grants the likelihood that many communities will reject greens’ preferred arrangements in favor of alternative, more ecologically impactful ones, it is difficult to imagine any other outcome than the continued degradation of the biosphere by these non-green communities.[1650] Yet, if assuming away disagreement with greens’ views is what it takes to make decentralization attractive as a response to an ecological crisis, then this chapter’s inquiry will be closed. The literature of green decentralism might still be able to serve as an outlet for green venting or a guide to self-purification, but it would not offer a practical solution to an ecological crisis in an ideologically divided world like our own.
-*** VI. Decentralization as an Adaptation Strategy
-So far, this chapter has proceeded on the assumption that greens’ rationale for seeking decentralization is to prevent an ecological crisis. We have seen that this rationale is dubious: in a world characterized by persistent disagreement over the merits of greens’ views and priorities, there is little reason to think decentralization would be effective in forestalling global environmental problems such as climate change. However, there is an alternative possibility for justifying decentralization as a practical response to severe ecological challenges. This is to view decentralization as a means not for mitigating these challenges but rather for adapting to them.
-There are several reasons why decentralization could help facilitate adaptation to an ecological crisis. For example, local decision-makers might be better equipped than distant officials to tailor adaptation strategies to local circumstances, beliefs, and priorities. Especially in areas where citizens possess intimate knowledge of their landscapes and community dynamics, the expansion of local autonomy could promote better decision-making. Smaller and more autonomous communities might also be better able to experiment with a wide range of strategies for navigating environmental difficulties. Misguided experiments would be less damaging in virtue of having been attempted only at small scales. Meanwhile, successful strategies could be replicated by other communities while still leaving room for further experimentation.
-For reasons like these, we might expect that when dealing with the consequences of an ecological crisis, a decentralized order of autonomous communities would boast important advantages over a society comprised of larger, more centralized units. Decentralization might not be a promising way to prevent ecological challenges from emerging in the first place, but in a world where it is plausible that nothing will prevent these challenges, the capacity to alleviate some of their worst impacts would be nothing to scoff at. Refocusing attention away from mitigating environmental problems and toward adapting to them might therefore help to rescue green decentralism from practical irrelevance.
-This recasting is not without its hurdles, however, as some of greens’ proposals lie in tension with the goal of facilitating adaptation to ecological challenges. In particular, we have seen that many greens hope decentralization proceeds in the direction of bioregional self-sufficiency. In the societies greens envision, goods would be produced “mainly from local materials and mainly for local use”[1651] with an eye to fostering arrangements that are intelligible and fulfilling to their participants.[1652] Citizens would seek to bring their economies into alignment with the resources available in their bioregions, avoiding economic reliance on other regions as much as possible.[1653] Communities would not necessarily seek economic isolation from one another, but they would allow relationships to form only “within strict limits—the connections must be nondependent, nonmonetary, and noninjurious.”[1654]
-If greens’ primary objective were to facilitate adaptation to an ecological crisis, strictures like these would be counterproductive. Without free economic flows of labor, materials, goods, and services between communities, the task of adapting to rapidly changing ecological conditions would be much more difficult than necessary. For well-functioning market economies are unmatched in their productivity and dynamism, and these qualities would be more essential than ever when facing the challenges greens see on the horizon. Rather than decoupling local economies from broader markets, adaptation-minded greens would be wise to revise their views to insist on maintaining economic integration even as they seek decentralization along other dimensions of public life.
-There are several reasons why well-integrated economies can be expected to fare better in responding to ecological challenges than bioregionally self-reliant ones. For one thing, it has been widely recognized since Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that economic performance is importantly connected to the division of labor. Specialization enables individuals to maximize their efficiency as producers, often increasing their outputs by orders of magnitude.[1655] Yet the division of labor, Smith observes, is itself related to the extent of the market. If individuals are confined to small networks of trading partners, the limited demand for specific goods and services will not justify highly specialized production strategies. Small, economically separated communities will therefore sustain much more rudimentary divisions of labor than can be achieved in larger, better-connected communities.[1656] Hence, they will remain comparatively poor—and comparatively vulnerable to severe ecological hazards.
-Integrated economic markets also enable individuals to acquire goods and services that are locally scarce but abundant in other areas—a condition sure to become increasingly common on a rapidly changing planet. In the event of a local crop failure, for example, the citizens of a bioregion that refused to transact with its neighbors would be forced to bear the brunt of the crisis on their own. On the other hand, citizens embedded in an integrated market system could simply turn to more distant producers to meet their needs, offering slightly higher rates to ensure that limited outputs were directed to them instead of other consumers. The resulting increase in market prices would have further effects as well, impelling buyers to consume less of the critical crops while encouraging producers to expand their production. Through these economy-wide adjustments, the regional crop failure could be addressed without the need for anyone to starve.
-As F.A. Hayek observes in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”[1657] this kind of mutual adjustment is at the heart of the existing economic order. As prices fluctuate, both consumers and producers are incentivized to respond to changing economic circumstances in socially desirable ways. This occurs even though economic participants inevitably know little about what the relevant circumstances are and why their revised conduct is warranted. In this way, the price system plays a crucial role in helping societies adapt to constantly fluctuating economic conditions.
-These observations suggest that if greens hope to use decentralization to facilitate adaptation to an ecological crisis, they must encourage economic integration even as they urge communities to proceed along diverging social and political paths. Economically separated communities will be impoverished by a stunted division of labor and cut off from opportunities to use global markets to meet rapidly changing needs. It is by taking advantage of specialization and integrated markets, and not by abandoning them, that communities will position themselves to respond effectively to a planet destabilized by human activities.
-None of this is to say that greens must reconceive their decentralist aspirations around unfettered global capitalism. But they will have to sharply qualify their visions of bioregional selfsufficiency if their program is to offer a sensible strategy for adapting to ecological changes. There is surely room in a viable green agenda for encouraging economic relationships that are meaningful, intimate, and ecologically conscientious. But communities can hardly expect to overcome a severe ecological crisis by suppressing their primary means for calling others to their aid.
-*** VII. The Dialectical Challenge
-We can now see that if greens wish to plausibly defend decentralization as a practical response to an impending ecological crisis, their proposals will need to differ in important ways from the ones that appear in existing green literature. Decentralization must be cast as a tool for adapting to ecological challenges rather than for preventing them, and it must be pursued with an eye to maintaining economic integration even amidst social and political dis-unification.
-Reconceived in these ways, we have seen that the program of decentralization could offer interesting possibilities for facilitating adaptation to severe environmental challenges. However, revising green decentralism in the ways I have suggested would invite difficult questions as to whether the project still offers a compelling and radical break from the liberal status quo. Such questions will become especially pointed for those who are not prepared to simply abandon the goal of mitigating global ecological challenges. As we have seen, the most plausible avenues for this mitigation involve the coercive enforcement of environmental norms, perhaps via centralized political authority. If one is tempted to concede that at least some coercion might be warranted between communities—and that perhaps this should be coordinated through overarching political bodies—then the vision that results is not very radical at all. Such a view would retain many of the same kinds of collective decision-making mechanisms and globalized market arrangements that already exist, and it would seek to expand communities’ autonomy, self-reliance, and ecological sensitivity only within these overarching systems. Is this really something fundamentally distinct from liberal democracy? If so, the key difference is far from clear.
-To be sure, it would not be a terrible thing to learn that the most plausible versions of green decentralism offer moderate ways of reforming liberalism rather than radical breaks from the status quo. For reformism along these lines could still have a great deal to teach us. Still, if the purpose of greens’ decentralist writings is to offer a practical and radical alternative to the status quo, then we can only say that greens have not given us a compelling case. For those who would hope to vindicate this kind of green decentralism, the dialectical challenge is clear: show how a truly radical and green form of decentralization can be defended in the kinds of circumstances that are relevant for theorizing about an ecological crisis. It is easy to imagine a green program of decentralization achieving felicific results in a world where opposition has evaporated and communities no longer need to rely on markets to protect themselves from harm. But this is not the world we inhabit, and it is unlikely to become so anytime soon. To vindicate their radicalism in our world, decentralist greens need to persuade us that their proposals can actually make things better despite the serious obstacles they face.
-[1608] For example, Graham Purchase, Anarchism and Environmental Survival (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp 1994).
-[1609] For example, Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1985); Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (eds.), Home! A Bioregional Reader (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990).
-[1610] For example, Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire 1982).
-[1611] At times, green writers have explicitly embraced this limited aspiration. Jim Dodge, for example, insists that “The chances of bioregionalism succeeding are beside the point. If one person, or a few, or a community of people, live more fulfilling lives from bioregional practice, then it’s successful,” in “Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 5—12, 12.
-[1612] For example, Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “I am certain that in the bioregional paradigm we have a goal, a philosophy, and a process by which to create a world which is not only necessary for the continuation of our species, but is also desirable and possible” (49; original emphasis).
-[1613] Murray Bookchin considers it critical to “challenge the status quo in a far-reaching manner—in the only manner commensurate with the nature of the crisis” (Ecology 3). He connects this attitude to the conviction that “Our world ... will either undergo revolutionary changes, so far-reaching in character that humanity will totally transform its social relations and its very conception of life, or it will suffer an apocalypse that may well end humanity’s tenure on the planet” (Ecology 18). Likewise, Edward Goldsmith, Robert Allen, Michael Allaby, John Davoll, and Sam Lawrence write, “We are sufficiently aware of ‘political reality’ to appreciate that many of the proposals we shall make.will be considered impracticable. However, we believe that if a strategy for survival is to have any chance of success, the solutions must be formulated in the light of the problems and not from a timorous and superficial understanding of what may or may not be immediately feasible. If we plan remedial action with our eyes on political rather than ecological reality, then very reasonably, very practicably, and very surely we shall muddle our way to extinction,” in Blueprint for Survival (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 1972) 18.
-[1614] Dodge 11.
-[1615] E.F. Schumacher writes, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very centre of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies,” in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 25 Years Later ... with Commentaries (Vancouver: Hartley & Marks 1999) 27.
-[1616] Schumacher complains, “The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success” (18). He laments “the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual” (24). To Bookchin, our society’s materialism has grown to the point where the typical individual is inculcated with limitless “needs” unconnected to any authentic interests. In societies like ours, “Needs, in effect, become a force of production, not a subjective force. They become blind in the same sense that the production of commodities becomes blind. Orchestrated by forces that are external to the subject, they exist beyond its control like the production of the very commodities that are meant to satisfy them. This autonomy of needs ... is developed at the expense of the autonomy of the subject. It reveals a fatal flaw in subjectivity itself, in the autonomy and spontaneity of the individual to control the conditions of his or her own life” (Ecology 68—69).
-[1617] Kirkpatrick Sale describes a mentality pervading Western civilization whereby nature is “no longer either beautiful or scary but merely there, not to be worshipped or celebrated, but more often than not to be used, with all the ingenuity and instruments of a scientific culture—gingerly at times, wholeheartedly at others, within limits if need be, heedless of limits if possible, but used—by humans, for humans” (13). Likewise Schumacher writes, “Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side” (4).
-[1618] Schumacher 56. See along similar lines Goldsmith et al. ch. 4.
-[1619] Peter Berg, “More Than Just Saving What’s Left,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 13—16, 13.
-[1620] Goldsmith et al. write, “we can expect our governments to encourage continued increases in GNP regardless of the consequences, which in any case tame ‘experts’ can be found to play down. It will curb growth only when public opinion demands such a move, in which case it will be politically expedient, and when a method is found for doing so without creating unemployment or excessive pressure on capital” (21).
-[1621] Peter Berg, “Growing a Life-Place Politics,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 137—144, 140.
-[1622] Sale 48. Original emphasis.
-[1623] Gary Snyder, “Bioregional Perspectives,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 19.
-[1624] Bookchin writes, “It is tempting to venture into a utopian description of how an ecological society would look and how it would function, but I have promised to leave such visions to the utopian dialogue that we so direly need today” (Ecology 343). Likewise, Sale insists, “Truly autonomous bioregions would inevitably go in separate and not necessarily complementary ways, creating their own political systems according to their own environmental settings and their own ecological needs” (108).
-[1625] For one influential articulation of how these bioregions could be individuated, see Sale, 1985, pp. 56—59.
-[1626] Decentralist green writers give different accounts of exactly how small they think communities should be. For example, Bill Mollison imagines communities inhabited by 7,000—40,000 citizens in “Strategies for an Alternative Nation,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 149—154, 149. Meanwhile, E.F. Schumacher places his upper limit for urban populations at 500,000 (49).
-[1627] Peter Berg writes, “Community development in all its aspects from economic activities and housing to social services and transportation should be aimed toward bioregional self-reliance” (“More” 15).
-[1628] Berg, “More” 77.
-[1629] Berg, “More” 78.
-[1630] As Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann describe it in “Reinhabiting California,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 35—38, “Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated it involves becoming fully alive in and with a place. It involves applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter” (35; original emphasis).
-[1631] Sale writes, “People do not, other things being equal, pollute and damage those natural systems on which they depend for life and livelihood if they see directly what is happening; nor voluntarily use up a resource under their feet and before their eyes if they perceive that it is precious, needed, vital; nor kill off species they can see are important for the smooth functioning of the ecosystem” (54).
-[1632] William B. Meyer, The Environmental Advantages of Cities: Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2013) 146.
-[1633] See, for example, Matthew A. Cole, Robert J.R. Elliott, and Kenichi Shimamoto, “Industrial Characteristics, Environmental Regulations and Air Pollution: An Analysis of the UK Manufacturing Sector,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 50.1 (2005): 121—43; Bruno Merlevede, Tom Verbeke, and Marc De Clercq, “The EKC for SO2: Does Firm Size Matter?” Ecological Economics 59.4 (2006): 451—61.
-[1634] Kirkpatrick Sale, for example, claims that “The political project of bioregionalism ... has promise precisely because it conforms so well with so many of the underlying trends of the contemporary world” (151), including a deep concern for the environment, affinity with the feminist movement, distrust of centralized and arbitrary authority, and a hostility toward the pathological political and economic systems that dominate the Western world (151—152). In an unguarded moment, Jim Dodge goes even further, portraying modern environmental conflicts as “a struggle between the bioregional forces (who represent intelligence, excellence, and care) and the forces of heartlessness (who represent a greed so lifeless and forsaken it can’t even pass as ignorance)” (10).
-[1635] For influential articulations of these competing perspectives, see Wilfred Beckerman, Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered (Washington, DC: Cato 1996); Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, NJ: PUP) 1996; Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (New York, NY: CUP 2001). For discussions of these views as cultural and psychological phenomena, see Dan M. Kahan, “Fixing the Communications Failure,” Nature 463.7279 (2010): 296—297; Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Donald Braman, “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,” Journal of Risk Research 14.2 (2011): 147—74; Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer, “The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes,” Psychological Science 24.1 (2013): 56—62; Jacob B. Hirsch, “Environmental Sustainability and National Personality,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 38 (2014): 233—40.
-[1636] Iddisah Sulemana, Harvey S. James, Jr., and Corinne B. Valdivia find that across a wide range of countries, individuals who perceive themselves as belonging to the “lower class” are significantly less likely to be willing to sacrifice economic growth and job creation for the sake of environmental protection in “Perceived Socioeconomic Status as a Predictor of Environmental Concern in Africa and Developed Countries,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 46 (2016): 83—95. According to Alex Lo, “National Income and Environmental Concern: Observations from 35 Countries,” Public Understanding of Science 25.7 (2016): 873—90, the lack of prioritization of environmental concerns in less-developed countries is driven more by a reduced ability to pay for strong protection measures than by a lack of concern for the environment as such. On the other hand, Xueying Yu finds that in China environmental concern is comparatively sparse among rural communities, with individuals commonly pleading ignorance of global problems and attending primarily to issues that visibly affect their communities and livelihoods, in “Is Environment ‘A City Thing’ in China? Rural-Urban Differences in Environmental Attitudes,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 38 (2014): 39–48.
-[1637] Purchase 12–13.
-[1638] Sale 108.
-[1639] Sale 109.
-[1640] Ibid.
-[1641] Ibid.
-[1642] Goldsmith et al. write, “Although we believe that the small community should be the basic unit of society and that each community should be as self-sufficient and self-regulating as possible, we would like to stress that we are not proposing that they be inward-looking, self-obsessed, or in any way closed to the rest of the world” (54).
-[1643] According to Murray Bookchin, “Municipal Libertarianism,” Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright (Philadelphia, PA: New Society 1990) 145–46, the formation of a confederal system is “the most important thing” for local communities to achieve (145). On the other hand, some decentralist greens express skepticism about the extent to which this kind of cooperation is likely. Peter Berg, for example, expects that most bioregional communities would primarily seek “to solve problems where they live” (“Life-Place” 144). See similar comments at Sale 96.
-[1644] Purchase 18. Original emphasis.
-[1645] Note that although some green proponents of decentralization have spoken of a desire to implement their visions through revolutionary means (e.g., Purchase), others have insisted that such an approach would do more harm than good (e.g., Goldsmith et al. 24). Thus, Sale prescribes a gradual, “evolutionary” process whereby governments slowly step back from their now-pervasive roles and simply allow more local autonomy (169–170, 176–177). As he sees it, the bioregional project “asks nothing of the Federal government and needs no national legislation, no governmental regulation, no Presidential dispensation. What commends it especially to its age is that it does not need any Federal presence to promote it, only a Federal obliviousness to permit it” (169).
-[1646] In fact, there is some evidence that levels of environmental concern have been decreasing in Axel Franzen and Dominkus Vogl, “Two Decades of Measuring Environmental Attitudes: A Comparative Analysis of 33 Countries,” Global Environmental Change 23.5 (2013): 1001–08.
-[1647] Decentralist green authors have sometimes written as if they would be open to such suggestions: for example, E.F. Schumacher claims that “We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination” (48). See along similar lines Goldsmith et al. 54, 60; Sale 94.
-[1648] In this connection, Jim Dodge insists that “Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control; it means out of their control. Anarchy is based upon a sense of interdependent self-reliance, the conviction that we as a community, or a tight, small-scale federation of communities, can mind our own business, and can make decisions regarding our individual and communal lives and gladly accept the responsibilities and consequences of those decisions” (8–9). Graham Purchase likewise insists that green anarchists seek to avoid making impositions on communities: “They hope, rather, that the people, in an attempt to produce a self-managed, directly democratic, and ecologically sustainable social system, will organize themselves from the bottom upwards—at the level of individual communities, interest groups, and workers’ organizations” (140). In the world he envisions, communities would be able to see themselves as “independent, self-governing, and answerable to no one” (149).
-[1649] Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund 2001).
-[1650] Indeed, insofar as some greens would likely abandon their ecological scruples if they did not expect others to engage in reciprocal sacrifices, the actions of dissenting communities might cause non-cooperative behaviors to cascade into green communities as well. For general discussion of these dynamics in the domain of norm-following behavior, see Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (New York, NY: CUP 2006).
-[1651] Schumacher 146.
-[1652] Schumacher hopes that this decentralization of production can promote what he considers the proper objectives of working life: “to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence” (39).
-[1653] Sale 46.
-[1654] Sale 79.
-[1655] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen 1904) ch. 1.
-[1656] Smith ch. 3.
-[1657] Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35.4 (1945): 519—30.
-<br>
-** 28. States, Incarceration, and Organizational Structure: Towards a General Theory of Imprisonment
-*Daniel J. D’Amico*
-*** I. Introduction
-Comparative researchers have converged upon a strong, but under-specified, consensus that “institutions matter” regarding the causes of imprisonment and the rise of mass incarceration. A large and growing body of consistent research reports a robust correlation between socio-political institutional types on the one hand and criminal justice outcomes on the other. Nations with similar economic and political institutional regimes tend to possess similar criminal justice systems and relatively similar punishment outcomes including prison population rates.[1658] However, contrasting theoretical perspectives yield different conclusions regarding the ultimate causes of prison growth and mass incarceration. What particular institutional types shape prison population rates, and through what causal processes, remains unresolved. This chapter attempts to make progress towards a generalizable framework designed to foster better understanding imprisonment.
-The currently dominant view explains mass incarceration’s timing and magnitudes with reference to political efforts intended to effect class- or race-based social control.[1659] I will refer to this paradigm as the “social control model.” In contrast, a growing body of research accounts for patterns of imprisonment with reference to organizational dynamics and the systemic potentials for error across different degrees of institutional centralization.[1660] I will call this latter framework the “government failure model.”
-Are high incarceration rates primarily the result of political efforts to maintain dominant power and social control? Or is excessive prison growth better understood as an unintended consequence of certain bureaucratic organizational patterns? Are the consequences of supposed “mass incarceration” a failure of societal preferences and political bias, or is mass incarceration a unique form of governmental failure more likely given some organizational arrangements than others? The respective implications and constituent features of these alternative frameworks can be investigated against the empirical record.
-Given the well-established economic and social consequences of mass incarceration,[1661] proper answers to these questions carry substantial implications for guiding reform efforts. If prison growth is primarily the result of attempts to achieve or maintain social control, then political activism and cultural change are likely needed to reshape outcomes. If mass incarceration instead stems more from incentive arrangements more prevalent within some institutional types than others, then reshaping outcomes may be a more difficult and complex process. If the government failure approach is correct, traditional forms of democratic action may prove ineffective against or even contributory to continual prison growth.
-I apply a standard of generalizability to adjudicate between these contrasting frameworks. In an ideal world, fully detailed and accurate measures of imprisonment across times and places would allow for more rigorous causality tests. Given the limitations of currently available data, I argue that prison growth should at least be understood from the vantage point of whichever framework most accords with the best available evidence. At least there now exists a growing body of increasingly more precise and accurate forms of empirics surrounding crime and punishment trends historically and at the cross-national level. The preferred model for comprehending the causes and consequences of imprisonment ought to fit most compatibly with these stylized facts and to require the least degree and quantity of ad hoc adjustments.
-To understand which alternative theory is more generally compatible with real imprisonment patterns, I investigate a variety of evidentiary sources, both qualitative and quantitative. I survey the available theory and evidence supporting and challenging each of the two contrasting approaches. I also summarize research surrounding the historical origins of prisons and punishment by incarceration. Where and when were prisons first constructed, and for what purposes? Last, I survey cross-national empirics and related historical research to describe the organizational dynamics of prison development and prison growth.
-In summary, these sources stand in substantial contrast to the social control model. Furthermore, the government failure model can be fitted to account for a broader sample of the available evidence. Thus, I propose a spectrum of organizational centralization that better accords with the observed patterns of imprisonment and contemporary trends of mass incarceration. In short, societies appear to commit more material and financial resources towards imprisonment where and when criminal justice institutions are more centralized and hierarchical.
-These findings are of particular relevance to anarchist theory and the interested readers of this volume. First, the government failure model broadens the relevant sample of social contexts to include and account for stateless social orders, whereas the social control model tends to focus more exclusively on advanced western democracies. Second, because of this recognition regarding the potentials and limits of statelessness, this framework has the ability to engage normative arguments surrounding prison abolitionism in ways typically unaddressed.[1662]
-Normative commitments that preclude the role of formal state authorities thus also conveniently avoid the social consequences of and normative concerns raised by mass incarceration. Similarly, as David Boonin has noted, the practical potentials of punitive norms within stateless contexts serve as a unique challenge to the typical justifications for state-based provisions of criminal punishment.[1663] Supplanting the social control model of imprisonment with the government failure model establishes a unique standard for the broader justification of state authority. Any punitive paradigm beginning from the presumption of state necessity and or legitimacy must also address and respond to the potential social consequences and normative dilemmas associated with prison growth and excessive imprisonment. I argue that this adjustment in how the causes of imprisonment are best understood would thus reshape much of our normative reflection on criminal punishment. Rather than focusing on debates regarding how to properly justify criminal punishments given state legitimacy, political philosophy must engage the more practical constitutional project of explaining how to justly limit state authority while minimizing systemic errors such as mass incarceration.[1664]
-The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section II summarizes the social control model as the dominant framework for understanding imprisonment and prison growth historically and across social contexts. Section III summarizes a variety of contemporary research and findings that raise substantial doubts about the generalizability of the social control model. Several of the direct implications within the social control model stand at odds with the available evidence. Section IV provides the outline of an alternative model of government failure for better explaining imprisonment trends. Section V offers some concluding remarks.
-*** II. The Social Control Model
-The social control model carries at least three related implications. First, crime rates do not sufficiently explain the patterns of imprisonment. Second, prison growth in the modern era and across developed nations is conspicuously correlated with free market capitalist ideology or public policies. Third, especially in the American experience, mass incarceration was instigated and buttressed by race- and class-based animosities.
-One of the most confirmed claims of the dominant social control model is that imprisonment trends are not sufficiently explained as a byproduct of real crime rates. In other words, it does not appear to be the case that prisons were originally designed or constructed or subsequently expanded because of a real societal need for crime control. Instead, it is argued that imprisonment historically provided a unique technological opportunity for the concentration of power. Hence, the subsequent implications of the social control model draw more attention to the particular identities of powerful interest groups: predominant owners of capital and racial majorities. This initial claim about the insufficient explanatory power of real crime trends is not necessarily new, nor is it necessarily unique to the social control perspective. In fact, many alternative models of imprisonment accept that contemporary imprisonment patterns cannot be fully explained with reference to real crime rates.[1665]
-Michel Foucault popularized the idea that incarceration ought to be understood alongside a fuller awareness of power structures.[1666] Drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s[1667] model of panopticism, Foucault explains: “The whole machinery that has been developing for years around the implementation of sentences, and their adjustment to individuals, creates a proliferation of the authorities of judicial decision-making and extends its powers of decision well beyond the sentence.”[1668] In short, incarceration not only levies penalties upon criminals but also provides a mechanism for authorities to both deter and encourage entire swaths of human and group behaviors.[1669] Furthermore, the disciplinary role of the criminal law provides a technologically unique form of power reserved to governments in the modern era. With such power came a similarly unique and often exploited opportunity for the expression and satisfaction of private and political interests.[1670] The social control model implies that the increased usage of incarceration reflects these tendencies towards the achievement and exercise of power rather than alternative explanations framed in light of such factors as real societal needs or supposed moral progress away from brutal penalties and towards humane alternatives. (Foucault famously rejected this latter explanation.)
-Foucault drew heavily on the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer, who viewed the growth of imprisonment in conjunction with unemployment trends.[1671] Prisons, they argued, helped to ameliorate the social problems associated with surplus labor conditions amidst post-industrial business cycles. Criminal justice via imprisonment was said to provide effective monitoring and deterrence against idleness, criminal opportunism, and organized revolt. Thus, prisons were also thought to assist in the maintenance of a relatively willing and docile industrial labor force.
-[T]he punishment of crime is not the sole element; we must show that punitive measures are not simply ‘negative’ mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support.[1672]
-Thus, on this view the criminal justice system writ large and incarceration in particular ultimately serve to preserve concentrations of wealth and privilege.
-Subsequently, more contemporary writings have extended this general theme of prisons as a mechanism for social control with foci on class inequality, mass incarceration, and racial disparity. Wacquant and Garland emphasize the relationship between prison power and economic inequality.[1673] Western highlights the strong correlations between economic inequality, criminality, and race in the American experience. And, most notably, Alexander argues that the criminal justice system has supplanted the Jim Crow legal regime as a means of maintaining white dominance over the black community.
-This social control model is the more prominent view today, with some or all of the following observations typically seen as supporting it. First, imprisonment supposedly became the standard practice of criminal punishment as and where the Industrial Revolution occurred. In particular, Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served as the spawning ground for the Industrial Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment and Bentham’s related ideas, and the rise of incarceration as the default form of criminal punishment. Second, the contemporary trend of mass incarceration seems conspicuously related to American practice. It is well established that the net amount and per capita rate of incarceration are greater in the United States than in any other developed nation.[1674] Furthermore, as the world’s only economic and military superpower, the United States is also perceived as an influencer and disseminator of specifically neoliberal policies and ideology. Presumably, the cross-national patterns of prison growth reflect American influence. In this vein, contemporary expressions of neoliberalism are seen as a consistent extensions of the social control methods used during the Industrial Revolution.[1675] Benthamite models of “panoptic” discipline obtained in factories and prisons alike during the eighteenth century; proponents of the social control approach suggest that contemporary neoliberal policies leverage similar incentive systems, featuring monitoring and graduated sanctions, to assure domestic economic performance, international free trade, and the privatization of traditionally public services.[1676] Excessive prison population rates result from the policies of neoliberal democratic regimes. Countries with stronger cultural legacies of individualism and more legal and political commitments to free markets tend to host larger prison population rates than do more interventionist and socially redistributive regimes.[1677]
-Lastly, the social control model suggests that US prison growth resulted in large part from the anxieties of wealthier white voters. Mass incarceration appears to have become a prominent feature of American life in the wake of the civil rights movement, the rise of national political campaigns focused upon law and order, and the war on drugs. Enns demonstrates the strong link between increases in punitive attitudes and public opinion trends.[1678] Wasow further shows conspicuous correlations between changes in partisan voter support and their proximity to racially motivated riots.[1679] As Clegg and Usmani explain: on the social control model, “American mass incarceration was the means by which white America re-established a system of racial control that had been threatened by the civil rights movement”; they note “more than 150 studies that offer support ... and only a handful ... that dispute it.”[1680]
-*** III. What the Social Control Model Cannot Explain
-Several of the basic components and implications of the social control model have been in place for decades. But the increased availability of better empirical evidence gives us the opportunity to verify or challenge this dominant paradigm and its constituent claims. In light of this evidence, I argue that the social control model does not effectively account for the full range of global and historical imprisonment patterns.
-First, the early observation that the invention and systemic adoption of incarceration as a standard form of criminal punishment coincided with emergence of Enlightenment ideas and the Industrial Revolution isn’t simply inaccurate; but it isn’t fully accurate, either. As Spierenburg has demonstrated, imprisonment was first leveraged as a punitive technique within Scandinavian territories prior to the British experience.[1681] Scandinavian imprisonment seems to have emerged more as a product of state convenience than as an attempt at full-fledged social control. The first prison facilities were remnant military outposts in which suspected and tried criminals could be housed and monitored at minimal additional social cost or security risk. Similar military spillover effects have shaped the forms and magnitudes of criminal justice techniques and protocols throughout history.[1682]
-The available evidence doesn’t simply contradict the social control model. The milder claim, that the desire to control crime doesn’t suffice to explain imprisonment, remains well supported,[1683] as does the implication that imprisonment does serve some social control function or functions. Furthermore, it is undisputed that Bentham’s designs were highly influential in England and subsequently inspired similar facilities throughout the developed world and especially the United States.[1684] However, details regarding the mechanism of military resource abundance also complement the recognition that the rise and proliferation of incarceration across primitive contexts coincided with episodes of developed and enhanced state power and capacity.[1685] Thus, this evidence alone leaves open the question of the merits of alternative frameworks for understanding incarceration.
-Another implication of the social control model potentially reaffirmed or challenged by more recent and detailed evidence is the supposed relationship between the rise and expansion of incarceration and the emergence of global capitalism, neoliberal ideology, and free market public policies. The most obvious confirmatory pieces of evidence compliment the social control model’s original narrative linking the rise and proliferation of incarceration to the Enlightenment and developments associated with the early Industrial Revolution. Mass incarceration is most apparently concentrated in the latter-twentieth-century United States. There is strong and detailed evidence of increased punitive preferences amongst voters in this setting.[1686]
-Recent empirically rooted efforts to establish an institutional framework for understanding cross-country patterns of imprisonment have reported greater prison population rates in nations identified as “neoliberal market democracies.” By contrast, more corporatist or socially democratic states apparently host proportionally smaller prison populations.[1687] (In this context, “neoliberalism” is defined as “almost the opposite of ... the standard meaning of the word ‘liberal’ when applied to American politics. ‘Neo-liberalism’ refers to the (politically conservative) late twentieth-century revival of the nineteenth-century approach of economic liberalism, based on free-market capitalism.”[1688])
-Sorting real political regimes into relevant conceptual categories is a difficult task, as objective and quantifiable measures of the salient institutional features and their criminal justice correlates are lacking.[1689] When larger data sets are used alongside more sophisticated statistical techniques, a number of findings emerge which don’t appear fully consistent with the social control model. First, long-standing claims regarding the contextual influence of unemployment cycles on crime and imprisonment trends cannot be confirmed.[1690] Results are mixed, and don’t appear strongly consistent or inconsistent with the social control model. Some researchers find that unemployment mildly coincides with prison growth,[1691] while others find the opposite.[1692] Similarly, several studies have reported that it is difficult to verify any consistent or positive relationship between prison population rates and objective measures of free market capitalism. Neither the aggregate size of the economy, growth trends, nor formally measured indexes of capitalism or economic
-freedom are robustly or significantly correlated with prison population rates.[1693] In contrast, the largest and most sophisticated empirical investigations available report that the institutional feature most correlated with contemporary prison largess is years under socialism.[1694]
-The racial implications of the social control model have also been empirically assessed. While Alexander and others have argued for a causal link between racial anxieties amongst white voters and “tough on crime” political campaigns, the war on drugs, and increases in punitive attitudes and policies, a number of recent studies offer a picture of the development of current criminal justice policies that is more complicated than the one offered by proponents of the social control model and in which racist and right-wing attitudes play less central roles.
-It is well established that American voter opinion became more punitive prior to as well as in conjunction with the rise of mass incarceration.[1695] The usual caveat that correlation does not imply causation correctly applies here.[1696] Furthermore, the implication that punitive opinions are foundationally or primarily motivated by racial anxieties is also less certain than proponents of the social control model have assumed. Wasow demonstrates a measurable link between the potency of violent riots amidst the civil rights era and switches from predominant support from Democratic to Republican candidates in proximate counties. Thus, from the impact of racial anxieties on increased imprisonment apart from the influence of real crime and violence is difficult. The link between specifically conservative and white opinions and punitive attitudes is also less clear than proponents of the social control model have supposed. Murakawa shows the pervasive nature of punitive attitudes on the part even of progressive Democratic candidates[1697] and Forman Jr (2017) highlights the embrace of such attitudes even by black political leaders.[1698] Similarly, Clegg and Usmani, investigating the impact of race on the adoption of punitive policies and incarceration outcomes, conclude that the available “evidence supports a revisionist view which emphasizes that crime [also] shaped black preferences.”[1699]
-The supposed link between specifically American mass incarceration rates and racist intentions is also challenged by comparative cross-national and historical observations. Tonry noted that England, Australia, and Canada all had larger black-to-white inmate ratios than the United States in 1994.[1700] Cases drawn from varied histories, cultures, and contexts suggest that, as a general matter, economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities tend to be over-represented in prison populations. Disparate impact may be an inherent component of imprisonment. However, existing rates of racial disparity, though disconcerting, are not prima facie evidence that racism operates as a foundational or predominant cause of prison growth.
-*** IV. The Government Failure Model of Imprisonment
-In this section, I develop a preliminary framework for understanding imprisonment as a form of government failure. Furthermore, I argue that this alternative paradigm better accords with the historical and contemporary evidence related to prison population rates. The government failure model posits that prison outcomes are related to the organizational patterns of different criminal justice institutions.
-A large and consistent body of theory and research explains the relationships between the dynamics of alternative internal decision-making processes and the effectiveness of these processes across differently organized institutions. First, the concentration of organizational hierarchies within governments helps to explain how effectively decision-making processes promote economic growth.[1701] Differently organized systems vary in their respective potentials for error correction and feedback. With discretionary authority concentrated in more centralized decisionmaking nodes, hierarchies tend to find it more difficult to identify and respond to errors than do polycentric systems.[1702] More hierarchical organizations thus tend to err more by suppressing otherwise “good” proposals, whereas polycentric systems err more by permitting a greater number of “bad” proposals.[1703] Furthermore, hierarchical bureaucracies tend to suffer from greater inefficiencies resulting from rent-seeking and capture.[1704]
-Can we extend this general account of institutional dynamics to account for imprisonment outcomes? What are the relevant decision-making processes and how do these processes deal with ineffective or otherwise undesirable policy proposals in the criminal justice context? What alternative responses to criminal behavior might help to avoid and or reduce mass incarceration outcomes?
-A credible organizational theory of imprisonment should carry some verifiable implications. We should expect that social environments with more centrally managed criminal justice systems would feature more challenging processes of error correction and greater proneness to bureaucratic inefficiencies and rent-seeking when compared with polycentric alternatives. Polycentric criminal justice systems would err more in so far as they made possible a variety of criminal justice regimes that did not necessarily preempt or alleviate mass incarceration, and some jurisdictions within polycentric systems could also perhaps be expected to punish insufficiently. Furthermore, hierarchically centralized criminal justice systems would err by suppressing punishment strategies that could otherwise successfully avoid or reduce mass incarceration.
-Before investigating these specific implications, we must first understand patterns of institutional organization through history and across countries more adequately. Which social environments possess more hierarchical criminal justice systems and which possess more decentralized structures, and how is the existence of such structures correlated with known patterns of imprisonment? Two groups of sources provide relevant details. First, qualitative histories can reveal the institutional breadth and variety of social environments prior to the development and proliferation of incarceration and prior to the recording and accumulation of accurate imprisonment measures. Second, we have reasonably accurate and detailed empirics related to contemporary imprisonment trends across a relatively wide variety of countries.
-While the social control model emphasizes the apparent connection between the invention and proliferation of imprisonment on the one hand and industrialization on the other, the government failure model recognizes that governmental institutions were organized in substantially different ways before and after the origins of the prison and the emergence of industrial society. A consistent pattern of decentralized and informal institutional processes is evident in multiple pre-modern and primitive social contexts. The relevant features include consistent legal standards, graduated sanctions against criminal behaviors, sustainable social orders, and restitutionbased penalties.[1705] As governments became more formalized as city-states, monarchies, and feudal arrangements, so too did the powers of criminal law enforcement become more monopolized by governments.[1706] Hence, when we look comparatively at pre-modern stateless societies on the one hand and early feudal and city state environments on the other, we see the initial predictions of the government failure model supported. Stateless environments featuring informal and decentralized governance processes possessed a variety of punitive norms but lacked large-scale incarceration. Punishment by imprisonment does not seem to have been a prominent response to crime in such environments.
-As organizational theory predicts, the effectiveness and desirability of punitive norms and outcomes across individual localities within and across polycentric jurisdictions is a mixed bag. On the one hand, pre-modern punitive norms found within such legal rules orders as Hammurabi’s code, Draconian law, and the Ancien Régime are well recognized as mandating excessive responses to minor violations. Inversely, it is also well understood that such systems essentially underprotected the rights of members of the lower classes.[1707] The early dispersed networks of frontier spaces in the new world similarly lacked the enforcement and policing potentials associated with the later rise of centrally coordinated oversight and federal authority.[1708] The operations and outcomes of early, formalized state governments are also consistent with the predictions of basic organizational theory. With the emergence of widespread punishment by imprisonment, state authorities were capable of expanding their legislative discretion, taxing powers, and territorial reach.[1709]
-To further investigate the implications of organizational theory requires broadening the sample of comparative imprisonment contexts. The organizational forms of contemporary nation-states are more varied than those observed in the early modern legal era. The structures of contemporary nation-states exhibit a broad range of varied organizational characteristics, though there are no precise quantitative metrics of the hierarchical or decentralized character of a government. As D’Amico and Williamson demonstrate,[1710] legal origin categories, more than any other organizational characteristics, are strongly and robustly correlated with imprisonment outcomes. As is well documented, such categories serve as reliable proxies for significant organizational features across countries.[1711] Contemporary nation-states founded on and committed to the common law possess significantly greater incarceration rates than German civil law, French civil law, or Scandinavian civil law societies.[1712] Beyond common-law countries, nations with the longest experiences under communism incarcerate people at the highest levels.
-At first glance, the correlation between common legal origins and greater prison population rates appears at odds with basic organizational theory. Common-law countries typically embrace more decentralized organizational patterns such as competitive market economies and stronger protections against corruption and rent-seeking.[1713] By contrast, as La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer indicate, “civil law is associated with a heavier hand of government ownership and regulation.”[1714] Yet it appears that this typical relationship between the size of centralized governments and legal origins is inverted with regards to imprisonment outcomes.
-To account for the common law’s decentralized structure and superior economic performance, Glaeser and Shleifer highlight long evolutionary histories in the course of which decentralized institutions were periodically re-affirmed and re-enforced amidst political and cultural revolutions.[1715] Hence, D’Amico and Williamson investigated the long historical processes of institutional selection regarding specifically criminal justice policies, practices, and norms across England, France, and the United States.[1716] The organizational patterns typically found within market- and civic-oriented legal processes under the respective common- and civil-law traditions are inverted within the criminal justice systems of each. Criminal justice administration under the common law in the British and American experiences has been a long history of continual centralization. By contrast, persistent decentralization is evident in France. The civic and commercial legal sector in civil-law countries fostered more centralized interventions, rent-seeking, and suppressed economic performance, whereas criminal justice institutions were shaped by stronger commitments to local autonomy and decentralization. Similar observations were made by theorists as early as Beaumont and Tocqueville,[1717] and have been reaffirmed more recently by Stuntz and by Hinton. Such sources suggest that the effectiveness of the American criminal justice system is largely dependent on the decentralization of enforcement authority across more localized jurisdictions.
-In result, the government failure model leverages institutional theory and criminal legal history to outline a rudimentary organizational centralization spectrum that is applicable indifferent national contexts and that consistently illuminates different nations’ respective imprisonment patterns. See Figure 28.1 below.
-On the far left side of the spectrum are those societies—for instance, primitive and stateless ones—with both the lowest prison population rates and the most decentralized administrative institutions of criminal justice. On the far right end of the spectrum are those societies—totalitar- ian regimes, say—with the highest rates of imprisonment and the most intensive forms of institutional centralization.
-[[][Figure 28.1 Spectrum of legal organization]]
-A consistent arrangement of some intermediate cases within these end points is evident. Polycentric systems that still feature states, such as the overlapping and competing jurisdictions operative in the Anglo-Saxon territories prior to the emergence of the British monarchy, the early American colonies, and the contemporary Swiss cantons are all relatively more centralized than fully stateless orders but still exhibit substantial levels of decentralization. I label this sample of cases “competitive federalism.”
-Further towards the centralization end of the spectrum are contemporary civil-law jurisdictions such as France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. I label these “administrative law” societies. Contemporary common-law countries fit between these administrative-law societies and totalitarian societies. These societies were originally decentralized, marked by competitive federalism. However, the criminal justice processes within contemporary common-law jurisdictions, especially the United States, became extremely centralized amidst broader trends of cartel federalism during the latter half of the twentieth century.[1718] This framework suggests a consistent relationship between organizational centralization and prison population rates. As criminal justice decision-making becomes more centralized and hierarchical, rent-seeking and bureaucratic growth increase. Simultaneously, discovering, designing, and experimenting with alternative punitive strategies becomes more costly in such cartelized environments than in either the more competitively federalist conditions that preceded them or in civil-law jurisdictions.
-The government failure model does not directly contradict to the social control model or its particular implication. Rather, it emphasizes alternative factors as more primarily relevant to the patterns of incarceration and prison growth around the world and throughout history. Whereas the extreme incarceration tendencies of socialist regimes and the potentials of social order observed in stateless environments cannot be consistently accounted for by the social control model, the government failure model does not require ad hoc adjustment in light of these observed features.
-*** V. Conclusion
-The governmental failure model is more consistent with the patterns of imprisonment observed around the world and over time relative to the more dominant social control model. These paradigms are not entirely in conflict with one another. However, there are facets of the historical and comparative record that cannot be fully explained from the vantage point of the social control model, but that are well accounted for by the government failure model. In particular, imprisonment was not as tightly linked to the Industrial Revolution or the British experience as many have presumed, nor does any empirical evidence support a consistent relationship between imprisonment and capitalism. Imprisonment emerged across a variety of social settings in consistent conjunction with the rise and formalization of state authority. In addition, most of the contemporary states with the highest imprisonment rates are nations that endured longer socialist experiences. A consistent spectrum demarcating the organizational properties of criminal justice institutions maps neatly onto the broad sample of incarceration patterns. Communities with more centralized criminal justice institutions tend to foster larger prison population rates.
-While the available evidence does not allow confident causal or predictive inferences, the alternative frameworks do have substantially different implications for practical reform strategies. The social control model conveniently implies a need for traditional forms of democratic action. In the face of systemic power imbalances and class-based or racial bias, activist efforts to raise awareness, coordinate voting coalitions, and request legislative reforms from elected officials are the most obvious paths towards positive change. Efforts of this sort have taken place in the United States since at least the mid 1980s, yet mass imprisonment has continued to grow. Today, the national trend has essentially plateaued, with the most tangible cases of successful reform happening at the state level.
-The government failure model is less sanguine about the effects of traditional political activism, as electoral political action is less capable of reshaping the organizational dynamics of the criminal justice system writ large. Furthermore, if increased centralization is a significant contributing factor to prison growth, we must inquire if any relationship exists between traditional democratic activism and the potentials for institutional centralization. As Murakawa has noted, support in the United States for consistent tendencies towards centralized criminal justice authority at the federal level and the increased professionalization of police have transcended partisan divides. Opportunities for structural change thus tend to be more limited to instances of exogenous shock or crises.[1719]
-Though it does not yield tangible reform strategies, the government failure model features substantial implications for the more normative political philosophy of punishment. Whereas the vast majority of justificatory frameworks for criminal punishment begin by assuming the legitimacy of formal state authority, the government failure model exhibits predictive power with respect to both traditional states and stateless societies. Formal governance can be recognized as a step towards the centralization of criminal justice administration. Thus, the government failure model offers a substantial challenge that any justificatory paradigm of criminal punishment must address. How can punitive institutions be arranged justly and effectively given the real potentials for errors of excessive imprisonment? If the potential for abuse is an inherent, inevitable feature of more centralized forms of governance, then any justifications for state legitimacy or the role of punitive authority must take account of this potential. Challenging mass incarceration, then, may seem to prompt critical questions about the state itself.
-[1658] M. Cavadino and J. Dignan, Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach (np: Sage, 2005), 3—30; J. Brodeur, “Comparative Penology in Perspective,” Crime and Justice 36 (2007): 49—91; N. Lacey, The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) 3—55.
-[1659] Clegg and Usmani (2018, 2) identify Alexander (2012), “cited over 6,000 times in just six years,” Garland (2002), “cited 9,000 times,” and Western (2007), with “2,345 citations,” as the sources contributing most substantially to this more popular framework. J. Clegg and A. Usmani, “The Racial Politics of the Punitive Turn” (2018), [[https://papers.ssrn.com][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3025670]]; M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY: New P, 2012); D. Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2002); B. Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).
-[1660] See W. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011); E. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2017); D. D’Amico and C. Williamson, “The Punitive Consequences of Organizational Structures in England, France and the United States,” Journal of Institutional Economics (forthcoming).
-[1661] It is worth noting that this essay presumes as a starting point of investigation that “mass incarceration” or exceptionally high prison population rates observed in recent decades (especially within the United States) are at least concerning and likely socially inefficient. While writing amidst the peak of American mass incarceration, economic historian Robert Higgs pointedly explained a possible worst-case scenario: “if the total incarcerated population were to continue to grow by 7.3% annually, it would double approximately every ten years .... Hence in the decade of the 2080s, within the lifetime of many people already born, the prison population would overtake the total population.” R. Higgs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2005) 96.
-[1662] Duff (2017) explains that, despite the fact that “insufficient attention is paid [to it] in the philosophical literature,” “in principle, the abolitionist challenge is one that must be met, rather than ignored; and it will help to remind us of the ways in which any practice of legal punishment is bound to be morally problematic.” A. Duff, “Legal Punishment,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017), [[https://plato.stanford.edu][https://plato.stanford.edu/]] [[https://plato.stanford.edu][entries/legal-punishment/#PunCriSta]].
-[1663] D. Boonin, The Problem of Punishment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).
-[1664] M. Pennington, Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011)
-[1665] E. Glaeser, “An Overview of Crime and Punishment” (2000), World Bank, [[http://www.worldbank.org][www.worldbank.org]].
-[1666] M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1975).
-[1667] J. Bentham, Panopticon (London: T. Payne, 1791).
-[1668] Foucault 21.
-[1669] Defending the panopticon, Bentham writes explicitly: “morals reformed—health preserved—industry invig- orated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the Gordian knot of the Poor—Laws are not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture!”
-[1670] B. Benson, “The Development of Criminal Law and its Enforcement: Public Interest or Political Transfers?” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 3.1 (1992): 79—108.
-[1671] G. Rusche and O. Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1939).
-[1672] Foucault 24.
-[1673] L. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009); L. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2010); D. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1993).
-[1674] R. Walmsley, “Global Incarceration and Prison Trends,” Forum on Crime and Society 3.1—2 (2003): 65—78.
-[1675] Wacquant, Punishing; B. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012).
-[1676] P. Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
-[1677] Cavadino and Dignan; Lacey.
-[1678] P. Enns, Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016).
-[1679] O. Wasow, “Do Protest Tactics Matter? Evidence from the 1960s Black Insurgency” (2017), working manuscript.
-[1680] Clegg and Usmani 1—2.
-[1681] P. Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991).
-[1682] Coyne and Hall explain how contemporary police forces have become technologically enhanced with advanced weaponry and vehicles as a result of increased military expenditures. Similarly, Styles has documented how urban policing strategies in newly industrialized London mimicked colonial tactics used to suppress indigenous uprisings. C. Coyne and A. Hall, “Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and the Impact on Minority Groups,” Peace Review 28 (2016): 165—70; J. Styles, “The Emergence of the Police— Explaining Police Reform in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England,” British Journal of Criminology 27.1 (1987): 15–22.
-[1683] While texts from diverse perspectives reflect concern regarding crime and social order amidst industrialization, market oriented, enlightenment thinkers were also noted critics of the relevant tough-on-crime politics of their era (see: Mandeville). Contemporary evidence suggests that heightened concerns with crime were largely unwarranted; as Beattie has shown, crime declined more quickly and substantially in newly urbanized industrial centers than in their rural counterparts. B. Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: And a Proposal for Some Regulations concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to Be Expected from Them (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Library, 1725); J. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1986).
-[1684] D. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1971).
-[1685] E. Peters, “Prison Before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds,” The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. N. Morris and D. Rothman (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1998) 3—43; D. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002); D. D’Amico, “The Prison in Economics: Private and Public Incarceration in Ancient Greece,” Public Choice 145.3—4 (2010): 461—82.
-[1686] T. Flanagan and D. Longmire, eds., Americans View Crime and Justice: A National Public Opinion Survey (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Enns.
-[1687] Cavadino and Dignan; Lacey.
-[1688] Cavadino and Dignan 15—16. Reflecting contemporary assumptions about neoliberalism, Wikipedia links neoliberalism “with an increase in human trafficking, the traumatization of the working classes, ‘belligerent capitalism,’ and high incarceration rates in the U.S. which aim at ‘keeping unemployment statistics low, and stimulating economic growth through maintaining a contemporary slave population within the U.S. and promoting prison construction and militarized policing.’” B. Caldwell, “The Chicago School, Hayek, and Neoliberalism” (2000), [[https://papers.ssrn.com][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1356899]]. Thus it is not only the case that neoliberalism is presented as a causal explanation of mass incarceration, but also that, for some, mass incarceration is inherently baked into the meaning of neoliberal ideology.
-[1689] R. Soares, “Crime Reporting as a Measure of Institutional Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 52 (2004): 851—71; R. Soares, “Development, Crime and Punishment: Accounting for the International Differences in Crime Rates,” Journal of Development Economics 73 (2004): 155—84.
-[1690] Rusche and Kirchheimer.
-[1691] T. Chiricos and M. Delone, “Labor Surplus and Punishment: A Review and Assessment of Theory and Evidence,” Social Problems, 39 (1992): 421—46; T. Marvel and C. Moody, “Prison Population Growth and Crime Reduction,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 10 (1994): 109—40.
-[1692] J. Sutton, “The Political Economy of Imprisonment in Affluent Western Democracies, 1960—1990,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 170—89.
-[1693] J. Neapolitan, “An Examination of Cross-National Variation in Punitiveness,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 45 (2001): 691—710; J. Sutton, “Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common-Law Democracies, 1960—1985,” American Journal of Sociology 106 (2000): 350—86; Sutton, “Political Economy”; R. Ruddell, “Social Disruption, State Priorities, and Minority Threat,” Punishment and Society 7 (2005): 7—28.
-[1694] D. D’Amico and C. Williamson, “Do Legal Origins Affect Cross-Country Incarceration Rates?” Journal of Comparative Economics 43.3 (2015): 595—612. Furthermore, freer market economies are associated with lower homicide rates (Stringham and Levendis), greater reporting of crimes to police authorities (Soares), and a wide variety of standard proxies for human well being (Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall). E. Stringham and J. Levendis, “The Relationship between Economic Freedom and Homicide,” The Economic Freedom of the World: Annual Report, ed. J. Gwartney, R. Lawson, and J. Hall (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 2010): 203—18; Soares, “Crime Reporting”; J. Gwartney, R. Lawson, and J. Hall, The Economic Freedom of the World: Annual Report. (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 2017).
-[1695] Enns.
-[1696] Beckett 1999.
-[1697] N. Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2014).
-[1698] Forman Jr 2017.
-[1699] Clegg and Usmani 2018.
-[1700] M. Tonry, “Racial Disproportion in U.S. Prisons,” British Journal of Criminology 34.5 (1994): 97—115.
-[1701] D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1990); O. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York, NY: Free, 1998).
-[1702] J. McGinnis, ed., Polycentricity and Local Public Economies: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1999).
-[1703] R. Sah and J. Stiglitz, “The Architecture of Economic Systems: Hierarchies and Polyarchies,” American Economic Review 76.4 (1986): 716—27.
-[1704] W. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Public Economics (Edinburgh: Edward Elgar, 1994); G. Tullock, Bureaucracy (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005).
-[1705] D. Friedman, “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law—A Historical Case,” Journal of Legal Studies 8.2 (1979): 399—415; R. Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Primitive Law,” Journal of Law and Economics 23.1 (1980): 1—53; P. Leeson, “Pirates, Prisoners, and Preliterates: Anarchic Context and the Private Enforcement of Law,” European Journal of Law and Economics 37.3 (2014): 365—79.
-[1706] F. Pollock and F. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1898); T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1929); Benson.
-[1707] Allen.
-[1708] Rothman; L. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994).
-[1709] D’Amico, “Prison.”
-[1710] D’Amico and Williamson, “Punitive Consequences.”
-[1711] R. La Porta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, and A. Shleifer, “The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins,” Journal of Economic Literature 46.2 (2008): 285—332.
-[1712] H. Spamann, “Legal Origins, Civil Procedure, and the Quality of Contract Enforcement,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 166.1 (2010): 149—65; M. DeMichele, “Using Weber’s Rechtssoziologie to Explain Western Punishment: A Typological Framework,” European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 21.1 (2013): 85—109; M. DeMichele, “A Panel Analysis of Legal Culture, Political Economics, and Punishment among 15 Western Countries, 1960—2010,” International Criminal Justice Review (2014).
-[1713] F. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1960).
-[1714] La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer 286.
-[1715] E. Glaeser and A. Shleifer, “Legal Origins,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107.4 (2002): 1193—1229.
-[1716] D’Amico and Williamson, “Punitive Consequences.”
-[1717] G. Beaumont and A. Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States, and Its Application to France: With an Appendix on Penal Colonies (New York, NY: Augustus M. Kelley, 1833).
-[1718] M. Greve, The Upside-Down Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2012).
-[1719] T. Yeager, Institutions, Transition Economies, and Economic Development (New York, NY: Westview, 1999).
-<br>
-** 29. The Problems of Central Planning in Military Technology
-*Abigail R. Hall*
-*** I. Introduction
-The United States vastly outpaces all other countries on military expenditures. In 2015, global military spending amounted to some $1.6 trillion. U.S. outlays represented 37% of this total.[1720] The United States spent nearly $650 billion on military-related expenses in 2018—more than China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany combined.[1721] The Trump administration proposed a military budget of $716 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2019 and the budget for FY 2020 was projected to be some $733 billion.[1722]
-The influence of the U.S. military extends beyond monetary expenditures. The U.S. armed forces maintain a presence on five continents, with some seventy countries hosting approximately 800 U.S. military bases.[1723] The military’s real estate portfolio includes some “562,000 facilities ... covering over 24.7 million acres.”[1724] At the end of FY 2014, U.S. Special Operations Forces operated in more than 130 countries—about 70% of all nations on the globe.[1725]
-The United States also occupies a critical role in the development and dissemination of military technology. For instance, it serves as the world’s primary arms dealer. The United States engaged in $55.6 billion in foreign military sales during FY 2018—representing a 33% increase from 2017.[1726] The country provides more weapons to developed and developing countries than any other nation. In 2015, for example, the United States agreed to some $40.2 billion in arms agreements with developing nations—50.29% of the market.[1727]
-The development of military technology is a cornerstone of contemporary policy. Technological innovation is a core component of the Third Offset Strategy of the U.S. military. An offset strategy is a “long-term, competitive strategy.that aims to generate and sustain strategic advantage.”[1728] The Third Offset Strategy seeks to leverage the development and integration of technology into the military more than ever before, including the extended use of network-enabled weapons, human-machine collaboration and combat teams, and “deep-learning” systems.[1729]
-A variety of scholars and policymakers have supported such a strategy and the further development and dissemination of military technologies. The position of the United States as primary global arms supplier, for instance, is viewed by many as a way to secure national security objectives and maintain international stability and regional power balances. It’s further argued that by supplying the majority of arms, countries like the United States can push developing nations toward developing other industries as opposed to armaments manufacture.[1730] Scholars in economics, political science, and military studies have called for the United States to embrace (what is viewed by some as) its position as an empire and to act as a global hegemon. They posit that doing so would lead to enhanced global financial stability, spark higher exports, promote peace, and allow for the further provision of putative public goods.[1731]
-My purpose in this chapter is to highlight some of the fundamental problems underlying contemporary scholarship concerned with military provision, paying particular attention to difficulties with the development and implementation of military technology. I highlight the existing literature that questions the dominant frameworks surrounding the provision and execution of military policies as a whole. I seek to advance this discussion by examining issues related to military technology, arguing that military activities as a whole are prone to two distinctive but complementary problems. Issues of the first sort—planner problems—result from insufficient knowledge and an inability to perform rational economic calculation outside of the context of markets. Issues of the second sort—perverse incentives—stem from issues related to political economy.
-I contribute primarily to three strands of literature. First, I contribute to the broader field of defense and peace economics.[1732] Within this arena, I seek to expand upon the criticisms related to the dominant models of defense provision. This work most closely relates to Coyne’s critiques of the underlying assumptions of defense and peace economics and my work with Coyne related to “non-comprehensive planning.”[1733] I expand upon this discussion by utilizing the frameworks laid out by Mises, Hayek, and Buchanan regarding incentive and knowledge problems.[1734] I apply these ideas to specific examples from U.S. military technology. Second, this work contributes to the overall discussion of the unintended overlooked costs of conflict by highlighting ways in which officials are unlikely to systematically develop “optimal” military technologies.[1735] Third, I contribute to the growing literature on the economics of anarchy and national defense.[1736] “Defense” is often utilized as the textbook example of a “pure public good.” As such, standard economic theory indicates that defense or military services will be underprovided by the market. When discussing the government provision of defense, however, it is often assumed that the centralized provision of military and defense services will be done in an economically optimal sense. This research calls this assumption into question this assumption.
-In the rest of the chapter, I proceed as follows. In Section II, I provide a brief overview of the dominant narrative regarding military activity and discuss the existing criticisms of this research. In Section III, I lay out two fundamental problems with the development and implementation of military technology. I discuss the limited knowledge of military planners and analyze the problem of economic calculation in implementing top-down military programs. I investigate the political economy of the military sector, considering the incentives faced by the military and other actors responsible for military activities and ways in which these issues contribute to problems within the military sector. I conclude in Section IV.
-*** II. Military Technology and the Assumed Public Interest
-When discussing the construction and execution of military policy, the literature largely assumes that those involved set aside their own goals and instead work to serve some greater “public interest.” More specifically, it’s assumed that benevolent agents seek to maximize some larger societal welfare function. This welfare function includes, among other things, the provision of national defense. Policymakers, acting as a rational collective body, allocate resources in a way that maximizes the value of national defense (i.e. provides the best possible protection for citizens) as part of overall societal welfare.
-Within this framework, public actors are motivated to please the general public—their “employers.” Further, the actions of policymakers are reinforced by appropriate feedback mechanisms.[1737] If a public official fails to maximize defense or other resources, for example, the theory indicates that the official in question will be appropriately “punished” by the citizenry (e.g. removed from office). It follows from these assumptions that the creation of military policy and the execution of military activities benefit society as a whole rather than a subset of actors. Moreover, this framework implies that resources are always allocated efficiently.
-Examining the literature related to defense and peace economics, Coyne highlights this and several other common assumptions.[1738] He notes that the vast majority of analyses related to defense assume that (1) defense is a pure public good and will be underprovided by the market, (2) state-provided defense is always “good” and beneficial to society, (3) the state provides the optimal quality and quantity of defense, (4) state defense expenditures are always value-added, and (5) state defense activities are neutral with respect to domestic political institutions. To further clarify and assess these assumptions, Coyne employs Buchanan’s discussion of conflicting theories of public finance—the “organismic view” and the “individualistic view.”[1739] The organismic view, according to Buchanan, models the state as a singular unit that acts as a “fiscal brain” in order to maximize social welfare. The second theory, the “individualistic view,” instead focuses analytically on individual decision-makers and their interactions within particular institutional constraints. In stark contrast to the organismic view, this theory treats public finance outcomes as emergent. In contrast to the organismic view, the individualistic view holds that “the state” is not some singular entity seeking to fulfill its own ends. Instead, the state comprises individuals with their own goals and aspirations. It follows from this view that the outcomes of political actions will only benefit society if the incentives facing policymakers align with the goals of the broader public. Building on this individualistic view, Coyne argues that much of the literature in defense and peace economics is fundamentally flawed.
-If the dominant assumptions of the literature hold, then the conjectures made regarding optimal provision, institutional neutrality, etc., should in some way be empirically verifiable. Research indicates, however, that there is a profound disconnect between what should be seen if a benevolent social welfare maximizer were responsible for defense provision and what is actually observed. In previous work, for example, I have analyzed how policies with respect to the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are assumed to serve the public interest. The empirical evidence, however, conflicts with this view.[1740] Others have examined similar issues within the area of defense, though academic analyses are uncommon.[1741]
-*** III. Further Problems with the Provision of Military Technology
-In addition to the problems noted above, two issues—planner problems and perverse incentives— further complicate the provision of military technology. Scholars have noted such issues are present in a number of areas, including economic development.[1742] I examine each of these issues in turn.
-**** A. Planner Problems with Military Technology
-In order to understand the problems of planning within the context of national defense, it is first necessary to appreciate the problems with state-led (centralized) planning more generally. Simply, such planning runs afoul of the need for effective economic calculation—which is required in order to answer the fundamental economic question of how to allocate finite resources toward their highest-valued use in an arena of infinite possibilities.
-Mises examined the problem of economic calculation and planner problems in relation to socialism.[1743] He argued that the ability to engage in economic calculation under socialism is impossible. The abolition of private property rights in the means of production inhibits the creation of a functioning market and monetary prices. Absent prices reflecting the relative scarcities of capital goods, decision-makers are unable to engage in rational economic calculation. It follows from this analysis that the market process, within a system of pricing reflective of relative scarcities, along with profit and loss signals that encourage the discovery and correction of errors, is essential for driving scarce resources to their highest-valued uses.
-Adding to the critique elaborated by Mises, Hayek argued that the nature of knowledge further disallows economic calculation under socialism.[1744] Neither a single individual, nor any group of individuals, can construct a rational economic order through central planning, because doing so requires the knowledge of many people. Individuals possess distinct knowledge of “time and place.”[1745] It is the interaction of many individuals within the context of market competition that allows for the process of discovery needed to determine how to allocate resources. For Hayek, no group of central planners can engage in rational economic calculation because there is no comparable discovery mechanism outside of the market context.
-Mises and Hayek intended their critiques to contribute to a broader discussion in academic, political, and social discourse regarding the capabilities of socialism in general. These critiques are, however, thoroughly applicable to particular instances of central planning—to, for instance, planning related to military technology. Just as those who support central planning argued that various mechanisms would work to allocate resources appropriately in a centrally planned economy, many within the military sector often purport to have developed feedback mechanisms in which those operating at the top of the relevant organizational structures (i.e. those in charge of funding decisions) are appropriately informed of the needs and capabilities of those at lower levels. Through these supposed mechanisms (namely trial and error), top officials are able to develop and implement programs, evaluate them effectively, and reallocate resources in order more effectively to meet the needs of the military and, ultimately, the broader public.
-The bureaucratic structure of the military (discussed further below), however, is no substitute for the discovery procedure of the market. Although the government undoubtedly has access to information pertaining to military technologies, officials still lack crucial pieces of knowledge. In order to effectively engage in economic calculation, officials would need to possess knowledge regarding which projects should be implemented to achieve the desired goals, when these projects should be implemented, where the projects would prove most effective, and which projects are most likely to generate the best outcomes. While the answer to these and other questions would be provided in a market setting via competition and profit and loss signals, military planners are at a loss to determine these answers effectively.
-These planner problems are further compounded because policymakers are unable to ascertain the secondary effects of the policies they adopt. Those involved in planning and implementing foreign military interventions, for instance, tend to view the world in linear fashion and to exhibit extreme confidence in their ability to solve complex problems.[1746] That is, they identify a problem, formulate a solution, and work to implement it. While this kind of approach may be appropriate in some fields (e.g. engineering), it is positively disastrous when it comes to military policy. Policymakers are unable to account for the infinite complexity of the social, political, and economic relationships in the context of which military technologies are introduced and used. Planners simply cannot know how the creation and introduction of military technologies in one arena will impact the broader system of military activity. Their inescapable ignorance leads to serious unintended consequences.
-Examples of knowledge failures in the creation and implementation of military technology abound. Consider the use of the Global Hawk Block 30 and other UAVs employed extensively in the “war on terror.” The technology was initially touted as (among other things) a means of reducing harm to military personnel. Since UAVs are, by definition, unmanned, policymakers pushed forward with the extended use of UAV technology. What policymakers were unable to foresee, however, was that the use of UAVs would ultimately require more “boots on the ground,” as their employment necessitated the involvement of “ground pilots,” surveillance analysts, maintenance personnel, and other operators.[1747] Many of the necessary functions require individuals to be in close proximity to UAVs rather than safely out of harm’s way. Policymakers were also unable to anticipate the psychological effects of involvement in UAV combat. The Department of Defense (DOD) has found that drone operators have experienced mental health problems at the same rate as conventional pilots.[1748] The Air Force reported that nearly half of UAV operators reported high levels of “operational stress,” and some 25% showed signs of “clinical distress,” depression, anxiety, or other problems severe enough to impact their family lives and job performances.[1749] Former UAV pilot Brandon Bryant reported:
-<quote>
-I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world ... I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled.
-I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself.[1750]
-</quote>
-In addition to these problems, policymakers could not predict how UAV technology would come to be used domestically. Coyne and I have highlighted this additional unforeseen consequence of UAV use abroad, documenting at length how UAV technology has come to be employed in a variety of domestic contexts, in ways that have led to serious encroachments on the civil liberties of U.S. citizens.[1751]
-Some advocates are quick to point out the benefits of military technology as a counter to the sorts of criticisms I’ve noted, citing inventions like the Internet, microwaves, and Jeeps. But the point of the criticisms is not that the military sector is incapable of creating useful materials, but instead that, absent the mechanisms made possible by private property rights, prices, and profit and loss, the DOD cannot consistently choose successful projects with respect to military technology. Furthermore, the supposed benefits of military technology may be impossible effectively to calculate. Robert Higgs, for example, highlights ways in which the use of standard measures of economic activity proves difficult or impossible when it comes to discussing activities related to the military, particularly those taking place during state-driven wars.[1752] He challenges the standard view of “war prosperity” and the idea that World War II “got the economy out of the Depression,” noting that prices under a command-and-control economy do not reflect relative scarcities or consumer preferences.
-**** B. Perverse Incentives Related to Military Technology
-The inability to engage in rational economic calculation is not the only problem facing key decision-makers with respect to the development and use of military technology. Another difficulty flows from the economics of bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a “specific form of organization defined by complexity[,].hierarchical coordination and control, [a] strict chain of command, and legal authority.. In its ideal form, bureaucracy is impersonal.and based on rules.”[1753] There is perhaps no clearer example of a bureaucratic organization than the DOD. The Secretary of Defense heads the department, subordinate only to the President and (nominally) Congress. Beneath the Secretary, each military branch is headed by its own secretary. Substantial influence is also exerted independently by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each of these entities is served by a variety of additional managers—not to mention the entirety of the U.S. fighting force, along with the various specialist agencies (e.g. the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and combatant commands (e.g. CENTCOM, AFRICOM).
-Unlike firms operating within the context of the free market, bureaus operating within and at the behest of the government do not compete for profits, but instead compete against other agencies for government resources. Absent the profit and loss mechanisms of the market, bureaucratic institutions must rely on other metrics to gauge their successes. Existing literature on this topic points namely to two primary metrics by means of which a bureaucratic entity’s success is characteristically measured—(1) the size of its total or discretionary budget and (2) the number of subordinate personnel it employs.[1754] The potential for increased budgets and more personnel creates incentives for bureaus to participate in intensive rent-seeking behavior and mission creep (the expansion of an agency’s goals and resultant activities) in attempts to secure more funding.
-One need not look far to see the success of the DOD in expanding its budget. While spikes in military spending are expected, especially during times of conflict, the U.S. military budget has increased dramatically over the past several decades. Consider that, in 1950, the United States spent less than $200 billion on the military (in 2018 dollars). During the Reagan Administration spending increased to just under $500 billion. During the “war on terror,” spending reached new heights with more than $600 billion in military spending.[1755] Spending continues to climb with a proposed budget of $716 billion for FY 2019 and a projected budget for FY 2020 of $733 billion.[1756]
-Examples of mission creep are likewise plentiful. The U.S. military now engages in a variety of activities apart from war and traditional “defense.” Perhaps the most obvious example is the use of military forces in an attempt to spark or sustain economic development and nation-building.[1757]
-The bureaucratic structure of the military is further relevant to the more specific issue of military technology. When profit and loss signals are unavailable to direct resource allocation, the political rules of government dictate the allocation of scarce resources instead.[1758] Critically, then, the military faces little or no incentive to minimize costs or please its putative ultimate “customers” (the public). Those who ultimately receive military contracts, for example, may not be those who are best able to provide them at the lowest price—but instead those who are able to effectively engage in rent-seeking. This problem is further compounded as a result of the presence of a number of special interest groups, namely military contractors, who often maintain significant influence over policymakers.[1759]
-UAVs are again valuably illustrative. When UAVs were introduced as options for combat, their proponents argued that UAV technology would “reduce the dollar cost of using lethal force .... [UAVs] are a bargain compared with the available alternatives.”[1760] The trumpeted cost savings, however, have yet to materialize. Consider the Global Hawk Block 30 UAV. While the UAV and the U-2 spy plane (considered a Cold War “relic”) are estimated to have similar operating costs (approximately $32,000 per hour), the UAV has “twice breached [the] Nunn—McCurdy acquisition cost ceiling,” despite initial promises to cut costs.[1761] The three Block 30s purchased in FY 2012 cost over $486 million. When questioned regarding the Air Force’s desire to halt the further acquisition of the UAVs, Chief of Staff General Norton Schwarz told officials that the “U-2 yielded $2.5 billion in savings” over a five year period compared to the UAV.[1762] Though initially proposed because of their purported potential to enhance operational efficiency, the Block 30s have consistently been evaluated by the military as inferior to other, much older technologies UAVs were designed to replace.[1763] Instead of using this information to improve existing UAV technology or substitute an alternative, officials continue to fund the Block 30, even requiring its use when the Air Force expressed its desire to retire the UAV. This was a direct result of intensive pressure from the UAV’s manufacturer and the subsequent decisions of lawmakers.[1764]
-Another often-cited example of the perverse incentives plaguing the military sector is the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter), referred to by some as the “great white whale of defense waste.”[1765] The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) emphasized in a 2015 report that the DOD’s “most costly and ambitious program” had “experienced significant cost, schedule, and performance problems.”[1766] The F-35 was formally unveiled in 2001; the DOD planned to purchase 2,852 of the airplanes at an estimated cost of $233 billion. But substantial cost overruns have plagued the production of the F-35, like that of the Global Hawk. The Pentagon reported that the cost of researching and procuring the fighters was likely to prove some $22 billion more than prior cost assessments. The estimated total cost for operating and supporting the F-35 fleet amounts to some $1.196 trillion. In addition to skyrocketing costs, the aircraft have suffered from a number of technical problems, including issues with landing, battery failures in cold weather, and loss of stealth capacity at supersonic speeds. In 2019, the F-35 program reported some sixty-four “category 1” deficiencies, down from 111 the prior year. A category 1 deficiency is one that could “cause death, severe injury or illness, [or] could cause loss or damage to the aircraft or its equipment,” among others.[1767] Policymakers refuse to jettison the project, however, due in part to the fear that such a move would reduce employment in their districts.[1768] Moreover, military contractors continue to apply immense pressure to elected officials; lobbying for the project has come to occupy
-a front row seat on K Street [in Washington, DC], with various actors pouring in big bucks into keeping this expensive program afloat ... [A]t least 15 different companies ... have filed lobbying disclosures for work on conducted in relation to ... the F-35 . Lockheed Martin has spearheaded these lobbying efforts, with 12 in-house [lobbyists] working on the issue.[1769]
-*** IV. Conclusion
-This chapter has two main implications. First, serious problems complicate traditional studies of military technology. In particular, some of the standard assumptions regarding military policy deserve to be questioned vigorously. The idea of a benevolent, singular entity working to maximize some broader notion of social welfare is likely not an appropriate framework for analyzing policies surrounding the development and implementation of putatively defensive technologies and strategies. This suggests that, when discussing issues of military technology—and military matters more generally—researchers should consider perspectives that appreciate the limitations of knowledge and the incentives facing policymakers.
-Second, military technologies may not be created or utilized in a way that promotes the public interest. As the examples of UAVs and the F-35 illustrate, knowledge problems and issues of political economy are likely to present serious problems. Because no one can acquire all relevant information, the development and use of any military technology will likely result in unforeseen consequences affecting a number of intimately interconnected systems. The presence of special interests within the military sector and the structure of the sector itself means that the incentives of policymakers is unlikely to align with the incentives of the general public.
-Taken together, these implications call into question the standard narrative that centralized states must necessarily provide defense and military services and open the door for a more critical discussion of how a free (anarchic) society may provide these services. As Mises, Hayek, and others have pointed out, individuals operating within market institutions, beholden to the signals and incentives generated by prices, profit, and loss, are not subjected to the aforementioned knowledge and incentive problems. Undoubtedly, the private provision of defense would carry with it a number of consequences—both positive and negative. The assumption, however, that government provision of these services is categorically superior is far from clear and requires further exploration.
-[1720] National Priorities Project, “U.S. Military Spending vs. The World,” [[http://www.nationalpriorities.org][www.nationalpriorities.org/cam]] [[http://www.nationalpriorities.org][paigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/]] (August 2019; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1721] Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries,” [[http://www.pgpf.org][www.pgpf.org/]] [[http://www.pgpf.org][chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison]] (August 2019; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1722] Lawrence Korb, “What the FY 2020 Defense Budget Gets Wrong,” [[http://www.americanprogress.org][www.americanprogress.org/issues/]] [[http://www.americanprogress.org][security/reports/2019/04/29/469086/fy-2020-defense-budget-gets-wrong/ ]](April 2019; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1723] David Vine, “Where In The World Is the U.S. Military?” [[http://www.politico.com][www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-]] [[http://www.politico.com][military-bases-around-the-world-119321 ]](July/August 2015; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1724] United States Department of Defense, “U.S. Department of Defense: Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Request,” [[http://comptroller.defense.gov][http://comptroller.defense.gov/budget.aspx]] (2014; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1725] Nick Turse, “The Golden Age of Black Ops: Special Ops Missions Already in 105 Countries in 2015,” [[http://www.tomdispatch.com][www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175945/]] (January 2015; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1726] Eugene Golhz, “Conventional Arms Transfers and US Economic Security.” Strategic Studies Quarterly, 13.1 (2019): 42–65.
-[1727] Catherine Theohary, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2007–2014,” [[http://www.fas.org][www.fas.org/]] [[http://www.fas.org][sgp/crs/weapons/R44320.pdf]] (2015; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1728] Katie Lange, “3<sup>rd</sup> Offset Strategy 101: What It Is, What the Tech Focuses Are,” [[http://www.dodlive.mil][www.dodlive.mil/2016/]] [[http://www.dodlive.mil][03/30/3<sup>rd</sup>-offset-strategy-101-what-it-is-what-the-tech-focuses-are/]] (2016; last accessed October 5, 2019).
-[1729] Katie Lange “#3<sup>rd</sup> Offset Strategy.”
-[1730] See Jonathan D. Caverley, “United States Hegemony and the New Economics of Defense,” Security Studies, 16.4 (2007): 598–614; Jonathan D. Caverley and Ethan B. Kapstein, “Arms Away: How Washington Squandered its Monopoly on Weapons Sales,” Foreign Affairs, 91.5 (2012): 125–132; and Jonathan D. Caverley and Ethan B. Kapstein, “America and the Arms Trade: From Subsidies to Rent Extraction,” (2012) Paper for annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA.
-[1731] See Deepak Lal, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order (New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan 2004); Kris James Mitchner and Marc D. Weidenmier, “Empire, Public Goods and the Roosevelt Corollary,” National Bureau of Economic Research (2004); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York, NY: Penguin 2004); Niall Ferguson and Mortiz Schularick, “The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization, 1880–1913,” Journal of Economic History, 66.2 (2006): 283–312.
-[1732] Charles H. Anderton and John R. Carter, “On Rational Choice Theory and the Study of Terrorism,” Defence and Peace Economics, 16.4 (2005): 275–282; Kenneth J. Arrow, “Some General Observations on the Economics of Peace and War, Peace Economics,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2.2 (1995): 1–8; Kenneth E. Boulding, The Economics of Peace (New York, NY: Prentice-Hall 1945); Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin, TX: U of Texas P 1978); Jurgen Brauer and Raul Caruso, “Economists and Peacebuilding,” Handbook on Peacebuilding, ed. Roger MacGintry (London: Routledge 2012); Jurgen Brauer and J. Paul Dunne, Peace Economics: A Macroeconomic Primer for Violence-Afflicted States (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace P 2012); Christopher J. Coyne, “The Institutional Prerequisites for Post-Conflict Reconstruction,” Review of Austrian Economics, 18.3/4 (2005): 325–342; Christopher J. Coyne, “The Politics of Bureaucracy and the Failure of Post-War Reconstruction,” Public Choice, 135 (2008): 11–22; Christopher J. Coyne and Tyler Cowen, “Postwar Reconstruction: Some Insights from Public Choice and Institutional Economics,” Constitutional Political Economy, 16 (2005): 31–48; Christopher J. Coyne and Adam Pellillo, “Economic Reconstruction Amidst Conflict: Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq,” Defence and Peace Economics, 22.6 (2011): 627–643; Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler, eds., Handbook of Defense Economics (Amsterdam: Elsevier 1995); Jack Hirshleifer, The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge 2001); Walter Isard, Understanding Conflict and the Science of Peace (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1992); Paul Poast, The Economics of War (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill 2006); Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley, The Economics of Defense (New York, NY: Cambridge 1995); Ron P. Smith, Military Economics: The Interaction of Power and Money (New York, NY: Palgrave 2009).
-[1733] Christopher J. Coyne, “Lobotomizing the Defense Brain,” Review of Austrian Economics, 28.4 (2015): 371–396; Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, “State-Provided Defense as Non-Comprehensive Planning.” Journal of Private Enterprise, 34.1 (2019): 75–85.
-[1734] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics 1981 (1922)); Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund 2005 (1927)); Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (Grove City, NY: Libertarian P 1983 (1944)); Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute 1998 (1949)); James M. Buchanan, “Public Choice: Politics Without Romance,” Policy, 19.3 (1975): 13–18.
-[1735] Alan T. Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1961); Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York, NY: Free P 1994); John V. Denson, The Costs of War (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction 1999); Linda J. Blimes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company 2008); Ivan Eland, “Warfare State to Welfare State: Conflict Causes Government to Expand at Home,” Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, 18.2 (2013): 189—218; Thomas K. Duncan and Christopher J. Coyne, “The Overlooked Costs of the Permanent War Economy,” Review of Austrian Economics 26.4 (2013): 413—431.
-[1736] Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Don Lavoie, “National Defense and the Public-Goods Problem,” Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, ed. Edward P. Stingham (London: Transaction 2007); Roderick Long, “Defending a Free Nation.” Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, ed. Edward P. Stingham (London: Transaction, 2007).
-[1737] Gordon Tullock, “Public Choice,” The New Pelgrave Dictionary of Economics, ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
-[1738] Christopher J. Coyne, “Lobotomizing the Defense Brain,” Review of Austrian Economics, 28.4 (2015): 371–396.
-[1739] James M. Buchanan, “The Pure Theory of Government Finance,” Journal of Political Economy, 57 (1949): 496–505.
-[1740] Abigail R. Hall, “Drones: Public Interest, Public Choice, and the Expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 21.2 (2015): 2014–2043.
-[1741] Tom Vanden Brook, Ken Dilanian, and Ray Locker, “Retire military officers cash in as well-paid consultants,” [[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com][http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-11-17-military-mentors_N.htm]] (November 18, 2009; last visited November 5, 2019); Tom A. Coburn, “Department of Everything: Department of Defense Spending that has Little to Do with National Security,” [[http://www.coburn.senate.gov][www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.]] [[http://www.coburn.senate.gov][cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=00783b5a-f0fe-4f80-90d6-019695e52d2d]] (last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1742] Abigail R. Hall, “Drones: Public Interest, Public Choice, and the Expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 21.2 (2015): 2014–2043; Rachel L. Mathers, “The Failure of State-Led Economic Development on American Indian Reservations,” Independent Review, 17.1 (2012): 65–80; Christopher J. Coyne and Peter T. Leeson, “The Plight of Underdeveloped Countries,” CATO Journal, 24.3 (2004): 235–249.
