Daily drawing 20-7-2015: Ancestor. Dip-pen & ink.

I had been looking at Mayan stone reliefs from Yaxchilán. One panel showed Lady Xook doing ritual bloodletting by drawing a barbed cord through her tongue; then in the next panel a serpent rises from the bowl of (burnt) bloody paper and opens its mouth— out of the serpent’s mouth leans an ancestor, who speaks to Lady Xook. I thought this eel looked kind of like the serpent descending from above to dispense advice.

Eels have a supernatural vibe, in any case. The mystery of where they even come from was only recently solved: briefly, they transform themselves from freshwater to saltwater beings and migrate to sea to breed— Northern Hemisphere eels to the Sargasso, Southern Hemisphere eels to somewhere near Tonga; then the larvae return from sea to river, changing as they go from tiny transparent leaf-creatures into little glass eels, then brown elvers.

As well as the sensitive tubular nostrils, the dimples on an eel’s snout are sensory organs that enable it to sense vibes across distances, which is how they can appear with uncanny swiftness, following the trace of blood in the water.