Maize God
The young Maya god of maize, his long head shaped like an ear of corn and sprouting leaves. In the K’iche’ creation story the first people were made from maize, and Maya people today speak of maize as sacred.
Meaning
The Maize God is the most human of the Maya gods: a young man with no animal features, in Tomás Pérez Suárez’s words “the very image of humans”. Paul Schellhas named him God E, recognising him by the maize leaves that grow from his head out of a kan glyph, the sign for a grain of maize. There are more than a hundred images of him in the three Maya codices. His head can stand in for an ear of maize, and his long hair is compared with the silk of the corn. He was long called Yum Kash, which Pérez Suárez says was a mistake; the glyph with his images reads nal, “maize”, and the names Hun Nal Yel and Hun Hunahpu, the father of the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh, have been proposed for him. The Maize God belongs to the living Maya too: Juana Batz Puac, a K’iche’ daykeeper, says on the NMAI’s Living Maya Time that “maize is sacred to us because it connects us with our ancestors”.
Origin and history
His head is his most telling feature. Ana García Barrios and Vera Tiesler describe a long, flat, backward-sloping skull that seems to copy the shape of a maize cob, especially where he is shown shaven or with his hair combed back. It matches a head-shaping popular among the Classic Maya, made by binding small boards and bands to an infant’s skull, most common along the Usumacinta river, where K’inich Janaab’ Pakal of Palenque had it too.
In Classic sculpture he is a young god whose head appears among foliage, the ear coming out of the plant; the best-known example, Pérez Suárez writes, is the Tablet of the Foliated Cross at Palenque. In Maya art he lives out a cycle in the underworld: he travels in a canoe paddled by the paddler gods, is dressed by young women, and sprouts from a turtle’s shell, the sign of the earth, between two gods thought to be the Hero Twins. In inscriptions his head writes the number eight.
Made from maize
In the Popol Vuh, recorded by K’iche’ nobles in the sixteenth century, the gods failed with other materials before they made people who could talk from yellow and white maize, as the NMAI retells it. Pérez Suárez sees in this myth the reason a maize god exists at all. Juana Batz Puac puts it in the present tense: “Our Creation Story teaches us that the first Grandparents of our people were made from white and yellow corn.”
The Olmec maize god
Maize gods are older than the Maya. Peter Joralemon, studying Olmec art, identified a maize deity he called God II, in six variants, all with maize signs that seem to sprout from the being’s cleft head. The Metropolitan Museum describes Olmec greenstone celts incised with the Olmec Maize God, and suggests the celts themselves stood for maize sprouts. The cleft head is one of the marks of the Olmec face scholars call the were-jaguar.
See also
Were-jaguar, Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna, Maya calendar, Maya numerals (bar and dot).
Sources
- El dios del maíz en Mesoamérica (Tomás Pérez Suárez, Arqueología Mexicana), Tomás Pérez Suárez, “El dios del maíz en Mesoamérica”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 25, pp. 44–55, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Nal. El Dios del Maíz (Dios E) (Tomás Pérez Suárez, Arqueología Mexicana), Tomás Pérez Suárez, “Dioses mayas”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 88, pp. 57–65, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Forma de la cabeza del dios del maíz (Ana García Barrios and Vera Tiesler, Arqueología Mexicana), Ana García Barrios and Vera Tiesler, “El aspecto físico de los dioses mayas. Modelado cefálico y otras marcas corporales”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 112, pp. 59–63, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Creation Story of the Maya (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Creation Story of the Maya
- Olmec Art (James Doyle, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History), James Doyle, “Olmec Art”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Internet Archive copy, 22 February 2026), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, essay text
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Last reviewed October 3, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research
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