Ixchel or Ix Chel is the Yucatec Maya language name of the aged jaguar goddess of midwifery and medicine. She corresponds, more or less, to Toci Yoalticitl ‘Our Grandmother the Nocturnal Physician’, an Aztec earth goddess inhabiting the sweatbath. Moreover, in view of Ixchel’s association with the earth and with jaguars, she also appears to be related to another Aztec goddess invoked at birth, viz. Cihuacoatl. In Taube's revised Schellhas-Zimmermann classification of codical deities, Ixchel corresponds to the goddess O. Yucatec Maya (or Yukatek in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas, now preferred by scholars) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. ... In Aztec legend, Toci was the goddess of the earth (mother earth), and she looked after all the injured wildlife and people. ... The Aztecs were a Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican people of central Mexico in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries who built an extensive empire in the late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology. ... In Aztec mythology, Cihuacoatl (snake woman; also Chihucoatl, Ciucoatl) was a fertility goddess and patron of mothers, particularly women who died in childbirth. ...

Ixchel in the Dresden Codex.

Image File history File links Ixchel_Dresden. ... Image File history File links Ixchel_Dresden. ... Maya codices (singular codex) are books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, using the Maya hieroglyphic script. ...

Identification

Referring to the early 16th-century Mayas, Landa calls Ixchel “the goddess of making children”, and also mentions her as a goddess of medicine. The goddess’s two qualities suggest, in their combination, an analogy with the aged Aztec goddess of midwifery, Tocî Yoalticitl. As a midwife and goddess of medicine, Ixchel was already known to the Classical Mayas. As Taube has demonstrated, she corresponds to goddess O of the Dresden Codex, an aged woman with jaguar ears. A crucial piece of evidence in his argument is the so-called ‘Birth Vase’ (Kerr 5113), a Classic Mayan container showing a childbirth presided over by various old women with weaving implements in their headdress, and headed by an old jaguar goddess, the codical goddess O. On another Classic Mayan vase, goddess O is shown acting as a physician, further confirming her identity as Ixchel. The combination of Ixchel with several aged midwives on the Birth Vase recalls the Tz'utujil assembly of midwife goddesses called the ‘female lords’, the most powerful of whom is described as being particularly fearsome. Landa is a city located in Bottineau County, North Dakota. ... The Tzutujil are a Native American people, one of the 21 Mayan ethnic groups that dwell in Guatemala. ...

Meaning of the Name

The name Ixchel is 16th-century Yucatec. Its meaning is not certain. An often mentioned possibility is chel ‘rainbow’, but this does not tie up with known facts about the goddesses of midwifery. Her glyphic names in the codices have two basic forms, one a prefix with the primary meaning of ‘red’ followed by a pictogram, the other one syllabic. Various suggestions have been made, but no general consensus has yet been reached. It is quite possible that the Classic Mayas used several names to refer to the goddess, and these need not have included Ixchel. Image File history File links Ixchel. ... Image File history File links Ixchel. ...

Ix Chel and the Moon

In the past, Ix Chel has wrongly been identified as the Classic Maya moon goddess. Iconographically, such an identification makes no sense, since the Classic Maya moon goddess, identifiable through her crescent, is always represented as a fertile young woman. However, the waning moon is often called ‘Our Grandmother’, and not inconceivably, Ixchel may have represented this lunar phase associated with the diminishing fertility and eventual dryness of old age. Her codical attribute of an inverted jar could then refer to the jar of waning moon being emptied. However this may be, the moon cycle, taken alone, is of obvious importance to the work of the midwife. The traditional Mayas generally assume the moon to be female, and the moons phases are accordingly conceived as the stages of a womans life. ...

Ixchel as an Earth Goddess

Crossed bones sometimes adorn Ixchel's skirt, and instead of human hands, she may show claws. Both features are also found with Aztec earth goddesses, of whom Tlaltecuhtli, Tocî, and Cihuacoatl were invoked by the midwives. More in particular, the jaguar goddess Ixchel could be conceived as a female warrior with a gaping mouth suggestive of cannibalism, thus showing her affinity to Cihuacoatl Yaocihuatl 'War Woman'. This manifestation of Cihuacoatl was always hungry for new victims, just as her midwife manifestation helped to produce new babies viewed as captives.

The Water Jar and the Flood

In the Dresden Codex, goddess O occurs in almanacs dedicated to the rain deities and is stereotypically inverting a water jar. On the famous page 74 preceding the New Year pages, her emptying of the water jar replicates the vomiting of water by a celestial dragon. The conventional interpretation of this scene is ‘catastrophic floodings’, perhaps bringing about the world’s (and the year's) end.

Mythology

No myth has been preserved figuring Ixchel under her Yucatec name, but the goddess of midwifery has an important role to play in myths from Oaxaca which turn on the sweatbath. As stated above, the Aztec counterpart to Ixchel, Tocî, is also the goddess of the sweatbath, were mothers went before and after birthgiving. In Oaxacan Sun and Moon myth, the aged adoptive mother of the Sun and Moon siblings is finally imprisoned in a sweatbath to become its patron deity. In Q'eqchi' Sun and Moon myth, however, an aged Mayan goddess (Xkitza) who would otherwise appear to correspond closely to the Oaxacan Old Adoptive Mother, is not connected to the sweatbath. Moreover,even though an intimate association of the goddess of midwifery with the sweatbath seems inevitable, no colonial source establishes such a connection in the case of Ix Chel. And yet, several Mayan myths do have aged goddesses end up there. Amongst them is the Cakchiquel and Tz'utujil grandmother of Sun and Moon - significantly called B’atzb’al ‘Weaving Implement' in Tz'utujil - and the aged Tzotzil jaguar goddess, K’uxbakme’el 'Venerable Mother Bone Grinder'. The Qeqchi language is spoken in Belize and Guatemala. ...

Cult of Ixchel

In the early 16th century, Mayan women seeking to ensure a fruitful marriage would make a pilgrimage to a small island off the northeastern tip of the Yucatan peninsula. The Spanish discoverer, Hernández de Córdova, called it the 'Island of Women' (Isla de las Mujeres) "because of the idols he found there, of the goddesses of the country, Ixchel and her daughters and daughters-in-law, Ixchebeliax, Ixhunie, Ixhunieta, only vestured from the girdle down, and having the breast uncovered after the manner of the Indians" (Landa). Here the women prayed to Ixchel to bless them with children.

References

• Nathaniel Tarn and Martin Prechtel, Constant Inconstancy. The Feminine Principle in Atiteco Mythology. In Gary Gossen ed., Symbol and Meaning beyond the Closed Community. Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas. New York: State University of New York at Albany 1986.
• Karl Taube, The Birth Vase: Natal Imagery in Ancient Maya Myth and Ritual. In Justin Kerr, ed., The Maya Vase Book: A Corpus of Rollout Photographs of Maya Vases, Volume 4. New York: Kerr Associates 1994.
• Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. Thames and Hudson 1997.
• J.E.S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1970.
• Alfred Tozzer, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, a Translation. 1941.