The Goddess in Her Aspect as Corn Mother

By Rosemary
(Written for Ecclasia)

One of my favorite stories, as a child, was the Greek tale of Demeter and Persephone, the easily-understood tale of a mother mourning her absent daughter, and an explanation of the cause for the unfruitful wintertime. In the oldest representations of Demeter and Persephone, according to Sir James George Frazer , they are decked with grain, crowned with corn and holding stalks of corn in their hands; hence, clearly corn goddesses. When Demeter is reunited with her daughter, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she immediately transforms the barren plain of Eleusis into a field of golden grain in her delight, showing it to the princes and gladdening their hearts as well.

Frazer also discusses the Mysteries of Eleusis, and connects the Demeter-worship with them, stating that the Hymn reveals the myth without the ritual; then Hippolytus, a Christian writer of the second century, explains to us that the very heart of the mysteries consisted in showing to the initiated a reaped ear of corn. Frazer concludes that Clement of Alexandria was correct in affirming that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a sacred drama in the mysteries of Eleusis. Thus we see that this archetype is ancient, and was seen as sacred of old.

The New World too, regards corn and divinity as synonymous, and corn likewise a gift of the gods. They speak of maize, rather than wheat, rye, barley, oats, or spelt, but the gift of the grain from the earth is the same Divine blessing. Betty Fussell (in The Corn Story) describes a piece of art found in the Maya ruins of Palenque, in the jungle of Yucatan, thus: "...the Foliated Cross reveals in its carvings what Christians call the Tree of Life. For the Maya, it is the World Tree in the shape of a cross, where the crosspiece or branches are formed by leaves and silk-topped ears of corn, each ear a human head. The corn sprouts from a trunk of blood rooted in the head of the Water-Lily Monster that floats on the primal waters of the Underworld. Here out of the monster's mouth a god is born--God K, the Young Lord, the Maize God. Today, Maya descendants in Chiapas, Yucatan and Guatemala live double lives between Christian and Maya crosses, Christian Axle-trees and Maya World Trees, Christian Saints and maize gods, Catholic priests and shamans--lives colored by blood. 'People, when they are dying, save their corn, which has beautiful grains,' a modern Chorti told an interviewer in 1972. 'They look for those with beautiful white grains, with black corn, with red corn. Because they say that that is the blood of Jesus Christ.' In a kernel of red corn, a contemporary Maya sees not only the cosmic globe but a drop of blood that condenses all of human history into a single germ of life."

One of the twenty named days of the Maya calendar is Net. When the old grandmother sees the imprint of the girl's net in the earth by the corn plant, she takes it as a sign that the evening star that rose on the day named Death will reappear as the morning star on the day named Net. The twin maize gods are also aspects of the evening star, the star-mask of Quetzalcoatl, whose heart at his fiery death was transformed into the bright planet that descends into the Underworld in cycles that parallel the cyclic life of corn, and of humans. In the Popul Vuh, man who sprouts like a seed in the womb sees his birth as the dawn of life; man whose corpse decays in the earth sees his death as the dawn of spirit. Like the twin gods, like the Plumed Serpent, he is both seed and star. The authors of the Popul Vuh--called themselves "daykeepers" or "mother-fathers of the Word", in imitation of the first "mother-father of life."

According to Sioux legend, it was Buffalo Cow Woman who first brought the Sacred Pipe to her people, together with the four different-colored grains of maize. These sprang from the milk which dropped from her udder when she kicked up her hind legs and departed, "so that maize and the buffalo were given together to be the food of all the red tribes.

When the Tewa dance today, they pound the same "earth mother earth navel middle place" as their ancestors did in the courtyards at La Venta, Monte Alban and Copan. In the ancient rhythms, they invoke the presence of Blue Corn Woman and White Corn Maiden, the summer and winter daughters of Mother Corn. The dances speak to rain because rain mediates between sun and earth, the father and mother or corn. The Corn Dance is a celebration of harvest and a prayer for the new year, a feast of thanksgiving for the ripe crop and a prayer for rain for next year's crop. Men and women dance face to face in opposite lines, then join as couples. All day they dance in alteration, Turquoise and Squash, under the banner of the Sun. "In midsummer the clouds mount every afternoon over the Sangre de Christo mountains, potent with the fire that spoke to Moses in the burning bush, but that here, in deserts half a world away, speaks in forked lighting to fertilize the seed deep in the womb of Mother Corn."

