Kʼicheʼ people

Corn or maize is the anchor crop, and it's a cornerstone of cosmology.

In the Popol Vuh, the 16th century K'iche' Maya text rooted in much older pre-Hispanic beliefs, the gods created humans out of corn dough, or masa.

In this world view, maize wasn't just food.

It was life itself.

Figuratively, in these dialects it meant subsistence, life, as we use in both these senses the word vitals.

Among the K'iche's of Guatemala, a tribe of Maya stock, we find as terms applied to their highest divinity, Upam U'le'u Upam Kah, literally belly of the earth, belly of the sky, meaning that by which earth and sky exist.

Popol Vuh, page 332.

End footnote The remaining Bacabs were the red assigned to the east, the white to the north, and the black to the west, and the winds and rains from those directions were believed to be under the charge of these giant Caryatides.

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The K'iche's of Guatemala were not distant relatives of the Mayas of Yucatan, and their mythology has been preserved to us in a rescript of their national book, the Popol Vuh.

Evidently they had borrowed something from Aztec sources, and a flavor of Christian teaching is occasionally noticeable in this record, but for all that it is one of the most valuable we possess on the subject.