pray for the prosperity of his people, while fasting and guarding sexual abstinence. As to the Classic Period king, he appears at times (often period-ending dates) to be scattering blood, incense or, perhaps, maize. At other times, the king, represented by the hero Hunahpu, is sacrificing his own blood in front of directional trees (murals of San Bartolo), or he is officiating in front of such a tree (Cross temple sanctuaries of Palenque). The king not only took a leading part in ritual, but ritual is likely to have focused on his office as well. The erection of stelae showing the king and dedicated to the day 'King' (Ahaw), which concluded intervals of five 360-day years, constituted a royal ritual by itself. It appears to implicate the king as the divine lord of his own day. Inversely, at San Bartolo, the divine hero of the day 'King', Hunahpu, substitutes for the real king. Setting up a stela may additionally have involved the notion of the king as a protective 'tree of life'. Moreover, in the Classic period, the king is commonly depicted holding a cosmic serpent from whose jaws deities (often those of rain, lightning and fire) emerge; the king's raising and balancing of this serpent, accompanied by his 'conjuring' of the emerging deities, may well have been expressed and supported by ritual. Ancestor worship During the Classic period, Tikal's North Acropolis consisted of nucleated royal burial temples and is even referred to as a 'necropolis'. In Classic-period royal courts, tombs are generally found integrated in the residences of the nobility. Apart from the ancestral remains themselves, sacred bundles left by the ancestors were also an object of veneration. Reliefs from the Classic-period kingdom of Yaxchilan also show that royal ancestors were sometimes approached during bloodletting rituals and then appeared to their descendants, emerging from the mouth of a terrestrial serpent (which has been nicknamed 'Vision Serpent'). The monthly feast cycle of the Postclassic kingdom of Maní included a commemorative festival for an ancestral hero viewed as the founder of Yucatec kingship, Kukulcan (a name corresponding to Quichean Gucumatz and Aztec Quetzalcoatl). Around 1500, the incinerated remains of the (male) members of notable Yucatec families were enclosed in wooden images which, together with the 'idols', were placed on the house altar, and ritually fed on all festive occasions; alternatively, they were placed in an urn, and a temple was built