Mama Sara

Mama Sara (in the colonial Quechua spellings Saramama or Zaramama, literally 'Mother of Maize') is the Andean tutelary deity of the sacred maize plant (Zea mays), of the fertility of cultivated grains, and of the preservation of family and state granaries in the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu). Far more than a poetic abstraction, Mama Sara was conceived by Quechua and Aymara farmers as the living animating power (camac) and the immanent sacred matrix of every ear of corn. Andean peasants recognized her theophanies embodied in ears that displayed prodigious features, such as twin grains, twisted rows or double ears fused into a single plant body. As the colonial chroniclers Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Bernabé Cobo and Pablo José de Arriaga recorded, these singular ears received the name zaramama and were ceremonially dressed like noble indigenous ladies in small woven wool mantles (lliclla) and silver pins (tupu), being enthroned inside the pirhuas (rural granaries of wattle and cane) and the monumental imperial stone qollqas to protect the food against pests, dampness and Cordilleran frosts.

6 min read · Reviewed on September 28, 2026 · How we research

The ear of corn, the straw doll, the granary and the chicha

Primary sources

• Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales de los Incas. translation: Edición de Aurelio Miró Quesada, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1985.
• Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo. translation: Edición de Francisco Mateos, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Madrid, 1956.
• Pablo José de Arriaga, La extirpación de la idolatría en el Pirú. translation: Edición facsimilar del Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco, 1999.

Studies

• Pierre Duviols, Cultura andina y represión: Procesos y visitas de idolatrías. Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1986.
• Brian S. Bauer, Inca Religion and the Holy Landscape: The Temple of the Sun, the Ceque System, and the Sacred Topography of Cuzco. University of Texas Press, 2000.
• Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton University Press, 1991.