Aside from the cosmic crocodile and four-sided world, a turtle floating on the sea also served as a basis for the world in ancient Maya thought. A Late Postclassic scene from the Codex Madrid portrays a darkened sky raining upon the earth turtle with the three hearthstones atop its back, and roughly contemporaneous sculptures from the northern Maya lowlands depict a hole in the center of its carapace, again referring to the world center (see Taube 1988; Finamore and Houston 2010: Number 85). Many Late Classic Maya vessel scenes portray the maize god emerging from the center of the turtle’s carapace (Taube 1985; Freidel et al. 1993). In ancient Maya thought, the maize god also embodied the central world axis, and Early Classic caches from Copán feature jade statuettes of the maize deity placed in the center of directionally oriented jade and spondylus caches (Taube 2005: 25). Similarly, both a stone box from Tizapán and page 31 of the Codex Borbonicus portray the Aztec maize goddess Chicomecoatl surrounded by four directional aspects of the rain god, Tlaloc, each denoted by a particular color (see Taube 2000: 318–319, Figures 22–23). For the aforementioned series of directional world trees appearing in the Codex Borgia, the fifth tree of the world center is a maize plant sprouting out of a pool of water (Codex Borgia: page 53).

The relation of maize to the central axis mundi can be readily traced to the Middle Formative Olmec (ca. 900–500 BC). A number of incised celts portray the Olmec maize god in the center of four evenly spaced directional signs placed at the inter-cardinal points, quite probably portraying the earth as a four-sided field with maize in the center (Taube 1996: 44, Figure 6; 2000: 303). Due to the recent discoveries at San Bartolo, the historic links between the Olmec and Classic Maya maize gods are becoming increasingly clear, with the Late Preclassic Maya maize god retaining many facial characteristics of his Olmec predecessor (Taube and Saturno 2008).

For the Classic Maya, the scenes of the maize god and the earth turtle are not only cosmological models but also constitute an important episode of creation mythology, the rebirth of the maize god out of the earth (Taube 1985). Classic Maya vessels provide a rich corpus of narrative information concerning the underworld watery journey and resurrection of the maize deity (Braakhuis 1990; Fitzimmons 2009: 35–39; Freidel et al. 1993: 89–94; Just 2009; Quenon and Le Forte 1997; Taube 1985, 1993). In many scenes, the god is accompanied and assisted by a pair of youths; commonly referred to as the Headband Twins, they are the Classic-period counterparts of Xbalanque and Hunahpu of the Popol Vuh (see Coe 1989). One salient episode that occurs in both the sixteenth-century K’ichean text and Classic Maya scenes is the shooting down of a monster bird by the Hero Twins, known as Vucub Caquix in the Popol Vuh and the Principal Bird Deity in current Classic Maya studies. Scenes pertaining to the defeat of the great bird by the Hero Twins can be traced still earlier to Late Preclassic Izapa (see Coe 1989). The West Wall mural from Pinturas Sub-1 at San Bartolo depicts a Late Preclassic version of the maize god emerging from the earth turtle, in this case flanked by the god of celestial rain and lightning, Chahk, and the god of terrestrial water (Taube and Saturno 2008; Taube et al. 2010). The appearance of a maize deity on a turtle carapace appears as early as the Middle Formative Olmec, this example being a serpentine pectoral from La Encrucijada, Tabasco, which depicts the head of the infant form of the Olmec maize god atop the underside of a turtle shell (see Taube 1996: 62, Figure 22c). However, in the Gulf Coast region today among the Tepehua, Sierra Totonac, Popoluca, and other peoples, there is a widespread and complex mythic account of an infant maize god who is slain, ground up, and thrown into water only to appear reborn on the back of a turtle, arguably making this the longest lived mythic episodes known for ancient Mesoamerica (Braakhuis 1990; Taube 1996: 62; Taube and Saturno 2008: 315).