"As I worked, words from another friend who had been at the San Juan conference, Johannes Wilbert, the great ethnographer of the Warao of Venezuela, came back to me. He had admonished me always to look to nature for the source of mythological symbolism. At the last minute, I decided to follow his advice and look at a map of the sky. I wanted to find out what it looked like when Scorpius was opposite the North Star.
I rummanged through my bookshelves and found a book of star maps, Menzel's Stars and Planets. Unfortunately, this book printed the south and north views of the sky on two separate pages, so I had to find some tracing paper and place it over the page showing the north sky. I drew it and then shifted the tracing paper to the south page and joined both sides of the sky together. I drew in Scorpius and the North Star and then looked at the result. My heart jumped into my mouth. There it was. The Milky Way (Fig. 2:11) stretched south to north from Scorpius past the North Star. The Wakah-Chan was the Milky Way.
When I presented this new insight at my next seminar, one of my graduate students, Matthew Looper, contributed yet another critical idea to the growing pattern. While I was telling the class about the Wakah-Chan World Tree being the Milky Way, I heard him murmur from the back of the crowded seminar room, 'That's why he entered the road.' His words exploded like a lightning bolt in my mind. The great image of Pakal's sarcophagus at Palenque (Fig. 2:12) shows him at the moment of his death falling down the World Tree into the Maw of the Earth. The expression the ancient Maya used for this fall was och bih, 'he entered the road.' The road was the Milky Way, which is called both the Sak Be ('White Road') and Xibal Be, 'Road of Awe,' by the Maya. Pakal entered this road in death.
Schele 1993:76
During eighteen years of his reign, Chan-Balam of Palenque created one of the great literary and artistic legacies of the New World. One of his first acts after his father Pakal's death and his own accession to the throne was to decorate the piers of his father's funerary mountain, the Temple of the Inscriptions. These painted stucco relliefs display portraits of his parents and other adults cradling him when he was six years old. As signs of his power and special status as a divine being, a smoking ax pierces his forehead and his leg is transformed into a snake (Fig. 4:8). These divine atrributes identify the young boy as the god K'awil,37 a sacred being who symbolizes the embodiment of spiritual force in material objects.
Adults could also display the smoking ax of K'awil pierced through their forheads, but only after they were dead. Pakal wears it as he falls down the Milky Way into the Otherworld (Fig. 4:9a). At Copan (Fig.4:9b), the last scion of a dynasty that had ruled for four hundred years wears it as he dances in the portal to the Otherworld at the moment of his own death. The inscription on the rear of the panel tell (sic) us that the dynasty has ended with this particular dance. Each appearance of this smoking ax represents a moment of transition--from child to heir or from life to death. As we shall see, to wear the ax through the forehead signaled that the person was in a state of transformation embodied by the power of lightning.
Freidel, Schele, Parker 1993:193-194