Ix Chel

Also Known As: also Ixchel; called chak chel, “Red Rainbow” or “Great Rainbow,” in the Postclassic codices; classified by Mayanists as Goddess O
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: An aged jaguar goddess who presides over childbirth, curing and divination, and who overturns the water jar that brings rain and flood.
Role in Mythos: She is the divine midwife and physician of the Maya, the old woman whose hands receive every child and whose jar empties the sky.
Relation to Humans: Maya women crossed open water to consult her oracle on Cozumel and hid her image beneath the bed during labour, while physicians kept small figures of her in their medicine bundles. She was approached as a working practitioner rather than a distant power, which is why almost every surviving trace of her worship is attached to a birth, an illness, or a rainstorm.

The rope hangs from the roof beam of the house, twisted so that it reads as two snakes braided into one, and the labouring woman grips it with both hands. Behind her an old woman locks both arms around her waist and squeezes. A second old woman crouches in front holding a shallow bowl, waiting for whatever comes. Maya painters put that scene on a four sided pot sometime in the eighth century, and the old woman doing the pushing has the ears of a jaguar, a coil of snake bound through her hair, and a spool of raw cotton pinned above her brow.

Mayanists know her as Goddess O, a label inherited from a classification system that assigned letters and then ran short of anything better. In the Dresden and Madrid codices her name is spelled out phonetically as chak chel. By the sixteenth century Yucatec speakers were calling her Ix Chel. What the name means has never been settled. Chak carries both “red” and “great,” and chel is the Yucatec word for rainbow, so “Red Rainbow” is the usual rendering, but her Classic period name glyph has still not been identified and there is no promise that older Maya called her any of this. In 1579 the Spanish encomendero of Cozumel put the question directly to the islanders and wrote down their answer: they could not tell him what yschel meant, nor why the idol had been given that name.

Her body is a catalogue of age and appetite. The face is sunken and deeply lined, the mouth collapsed inward over lost teeth, the breasts long and flat against the ribs. Where a hand should be she often has a paw, and the three spotted jaguar eye that doubles as the day sign Ix sits in her own eye socket. Around her hips runs a skirt worked with crossed bones. A serpent lies knotted across her brow like a headband, and sometimes a second one belts her waist. Highland Maya women still wear a twisted cloth headdress that carries the same meaning; among the Poqomchi’ the braided band across a married woman’s forehead stands for a coral snake. A Terminal Classic sculpture dug up at Oxkintok was recognised as her on two details alone, the sagging breasts and the crossed bones on the skirt. A Jaina figurine shows her with a shield and a weapon, an old woman going to war.

The work she is best attested doing is delivery. Diego de Landa, writing in the 1560s to save his own skin after a brutal campaign against Maya religion, called her “the goddess of making children,” and described women in labour who “put under their couch the image of an evil spirit called Ixchel.” He was hostile and he was careless, but he was reporting something real. On the painted vase the arrangement is exactly what ethnographers recorded four centuries later among the Tzotzil of Chenalho’, where the woman holds a rope slung from the beam and the midwife stands behind her and grips her by the waist with encircling arms. She is not the mother in these scenes. She is the one with her arms around the mother. Midwives across Mesoamerica have generally been old women past childbearing, and that is precisely the shape of her authority: she is barren, and she is indispensable.

Healing sat alongside it. Landa recorded a feast called Ihcil Ixchel held in the month of Zip, at which physicians and diviners brought out their bundles of divining stones and the small idols of the goddess of medicine kept inside them. The Ritual of the Bacabs, a Yucatec book of curing incantations, calls her simply grandmother. One Classic vase shows her at work as a curer. Copal smoke, a bundle of stones, an old woman leaning over a sick body: the picture is consistent across seven centuries of evidence.

Then there is the water. In the Dresden Codex she appears in almanacs belonging to the Chaacs, the rain gods, and she is usually tipping a jar. On page 74 she upends it beneath a sky serpent that is vomiting water from its mouth. The Madrid Codex has rain running out of her armpits and her belly. That Dresden page was read for over a century as the drowning of the world, and it still reads that way to many; more recent work argues that the almanacs preceding it are rain tables, and that what she pours is the ordinary catastrophic storm rather than the end of everything. Either way the gesture is hers, and it is the only thing in her iconography that is unambiguously destructive.

