Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

It's tough at the top. At least that's what those at the top like us to think.

The long hours, the public exposure, the responsibility.

In return though, most of us would argue, they get the status and the pay.

And most people it seems are willing to settle for that particular trade-off.

But we'd all think twice I suspect about envying anyone, however privileged, whose regular duty was to go through an ordeal that sounds like this.

It's the sound of pain.

In this case, of a man in the Philippines seeking and enduring excruciating physical pain in order to

achieve a transformed spiritual state. These days most of us take quite a lot of trouble to

avoid pain and willful self-harm suggests to most people an unstable psychological

condition. Sadomassicism gets, on the whole, a bad press.

But around the world, there are, as there always have been,

believers who see self-inflicted pain as a route to transcendental experience.

To the average 21st century citizen, and certainly to me, this willed suffering has about

it something deeply shocking. And so I find it hard even to look at the

image that I'm going to be discussing in this program. What I find startling

about this horrific image is how visible the woman's pain is.

You can tell from her clothing, her jewelry and her elaborate head ornament that this is a woman of great status and wealth.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. My relief of bloodletting made from stone from early 8th century Mexico.

All the objects in the programs this week are from the great royal courts of the world around 800 a.

They're not objects that were made for public view,

their intimate private expressions of great public power.

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