Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Betty Fussell

In the New World, the growing cycle of maize furnished a root metaphor for ordering the universe, a metaphor that made all forms of life organic and made man "blood-kin" to maize. Maize furnished not only literal life-giving seeds but also symbolized all those generative forces of matter and energy that connect sky and earth to the vegetative world of which man and all created beings are a part. The Maya-Aztec calendar, which began with Olmec and Zapotec, elaborated this metaphor of cyclic growth and decline to order, by analogy, historical and astronomical time, integrating both into a single comprehensive system. Thus the dynastic succession of kings was related directly to the pattern of agricultural seasons and to the cyclic movement of the heavens. This extraordinary calendar was incorporated into the complex language by which the Maya in their glyphs could map simultaneously both human history and the constellations in a constantly mutating universe.(16)

Europeans spoke a radically different language of time and history, based on a radically different mythos of separation and loss. God created and man Fell--out of timeless Paradise and into time. In contrast, the New World focused not on a Fall but an Emergence, through successive creations, in cyclic time. Their universe was dynamic, in process, constantly being recreated through the powers of the shaman. Again, Europeans spoke a radically different language of space. In the fixed Ptolemaic universe, the Christian image of the Great Chain of Being linked all creation vertically in a hierarchy. The way to go was up, away from earth at the bottom, the "dregs of the universe," to the pure spirit of God at the top. In the Amerindian cosmos, on the other hand, all motion was circular with no moral and spiritual superiority of "up" over "down," or of the heavens over the earth. The template for time and space, heaven and earth, was a flat field of maize in which life, like a sprouting seed, matures, dies, and returns to earth to be reborn. That field gave shape to the universe.

In the creation myth recorded in the sacred book of the Maya, the Popol Vuh, First Father in the beginning raised the earth high enough above the sea to place in the earth's center the "three stones of creation" and to light the First Fire. The Creator Couple then measured out the four corners of "sky-earth" as if they were measuring a maize field, flat like "el gran tortilla." Sky-earth is a hyphenated word because sky and earth are mirror images of each other, both flat fields connected by the World Tree of Maize, with its roots in the sea below the earth and its crest in the heavens. In the center of each field, sky and earth, the three stones of creation are imaged by the three stones of an ordinary hearth fire in an ordinary house (Figure 5). Even today, every time a Maya housewife in the Yucatan or in Chiapas or in Huehuetenango cooks a tortilla on her comal she is linked to the twin hearths of creation, one in the earth's navel and the other in a constellation of stars.