-[1743] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics 1981 (1922)); Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund 2005 (1927)); Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (Grove City, NY: Libertarian P 1983 (1944)); Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute 1998 (1949)).
-[1744] F.A. Hayek, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics<sub>}</sub> 5.3 (1968 (2002)): 9–23; F.A. Hayek, “The Present State of the Debate,” in Collectivist Economic Planning, ed. F.A Hayek (New York, NY: Augustus M. Kelley 1935); F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1945); F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1988); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Paris: Collection Quadrige, Presses Universitaire de France 1946–1993); F.A. Hayek, “The Competitive ‘Solution’,” Individualism and Economic Order, ed. F.A. von Hayek (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1940).
-[1745] F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P 1945).
-[1746] Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of US Militarism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2018).
-[1747] Micah Zenko, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones,” [[http://www.foreignpolicy.com][www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/]] [[http://www.foreignpolicy.com][27/10_things_you_didnt_know_a bout_drones]] (February 27, 2012; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1748] Dao, James, “Drone Pilots are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do,” [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.]] [[http://www.nytimes.com][nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html]] (February 23, 2013; last visited August 18, 2020).
-[1749] Elisabeth Bumiller, “Air Force Operators Report High Levels of Stress,” [[http://www.nytimes.com][www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/]] [[http://www.nytimes.com][world/asia/air-force-drone-operators-show-high-levels-of-stress.html]] (December 18, 2011; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1750] Quoted in Pratap Chaterjee, “A Chilling New Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Why Drone Pilots Are Quitting In Record Numbers,” [[http://www.salon.com][www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumatic_stress_disorder_why_dro]] [[http://www.salon.com][ne_pilots_are_quitting_in_record_numbers_partner/]] (March 7, 2015; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1751] See Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of US Militarism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2018); Abigail R. Hall, “Drones: Public Interest, Public Choice, and the Expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 21.2 (2015): 2014–2043.
-[1752] Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in The 1940s,” Journal of Economic History, 52.1 (1992): 41–60.
-[1753] Bert Rockman, “Bureaucracy,” [[http://www.britannica.com][www.britannica.com/topic/bureaucracy]] (2019; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1754] See Gordon Tullock, The Politics of Bureaucracy (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs P 1965); William N. Niskanen, “Bureaucrats and Politicians,” Journal of Law and Economics, 18.3 (1995): 617—43; William N. Niskanen, “The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy,” American Economic Review, 58.2 (1968): 293—305; William N. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago, IL: Aldine, Atherton 1971).
-[1755] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database,” [[http://www.sipri.org][www.sipri.org/]] [[http://www.sipri.org][databases/milex]] (2018; last visited August 18, 2020).
-[1756] Lawrence J. Korb, “What the FY 2020 Defense Budget Gets Wrong,” [[http://www.americanprogress.org][www.americanprogress.org/issues/]] [[http://www.americanprogress.org][security/reports/2019/04/29/469086/fy-2020-defense-budget-gets-wrong/ ]](April 29, 2019; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1757] Christopher J. Coyne, “The Politics of Bureaucracy and the Failure of Post-War Reconstruction,” Public Choice, 135 (2008): 11—22; Christopher J. Coyne and Tyler Cowen, “Postwar Reconstruction: Some Insights from Public Choice and Institutional Economics,” Constitutional Political Economy, 16 (2005): 31—48; Christopher J. Coyne and Adam Pellillo, “Economic Reconstruction Amidst Conflict: Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq,” Defence and Peace Economics 22.6 (2011): 627—643.
-[1758] Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (Grove City, PA: Libertarian P (1944 (1983))).
-[1759] See Abigail R. Hall and Christopher J. Coyne,“The Political Economy of Drones,” Defence and Peace Economics, 25.5 (2013): 445—460; Abigail R. Hall, “Drones: Public Interest, Public Choice, and the Expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 21.2 (2015): 2014—2043; Thomas K. Duncan and Christopher J. Coyne, “The Overlooked Costs of the Permanent War Economy,” Review of Austrian Economics, 26.4 (2013): 413—431.
-[1760] Rosa Brooks, “Take Two Drones and Call Me in the Morning: The Perils of Our Addiction to Remote- Controlled War,” [[http://www.foreignpolicy.com][www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/12/take_two_drones_and_call _me_in_the_]] [[http://www.foreignpolicy.com][morning]] (September 12, 2012; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1761] Chris Pocock, “U.S. Air Force Defends Global Hawk Grounding Decision,” [[http://www.ainonline.com][www.ainonline.com/avi]] [[http://www.ainonline.com][ation-news/2012-03-16/us-air-force-defends-global-hawk-grounding-decision]] (March, 16, 2012; last visited November 5, 2019). The Nunn—McCurdy Act (10 U.S.C. §2433) requires the U.S. Department of Defense to notify Congress whenever a major program experiences cost overruns that exceeed particular threshholds. Breeches are categorized as Significant or Critical. The latter occurs when the cost increases by 25% or more of the current baseline cost estimate or 50% of the original estimate.
-[1762] Ibid.
-[1763] See H.P. Sia and Alexander Cohen, “The Drone that Wouldn’t Die: How a Defesw Contractor Bested the Pentagon,” [[http://www.theatlantic.com][www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/the-drone-that-wouldnt-die-how-]] [[http://www.theatlantic.com][a-defense-contractor-bested-the-pentagon/277807/ ]](July 16, 2013; last visited November 5, 2019); Loren Thompson, “U-2 vs. Global Hawk: Why Drones Aren’t Always the Answer to Every Military Need,” [[http://www.forbes.com][www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/02/20/u-2-vs-global-hawk-why-drones-arent-the-answer-to-]] [[http://www.forbes.com][every-military-need/ ]](February 20, 2014; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1764] Abigail R. Hall, “Drones: Public Interest, Public Choice, and the Expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 21.2 (2015): 2014—2043.
-[1765] Ross Marchland, “The F-35, The Great White Whale of Defense Waste,” [[http://www.washingtonexaminer.com][www.washingtonexaminer.]] [[http://www.washingtonexaminer.com][com/opinion/op-eds/the-f-35-the-great-white-whale-of-defense-waste ]](November 14, 2018; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1766] United Sates Government Accountability Office, “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Assessment Needed to Address Affordability Challenges,” [[http://www.gao.gov][www.gao.gov/assets/670/669619.pdf]] (2015; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1767] Valerie Insinna, “FAQ: Your Guide to Understanding How The Military Rates F-35 Technical Shortfalls,” [[http://www.defensenews.com][www.defensenews.com/smr/hidden-troubles-f35/2019/06/12/faq-your-guide-to-understanding-how-the-]] [[http://www.defensenews.com][military-rates-f-35-technical-shortfalls/ ]](June 12, 2019; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1768] William D. Hartung, “The Military Is the Ultimate Special Interest Group,” [[http://www.thenation.com][www.thenation.com/article/]] [[http://www.thenation.com][the-military-is-the-ultimate-special-interest-group/ ]](November 1, 2018; last visited November 5, 2019).
-[1769] Tess VandenDolder, “Why Everyone Is Lobbying on the F-35 Fighter Jet,” [[http://www.americaninno.com][www.americaninno.com/dc/]] [[http://www.americaninno.com][why-everyone-is-lobbying-on-the-f-35-fighter-jet/]](October 9, 2014; last visited November 5, 2019).
-** 30. Anarchy and Transhumanism
-*William Gillis*
-*** I. Introduction
-The term “anarcho-transhumanism” is a relatively recently one, barely mentioned in the 1980s, publicly adopted in the early 2000s and only really popularized in the last decade. But it represents a current of thought that has been present in anarchist circles and theory since William Godwin tied the drive to perpetually improve and perfect our social relations with the drive to perpetually improve and perfect ourselves, our material conditions, and our bodies.
-The idea behind anarcho-transhumanism is a simple one:
-<quote>
-We should seek to expand our physical freedom just as we seek to expand our social freedom.
-</quote>
-Anarcho-transhumanists see their position as the logical extension or deepening of anarchism’s existing commitment to maximizing freedom. And the term “morphological freedom” is widely used by transhumanists of many varieties as a label for the positive freedom to alter one’s body or material conditions.
-Transhumanism is often shallowly characterized in the media in terms of the desire to live forever, the desire to upload one’s mind to a computer, or a fantasy in which a self-improving artificial intelligence (AI) suddenly arrives and transforms the world into a paradise. And, of course, some people are attracted to these goals. But the only defining precept of transhumanism is that we should have more freedom to change ourselves and our environment.
-Transhumanism thus challenges essentialist definitions of the “human” and is sometimes framed as part of a wider discourse in feminist and queer theory concerned with cyborg identities and “inhumanisms.” Transhumanism can be seen as either an aggressive critique of humanism, or alternatively as an extension of specific humanist values beyond the arbitrary species category of “human.” Transhumanism demands that we interrogate our desires and values beyond the happenstance of What Is, accepting neither the authority of arbitrary social constructs like gender nor a blind fealty to how our bodies presently function.
-As one would expect, transgender issues have been at the core of transhumanism from the start. But transhumanism radically expands on trans liberation to situate it as part of a much wider array of struggles for freedom in the construction and operation of our bodies and the surrounding world. A number of anarcho-transhumanists work on immediately practical projects that give people more control over their bodies—the operation of abortion clinics, the distribution of naloxone, or the 3D printing of open-source prosthetics for children. But transhumanists also ask radical questions like: Why is it not only the case that our society is okay with the involuntary decay and death of the elderly but also that it moralizes in support of their perpetual extermination?
-The struggle for life extension is certainly not the entirety of transhumanism, but it is an important example of the kind of campaign transhumanists initiated and continue, shockingly, to fight largely alone. The notion that an objectively “good life” extends to seventy or a hundred years but no further is clearly arbitrary, and yet the opinion that it does is both nearly universally held and violently defended. Many early transhumanists were shocked by this response, but it illustrates how people can easily become staunch defenders of existing catastrophes for fear of otherwise having to reconsider standing assumptions in their own lives. In the same way that people will defend mandatory military service or murdering animals for food, the arguments for death are clearly defensive rationalizations—and rational responses are easy to formulate:
- - “Death gives life its meaning.” Yet how is death at seventy years old more meaningful than death at five years old or at two hundred years old? If an eighty-year-old woman gets to live and work on her poetry for another five decades, does that really undermine your capacity to find meaning so badly that you’d prefer to see her murdered?
- - “We would get bored.”This seems nothing more than a call to build a world that isn’t boring! Never mind the wild possibilities embedded in both anarchism and transhumanism; it would take almost three hundred thousand years to read every book in existence today. There are already 100 million recorded songs in the world. There are thousands of languages with their own conceptual ecosystems and their own poetry. There are hundreds of fields of inquiry, rich and fascinating, in which to immerse yourself. There are vast arrays of experiences and novel kinds of relationships to explore. Surely we can do with a few more centuries at least.
- - “Old, static perspectives would clog up the world.” It’s a pretty absurd and horrifying to instinctively appeal to genocide as the best means to solve the problem of the rigidity of people’ perspectives or identities. Over a hundred billion humans have died since the arrival of Homo sapiens on the scene. At best they were only able to convey the tiniest sliver of their subjective experiences, their insights and dreams, before everything else inside them was abruptly snuffed out. People say that every time an elder dies it’s like a library’s being burned to the ground. We’ve already lost 100 billion libraries! There are no doubt infinite myriad ways we might live and change, but it would be strange indeed if the sharp binary of sudden, massive, and irreversible loss that is currently standard were universally ideal.
-Life extension is an illustrative example that gets to the heart of what transhumanism offers as a continuation of anarchism’s radicalism: the capacity to demand that unexamined norms or conventions justify themselves, to challenge things otherwise accepted.
-Anarcho-transhumanism breaks down many other common operating assumptions about the world, just as it seeks to expand and explore the scope of what is possible. Radicalism is all about pressing assumptions and models into alien contexts and seeing what breaks down in order to better clarify what dynamics are more fundamentally rooted. Anarcho-transhumanism seeks to advance anarchism through this kind of clarification—to get it into better fighting shape so it can deal more effectively with the future, to make it capable of fighting in all situations, not just those specific to particular contexts.
-It’s easy to say “all this talk of distant science fiction possibilities is an irrelevant distraction.” Anarchotranshumanists certainly don’t advocate abandoning the day-to-day of anarchist struggles and infrastructure-building. But it is forward thinking that has often won anarchism its biggest advances. Indeed, it’s arguable that a great deal of anarchism’s potency has historically derived from its correct predictions. And this is a widespread pattern. While the Internet is obviously the site of major conflicts today, many of the freedoms still provided by it were won decades ago by radicals who were tracing out the ramifications and importance of social phenomena and institutions long before the state and capitalism caught up or grasped the ramifications of certain battles.
-On the other hand, if there’s one takeaway from the last two centuries of struggle, it should be that it often takes radicals a really long time to field responses to new developments. Anarchists have adapted very slowly to changing conditions. It’s frequently taken a decade or more for anarchists to try out various approaches, settle on the good ones, and proceed to popularize them. Today, radical leftists have an increasing tendency to dismiss futurism and instead just shrug and say, “We’ll solve that problem through praxis.” But what that dismissal often boils down to is: “We’ll figure it out through trial and error when the shit hits the fan and we don’t really have time for years of error and stumbling.”
-Theorists and activists are finally coming around in large numbers to the realization that the simplicity of radicals’ responses and their slow adaptation times have often left them predictable to those in power, their instinctual responses already integrated into rulers’ and bosses’ plans, with the result that their struggles effectively serve as pressure valves for society—inadvertently helping to sustain existing institutions and practices rather than undermining or transforming them.
-It might seem bizarre and disconnected to try to determine exactly what anarchists really means by “freedom” in a technological context in which “selves” and “individuals” are not clearly defined and conventional appeals to autonomy fall short. One might seek to dismiss the relevance of various contemporary phenomena to the project of rethinking the nature of humanness and human connection—of twins conjoined at the brain who use pronouns unconventionally. It might seem easy to treat multicameral minds as “irrelevant” or “marginal” or to treat the possibility of brain-to-brain empathic technologies as too remote to be worth even considering (never mind the couples who’ve already utilized limited prototypes). But dismissing anything beyond one’s present, particular experience serves to confine anarchism to a parochial context, leaving it a superficial and soon-to-be-antiquated historical tendency—incapable of speaking more broadly or claiming any depth or rootedness in our ethical positions.
-It’s important to be clear, however: Proactive consideration of the possible is not the same thing as small-minded prefiguration. Anarcho-transhumanists are not making the mistake of demanding a single specific future—of laying out a blueprint and demanding that the world comply. Rather, they advocate the enabling of a multiplicity of futures.
-*** II. Historical Antecedents
-William Godwin is frequently identified as the first prominent anarchist in modern times, although Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would later be the first person to use the term “anarchist.” Godwin was a prominent utilitarian philosopher and novelist, but was eclipsed by his partner Mary Wollstonecraft (often identified as the first modern feminist), and their daughter Mary Shelley (often identified as the first science fiction novelist). Godwin called for the abolition of the state, capitalism, and many other forms of oppression, but also linked his emancipatory agenda with farseeing calls for the radical extension of technological capacity, considering possibilities including life extension and the defeat of death.
-Godwin was just one of many historical anarchists who spoke in sharply transhumanist terms. Voltairine de Cleyre, for instance, praised the development of greater technological freedoms and saw the end goal as “an ideal life, in which men and women will be as gods, with a god’s power to enjoy and to suffer.”[1770] And talk of the gradual transformation of both humanity and our environment has been common throughout anarchist ranks historically. One of the most prominent popularizers of anarchism, Errico Malatesta, framed anarchism as a never-ending march towards greater freedom: What matters, he declared, “is not whether we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.”[1771]
-Anarchists as early as Joseph Déjacque dabbled in wild science fiction, describing future worlds with machines that automated doing the laundry, washing the dishes, etc., and many pressed further still. In particular, Russian anarchists and socialists just prior to the Bolshevik revolution embraced a wide variety of avant-garde movements with extreme technoscientific aspirations. Most striking among these was the Cosmist movement. Cosmist thinkers advocated radical life extension, the merging of human and machine, and the spread of consciousness beyond Earth. While many Cos- mists were socialists rather than anarchists and were eventually consumed by the USSR, influencing both the space race and Soviet culture, their slogans like “Storm the Heavens and Conquer Death” have been widely adopted by anarcho-transhumanists today.
-Though the sweeping term “cybernetics” is less used today by scientists, a self-conscious “cybernetics” movement attracted considerable attention and intellectual energy from the 1950s through to the 1970s. This movement was often seen as split between the military-industrial complex camp and the radical socialist or anti-authoritarian camp. But the political divide was in practice more messy. For instance, the anarchist Walter Pitts, a homeless runaway who raised money for the fight against Franco, became one of the founders of cognitive science. Many of the themes of cybernetics, like feedback and self-organizing complex systems, were obviously directly in line with anarchist thinking and have been cited and referenced by anarchists within the more mainstream activist milieu.
-Those in the open-source and free-software movements have often derived transhumanist implications from their ideals. What if the kind of freedom exemplified by free software were applied to everything? What if our bodies and environmental conditions were made as opensource and reconfigurable as we’d like our computers to be? Many anarcho-transhumanists today see their transhumanism as simply an extension of the values of openness and user agency that drive the free-software (and free-hardware) movement.
-There are of course a number of broad transhumanist themes in the broader society that have influenced different lineages of anarcho-transhumanists. They range from common notions of “Prometheanism” to interpretations of Nietzsche to Afrofuturism to countless sub-currents of feminist and queer thought.
-*** III. Practicality
-The majority of anarchists around the world are activists who work in immediate struggles from feeding the homeless to resisting immigration-restriction regimes. It is unsurprising, then, that their foci are primarily practical. The most common objection made by many anarchist activists to anarcho-transhumanism is that focusing on the future takes away from transformative practice in the present. This is often bundled with critiques common on the modern left of the “abstract” and calls to center political practice and theory on “everyday life.”
-Yet it’s worth considering the ultimate conclusion of such an orientation. If we lived directly in the present with no reflection, we wouldn’t be self-aware. Mental recursion—modeling ourselves, others, and our world—is central to consciousness itself. What defines a mind as a mind is its capacity proactively to think a few steps ahead—to avoid rolling immediately down the steepest slope like a rock, but instead to grasp our context, the landscape of our choices and possible paths, and sometimes to choose ones that don’t immediately satiate.
-There is always the danger of becoming ungrounded; but futurism in no way obliges a disconnect with the struggles of the present. It does, however, have implications for what we prioritize in the present; for example, refusing to accept a reform that might improve our lot in the short term but seriously impede our capacity to struggle in the future. Liberals are famous for their dismissal of the future, an attitude which they use to justify short-sighted actions like ecological devastation and granting the state ever more power over our lives. There’s a sense in which we sometimes need to improve our lot in the short term just to keep fighting, but we must always be aware of what we’re trading away.
-A democratic socialist utopia might immediately improve most people’s lives. And perhaps we might be able to realize such a utopia if we all really worked hard to achieve it. But there’s a limit on the improvements a state-based solution could achieve. And, once such a putative utopia was in place, its authoritarian tendencies might deepen, with the result that it becomes even harder for future generations to overthrow.
-In addition to illuminating challenges on the road ahead, anarcho-transhumanism offers direct insights into our daily struggles and our continuing resistance against the state.
-If fascism is so powerful, why hasn’t it totally triumphed? Our world could be so much worse than it is. Despite all the sources of contemporary elites’ power—all the vast wealth and coercive force they’ve accumulated, all the ideological and infrastructural control, all the systemic planning and surveillance, all the ways humans are by default inclined to cognitive fallacies, cruelty, and tribalism—they have clearly been massively impeded on every front. And those societies or movements that have sought to embrace the strengths of authoritarianism more directly have failed. Anti-authoritarians—despite myriad shortcomings and imperfections—have won time and time again. The host of those in fealty to absolute power, to mindless surrender and violent simplicity, are legion. And yet grassroots activists have crippled their ambitions, outflanked their worldviews, bogged down their campaigns, sabotaged their projects, creatively struck back, preempted them—and changed the landscape out from under their feet.
-Free people are better inventors, better strategists, better hackers, and better scientists, exhibiting the very tendencies transhumanism embraces—tendencies of abstraction, reflection, and churn. The ideology of power fails because of its necessary weakness at leveraging complexity. Philosophies of control innately seek to constrain the possible; freedom is about unleashing it.
-Having more tools means having more ways to approach a problem. The “choices” some tools provide can be superficial and can exert limited impact. Choosing certain tools can shrink the range of available choices in other ways. But, at the end of the day, it’s not possible to maximize freedom without also continuously expanding one’s toolset.
-Expanded degrees of freedom in technics typically empower attackers over defenders. When there are more avenues by which to attack and defend, the attackers only need to choose one, while the defenders need to defend all, with the result that the defense of rigid, extended institutions and infrastructure proves harder and harder.
-Thus, in the broadest lens, technological development ultimately bends towards empowering minorities to resist domination and makes cultural habits of consensus and autonomy increasingly necessary—because in some sense everyone gets a veto.
-Similarly, information technologies unleash positive feedback loops and increase sociocultural complexity. While early, crude information technologies, like radio and television, were seized and controlled by the state and capital to form a monopolistic infrastructure promoting monolithic culture, the wild array of technologies we’ve blurred together as “the Internet” has empowered people to resist this tendency and promoted an increasing complexity of fluid discourses and subcultures.
-This provides an amazing source of resistance because it makes mass-control harder and harder. What is hip moves so fast and is so diverse and contingent that politicians and businesses stumble more and more when trying to exploit it.
-Anarcho-transhumanists have argued that this feedbacking sociocultural complexity constitutes a Social Singularity, a reflection of the Technological Singularity—a process in virtue of which collaboratively feedbacking technological insights and inventions grow too fast to be predicted or controlled.
-Silicon Valley is desperately trying to avoid the reality that the net profitability of the entire advertising industry is in decline. Since the advent of the Internet, people have begun wising up and, on the whole, advertisers are exerting less and less impact. All that remains marginally effective with the younger generations are more individually-targeted outreach campaigns—think businesses trying to get in the meme game or paying popular Instagram teens to reference their products. But these approaches are clearly yielding diminishing returns. When a hypercomplex teen fashion subculture comprises thirty people it’s no longer worth the energy for corporations to try to target them.
-Those anarchists skeptical of prediction and strategy, who instead focus on “everyday life” and the immediate, often frame their hostility to abstractions as part of a wider rejection of “mediation.” Yet it’s worth emphasizing that all causal interactions are “mediated.” The air mediates the sounds of our voices. The electromagnetic field and any intervening material mediate our capacity to see. Culture and language mediate the concepts we seek to express. This may seem like a trivial point, but it’s a deep one. It’s hard to provide an objective metric of just what counts as “more” or “less” mediation, and it’s harder still to try and claim that such a metric means something.
-There is no such thing as “direct experience.” To see anything requires an immense amount of processing as raw signals are transformed by neural columns in our visual cortices into ever more abstract signals. Artifacts from this processing can be found in optical illusions and patterned hallucinations. And in turn our experiences shape what pattern recognition circuits form with what strengths. To experience “directly” without mediation would be to not experience or think at all.
-One can certainly try to distinguish between “human created” mediation and other varieties, but such a distinction has no fundamental correlation with how viscerally or accurately we experience things. While there’s a different flavor of danger to someone tapping or censoring your community mesh Wi-Fi network, such interference or sabotage applies in various ways to all our means of communication, including cultural and linguistic constructs.
-It’s nonsensical to talk of “more” mediation rather than different flavors with different contextual benefits and drawbacks. Even an anarcho-primitivist like John Zerzan wears eye glasses to improve his overall capacity to visually experience and engage with the world around him. In this respect he’s a transhumanist. In many ways modern technologies can be used to expand the depth and richness of our engagement with nature and each other.
-*** IV. Contra Primitivism
-For the most part, anarcho-transhumanism emerged as an explicit response to anarchoprimitivism; many anarcho-transhumanists in the early aughts were former primitivists. As a result, unlike the broader transhumanist movement, which tends to engage minimally or not at all with primitivist critiques, anarcho-transhumanism was founded in many ways as a response to primitivist concerns.
-Anarcho-transhumanism emphasizes that transhumanism isn’t a claim that all tools and applications of them are—in all contexts—totally wonderful and without problematic aspects to be considered, navigated, rejected, challenged, or changed. Nor is transhumanism an embrace of all the infrastructure or norms of tool use that currently exist. Transhumanists hardly imagine that all technologies are positive in every specific situation, that tools never have biases or inclinations, or that some arbitrary, specific set of “higher” technologies should be imposed on everyone. Rather, transhumanists merely argue that people should have more agency and choices with regard to the ways in which they engage with the world.
-Being more informed and having a wider array of tools to choose from is critical. In the broadest sense, “technology” is just any means of doing things, and freedom is the availability of more options or means.
-While they recognize there will inevitably be a lot of contextual complications in practice, at the end of the day transhumanists want more options in life and in the universe, In much the same way that anarchists have argued for the availability of as many different tactics as possible. Sometimes one tactic or tool will be better for a job, sometimes not. But expanding freedom ultimately necessitates expanding technological options.
-What’s deplorable about our current condition is the way in which technologies are suppressed until all we are allowed is a single technological monoculture, often with some very sharp biases. On the one hand, more simple or primitive technologies are suppressed or erased. On the other, technological development is viciously slowed or curtailed thanks to intellectual property laws and myriad other injustices. Similarly, the conditions of capitalism and imperialism distort what technologies are more profitable and thus what lines of research are pursued.
-That does not mean that technological inventions under capitalism are innately corrupted or useless. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we should start entirely from fresh cloth, ignoring all discoveries and knowledge accumulated along our trajectory.
-But many of the industries and commodity forms that are standardized in our existing society would be unsustainable and undesirable in a liberated world.
-For instance: There are many ways to make photovoltaic solar panels, but when the People’s Republic of China reportedly uses slave labor and eminent domain to seize, strip, and poison vast swathes of land, such actions could lower the cost of certain rare earth minerals—and thus steer more money more towards research focused on photovoltaic approaches that use these artificially cheap minerals rather than towards alternative viable research branches that use more common materials. Military forces in the Congo allegedly allow for the replacement of Canadian coltan miners with slaves working in horrific conditions. Or consider another example: two centuries ago, employing not much more than simple mirrors, Augustin Mouchot demonstrated a fully functional and (at the time) cost-efficient solar steam engine at the world’s fair. It would have gone into mass production had the British not won battles in India enabling them to effectively enslave large populations and put them to work in coal extraction, thus dramatically driving down coal prices.
-It is a simple fact that institutional violence frequently alters the immediate profitability of certain lines of research.
-Primitivism oversimplifies the situation, saying that what exists must necessarily be the only way to enable certain technologies. It also frequently implies a single linear arc of development such that everything is dependent upon everything else, ignoring the often enormous latitude and diversity of options along the way and failing to investigate the vast potential for reconfiguration.
-Any discussion of “civilization,” for example, is necessarily going to involve sweeping and over-simplistic narratives. Our actual history is far more rich and complicated than any tale of simple historical forces can account for. Systems of power have been with us for a long time and are deeply enmeshed in almost every aspect of our society, our culture, our interpersonal relations, and our material infrastructures. But if in using the term “civilization” we mean to speak of some kind of characteristic or fundamental “culture of cities,” it’s begging the question to write domination in from the start.
-There have always been constraining power dynamics in every human society from huntergatherers on up. While larger-scale societies have naturally made possible more showy expressions of domination, domination is not inherent in the structures of such societies.
-Throughout the historical record, cities have been quite diverse in their degrees of internal hierarchy and relations with surrounding societies and environments. A number of city cultures left no traces of hierarchy or violence. More egalitarian and anarchistic urban societies didn’t waste energy building giant monuments or waging wars, and thus are thus less prominent in the historical records available to us. Further, because we currently live under an oppressive global regime, it goes without saying that at some point any more libertarian societies had to be con- quered—and victors often intentionally destroy the records of those they subjugate. Similarly, non-anarchist historians have leapt to assume that the presence of any social coordination or technological invention in egalitarian and peaceful city cultures like Harappa proves the presence of some state-like authority—even when there’s zero sign of any such authority and there are, indeed, strong indications to the contrary.
-Urban concentrations arose in a number of places prior to agriculture. Indeed, in many places around the globe where the land could not support permanent cities, people nevertheless struggled to come together in greater numbers whenever and for however long they could manage to do so. Frequently, the members of early societies would be both temporary hunter-gatherers and temporary city dwellers, transitioning back and forth with the seasons.
-This does not remotely fit an account of cities as solely runaway concentrations of wealth and power—of urban life as a cancerous mistake. If the establishment of cities were such a bad idea, why do people with other options keep voluntarily choosing them?
-The answer, of course, is that living in large numbers increases the social options available to individuals, opening up a much greater diversity of possible relationships to choose from.
-Instead of being confined to tribes of one hundred or two hundred people, while perhaps enjoying opportunities to interact with the members of limited numbers of nearby tribes, people living in cities can form affinities not limited by the happenstance of birth, to organically form their own distinct networks by choice. Better than tribes, they can shed the limiting insularity of closed social clusters entirely. There’s no good reason your friends should all be forced to be friends with each other as well. Cities enable individuals to form vast panoplies of relationships linking them with far larger and richer networks.
-Such cosmopolitanism enables and encourages the empathy necessary to transcend tribal or national othering. It expands our horizons, enabling mutual aid on incredible scales, and helping far richer cultural and cognitive ecosystems than would otherwise be possible to flourish. If there is any single defining characteristic “culture of cities” (otherwise known as “civilization”), it is thus one of wild anarchy, of unleashed complexity and possibility.
-And, of course, large-scale cooperation enables technological developments that expand the possible scope of our material conditions.
-What we want is a world with the teeming connectedness of cosmopolitanism, but without the centralization and sedentary characteristics of many “civilizations.” We want to fulfill the promise and radical potential of cities that have led humans to form them voluntarily again and again throughout history. This may not be in keeping with our biology as Stone Age creatures, whose physical evolution has been incapable of keeping up with our cultural evolution, but so what?
-Of course, many primitivists may well enjoy and acknowledge the benefits offered by the fruits of civilization. They may even feel an affinity for the aspirations of anarcho-transhumanism, but nevertheless believe that transhumanist aspirations are pointless because a permanent civilizational collapse is inevitable.
-It’s true that our present infrastructure and economy are incredibly brittle, destructive, and unsustainable—in many ways serving and intertwined with oppressive social systems. But so many other forms remain possible. Our global civilization is not some magical whole, but a vast and complex battlefield of competing forces and tendencies.
-The “inevitability” of the supposedly coming collapse is in fact itself quite brittle. Any number of single developments could massively derail it. An abundance of cheap, clean energy, for example, or an abundance of cheap, rare metals. Each would lead to the other, because cheap energy means more cost-effective metals recycling, and the availability of cheap metals means cheaper batteries and expanded access to energy sources like wind. The Earth is not a closed system, and, for example, several major corporations are now racing to seize nearby asteroids so rich in rare metals that successful asteroid mining could crash the metals markets and shutter nearly every mine on Earth.
-And let’s note that it is highly unlikely that a civilizational collapse would return us to an idyllic Eden. Many centers of power would likely survive, almost no society would fall below Iron Age technology, billions would die horrifically, and the sudden burst of ecological destruction would be incredible. It even turns out that the spread of forests in northern latitudes would perversely end up making global warming worse because trees are ultimately poor carbon sinks and changes to the Earth’s albedo (from darker forests) cause it to absorb more energy from the sun.
-No matter the odds, we must fight against the unfathomable holocaust of a collapse. We have an ethical obligation to struggle, to have some agency with respect to our future and our environment, and to take some responsibility for our destiny. Only with science and technology will we be able to repair ancient disasters like the desertification of the Sahara, manage the decommissioning of horrors, and rewild most of the Earth.
-*** V. Pessimism about Technological Possibilities
-One of the most common concerns with transhumanism derives from a misunderstanding of the distinction between “physically doable but not yet engineered” and “who knows.”
-Much of this stems from ignorance of the relevant fields. Most people wouldn’t have to argue over whether or not an “upside down treehouse” would be possible to build; it would just require a bit of work.
-While some ideas are highly speculative, many of the things transhumanists talk about fall very far to the doable side of the spectrum—there’s no chance they’re ruled out by physics, mathematics, chemistry, or the like; they don’t require the existence or use of wormholes, for example. The problems that stand in the way of our reaching these transhumanist goals are merely engineering problems, albeit challenging ones—problems on which plenty of experts are working, problems that the established consensus is confident we can solve. Asteroid mining, for example, is no more unimaginable or impossible today than placing satellites in Earth orbit was in the 1940s. We know we can do it; we know it will pay off; we just have to complete the mounds of fucking busywork in our way first. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) was an amazing advance in gene therapy but it was amazing only in virtue of the suddenness of the breakthrough; gene editing had never seemed strictly infeasible.
-Estimates of how long it will be until a given technological development occurs are naturally subjective. But it requires conspiratorial science-denialism to pretend that creating and using mining robots to mine will somehow prove impossibly hard—or require so much human labor that their arrival on the scene won’t represent any sort of efficiency gain.
-It’s very common in radical leftist circles to hear that green technologies are mythical. This is deeply inaccurate, but it’s understandable given all the corporate greenwashing and media misrepresentation of technologies. It’s thus easy to do a little critical research and assume that scientists have systemically overlooked things like life-cycle analyses. In fact, however, reductions in footprint by a factor of one hundred times or one thousand times would constitute a monumental difference, not some trivial reform—and such reductions are in some cases highly probable.
-Humans have always had an effect on their environment, and the Earth’s ecosystems have never been static. Our goal should not be some unchanging and sharply constrained lifestyle with literally zero footprint; instead, we should seek to enable our ingenuity and exploration in ways that don’t bulldoze the Earth.
-If we put a small fraction of the energy unlocked by hydrocarbons into solar energy technologies, we’ll have enough power to render hydrocarbon energy obsolete. While hydrocarbons were unquestionably a world-changing source of dense energy, it’s possible to get incredibly high power returns from solar technologies using even 1800s technology of mirrors and steam pipes. There are a great many condensed battery options, and more are being developed—for instance, in high- density biochemical storage. Meanwhile, photovoltaic cell technology has leapt past every supposed barrier; and the materials needed to make effective use of this technology have been dramatically diversified. Options now on the table include quite simple approaches featuring tiny ecological footprints. The energy return on solar is close to 12 times and is rocketing upward. The efficiency of solar technology has reached the point at which governments like Spain have required solar power users to pay steep taxes to keep fossil fuels and centralized grids competitive.
-While nuclear energy still carries many extremely negative associations among the 1980s ecopunk set, many of these concerns are only valid in the context of Cold War-style reactors—ones built to be highly centralized, to be state-run, and to work only with material capable of producing weaponizable byproducts. On the other hand, many liquid fluoride thorium reactor designs have literally no capacity to melt down, run on a radioactive material already naturally in poisonous abundance on the Earth’s surface, and leave remains with relatively low half-lives.
-Similarly, while some specious reporting about “cold fusion” and overenthusiastic claims about normal fusion in the 1980s turned fusion into a laughing stock on late-night television, it remains a reasonable and known source of incredible clean energy only limited by engineering challenges rather than any issues of basic science. And recent history has been littered with a chain of incremental successes achieved and benchmarks transcended.
-While all these may provide cheap energy, the only safe way to reverse global warming at this point is with carbon-negative technologies that leave behind solid carbon as a byproduct. Proven technologies that do just this—from ancient gassification technologies to an array of algae- farming approaches—are already available.
-That none of these have been widely adopted is a matter of politics, not science. State violence subsidizes our incredibly inefficient infrastructure because the maintenance of this infrastructure is beneficial to centralized, large-scale economic entities. Similarly, much of our energy consumption presently goes towards war and frivolities, supply and demand are aggressively distorted, and the environmental costs have been systematically shifted away from certain companies and industries.
-It doesn’t have to be this way. Technological development innately expands options, so it should come as no surprise that technological innovation isn’t underwriting massive, centralized, ham-fisted structures but is instead encouraging organic, decentralized, and reconfigurable approaches along the lines of 3D-printing and open-source technologies.
-*** VI. Other Transhumanist and Promethean Political Traditions
-Transhumanism is a quite simple position, and so there’s a wide array of people who’ve been attracted to it and a variety of ways people have spun off from it. Inevitably some of them are short-sighted or reactionary, and in many people’s minds “transhumanism” conjures up images of far-right ideologues in Silicon Valley.
-Fortunately, many reactionaries abandoned transhumanism when they recognized its liberatory implications regarding gender, race, and class, instead embracing a fascism-for-nerds movement called “neoreaction”—an early predecessor and eventual component of the alt-right. In an amusing reversal, a number now hope for and advocate the collapse of civilization. They expect that this will lead to a post-apocalyptic landscape in which their notions of biological essentialism reign supreme—in which “Real Alpha Men” rule as warlords and the rest of us are used for raping, slaving, or hunting. Or in which we are forced back to tribal-scale relations, better enabling (small-scale) nationalistic identity, social hierarchy, and traditionalism. Others envision small corporate fiefdoms and some kind of AI god that will help them maintain their desired authority structures by stopping oppressed groups from gaining, understanding, or developing technology.
-Anarcho-transhumanists are glad such currents have departed the broader transhumanist movement. At the same time, it must be admitted that a majority of transhumanists still presently identify with liberalism, state socialism, social democracy, and similar technocratic cults of power.
-Non-anarchist transhumanists are politically naive at best and dangerous at worst; transhumanism without anarchism is totally untenable.
-A world in which everyone has increased physical agency is a world in which individuals are super-empowered and are thus obliged to solve disagreements through consensus as though everyone has a veto rather than through the coercion of majoritarian democracy.
-To provide people with tools but also to try somehow to restrict from the top down what they can do with those tools or what they can invent is impossible absent an extreme authoritarian system that suppresses almost all the functions of those tools. Consider the struggle to impose and enforce “intellectual property” on the Internet, or the war against general-purpose computing. In this sense, all statist transhumanists fall short of transhumanist ideals because of their lingering fear of liberty and super-empowered proletarians.
-On a philosophical level, it’s impossible to reconcile transhumanism’s embrace of greater agency in our bodies and environment with simultaneous advocacy of oppressive social institutions that broadly constrain our agency.
-This difference of values is manifested in a number of ways. Anarcho-transhumanists are obviously a lot less sanguine than statist transhumanists about letting states and capitalists monopolize the control or development of new technologies. They support serious resistance efforts—efforts intended both to attack oppressors’ centralized infrastructure and to liberate their research and tools for everyone.
-Further to the left, the legacy of Cosmism has continued in state socialist and state communist circles. There is a distinct tradition of Left Accelerationism and more diffuse but widely popular political positions often referred to collectively as Fully Automated Luxury Communism. These traditions are broadly Marxist rather than anarchist, and don’t always identify as transhumanist, but they have been in close dialogue with anarcho-transhumanists. And traditions like Xenofe- minism are in many ways situated at the intersection of pro-technology Marxist and anarchist currents.
-It’s certainly true that there’s much overlap between the political and economic aspirations of anarcho-transhumanists and those Marxist traditions likewise set on radically expanding the wealth available to everyone. Many have commented on the convergence of anarchism and Marxism when the “means of production” shrink from large-scale mechanisms necessarily operated and overseen by large groups to techniques and devices controllable by individuals (as when factories are replaced by 3D printers). Yet significant differences remain.
-The divide between Marxism and anarchism has been often referred to as a divide between political philosophy and ethical philosophy. Anarchists focus on tackling domination and constraint on every level, not just the macroscopic or institutional. And anarchists want more than a merely classless society: they want a world without power relations, and thus their ethical analysis necessarily extends to challenging interpersonal dynamics of power, including more complex, subtle, informal, or even mutual relationships of domination and constraint.
-While anarchists share their aspirations for a world in which the efficiencies of technologies lead to a world of abundance and liberate people from the drudgery of work it’s impossible as anarchists to accept the Left Accelerationists’ prescription of “verticalism”—their embrace of organizational hierarchies. Left accelerationists like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have critiqued the mainstream left for an embrace of short-sighted immediatism,[1772] but anarchists still find in the details of their “strategy” many of the same old Marxist penchants for the establishment of an elite whose members will run the revolution/society. This allegiance leads them to sympathize with and misidentify aspects of our world, suggesting that certain corporate and state structures reflect necessary hierarchies rather than wasteful cancers propped up by systemic violence and actively suppressing scientific and technological development.
-More broadly, Marxism shares a troubling tendency with its ideological offshoot primitivism to speak in highly abstract and macroscopic terms like “capitalism” or “civilization.” In Marxist analyses, these entities are imbued with a kind of agency or purposefulness and all their elements are seen as constituent dynamics serving a greater whole, rather than as conflicting and capable of being rearranged. Marxists and primitivists are thus both frequently blinded to the aspects of better world now growing within the shell of the old, as well as opportunities for meaningful resistance and positive change that aren’t necessarily cataclysmic total breaks.
-*** VII. Other Topics
-Vegans have been among the strongest partisans of anarcho-transhumanism, knowing very well that what is “natural” may not be ethical. Biohackers have worked on projects like getting yeast to produce the critical milk enzymes in normal cheese.[1773] (To do this, just put yeast in a warm vat with sugar and let it fall out!) Others have, for example, worked on custom algae production that yields useful protein and carbs from sunlight much more efficiently than conventional agriculture—while raising the possibility of dramatically reducing or even entirely eliminating the death toll from tractor operation.
