| Blood letting, sometimes qualified as 'personal' blood letting or 'autosacrifice', is how anthropologists refer to the ritual practices through which the pre-hispanic peoples of Mexico and Guatemala produced blood from their own limbs as part of calendar, ancestral, or deity-veneration rituals. Aztec art is rich and explicitly narrative in presenting personal blood sacrifice. Human and deity figures stand holding pointed bone awls with tips piercing the ear lobe. Streams of blood, represented in ways identical to water, spring out and enter a pit in the earth, lined with the skeletal jaws of death. Or similar streams pass toward a sun disk, in a scene recalling the primordial blood sacrifice that allowed the new sun to begin to move. Blood itself contained an energy that the Aztecs labelled "ollin", or "motion". The same word served for rubber, from which the wildly bouncing balls used in the native ball games were made. 4 Motion was the birth date, and hence the divination name, of the sun of the current age of the world. Without motion, there could be no continuing energy in the world, and blood was the substance of motion.
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