Ixim is the Tz’utujil word for corn or maize. Nawal, also written nahual, is the Mayan word for a guardian spirit. In this painting we see Pedro Rafaél’s personification of maize. When the Maya perform a ritual to bless their corn for the next year’s planting, they commune with the spirit of maize during the ceremony. Corn is the staple of Maya diet and is part of the Maya creation story as expressed in the Popol Wuj. In that story, the hero twins defeat the gods of the underworld, tricking them by dying and coming back to life. Each year, the twins come up from the underworld and are born as ears of corn, only to die again, and the cycle repeats itself.