The simplist is in figure (d) above, a hand-held staff with a stylized axe head attached.  A more complex variant is in (a), as in the following example of the Ceremonial Staff on an 8-foot-high carving on Stela 5 at in the Mayan site of Piedras Negras:

In some instances, the axe head itself was a symbol of a serpent's head and mouth, as shown even more stylized in (b) (also compare with the same serpent-head structures found in the Ceremonial Bar).

In some Ceremonial Staffs, as in (a) and (e), the staff portion elongated into a serpent's body. The serpent, of course, was an immensely powerful symbol in ancient Meso-American cultures -- particularly the symbol of the feathered serpent, such as the enormous number of carvings of the feathered-serpent god Quetzlcoatl that adorns many structures at Teotihuacan outside Mexico City.

Eventually, the Ceremonial Axe became stylized into the miniature body of a Mayan deity, as shown in (b), (c), and (e).  These became the Manikin Scepter, symbol of god-power.

Thus, perhaps a sequence of how these symbols evolved might be something like this:
    - a simple staff or pole
    - a staff symbolizing and conjuring the power of a serpent
    - a serpent-staff adorned with an axe head
    - the axe-head symbolized by a serpent's head
    - the axe-head serpent's head gaping
    - the axe-head serpent's head gaping with the power of a god-image emerging
    - the axe-head symbolized by the god-image itself
    - the entire Ceremonial Staff represented by a Manikin Scepter

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