-A small fraction of environmentalists have played with ideas of a more ethically engaged stewardship, positing a future in which, after rewilding the majority of the planet and restoring its ecology, we might make tweaks that reduce net suffering among non-human species. Animal liberationists have long criticized the slavery of animal “ownership” and the injustice of breeding certain animals to serve us. But what would assisting animals in their own self-improvement look like? This is a so-far speculative field called “uplifting,” and the anarchist take on it is as always to center the subject’s perspectives, to try to find ways of communicating and bridging the cultural and phenomenological gap with conscious persons (e.g. cetaceans, elephants, octopi, primates).
-The animal-liberationist tendencies at the heart of modern anarchism also come to expression in our responses to the possibility of artificial general intelligence. There’s a noteworthy current in non-anarchist transhumanist circles that focuses on the development of AI, with the goal of solving the problem of how to control a mind smarter than your own. Many transhumanists are convinced that AI will unleash an explosion of feedbacking intelligence that can remake the world.[1774] To anarchists, this focus is silly given the billions of minds already on this planet and criminally underutilized. If we want an explosion of intelligence then the surer and quicker path would be to liberate and empower all the potential Einsteins currently trapped in slums, favelas, open mines, and fields around our planet.
-Transhumanism has historically distinguished itself from other celebratory approaches to high technology precisely in its focus on self-alteration. If you want something done, you should do it yourself. If you’re worried about what values an alien mind ripped into existence from scratch might develop, you should instead start with humans interested in expanding their own capacities. And while we might reasonably anticipate rapid improvements in our individual cognitive speed and memory, it is how we communicate and collaborate with one another that has served as a real bottleneck on advancement. Instead of a race to create an artificial generalized intelligence, many anarcho-transhumanists have argued that we should instead focus on the benefits of technologies that improve or deepen our connection with one another, so that collectively we can race ahead of any AI.
-It’s rather terrifying that the default question about AI has largely been: “How can we most effectively control/enslave it?” As anarchists our position is obvious: If we are to develop such minds, they deserve compassion and liberty. All too often, those in AI-focused communities that have spun off from transhumanist circles abandon the ethical dimension of their research. This paradigm is profoundly un-transhumanist because it privileges some kind of static humanity with static values and desires, and then enslaves non-human minds to serve those ends. The entire point of transhumanism is to embrace the fluidity and transitory nature of the “human,” not to cling to humanness in its current form.
-As you would expect when it comes to non-neurotypicals and differently abled people already alive, the transhumanist and anarcho-transhumanist position is to let a billion physical and cognitive architectures bloom! It’s important to radically attack and remove stigmas and constraining social norms so that a great diversity of experiences can be lived without oppression. At the same time, it’s also important to provide people with the tools to exercise control over their bodies, minds, and life conditions. It should be up to all people individually to determine what factors might constitute oppressive impairments in their own lives, and which factors are elements of their identities and unique life experiences.
-Ultimately transhumanism is a queering of the distinction between “impairment” and “augmentation” as well as between “want” and “need.” No “baseline” should be oppressively normalized. Instead, individuals should be free to grow in whatever directions they see fit.
-[1770] Interview with Voltairine de Cleyre. 1894. The Sun (March 4). Center for a Stateless Society. [[https://c4ss.org][https://c4ss.]] [[https://c4ss.org][org/content/45277]].
-[1771] Malatesta, E. n.d. “Towards Anarchism.” Anarchy Archives. [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu][http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Arc]] [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu][hives/malatesta/towardsanarchy.html]].
-[1772] Srnicek, N., and Williams, A. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. New York: Verso.
-[1773] Real Vegan Cheese. n.d. What’s vegan cheese? [[https://realvegancheese.org][https://realvegancheese.org/]].
-[1774] Bostrom, N. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-<br>
-* [Back Matter]
-** Annotated Bibliography
-<biblio>
-Anarchism in America. Dir. Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher. Perf. Murray Bookchin, Paul Avrich, Jello Biafra, Mollie Steimer, Mildred Loomis, Karl Hess, et al. Pacific Street 1983. DVD. AK 2005.
-An evocative documentary that provides an overview of American anarchist thinkers and activists representing multiple schools and backgrounds from the nineteenth century to the present.
-An Anarchist-Transhumanist Manifesto. N.p., June 4, 2019. [[https://docs.google.com][https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wJrXYB]] [[https://docs.google.com][XAmNH9zwyfgg1-yAYN_Cda-26pFCk0u_QhyBc/edit]].
-A lengthy and highly annotated document with many authors, this essay provides extensive commentary on precursors and a bibliography of texts.
-Anderson, Terry L., and Hill, P. J. The Not so Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2004.
-Anderson and Hall show how property rights emerged informally in the American West prior to their formal codification by the US government. Their work highlights the role that institutional entrepreneurship plays in devising ways of creating wealth by restructuring existing property rights and creating new property rights arrangements.
-Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Ed. Richard Stalley. Oxford: OUP 1995.
-The seminal study of theories about how best to organize collectivities, and of the actual collective systems known to Aristotle.
-Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Oakland, CA: AK 2005.
-Invaluable resources related to the anarchist tradition in the United States.
-Bader, Ralf M. “Counterfactual Justifications of the State.” Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 3 (2017): 101–131.
-Bader provides an interpretation of Nozick’s justification of the state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He identifies a form of counterfactual justification of the state that is distinct from traditional hypothetical, teleological, and historical justifications.
-Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. Bakunin on Anarchism. Ed. Sam Dolgoff. Montreal: Black Rose 1980.
-———. God and the State. Mineola, NY: Dover 1970.
-———. Statism and Anarchy. Ed. Marshall Shatz. Cambridge: CUP 1990.
-Anarchist writings of a passionate Russian sparring-partner of Karl Marx who saw religion and statism as equally illusory and believed that Marx’s ideas could be used to justify dictatorship.
-Barnett, Randy E. The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law. 2d ed. Oxford: OUP 2014.
-Offers a framework for understanding the relationship between law and governance, leading to a description of a stateless legal system.
-Beito, David T. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967. 2d ed. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P 2000.
-Before the rise of the welfare state, a massive number of Americans belonged to fraternal societies. They pooled their resources as a means of collective self-reliance, creating a social safety net free from dependence on either the state or wealthy benefactors.
-Bell, Tom W. “Special International Zones in Practice and Theory.” Chapman Law Review 21 (2018): 273—302, [[http://www.chapman.edu][www.chapman.edu/law/_files/publications/clr-22-1-Bell.pdf]] (last visited Aug. 16, 2020). Documents the splintering of uniform political territories.
-———. Your Next Government? from the Nation State to Stateless Nations. Cambridge: CUP 2018.
-Documents and explains how special jurisdictions are transforming governments across the globe from the bottom up and inside out.
-Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale UP 2006.
-An examination of the promise of stigmergic organization.
-Benson, Bruce L. The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State. 2d ed. Oakland, CA: Independent 2013.
-Viewing history and politics through the lens of economic theory, Benson applies the logic of the market process to the task of understanding the private enforcement of law and the private adjudication of legal disputes. Critiquing the notion that law is a public good, Benson demonstrates that private-sector institutions are capable of establishing strong incentives that lead to effective law-making and law enforcement. He shows how the resulting legal constraints facilitate interaction and support social order by inducing cooperation and reducing violent confrontation.
-Berkman, Alexander. What Is Anarchism? Oakland, CA: AK 2003 [1937].
-A simple, clear exposition of what the author labeled “communist anarchism,” by a life-long friend and sometime lover of Emma Goldman.
-Bicchieri, Cristina. The Grammar of Society. New York: CUP 2006.
-This was a groundbreaking book, which developed a theoretically compelling account of social norms that could be tested in the lab and in field studies. It has exerted significant influence on academic and policy work concerned with social norms.
-——— Norms in the Wild. New York: OUP 2016.
-This book takes a much deeper look at the mechanics of norm measurement and norm change, informed by work undertaken in the development context. It examines rules and collective behavior in communities that have reasonably minimal exposure to the state, and offers an informative look at the benefits and liabilities of social norms.
-Block, Walter. The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors. Auburn, AL: Mises 2010. While roads are not public goods in the economist’s sense, a stereotypical challenge to anarchists is the question: “Who will build the roads?” Economist Block examines the dynamics of the non-state provision of roads, considering not only its viability but also the societal benefits he believes it likely to yield.
-Boétie, Etienne de la. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 2012 [<verbatim>1576</verbatim>].
-In this 1576 classic, Etienne de la Boétie argues that power is ultimately distributed, and that domination thus always rests on the assent of the governed. As a result, toppling tyrants is less dependent on positive attacks and more a function of coordinating refusals to comply. The book’s arguments provide a foundation both for many anarchist theories of power and strategies of tactical non-violence.
-Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. San Francisco: AK 2005 [1982].
-———. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. 3d ed. Stirling: AK 2004.
-Bookchin was the leading advocate of a school of green anarchist thought known as Social Ecology. He traces a multitude of social and ecological ills to the hierarchical relationships that characterize modern political society, and identifies anarchism as a potential approach to tackling all of these problems.
-Boonin, David. The Problem of Punishment. New York: CUP 2008.
-Criminal law lies near the core of state power. Boonin surveys and challenges a wide range of proposed justifications for the practice of punishment. He suggests that the law’s focus be changed from harming offenders to securing restitution for victims.
-Borders, Max. The Social Singularity. Austin, TX: Social Evolution 2018.
-A manifesto for the “underthrow” of traditional, political forms of governance—leading to their replacement by new, decentralized ones.
-Brennan, Geoffrey, et al. Explaining Norms. New York: OUP 2013.
-This book offers an account of social norms alternative to Cristina Bicchieri’s influential position and explores the role that norms play in creating social meaning.
-Brennan, Jason. When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2018. A sustained defense of the thesis that civilians possess the same right to defend themselves and others against government agents that they possess against civilians. Brennan argues that government agents who voluntarily accept government jobs nevertheless retain the right to resist state injustice, sabotage government wrongdoing from within, and violate or ignore wrongful orders.
-Buchanan, James M. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Chicago: U of Chicago P 1975.
-A major work by the founder, with Gordon Tullock, of the Public Choice school (or Virginia School) of economics, exploring the emergence of state institutions from anarchy or a state of nature. Buchanan’s notion of a “natural equilibrium” is an important development of earlier concepts of “the state of nature.”
-Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. 4<sup>th</sup> ed. London: Red Globe 2012.
-A profoundly important analysis of the international system as an instance of anarchy. Though this isn’t Bull’s concern, the global persistence of ordered anarchy has served as crucial inspiration for proponents of stateless social arrangements.
-Byrd, B. Sharon, and Hruschka, Joachim. Kant’s Doctrine of Right: A Commentary. Cambridge: CUP 2010.
-A very thorough historical commentary on Kant’s legal and political philosophy.
-Caplan, Bryan. Anarchist Theory FAQ: Or, Instead of a FAQ, by a Man Too Busy to Write One. Version 5.2. N.p. n.d. [[http://econfaculty.gmu.edu][http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
-A readable and wide-ranging overview of issues related to anarchism by an academic economist who also writes about philosophy and politics.
-Carson, Kevin A. The Desktop Regulatory State. Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2016.
-Carson creatively reinterprets, synthesizes, and advances ideas from a range of anarchist tendencies, drawing on both nineteenth-century classics like the work of Proudhon and Tucker and more recent work in history, economics, and political theory. In this book, he explains how voluntary institutions could perform regulatory and related functions.
----- . “Health Care and Radical Monopoly.” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 60.2 (March 2010): 8—11. [[https://fee.org][https://fee.org/articles/health-care-and-radical-monopoly/ ]](Aug. 16, 2020).
-Carson highlights the role of state intervention in raising the costs of and limiting access to medical care, arguing for the merits of alternative arrangements crafted in the absence of cartelizing regulation.
-———. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2009.
-Carson explains why organizational hierarchies are inherently inefficient and why state intervention is needed to sustain them, arguing that small, flat organizations interacting by contract on a fluid basis are appealing alternatives to conventional corporations.
-Carson, Kevin A. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2007. Mutualist.org, 2007. [[http://www.mutualist.org][www.mutualist.org/id47.html]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
-Drawing on both history and economic theory, Carson argues that the mutualism of Tucker and others can be effectively integrated with insights from later economic thinkers. This book is especially provocative in virtue of Carson’s arguments for the rehabilitation of a version of the labor theory of value.
-Carson, Stephen W. “Biblical Anarchism.” LewRockwell.com. June 7, 2011. [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrockwell.com/2001/]] [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][06/stephen-w-carson/no-government-but-god/ ]](Aug. 20, 2019).
-A contemporary Christian market anarchist grapples with Romans 13 and other passages suggesting the legitimacy of the state.
-Casey, Gerard. Libertarian Anarchy. New York: Continuum 2012.
-Casey argues that Lockean self-ownership implies a strong enough conception of individual rights that the state necessarily infringes on them. And, since law can evolve spontaneously, the state is not required as a source of social order.
-Chartier, Gary. Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society. Cambridge: CUP 2012.
-Develops a normative account of law rooted in the New Classical Natural Law theory and uses this model both to help (in tandem with a range of other normative and social-scientific considerations) establish the appropriateness of anarchy and to elaborate anarchic legal norms. Argues that natural-law theory is compatible with spontaneous-order theory and that this confluence provides support for a voluntary, polycentric legal order. Defends anarchism via rejection of monopolistic legal power and appreciation for organic cooperation. Argues for an understanding of market anarchism as leftist and anti-capitalist.
-Chartier, Gary, and Johnson, Charles W., eds. Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. New York: Minor Compositions-Autonomedia 2011. [[http://radgeek.com][http://]] [[http://radgeek.com][radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
-A collection of historical and contemporary essays highlighting the radical orientation and potential of the individualist anarchist tradition.
-Chomsky, Noam. Chomsky on Anarchism. Oakland, CA: AK 2006.
-Not only a premier theoretical linguist and a long-time, articulate critic of the US government’s foreign policy, Chomsky is also among the leading social-anarchist thinkers writing today.
-Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre. Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Abridged ed. Exeter: Imprint Academic 2011.
-Christoyannopoulos’ work is the first comprehensive study of Christian anarchism. Christoyannopoulos skillfully synthesizes the claims of figures such as Tolstoy, Day, and Ellul in order to provide readers with an overview of Christian anarchist arguments, thinkers, and history.
-Churchill, Ward. Pacifism as Pathology. Oakland, CA: AK 2003.
-Churchill argues that the pacifist victories of the twentieth century only occurred because of background threats of violence and that pacifism mostly helps keep the violent state and social order in place.
-Clark, Samuel J. A. Living without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist Utopia. Farnham: Ashgate 2007.
-A corrective analysis of misconceptions about anarchism, utopianism, and human sociability, followed by an analysis of the natural human social activity which shows the possibility of anarchist sociability.
-Clark, Stephen R. L. Civil Peace and Sacred Order. Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1989.
-Offers both a subdued argument for anarchism and a critique of the idolatrous pretensions of states.
-———. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge 1999.
-Includes two provocatively anarchic essays: “Slaves and Citizens” and “Anarchists against the Revolution”.
-Conrad, Ryan, ed. Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Chico, CA: AK 2014.
-This anthology covers a wide range of LGBTQ+ issues, consistently favoring greater autonomy and less state power. Its provocative essays offer critiques of hate crime laws, HIV criminalization, institutionalized marriage, participation in the military, and more.
-Crow, Scott. Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective. 2d ed. Oakland, CA: PM 2014.
-Crow offers a personal account of disaster recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans based on anarchist principles of mutual aid. From the provision of defense against roaming predators to the distribution of aid and the establishment of medical clinics, the Common Ground Collective operated on the basis of an ethic of “solidarity, not charity.”
-Coyne, Christopher J. “Lobotomizing the Defense Brain.” Review of Austrian Economics 28. 4 (2015): 371—396.
-Coyne examines the dominant narrative and underlying assumptions within the defense and peace economics literature. He identifies and critically analyzes five of these assumptions and argues that an alternative framework is necessary for understanding and providing realistic analyses of defense provision.
-Coyne, Christopher J., and Hall, Abigail R. “State-Provided Defense as Non-Comprehensive Planning.” Journal of Private Enterprise 34.1 (2019): 75—85.
-Argues that state-provided defense is a form of non-comprehensive planning and that instances of this kind of planning are subject to two distinct problems—“knowledge problems” and “power problems.” These problems are discussed and analyzed within the context of the US defense sector.
-Cuboniks, Laboria. “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation.” Laboriacuboniks.net, n.d. [[https://laboriacuboniks.net][https://laboriacubo]] [[https://laboriacuboniks.net][niks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/ ]](Aug. 16, 2020).
-The Xenofeminist manifesto—albeit written primarily for a feminist audience steeped in continental philosophy and deeply suspicious of rationality and humanism—was almost immediately republished by anarcho-transhumanists, and much cross-fertilization has occurred as a result.
-Day, Dorothy. Selected Writings: By Little and by Little. Ed. and intro. Robert Ellsberg. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 2005.
-This collection introduces readers to the life, work, and thought of the Christian anarchist Dorothy Day. Day was co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which continues to serve as a source of inspiration for many Christian anarchists.
-De Cleyre, Voltairine. The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader. Ed. A. J. Brigati. Oakland, CA: AK 2004.
-A leading American anarchist at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, de Cleyre coined the phrase “anarchism without adjectives.”
-De Jasay, Anthony. Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem. Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1991. An economist and philosopher argues on rational-choice grounds that social order is possible without the state but that the emergence of the state is a persistent danger.
-DeLeon, David. The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1978.
-An historical analysis of anarchism as reflective of a persistent anti-authoritarian strand in American thought. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P 1999.
-An autonomist classic on the Exodus model of postcapitalist transition.
-Edmundson, William E., ed. The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings. Lanham, MD: Rowman 1999.
-A good introduction to contemporary debates about political authority, duties to obey, and the position dubbed “philosophical anarchism.” See especially the selections from Robert Paul Wolff, M. B. E. Smith, A. John Simmons, and Joseph Raz.
-Egoumenides, Magda. Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2014. Demonstrates the value of taking an anarchist approach to the problem of political authority.
-Eller, Vernard. Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1987.
-Eller’s work is a classic of Christian anarchist literature. Eller defends a vision of Christian anarchism as antipolitical and anti-revolutionary. In Eller’s view, Christian anarchists do not put their faith in any human “arkys,” including whatever new “arky” might be established through revolution.
-Ellickson, Robert C. Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1991.
-Ellickson examines the ways in which the residents of Shasta County, California, often succeed, without the involvement of the state, in coordinating with one another in a mutually advantageous way, by assigning property rights over land despite formal legal rules.
+at Copan, 321–322. 336, 488 raised-field, 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433
-Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eugene, OR: Wipf & 2011.
+swidden, 39
-Ellul’s influential work, first published in 1991, explores the possibility of reconciling Christianity and anarchism. According to Ellul, anarchism—which he understands as the rejection of all violence—is biblically well-founded. Additionally, he argues that anarchists’ rejection of Christianity rests on a misunderstanding of biblical faith, which is often betrayed by the religion of the church.
+ahau, 17, 20, 21, 45, 53–54, 57, 58,
-———. The New Demons. New York: Seabury 1975.
+. 419, 423, 436 ahauob, see kings; nobility Ah-Bolon-Tun, king of Seibal. 387–389, 393, 505
-Ellul argues that the state and revolution are modern sacreds that command respect and fear much like religious gods and totems.
+Ah-Cacaw, king of Tikal. 184,
-Fedako, James. “Romans 13 and Anarcho-Capitalism.” LewRockwell.com. Feb. 25, 2010. [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrockwell.]] [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][com/2010/02/jim-fedako/romans-13-and-anarcho-capitalism/ ]](Aug. 20, 2019).
+–212, 413, 451. 461, 462–466 accession of, 208 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 202 Calakmul vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213 costumes worn by, 209–211 in dedication rituals, 197 203, 205, 206–211. 462–465
-Examines attempted Christian justifications for state authority proffered on biblical grounds.
+height of, 195. 198, 462 name glyph of, 462
-Friedman, David D. The Machinery of Freedom. 3d ed. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 2015.
+ritual performances of, 202–203, 209 son of, 214. 466
-This book is a modern classic in the theoretical literature concerned with anarchy. In it, Friedman articulates a broadly (but not exclusively) utilitarian case for market anarchism rooted in the law-and-economics tradition, one that might be thought of as a market-anarchist alternative to Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism. Friedman advances an economic analysis of statism and, finding much of it inefficient, suggests alternatives more attuned to maximizing social gains and aligning institutions with individual incentives. Beginning within the context of existing institutions, Friedman suggests a series of specific reforms in the direction of increasing privatization that would produce desirable movements in the direction of a market-anarchist society.
+stelae of, 204–205, 213, 486 tomb of, 205. 214. 466 war captives of, 205–206, 211, 212, 215, 457
-Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Enlightened Anarchy.” The Penguin Gandhi Reader. Ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee. New York: Penguin 1996.
+altars, 386, 389, 506
-Gandhi lays out a case for a pacifist anarchist vision of the world.
+at Caracol, 171, 173, 456, 464 at Copan, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337, 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 491–492, 493–194
-Gibbard, Alan. “Natural Property Rights.” Nous 10.1 (1976): 77–86.
+Altun Ha, 159, 505
-While this paper does not bill itself as a social-anarchist argument, it contends that core libertarian commitments actually militate against the appropriation of unowned natural resources. Specifically, it notes that there is a “hard libertarian” position that holds that people can lose their natural rights only through voluntary agreement. However, given that people have a natural right to use all unowned resources, it would then follow that others can only strip them of this right via initial appropriation if those others consent to such appropriation.
+ancestor cartouches, 372, 393, 479, 503 ancestors, 26, 39, 57, 84, 153, 202–203, 207. 275, 307, 394, 395, 506 founding, 85, 87, 116, 140–141, 159–160, 222, 256–257, 271, 310–313, 431, 432, 470 as orchards, 217, 221 relics of, 135, 463 on stelae, 141, 441
-Gillis, William. “The Incoherence and Unsurvivability of Non-Anarchist Transhumanism.” Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Oct. 29, 2015. [[https://ieet.org][https://ieet.]] [[https://ieet.org][org/index.php/IEET2/more/gillis20151029 ]](Aug. 16, 2020).
+Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–76, 101, 114–116, 124, 125. 142. 226, 243, 245, 425, 429, 434, 436, 454, 473
-Transcript of a talk at a 2015 conference, The Future of Politics, organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a transhumanist think tank with social-democratic leanings. It is the most linked and discussed treatment of anarchism within the transhumanist milieu.
+bailgame of, 74–75, 76. 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488
-Goodway, David, ed. For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice. London: Routledge 1989.
+as kingship prototypes, 115–116, 211. 239, 316, 376, 488
-A collection of essays examining the early stages of twentieth-century anarchism and offering varied perspectives on anarchist theory.
+symbols of, 114–115, 125, 245
-Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth 1910.
+Andrews, Anthony P., 498
-———. Living My Life. New York: Knopf 1931.
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, 495, 496
-Anarchist and feminist who bridged the anarchist movements in the United States and Europe, Goldman famously declared, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
+Argurcia, Ricardo. 490
-Goldsmith, Edward, et al. Blueprint for Survival. New York: Houghton 1972.
+armor, cotton, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502
-This book was first published as a special edition of the British environmental journal The Ecologist, and had a major role in stimulating the emergence of the UK’s green movement. Although its main purpose was to sound the alarm about the social and ecological dangers facing modern civilization, the book’s recommendations for addressing these problems had a radical and anarchistic tenor. The decentralist agenda laid out in this book had an important hand in linking environmentalism with anarchism in the decades that followed.
+astronomy, 73, 76, 78. 81, 98, 276. 425, 480
-Goodman, Paul. Like a Conquered Province. New York: Vintage 1966.
+see also specific planets
-———. People or Personnel. New York: Vintage 1964.
+Avendano y Layóla, Andrés de, 397–400, 506–507
-Two books exploring the ways in which the organizational culture of bureaucratic hierarchy has become hegemonic throughout our society.
+Aveni, Anthony F., 473–474
-Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm 2004. [[http://prickly-paradigm.com][http://prickly-para]] [[http://prickly-paradigm.com][digm.com/sites/default/files/Graeber_PPP_14_0.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+“ax,” 173, 456, 487
-A compact program for the development of a full-blown anarchist social theory, laying the groundwork for discussions of the state, voluntary associations, and resistance, by a scholar described by a distinguished peer as “the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world.”
+axes, 145, 358, 364, 501
-Graham, Robert, ed. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939). Montreal: Black Rose 2005.
+Ayala Falcon, Marisela, 447. 463, 496 Aztecs, 147, 377–378, 421, 429, 431, 433, 444, 497, 498. 500, 504
----- . Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas 2: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939— 1977). Montreal: Black Rose 2007.
+Baby Jaguar, 392, 406
-——— Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas 3: The New Anarchism (1974 to 2012). Montreal: Black Rose 2012.
+backracks, 211, 213, 242, 390, 454
-A vast collection of anarchist source materials from before the Middle Ages to the present. The selections are drawn from multiple intellectual and cultural traditions, many non-Western.
+Bahlum-Kuk, king of Palenque, 217, 221–222, 254. 261, 470, 474 baktun, 7 8, 81, 82, 341, 3 85, 430, 446
-Green, Leslie. The Authority of the State. Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1988.
+Ball, Joseph, 423, 497
-A comprehensive account of theories defending state authority.
+ballcourt markers, 77, 158, 173, 455, 488
-Guerin, Daniel. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. Trans. Mary Klopper. New York: Monthly Review 1970. Anarchist Library 2009. [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org][http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Daniel_Guerin__Anarchism__From_Theory_]] [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org][to_Practice.html]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+at Teotihuacan, 158, 451
-An influential overview of anarchist history and theory which also features historical information about twentieth-century anarchist experiments.
+at Tikal, 146, 149, 154, 156, 158, 451 ballcourts, 77, 158, 353, 451 455
-Hasnas, John, “The Obviousness of Anarchy.” Long and Machan. 111—132.
+at Caracol, 173, 455
-Hasnas argues that a stable, successful society without government can exist by reviewing past and current examples of non-governmental order-producing mechanisms. Since a coercive monopoly is not essential for the provision of any good or service, including law, the state is unnecessary and so unwarranted.
+at Cerros, 104–105, 123, 126, 451
-Hayek, Friedrich. “Competition as a Discovery Procedure.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 5. 3 (2002): 9—23. Originally published in 1968, this article discusses the meaning and nature of the competitive process, highlighting that many discussions of “competition” do not provide a clear understanding of the concept. It argues that competition is a discovery procedure in which individuals come to find new knowledge regarding costs, potential innovations, and preferences.
+at Chichén It/a, 77. 368, 370, 371–372, 373
-Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. Oxford: OUP 1982. An anarchist economic historian carefully analyzes the link between economic, political, and military crises and the cancerous development of the American state.
+at Copan. 77, 308, 312, 316, 319, 321, 325, 344, 428, 485, 487–188 false, 322–323, 489
-———. Delusions of Power: New Explorations of the State, War, and the Economy. Oakland, CA: Independent 2012.
+“Thrice-Made Descent,” 487—488
-Higgs offers both economic and moral arguments against the state. He directs his ire, in particular, at militarism and war, effectively debunking numerous pro-war fallacies.
+at Ucanal, 194–195, 461 bailgame, 38, 76–77, 158, 176–177, 373, 429, 451 455
-Hess, Karl. Dear America. New York: Morrow 1975.
+of Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–75. 76, 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488
-A Goldwater-speechwriter-turned-New-Leftist explains his conviction that anarchism best expresses American ideals.
+of Bird-Jaguar, 283, 289, 487 purposes of, 126
-Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. London: Crooke 1651.
+war captives in. 126, 177. 179. 457.
-The classic discussion of anarchy and the “state of nature.” Perhaps the most important work of modern political philosophy, Leviathan is also an important contribution to moral philosophy and to important earlymodern ideas about science and knowledge.
+–488, 503–504
-Hodgskin, Thomas. The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. London: Steil 1832.
+Bardslay, Sandy. 477
-Hodgskin argues forcefully against Benthamite reformers that moral rights to property are prior to state recognition, and that states are not free to engineer new property rights not grounded in justice. Natural property rights, he contends, are manifestations of individual freedom, while artificial property rights are constructs reflective of unjust privilege.
+Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo, 472, 501
-Holterman, Thom, and van Maarseveen, Henk, eds. Law and Anarchism. Montreal: Black Rose 1984.
+Battle Disks, 395
-Essays on the legal problems of a stateless society from diverse perspectives.
+benches, 327, 328–330. 336–337, 371, 490, 491, 492. 493, 506
-Horn, Norman. “New Testament Theology of the State.” LewRockwell.com. Sep. 29, 2007, [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][www.lewrock]] [[http://www.lewrockwell.com][well.com/2007/09/norman-horn/new-testament-theology-of-the-state/ ]](Aug. 20, 2019).
+Benson, Elizabeth, 421
-A contemporary Christian market anarchist addresses ways in which the New Testament might be relevant to questions of political theology and the authority of the state.
+Berlin. Heinrich, 49, 58, 245, 419, 420. 423. 457, 458, 459, 461, 467, 471. 477. 478
-Huemer, Michael. The Problem of Political Authority. New York: Palgrave 2013.
+Beyer, Hermann, 496
-Governments purportedly have the power to create in us an obligation to obey some of their commands and laws, and also possess the moral permission to enforce these edicts through violence and threats of violence. Huemer argues that common-sense moral principles are sufficient to rebut any claim that the state can have justification for acts an individual would not. He examines and refutes dozens of putative reasons to attribute these special powers to government. He also provides a psychological diagnosis of why the apparently mistaken belief in government might be so widespread. In the second half of the book, he describes how an anarchist society might effectively function. He concludes that there is no duty on persons to obey the law and no right of the state to coerce.
+Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 263–264, 270–305, 329, 330, 338, 361 370. 375, 383, 473, 479, 481–482
-Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper 1973.
+accession of, 275, 285, 287–290 bailgame of. 283, 289, 487 birth of, 266, 268, 269, 271,
-An analysis of ways in which totalizing professional bureaucracies transform society and individuals into means to their own ends.
-Karl Hess: Toward Liberty. Dir. Roland Hallé and Peter W. Ladue. Direct Cinema 1980. An Oscar-winning portrait of the gentle, decent anarchist thinker and activist and advocate of local empowerment.
+bloodletting rituals of. 276–282, 285–286, 291
-Kauffman, Bill. Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green 2010.
+bundle ritual of, 298–301 flapstaff rituals of, 275, 278, 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 303, 383
-A literate, contrarian proponent of “front-porch anarchism” pens a love poem to decent secessionist movements, past and present.
+heir-designation ritual of, 298–301 marriage alliances of, 273, 294 rivals of, 271–272
-Keyt, David. “Aristotle and Anarchism.” Reason Papers 18 (Fall 1993): 133—152. Rptd. Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety. Oxford: Rowman 2005. 203—22).
+state visits of, 265, 303–305. 494 stelae of, 270. 275, 276, 283, 285, 287, 288. 291
----------- . “Aristotle, and the Ancient Roots of Anarchism.” Topoi 15 (1996): 129—142.
+Bird-Jaguar (continued)
-These two papers identify the anarchistical implications of Aristotle’s study of properly political organization (that is, of the self-governing and largely self-supporting cities and associated land known as poleis—which are not quite the same as “states”).
+war captives of, 285, 287, 291, 292, 295, 301
-Kinsella, N. Stephan. Against “Intellectual Property.” Auburn, AL: Mises 2009. [[http://www.mises.org][www.mises.org/books/against.]] [[http://www.mises.org][pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+black (ek), 66
-An anarchist lawyer and legal theorist offers a sustained case that patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are unjust creations of the state.
+bloodletters, 135
-Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916. New York: Free 1963.
+obsidian, 90, 202, 233, 275, 404, 432
-Though not an anarchist himself, Kolko provides ammunition for anarchist critiques of the state in this study of how Progressive-era regulations were shaped to serve the interests of big business.
+stingray spines, 135, 281, 425, 492 bloodletting rituals, 19, 38, 64, 66,
-Konkin, Samuel, III. New Libertarian Manifesto. Los Angeles, CA: Koman 1983.
+–71, 87, 164, 233–235, 243, 334, 399, 404, 426–427, 432, 444
-Samuel Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto is the locus classicus for the author’s version of anarchism, “agor- ism.” It outlines Konkin’s model of libertarian praxis through black-market participation, an important departure in libertarian theory.
+of Ah-Cacaw, 158, 202
-Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. London: Penguin 2015.
+of Bird-Jaguar, 276–282, 285–286, 291
-Originally published in 1892, The Conquest of Bread outlines Kropotkin’s argument for a stateless society. One of the earliest and most masterful expositions of the anarcho-communist position, it features a sweeping description of anarchist normative principles, analyses of existing political and economic organizational arrangements, and prescriptions for what form an anarchist society should take. It profoundly influenced the course of anarchist thought and activism in the twentieth century.
+of Chan-Bahlum, 233–234, 257, 259, 260, 475
-———. Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution. London: Freedom 1998 [1914]. Project Gutenberg n.d. [[http://www.Gutenberg.Org][www.Guten]] [[http://www.Gutenberg.Org][berg.Org/etext/4341 ]](Aug. 16, 2020).
+of First Mother, 248, 254—255, 260
-Biologist, geographer, and social theorist Kropotkin articulates a vision of anarchy emphasizing cooperation and rootedness in the natural world.
+“fish-in-hand” glyph and, 254, 257, 268, 276, 357, 473, 480, 494
-———. Peter Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. Ed. Petr Alekseevich. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger 2010 [1927].
+giving birth to gods through, 89, 259, 260, 425, 427, 475^76
-Not only an anarchist but also a distinguished biologist and natural historian, Kropotkin emphasized the importance of symbiotic and cooperative endeavors in human society and the natural world.
+of Great-Jaguar-Paw, 149, 156–157, 443
-Landauer, Gustav. Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader. Oakland: PM 2010.
+of Lady Eveningstar, 276, 279–280, 287, 291, 481
-Many essays in this book deal with the issue of violence and war-making. Landauer argues for an anarchist, pacifist practice.
+of Lady Great-Skull-Zero, 275–276, 280, 287, 292, 479
-Lavoie, Don. National Economic Planning: What Is Left? Arlington, VA: Mercatus 2016.
+of Lady Wac-Chanii-Ahau, 184
-Lavoie presents the social science behind two systemic problems with central planning: the knowledge problem and the power problem. He also argues that planning represents the militarization of the economy, and that therefore the left’s radical goals of abolishing war and injustice are best served by rejecting economic planning.
+of Lady Xoc, 266–268, 289–290, 291, 293, 478, 501
-Leeson, Peter. Anarchy Unbound. New York: CUP 2014.
+materializations through, 70, 87, 89, 425, 427, 437, 441
-Leeson provides careful empirical evidence that “anarchy works better than you think.” He explains why certain kinds of non-government enforcement mechanisms are successful, stable, and efficient. He challenges the conventional wisdom according to which self-governance always performs worse than government. Utilizing rational-choice theory, he analyzes historical examples of the endogenous formation of governance mechanisms and social rules, demonstrating that anarchy has functioned more effectively than economists might otherwise predict.
+pain unexpressed in, 279, 481
-———. “Governments, Clubs, and Constitutions.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80.2 (2011): 301–308.
+paper and, 89, 101, 202–203, 233–235, 275
-Many propose constitutions as a means to constrain government, but the mere presence of a constitution does not guarantee it will be enforced. In this paper Peter Leeson argues that clubs formed through voluntary association provide the best enforced constitutions, largely because they are owned by residual claimants and are subject to competition.
+penis perforation in, 89, 111, 149, 202, 233, 281, 286, 426, 447
-———. The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2009.
+of Stormy-Sky, 188, 203, 208
-Defying the conventional presumption of lawlessness among criminals, Leeson’s work illustrates the creative capacity of pirates to craft institutions of governance, including constitutions mandating the separation of powers, outside the shadow of the state.
+tongue perforation in, 89, 207, 266, 268, 271, 276, 279, 286, 426, 465
-Levy, Jacob T. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. New York: OUP 2014.
+in villages, 89–90, 101, 307
-Levy explores two strands of thought in the history of liberalism. Rationalism advocates the power of the centralizing, rationalizing state to liberate the individual from the domination of family, religious, feudal, and associational life. Pluralism stresses the value of associations as bulwarks against the predation and domination of modern states. Levy cautions us not to embrace either side of this dichotomy at the total expense of the other.
+blood scrolls, 134, 164, 170, 316, 3 86, 391, 395, 406, 438–139, 503
-Linnell, Lexi. “This Machine Kills Ableism.” Anarchotranshuman: A Journal of Radical Possibility and Striving 3 (2016): 12–15. [[http://infoshop.io][http://infoshop.io/media/Anarcho-Transhuman%20-%20Issue%203.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+“blue-green” (yax), 66, 150, 310, 436, 440, 465, 476
-While everything in this issue of Anarchotranshuman is good, Linnell’s piece frames the ethical and philosophical context of anarcho-transhumanism well.
+Bonampak, 236, 264, 383, 392, 432, 469, 471, 480, 481, 506
-Lipscomb, David. Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation to It. Nashville, TN: McQuiddy 1996.
+murals at, 87, 298, 424, 444, 447, 458, 462, 463, 464, 470, 506 Bonpland, Aimé, 420
-An important nineteenth-century Christian anarchist work, offering one of the first cases for explicitly Christian anarchism.
+books, 18, 38, 55, 74, 399, 401
-Long, Roderick T., and Machan, Tibor. Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? Farnham: Ashgate 2008.
+codices, 50, 54, 84, 396, 420, 421, 431, 489
-Up-to-date arguments from people who believe there should no states, and people who believe there should be very limited states.
+see also Chilam Balam, Books of;
-Martin, James J. Men against the State. Colorado Springs, CO: Myles 1970. [[http://www.mises.org][www.mises.org/books/Men_A]] [[http://www.mises.org][gainst_the_State_Martin.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Popol Vuh
-Martin’s masterful, groundbreaking history of the American individualist anarchist movement remains the best available overview of key figures in the movement and of the content and development of their ideas. Martin explores the origins of the uniquely American strains of anarchist thought, distinguishing them carefully from their European cousins and providing important biographical information on the key figures of American individualism.
+Bricker, Victoria, 458, 465, 495
-Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Oakland, CA: PM 2010.
+Brown, Kenneth L., 452
-An extensive global narrative focused on the growth and significance of anarchist ideas and multiple anarchist movements and figures.
+bundle rituals, 293, 294, 298–301, 304
-Marvin, Carolyn, and Ingle, David. Blood Sacrifice and Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. New York: CUP 1999.
+bundles, sacred, 201, 289, 394, 404, 463, 482
-Marvin and Ingle argue that American nationalism is a religious that revolves around a religious totem, the American flag, and that state wars are blood sacrifice rituals that periodically purge disunity and help sustain nationalist identity and religious practice.
+burials, burial rituals, 45, 56, 103, 131–132, 149, 421–122, 453, 456, 480
-McElroy, Wendy. The Debates of Liberty. New York: Lexington 2003.
+offerings in, 56, 134, 307–308, 421, 483
-This is an extremely helpful study of the contentions advanced and the debates conducted in Liberty, the chief organ of the American individualist anarchist movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
+of Pacal the Great, 228–235, 468, 469
-McKay, Iain et al. An Anarchist FAQ. Vol. 2. Chico: AK 2008—12.
+sacrificial victims in, 134, 233, 469, 475
-An influential exposition of anarchism, featuring contributions from anarchists with a range of viewpoints, discussions of arguments for and against anarchism, and analyses of multiple schools of anarchist thought.
+see also tombs
-McLaughlin, Paul. Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism. London: Routledge 2016.
+Cabrera, Paul Felix, 466
-A conceptual and historical analysis of anarchism, of authority, and of the historical, theoretical, and practical relations between the two. Describes, develops, and defends anarchism’s philosophy of authority.
+cacao, 38, 92, 93, 94, 101, 435
-Meikle, Scott. Aristotle’s Economic Theory. 2d ed. New York: OUP 1997.
+Cacaxtla, 163, 374. 380, 444, 453, 502–503, 504
-A serious study of Aristotle’s often puzzling discussion of economic justice, and the effects of money in a cooperative society.
+caches, 102, 120–122, 161, 200–201.
-Meltzer, Albert. Anarchism: Arguments for and Against. Oakland, CA: AK 2001.
+–394, 435. 437–438, 450, 452, 462–463, 465, 486
-A brief primer on anarchist ideas designed to respond to Marxist critiques. Dismisses anarchist thinkers including Tolstoy, Tucker, and Proudhon.
+cahalob, see nobility cuh rank, 374 calabtun, 81, 430 Calakmul, 384, 388, 424, 440
-Mises, Ludwig von Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. New Haven: Yale UP 1951.
+Ah-Cacaw vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213
-This classic work highlights the problem of economic calculation for varieties of socialism committed to collective ownership, but also contains some commentary on Christian theological issues.
