By Stephen Beachy

IT WASN'T LONG ago that we knew so little about the ancient Maya that the romantics among us could imagine them as most anything: a gentle, evolved people in possession of secret knowledge and in contact with UFOs, or maybe psychic vampires using their advanced mind-control techniques on a helpless population.

In the past 20 years or so, as we've deciphered more and more of their hieroglyphics, we've discovered they're more interesting than that. We know torture was as fully integrated into their culture as it is into ours today. We know that they were fond of human sacrifice and that Maya royalty, at the least, hallucinated with frequency. They used mushrooms and other psychoactive plants, smoked or in enemas, and they pierced their ears, tongues, and penises with stingray spines until visions appeared. They dreamed up a shifting pantheon of mutant deities and fed them with blood, semen, and sap. They conjured complex cosmic histories and superimposed them over the Milky Way. They lived according to the rigorous demands of complicated interlocking calendars they used to make sense of the past, present, and future.

The best venue this side of Mexico City's Archeological Museum to encounter this worldview is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which is exhibiting "Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya." The varied collection of Mayan artifacts, on display until Jan. 2, has just the right mix of violent and hallucinogenic imagery for the holidays. From the statue that first greets you – a king wearing a ridiculously elaborate headdress full of gods and hieroglyphic language – to the reconstruction of the mural you see on your way out, depicting a group of unhappy captives headed to their doom, there's something charmingly mutilated about this world. Is it the way the Maya elite flattened the foreheads of their babies, to create the sloped foreheads they so admired, reminiscent of tapered corncobs? Or all those gods with elongated snouts, googly eyes, and animal features?

My personal favorite is the omnipresent K'awiil, sometimes known as God K, with his serpent foot. You can see K'awiil as an intricate white-stone scepter, K'awiil as an eccentric carved flint with a convoluted lightning quality, and a tiny, delightfully sinister K'awiil perched like Chucky in the lap of one of a king's ancestors in the limestone relief of the ruler dancing in the guise of a storm god. K'awiil was associated with lightning, prophecy, sacrifice, and the visions conjured in smoke and mirrors and is one of the gods said to have introduced the Maya to homoeroticism. He's often portrayed with a smoking mirror emerging from his forehead. One of the pyrite mirrors is on display, and on intricately painted vases, we see kings and priests gazing into the mirrors, looking for the future. Their future was pretty much like our present: war, bloodshed, and bound captives with alarmed or oddly serene expressions.

There's something explosive about these figures carved as statues and lintels, elaborately painted on vases, shaped into ceramic figurines. Everything feels like it's in process, just transformed or about to transform into something else. Kings perform as gods, priests dress like jaguars, and everyone wears his or her hair to resemble the tassels of maize. Gods dance, soccer players are in motion, and a lidded turtle shell is cracked like the earth, ready for the maize god to burst out of it. Cloud, dwarf, skull – these images feel like facets of a reality undergoing a profound mutation. During their soccer games, the portal to the otherworld opened up, and they tossed the losers in. For the Maya, the underworld was intimately linked with Earth and the heavens, in a mutual relationship of give and take. In two enormous stone carvings, we see her highness Lady Xoc running a thorn-studded rope through her tongue. In the following scene, she's burned paper soaked with her own blood, and an enormous fanged serpent emerges from the smoke, vomiting up her predictable vision: another militaristic ancestor encouraging her to go to war. Serpents and corn were central metaphors, both life-forms that shed their skins and regenerate. The Milky Way was a snake, and the cosmos was always in violent motion, transforming itself in elaborate cycles.

Not to be missed are the smaller pieces, easy to lose among all the stone monoliths. There are intricately carved bone weaving tools, a tiny frog made of shell, a bone inscribed with tiny hieroglyphics, a jade death mask with elaborate ear ornaments, and perhaps the highlight of the show, a death god assembled from pieces of mother-of-pearl, with a stomach distended by rot. If there seems to be something inhuman at play here, it's because the Mayan concept of "human" was somewhat larger than our own. Humanity was a force that contained the rest of the cosmos – animal, vegetable, weather, stars – a pantheistic concept of reality common among shamanic cultures and users of psychedelics everywhere.

Another animal

After our own culture has been buried in the rubble, perhaps future life-forms will imagine us to have been humane and enlightened beings, a gentle and evolved people in contact with space aliens. We can only hope they'll discover the artwork of Sue Coe among the debris of Starbucks, Home Depot, and the Good Guys. Coe's new show, "Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?," is at the Pigman Gallery from Dec. 2 through Jan. 9, in conjunction with the release of her new book, Bully: Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round (Thunder's Mouth Press). Bully portrays America as a carnival fun house of torture and particularly mirthless mayhem, lorded over by our current crop of despots: George W. Bush as barker in chief and Condoleeza Rice, who leaks oil from her breasts. Coe's indictments work well in book form, the extremity of her art balanced by facts that are always more extreme. While Bully signals an enlargement of Coe's concerns, the show may disappoint those who come expecting to see new work and a broader engagement. The subjects of the show's multiple-choice title aren't the Iraqi people, but animal liberation activists. Fans of Coe's work will discover a gallery full of familiar images: vivisected monkeys, animals being operated on, genetically engineered mice with human ears on their backs, cows mainlining hormones and hooked up to milking machines.

Although many of these lithographs and etchings are numbered reproductions of old work, newer themes do creep in peripherally. We see a rhino at the Belgrade Zoo, driven mad by night bombing, that beats its head against a wall until it dies, and a tiger that loses hope and eats its young. The image of a harried and emaciated dog surrounded by dismembered hands is captioned "They cut off their hands so they couldn't vote." In Coe's X-ray vision, the global empire is revealed as a place as violent, mutilated, and mutating as anything the Maya dreamed up, but devoid of sacred content. Instead of snake-footed gods, we get Mickey Mouse genetically altered to develop cancer.

'Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya' runs through Jan. 2. Tues.-Sun., 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m., California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave. and Clement), S.F. $5-$8. (415) 863-3330. 'Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?' runs through Jan. 9. Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Pigman Gallery, 72 Tehama, S.F. Free. (415) 546-7441.