Her cult was coastal and it was busy. Every one of the first three Spanish voyages along Yucatan, in 1517, 1518 and 1519, reported worship of a goddess whose name they wrote as aixchel or yschel, and Cozumel was the destination. Women sailed there to secure a fruitful marriage, making it the most visited pilgrimage site in the peninsula after Chichen Itza. The shrine held a large terracotta figure with a hollow back, and a priest concealed inside it answered the questions. On the small island to the north, Hernandez de Cordoba found female idols and named the place Isla Mujeres for them; the goddesses listed were Ixchel, Ix Chebel Yax, Ixhunie and Ixhunieta, all of them clothed from the waist down with their breasts covered, in the manner of the women who made them. Across the peninsula the Chontal province of Acalan kept her as a principal deity and named one of its coastal towns Tixchel, at the place of Ixchel. Cortes heard that unmarried girls were being sacrificed somewhere in that province to a goddess the people had great faith in.

The archaeology has not confirmed any of it. Thirty odd sites have been mapped on Cozumel, the isolated shrines along the eastern shore have yielded almost no artefacts, and the building at San Gervasio identified as her main temple was identified on the strength of its floor plan matching a Spanish description. No idol, no offerings, no ritual debris. Excavators have looked for decades.

Only one myth involving her survives, and it comes secondhand from Las Casas out of the Verapaz highlands: she and Itzamna had thirteen sons, and two of those sons made the sky and the earth and everything in them. That is the entire narrative record.

Which makes the next part strange. Ix Chel is famous today as the Maya moon goddess, and no colonial source says any such thing. The identification was built in 1939 by J. Eric S. Thompson, the most powerful Mayanist of his generation, in a study that leaned on a Mopan story collected around 1940 in which the Moon is the wife of the Sun. Thompson folded the codical goddesses into one figure, decided she was lunar, and repeated it in a popular paperback in 1970 that has never gone out of print in Spanish. He illustrated his moon goddess with a page showing the young Goddess I, Ixik Kab, an earth and fertility deity who is not Ix Chel at all. The young, full bodied woman reproduced on a thousand posters and product labels is that other goddess. Since the 1970s the name has been attached to a textile museum in Guatemala City, a medicinal plant farm in Belize, a women’s development centre, and the tricycle taxi union of Playa del Carmen, whose members wear her on their shirts to work.

Her powers follow from what she is. She opens the womb and closes the wound, reads the future out of a handful of stones, and holds the weather in a clay jar she can tip whenever she likes. Her limits follow just as plainly. She creates nothing herself; she assists, and everything that arrives through her arrives out of somebody else’s body. The jar has to be refilled. And the tradition that kept her, the priests inside the idols and the women who rowed to Cozumel, was dismantled inside a century of contact, leaving a goddess of childbirth with almost no children of her own story left.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ix Chel?

Ix Chel is the aged Maya goddess of childbirth, healing, divination and rain, known to scholars as Goddess O and named chak chel in the Maya codices. Bishop Diego de Landa recorded her in the 1560s as “the goddess of making children,” and she also appears as the patron of physicians. Her worship centred on the island of Cozumel, off the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

Was Ix Chel the Maya moon goddess?

No colonial or ethnographic source connects Ix Chel to the moon. The identification was made in 1939 by the Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson, who merged several distinct Maya goddesses into a single lunar figure and then popularised the idea in a widely reprinted book in 1970. Thompson also illustrated his moon goddess with images of a different deity, the young earth goddess Ixik Kab, which is why the youthful figure now sold as “Ixchel” is not Ix Chel.

What does Ix Chel look like?

She is depicted as a very old woman with a sunken, deeply lined face, long pendulous breasts, jaguar ears, and clawed hands or jaguar mittens. A live serpent is knotted through her hair as a headband, sometimes with a spool of raw cotton, and her skirt is patterned with crossed bones. A Terminal Classic stone sculpture from Oxkintok was identified as Ix Chel by the breasts and the crossed-bone skirt alone.

Why was Cozumel important to Ix Chel?

Cozumel held her principal shrine and was the most visited Maya pilgrimage destination after Chichen Itza. Maya women crossed to the island to petition her for a fruitful marriage and a safe birth, and the sanctuary contained a large hollow-backed figure inside which a priest delivered her answers. Spanish voyages in 1517, 1518 and 1519 all reported the cult, though decades of excavation on the island have produced almost no physical evidence of the rituals.

What is the difference between Ix Chel and Chak Chel?

They are the same goddess under two names. Chak chel is the phonetic name written beside her in the Dresden and Madrid codices, while Ix Chel is the sixteenth-century Yucatec form recorded by the Spanish. Her Classic period name glyph has not yet been identified, so it is possible that several names were in use for her at different times.