In the long darkness before creation, the Maya gods pondered the dawning of a new age and the making of a people who would honor them. The gods sought yellow corn and white corn; for, as the Maya later wrote in a sixteenth-century narrative, the Popol Vuh, “These were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, the human design.” The maize was ground with water to yield flesh and blood. The gods had tried to create humankind before, but their first attempt at creation, the animals of the …