Olmec maize god
The Olmec god of maize: a head whose cleft crown sprouts an ear of corn, with almond eyes slanting up at the outer corners. Peter David Joralemon called him God II. He is the earliest known maize god of Mesoamerica, and the Maya maize god inherits his face.
Meaning
Identified first by Michael Coe and by Peter David Joralemon, who numbered him God II, the Olmec maize god typically has an ear of corn rising from the middle of his cleft head. Karl Taube of the University of California, Riverside, describes the head as the maize ear made into a person: the cob coming out of the split husk. The face has almond-shaped eyes that usually slant upward at the outer corners and a prominent pair of upper front teeth, traits Taube finds again in the Classic maize gods of the Maya, the Zapotecs and the Gulf Coast. Joralemon recognised six variants, all with maize signs sprouting from the cleft head or printed on the forehead, as Tomás Pérez Suárez summarises him. The god commonly appears on greenstone axes, or celts, and celt-shaped stelae from La Venta, often surrounded by four celts marking the directions.
Origin and history
The first known images of a maize god in Mesoamerica are Olmec, writes the archaeologist Enrique Vela, though the cult itself may go back to the time the plant was domesticated. In them a spike rises from an opening in the forehead, the open leaves of the plant, which suggests the whole head is the ear. The cleft has been read two ways. Peter Furst and Joyce Marcus took the V-shaped cleft for the earth; Taube argues that it is the husk, the bracts round the ear.
Taube and Norman Hammond propose that different aspects of the god personify stages in the growth of maize. Joralemon’s God II is the mature ear. God IV, an infant whom Joralemon took for the rain god, is probably the seed. God VI is the green, tender growing corn, and has a cleft head without the ear. Vela draws the same line: young maize was shown without the spike and with the skull shaped backward. The stages overlap, and the four maize gods carved at Teopantecuanitlan, in Guerrero, carry the marks of all three.
The god at the centre of the world
On a group of incised jade axes attributed to Arroyo Pesquero, the maize god stands with four axe-shaped ears of maize at the corners. Frank Kent Reilly saw that this recreates the Olmec cosmogram of a bar and four dots, with the god as the central bar, the axis of the world, and Taube relates it to the widespread image of the world as a four-sided maize field. The arrangement was built in stone too. At La Merced, near the spring of El Manatí, hundreds of serpentine celts were set upright, blades up, round a celt-shaped figure of the maize god some 72 cm tall.
From the Olmec to the Maya
In the San Bartolo murals in Guatemala, painted in the first century BC, the central figure of the Maya creation story is the maize god, and Taube, iconographer of the San Bartolo project, finds that his face, unlike every other face in those scenes, clearly bears the traits of the Olmec maize god. The Maya Maize God keeps the plant on his head: leaves of maize sprouting from the head are one of the marks of Maya maize gods, Vela writes.
Often confused with
The maize god shares the snarling, pulled-back upper lip, the hallmark of the Olmec style, with the Olmec rain god. A cleft head without an ear of corn belongs to his young, growing aspect, God VI. What marks the mature maize god is the ear of corn in the cleft.
Read next
- Next in Olmec symbolsOlmec colossal headsSeventeen giant stone heads carved by the Olmec of Mexico’s Gulf Coast about 3,000 years ago, each with its own face and a close-fitting helmet. Archaeologists read them as portraits of rulers.
- The maize god of the San Bartolo murals has the Olmec maize god’s faceMaize GodThe 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.
See also
Las Limas figure, Kunz axe, Were-jaguar, Olmec dragon (earth monster), La Venta Altar 4.
Sources
- Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks: Introduction (Karl A. Taube), Karl A. Taube, Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks no. 2, revised digital edition, introduction, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Harvard University), introduction
- 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
- Los dioses del maíz (Enrique Vela, Arqueología Mexicana), Enrique Vela, “De las comidas que usaban los señores”, Arqueología Mexicana edición especial no. 38, pp. 34–39, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- La jadeíta y la cosmovisión de los olmecas (Karl A. Taube, Arqueología Mexicana), Karl A. Taube, “La jadeíta y la cosmovisión de los olmecas”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 87, pp. 43–48, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text, caption and author note
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .