This statue is out of sequence, chronologically, but it’s here because the point of it is that with agriculture, you start worshipping food. Organized religions come into being that help people make sense of the cycle: food sprouts, grows, flourishes, is killed and eaten, yet will grow again; humans are born, grow, flourish, yet die, and who knows after that—although most of us would like to believe there’s some kind of return. Besides, you are what you eat. If God made us in his own image, and we’re physically composed of the food we eat, then food is God, and should be worshipped. To make the point, MacGregor looks at a wonderful late Mayan statue, found in Honduras, but one of his experts points out that the worship of corn goes back to the Olmec and probably long before that, to when Americans first started domesticating corn, back at the beginnings of agriculture. Case in point, what I mentioned above—originally you had to work your tail off to make corn edible; we selectively evolved it to make the delicious summer treat of drop-it-in-boiling-water/enjoy/and-don’t-forget-to-floss. Corn is a great crop, wonderfully versatile (I grew up in the fertile cornfields of Michigan, where it’s “knee-high-by-the-4th-of-July”); kind of bland, but as MacGregor points out, the Central Americans figured out what to do with chili peppers about the same time, so corn’s blandness wasn’t a bad thing.
One other note about this statue: the head is too big for the body, but that’s because a whole series of these gods used to sit atop the entrance to a temple, were knocked over, and heads were replaced willy-nilly on different torsos. Who cares, they were all ears of corn.
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