In Navajo myth, when Changing Woman buried the magic corn bundle she had been given by First Man in the heart of the earth, she created Thought in the shape of Long Life Boy and Speech in the shape of Happiness Girl. Together they made That Which Continues, the progeny of White Corn Boy and Yellow Corn Girl, Pollen Boy and Cornbeetle Girl. Changing Woman created the Mating Songs of these first corn couples by painting their forms, running her hand over the corn ears of shell, turquoise, abalone and jet, drawing their root legs and tasseled faces. She then told the Corn People that through them the earth would be permanent, the sky, flowers, dew, pollen, young men, young women, death, birth and rain, and "by that we will go about in blessing." When she gave them speech, she gave them pollen words. "You will speak for us with pollen words. You will talk for us with pollen words." The word of Blessing Way is pollen. Changing Woman, again, is the Goddess in her Corn Mother aspect. The magic corn bundle contained four jewels of four colors, white shell, turquoise, abalone and jet, each carved into a perfect ear of corn, each wrapped in a translucent sheet of its own gem, each containing the power to create the inner forms of outward shapes, the forms of the natural world.

To this day, some of the Navajo hold their sacred ceremonies. The gift of the Corn Mother, Changing Woman, is used in a ceremonial cake baked by the entire community of women at the Fourth Dawn of the Kinaada, and they bake it in the old way, in an earth oven fired by pinon and juniper. Fifty pounds of yellow corn, fifty pounds of wheat flour, and twelve pounds of sprouted wheat, dried and ground, together with brown sugar and raisins, moistened, mixed, and poured onto the bottom layer of cornhusks that line the pit. The women then draw a sacred pattern with the pollen of the four corn colors before covering the whole with a layer of husks, shovelling on a layer of sand and hot coals, and allowing the cake to bake overnight. In the morning, they uncover the cake and cut it into eight giant pieces until only the heart remains. This they cut into four pieces to represent the cardinal directions, and put these back into the ground to feed Mother Earth. Mother Earth, through the Corn Mother, feeds us and feeds herself.

It is not such a great jump, then, to the cannibalistic customs made explicit among the Maya and practiced among all early planting cultures, at least in symbolic relic, according to Joseph Campbell. The image of a primal being, whose body is the universe, occurs over and over again. The myths of the earliest hunting cultures dramatize the struggle between antagonists who are equal, hunter and hunted, alike independent and mobile creatures who rely on skill and speed to outmaneuver each other. Plants do not do this. The myths of planting cultures reveal an abandonment of human consciousness and immersion in the primeval ooze, the formlessness and flux beneath the earth's crust. Here all creatures breed, grow and decay in the same generative mud. Here man experiences more primally "the voracity of life, which feeds on life, the sublime frenzy of this life which is rooted (if one is to see and speak truth) in a cannibal nightmare. It is vegetable death that generates and sustains new life; for humans it is chosen death, self-sacrifice, that generates and sustains social order." [Campbell, as quoted by Fussell.]

I will not, here, go into the arcane lore of corn-dollies and Old Woman, the Corn-Mother of the Germans whose passage is seen when a field of grain ripples in the wind. I merely refer you to Frazer's Golden Bough, where a thorough and scholarly work has been done.

Corn--maíz--is the oldest cultivated grain. It will not propagate without human aid, and this has been so for at least the last 7,000 years. Tiny corn ears have been found in graves that date back that far, and the corn found in the Bat Cave of 3,000 years ago would still pop. It feeds us, and needs us to live. Corn converts more fully to energy than any other single grain--corn should only be given to horses in the winter, or they will overheat--corn fattens pigs faster than any other grain--corn nourishes us, for it is the flesh of the Mother. Corn, together with other gifts of the Mother, keeps us well fed; in this modern day and age we are more dependent on it than ever, not less. Corn, usually processed, touches almost all other foods: eggs, cream and butter are fed by corn; even baking powder, sugar and salt have contact with corn; commercial fresh fruit and vegetables, sprayed by insecticide, are touched by corn. Step into a supermarket; everything but the fresh fish will have touched corn or some by-product of it, syrup, oil or starch, edible or inedible.

Thus we see that, through the eating of the Mother's flesh, we become more truly Her daughters and sons; through her death she nourishes us; and through our work she is born again, to live and die again, and feed us again. And when we die, our bodies go to feed the Mother, in an endless wheel of birth and death, life and darkness, and in the end, we are one with the Mother.

 

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