+Emblem Glyph of, 456–457, 466, 479 in wars of conquest, 174–179, 181–183, 184. 191, 211–212, 213, 214
-More, Max, and Vita-More, Natasha, eds. The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. New York: Wiley-Blackwell 2013.
+Calendar Round, 45, 81, 82, 83, 344, 430
-A compilation of important texts in the mainstream transhumanist tradition. Of particular note are “Morphological Freedom—Why We Not Just Want It but Need It,” by Anders Sandberg, and Natasha Vita- More’s original 1982 Manifesto. Radical politics and anarchist derivations are for the most part studiously ignored in this compilation and the contributions of serious philosophers like Nick Bostrom are positioned side-by-side with less impressive selections, but it’s the best survey out there.
+calendars, 46, 78, 79–83, 84, 90. 144, 165, 252, 399–400, 402, 429, 430–431, 432, 442, 451, 472–473, 476, 504, 507 haab (365-day), 81, 83, 84 Long Count, 81–83, 399, 430–431, 442, 451, 507
-Mulgan, Richard. “Lycophron and Greek Theories of Social Contract.” Journal of the History of Ideas 40.1 (1979): 121–128.
+tzolkin (260-day), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84, 400, 451
-Lycophron the Sophist seems to have emphasized the notion of “free contract” as the only proper basis for a just civil society.
+Campbell, Lyle, 422
-Murphy, Robert P. Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy. New York: RJ 2002. Mises Institute n.d. [[http://www.mises.org][www.mises.org/books/chaostheory.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Can-Ek, king of Itza, 396–401, 402, 506–507
-A helpful discussion of the management of the potentially violent in a stateless society.
+canoes, 60–61. 277, 397, 398, 424 seagoing, 100, 351, 377, 434
-National Intelligence Council. Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2012. [[http://www.dni.gov][www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Captain Serpent, 371–372, 503
-Recognizing some shockingly radical possibilities, for a government publication, while describing them in soothingly smooth prose.
+Captain Sun Disk, 371–373, 393, 503, 505
-Negri, Antonio, and Hardt, Michael. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard UP 2009.
+captives, war, see war captives
-— ——. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin 2004.
+Caracol, 181, 183, 189–190, 193, 104–195, 319, 373, 391, 424, 449, 452, 454–455, 461, 503 altar at, 171, 173, 456, 464 ballcourt at, 173, 455 monuments effaced by. 167, 172–173, 178–179, 196, 462
-Two more autonomist classics on the Exodus model of postcapitalist transition.
+Naranjo conquered by, 174–179, 205, 211, 212, 214, 317, 478. 499 stylistic influence of, 174, 205, 464 Tikal conquered by, 167, 171–179, 197, 214, 317, 457, 458, 462, 499 tribute paid to. 178 cargo officials, 42–43, 44 Carlson, John, 496 Carr, H. Sorayya, 434 cartouches, 52–53, 54
-Newman, Saul. Postanarchism. Cambridge: Polity 2015.
+ancestor, 372, 393, 479, 503 Catherwood, Frederick, 46, 217, 261, 466
-Newman charts a course from anarchism to anarchy, a new “ontological anti-authoritarianism,” freed from the authority of first principles. Newman endeavors here to present a new and different radical politics focused on “self-government and free and spontaneous organization, rather than organization by and through the state.”
+Cauac-Sky, king of Quirigua, 317, 456, 486, 487
-———. The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2010.
+caves, 67, 72, 98, 368, 385. 423, 427. 488. 496, 500, 502, 506
-A contemporary account of anarchist ideas, relations, and practices rooted in a version of poststructuralist philosophy.
+ceiba trees, 61, 72, 306, 489
-———. Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political. London: Routledge 2007.
+Celestial Bird, 90, 242, 243, 255, 398, 407, 473, 503
-Newman examines the influence of poststructuralist thought on contemporary political theory, drawing on figures such as Foucault and Derrida to help him reconsider Stirner and to demonstrate the continued relevance of Stirner’s radical critique of essentialism.
+Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster cenotes, 48, 61, 352, 395, 500, 502 censers, 101, 146, 203, 279, 280, 281. 342, 369, 434, 443
-———, ed. Max Stirner. New York: Palgrave 2011.
+Cerros, 15–16, 74. 98–129, 211, 215, 228, 243, 253, 308, 379, 423, 433–438, 460, 504 abandonment of, 127–128 ballcourts at, 104—105, 123, 126, 451 daily life of, 98–103 docking area of, 100 founding of, 106, 116–117, 434, 437
-This collection brings together some of the most interesting and insightful contemporary scholars working on anarchism to consider how Stirner’s work can lead to “a radical rethinking of key political categories.” It “is the first ever edited book on Max Stirner published in the English language,” an excellent introduction to Stirner’s key ideas and the debates that have raged around his often puzzling work.
+houses at, 98–99, 110, 119–120 kingship at, 98–129
-Niskanen, William N. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. London: Routledge 2007 [1971].
+labor force of, 106, 107, 116, 119, 122, 123
-Niskanen analyzes output within the context of a public-sector bureaucracy. He argues that, facing incentives to maximize their budgets, bureaux supply up to twice as much output as competitive industries facing identical cost and demand conditions.
+location of, 98
-Nock, Albert Jay. Our Enemy, the State. New York: Morrow 1935.
+original village at, 98–103, 105, 119, 123
-Highlights the role of the state as an enabler of mercantile interests and as an adversary of society.
+patriarchs of, 100–101. 110
-North, Douglas C., Wallis, John J., and Weingast, Barry. Violence and Social Order: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: CUP 2009.
+temple pyramids at, 15, 104—128, 136, 138, 170, 238, 435, 438, 439, 440, 470
-Empirically explores the development of societies from “natural states,” in which order is maintained by fragile coalitions held in place by means of personal relationships, to “open access orders” in which stability, dispute resolution, and political power are maintained using impersonal legal artefacts. Whilst modern liberal democratic states are much “bigger” than medieval monarchies, their power is also more robustly limited. To protect freedom, then, North et al. might be seen as suggesting, we might need a strong state after all.
+trade at, 98, 100–103, 434
-Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic 1974.
+water management at, 105, 119
-Assesses the justification of the state and argues with great philosophical sophistication that a minimal state could arise without violating natural rights. The first 40 percent of the book is devoted to a complex critical analysis of and the articulation of a serious challenge to a certain kind of anarchism. The last chapter, “A Framework for Utopia,” is pretty anarchic.
+Chaacal III, king of Palenque, 230, 469, 476
-O’Neill, Onora. “Reason and Politics in the Kantian Enterprise.” Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP 1989. 3—27.
+Chae, 392, 427, 479
-Demonstrates how Kant tries to overcome anarchy in different parts of his philosophy.
+Cha-Chae ritual, 44
-Oppenheimer, Franz. The State. 2d American ed. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 2017.
+Chae Mool, 366, 506
-Sociologist Oppenheimer defends the idea that the state is product not of social evolution or social contract but rather of conquest. Emphasizes the role of the state in fostering and propping up inequality.
+Chac-Xib-Chac (God B), 70, 144–145, 151, 201, 242, 285, 323, 408, 489
-Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: CUP 2015 [1990].
+Chan-Bahlum, king of Palenque, 21, 124–125, 217–261, 305, 316, 435 accession of, 235, 240–241, 242, 471 bloodletting rituals of, 233–234, 257, 259, 260, 475
-This book offers a fascinating account of how informal institutions can solve challenging collective action problems. Ostrom argues for the possibility of successful common property arrangements by appealing to a wide range of stable practices. These cases do not fit neatly into the categories of “market” or “state” institutions, but are instead instances of bottom-up collective self-governance.
+dedication rituals of, 242, 256–260, 268 , 473–4 74, 475
-Otsuka, Michael. Libertarianism without Inequality. New York: OUP 2003.
+dynastic claims of, 235–261
-This book defends a variety of left-libertarianism that is conceptually adjacent to the social-anarchist position. It argues that people can have robust rights of self-ownership where these rights are compatible with an egalitarian distribution of material resources. It also argues for a voluntarist account of state legitimacy.
+Group of the Cross erected by, see Group of the Cross, Palenque in heir-designation rituals, 235–237, 239–241, 242, 432, 469–471
-Pateman, Carole. The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory. Berkeley: U of California P 1985.
+name glyph of, 466
-Pateman disposes effectively of conventional defenses of consensual state authority. While her concern is with grounding political obligation in democracy, her criticisms of conventional theories can easily be read as conveying anarchist implications.
+in Pacal the Great’s burial ritual, 228–235
-Pogge, Thomas. “Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive Liberalism?’” Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. Mark Timmons. NewYork: OUP 2002. 133–158.
+plaster portrait of, 260
-An influential article that argues forcefully for the “independence thesis”—that Kant’s legal philosophy has a foundation independent of his ethics.
+six-digit deformity of, 236 war captives sacrificed by, 233, 236, 243, 258, 259, 260
-Perry, Stephen. “Political Authority and Political Obligation.” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law 2 (2013): 1–74.
+Chariot, Jean. 500, 502
-Distinguishes political authority—the moral power of the state to change the normative situation of its citizens—from political obligation.
+Chase, Arlen F. and Diana Z., 455, 456, 461
-Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. John Beverly Robinson. Mineola, NY: Dover 2004 [1923].
+Cheek, Charles, 452
-———. System of Economical Contradictions; Or, the Philosophy of Misery. Trans. Benjamin R. Tucker. New York: Arno 1973 [1888].
+Chel-Te-Chan, see Shield-Jaguar II, king of Yaxchilan
-———. What Is Property? Ed. and trans. David R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge: CUP 1994.
+Chichen Itza, 14, 61, 163, 332, 346–376, 385, 389, 392–396. 495–504, 506
-Arguably the first person to use the word “anarchist” for himself, Proudhon jousted with Marx and developed a distinctive approach to anarchism he labeled “mutualism.”
+Casa Colorada at, 357, 362–363, 498–499, 501
-Purchase, Graham. Anarchism and Environmental Survival. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat 2011 [1994].
+Castillo at, 349, 356, 368
-Alarmed by the prospect of an ecological crisis, Graham Purchase argues that humanity’s survival depends on replacing existing states with radically decentralized political communities. Following in a rich tradition of green anarchism, Purchase seeks to grapple with some of the big challenges facing other similar views— especially those having to do with large-scale challenges that transcend local contexts.
+Cenote of Sacrifice at, 48, 352, 395, 500, 502
-Raimondo, Justin. An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard. Amherst, NY: Prometheus 2000.
+Emblem Glyph of, 363–364, 496, 502
-This biography follows the father of modern anarcho-capitalism from his early years as a student and devotee of the Old Right through his flirtations with the New Left and his founding of the Libertarian Party to his later return to the right-wing fold as a paleo-libertarian. The work is crucial for scholars of American libertarianism.
+empty throne of, 370–371, 394
-Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly 1999.
+Great Ballcourt at, 77. 368, 370.
-The original classic contrast of stigmergic to bureaucratic coordination. Just don’t read anything else by him.
+–372, 373
-Raz, Joseph. The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality. 2d ed. New York: OUP 2009.
+High Priest’s Grave at, 356, 368, 385, 387, 500, 502
-Raises critical questions regarding the capacity of states to create obligations.
+High Priest’s Temple at, 356 inscribed monuments of, 355, 356–364, 496
-———. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1986.
+multepal government of, 357, 359–364, 370–371, 374, 501. 502 nonglyphic monuments of, 349, 355–356, 358, 364–374
-An exemplary philosophical exposition of a moral and political theory of freedom.
+Northwest Colonnade at, 364, 374 pottery of, 351, 354–355, 498 processions at, 364–370, 372, 500, 503–504
-Redford, James. Jesus Is an Anarchist: A Free-Market, Libertarian Anarchist, That Is—Otherwise What Is Called an Anarcho-Capitalist. Amsterdam: SSRN-Elsevier 2011. [[https://papers.ssrn.com][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?]] [[https://papers.ssrn.com][abstract_id=1337761]].
+serpent imagery of, 356, 357, 372–373, 394–395, 501, 503
-Redford defends the position that Jesus’s life and teachings imply anarcho-capitalism. He examines a number of biblical passages and addresses various potential objections to support his argument.
+size of, 349, 497
-Richman, Barak. Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2017.
+Temple of the Chae Mool at, 356.
-Richman provides a case of study focused on ways in which ethnic trading networks centered on Manhattan’s 47<sup>th</sup> Street have provided contractual enforcement for participants in the diamond trade outside the scope of the state. Whereas conventional wisdom supposes that technological progress should lead to the displacement of “primitive” commercial networks, Richman reveals the adaptiveness of the commercial practices prevailing in the diamond district, making clear that they represent institutional responses to the transaction costs of state enforcement of property rights in diamonds.
+, 393–394
-Richman, Sheldon. “Libertarian Left: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.” American Conservative 10.3 (March 2011): 28—32. [[http://www.theamericanconservative.com][www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/libertarian-left/ (Aug. 16, 2020)]].
+Temple of the Four Lintels at, 357, 496, 500
-Provides an overview of a developing intellectual and political movement on the political left, populated largely by anarchists, that interestingly bridges some traditional ideological and strategic divides.
+Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs at. 358
-Ripstein, Arthur. Force and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2009.
+Temple of the Jaguar at, 366, 372, 373, 374
-A contemporary defense of Kant’s legal and political philosophy.
+Temple of the Warriors at, 356, 364–371, 372, 373, 374, 394, 500, 502, 503, 506
-Robb, John. Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. Hoboken: Wiley 2007.
+two apparent occupations of, 354–355, 356–357, 358, 497, 500, 501
-An examination of the rise of networked insurgencies and their superiority to the bureaucracies attempting to fight them.
+war captives in, 366–370, 372, 373–374, 502–504
-Rocker, Rudolph. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. Oakland, CA: AK 2004.
+Watering Trough Lintel at, 356 Chilain Balam, Books of, 209, 346–347 351, 378, 393, 467, 495, 496, 497, 498, 501 prophecies of, 396, 397, 400, 401, 506, 507
-———. Pioneers of American Freedom: Origins of Liberal and Radical Thought in America. Trans. Arthur E. Briggs. Los Angeles, CA: Rocker 1949.
+Chinkultic, 385
-Anarcho-Syndicalism is a classic of anarchist strategy, theory, and history which emphasizes the commitment to freedom shared by proponents of different anarchist tendencies. Pioneers is an appreciation of indigenous American radical traditions from the perspective ofa titan of European anarchism.
+Chontai (Putun) Maya, 350–351, 380, 382, 385, 497, 504
-Rosler, Andres. Political Authority and Obligation in Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 2005.
+Christianity, 45, 77
-A discussion of Aristotle’s suggestions for the origin of felt obligations to governing bodies or persons.
+Maya’s conversion to, 396–401 ch’ul (“holy”). 71, 423, 426, 473 clans, 84–85, 133, 311, 431 Classic period, 26–33, 52, 57–60, 74, 86, 87, 130, 308, 309, 310, 402, 423, 484
-Rothbard, Murray N. The Ethics of Liberty. 2d ed. New York: New York UP 2003. Mises Institute n.d. [[http://mises.org][http://]] [[http://mises.org][mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp]]. (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Early, 26–27, 57, 145, 165, 313
-Rothbard defends a secular version of natural-law theory that he believes can be wholly understood by reference to two simple principles: self-ownership and homesteading. In quasi- Lockean fashion, he argues for the view that we all come into with an exclusive claim to control our own bodies and lives, and to acquire unowned natural resources through use. And he defends the appropriateness of political and economic institutions he judges to be consistent with this: yes to voluntary exchange and contract, no to monopoly and the state.
+Late, 27–30, 57, 59, 60, 204, 313, 349, 387, 424, 486, 489
-———. For a New Liberty. 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. San Francisco: Fox 1978.
+Terminal, see Terminal Classic period
-Rothbard’s anarchist manifesto, For a New Liberty is an important statement of an individualistic anarchist position. It features three important chapters on alternatives to state provision of various services.
+climate. 61–62, 322
-———. Man, Economy, and State. Scholars ed. Intro. Joseph Stromberg. Auburn, AL: Mises 2004.
+Closs, Michael, 443. 458, 460 clubs, 146, 153, 184, 295, 364 Coba, 349, 352–354, 374, 430, 459, 471, 496
-The final portion of this general account of economics, “Power and Market,” offers economic analyses of issues related to the performance in the state’s absence of functions often thought to require state action.
+sacbe road of, 353, 498 size of, 351, 498, 499
----------- . “Society without a State.” Nomos 19 (1978): 191—207.
+Cocom family of Mayapan, 361–363, 371, 396, 499, 502
-A frequently cited article in which Rothbard lays out the core distinction between society and state, and outlines how a non-monopolistic legal order might function.
+codices, 50, 54, 84..396, 420. 421, 431, 489
-Rousseau, Jean Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin 1985 [<verbatim>1754</verbatim>]. One of Rousseau’s major political works, developing a conception of the state of nature different from those of his predecessors, Hobbes and Locke.
+Coe, Michael D„ 49, 425, 429, 440 Coe, William R„ 434, 437, 438, 464 Coggins, Clemency, 438, 442—4–43, 452, 453, 454. 456, 458, 462, 464 colors, 133, 201, 464 of costumes, 397 of four cardinal directions, 66, 67, 78, 83
-Ruwart, Mary. Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression. 3d ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Sunstar 2003.
+of temple pyramids, 111–112, 162, 476
-A lively and insightful discussion of institutional and personal methods for problem-solving apart from state action.
+Columbus, Christopher, 77, 379, 401 Comitan, 392 compounds, residential, see residential compounds
-Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society 1985.
+construction pens. 106, 123, 204, 438 containment rituals, 73–74, 110. 229, 428, 464
-This book lays out the case for reconstructing our political orders to reflect the ecological contours of the natural world. To Kirkpatrick Sale and other “bioregionalists,” our serious ecological challenges can be traced to the fact we live in gargantuan societies that have little connection to the landscapes in which they are imbedded. Sale’s proposed alternative would reorganize communities into smaller, more ecologically determined units, pushing us to come to terms with the distinctive possibilities and limits of the places where we live.
+contracts, 92. 433
-Salter, Alexander. “Christian Anarchism: Communitarian or Capitalist?” Libertarian Papers 4.1 (2012): 151—162. [[http://libertarianpapers.org][http://libertarianpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/article/2012/lp-4-1-8.pdf]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Copan, 16, 50, 51. 58, 87, 193, 306–345, 346, 351, 422, 423, 431, 432, 437, 443, 457, 465, 475, 478, 483–495 agriculture at, 321–322, 336, 488 altars at, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337. 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 401–492, 493–494
-Offers an extensive literature review of various strands of Christian anarchist thought and discusses ways in which they might bear on socialist and capitalist forms of anarchism.
+Ballcourt at, 77, 308, 312, 316, 319, 321, 325, 344. 428. 485, 487–488
-Sanders, John T. The Ethical Argument against Government. Washington, DC: UP of America 1980.
+in Classic period, 308, 309, 310, 313, 484, 486, 489
-Uses the framework of a Rawlsian “constitutional convention” to argue that rational parties confronted successively with Aristotelean, Hobbesian, Lockean, and Marxian arguments in behalf of the state would remain unconvinced of its reasonableness.
+council of brothers at, 324, 331–340, 489, 492, 493
-———. “The Free Market Model versus Government: A Reply to Nozick.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1.1 (1977): 35–44.
+decline of, 338–345, 381, 401–402 deforestation and, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
-Argues that Nozick’s “dominant protection agency” neither meets his monopoly condition for statehood nor need run afoul of his redistributive requirement. This being the case, his argument against market anarchism fails.
+disease in, 322, 335, 336, 379, 489 early inhabitants of. 306–307 Emblem Glyph of, 309, 484 founding of, 309–310, 484 Great Plaza at, 307, 308, 313, 316, 322, 325, 489
-——— “Justice and the Initial Acquisition of Property.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 10.2 (1987): 367–399.
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 312, 313, 319, 341, 427, 466–167, 484, 487, 488 nobility of, 311, 314–315, 316–319, 320, 322, 325, 328–330, 335, 337–338, 341, 487
-Argues that the defensibility of some initial claim to property is required by any theory which holds that certain present distributions may be justified, that certain transfers of property are justified, or that restitution ought to be made for previous injustice in transfer or acquisition. Also defends the view that a “Lockean proviso” to principles of just initial acquisition may be self-defeating.
+Palenque and, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
-———. “Political Authority.” Monist 66.4 (1983): 545–556.
+platforms at. 324, 327, 485, 486 population of, 308, 317, 321–322, 335, 343, 345, 379, 483–484, 486, 488
-Starting with a notion of “authority” that makes a sharp distinction between authority and power, and granting the legitimacy and possible necessity of such authority, this essay traces the devaluation of the idea through varying degrees of institutionalization, culminating in its political cooptation. Argues that what goes by the name of political authority is the very antithesis of the legitimate and necessary element with which the exercise began.
+in Preclassic period. 308, 310, 484
-———. “Projects and Property.” Robert Nozick. Ed. David Schmidtz. Cambridge: CUP 2002. 34–58.
+Quingua and, 315, 317–319, 342, 486–187
-Offers a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Also argues against Proudhonian/Waldronian contentions that society has an obligation to ensure that every citizen possesses private property.
+residential compounds at, 85–86, 308–309, 316–317, 321, 328- 330, 335, 337, 345, 483–184, 488, 491
-———. “The State of Statelessness.” Sanders and Narveson. 255–288.
+Reviewing Stands at, 322–323, 489 temple pyramids at, 14, 308, 309, 312–313, 316, 319, 321, 322–327, 336, 341, 342, 427, 428, 432, 484, 485, 486. 488–489, 490–401, 492–193
-Addresses a handful of issues often raised in discussions of anarchism, whether by anarchists or their critics, from the point of view of a particular version of philosophical anarchism.
+tombs at, 308, 341, 483, 493 urban development of, 308–309 villages at, 307, 308, 309, 330, 332, 339
-Sanders, John T., and Narveson, Jan, eds. For and against the State: New Philosophical Readings. MD: Rowman 1996.
+corbel-arch construction, 123, 433, 490
-A collection of essays on the legitimacy and propriety of the state. All but two were written originally for this book.
+Cortes, Hernando, 38, 377–379, 396, 398
-Sartwell, Crispin. Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory. Buffalo, NY: SUNY 2008. Demonstrates the inadequacy of traditional arguments for state authority.
+Cortez, Constance, 473, 477, 478, 496
-Schmidtz, David. The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument. Boulder, CO: Westview 1990.
+Cosmic (Celestial) Monster, 66, 70, 114–115, 170, 242, 316, 325–326, 330, 340. 388, 389, 408, 425, 436, 489
-A critical examination of the view that we need the state because important public goods will not be produced at optimal levels in its absence.
+cosmos, 19, 55, 67, 69–70, 73, 78, 84, 87, 137, 218, 242
-Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Twenty-Five Years Later. With Commentaries. Vancouver, BC: Hartley 1999.
+costumes, 115, 139, 144, 145, 161, 209–211, 268, 278, 389, 397, 471, 480, 499, 506
-After spending two decades as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board, E. F. Schumacher memorably broke from the mainstream of his profession with this classic 1973 manifesto. Schumacher accused economists of neglecting humanity’s spiritual and ecological needs in the service of mindless, soul-crushing, and ecologically devastating growth. In Schumacher’s view, a truly humane economy would be reoriented to embrace smallness: small scales of production, small communities, and small impacts on the natural world.
+burial, of Pacal the Great, 229–230, 242, 469
-Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale UP 2018.
+staff king, 165, 454
-Argues that states advanced in conjunction with the cultivation of grain and an entire domestic ecosystem.
+of Teotihuacan, 162, 163, 453
-———. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale UP 2010.
+of Tlaloc-Venus war, 146–147, 149, 15 3, 159–160, 163, 194, 205, 209–210, 258, 259, 260, 319, 341, 367, 370, 443, 444, 475
-Describes the role of stateless regions in attacking and supporting states and suffering under their rule.
+of war captives, 367, 373–374, 464, 482, 502–503
-———. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale UP 1998.
+of women, 279, 280 cotton, 94. 101, 435
-Scott shows that the imposition of abstract rules that necessarily simplify and re-order spontaneous social relations are necessary to state-building. He examines a range of cases in which programs of top-down societal planning and management have proven unsuccessful. Though he does not argue for anarchism here, he emphasizes the liabilities to which states can be subject and offers multiple examples of state failure.
+armor made of, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502
-———. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2012.
+council houses (Popol Nah), 200. 336–337, 367, 369, 371, 463, 492–493
-A personal, often droll look at the defects of hierarchy and the potential of peaceful, voluntary cooperation to address societal challenges. Scott celebrates human creativity and experimentation in the face of authoritarianism and bureaucratic rigidity. While not completely endorsing political anarchism, Scott asks us to look at the world through an “anarchist squint.” From that perspective, he defends open politics over rationalized manipulation, principled law-breaking over unreflective obedience, and fluid complexity over stale homogeneity.
+Cozumel Island, 15, 351, 378–379, 400, 458, 501
-Seel, Gerhard. “How Does Kant Justify the Universal Objective Validity of the Law of Right?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2009): 71—94.
+craftsmen, 40, 42, 91, 337, 344–345 of temple pyramids, 106–107, 108, 109, HO, 111–112, 116, 120, 435, 436
-Argues with extensive textual support against the claim that Kant’s positions on legal and moral philosophy rest on independent foundations (the “independence thesis”). Provides an excellent overview over the literature on the topic.
+Crane, Cathy J., 434, 435
-Shaffer, Butler. In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign against Competition, 1918—1938. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP 1997.
+creation mythology, 81, 82, 84, 106, 142. 429–430
-An anarchist legal theorist explains how big business used the regulatory state to its advantage at a crucial period in American history.
+creation date in, 245, 252, 471, 472 in Group of the Cross texts, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
-Simmons, A. John. “Justification and Legitimacy.” Ethics 109.4 (1999): 739—771.
+see also Popol Vuh
-Distinguishes legitimacy from justification. The former is understood in terms of a right to impose binding duties and is based on transactional relationships between citizens and the state. The latter is a function of the extent to which the state solves the problems of social interaction. The extent to which a state is justified determines whether and to what extent the state merits our support.
+Cuello, 164, 421, 422
-———. Moral Principles and Political Obligations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1979.
+Cu-Ix, king of Calakmul, 175, 383, 457, 479
-A thorough account of the most popular moral defenses of political obligation and of their failure as indicated by philosophical anarchism.
+Culbert, T. Patrick, 423
-———. “Philosophical Anarchism” For and against the State: New Philosophical Readings. Eds. John T. Sanders and Jan Narveson. Lanham, MD: Rowman 1996. 19—39.
+Curl-Snout, king of Tikal. 147, 154–158, 159–160, 162, 210, 361, 438, 442–143, 453
-A clarifying account of the position of philosophical anarchism within the anarchist tradition and with regard to the problem of authority.
+accession of, 155, 157, 448–449, 450–451
-Skarbek, David. The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System. New York: OUP 2014.
+stelae of, 155, 159, 171
-Skarbeck illustrates the creative capacity of prison gangs to foster social order.
+tomb of, 160, 197, 199
-Skoble, Aeon J. Deleting the State: An Argument about Government. Chicago: Open Court 2008.
+darts, 152, 184, 201, 206, 358, 369, 393, 449
-Expertly dissects arguments for the necessity and legitimacy of the state. Skoble argues that minimal-state libertarian arguments all involve a tacit assumption about social cooperation that is undercut by research in economics and game theory. Bringing this work to bear on political philosophy, he argues that the basic premises of classical liberalism are sufficient to justify anarchism.
+dates, see calendars
-Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. New York: CUP 1999.
+Davoust. Michel, 496
-Sorel argues that an anarcho-syndicalist society can only come about through organized violence and strikes, which he views as creative and life-giving actions.
+“dawn” (pac), 483
-Spooner, Lysander. The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner. Vol 6. Ed. Charles Shively. Weston, MA: M&S 1971.
+“day” (kin), 81. 145
-This collection features almost all of Spooner’s works, including his attacks on slavery and the fugitive slave laws, his incendiary “A Letter to Grover Cleveland,” his essay in support of revolution in Ireland, and his defense of private property—including intellectual property.
+days, 52–53, 78–81, 82–83, 84
-— ——. The Lysander Spooner Reader. Ed. George Smith. San Francisco: Fox 1992.
+decapitation. 75. 1b
-This collection includes Smith’s fine introduction and many of Spooner’s writings, including “Vices and not Crimes,” Spooner’s three “No Treason” essays, and his “Trial by Jury.”
+axes in, 145. 358, 501
-— ——. Reasonable Religion: Lysander Spooner on Christianity. Apple Valley, CA: Cobden 2012.
+sacrifice by, 124, 126, 145, 149, 158, 243, 245, 358. 373, 451, 487–488, 501
-Mikhail Bakunin was not alone in seeing opposition to the authority of traditional religion as an important aspect of the quest for human liberation. Spooner’s religious essays make clear his passionate commitment to freedom of thought.
+see also severed heads
-Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam 1995.
+dedication rituals, 104, 106, 323, 357, 428, 432
-A young woman’s life illustrates the conflicts and wonders of a near-future world shaped by remarkable advances in nanotechnology.
+of Ah-Cacaw, 197–203, 205, 206–211. 462–465 .
-— ——. “The Great Simoleon Caper.” Time. March 1, 1995. [[http://content.time.com][http://content.time.com/time/magazine/art]] [[http://content.time.com][icle/0,9171,982610,00.html]]. June 7, 2020.
+caches in, 102, 120–122, 161, 200–201, 393–394, 435, 437–438, 450. 452, 462–463, 465, 486
-A short story about a state attempt to thwart public acceptance of a private crypto-currency, and the response of group of hacker-revolutionaries.
+of Chan-Bahlum. 242, 256–260. 268, 473–474, 475
-— ——. Snow Crash. New York: Del Rey 1992.
+offerings in, 94, 104, 106, 120–122, 123. 127, 145, 328, 435, 437–438, 491
-A wild ride through a post-state landscape and virtual-scape of viral code and franchised city-states.
+sacrificial victims in, 145, 164, 206, 211
-Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Trans. David Leopold. Cambridge: CUP 1995.
+deforestation, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
-Stirner’s masterwork offers a groundbreaking critique of modernity and its most salient ideas, both employing and parodying Hegel’s dialectical approach to deconstruct Christianity, humanism, liberalism, and, indeed, morality itself. Stirner’s rejection of universals and essentials anticipates existentialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernist thought generally, positioning the unique individual as the source of all value, unable to brace herself against anything more fundamental than her own arbitrary feelings and desires. Hostile to all fixed systems and ideologies, Stirner attacks capitalism, socialism, and every other political or economic vision, pointing the way to an anarchism that underscores the individual’s self-conscious attempts to create meaning for herself.
+del Rio, Antonio, 46, 420, 466
-Stringham, Edward Peter. Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life. New York: OUP 2015. This book offers a critique of legal centralism, which postulates that social order requires the provision of law as a public good by government. Many people implicitly believe that rules, governance, and social order can only be provided by the state; Stringham provides both theoretical and empirical evidence against this assumption, documenting private governance in diverse settings including internet commerce, early stock markets, and private policing in San Francisco. He argues that, as a matter of fact, most social rules and economic transactions are enforced through non-governmental means, in part because the transaction costs of enforcement greatly exceed the possible benefits of government enforcement. He suggests that this shows that order and stability cannot be attributed entirely or even mostly to government enforcement.
+Demarest, Arthur A., 499, 505
-— ——, ed. Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice. Oakland, CA: Independent 2007.
+Dillon, Brian, 447, 464
-This anthology compiles some of the best available essays on market anarchism, featuring many classic and contemporary arguments for anarchism in philosophy, economics, and history. It features explorations of anarchist theory, debates between anarchists and their classical liberal critics, essays on the history of anarchist thought, and empirical case studies of law enforcement without the state.
+directions, four cardinal, 66, bl, 316, 326, 387, 410, 426
-— ——, ed. Anarchy, State, and Public Choice. Cheltenham: Elgar 2005.
+temple trees as, 107, 109, 435, 485
-Offers a range of responses to economic arguments for the necessity or inevitability of the state. Reprints earlier essays by, among others, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, generally pairing later defenses with earlier critiques of anarchy.
+time and, 78, 83
-Tannehill, Morris, and Tannehill, Linda. The Market for Liberty. 3d ed. San Francisco: Fox 1993.
+disease, 44
-A detailed explanation of how the authors believe social cooperation could be managed without the state. Even if some of their observations are problematic, the Tannehills also sometimes exhibit a humane, often charming, hippie sensibility.
+in Copan, 322, 335, 336, 379, 489
-Taylor, Michael. Community, Anarchy and Liberty. Cambridge: CUP 1982.
+disembodied heads, 142, 243
-A rational-choice defense of a kind of communitarian anarchism. Argues that community plays a vital role in shaping the relations between people required for a stateless social order to be possible.
+“door” (ti yotof), 11
-— —— The Possibility of Cooperation. Cambridge: CUP 1987.
+doorways, 71–72, 104, 110, 358, 427 Dos Pilas, 179–195, 258, 319, 320, 379, 383–384, 389, 443, 452, 456, 487, 499, 505, 506
-Argues that traditional game-theoretic defenses of the state, notably those offered by Hume and Hobbes, are unsuccessful.
+Emblem Glyph of, 180. 458
-Tolstoy, Leo. Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism. New Haven: Phoenix 1990.
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, I8l, 182, 458
-———. The Kingdom of God Is within You. Trans. Constance Garnett. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 2014.
+in wars of conquest, 179–186, 2H-212
-Tolstoy argues that Jesus taught radical pacifism, and that the institutional church has betrayed this message. A return to the teachings of Jesus, Tolstoy argues, requires a rejection of violence in all its forms, especially including the violence of the state, which is, indeed, founded on violence. True Christianity thus leads, for Tolstoy, to anarchy.
+Double-Bird, king of Tikal, 174
-Tucker, Benjamin R. Individual Liberty. New York: Vanguard 1926.
+stelae of, 167, 173, 455
-In a moral, political, and economic treatise that represents anarchism without adjectives, Tucker outlines a vision of anarchism as total liberty for the individual—both from the state, and from predatory private actors that the state empowers.
+Dresden Codex, 396, 420, 421, 431, 489
-———. Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One. 2d ed. New York: Tucker 1897. [[http://fair-use.org][http://fair-use.]] [[http://fair-use.org][org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book]] (Aug. 16, 2020).
+drum censers, 101, 434
-A collection of key essays published by Tucker in Liberty, this book highlights Tucker’s radicalism and the range of his interests.
+drums, 100, 151, 184, 235, 277, 368
----------- , ed. Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order (1881—1908). Westport, CT: Greenwood 1970.
+Diittirig, Dieter, 473—474
-The journal Tucker edited contains a wide range of lively debates regarding the shape of human freedom.
+Dzibilchaltun, 51, 354, 496, 499
-Tullock, Gordon. The Politics of Bureaucracy. Washington, DC: Public Affairs 1965.
+earflares. 127, 141, 201, 486
-Tullock uses the economic way of thinking to explain the behaviors of political officials and regulatory actors. He applies the concepts of incentives, opportunity cost, and knowledge problems to questions regarding the actions of political officials within relevant institutional structures.
+of mask panels, 107, 111, 435–436 “earth” (cab), 21. 52, 53, 66, 317, 400, 426, 444, 486
-Vallentyne, Peter, and Steiner, Hillel, eds. Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave 2000.
+east (lakin), 6b, 426
-———. The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings. New York: Palgrave 2001.
+eccentric flints, 243, 409, 482
-“Left-libertarianism” can refer to anarcho-communism, to the style of individualist anarchism associated with a range of leftist political positions, or to a position that endorses individual self-ownership but common originary ownership of property in land. Vallentyne and Steiner collect a range of important historical and contemporary sources related to the last, broadly Georgist (or “Geoist”), position. Debates between left- and right-libertarians have implications for different conceptions of anarchy.
+Edmonson, Munro, 498, 501
-Van der Vossen, Bas. “Imposing Duties and Original Appropriation.” Journal of Political Philosophy 23.1 (2015): 64–85.
+-Rabbit, king of Copan, 315–319, 323–325, 326, 327, 329, 335, 341, 419, 424
-Distinguishes duty-creation from duty-activation and argues that the unilateral original acquisition of property does not amount to an objectionable imposition of duties on others, since it involves the activation rather than the creation of duties.
+stelae of, 312, 316, 322, 339, 484, 486, 492
-Van der Walt, Lucien, and Schmidt, Michael. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Edinburgh: AK 2009.
+as war captive, 317–319, 321, 337, 456, 486–187, 488, 493
-Van der Walt and Schmidt argue forcefully against the “big tent” model of historical anarchism. Instead, they insist that the ideology has always been rooted in the union-based model of activism that was pioneered by Mikhail Bakunin and that bore fruit in anarcho-syndicalism.
+Eliade, Mircea, 427–428
-Vrousalis, Nicholas. “Libertarian Socialism: A Better Reconciliation between Equality and Self-Ownership.” Social Theory and Practice 37.2 (Apr 2011): 211–226.
+Eliot, Steve, 507
-Social anarchism is characterized by its synthesis of libertarian and socialist commitments. Vrousalis offers an understanding of ways in which these commitments might be reconciled by prescribing common ownership of the means of production coupled with each person’s being afforded a protective “shell” of private property. The suggestion is that this shell protects a person’s effective self-ownership while the joint ownership of the means of production promotes the socialist values of democracy and community.
+El Mirador, 128, 130, 136, 140, 144, 174, 211, 422, 423, 434, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440 El Perú, 181, 456–437 El Salvador, 56, 307, 422 Emblem Glyphs, 58, 60, 423, 424, 429, 438, 444, 477–478
-Ward, Colin. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: OUP 2004.
+of Calakmul, 456–457, 466, 479
-———. Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom 1982.
+of Chichén Itzá, 363–364, 496, 502
-Anarchist history, theory, and practice from the perspective of the doyen of post-World War II English anarchism—good-natured, humane, and always thoroughly practical.
+of Copán, 309, 484
-Ward, Colin, and Goodway, David. Talking Anarchy. Nottingham: Five Leaves 2004.
+of Dos Pilas, 180, 458
-An extended conversation between anarchist icon Ward and historian Goodway that focuses on a broad range of anarchist activists, ideas, and prospects.
+of Naranjo, 186, 459
-Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Ed. Talcott Parsons. Trans. A. M. Henderson and Parsons. Oxford: OUP 1947 [1922].
+of Palenque, 49, 227, 468, 488
-Offers the standard definition of “state.”
+of Piedras Negras, 466
-Wellman, Christopher Heath, and Simmons, A. John. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? New York: CUP 2005. A debate between Wellman and Simmons on the question of whether there is a duty to obey the law, or at least certain laws issued by certain states. Wellman defends a Good Samaritan theory of obedience, which holds that we owe obedience as a way of helping our fellow citizens. Simmons argues that Wellman’s theory fails, and, in particular, that most theories of authority cannot explain why anyone owes obedience specifically to the government that happens to rule the geographic area in which that person resides as opposed to governments elsewhere.
+of Tikal, 141, 142, 153, 180, 207–208, 391, 441, 443, 456, 458, 459, 465–466, 484
-Welsh, John F. Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation. Lanham, MD: Lexington-Rowman 2010. Welsh carefully distinguishes Stirner from the existentialists and postmodernists to whom he is frequently compared, regarding him as offering a truly one-of-a-kind attack on modernism and humanism. Welsh’s book provides interesting comparisons of Stirner’s thought to, among others, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx, as well as a survey of some of the applications of Stirner’s thought by prominent egoists such as Benjamin Tucker and Dora Marsden.
+of Yaxchilán, 479
-Widerquist, Karl, and McCall, Grant S. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2017.
+England. Nora, 507
-A systematic attack on philosophers’ conceptions of the state of nature.
+face painting, 101, 151, 152
-Wilbur, Shawn P. The Libertarian Labyrinth: Mutualist Anarchism and Its Context. N.p. n.d. [[http://libertarian-labyrinth.org][http://libertarian-]] labyrinth.org (Aug. 16, 2020).
+Fahsen, Federico, 441, 442, 447, 450–451
-Wilbur offers insightful, literate anarchist social theory and commentary, in addition to a broad range of historical texts—the obscure as well as the relatively well known—by American and European anarchists (the latter sometimes available in translation for the first time).
+fairs, 92, 93, 433
-Wolff, Robert Paul. Defense of Anarchism. Berkeley: U of California P 1998.
+Fash, Barbara, 483, 489, 492–493, 494 Fash, William, 428, 431, 432, 483, 484, 485 486, 487, 488, 489, 491, 493, 494 festivals, 88, 91. 92, 93, 95, 144, 202, 264, 432
-This book defends the view that if we take personal autonomy seriously, we not only have a right to defy the state, but also a duty to reject its claim to authority. The authority of the state to make and enforce laws is inconsistent with our right to be autonomous and to act according to conscience. Wolff begins with the Kantian premise that people are autonomously self-legislating in the sense that they can and must independently determine how they should act in accordance with moral law. However, he maintains that this fact about persons is incompatible with their being obligated to comply with state-made laws in virtue of the fact that those laws are state-made. He also offers a brief statement of his preferred anarchist approach to managing the economy.
-</biblio>
-<br>
+of modern Maya, 42–43, 44, 45.
