Early Corn Planters 13 



fingers. He was a man of cities, whose life had been lived within 

 university walls. Gazing over them he had glimpsed snow 

 peaks, blue fjords and the neat barley fields of the Scandinavian 

 peasants. Only from books and travelers' tales did he know of 

 the land of the Plumed Serpent, where the mulberry and 

 banana trees spread over crumbling cities whose very names 

 were lost. The Franciscan Provincial and Bishop, de Landa, 

 had told of them, in his Apologia after he had been repri- 

 manded for his cruelty to the Indians of Yucatan. His book, 

 with its amazingly detailed picture of the life of the Indians of 

 that part of the world, was circulated widely in Europe. De 

 Landa revealed on every page the importance of the maize to 

 the Indians of Central America. He credited the maize, as their 

 chief food, with the fecundity of the Indian women. "They 

 are excellent nurses first because from the maize they take 

 away the milk and thicken it at the fire making a sort of curd 

 for morning use and this they drink hot. This produces plenty 

 of milk. And again because their constant grinding of the 

 maize without tying up the breasts causes them to grow large 

 and thus hold a great deal of milk. . . ." He described the 

 planting and harvest festivals of the maize fields; how a man's 

 wealth was in his granary and milpas (cornfield); how these 

 savages, too ignorant to know about money, used maize for 

 barter because it was the one thing of which every man stood 

 in need and of which a man could not have too much. Bitterly 

 he told how he had tried to stop the Indians' worship of the 

 Earth Mother and her son, the "Young Green God," which 

 was a deification of the maize plant. 



Other priest-chroniclers of the Mexican and Peruvian con- 

 quests had added their evidence to de Landa's complaint. No 

 matter how these doughty Christians had preached, threat- 

 ened, punished, burnt at the stake, the Indians continued to 

 pay homage to Cinteotl, the maize-god, and to the fecund and 

 terrible Coatlicue, Mother Earth. Even those Indians who 

 obligingly accepted the Christian God and the saints still kept 



