Corn Tattoo Meaning

Sustenance, creation, partnership, and the grain humanity was said to be made from.

Corn is the sacred grain of the Americas — the plant from which whole peoples said they were made, the staff of life that fed great civilizations, grown in prayer and partnership, the crop so bound to its growers that to eat it is to feed the very substance one is made of. To carry corn is to carry sustenance, creation, partnership, and the grain humanity was said to be made from — the flesh of the corn-people, the prayer planted in the dry ground, the sacred food on which civilizations were built.

In the Popol Vuh, the great Maya creation epic, human beings are made from maize — and this is the culmination of a series of divine attempts. The gods first tried to make people from mud, but the mud-people dissolved and could not hold their shape or think. They tried again with wood, but the wood-people were hollow, without hearts or minds or proper reverence for the gods, and were destroyed. Only on the final attempt, when the gods ground maize and formed human flesh from corn dough, did they succeed: the maize-people could think, speak, and worship. Humanity was made, at last, from corn.

This is no mere metaphor in the Maya understanding. The flesh of human beings is corn flesh; human blood is corn water; every person is, quite literally, corn walking — a being formed from the sacred grain and animated by it. To eat corn, then, is to feed the very thing you are made of, to sustain the maize-flesh with maize. Corn is the substance the gods finally found worthy of carrying human consciousness, the only material from which a thinking, praying, fully human being could be made. For the Maya, there is no separating the people from the plant: they are corn, and corn is them, the sacred grain and the human being one and the same flesh. The Maya say humans were made from maize in the Popol Vuh — every person is corn walking, our flesh corn flesh. The Maya corn is the people made of maize — in the Popol Vuh human beings were made from maize after the gods' first attempts with mud and wood failed; the flesh of humans is corn flesh, the blood is corn water, every person is corn walking; to eat corn is to feed the thing you are made of, the sacred substance the gods finally found worthy of human consciousness.

Maize (Zea mays) is the product of one of the most dramatic domestication events in plant history — it was developed from teosinte (a wild grass with small, few-kerneled ears) approximately 9,000 years ago in what is now Mexico, through selective breeding so intensive that the relationship between teosinte and corn was not recognized by botanists until the 20th century. The transformation is so complete that corn cannot reproduce without human intervention — it cannot disperse its seeds because the husk prevents the kernels from falling, and it cannot self-sow. The plant and the human civilization are mutually dependent. The Popol Vuh (the K'iche' Maya creation epic, recorded in the 16th century CE from oral tradition) specifies that humans were made from white and yellow corn — this is not metaphor but literal cosmological fact within the tradition. Corn is currently the most produced grain on earth by volume — approximately 1.1 billion metric tons annually. The United States produces approximately 30% of the world's corn, the majority used for animal feed and ethanol rather than direct human consumption.

Corn across cultures

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