-** Index
-Page numbers in italics refer to information in figures and those followed by ‘n’ refer to chapter notes with the note number indicated by the number following the ‘n’.
+Fields, Virginia, 423, 449–450 “fire” (kak), 357, 360, 500 fire rituals, 200–203, 357, 373, 462–463, 500
-<br>
+“first” (yax), 332, 436–437, 440, 483, 492
-<biblio>
+First Father (GI’), 245–251, 254, 255–256, 260, 475 birth of, 252, 253, 472, 473 First Mesa Redonda of Palenque. 14, 49, 466
-Samuel 8 195, 197
-ableism 173, 175, 177, 181
+First Mother (Lady Beastie), 142, 231, 236, 245–251, 252–255, 256, 261, 474
-accelerationism 426, 427
+accession of, 247, 254, 476 birth of, 223, 246, 252, 472 473 bloodletting ritual of, 248, 254–255, 260
-acephalous societies 46—47
+Lady Zak-Kuk analogous to, 223, 227, 245, 252–253, 254 zac uinic headband of, 253–254 “fish-tn-hand” glyph, 254, 257, 268, 276, 357, 473, 480, 494 tlapstaff rituals, 274–275, 278. 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 303, 383, 481 flayed-face shield, 243, 409 flints, 201, 463
-Achenwall, Gottfried 100
+eccentric, 243, 409, 482 Flint-Sky-God K, king of Dos Pilas, 179–186, 188, 191, 194. 211–212, 383, 459, 461
-activism: anarchism as a social (activist) movement 17—18, 19, 20; anarcho-transhumanist criticism 419; anti-war activism 296; direct action to reject the policy framework 62—66, 67;
+marriage alliances of, 181, 183–186, 195, 320
-in freed-market anticapitalist anarchism 180; prison reform efforts 393—394, 402; rejecting anti-state violence 78—79; see also nonviolence;
+sons of, 181, 214, 458
-revolution
+stela of, 182–183
-adaption (to ecological crisis) 381, 386—388
+war captive of, 181, 183
-Adler, Max 139
+Follett, Prescott H. F., 447 forests, 59, 61–62, 306, 349 deforestation of, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
-administrative law societies 401, 401
+Förstemann, Ernst, 46
-adult supremacy 173, 175, 176, 181
+Forsyth, Donald, 422 fourfold pattern, sacred, 112, 116, 121, 149, 388, 394, 410, 426, 436, 437, 488, 505
-advertising industry 421
+see also directions, four cardinal
-Africa 46, 230, 263–266, 295, 422
+Fox, James, 496, 501, 502
-agorism 120, 314
+Fox, John W., 422, 505
-AI see artificial intelligence (AI)
+Freidel, David A., 15–16, 41, 42, 43, 44. 48 49, 404–405, 426, 458, 501, 505
-Alchian, Armen A. 223, 224
+Furst, Peter T., 427, 432
-Alexander, M. 396, 398
+GI, 245–251, 253, 257, 260, 413–414 434, 471–472
-Alexis-Baker, Andy 193
+GI’, see First Father
-Alexis, Nekeisha 191, 195
+G1I (God K: Kawil), 78, 143, 181, 211, 236, 245–251, 254, 257, 276, 289, 343, 384, 410, 414, 429, 473
-Allen, William 224
+Manikin Scepter of, 294, 295, 298, 301, 371, 389, 482
-altruism 117, 145, 167, 349, 357
+GUI, 142, 211, 245–251, 253, 257, 395, 414, 434, 436, 471 472
-analytical anarchism 4, 222–223, 231; anarchy as
+glyphic tags, 112, 436
-a starting point 226–228; mechanisms of (anarchic) cooperation 223, 225, 229–231, 262–269;
+God B (Chac-Xib-Chac), 70, 144–145, 151, 201, 242, 285, 323, 408, 489
-presumption of social disorder without the
+God C, 410, 426
-state 223–225, 228, 298
+God D (Itzamna), 366, 410
-anarcha-feminism 175 anarchism: Christian conceptions of 187, 188—191; classical roots 83—97; definitions of 1, 9, 15—24, 76–77, 99, 207, 309–310; history of2-4, 17; practical significance 9, 76–80; socialist roots 139 anarchist-ism 15, 17–20 anarcho-capitalism (ancaps): anarchist landscape 30–31, 32–33, 34, 35; and Christian anarchism 187–188, 196–200; crime problem 345, 347; emergence 30; forecast for anarchy 4, 312–314, 320; and free markets 30, 31, 33, 34, 119, 168–169, 343; law 313, 344, 345; need for capitalists 345, 349–353; and the nineteenth century individualists 30–31, 33, 126–127, 165–166; private property ownership 30, 31, 33, 35, 69n3, 118–119, 127, 164–165, 178, 229, 327–329, 342, 343–344; private security firms/ policing 32, 112, 119, 166, 313, 329, 343–344, 345, 348; pro-capitalist position 30, 31, 32, 34, 119, 121, 128, 168, 329, 345, 349–356, 357–358; Rothbard’s coining of the term 120; social stability 345, 353–357; social welfare 356–357; wage systems 31
+God K, see GII
-anarcho-communism: Cohen’s subliminal acceptance of the policy framework 57; economic calculation 117; post-revolutionary society 311–312, 316, 327; and Rothbard 118, 119, 172; and Stirner’s egoism 29, 146–147; and varieties of anarchism 28, 29, 30, 33, 53; see also Kropotkin, Peter; Malatesta, Errico
+“God K-in-hand” events, 311, 312, 317, 484
-anarcho-socialism see social(ist) anarchism anarcho-syndicalists 28, 116, 117–118, 297 anarcho-transhumanism: animal liberation 427;
+God L, 241, 243, 410–411, 471
-artificial intelligence (AI) 416, 426, 427, 428; contra-primitivism 421–424; defined 416; life extension 417, 419; practicality 419–421; technology 416, 418, 420, 421, 422, 424–425, 426, 427, 428; veganism 427
+god masks, 151, 209, 285, 370, 371, 398
-anarchy: acephalous societies 46–47; anarchy-ist concept of anarchism 15, 20–23; dilemma arguments for state vs. anarchy 39, 40, 46, 50; and economic development (Somalia) 227–228;
+God N (Pauahtun), 316–317, 325, 327, 329, 330, 410, 414, 486, 487, 489, 491
-forecasts of 309–321; meanings of 1, 4, 15, 77, 225, 226, 295, 309, 310, 320–321; non-state alternatives to anarchy 40–42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50; ontological anarchism 142; see also decentralization; mechanisms of (anarchic) cooperation; non-state institutions; state of nature
+gods, 38, 66, 67, 71, 84, 149, 429 giving birth to, through bloodletting ritual, 89, 259, 260, 425, 427, 475–476
-ancaps see anarcho-capitalism (ancaps)
+Graham, Ian, 420, 456, 458, 460, 461, 496
-Anderson, Elizabeth 63, 67, 174, 178
+graphic forms, 53–54
-Andorra 45, 46
+Great-Jaguar-Paw, king of Tikal, 144–149, 152, 153, 159, 162, 163, 165, 179, 195, 199, 348. 448, 464–465, 506
-Andrews, Stephen Pearl 28, 30, 35, 130, 146
+bloodletting ritual of, 149, 156–157, 443
-animal liberation 427
+name glyph of, 149, 440 Smoking-Frog’s relationship to, 155–157
-Annas, Julia 169–170
+stelae of, 144–145, 146, 442
-anti-vigilante principle 242–243, 328
+Grolier Codex, 421, 431
-anti-war activism 296
+Group of the Cross, Palenque, 233, 237–261, 268, 297, 419, 432, 464, 470–471
-Aquinas see Thomas Aquinas
+pib na of, 239, 242, 243, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258–260, 261, 470, 474, 475
-arbitration see dispute resolution
+reliefs on, 239–244
-Aristotle 5, 164, 172, 296, 339n16; Nicomachean Ethics 84, 92, 95; Politics 83, 84, 85–86, 87–88, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 95
+Temple of the Cross in, 14, 237, 239–240, 242–243, 246–247, 252–254, 255–256, 257, 259, 426, 429. 470, 472, 474, 476
-artificial intelligence (AI) 416, 426, 427, 428
+Temple of the Foliated Cross in, 237. 240–242, 243. 248–249, 254–255, 256, 257, 259, 471, 475
-Athens 41, 44, 46, 91
+Temple of the Sun in, 124–125, 237, 240–242, 243, 250–251, 256, 257, 258–259, 469, 471, 475
-Austin, John 282, 289
+texts on, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
-Austrian economics 248–251
+Grove, David, 464
-authority: condition of liberty (Rothbard) 164; God’s arky 191; household 83–84, 85; institutional power relations 365–379, 410; interpersonal domination 144, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 181; pirate ships 267, 268; religion 362; social norms 273; teachers 148, 176, 361, 362; Tolstoy’s rejection of 189; see also political authority
+Grube, Nikolai, 45, 420, 441. 446, 459, 474, 484, 487, 491, 492, 494
-autonomy: in the anarchy-ist sense of anarchism 21; chieftaincies 46; consumerism 147, 390n9;
+Guatemala, 39, 56, 307, 401, 420, 422, 424
-decentralization and green priorities 383, 387, 388; decentralized criminal justice system 400; demands of political institutions 214; and interpersonal domination 144, 147, 174, 175, 176; Kant’s autonomy of reason 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108; in natural rights doctrine 129, 164, 165, 170, 181; Political individualist anarchism 208–209;
+haab (365-day) calendar (vague year), 81, 83, 84
-poststructuralism 142; self-ownership 30, 53, 57, 118, 165, 178, 332, 335; state authority 44, 59; and technology 418, 420; of workers in capitalist firms and freed markets 178, 180; see also freedom
+Hammond, Norman, 421, 451, 453
-Bailey, F. G. 255
+Hansen, Richard, 422, 423, 434, 438 Harrison, Peter, 463, 464
-Bakunin, Mikhail: and the anarchist movement 18; market anarchism 116–117; on natural law theory 169; and new anarchism 211; on Proudhon 116; rejection of the state 3; on revolution 190, 296, 304; on science education 361, 362; and social anarchism 116—117, 123n13; split with Marx 209; and state violence 295, 296, 301, 302
+Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project, 15, 419
-banking 114, 169
+Hauberg Stela, 87, 423
-Barnett, Randy 4, 313—314
+Haviland, William A., 431, 433, 439, 462 headbands, 102, 115, 121, 135, 200, 253, 436, 439 pendants of, 102, 422 zac uinic, 253–254
-Bauwens, Michel 376
+Headband Twins, 411, 436, 466 headdresses, 147, 156, 211, 242, 277, 279, 370, 450, 454, 469, 481, 494, 503, 505 balloon. 146, 209, 444 Mosaic Monster, 164, 210, 453 tasseled, of Teotihuacan, 162, 452
-Benkler, Yochai 378
+Headrick, Annabeth, 500 heads, 287 disembodied, 142, 243 see also severed heads heart-extraction rituals, 357, 358, 369, 373, 503, 506 heir-designation rituals, 235–237, 239–241, 242, 298–301. 304. 432, 469–471
-Benson, Bruce L. 233n30
+helmets, 151, 153, 184, 268, 367 hematite, 94, 121, 201, 463
-Bentham, Jeremy 129, 140, 395, 396, 397
+Hero Twins, see Ancestral Hero Twins hieroglyphic stairs, 264, 283. 481
-Berg, Peter 382, 390n20, 390n23, 391n36
+at Copan, 312, 313, 319, 341, 427, 466–467, 484, 487. 488
-Berkman, Alexander 35, 53
+at Dos Pilas, 181, 182, 458 illegible resetting of, 194, 461 at Naranjo, 174, 178, 179, 184, 194–195, 461
-Bey, Hakim 142, 149n1
+at Palenque, 265, 477
-Bible references: 1 Samuel 8 195, 197; Colossians 2:15 194; Ephesians 6:13 192; Ezekiel 16.49 95; Galatians 2:10 200; Old Testament 191, 197, 199; Romans 13:1–7 187, 193, 194–195, 196, 197 bioregionalism 11, 381–389, 422, 424–425 Bitnation 320
+Hirth, Kenneth, 486 historical hypothesis, 46–49, 50, 171–172, 455, 477
-Black, Bob 20, 29, 147–148
+“holy” (chul), 71, 423, 426, 473 hom glyph, 148, 158, 184–186, 343, 373, 446–447, 459 460
-black and indigenous anarchism 176
+Honduras, 39, 56, 306, 317. 423, 485, 486
-black markets 120, 168
+Hopkins, Nicholas, 422, 424, 426, 431, 507
-Black Panthers 176
+hotun, 337, 338, 493
-Boettke, Peter J. 164, 259n4, 259n5, 260n30, 260n52, 261n59
+“house” (na; otot), 71, 256, 427, 491 Houston, Stephen, 45, 420, 421, 424, 441, 447, 455, 456–457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 474, 479, 481, 489. 499. 503, 505
-Bookchin, Murray 33, 35, 139, 143, 148, 170, 212, 389n6, 389n9, 390n17, 391n36
+“human being” (uinic), 81, 253, 377, 430, 500
-Boonin, David 394
+Hun-Ahau (Ancestral Hero Twin), 74–76, 436
-Borders, Max 319
+symbolized by Venus, 114–115, 125, 245
-Borsodi, Ralph 375
+incense, 100, 101, 228, 281, 369, 404 Incidents of Travels in Central America,
-Boulding, Kenneth E. 366
+Chiapas and Yucatan (Stephens and Catherwood), 46, 261, 466
-Bourne, Randolph 167, 295, 300
+Isla Cerritos, 351, 496, 498
-boycotts 67, 180, 226, 230, 262–263, 264, 267, 304
+Itzá Maya, 57, 396–401, 421, 497418 see also Chichen Itzá
-Boyd, Greg 195
+Itzamna (God D), 366, 410
-Boyd, John 378
+Ix-Chel (Moon Goddess), 366, 377, 378, 412–413, 502
-Brennan, Jason 55, 65, 66, 273, 333
+Ixlú, 389, 391, 506
-Brooks, David 93
+Izamal. 351, 498–499
-Bryant, Brandon 410
+Izapa, 74. 423
-Buber, Martin 140
+jade, 91, 92, 93, 94
-Buchanan, James M.: competitive federalism 257; constitutions against the predatory state 256; defense and peace economics 407, 408; incentive and knowledge problems in the provision of public goods 4, 44, 55, 223, 224, 225, 228, 229, 252, 292, 407; natural equilibrium 52n43
+in burial offerings, 56, 307, 308, 421.
-Buchanan, Patrick 118, 163
-Buckley, William F. 118 budgets 253, 317, 406, 411
+jewelry of, 102, 103, 120–121, 127, 200, 201, 211 463
-Bull, Hedley 4
+ritually broken, 103, 127. 201. 463 “jaguar” (balam, bahlum\ 52, 217, 466, 495
-bureaucracies see hierarchical bureaucracies
+jaguar imagery, 124—125. 143, 164, 211, 243, 444
-Bush, Winston 52n43, 224–225
+of mask panels, 112–114, 139, 440 Jaguar-Paw, king of Calakmul.
-Buterin, Vitalik 319
+–183, 191, 211–212, 213 accession of. 181–182. 184, 458 as war captive. 205–206. 211, 212, 214. 215, 457
-Byington, Steven T. 145
+Jaguar Sun God, 112–114, 124, 211, 243, 245, 260, 451 see also Gill
-calculation problem 121, 168–169, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409
+Jester God, 115. 135, 143, 201, 211, 253, 411, 422–423, 436, 437 jewelry, 93, 100. 115, 281, 397. 486 jade. 102, 103, 120–121, 127, 200, 201, 211. 463 pectoral, 102, 121. 135, 211, 439, 491–492
-Camus, Albert 139, 141, 142
+Jnnbal. 391
-capitalism: anarcho-capitalism’s pro-capitalist stance 30, 31, 32, 34, 119, 121, 128, 168, 329, 345, 349–356, 357–358; and anti-capitalist individualist anarchists 30, 31, 33–34, 112, 115, 121, 127, 146; and bioregionalism 388; capitalist hierarchies 177, 178–180, 181, 229; Christian anarchism 187–188, 189, 196–200; and companionship in the Aristotelian polis 95; competition in political capitalism 254, 257, 372–373, 376, 422; defining 15, 30, 342; egoist (post-left) anarchism 141, 146, 147, 148; freed-market anti-capitalism 171, 172, 179, 180; indoctrination through education 360–361; Marxist alternative to 311; mass production 371–372, 375, 376; in the policy framework 56, 61; and prison populations 395, 397, 401; Rothbard’s liberal class theory 167; social(ist) anarchist rejection of 32, 33, 116, 249, 328, 354; technologies and transhumanism 422, 426; violence against 296, 303, 304; see also private property; wage systems
+Johnson. Richard, 496. 505
-capitalist class 342, 343, 349–353, 354, 355, 357–358, 367
+Jones, Carolyn, 478, 493
-Carnap, Rudolf 16
+Jones, Christopher, 439, 440, 441, 448, 454, 455, 461–462, 464, 466
-Carson, D. A. 194
+Jones, Grant, 506
-Carson, Kevin 31, 121, 122, 179
+Jones. Tom, 470, 478, 480, 493 Joralemon, David, 426, 432 Josserand, J. Kathryn, 421, 422, 424, 507
-Carson, Stephen W. 188, 196, 197 cartels 167, 254–255, 369, 401, 401 Carter, Alan 26n44, 212
+Jupiter, 83. 147. 158, 163. 164, 192, 256, 268, 343. 438, 443–446.
-Carter, April 27n54
+. 456, 461, 473–474, 501 Justeson. John, 424, 430, 431
-categorical imperative 101–102, 104, 106
+Kaminaljuvu, 21, 162, 164, 442, 443,
-central banks 169
+’ 451. 452
-centralization: banking 169; community security forces 348; features of the modern state 44; government failure model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 398–401, 402; Hart’s theory of law 282–283, 289; legal positivism 281, 282; military technology 250–251, 406–412; nuclear reactors 425; policy framework 53–62, 67, 68–69, 395; power problem 4, 55, 172, 247, 248, 252–256, 257, 258, 292; pricing mechanism and calculative inefficiencies 121, 168–169, 171, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409; public goods justification for state 256–258; social control model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 395–398, 399, 401, 402; versus endogenous rule formation for economic development 227, 228; see also decentralization; hierarchical bureaucracies; socialism
+Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ of Palenque, 221, 223, 225, 468
-Chartier, Gary 31, 53, 121, 122
+Kan-Boar, king of Tikal. 167, 199, 454
-cheating 230, 262–263, 264, 267, 268; see also fraud Cherryh, C. J. 83
+Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, 243, 411–412
-Chesterton, G. K. 84
+Kan-Xul. king of Palenque, 223, 228–235, 419, 464
-chiefdoms 46–47
+as war captive, 392, 424. 468, 469, 476, 487
-children: education 90, 91, 175, 360–363; and Feser’s control thesis 332; household hierarchies 83;
+katun, 45, 78, 81. 144, 145, 209, 325, 338, 430, 442, 446, 451, 454. 467. 489, 494, 495
-population control in the Aristotelian polis 92–93; rights of and adult supremacy 173, 175, 176, 181; socialization of 346, 347; and suitable occupations in the Greek polis 91; victims of violence 79, 295; welfare systems 7
+prophecies of, 396, 397, 399–400
-China 316, 320, 422
+Kaufman, Terrence S., 422
-Chomsky, Noam 12n5, 15–16, 169, 211–212
+Kawil. see GII
-Christian anarchism 10; capitalism-socialism disagreement 188, 198–200; Christian conceptions of anarchism 187, 188–191; Christian market anarchism 187–188, 196–200; nonviolence 187, 188–189, 189–190, 191–193, 194, 198–199, 301, 304; state authority 4, 187, 188, 193, 193–196, 197
+Kelley, David. 49, 419, 420, 421, 443, 449, 457–458, 471, 477, 484, 486, 489, 496, 503
-Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre 187, 192, 193, 198, 201n17, 202n53
+kin (“day”: “sun”), 81. 112, 115, 145, 426
-Churchill, Ward 305
+kings, 17, 18, 19, 21, 43, 57, 58, 76, 90, 116, 120, 128–129, 363, 400 accession of, 5 9, 15 9–160, 242 charisma of 120, 128, 215, 217. 311, 427, 442
-Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 95 cis-heteropatriarchy 175, 181 cities: cosmopolitanism 423; late medieval Europe 42; making a consensual community 84–88; role of virtue 88–93; and Rousseau’s ideas on state authority 3; and transhumanism 423
+failure of, 128
-civil law societies 400, 401
+obligations of, 92
-CIW see Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) clans 44, 84, 85, 227, 228, 238
+propaganda of, 128, 149, 159–160, 163, 193, 437
-Clark, John P. 35, 146
+ritual performances of, 105, 108, 110–111. 114, 116, 117, 118–119, 121, 136, 139, 201, 295, 314, 435, 436, 485
-class: Aristotelian polis 84, 90–91, 93; business organization 376, 377, 379; capitalist elite 342, 343, 349–353, 354, 355, 357–358, 367; and distorted information flows 366; and education 360, 361, 362, 363; and Ellul’s views on violence 299; environmental protection 391n29; human capital 376; in liberal class theory 164, 166–168, 169, 171, 180, 181; and Marxist classless society 311, 312, 316; models of mass incarceration 393, 395, 396, 399, 402; post-left anarchists 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148; and questions of economic activity 8; see also capitalist class
+as shamans, 65, 66, 72–73, 87–88,
-Clegg, J. 396, 398
+. 105, 110. 427
-climate change 382, 383, 384, 386 club goods 224, 230, 257–258
+social system and, 65, 86–95, 97–98 state visits of, 92, 433
-Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) 64
+succession of, 59, 87, 121–122, 174, 256, 424, 431. 432, 456, 464 trade and, 90, 98, 101–102 tribute paid to, 91–92, 93, 94, 99, 178, 380, 442
-Coase, Ronald 223, 224
+victorious, history written by. 55, 271
-coercion: analytical anarchism 223, 227, 228; in the Aristotelian polis 86, 87, 88; consent and the mechanisms of political authority and political obligation 153–154, 156, 212; critical philosophical argument 218, 219; despotic rule 85, 86, 87–88, 92, 94; in education 361, 363; and egoism 133; engendering social relations 57; exclusionary property rights rights (initial appropriation) 329, 330–338; facilitating economic development 222, 227–228; failure of the ideology of power 420; and the features of political obligation 213, 214; free-market economics 115, 120, 121, 122, 127, 168, 171, 172; by green anarchists 386, 388; hierarchical bureaucracies 368, 377; ideological danger of the policy framework 60; individualist and communal anarchist differences 209, 211; justification of the non- consensual state 152–159; in Kant’s conception of a rightful state 70n15, 100, 106, 107, 108; law, non-coercive mechanisms of 284–288; law, obedience and enforcement of legal norms 281,
+wars of, see war, sacred; war captives: wars of conquest women as, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
-—290; and moral parity between state and nonstate actors 238, 239—240, 328; natural law theory as coercive imposition 169; non-physical interpersonal domination 173—180, 181; as objects of anarchist skepticism 21, 22, 23, 77, 152, 166, 207, 235, 310; open-source technology 319; pathologies of state 172, 250, 251, 255, 256; polycentric legal orders in times of emergency 8; putative social norms 271, 274, 277, 278, 279; right-wing collectivism 167; rulers 12n1; significance of arguments for anarchism 79, 80; social norms as an alternative to 7, 58, 59, 67, 273, 274, 278, 284; state monopoly on public goods provision 166, 344; state’s control of the police 166; the state’s de facto monopoly 158; taxation 6, 166, 250; and virtue 164; Weberian definition of state 43, 44, 45, 157, 299; workers in a capitalist government-dominated society 343
+as World Tree, 67–68, 90, 242–243 see also specific kings
-Cohen, G. A. 56–57
+kingship, 4, 52, 56–60, 63, 96–129, 260,
-Cohen, Ronald 51n21 colonialism 94, 298–299 Colossians 2:15 194 common law 119, 240, 286, 344, 400, 401 communal anarchism see anarcho-communism;
+, 317. 320, 338, 375–376, 380, 389, 422, 496
-social(ist) anarchism
+Ancestral Hero Twins as prototypes of. 115–116, 211, 239, 316, 376, 488
-communist anarchism see anarcho-communism
+cargo officials vs., 43 at Cerros, 98–129 community cooperation necessary to, 116. 119, 128
-community spirit 85, 277, 349
+emblems of, 141–142, 143 functions of, 98
-competition: analytical anarchism 223; anarchocapitalism 349, 354, 355, 356, 359; decentralised legal systems 290, 291; Freed-market anticapitalism 171, 172, 179; governance and prison populations 400, 401, 401; human nature 117, 346, 349; market anarchism 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 122; in natural states 48; political quasimarkets 257; polycentric governance 256–257, 400, 401; and price mechanisms 254–255, 344, 354–355, 372, 409; security forces 348; social(ist) anarchism 116, 344, 349, 354, 355, 356, 359; state intervention 80, 115, 171, 172, 180, 253, 254–255, 369–370, 372–373, 376, 425;
+invention of, 96–98, 128, 308, 434 symbols of, 68–69, 94. 139, 142, 201.
-varieties of individualism 28, 30, 31, 33–34, 112; workplace 114
+, 245, 294, 311, 312, 342, 393, 394, 440, 470
-conscript clienteles 368–369
+kinship, 45. 84–87, 253, 359–361. 422, 432
-consensual law 281, 284–285, 289, 292, 344
+clans in, 84–85, 133, 31 1, 431 “sibling” relationships in, 156, 360, 375,“449, 500. 504
-consent: consensual law 281, 284–285, 289, 292, 344; consensus-based stigmergic projects 377; creating political obligation 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 209, 215; exclusionary property rights 330, 337, 338; individual, collective and majority 5, 114, 152, 166; making a consensual community (classical roots of anarchism) 83–88; moral prohibition (natural rights) enforcement by non- consensual states 152–153, 156–157, 159; natural law theory 170; outgrowing governments 309, 310, 319, 321; and political authority 2, 3, 5, 114, 152, 153, 156, 157, 212, 330, 337; and the social contract 2, 298; in socialist anarchism 343; and the state’s de facto monopoly on coercion 153,
+yichan relationship in. 300, 303, 479
-–158; Tolstoy’s nonviolent revolution 189, 192; and transhumanist consensus 420, 426 copyright see intellectual property rights coronavirus pandemic (2020) 2 cosmism 419, 426 cosmopolitanism 57–58, 96, 423 courts see dispute resolution Covid-19 pandemic 2 Cowen, Tyler 224
+see also lineages
-Coyne, Christopher J. 224, 259n7, 259n11, 259n12, 260n31, 260n47, 260n51, 261n54, 261n59, 403n25, 407, 408, 410
+Kirchhoff. Paul, 420
-craft industry 375–376
+Knorozov, Yuri. 49, 421
-Creative Interventions 64, 66
+Kowalski, Jeff K , 496, 497. 504, 505
-credit agreements (pre-colonial Africa) 230,
+Krochock Ruth. 477. 496–497, 500.
-–266
+, 503
-crime: egoism’s freedom from fixed ideas 132, 136; overcoming through socialism 345–347; vice crime 1, 64–65, 236, 239, 240, 346, 396, 398; see also dispute resolution; policing; punishment critical philosophical anarchism 208, 210, 211–212, 215, 217–219
+Kubler, George, 419, 465, 497, 506 Kukulcan, cult of, 362, 371, 394—395, 506
-crypto-anarchism 309, 311, 312, 318–320 cybernetics 365, 419
+labor force, 91, 93, 94, 97, 136, 195, 215, 439, 442
-Dahl, Robert 292
+at Cerros, 106, 107, 116. 119, 122, 123
-D’Amico, D. 400
+Lady Beastie, see First Mother Lady Eveningstar of Calakmul and
-Dana, Charles A. 114
+Yaxchtlan, 269, 270, 272–273, 276–282, 293, 299, 301. 370, 479 bloodletting ritual of, 276, 279–280, 287, 291, 481 death of. 285, 291
-Dante Alighieri 95
+Lady Great-Skull-Zero of Yaxchilan, 275–282, 285, 287, 289, 295 bloodletting rituals of. 275–276, 280, 287, 292, 479 bundle ritual of, 298–301
-Dasmann, Raymond 390n23
+Lady Kanal-Ikal, king of Palenque, 221–223, 224, 467
-Day, Dorothy 191, 196, 203n76
+Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Dos Pilas and Naranjo, 183–186, 195, 221, 459, 460. 461, 478 bloodletting ritual of, 184 journey of, 183–184 son of, see Smoking-Squirrel, king of
-Dear, John 193
+Naranjo
-death 417
+stelae of, 184–185, 187–188, 190.
-decentralization: and anarcho-transhumanism 420, 423, 425, 426, 427; bioregionalism 11, 381–389, 422, 424–425; as a check on power 256–258; craft industry 375–376; government failure model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 398–401, 402; Self-managed and user-owned organizations 377–379; see also non-state institutions
+, 460 war captive of. 190 Lady Xoc of Yaxchilan, 265–271, 273, 276, 277–278, 282, 287. 288, 295. 296. 301. 479 age of, 269, 480
-Declaration of Independence (US) 5
+bloodletting rituals of, 266–268, 289–290, 291, 293, 478, 501
-De Cleyre, Voltairine 28, 31, 33, 35, 295–296, 303, 360, 362, 363, 418
+death of, 284, 285, 291, 478 unusual prominence of, 268, 478
-defense see national defense
+Lady Zak-Kuk, king of Palenque, 221, 223–225, 227–228, 266, 467. 468, 478
-defense and peace economics 250–251
+First Mother analogous to, 223, 227, 245, 252–253, 254
-Dejacque, Joseph 30, 32, 419
+name glyph of, 227, 468 political ability of, 224—225
-de Ligt, Bart 192
+Lamanai. 128, 136, 436, 437, 438, 505
-democracy: collapse of communism 228, 316;
+Landa, Bishop Diego de, 425, 433, 464, 500, 501, 502, 504
-democratic federations 171; discourages multiple points of view 66; domination and violence 295, 296, 304, 372; electoral system 66, 166, 252–253, 254, 256, 343, 348; exogenous imposition 227, 228; in the Greek polis 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 96; and green decentralization 382, 386, 388; Hayek’s theory of emergent law 292; and mass incarceration 394, 396, 397, 398, 402; New Left’s participatory democracy 179; pirates 231, 267, 268; political elites 88, 253–254, 343, 349; replacing the doctrine of divine right 5; Rousseau on 3; socialist anarchy 343, 352
+La Pasadita, 301–302, 329
-Demsetz, Harold 232n11, 261n67
+Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro, 452, 463
-Der Eigene (periodical) 144
+Larios, Rudy, 483, 485
-developing nations 227, 228, 406; see also Africa
+Laughlin, Robert, 43
-Digital Millennium Copyright Act 376
+La Venta, 38, 315, 422, 423, 486, 492
-Diogenes Laertius 84, 96
+Leiden Plaque, 143, 144, 441
-Diogenes of Sinope 96 direct action see activism disabled people 92, 173, 175, 177, 181 dispute resolution: consensual law 281, 284, 285, 292; Deioces’s story 89; emergent law 284, 286; international commerce 226; Kant’s defense of state 99, 100, 108; private arbitration services 94, 119, 288, 289–290, 291, 292, 313, 319, 320, 343, 344, 345; social norms 7, 279, 288; state 6, 7, 80, 166, 247, 271, 302
+Leyenaar, Ted J. J.. 429
-distributive justice: in the ancient polis 87; fair pay 352–353; Greek polis 87, 95; methodological anarchism 63, 68; policy framework 53, 54–57, 58–59; social(ist) anarchy 337; in the state of nature (Kant) 100
+Lincoln, Charles, 497, 499, 500, 503 lineage compounds, 88, 158–159, 203, 308, 501
-diversity: interpersonal domination 32, 173–180, 181; and social norms 277, 278–279, 280
+benches in, 328–330, 491 patriarchs of, 328–329 of scribes, at Copan, 85, 316–317, 329–330, 345, 431
-Divine Will 129
+lineages, 57, 84–87. 125, 201, 208, 319, 422, 431. 432, 438, 484
-Dixit, Avinash K. 225
+matrilineal descent in, 270, 271, 360, 363–364, 366, 502; see also Chan-Bahlum, king of Palenque; Pacal the Great, king of Palenque
-Dodge, Jim 382, 389n4, 391n27, 392n41
+patrilineal descent in, 84—85, 94, 133, 431
-Donisthorpe, Wordsworth 30, 31, 35
+logographs, 52, 421
-drugs 1, 64–65, 236, 239, 240, 346, 396, 398
+Long Count, 81–83, 399, 430^31, 442, 451
-Dunn, James D. G. 202, 259
+zero date of, 82, 83, 507
-Durkheim, Emile 300
+Lord Kan II. king of Caracol, 171,
-Dworkin, Ronald 56
+, 174, 176–178. 189–190, 212, 320, 455
-eco-anarchism 11, 381–389, 422, 424–425
+Lords of Death, 74–76, 77, 124, 125, 126, 235, 243, 316, 383
-ecological crisis (green anarchism) 11, 381–389, 420, 424
+Lords of the Night, 81, 82, 156, 449, 473
-Eddy, Paul Rhodes 195
+Lord Water, king of Caracol, 171.
-education: access in different types of social order 48, 49; anarcho-capitalism 356; children’s freedom 176, 361–362; China 316; conscript clienteles 369; curricula 361–363; doctors 254; Greek polis 90, 91; marginalized people 175; as methodological anarchism 62; non-state providers 361; as a process of socialization and propaganda 148, 316, 360–361; state monopoly 166
+–174, 195, 348, 455, 462
-egoism: civilization and work 147–148; and communism 146–147; Egoism-versus-Morality debate (Liberty) 9, 126, 128, 129, 130–137; ethics of 29; and existentialism 139, 141–142; and freedom 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 145; and human perfectability 140; and poststructuralism 139, 142; and revolution 142–143, 145; ruling out natural rights (Stirner and Tucker) 130, 169; and sexual liberation 144; Stirner’s anti-Hegelelian arguments 146; varieties of individualists 28–29, 144–146
+accession of, 173
-Egoist, The (periodical) 29, 140, 144
+sons of, 174, 176, 456
-Eigene, Der (periodical) 144
+Lothrop, Samuel K , 506
-Der Eigene (periodical) 144
+Lounsbury, Floyd G, 49. 421, 429, 431, 440, 443–444, 458, 461, 467, 468, 470, 471, 472, 473, 479
-electoral system 66, 166, 252—253, 254, 256, 343,
+Love, Bruce. 463
-; see also voters
+“Macaw Mountain,” 335, 483
-eleutheria 90
+Machaquila, 385
-Eliot, T. S. 144
+MacLeod, Barbara, 427, 429
-Eller, Vernard 4, 188, 190–191, 194, 196
+MacNeish, Richard S., 421
-Ellickson, Robert C. 229
+Madrid Codex, 396, 421, 431
-Elliot, Michael 192
+Mah-Kina-Balam, king of El Peru. 181, 457
-Elliott, Michael 192
+maize, 19, 38, 99, 243, 259, 260, 281, 307, 321, 335
-Ellul, Jacques: anarchy 190, 191; rendering unto Caesar 196; state validity (1970s trends) 4; views on violence 189–190, 192, 198–199, 297, 299, 300, 302, 304, 305
+“male-genitalia” glyph, 363–364, 483
-emergent law 281, 284, 285–286, 288, 289, 290, 291–292
+Maier, Teobert, 46, 48, 262, 476 Manikin Scepter, 294, 295, 298, 301, 371, 389, 482
-empire: Indian resistance to 304; as non-anarchic non-state 40, 44, 46, 49, 50; social contract theory 298–299; union of egoists 133; US as 167, 407
+Marcus, Joyce, 423, 452, 456. 457, 466, 484, 487, 488
-Engels, Friedrich 52n44, 139, 146, 311, 312, 327 Enlightenment thinkers: defence of the state 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 40, 50, 99–109, 162n42, 298; prison as standard punishment 396, 397
+markets, 92–93, 433 marriage alliances, 59, 158, 215, 265, 443, 458
-Enns, P. 396
+of Bird-Jaguar, 273, 294
-environmentalism see green anarchism
+marriage alliances (continued) of Flint-Sky-God K, 181, 183–186, 195, 320
-Ephesians 6:13 192
+of Shield-Jaguar, 270–271, 479
-Epictetus 96
+of Smoke-Shell, 319, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
-Escola Moderna (Italy) 362
+Mars, 192, 256, 343, 473–474 mask panels, 15, 106, 108–109, 111–115, 116, 120, 121. 133, 164, 211, 435–437, 498 earflares of, 107, 111, 435–436 jaguar imagery on, 112–114, 139, 440 at Tikal, 169–170, 454 at Uaxactun, 136–139, 169, 439–440 masks, god, 151, 209, 285, 370, 371, 398
-Ethereum network 319–320
+“mat” (pop), 440, 492
-ethics: anarchist violence 305; animal liberation 427;
+Matheny, Ray T., 434
-artificial intelligence 428; Christian anarchism 188, 193, 199, 202n56; and the classical roots of anarchism 88–93, 95, 96; conceptions of anarchism 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 426–427; differently abled people 428; and Kant’s moral philosophy (on leaving the state of nature) 100, 101–109; market anarchism 112, 114, 121; post-left anarchism 148;
+Mathews, Peter, 14, 49, 421. 423, 424, 430, 431, 432, 440, 441, 442, 443, 447. 448, 450, 454, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 474, 477. 478, 479, 484, 506 matrilineal descent, 270, 271, 360, 363–364, 366, 502 see also Chan-Bahlum, king of
-problem of political obligation 216; varieties of anarchism 29; veganism 427; see also morality eudaimonism 169–170, 172
+Palenque; Pacal the Great, king of Palenque
-Europe: European Union 46; France 3, 41, 42, 49, 255, 303, 317, 400, 401, 406; medieval political arrangements 5, 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 226; Spain 117–118
+Maudslay, Alfred P., 46, 470, 476
-existentialism 139, 141
+Maw of the Underworld, 69–70, 72, 327, 332, 412
-Ezekiel 16.49 95
+Maya, 17–33, 37–95 bilingual, 5O--51 Christian conversion of, 396–401 chronology of, 26–33, 55- 60 diet of, 99, 101, 131, 434 fatalism of, 400, 507 height of, 195, 198, 471 highland, 38, 42, 43, 57 lowland, 38, 50–51, 56, 57. 59, 61, 346
-F-35 Lightning II jets 411–412
+political geography of, 57–60, 215, 261
-FAI see Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)
+population of, 57, 423, 424 region settled by, 22–25, 37–39, 40–41, 51
-fair pay 114, 116, 352–353, 354
+social system of. see social system technology of, 60–61, 96–97, 346, 433–434, 495
-fair play theory 156, 238–240
+world view of, 19, 38, 52, 56, 64–77 writing system of, see writing system Maya, modern, 39—45, 50, 65, 309, 330, 332, 401 403, 404–405, 424, 426, 429, 470
-fall-out objection 242, 243
+division of labor in, 42 extended families of, 39–40, 45, 84, 97
-fascism 34, 420
+festivals of, 42–43, 44, 45, 92 oral traditions of, 44, 54, 74 public officials of, 42–43, 44, 428 rituals of, 42, 44, 94 shamans of, 44 45, 72, 401, 405, 427, 485
-Faure, Sébastien 327
+Mayan, 39, 421, 426, 427 pronunciation of, 20–21
-Fedako, Jim 196, 197
+Mayapan, 398, 501–502
-federations 28, 117, 171, 190, 257, 286, 338, 361, 384–385, 401
+Cocom family of, 361–363, 371, 396, 499, 502
-feedback mechanisms: cybernetics 365, 419; elections as 252, 253; hierarchical bureaucracies 365, 367, 369, 371, 375, 377, 379, 398; information technology 420, 421; military policy and technology 407–408, 409, 410; output measures and central planning 249–250; price signals 168, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–249, 250, 251, 408–409; profit and loss 247, 248–249, 250, 253, 258, 410; ‘whispering down the lane game’ 253
+Means, Philip A., 506, 507 merchants, 92, 93, 351, 433 Mesoamerica, 18, 37–38, 56, 81, 142, 254, 367, 401, 420, 444
-Feldman, Martha 367
+Mexican Year Sign, 412, 443, 444 Mexico, 37, 39, 56, 97, 163, 346, 349, 374–375, 396, 497, 501
-feminism 32, 122, 144, 173, 175, 178, 181
+Middleworld, 66, 67, 74, 76, 425 Mije-Zoquean languages, 97, 422 Miller. Arthur G., 454. 503
-Ferguson, Adam 3, 285
+Miller, Jeffrey, 440, 456, 457, 458 Miller. Mary E., 404, 424, 425, 426, 427, 432, 441, 444, 447, 471, 481, 489, 503, 505, 506
-Ferrer, Francisco 362 Feser, Edward 330–332 feudal system 41–42, 399 Fiala, Andrew 305 Finer, S. E. 51n8 Floyd, George 2 Forman Jr., James 398 Foucault, Michel 142, 209, 395 Fourier, Charles 113 fragile natural states 48 Fragile States Index (FSI) 227 France 3, 41, 42, 49, 255, 303, 317, 400, 401, 406 Franks, Benjamin 16, 17, 26n47, 212 fraud 67, 199, 230, 258, 267, 268; see also cheating freed-market anti-capitalism 179–180 freedom: anarcho-transhumanism 416, 418, 419, 420, 422, 426, 427, 428; and the classical roots of anarchism 85, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 91–92, 95, 96; education 176, 361–362; egoism’s freedom from fixed ideas 14, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 142; Godwin’s human perfectibility 140; in Kant’s justification of state 100, 101, 102, 105–106, 107, 108; of labor 311; libertarianism 30, 121; Marxism 310, 312, 316; maximization of aggregate human happiness (Spencerian utilitarianism) 129–130; open-access orders 47, 48–49; Rothbard’s natural law theory 164–165, 169, 170, 181; selfgovernance 93, 166, 211, 257–258; social contract theory 298; social(ist) anarchism 116, 209, 210, 211, 343, 356; see also autonomy; coercion
+Miller, Virginia, 497
-free-market capitalism see capitalism
+Millon, René, 444, 453, 465 mirror-image texts, 326 mirrors, 393
-free markets: Austrian economics 119, 168–169, 171, 179, 180, 188, 196, 198, 200, 248–249; complete market model 227; contestability 257; and ecological anarchism 387–388; failures of and government intervention 223; open-access orders 48; in the policy framework 61; power problem (of state provision) 247, 248, 252–256, 257, 258, 349, 407, 408, 410–412; socialist/individualist types of anarchism 28, 29, 53; underprovision of public goods 6, 223–224, 250–251, 407, 408; see also capitalism; market anarchism; price mechanisms
+mosaic, 121, 201, 394, 437, 463 Moholy-Nagy, Hattula, 452
-Freiman, Christopher 55
+Molloy, John P., 459
-Friedenberg, Edgar Z. 368–369 Friedman, David 4, 30, 32, 313 Frye, Marilyn 177, 178 Fuller, Lon L. 291
+money, 38, 92–93, 94, 405
-Galatians 2:10 200
+Monte Alban, 162, 444, 452
-Galbraith, John Kenneth 371–372, 374–375
+months (uinic, uinal), 81, 82, 83, 430 moon, 81, 83, 201, 245, 256, 459, 473–474
-Gambetta, Diego 225
+Moon Goddess (Ix-Chel), 366, 377,
-Gambone, Larry 116
+, 412–413, 502 Moon-Zero-Bird, king of Tikal, 143, 144, 441
-Gandhi, Mohandas K. 304
+Morales, Alfonso, 488, 490
-Garland, D. 396
+Morley, Sylvanus G., 47, 420, 484, 486, 494
-Garrett, Garet 118
+Morris, Ann Axtell and Earl H., 502 mosaic mirrors, 121, 201, 394, 437, 463 Mosaic Monster, 164, 205, 210, 453 Motul de San José, 291, 294, 295, 388 “mountain” (witz), 68, 71, 427, 479 mountains, 67, 225, 335, 471
-Gelderloos, Peter 305
+temple pyramids as, 71–72, 106, 121, 239
-gender 144, 416; see also women
+multepal government, 357, 359–364, 370–371, 374, 501, 502
-Genesis DAO 320
+murals, 305, 371–373, 503
-George, Henry 133–134
+at Bonampak, 87, 298, 424, 444, 447, 458, 462, 463, 464, 470, 506
-Glaeser, E. 400
+at Teotihuacan, 158, 162, 164, 451, 453
-Global Hawk Block 30 409, 411
+at Tikal, 133, 134
-Godwin, William 3, 18, 26n51, 113, 140, 149n14, 360, 361, 416, 418
+at Uaxactun, 449
-Goldman, Emma 29, 35, 146, 147, 211, 303, 360, 361–362
+mythology, see creation mythology: Popol Vuh
-good-faith objection 242
+Nah Tunich, 51, 183, 457, 459 Nakamura, Seiichi, 423 Nakbe, 422, 423, 438–439 Naranjo, 58, 181, 183–195, 258, 319, 320, 384, 423, 432, 457, 462 conquered by Caracol, 174–179, 205, 211, 212, 214, 317. 478, 499
-Goodman, Paul 370, 372–373
+Emblem Glyph of, 186, 459 Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 174, 178, 179, 184, 194–195, 461
-Gordon, Uri 17–18, 19–20, 21, 212
+Ucanal conquered by, 189–190, 194–195, 205, 212, 213, 460–461, 499
-governance: city-states 45, 85, 86, 88–89; crypto networks 318–320; and mass incarceration 393, 394, 398–401, 402; non-anarchic alternatives to state 40–42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50; political quasimarkets 257; surveillance 305, 316, 320, 377, 410; see also analytical anarchism; law; public goods; social norms
+Yaxhâ conquered by, 181, 191–192, 212, 213, 452, 499
-government failure model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 398–401, 402
+Naum-Pat, 377–379, 400
-Graber, Mark 292
+nobility (ahauob; cahalob), 17, 18, 21, 43, 60, 65, 88, 89, 133, 134, 145. 200, 231, 235, 294, 351, 354, 441, 442
-Graeber, David 1, 4, 18, 20, 37n45, 373
+Bird-Jaguar and, see Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilân
-Grasse, Pierre-Paul 378
+comparative robustness of, 135–136, 380, 397, 433, 439, 506
-green anarchism 11, 381–389, 422, 424–425
+of Copan, 311, 314–315, 316–319, 320, 322, 325, 328–330, 335, 337–338, 341, 487
-Greene, William B. 28, 30, 35, 114, 115, 146
+ethnic markers of, 385, 387
-Green, Leslie 212, 216
+life-style of, 92, 480, 506
-green technologies 422, 424–425
+rationale for, 98, 434
-Grotius, Hugo 298
+state visits of, 92, 93, 433 in temple pyramid rituals, 118 titles of, 58–59, 85, 94, 358, 360, 374, 424, 431, 469, 501
-Guerin, Daniel 144, 170
+see also Chichén Itza
-Harappa 423
+Nohmul, 159, 451, 501 north (xaman), 66, 426, 472, 477 numbers, 81, 429
-Harel, Alon 243–244, 245
+arithmetic with, 92, 433
-Hart, H. L. A. 238–239, 277, 282–283, 284, 289
+sacred, 78, 108
-Hauerwas, Stanley 194
+in writing system, 82 numerology, 84, 253. 429, 431, 472, 476
-Hayek, Frederick A. 121, 249, 255, 285, 286, 290, 291–292, 388, 407, 409, 412
+obsidian, 93, 102, 131–132, 152, 153, 184, 201, 463
-Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 131, 146
+bloodletters, 90, 202, 233, 275, 404, 432
-Heinlein, Robert 314
+green, 159, 351, 451, 453 offerings, 131, 134- 135, 200–201, 404, 469
-Herbert, Auberon 30, 31, 35, 361
+in burials, 56, 134, 307–308, 421, 483 dedicatory, 94, 104, 106, 120–122, 123, 127, 145, 328, 435, 437–438, 491
-Herodotus 89–90, 94
+flowers as, 104, 106, 435
-Hess, Karl 120–121, 122
+plates for, 200, 463
-Heywood, Ezra 28, 145–146
+Olmec, 38, 56, 84, 105–106, 142, 164, 254, 307. 422, 428, 430, 431, 464, 483, 487
-hierarchical bureaucracies 8; bureacratic rationality 370; counterproductivity 368; criminal justice systems and mass incarceration 394, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402; Department of Defense (US) 409, 410–412; discretionary budgets 253; distorted information flow 253,365–366, 367; individual initiative 370–371, 373, 374; negative externalities 367—368, 370, 371; post-capitalist transition 374—376; reification of clienteles 368—369; survival of the irrational system 371—374
+Orejel, Jorge. 487
-hierarchy: anarchist landscape 32; capitalist 177, 178—180, 181, 229; chiefdoms 46—47; conceptual analysis of anarchism 21, 22, 24; in education 361, 369; feudal system 41, 42; household 83–84;
+Otherworld. 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 89, 98, 104, 111, 225, 232, 241, 260. 404, 405, 425, 426, 485 owl, as symbol, 156–157, 394, 443, 444, 449–450, 506
-Jesus’s kingdom 191; nineteenth century libertarianism 32; panopticism and holoptism 377; primitivism 147; and Proudhonian equality 115; see also hierarchical bureaucracies; interpersonal domination
+Pacal I of Palenque, 222–223, 467
-Higgs, Robert 255, 403n4, 410
+Pacal the Great, king of Palenque, 14, 21. 82, 121, 156, 217–237, 260–261, 265, 305, 316, 382, 419, 430, 432, 449, 477 /
-Hobbes, Thomas 31, 226; on indigenous people 298–299; justification of the state 2, 3, 4, 40, 50, 99, 100, 101, 135, 298; on the natural condition 2, 40, 99, 108, 226, 298–299; underlying the policy framework 55
+accession of, 224, 474 birth of, 223, 252, 467, 472–473 burial costume of, 229–230, 242, 469
-Hodgskin, Thomas 3, 28, 35
+burial of, 228–235, 468, 469 dynastic claims of, 217–224, 227–228, 467
-holoptism 377
+great-grandmother of, 221–223, 224, 467
-Holterman, Thom 4
+in Group of the Cross reliefs and texts, 242–243, 252–253, 255, 470–471
-Homer 83
+mother of, see Eady Zac-Kuk, king of Palenque
-Hoppe, Han -Hermann 173, 181
+plaster portraits of, 231–232, 261, 469
-Horn, Norman 196, 197
+sarcophagus of, 217, 219, 221, 225–226, 228, 229–233, 236, 261, 398, 467, 468, 469, 494
-Horton, John 209, 210, 213, 215
+tomb of, 217, 221, 225–227, 228–233, 261, 469
-Huemer, Michael 65–66, 237, 238–239, 242, 327–329, 330, 334, 336, 337
+wife of, 469
-Huemer test 237, 238–239, 242
+Pacay, Eduardo “Guayo,” 402–403 Paddler Gods, 389, 391, 412, 503 Pahl, Gary, 484
-human nature: in an anarcho-capitalist society 345, 349; in anarchy-ist conceptions of anarchism 20, 21, 24; bioregionalism 384; capacity for selfregulation 209; in a communal anarchist society 117, 346–347; and natural law 170, 287; and panopticism 377; slavish dispositions 85; social disposition 83, 99–100, 165, 210; and socialist businesses 354; and state of nature 47, 99–100, 321
+Palenque, 13–14, 15, 16, 38, 49, 50, 51, 58, 87, 216–261, 265, 316, 346, 351, 396, 400, 419, 421, 423, 424, 431, 433, 438, 449, 452, 465. 466–476, 487, 501 architecture of, 216, 217, 225, 467 collapse of, 217, 381–382 Copan and, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
-Hume, David 2, 3, 106, 275, 287
+Emblem Glyph of, 49, 227, 468, 488 Group of the Cross at, see Group of the Cross, Palenque
-Huxley, Aldous 314
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 265, 477 Palace at, 225
-Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 117
+Tablet of the 96 Glyphs of, 402, 507 Temple of the Count at. 225
-Illich, Ivan 368
+Temple of the Inscriptions at, 13, 217–237, 258, 430, 432, 467, 468, 474, 477
-imaginative immersion 287–288
+Temple Olvidado at, 225, 467—1–68
-immigration 86, 175, 227, 247, 252, 313, 419
+women as kings of, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
-imprisonment 243–245, 377; see also mass incarceration
+Palenque Triad, 142, 223, 245–251, 252, 256, 257, 259–261 413–414, 471–472, 474, 475 see also GI: GII: Gill
-incarceration 243–245, 377; see also mass incarceration
+paper, 18, 50, 74, 421, 431, 433, 463
-incentives see perverse incentives; power problem
+as bandages 152
-India 304, 316, 422
+bloodletting and, 89, 101, 202–203, 233, 235, 275
-indigenous people 45, 94, 176, 265–266, 298–299
+in fire ritual, 202–203
-indirect utilitarianism 126, 128, 129, 130–137 individualist anarchism 8, 9, 18, 28–30, 208–209,
+Paris Codex, 421, 431
-, 310, 314, 327; see also anarcho-capitalism (ancaps); egoism; Godwin, William; Liberty (periodical); market anarchism; Proudhon, Pierrre- Joseph; Rothbard, Murray Newton
+Parker, Joy, 16
-Ingalls, Joshua King 146
+parry sticks, 364–365, 502
-Ingle, David 301
+Parsons, Lee, 422
-initial appropriation 329; colonialism 94, 298–299; compensation accounts 330, 332–335;
+Pasztory, Esther, 453
-expropriation of labor 335–336; transformation and control 127, 330–332
+Patio Quad structures, 358, 501 patriarchs, 42, 56–57, 72, 85, 92, 97, 133, 201, 307, 319
-institutions 3, 4–8, 9, 77, 310, 418; Christian anarchism 188–189, 190; crypto-anarchy 309, 311, 312, 318–320; direct action (methodological anarchism) 62–66, 67, 68; egoist rejection of 144, 147, 148; features of the modern state 43–44; of interpersonal domination 32, 173–180, 181; and justice as a constituent of state 53; labor unions 58, 63–64, 67, 117, 144, 370, 374; mechanisms of (anarchic) cooperation 223, 225, 229–231, 262–269; methodological anarchism 9, 53–54, 55, 62–69, 310; in the policy framework approach 53, 54–62, 67, 68; and the political obligation problem 207, 210, 211, 212–219; polycentricity 4, 7, 256–257, 398–399, 400, 401; to contain violence in limited-access and open-access societies 47–48; voluntary mechanisms securing property rights (analytical anarchism) 225, 226, 227, 228–231; see also education; free markets; hierarchical bureaucracies; law; national defense; policing; political authority; prisons; private policing; private property; public goods; social norms
+ofCerros, 100–103, 110
-intellectual property rights 369–370, 376, 422, 426 internet 377, 378, 417, 418, 420, 421, 426 interpersonal domination 32, 173–180, 181
+of Cocom family, 361–362
-Jaworski, Peter 55
+of lineage compounds, 328–329 patrilineal descent, 84–85, 94, 133, 431 Pauahtun (God N), 316–317, 325, 327, 329, 330, 410, 414, 486, 487, 489, 491
-Jensen, Derrick 305
+pectoral jewelry, 102. 121, 135,211, 439, 491–492
-Johnson, Charles W. 31, 121, 122, 175, 179
+Pendergast, David M., 451
-Joyce, James 144
+penis perforation, 89, 111, 149, 202, 233, 281, 286, 426, 447
-Jun, Nathan 21, 192
+Personified Perforator, 243, 255, 287, 414, 470, 479
-jurisdictional competition 257
+phonetic complements, 52, 447, 466 phoneticism, 49, 50, 421, 446 pib na, 239, 242, 243, 253. 255, 256, 257, 258–260, 261, 470, 474, 475
-justice: anarchist infighting 53; and the authority of the state 3, 170; Christian anarchism 199; cosmopolitanism 57–58; direct action (methodological anarchism) 54, 62, 63–66, 67, 68; egoist conception 126, 131, 132, 133, 140; emancipatory doctrines against interpersonal domination 32, 173–180, 181; in fair play theory 239; and free-market competiton 115; and majority rule 87, 92; in the policy framework approach 53, 54–62, 67, 68; scientific socialism 140; and social norms 58, 59, 60, 274; and the state of nature 86, 99, 100, 107, 108, 298; see also crime; distributive justice; natural law
+pictun, 81, 430
-Kant, Immanuel 2, 3, 9, 99–109, 162n42, 298
+Piedras Negras, 264, 433, 437, 443, 455, 468, 477, 481, 493
-Kelly, John F. 128, 129, 130, 132, 133–134, 135, 136 Keyt, David 87 Kinna, Ruth 25n27 Kirchheimer, O. 395
+Emblem Glyph of. 466
-Knight, Frank 255
+Pomona conquered by, 382–383, 452, 505
-knowledge problem (central economic planning) 121, 168–169, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409
+state visits to, 265, 303–305, 494 platforms, 72, 106–107, 118, 123–124, 125, 132–133, 136
-Konkin, Samuel E. III 30, 120
+at Copan, 324, 327, 485, 486
-Kropotkin, Peter: and Christian anarchists 203n76; early foundations of anarchism 3; on education 362, 363; on human nature 26n51; industrial decentralization 375; influence on new anarchism 211; and market anarchism 35, 112, 116, 117; on private ownership 341; on Proudhon 116; on revolutionary means 296; state’s synonymy with war 295; and varieties of anarchism 29, 32, 33, 35
+houses on, 120
-Labadie, Joseph A. 149n19
+at villages, 101, 434
-Labadie, Laurance 146
+plazas, 38. 70–71, 106, 108, 117–118, 119, 266, 314, 425
-labor: division of 114, 165, 168, 225, 231, 311, 387, 388; labor-mixing theory 113—114, 118, 127, 164—165, 330—331, 335—336; resource allocation 350; social control model of mass incarceration 395—396; see also workers
+Pohl, Mary, 506
-labor-mixing theory 113—114, 118, 127, 164—165, 330–331, 335–336
+pole star, 66, 256, 472
-labor movement 58, 63–64, 67, 117, 139, 144, 147, 370, 374
+political geography, 57–60, 215, 261
-Landauer, Gustav 296, 303, 304, 305, 306 Landstreicher, Wolfi 29, 147
+Pomona, 382–383, 452, 505
-La Porta, R. 400
+Popol Nah (council houses), 200, 336–337, 367, 369, 371, 463, 492–193
-Lavoie, Don 172, 258n1
+Popol Vuh, 74–76, 77, 126, 245, 399, 425, 428, 429, 435, 436, 468, 473, 475–476, 487–488 population, 57, 423, 424
-law: the anarchist’s end-goal in the policy framework 54; in anarchy-ist conceptions of anarchism 21, 22; and the classical roots of anarchism 85–86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96; common law 119, 240, 286, 344, 400, 401; criticisms of the policy framework 54, 58, 59, 68; crypto-anarchy 318, 319; Hobbesian premise of state 2, 3, 55, 108, 135, 298; intellectual property rights 369–370, 376, 422, 426; international commerce 119, 226; and the justification of coercion by non-consensual states 152–159; Kant’s defense of state 3, 100, 101, 108; Kant’s ethical and juridical differences 102, 106; Kant’s law of obligation (to leave the state of nature) 102–107; legal history 42, 52n36, 119, 226, 399–400, 401; possibility of law without the state 293; see also dispute resolution; legal systems; natural law; political obligation; social norms
+of Copan, 308, 317, 321–322, 335, 343, 345. 483–484, 486, 488 portal temples, 118
-law enforcement see policing
+Postclassic period, 33, 57, 163, 361, 377–379, 396–401, 422, 423, 442, 504
-Law Merchant 119, 226
+pottery, 307, 422, 423, 424–425. 433, 465, 483, 486, 491
-Leeson, Peter 230–231
+of Chichen Itza, 351, 354–355, 498 cylindrical tripod, 161, 452 ritually broken, 103, 106, 127, 428
-left-wing market anarchism (LWMA) 9, 30, 31–35, 120–122
+power: accumulation of, 72–73, 122, 203–204, 252, 428, 464
-legal systems 7–8; based on rules 60; Bitnation 320; children’s rights 176; and the concept of the state 43; consensual law 281, 284–285, 289, 292, 344; and elite privilege 52n36; emergent law 281, 284, 285–286, 288, 289, 290, 291–292; and the government failure model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 398–401, 402; Hart’s theory of law 277, 282–283, 284, 289; international commerce 119, 226; polycentricity 4, 7, 8, 256–258, 398–399, 400, 401; see also law; natural law
+objects of, 121–122, 200, 243, 464 power points, 67, 104, 122
-Lenin, Vladimir I. 122, 312
+containment rituals at, 73–74, 110, 229, 428, 464
-Leopold, David 144, 146, 149n2
+edges as, 98 termination rituals at, 103, 120, 127–128, 134, 145, 203, 313, 428, 435, 438, 459–460, 464
-Levy, Jacob T. 55, 60, 61
+Preclassic period, 26, 45, 56–57, 74, 128–129, 438
-liberal class theory 164, 166–168, 169, 171, 180, 181 liberalism: anarchism’s history 2, 34; and anarchist- ism 19; and egoism in the anarchist project 145–146, 148; and green anarchism 382, 386, 388, 389, 420; libertarian clarifications 30; and market anarchism 116, 119, 121, 122; presentism of 420; Rothbardianism 164, 166–168, 169, 171, 179, 180, 181; and the social contract 23–24, 89; social control 23–24; Stirner on 145, 146
+Early, 56, 421, 422
-Libertarian Forum (periodical) 121
+Middle, 56, 180, 308, 420, 422
-libertarianism: and the anarchist landscape 30, 31, 32, 33, 34; anarcho-capitalism 30, 31, 120, 312–314, 345, 354–355; and the corporate class 65, 167, 179; education 361; individual rights 58, 67, 118, 129, 344; and interpersonal domination 32, 122, 173–174, 175; Kropotkin 116; left-wing market anarchism 32, 33, 34, 120–121, 122; libertarian institutions 119, 361, 366, 376–379; and market anarchism 32, 33, 34, 112, 114, 115, 120–121, 122, 198, 199; minimal state 64, 89;
+Late, 57, 98, 112, 130, 136, 145, 164, 237, 308, 310, 421, 422, 423, 426, 431, 439, 441, 484
-paleolibertarianism 163; and postwar conservativism 118; property ownership 94; Rothbard 112, 118, 119–120, 163, 165, 167, 173–174, 179, 181; and social(ist) anarchism 31, 34, 116, 118, 327; and virtuous citizenship 89, 90
+Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, 14, 49, 466 primogeniture, 84, 85, 305. 431 Principal Hird Deity, see Celestial
-Libertarian Party (US) 120
+Bird processions, 364–370, 372, 500, 503–504 “progenitor,” 263, 363 prophecies, 378, 396—400, 401, 495, 504, 506, 507 Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 47–49, 171–172, 187, 262, 420, 442, 448, 453, 455, 459, 460, 465, 466, 477, 478, 483, 486, 487, 489, 496, 500, 501, 506 Puleston, Dennis, 426, 427, 433, 495, 506, 507
-Liberty (periodical) 115–116; anarcho-capitalists 31; conversation between social anarchist, anarchocapitalists, anarcho-capitalists and LWMAs 35; Egoism-versus-Morality debate 9, 126, 128, 130–137; natural rights doctrine 130; Tak Kak (James L. Walker) 128, 129, 130–137, 147 life extension 417, 419 lifestyle anarchism 139, 143, 148 limited-access social order (natural state) 47, 48, 49, 50
+Putun (Chontai) Maya, 350–351, 380, 382. 385’ 497, 504
-Lipscomb, David 196
+Puuc hills region, 349–354, 355. 374.
-Locke, John: consent-based view of the state 2, 3, 6, 298; indigenous people’s land rights 298, 299; private property rights 67, 69n3, 113, 118, 127, 299, 330, 332; on right to punish 243, 245; on the state of nature 40, 99, 108, 245, 298
+, 497, 501 pyramids, see temple pyramids
-Lockheed Martin 412
+Quadripartite Monster, 70, 414—415, 425
-logic of continuous dealings 262–263, 267
+Quen Santo, 392
-Lomasky, Loren 333
+Quiche Maya, 74, 422, 425, 428, 429, 463
-Long, Roderick T. 165, 170, 174, 339n3
+Quirigua, 49, 420, 424, 449, 456. 477.
-Lopez-de-Silanes, F. 400
-Lord, Audre 177
+Copan and, 315, 317–319, 342, 486–487
-luck egalitarianism 61
+radiocarbon dating, 421, 434, 437
-Lum, Dyer 28, 35
+Rafinesque, Constantine, 46 rain, 44, 61–63, 322, 335, 336, 393, 488 Cosmic Monster and, 66, 70 raised-field agriculture. 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433
-LWMA see left-wing market anarchism (LWMA) Lycophron the Sophist 89
+Rands, Robert, 504, 505
-McElroy, Wendy 128, 138n58
+Rathje, William L., 419, 459
-McElwee, Brian 332
+Recinos, Adrian, 425, 429 red (chac), 66 residential compounds, 84, 382 at Copan, 85–86, 308–309, 316—317, 321, 328–330. 335, 337, 345, 483-4X4. 488, 491
-McKay, Iain 27n73
+of modern Maya, 39, 40 42, 45 Patio Quad structures, 358, 501 types of, 85–86 see also lineage compounds Rice, Don S., 506
-Mackay, John Henry 29, 144, 147
+Ricketson, Oliver G. and Edith B., 439 Riese, Berthold, 432, 444, 484, 491, 494 Robertson, Merle Greene, 419, 420, 421, 434, 468, 469, 471, 482
-Mack, Eric 67, 333, 335
+Robles, Fernando, 498 royal belt, 143, 144, 145, 211, 232, 242, 415, 440, 469, 488
-mafia 171, 225
+Roys, Ralph L , 433, 495, 501, 502
-Maitland, F. W. 41
+Ruppert, Karl, 501
-Malatesta, Errico 211, 303–304, 418–419
+Ruz Lhuillier, Alberto, 228, 468
-March, James 367
+Sabloff, Jeremy A.. 419, 505
-market anarchism: anti-capitalism 30, 31, 33–34, 112, 115, 121, 127, 146; Christian market anarchism 187–188, 196–200; and communal anarchism 28, 31, 53, 112, 116–118; decentralised public functions 70n15, 112; defined 31; left-wing market anarchism (LWMA) 9, 30, 31–35, 120–123; and liberalism 124n28; private arbitration services 94, 119, 288, 289–290, 291, 292, 313, 319, 320, 343, 344, 345; private prisons 243–244, 245; private provision of military technology 250–251, 407, 408, 409, 410–411, 412;
+sacbe roads, 351, 353, 355, 357, 498
-pro-capitalism 30, 31, 32, 34, 119, 121, 128, 168, 329, 345, 349–356, 357–358; Proudhon and the individualists 28, 29–30, 31, 35, 53, 112, 113–116, 119, 122; Rothbard 4, 112, 118–120, 121, 126, 163, 168–169, 171, 172, 179; see also anarcho-capitalism (ancaps); private policing
+sacred geography, 67, 84, 423
-markets: Austrian economics 119, 168–169, 171, 179, 180, 188, 196, 198, 200, 248–249; complete market model 227; contestability 257; and ecological anarchism 387–388; failures of and government intervention 223; open-access orders 48; in the policy framework 61; and the power problem (of state provision) 247, 248, 252–256, 257, 258, 349, 407, 408, 410–412; socialist/ individualist types of anarchism 28, 29, 53; underprovision of public goods 6, 223–224, 250–251, 407, 408; see also capitalism; market anarchism; price mechanisms
+cities as, 70–73, 428
-Marsden, Dora 29, 140, 143, 144
+sacred round (tzolkin calendar), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84, 400, 451
-Marshall, Peter 209
+salt, 92, 93, 351, 496, 498
-Martin, James J. 4, 128, 137n30, 145
+Sanders, William T., 432, 488
-Marvin, Carolyn 301
+San Diego clifl drawing, 87
-Marxism: and anarchism as anarchist-ism 19; and arguments for direct action 65; and egoism 146, 147, 148; as a forecast for anarchy 310, 311–312; human capital 376; market anarchism 122; and Rothbardianism 171, 173, 181; and Tolstoy 189; and transhumanism 426, 427; utopian sympathies 52n44; view of the state 65, 304, 311–312, 316, 327
+Sato, Etsuo, 486
-Marx, Karl 19, 122, 143, 146, 209, 211, 311, 312, 316
+Satterthwaite, Linton, 454—455, 457
-mass incarceration: government failure model 393, 394, 398–401, 402; reform strategies 393–394, 402; social control model 393, 394, 395–398, 399, 401, 402
+Saturn, 83, 147, 158, 163, 192, 256, 438. 444–446, 450. 456, 461, 473–174. 501
-May, Timothy C. 318–319
+Scarborough, Vernon L., 437 scattering rituals, 328, 342, 480, 491 Scheie. Linda, 13–15, 37, 39, 49, 401–403, 404, 421, 424, 425, 426, 427, 432, 440, 441, 447, 457, 465, 467, 468, 471, 477, 483, 484, 485, 487, 489, 490, 491, 492, 494, 507
-May, Todd 212
+Schellhas, Paul, 429
-mechanisms of (anarchic) cooperation 223, 225, 229–231, 262–269; see also social norms
+scribes, 50, 53, 55, 58, 227, 400, 430, 465, 476, 478
-medieval Europe 5, 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 226
+lineage compound of, at Copan, 85, 316–317, 329–330, 345, 431
-Meltzer, Albert 116
+patron gods of, 316–317, 329 Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar, king of Tikal,
-Mencken, Henry Louis 118
+–142, 144, 441
-Menger, Carl 222, 224
+segmentary social organization, 56–57, 422
-merchant courts 119, 226
+Seibal, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387–389, 391, 393, 452, 505, 506
-methodological anarchism 9, 53–54, 55, 62–69, 310
+Seler, Eduard, 46
-Meyer, William 383
+semantic determinatives, 52–53, 436 sentence structure, 54
-Midgley, Mary 297
+Serpent Bar, 68–69, 90, 142, 242, 342, 384, 415, 426, 473, 492, 494 serpent imagery, 356, 357, 372–373, 394–395, 501, 503, 506
-militarism 167–168, 173, 189, 295–296
+severed heads, 124, 131, 149, 358, 451 on skull racks, 368, 373, 504 worn around necks, 151, 184, 341 see also decapitation
-military goods and services 11, 44, 47, 250–251, 403n25, 406–412
+“shaman” (way), 45, 441, 474 shamans, 15, 45, 97, 103, 133, 200–203, 229, 235, 369, 420, 427–428, 432, 437, 471
-Miller, David 56
+divination stones of, 94, 103, 201, 394
-Mill, John Stuart 23, 232n9, 276–277
+H-men, 401, 405
-minimal states 2, 64, 84, 88–89, 90, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161n28, 292
+kings as, 65, 66, 72–73, 87–88, 95, 105, 110, 427
-Mises, Ludwig von 119, 121, 164, 168, 173, 200, 249, 407, 408, 409, 412
+of modern Maya, 44–45, 72, 401, 405, 427, 485
-Molinari, Gustave de 3, 30, 31, 35, 124n28, 171 Moo, Douglas J. 194, 202n56, 202n59 moon landing 331, 332
+Sharer, Robert J., 488
-morality: anti-state violence 78–79; egoism 9, 28, 29, 126, 128, 129, 130–137, 148, 169; eudaimonism 169–170; exclusionary coercion rights (initial appropriation of property) 329, 330–338; and the justification of state coercion 152–159; law of duty (Kant) 102–106; natural law 164–165, 169–170, 199, 287; Positive anarchism 209; relativism 95–96; virtue 88–93, 95, 131, 148, 164, 166, 175; see also ethics; interpersonal domination; justice; moral parity (of state and non-state actors)
+“shield” (pacal), 162, 217, 419, 449–150
-moral parity (of state and non-state actors): consensual conferral of moral powers on the state 156; and the de facto monopoly of the state 153, 157–158; fair play theory 238–240; Huemer test 237, 238–239, 242, 328; moral parity thesis 236, 237, 239, 241, 329; prevailing statist view of the moral privileges of the state 235–236, 328; punishment question 243–245; self-defense and the defense of others 240–243
+Shield-God K, king of Dos Pilas, 194, 214
-moral prohibitions (enforcement by non-consensual states) 152–153, 156–157, 159
+Shield-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 263, 265–271, 273–284, 295, 296, 299, 301
-Morland, David 18, 20
+accession of, 265–267, 269, 276, 289, 383, 478, 480
-Morris, Christopher W. 43–44, 45
+age of, 265, 271, 273, 274, 275, 277 birth of, 265, 477 death of, 271, 283, 291
-Most, Johann 33, 303
+flapstaff rituals of, 274–275, 278, 282, 284. 285, 293, 303
-Mouchot, Augustin 422
+marriage alliances of, 270–271, 479 stelae of, 265, 275, 285 war captives of, 265, 268, 273, 477—478
-Murakawa, N. 398, 402
+Shield-Jaguar II, king of Yaxchilan, 297–303, 383
-mutual aid societies 63, 66, 251
+birth of, 276, 285–287, 289–290 in heir-designation ritual, 298–301 shields, 151, 152, 156, 160, 209, 258, 259, 268, 341, 367, 443, 444, 474
-myths 296–302, 303, 304, 305, 306
+flayed-face, 243, 409
-national anarchists 34
+Shield-Skull, king of Tikal, 195, 208, 215 tomb of, 197, 199, 462
-national defense 85, 88, 224, 250–251, 343, 407–408; see also military goods and services
+Shook, Edwin M.. 462, 463 “sibling” (ihtan; itah: yitah; yitan), 156, 265, 360, 375. 449, 477, 500, 504
-nation state see the state
+-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 265, 270, 283, 477. 480 skull-racks, 368, 373, 504 “sky” (chan), 52, 255, 436–4.37, 472 “sleep” (wayel), 81, 429 Smith. A. Ledyard, 447–448 Smoke-Imix-God K, king of Copan, 312, 313–315, 316, 317, 319, 488 stelae of, 314, 333, 334, 344, 484, 485–486, 492
-natural law: Christian market anarchism 188, 196, 197, 198, 199; decentralized legal system 281, 284, 287–288, 290, 292; egoist denunciation of moral rights 126, 128, 140; history of anarchist thought 4; individualist anarchism 118–119, 126, 127, 128, 130, 146, 164–165, 169, 170, 181; moral prohibitions 152—153, 156—157, 159; Rothbardianism 118—119, 127, 128, 164—165, 169, 170, 181; and Spencerian indirect utilitarianism 128, 129—130, 137; and violence in the state of nature 298
+Smoke-Monkey, king of Copan, 319, 336, 487, 493
-natural states (limited-access social order) 47, 48,
+Smoke-Shell, king of Copan, 319–320, 325, 328, 341, 487, 491 marriage alliance of, 319, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491 stela of, 322 smoktng-ax, 231, 236, 245
-, 50
+Smoking-Batab, king of Naranjo, 214. 466
-nature see state of nature
+Smoking-Frog of Tikal, king of Uaxactun. 146–149. 152–160, 162, 163, 179, 361, 442 443, 448–449. 450 identity of, 153–158 length of reign of. 153, 157–158 name glyphs of, 153 stelae of. 146–147, 153–154, 158, 159, 210, 447
-neoliberalism 396, 397
+Smoking-Squirrel, king of Naranjo, 184. 186–195, 205, 213, 214–215. 423, 461 mother of, see Lady
-neoreaction 426
+Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Dos Pilas and Naranjo son of, 214. 466 stelae of, 187–188, 190–191, 192–193, 194, 460 war captives of. 190--191, 192, 193, 194, 460–461
-Nettlau, Max 141
+smoking torch symbol, 342–343, 494 “snake” (chan), 52, 217, 255, 436–437, 466
-neurodivergent people 177
+social system, 84–95, 96–98 economic aspects of, 90–95 kings and, 65, 86–95, 97–98 kinship in, see kinship
-new anarchism 211
+solar year, 78, 81, 429 south (noho!), 66, 426
-New Freewoman, The (periodical) 29
+Spanish conquest, 15, 18, 20, 38, 45, 57, 74, 78, 346, 361, 377–379, 395, 396–401, 426
-New Left 30, 65, 118, 163, 179, 211, 372
+spears, 184, 201, 243. 364, 371, 502 “spearthrower,” 156–157, 162, 449–450 spearthrowers, 146, 152, 153, 157, 160, 161, 164, 184, 201, 209, 364, 371, 373, 393
-Newman, Saul 26n38, 142, 148, 149n3, 209, 212
+spelling, 49, 52–53, 421
-New Right 118
+Spinden, Herbert J., 47, 420, 427 spirit tube, 230, 232, 233
-Niskanen, William N. 253
+Split-Earth, king of Calakmul, 213, 466 spondylus shells, 92, 93, 94, 100, 121, 135, 200, 278
-Nock, Albert Jay 4, 118
+staff kings, 165–168, 204, 213, 390, 454 stairways, 106, 107–108, 118. 387
-non-state institutions 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 190, 293; club goods 224, 230, 257—258; consensual law 281, 284–285, 289, 292, 344; crypto-anarchy 309, 311, 312, 318–320; direct action (methodological anarchism) 62–66, 67, 68; education 360–363;
+war captives and, 179, 283, 322–323, 503, 504
-emergent law 281, 284, 285–286, 288, 289, 290, 291–292; institutional mechanisms for public goods provision 228–231; international commerce 119, 226; labor unions 58, 63–64, 67, 117, 144, 370, 374; legal history 42, 119, 226, 399, 400, 401; mechanisms of (anarchic) cooperation 223, 225, 229–231, 262–269; natural law 281, 284, 287–288, 290, 292; polycentricity 4, 7, 256–257;
+star war, see Tlaloc-Venus war state visits, 59, 92, 93, 181, 264—265, 424, 433, 479
-private arbitration services 94, 119, 288, 289–290, 291, 292, 313, 319, 320, 343, 344, 345; see also free markets; private policing; social norms
+of Bird-Jaguar, 265, 303–305, 494 of Yax-Pac, 342, 494
-nonviolence: boycotts 67, 180, 226, 230, 262–263, 264, 267, 304; Christian anarchism 187, 188–189, 190, 191–193, 194, 198–199, 304; cryptoanarchism 319; different forms of anarchism 208; direct action rejecting the policy framework 54, 62–69; egoist revolution of everyday life 142; expansion and peaceful collapse of the state 50, 309, 312, 316–322; Gandhi 304–305; left-wing market anarchism 120; rejecting anti-state violence 78–79; social norms enforcement 59, 67, 273–274, 276, 277–278; and statist mythology 295, 306 norms see social norms
