rope through her tongue. In front of her, her husband and the ruler of Yaxchilan, Shield Jaguar, is shown holding a torch. Ideological undertones Among all the Mesoamerican cultures, sacrifice, in whatever form, was a deeply symbolic and highly ritualized activity with strong religious and political significance. Various kinds of sacrifice were performed within a range of sociocultural contexts and in association with a variety of activities, from mundane everyday activities to those performed by the elites and ruling lineages with the aim of maintaining social structure. The social structure was maintained by showing that rulers blood sacrifice to the gods showed the power they had. At its core, sacrifice symbolized the renewal of divine energy and, in doing so, the continuation of life. Its ability of bloodletting to do this is based on two intertwined concepts that are prevalent in the Maya belief system. The first is the notion that the gods had given life to humankind by sacrificing parts of their own bodies. The second is the central focus of their mythology on human blood, which signified life among the Maya. Within their belief system, human blood was partially made up of the blood of the gods, who sacrificed their own divine blood in creating life in humans. Thus, in order to continually maintain the order of their universe, the Maya believed that blood had to be given back to the gods. The rulers are giving their blood to empower the gods in return for giving them life. Depictions of bloodletting in Mesoamerican cultures Unlike later cultures, there is no representation of actual bloodletting in Olmec art. However, solid evidence for its practice exists in the jade and ceramic replicas of stingray spines and shark teeth as well as representations of such paraphernalia on monuments and stelae and in iconography. A proposed translation of the Epi-Olmec culture's La Mojarra Stela 1, dated to roughly AD 155, tells of the ruler's ritual bloodletting by piercing his penis and his buttocks, as well as what appears to be a ritual sacrifice of the ruler's brother-in-law. Bloodletting permeated Maya life. Kings performed bloodletting at every major political event. Building dedications, burials, marriages, and births all required bloodletting. As demonstrated by Yaxchilan Lintels 24 and 25, and duplicated in Lintels 17 and 15, bloodletting in Maya culture was also a means to a vision quest, where fasting, loss of blood, and perhaps