"Newborn Nanahuac, Sudden Nanahuac: As Schultze Jena pointed out (1944:187), Nanahuac would appear to be the Aztec deity Nanahuatl (or Nanahuatzin), who throws a thunderbolt to open the mountain containing the first maize.

Nanahuatl means 'warts' in Nahuatl... giving us one of several bits of evidence that there might be an allusion to mushrooms in the names of the previous line, 'Newborn Thunderbolt, Sudden Thunderbolt'.

On the basis of fieldwork, Barbara Tedlock and I can confirm Lowy's report that the Quiché word for thunderbolt, kaqulja, is also the term for Amanita muscaria mushroom (Lowy 1974:189). We must hasten to add that although Quichés collect and eat wild mushrooms, including Amanita caesaria, they regard muscaria as a poisonous species best avoided.

But it is suggestive that the stipe of a mushroom (like the trunk of a tree) is called raqan or 'its leg' in Quiché, and that the name kaqulja juraqan, earlier rendered as 'Thunderbolt Hurricane' (p. 65), could be also translated as 'one-legged thunderbolt'.

The names Newborn and Sudden Thunderbolt suggest the rapidity of mushroom growth. Literal bolts of lightning are sudden as well, and frequently one-legged, but the 'warts' of the name Nanahuac do suggest the appearance of muscaria when the remnants of its veil still fleck the cap."

(Tedlock in his comments on Popol Vuh)