Functions of The Tonsured Maize God
Iconographically, various functions can be discerned:
- The Tonsured Maize God personifies precious substances: maize, jade, and also cacao. The Popol Vuh has Xquic imploring a 'Cacao Woman', but the Classical Mayas preferred to depict the cacao god as a male. The Tonsured Maize God doubles as a Tonsured Cacao God, wicacao pods growing from his body. More directly, the Tonsured Cacao God's body can be shown as a tree, with his head representing the cacao pod growing on its stem. A Classical Mayan vase in the Popol Vuh Museum seems to show a trophy head suspended in such a personified cacao tree.
- The Tonsured Maize God is intrinsically connected to the lightning deities and can therefore evince a lightning celt or torch stuck in the forehead.
- In addition to being the deity of maize and cacao, the Tonsured Maize God is also a patron of dancing and feasting. As a ceremonial dancer, he often carries a specific 'totemic' animal in his backrack.
- Along with the Howler Monkey Gods, he is a patron of the scribal arts (see fig. 1). In this, as in some other respects, the Tonsured Maize God is a juvenile form of the upper god, God D (Itzamna).
- In his life as in his death and resurrection, the Tonsured Maize God serves as a model for the king.
- In the San Bartolo murals, the Maize God is connected to a fifth world tree probably representing the central tree of life; in Palenque, a maize tree serves as such a tree of life.
Read more about this topic: Maya Maize God
Famous quotes containing the words functions of the, functions of, functions, maize and/or god:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“Mark the babe
Not long accustomed to this breathing world;
One that hath barely learned to shape a smile,
Though yet irrational of soul, to grasp
With tiny finger—to let fall a tear;
And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves,
To stretch his limbs, bemocking, as might seem,
The outward functions of intelligent man.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions ... extends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“O Love, what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.”
—Lucille Feynman, mother of American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988)