纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 051玛雅宫廷放血仪式浮雕（5）（在线收听）

"If you can create a feeling of pain in the body and you survive it, you can move into either a state of, not quite ecstasy, but out-of-the-ordinariness, a sense that you can transcend, you can do something rather special.

"What I find interesting about this image, which is quite startlingly horrific, is how visible the woman's pain is. I think that, in the present day, we've come to hide our pain. We have the jokes about our capacity for pain, but we don't really show it.

"What we see there is something that women can understand and can reflect, although it's very exaggerated, the kind of relation to self and to a husband that a woman often makes - or to her children. And it's not that men are extracting them. It's that women experience their sense of self by doing these things, by enacting them. They give them a sense of their own identity. And I'm sure that was true for her."

The next lintel in the series shows us the consequence of the Queen's self-mortification. The ritual blood-letting, and the pain, have combined to transform Lady K'abal Xook's consciousness, and enable her to see, rising from the offering bowl that holds her blood, a vision of a sacred serpent. From the mouth of the snake a warrior brandishing a spear appears - the founding ancestor of the Yaxchilan royal dynasty,