+stelae, 47, 48, 56, 57, 86–87, 89, 140, 144, 172, 181, 195, 309–310, 351 of Ah-Cacaw. 204 -205, 213, 486 ancestors on, 141, 441 of Bird-Jaguar, 270, 275, 276, 283, 285, 287, 288, 291
-North, Douglass C. 47–48, 49, 233n35
+blood smeared on, 202. 463 of Curl-Snout, 155, 159, 171 of Double-Bird. 167, 173, 455 of 18-Rabbit, 312, 316, 322, 339, 484. 486, 492
-Novatore, Renzo 143
+of Flint-Sky-God K, 182–183 of Great-Jaguar-Paw, 144—145, 146, 442
-Nozick, Robert: failure of consent-based defenses of state authority 10, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159, 161n28; and fair play theory 238; forecast for anarchism 313; on individualist anarchism 126–127, 128–129; on the minimal state 4, 128, 159; and the policy framework 53, 56, 62; on property appropriation 332, 339n18; and the state/ anarchy distinction 39, 40
+of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, 184—185, 187–188, 190, 193, 460
-nuclear energy 425
+of Lord Water, 171 rededication of, 197–203, 462–463, 464
-obligation see political obligation
+of Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar, 141–142 of Shield-Jaguar, 265, 275, 285 of Smoke-Imix-God K, 314, 333, 334, 344, 484, 485 486. 492 of Smoke-Shell, 322
-Old Right 118, 163, 167
+of Smoking-Frog, 146–147, 153–154. 158, 159, 210, 447
-Old Testament 191, 197, 199
+of Smoking-Squirrel, 187–188, 190–191, 192–193, 194, 460 of Stormy-Sky, 148, 155, 156, 158, 159–160, 163, 166, 184, 197, 200, 203, 205, 208–209, 210, 211, 438, 450–451
-ontological anarchism 142
+styles of, 165–167
-OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) project process 378–379
+tn Terminal Classic period, 382–383, 384–386, 388–393
-open-access social order 47, 48–49
+of Waterlily-Jaguar, 311, 313
-open publishing projects 377
+of Yax-Pac, 330, 336, 342–343, 344
-open-source software 319, 377, 419
+Stephens, John Lloyd, 46, 217, 261, 466
-Oppenheimer, Franz 164, 166, 253
+“steward” (k’amlay), 332, 492 stingray spines, 134, 201
-organizational theory see hierarchical bureaucracies Orwell, George 314
+as bloodletters, 135, 281. 425, 492 “stone” (tun), 81, 427, 430, 457 Storey, Rebecca, 486, 489, 494, 495 Stormy-Sky, king of Tikal, 147, 155–157, 162, 164, 165, 204, 207, 214, 438, 440, 441 accession of, 159–160, 450–451 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 203, 208 stelae of. 155, 156, 158, 159–160, 163, 166, 184, 197, 200, 203, 205, 208–209, 210, 211, 438, 450–451 tomb of, 160, 168, 197, 199, 208–209, 454, 462
-Ostrom, Elinor 63
+Strömsvik, Gustav, 485, 489
-Ostrom, Vincent 256
+Stuart, David, 45, 419, 420, 424, 425, 426, 427, 431, 432. 440, 441, 442, 447, 449, 456–457, 458. 459, 465, 466, 470. 474, 475, 477, 479, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 489, 490, 491, 492, 494, 496, 498, 501, 503, 505
-output statistics 249–250
+Stuart, George, 420, 507 summit temples, 108, 109, 110–111, 199, 314, 435, 485 sun, 66, 70, 83, 101, 104. 142, 242, 255, 425, 431, 492 ritual path of, 110–111
-Owen, Robert 114, 145
+Yax-Balam symbolized by, 114, 115
-P2P projects see peer-to-peer projects (P2P) paleoconservatism 118, 167, 178 paleolibertarianism 163
+“sun” (kin), 112, 115, 426 sun disk, 372, 393, 394, 503 Sun God, 112–115, 395, 416
-panopticism 376, 377, 395, 396
+Jaguar, 112–114, 124, 211, 243, 245, 260, 451
-Parker, Sidney E. 143, 147
+swidden agriculture, 39 syllabary signs, 52, 53, 446 syntactical analysis, 49–50, 421
-Pateman, Carole 4
+Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, 402, 507 Taladoire, Eric, 451 talud-tablero-style temple pyramids, 161. 442, 451, 452, 453
-patriarchy 58, 173, 175, 181
+Tate, Carolyn, 477. 482
-Patterson, Isabel 118
+Taube, Karl, 426, 429, 447, 453, 465
-peer-to-peer projects (P2P) 376–377
+Tedlock, Dennis, 425, 429, 468 “temple” (yotot; ch’ul na), 71, 427, 474 Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, 13, 130, 217–237, 258, 432, 468, 474 construction of, 225–227 king lists on, 217–224, 227–228, 467 temple pyramids, 38, 68, 70, 71–73, 94, 346, 352, 387–389. 495, 498, 501, 504
-Perry, Stephen 155, 160n13, 160n18
+at Cerros, 15, 104–128, 136, 138. 170, 238. 435, 438, 439, 440. 470 at Chichen Itza, see Chichen Itza colors of, 111–112, 262, 476 construction of, 91, 105–112, 123, 433, 438
-perverse incentives 253, 256, 257, 258, 349, 365, 407, 410–412
+at Copan, 14. 308, 309, 312–313, 316, 319, 321, 322–327, 336, 341, 342, 427. 428, 432, 484, 485, 486, 488–489. 490–491, 492^93 craftsmen of, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 111–112, 116, 120, 435, 436 directional trees in, 107, 109, 435, 485
-philosophical anarchism: Huemer 328; meaning 12n2, 271, 328, 358n2; and political anarchism 207–208, 210, 217, 218, 219, 328; and political obligation 212, 214, 215, 216, 217; social coordination 271, 274; social norms 274; Tucker’s use of 145, 150n65; types of 208, 209–210; see also critical philosophical anarchism
+foundations of, 106, 122 gateway buildings of, 139 lower terraces of, 108–109 mask panels of, see mask panels meaning of, 106, 112–116, 120 as mountains, 71–72, 106, 121, 239 Olmec, 105–106 optical effects of, 108 at Palenque, see Palenque pausing stations of, 108 platforms of, 72, 106–107, 118, 123–124, 125
-pirates 231, 266–268
+plazas of, 38, 70–71, 106, 108, 117–118, 119, 266, 314, 425 portal temples of, 118 stairways of, 106, 107–108, 118, 3 87 summit temples of, 108, 109, 110–111. 199, 314. 435, 485 talud-tablero-style, 161, 442, 451, 452, 453
-Pitts, Walter 419
+at Teotihuacan, 161, 162, 385, 438, 442, 451, 452, 453, 500
-planner problems: military technology 407, 408–410, 412; price mechanisms 121, 168–169, 171, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409; profit and loss 247, 248–249, 250, 253, 258, 410
+at Tikal, 131, 132, 133–136, 168–171, 195–197, 204–205, 213, 215, 439, 451, 454, 461–462, 463–464
-Plato 41, 47, 86, 87, 103, 296; Laws 86, 96; Republic 84, 85, 89
+T shape of, 106–107, 435 twin-pyramid complexes of, 171, 204, 213. 454
-policing: for an abstract society 119; anti-vigilante principle 242; Kant’s defense of state 100, 108; and neoliberalism 404n31; police violence and victimization of inncocent people 2, 60, 175, 177; policy framework 55, 57, 58, 60; political activism 1, 2, 176; repressive technology 305–306, 403n25; social(ist) anarchism 346, 347–348, 354, 357; and special immunity of state actors 64, 236, 238, 240, 242; state features 7, 44, 64, 166; see also private policing
+at Uaxactun. 136–139, 169, 211, 439–440, 447–448, 449
-policy framework 53–62, 67, 68–69, 395
+viewing spaces of, 117–119
-political activism see activism
+World Tree in, 105
-political anarchism: defined 207; and forms of anarchism 208–209; Huemer 328–329; ideals of legitimacy 217; and methodological anarchism 54, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71n41; and philosophical anarchism 207–208, 210, 217, 218, 219, 328
+at Yaxchilan, 262, 266–268, 271, 273, 275–276, 277, 285–295, 297–301, 430. 476, 477, 487
-political authority: anarcho-transhumanism 426–427; Christian anarchism 4, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 193–196, 197; and the classical roots of anarchism 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96; and coercion in non-consensual states 152, 153, 154–155, 156, 157–158, 159; in the Communist Manifesto 311; compared to the coercive rights of property owners 329–330; in a comparison of political and philosophical anarchism 207–208, 209–210, 211, 218, 219; and consent 2, 3, 5, 114, 152, 153, 156, 157, 212, 330, 337; definitions of state 43, 44, 45, 60, 157, 299; and egoism 126, 131, 133, 140, 141; Enlightenment defence of the state 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 40, 50, 99–109, 162n42, 298; entrenching privilege 65; green communities 384, 386;
+Teotihuacan, 97, 130–131, 380, 443, 465, 497. 504
-Huemer’s rejection of 237, 238, 239, 328, 330, 334, 336; and the ideological danger of the policy framework 60–61; and mass incarceration 394, 395, 398, 399–400, 402; moral parity (of state and non-state actors) 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245; in non-anarchic alternatives to the state 40–42, 46–47, 49, 50; object of anarchist skepticism 21, 22, 23, 76, 77, 152, 170, 207, 235, 310, 365; one-way communication structures 366; and political obligation 44, 153–156, 207, 210, 211, 212–219, 236, 238; and the social contract 2, 3, 24, 40, 61–62, 298, 299–300, 301; and the special immunity thesis 241–243; state socialism 354; and the value of anarchist argument 76, 77, 78, 79, 80
+ballcourt markers at, 158. 451 costume of, 162, 163, 453
-political obligation: ancient Greek schools of philosophy 96; and coercion in non-consensual states 153–154, 155, 156, 209; consensual law 284; as a correlate of political authority 44, 212–213, 236, 238; critical philosophical anarchist position 208, 210, 217–219; defining features of the modern state 44; and egoism 131, 132, 136; feudal system 42; Hart’s theory of law 238–239, 282, 289; history of anarchist thought 3, 4; and natural law theory 169–170; in the policy framework approach 59; in political and philosophical anarchist thought 209, 210, 211; problem of 212–219
+murals at, 158, 162, 164, 451, 453 pottery of, 161, 452
-political opportunism 252, 254
+as sacred center of creation, 162–163, 453, 500
-polycentricity 4, 7, 256–257, 348, 398–399, 400, 401 post-anarchism 20
+temple pyramids at. 161, 162, 385, 438, 442, 451, 452, 453, 500
-post-left anarchism 29, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147–148
+trade network of, 158, 159–164, 451–453
-poststructuralism 139, 142, 209
+wars of conquest originated by, 147, 152, 159–163, 164, 444, 446
-Pound, Ezra 144
+Terminal Classic period, 30–33, 57, 171. 261, 313, 346–352, 356, 379–103, 422. 441, 495
-power problem 247, 248, 252–256, 257, 258, 349, 407, 408, 410–412
+stelae of, 382–383, 384–386, 388–393 termination rituals, 103, 120, 127–128, 134, 145, 203, 313, 428, 435, 438, 459–460, 464
-prefigurative principle 192–193
+te-tun (“tree-stone”), 71, 72 see also stelae
-price mechanisms: in an anti-capitalist freed market 179, 180; and competitive markets 254–255, 344, 354–355, 372, 409; control by natural states 48; drugs 346; explaining emergent law 281, 285—286; fair pay 353; integrated economic markets 388; knowledge and calculative deficiencies (central planning) 121, 168–169, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409; military provision 410, 411, 412
+texts, 18, 54–55, 57. 112. 421
-Primitivism 147, 421–424
+on Group of the Cross, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
-prisons 243–245, 377; see also mass incarceration private courts/arbitration services 94, 119, 288, 289–290, 291, 292, 313, 319, 320, 343, 344, 345
+longest, 217, 319, 466–467, 488 mirror-image, 326
-private policing 3, 28, 112, 289–290; anarchocapitalism 32, 112, 119, 166, 313, 329, 343–344, 345, 348; anti-vigilante principle 242; concentration of power 292; as crypto-statism 32; positive externalities 290, 291; San Francisco’s private police force 258; Threat Management Center (Detroit) 64
+Thompson, J. Eric S., 47, 49. 50, 420–421, 426, 465, 496, 497, 501, 505
-private prisons 243–244, 245
+Tikal, 21, 57, 61, 128, 130–212, 243, 258, 264, 308, 319, 343, 353, 373, 375, 424, 431, 433, 434, 438–466, 489 ancient name of, 211, 465—466 architecture of, 133
-private property: analytical anarchism 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230; anarcho-capitalism (ancaps) 30, 31, 33, 35, 69n3, 118–119, 127, 164–165, 178, 229, 327–329, 342, 343–344; anarcho-socialism 28, 327, 329, 337–338, 342–343; in the Aristotelian polis 85, 93, 94–95; and central planning in military technology 408, 410; Christian anarchism 187–188, 189, 196–200; and the common good 94; exclusionary coercion rights (initial appropriation) 329, 330–338; individualist anarchism 28, 29, 30, 113–114, 127; intra-anarchist disputes 53; labor-mixing theory 113–114, 118, 127, 164–165, 330–331, 335–336; moral parity thesis 241; natural law theory 165; pre-colonial Africa 264; and socialist economics 249, 408
+Ballcourt Markers at, 146, 149, 154, 156, 158, 451
-propaganda: by the deed 208, 296, 303; Chomsky on 211; state education 360
+burials at, 131–132, 149, 456 conquered by Caracol, 167, 171–179, 197, 214. 317, 457, 458, 462, 499 construction at, 136, 165, 195, 439, 461–462
-property see private property
+decline of, 380, 388, 390–391. 397, 506
-Proudhon, Pierrre-Joseph 418; and the anarchist landscape 32, 35; and Christian socialist anarchists 203n76; communication principles 366; dialectical approach 3, 366; on education 361; on human nature 26n51; and libertarianism 32; and market anarchism 35, 112, 113–115, 116, 119, 122; and the pre-history of anarchism 3, 18, 116; on property ownership 113–114, 189; and Stirner’s egoism 140
+early inhabitants of, 131–132 effaced monuments of, 167, 172–173, 178–179, 186, 462
-Prychitko, David L. 179
+Emblem Glyph of, 141, 142, 153, 180, 207–208, 391, 441, 443, 456, 458, 459, 465–166, 484 founding of, 434
-Ps-Xenophon 91, 92
+Lost World Complex at, 158, 442, 452
-public choice theory 4, 224, 252, 255, 257
+mask panels at, 169–170, 454
-public goods: as club goods 224, 230, 257–258; defining 6, 7, 224, 250; free-riding 6, 223–224, 228, 238, 250–251, 258, 290; incentives (of political actors) and the power problem 4, 55, 172, 247, 248, 252–256, 257, 258, 349, 407, 408, 410–412; justifying the existence of the state 2, 6, 223–224, 228–229, 238–239; market underprovision 6, 223–224, 250–251, 407, 408; in the policy framework 55; polycentricity 256–257; price mechanisms (knowledge problem) 121,
+murals at, 133, 134
-–169, 172, 223–224, 247, 248–251, 408–409; reification of clienteles 368–369; and the state’s monopoly on coercion 166, 250; voluntary (non-state) production 6, 224, 228–231, 230, 257–258; see also national defense; policing; prisons public policy: elections 252–253; methodological
+patron god of, 211
-anarchism 9, 53–54, 55, 62–69, 310; policy framework 53–62, 67, 68–69, 395; see also institutions
+staff kings of, 165–168, 204, 213, 390, 454
-Pufendorf, Samuel 298
+temple pyramids at. 131, 132, 133–136, 168–171, 195–197, 204–205, 213, 215, 439, 451. 454, 461–462, 463^64
-punishment: in anarcho-capitalism 345; anti-vigilante principle 242–243; by non-consensual states 153, 156, 157, 158; China’s surveillance programs 316; discrimination 68, 175; expressive retributivism 56; Law of Equal Freedom 130; and moral parity between state and non-state actors 236, 241, 242, 243–245; pre-modern norms 399; priate code 267, 268; social norms and pressure 59, 67, 271, 273–274, 276, 277–278, 289; of state actors 241, 254, 407; see also mass incarceration; prisons
+Teotihuacan’s trade with, 158, 159–164, 451–153
-Purchase, Graham 384–385, 392
+tombs at, 131, 133–136, 160–161, 174, 177–178, 179, 197, 199, 205, 214, 438, 452, 462, 466
-quasimarkets 257
+Uaxactiin conquered by, 130, 144–160, 184, 197, 210, 242, 442–143, 446–448, 465, 506 time, 18, 45, 47, 65, 73, 77–84, 495 days in, 52–53, 78–81, 82–83, 84 directional quadrants of, 78, 83 months in, 81, 82, 83, 430 numbers in, 78, 81, 429 writing system and, 52–53, 54, 430 see also calendars
-queer anarchism 68, 142, 144, 175–176, 181
+Tlaloc, 160, 164, 205, 258, 276, 416, 443, 444, 452, 453, 475
-queer theory 144, 416, 419
+Tlaloc-Venus war (star war), 130–131,
-racial minorities: interpersonal domination 122, 173, 176, 178, 181; and models of mass incarceration 393, 395, 396, 398, 402; police violence 2
+, 162–164, 173, 179, 181,
-Rajan, Raghuram 227, 228
+, 327, 365, 373, 375, 393, 452, 489, 490
-Rawls, John 4, 47, 51n2, 56
+costumes of, 146- 147, 149, 153, 159–160, 163, 194, 205, 209–210, 258, 259, 260, 295, 319, 341, 367, 370. 443, 444, 475
-Raz, Joseph 4, 216
+owl as symbol of, 156–157, 394, 443, 444, 449–150. 506
-Read, Herbert 142, 212
+planetary alignments in, 147, 153, 163, 164, 176, 178, 190, 192, 438, 443–446, 456, 457–158, 460, 461
-Reagan, Ronald 316, 411
+see also wars of conquest
-Redford, James 188, 196, 197, 199
+tombs, 121. 447–448, 478
-reification of clienteles 368–369
+of Ah-Cacaw, 205, 214, 466
-relational egalitarianism 67, 173, 174–180, 181 rent seeking 169, 253–254, 399, 400, 401, 411 revolution: absolute moralism 95–96; anarchist
+at Copan, 308, 341, 483, 493
-environmental r/evolution 384, 391n38; on “Anarchist-ism” 17, 18, 19; apocalyptic potential 389n6; Aristotle’s Politics 84; assassinations 78, 296, 303; contrasted to direct action 62, 63, 64, 65, 66; different forms of and divisions within anarchism 208; and egoism 142–143, 145; Marxism and Leninism 17, 19, 211, 304, 312, 316, 419; science fiction 314, 318; Spanish (1936) 117–118;
+of Curl-Snout. 160, 197, 199
-stereotyping violence 4, 295; violence reinforcing hierarchy and the state myth 78, 295, 303–304, 306; see also nonviolence
+of Pacal the Great, 217, 221, 225–227, 228–233, 261, 469
-Robinson, John Beverley 149n7
+of Shield-Skull, 197, 199, 462
-Rocker, Rudolph 116
+of Stormy-Sky, 160, 168, 197, 199, 208–209, 454, 462
-Romans 13:1–7 187, 193, 194–195, 196, 197
+at Tikal, 131, 133–136. 160–161, 174, 177–178, 179, 197, 199, 205, 214, 438, 452, 462, 466
-Rome 41, 44, 46
+see also burials
-Rothbard, Murray Newton 10; anarcho-capitalism 30, 35, 120, 126–127; on capitalist hierarchy 178–180, 181; economic thought 119, 166, 168–169, 171–172, 173; and interpersonal and non-violent domination 173—180, 181; liberal class theory 164, 166–168, 169, 171, 180, 181; and market anarchism 4, 112, 118–120, 121, 126, 163, 166, 168–169, 171, 172, 179, 225; natural law theory 118–119, 127, 128, 164–165, 169, 170, 178, 181; and the New Left 118, 163, 179;
+tongue perforation, 89, 207, 266,
-non-state institutions 4, 112, 119, 120, 121, 166, 225; primary contributions to contemporary anarchist theory 169–173; on self-ownership rights 53, 118, 165, 178; and Spooner’s individualist anarchism 127, 128, 164, 165–166
+, 271, 276, 279, 286, 426, 465
-Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 3, 25n19, 47, 298
+Tonina, 392–393, 423, 458, 506
-Royal Fortune (pirate constitution) 267, 268 rules of recognition 277–278, 282–283, 284 Rusche, G. 395
+Kan-Xul captured by, 392, 424, 452, 468, 469, 476, 487
-Sagitta (John Henry Mackay) 29, 144, 147
+Tozzer, Alfred M., 425, 502, 504, 507 trade, 51, 61, 92–93, 97–98, 315, 347, 351, 422, 496
-Sale, Kirkpatrick 382, 384, 389n5, 390n10, 390n17, 390n24, 391n27, 391n38
+at Cerros, 98, 100–103, 434
-Salter, Alex 196, 198
+kings and, 90, 98, 101–102
-Samuelson, Paul 223, 224
+by Teotihuacan, 158, 159–164, 451—453
-Samuels, Warren J. 173
+transportation, 60–61
-Sars-Cov-2 pandemic 2
+trees, 61, 72, 90, 306, 489
-Sartre, Jean-Paul 141
+directional, in temple pyramids, 107, 109, 435. 485
-Sartwell, Crispin 209
+as symbols, 66
-Scandinavia 401
+“tree-stone” (te-tun), 71, 72
-Schmidt, Michael 17, 18, 19, 27n63
+see also stelae
-Schmidtz, David 332–333
+tribute, 91–92, 93. 94, 99, 178, 380, 442
-Schulman, J. Neil 314
+Tula, 375, 393, 497, 506
-Schumacher, E. F. 389n8, 389n9, 390n10, 390n19, 392n40, 392n45
+tumplines, 61, 424
-Schwarz, Norton 411
+tun (360-day year), 81, 430
-Sciabarra, Chris Matthew 173
+tun (“stone”), 81, 427, 430, 457
-science education (in anarchist schools) 361, 362–363 science fiction 314–316, 318, 418, 419
+tunkul drums, 151
-scientific socialism 140
+twin-pyramid complexes, 171, 204, 213, 454
-Scott, Bernard Brandon 202n56
+tzolkin (260-day) calendar (sacred round), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84.
-Scottish Enlightenment thinkers 3, 396
+, 451
-Scott, James C. 4, 63, 366, 373
+Uaxactun, 20, 21, 128, 130–164, 170, 215, 305, 308, 375, 385, 391, 423. 436, 437, 458, 463
-security institutions see national defense; policing;
+conquered by Tikal, 130, 144–160, 184, 210, 242, 442–143, 446–448, 465. 506
-prisons
+defeated king’s family sacrificed at, 151. 447–148
-self-defense 176, 240–243, 330
+murals at, 449
-self-ownership rights 30, 53, 57, 118, 165, 178,
+temple pyramids at, 136–139, 169, 211, 439–440, 447–448. 449
-, 335
+tombs at, 447—448
-self-sufficiency 83, 87, 88, 383, 384, 385, 387
+Uayeb, 81, 429
-sense of community 85, 277, 349
+Ucanal, 385–386, 391, 503
-Sermon on the Mount 187, 191, 192, 194, 198, 199
+ballcourt at, 194–195, 461
-Sextus Empiricus 86
+conquered by Naranjo, 189–190, 194–195, 205, 212, 213, 460–461, 499
-sexual liberation 144
+U-Cit-Tok, king of Copan, 343–344, 381
-Shelley, Mary 418
+name glyph of. 494
-Shleifer, A. 400
+uinic (“human being”), 81, 253, 377, 430, 500
-Sicilian Mafia 225
+uinic, uinal (months), 81, 82, 83, 430 Underworld, see Xibalba
-Simmons, John 4, 209, 210, 215, 335
+Uxmal, 14, 354, 496, 497, 499, 504
-slaves: African slaves 167, 176; ancient polis 83, 85, 86, 88, 91, 97; animals as 427; mass production 422
+vague year (haab calendar), 81, 83, 84
-Smith, Adam 3, 254, 286, 387
+Valdes, Juan Antonio, 439
-social contract: city-state formation 84, 85; feudal lords 40; indigenous people and common property ownership 298–299; and liberal politics 2, 23–24; and the policy framework 61–62; and political obligation 154; and the state of nature 3, 39–40, 47, 298; state power and violence 298, 299–300, 301; and the virtue of individuals 89
+Valdez, Fred, 420
-social control model of mass incarceration 393, 394, 395–398, 399, 401, 402
+vases, 161–162, 381–382, 426, 456, 487
-social ecology 11, 381–389, 422, 424–425
+Venus, 70, 77, 81, 83, 156, 158, 170, 242, 260, 323, 431, 436, 438, 450, 453, 486 as Eveningstar, 177, 193, 213, 241, 319, 325, 457–158, 479, 487, 489
-socialism: anarchism’s history 34, 116, 118, 127; and Christian anarchism 187, 188, 196, 198, 199, 200; and cosmism 419, 426; defined 342; economic planning 168, 172, 249, 250, 327, 408–409; and individualist anarchism 31, 113, 114, 116, 122, 127, 145; and political communal (or social) anarchism 209, 327; and post-left anarchism 139;
+Hun-Ahau symbolized by, 114–115, 125, 245
-prison populations 398, 401, 402; Rothbard’s view of 166, 167; and transhumanism 426; see also Marxism
+as Morningstar, 101, 176, 178, 192, 208, 319, 330, 334–335, 343, 457, 475, 487, 491, 492
-social(ist) anarchism: business enterprise 349–350, 351, 352, 354; and Christian anarchism 187, 196, 198–200; crime problem 345–347; and critical philosophical anarchism 210–211, 212, 218; decentralization 384; and education 361–363; human nature 26n51; and market anarchism 28, 33, 116–118, 122; private property 28, 327, 329, 337–338, 342–343; and revolution 142, 143; social welfare 356–357; and varieties of anarchism 28, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 35, 208, 209; and violence 309
+see also Tlaloc-Venus war villages, 60, 63, 65, 72, 97, 421 bloodletting rituals of, 89–90, 101, 307
-social media 276
+at Copan, 307, 308, 309, 330, 332, 339
-social norms: absence of intentional control 274, 277–278; arbitrariness 274–276, 277, 278, 279; community diversity and population churn 277, 278–279, 280; creation of 271, 273, 274–276, 278, 285–286; a definition 271–273; Egoism 136;
+migrations from, 92, 432–433 original, at Cerros, 98–103, 105, 119, 123
-emergent law 284, 285–286; enforcement 59, 67, 271, 273–274, 276, 277–278; invasiveness 276–277; and justice 58, 59, 60, 274; natural law 288; replacing state institutions 7, 273, 289; rule of recognition 277–278, 283; unintended consequences of state welfare intervention 251
+platforms at, 101, 434 vision quest, 87, 89, 134. 242, 243, 254–255, 257, 426–427, 432, 473
-social safety nets 58, 62, 63, 68, 231, 356–357
+Vision Serpent, 68–70, 90, 137, 138–139, 202, 207, 232, 233, 254, 266, 275, 276, 279, 287. 319, 322, 339, 369, 389, 394–395, 417, 425, 426, 473, 494, 503
-Socrates 168
+Vogt, Evon Z., 426, 428
-Somalia 227, 228
+wacah chan, see World Tree war, sacred, 64–65, 124, 144 battle gear for, 151, 448 causes of, 60 central metaphor of, 124 code of, 145, 151–152 monuments to, 124–125, 126 ritual preparation for, 151 season for. 62
-Sorel, Georges 297
+war captives, 60, 65, 127, 143, 144, 152, 164, 166, 181, 265, 354, 384, 386, 390–391, 452, 459, 461, 462
-sovereignty: Aristotle on customary law 97n19; Deioces 89; egoism 135, 140; European Union 46; feudal system 42; indigenous people 298; of the individual 3, 114, 130, 131, 145, 170, 209; see also autonomy
+of Ah-Cacaw, 205–206, 211, 212, 214, 215, 457
-state and state actor authority 44, 45, 207, 213, 244, 245, 276, 282
+in ballgame, 126, 177, 179, 457, 487–188, 503–504
-Soviet Union 249–250, 316, 419
+of Bird-Jaguar, 285, 287, 291, 292, 295, 301
-Spade, Dean 68
+Chan-Bahlum’s sacrifice of, 233, 236, 243, 258, 259, 260
-Spain 117–118, 296, 425
+in Chichen Itza, 366–370, 372, 373–374, 502–504
-special immunity thesis 236, 241–243, 245
+costumes of, 367, 373–374, 464, 482, 502–503
-speculative fiction 314–316
+-Rabbit as, 317–319, 321, 337, 456, 486–487, 488, 493
-Spooner, Lysander 3, 146; economic thought 30, 31, 32, 127; and the Moralist-versus-Egoist debate (Liberty) 126, 127—128, 129, 130, 136; and natural rights doctrine 114, 124n23, 128; and Rothbard 119, 127, 128, 164, 165–166; Tucker’s obituary 130
+of Flint-Sky-God K, 181, 183
-the state 1; Christian defense of 199; in a comparison of political and philosophical anarchist thought 76–77, 207–208, 209–210, 211, 218, 219, 328; and competitive markets 80, 115, 171, 172, 180, 253, 254–255, 369–370, 372–373, 376, 425; control of education 48, 90, 148, 166, 176, 360–361, 362; defining anarchism 1, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 76–77, 207, 342; definitions of 43–45, 60, 76, 157, 299, 310; egoist thought 131, 140, 141, 145; Enlightenment defence of 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 40, 50, 99–109, 162n42, 298; exhaustivity in the anarchy/state distinction 39–43, 45, 46, 49, 50; expansion and peaceful collapse 50, 309, 312, 316–322; and Ghandian nonviolent resistance 304–305; individual, collective and majority consent 5, 114, 152, 166; information technology monopolies 421; interpersonal domination 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180; militarism 167–168, 173, 189, 295–296; minimal states 2, 64, 84, 88–89, 90, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161n28, 292; myth and sacrilization of 10, 296, 297–302, 304; non- consensual states and the justification of coercion 152–159; the point of arguments for anarchism 78, 79–80; police violence and heavy-handedness 2, 60, 175, 177; rejecting anti-state violence 78–79; repressive surveillance technology 305–306, 403n25; Rothbardian individualism 165, 166, 181; Rothbardian liberal class theory 167, 168, 179, 180; Rothbardian natural law theory 170; statepropped economic privilege 115, 119, 127, 167, 168, 180, 253–255; synonymy with war 295–296; transhumanist anarchism 420, 426, 427; see also centralization; moral parity (of state and non-state actors); national defense; political authority
+Kan-Xul as, 392, 424, 468, 469, 476, 487
-state of nature: deliberate exit from (Kantian endorsement of state authority) 3, 9, 99, 100–109, 298; and human nature 47, 99–100, 321; indigenous people (Hobbes) 298–299; interpretation as natural state (limited-access social order) 39, 47, 48, 49, 50; and the logic of continuous dealings 262; and the right to coercion 99, 100, 153, 156–157, 159, 161n28, 243, 245; and the state/anarchy distinction 39–40, 41, 45, 47, 49
+kept alive for years, 190, 193, 194, 464
-Stein, Barry 372, 374, 375
+of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, 190 ritual display of, 190–191, 193, 194,
-Stephens, David 189
+war captives (continued)
-Stephenson, Neal 314–316, 318
+ritual display of (continued) 205–206, 213, 292, 367, 382, 464, 471
-stigmergic project coordination 377–378
+ritual sacrifice of, 87, 124, 126, 145, 149, 178, 206, 209, 268, 373, 432, 451, 488
-Stirner, Max 26n51, 28–29, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139, 140–148, 209, 212
+of Shield-Jaguar, 265, 268, 273, 477–478
-Stoicism 96
+of Smoking-Squirrel, 190–191, 192, 193, 194, 460–461
-Stringham, Edward P. 230, 258
+stairways and, 179, 283, 322–323, 503, 504
-Suissa, Judith 26n49, 360
+wargames, 369, 502
-Sutter, Daniel 229
+wars of conquest, 58, 130–215,
-Swan, Melanie 319
+–342, 354, 380, 441–442,
-Tak Kak (James L. Walker) 128, 129, 130–137, 147 taxation 6, 57, 67, 145, 166, 180, 193, 195, 196, 197, 224, 238, 250, 316, 344, 368; see also theft
+, 499–500
-Taylor, Michael 4, 45, 47
+Calakmul in, 174–179, 181–183, 184, 191, 211–212, 213, 214
-technology: anarcho-transhumanism 311, 416, 418, 420, 421, 422, 424–425, 426, 427, 428; capacity for mass control 305, 395, 420; capital investment 372, 375; creating counter-productivity 368; green 422, 424–425; intellectual property rights 376;
+code of, 152–153
-internet 377, 378, 417, 418, 420, 421, 426;
+Dos Pilas tn, 179–186, 211–212
-military 11, 250–251, 403n25, 406–412;
+originated by Teotihuacan, 147, 152, 159–163, 164, 444, 446
-post-capitalist transition 379; primitivism 147;
+.tee also Caracol; Naranjo; Tikal; Tlaloc-Venus war
-and rationality 296; role of capitalists in resource
+water, 13, 61, 243, 417, 426, 457, 458, 479
-allocation 352; stigmergic projects 377–378;
+management of, 93, 97, 105, 119
-worker surveillance 369, 370
+waterlilies, 93, 94, 104, 209, 331, 341, 504
-Thomas Aquinas 339n16
+“waterlily” (nab), 94, 417, 458
-Threat Management Center 64
+Waterlily Jaguar, 124, 436
-Tiebout, Charles 256
+Waterlily-Jaguar, king of Copan, 311, 313
-Tilly, Charles 44
+Waterlily Monster, 418
-Tolkein, J. R. R. 314
+Kan-cross, 243, 411–412
-Tolstoy, Leo 187, 188–189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 304, 361, 362
+waterways, 60–61, 93, 433, 504
-Tonry, M. 398
+Webster, David, 441
-trade: cartels 254–255; consensual communities 84; institutional frameworks 48, 180, 222, 226, 252; market anarchism 112, 116, 117, 122, 127;
+west (chikin), 6b, 426, 447
-neoliberalism 396; non-state treaties and agreements 88, 226, 230–231, 262–266, 292;
+white (zac), b6, 83, 468
-process of economic development 228; Rothbard’s voluntary mutual exchange 166, 168, 169, 171
+white earth, 104, 106, 110, 119, 123
-transgender issues 68, 144, 175, 416
+Willey, Gordon R., 48, 171, 455, 458, ’ 505
-transhumanism 416–417, 419, 421–422, 426; see also anarcho-transhumanism
+Williamson, Richard, 485, 490
-Trump administration 295, 406
+Wisdom, Charles, 488
-Tucker, Benjamin: egoism 29, 126, 128, 129, 130, 136, 140, 143, 145, 169; and market anarchism 31, 32, 33, 35, 112, 115, 119; and Rothbardian anrcho-capitalism 127; scientific anarchism 146;
+witz (“mountain”), 68, 71, 427, 479
-Spooner’s obituary 130; see also Liberty (periodical)
+Witz Monsters, 239, 316, 325, 407, 418, 486
-Tullock, Gordon 4, 224, 229, 253, 292
+on mask panels, 137–139, 169–170, 439–440, 454
-UAVs see unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs)
+women, 99, 133, 177–178, 268, 360, 363–364, 438, 455. 479
-ultraminimal states 157, 158, 161n31, 161n41
+costumes of, 279, 280
-United States of America: amending laws 278;
+as kings, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
-American nationalism 295, 301–302; Black Panthers 176; Declaration of Independence and rule by consent 5; direct action, examples of 62–64; Donald Trump 295, 406; drug crime 346; economic effect of World War II 250, 410;
+World Tree (wacah chan), 66—70, 71, 407, 418, 425, 426, 427, 428, 439, 471. 503
-electoral system 66, 252; as empire 167, 407;
+on Group of the Cross, 242, 255, 256, 259, 472, 475
-federal debt 317; George Floyd murder 2; healthcare 254; market anarchism 4, 112–123, 126, 163, 166, 168–169, 171, 172, 179, 225; and mass incarceration 395, 396, 397, 398, 400, 401, 402; military goods and services 406–407, 409–412; moon landing 331; nineteenth century individualists 4, 8–9, 30–31, 33, 126–127, 165–166 (see also Godwin, William; Spooner, Lysander; Stirner, Max; Tucker, Benjamin;
+kings as, 67–68, 90, 242–243 on Pacal the Great’s sarcophagus, 225–226, 232, 398
-Warren, Josiah); political compromise 93–94; private police department (San Francisco) 258; Progressive Era 167; prospect of fiscal ruin 316–317; Ron Paul movement 1; science fiction 314, 315; surveillance of citizens 316
+tn temple pyramids, 105
-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) 409–410, 411, 412 Usmani, Adaner 396, 398
+Yax-Cheel-Cab, 378, 396, 398, 399
-usury 95, 107, 115, 119, 265, 266
+Wren, Linea, 500
-utilitarianism 3, 126, 128, 129, 130–137
+writing system, 14, 19, 45–55, 97, 346, 379, 495, 502
-Vallier, Kevin 339n15
+calligraphy of, 50, 55 cartouches in, 52–53, 54 on costumes, 397, 506 decipherment of, 46–50, 401, 420, 426
-Van der Vossen, Bas 333
+elements of, 52–53 glyphic tags in, 112, 436 graphic forms in, 53–54 homophones in, 52, 421, 436–437, 472
-Van der Walt, Lucien 17, 18, 19, 27n63
+literary genres of, 54 logographs in, 52, 421 numbers in, 82
-Van Maarseveen, Henc 4
+phonetic complements in, 52, 447, 466
-Van Notten, Michael 227
+semantic determinatives in, 52–53, 436
-Van Steenwyk, Mark 191
+sentence structure in, 54
-veganism 427
+spelling in, 49, 52–53, 421
-vice crime 1, 64–65, 236, 239, 240, 346, 396, 398 Vinge, Vernor 314
+syllabary signs in, 52, 53, 446
-violence: in anarchy-ist conceptions of anarchism 21, 22; despotic rule 85, 86, 87–88, 92, 94;
+texts of, 18, 54–55, 57, 112, 421
-interpersonal domination 174, 175, 176, 177, 178; methodological anarchism 64, 65, 66; the myth and sacrilization of state 10, 295, 296, 297, 300–302, 304, 305, 306; and the natural state 47, 48, 49, 50; police violence 2, 60, 175, 177;
+time and, 52–53, 54, 430
-primitive societies 147; rejecting anti-state violence 78–79; revolutionary violence (assassinations) 78, 296, 303; revolutionary violence (Bakunin’s belief in) 296; revolutionary violence (reinforcing hierarchy) 65, 78, 303–304, 306; revolutionary violence (Spanish Revolution, 1936) 117–118; in the state of nature 99, 100, 108, 298, 299, 305, 321; state’s legitimate monopoly 43, 44, 45, 166, 299; state synonymy with war 295–296; stereotyping anarchy and anarchists 4, 11, 77, 223–225, 226, 295, 296, 305, 309; unfree markets 171, 172, 180; varieties of anarchism 208; see also coercion; nonviolence; self-defense
+word plays in, 52, 468 see also books; scribes
-voters 252–254, 396, 397, 398; see also electoral system vulgar libertarianism 179
+Xibalba (Underworld), 66, 84, 90, 153, 209, 226, 239, 241, 242, 327, 376, 399, 425, 427, 473, 490
-Wacquant, L. 396
+Lords of Death in, 74–76, 77, 124, 125, 126, 235, 243, 316, 383
-wage systems 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 115, 343, 352–353, 354, 375; see also fair pay
+Xulttin, 145, 392
-Walker, James L. 128, 129, 130–137, 145, 147 Wallis, John 47–48, 49
+Xunantunich, 385
-Walter, Nicolas 34
+Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac of Copan, 21, 331–340, 344, 491, 492, 493
-Warren, Josiah 3, 28, 30, 35, 114, 115, 119, 130, 145 Warren, Robert 256
+Yat-Balam, king of Yaxchilân, 263, 265, 266–268, 277, 278, 477, 478
-wars 295–296; see also militarism; military goods and services
+yax (“blue-green”; “first”), 66, 150, 310, 332, 436–437, 440, 465, 476, 483, 492
-war on terror 409, 411
+Yax-Balam (Ancestral Hero Twin), 74–76, 142, 436 symbolized by sun, 114, 115
-Wasow, O. 396, 398
+Yax-Cheel-Cab (First World Tree), 378, 396, 398, 399
-Weber, Max 43–44, 45, 46, 47, 157, 162n41, 299
+Yaxchilán, 21, 87, 174–175, 176, 207, 262–305, 329, 330, 424, 433, 443, 449, 455, 457, 459, 473, 476 483, 484, 503 decline of, 383
-Weingast, Barry R. 47–48, 49, 257
+Emblem Glyph of, 479
-welfare (social safety nets) 58, 62, 63, 68, 231,
+lintels of, 47, 175, 265–268, 269–270, 275–276, 285–295, 297–301, 303, 444, 447, 478, 487
-–357
+temple pyramids of, 262, 266–268, 271, 273, 275–276, 277, 285–295, 297–301, 430, 476, 477, 487
-Welsh, John F. 141–142, 146, 148
+Yaxhá, 181, 191–192, 212, 213, 452, 499
-white privilege 176
+Yax-Kamlay of Copán, 332–338, 493 name glyph of, 492
-Widerquist, Karl 61
+Yax-Kuk-Mo’, king of Copán, 310–313, 319, 322, 327, 341, 343, 344, 484, 485, 486
-Wikipedia 377, 378
+Yax-Moch-Xoc, king of Tikal, 140–141, 144, 198 name glyph of, 440
-Willems, Kurt 192
+Yax-Pac, king of Copán, 21, 311, 319, 320–343, 424, 425, 488, 489, 490–491 492–494 accession of, 320, 322 brothers of, 331–340, 344, 361, 491, 492, 493 death of. 342–343, 483 mother of, 320, 330–331, 488 state visit of, 342, 494 stelae of, 330, 336, 342–343, 344
-Williams, Brian 295
+Yaxuná, 16, 42, 44, 352–354, 374, 404–405, 496, 499
-Williams, Dana 178
+perimeter communities of, 353–354, 504
-Williams, Leonard 142
+yellow (kan), 66
-Williamson, C. 400
+yichan relationship, 300, 303, 479
-Wilson, Peter Lamborn see Bey, Hakim
+zac lac (“offering plates”), 200, 463
-Wilson, Robert Anton 365–366
+zac uinic headband, 253–254
-Wink, Walter 188, 191, 192
+Zavala, Lauro José, 505
-Winstanley, Gerard 113
+Zinacantan, 43. 426. 428, 471
-Wittgenstein, Ludwig 297
-Wolff, Jonathan 50
-Wolff, Robert Paul 4
-Wollstonecraft, Mary 418
-women: as flatterers (Aristotle’s Politics) 91;
-interpersonal domination 122, 173, 175, 178, 181;
-Proudhon’s denial of equal status 32
-Women’s Liberation Movement 173, 175
-Woodcock, George 116
-Woods, Thomas E. 188, 196, 197, 198
-workerist anarchism 147
-workers: coercion 422; cooperatives 114, 179, 180, 349—350, 353—355; education 363; in hierarchical bureaucracies 366—368, 369, 370—371; initiative and discretion 370, 371, 373, 374; labor unions 58, 63–64, 67, 117, 144, 147, 370, 374; law of competition 114; mass production jobs 373, 374; unemployment cycles and prison populations 395, 397; see also labor
-Wright, N. T. 202n54, 203n68
-YAF see Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)
-Yago, Edan 319
-Yasnaya Polyana 362
-Yglesias, Matt 367
-Yoder, John Howard 188, 195, 198
-Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) 120
-youth liberationist anarchism 176
-Zakaria, Fareed 295
-Zerzan, John 147, 421
 </biblio>
 <br>
-** Taylor & Francis eBooks
-[[http://www.taylorfrancis.com][www.taylorfrancis.com]]
-<center>
-A single destination for eBooks from Taylor & Francis
-<br>with increased functionality and an improved user
-<br>experience to meet the needs of our customers.
-,000+ eBooks of award-winning academic content in
-<br>Humanities, Social Science, Science, Technology, Engineering,
-<br>and Medical written by a global network of editors and authors.
-</center>
-TAYLOR & FRANCIS EBOOKS OFFERS:
-A streamlined
-<br>experience for
-<br>our library
-<br>customers
-REQUESTA FREE TRIAL
-<br>[[mailto:support@taylorfrancis.com][support@taylorfrancis.com]]
-Routledge
-Taylor & Francis Croup