Ix Chel

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The women came by canoe. From the harbors of the eastern coast they crossed the open channel to the low green island that lay off the mainland, and they came in such numbers, and so steadily, that the crossing wore itself into the shape of an obligation: a woman went once when her own mother brought her, and once again when she had a daughter to bring. The island held the shrine of the goddess, and the goddess held what the women needed of the world — a safe delivery, a cure, a marriage, the turning of the moon. The Spanish, arriving in 1517, found the small clay figures of her standing in the buildings there and named the place for them. It is still called the Island of Women.

The goddess they crossed the water for is known by the Yucatec name Ix Chel, which the philologists most often read as “Lady Rainbow” — ix, the feminine prefix, the marker of a woman or of a thing belonging to women, and chel, taken variously as “rainbow” or “light.” She is the moon and the rainbow at once, the patroness of childbirth and of the midwife’s hand, of medicine and the gathering of the healing plants, of the loom and the dye-pot; and she is also, in another of her faces, the old woman who tips the jar of waters over the world and drowns it. The Maya did not find these incompatible. The same arc that bends bright across the sky after the storm is the storm’s own residue, and the moon that measures a woman’s months also governs the tides and the rains. What the outside reader meets as a contradiction the tradition holds as a single span.

The two faces of the goddess

The records show her in two distinct figures, and how to count them is the longest-running question in her study.

The first is old. In the surviving codices — the painted bark-paper books of which only a handful escaped the colonial fires — there appears an aged goddess of fierce and unmistakable aspect, whom modern scholars label by the inventory-letter Goddess O and whose Maya name is read as Chak Chel, “Great Rainbow” or “Red Rainbow.” She is no maiden. She has the sagging body of great age; she wears a coiled serpent on her head in place of a headdress; her hands and feet end not in human fingers but in the claws of a beast, and her skirt is marked with crossed bones. On the last page of the Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four books to survive, she stands with a great jar tilted forward and the water streaming out of it onto the earth below, while a sky-serpent vomits a second flood from above. For a long time this scene was read as the deluge that ends the world — the unmaking of creation by water. The reading has since softened: set after a sequence of almanac pages concerned with rains, the overturned jar is now more often taken for the seasonal storm and the seasonal flood, the destroying water that is also the watering of the fields. Destruction and nourishment pour from the one vessel.

Detail from the Dresden Codex showing the aged goddess (Goddess O / Chak Chel). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The second face is young. Across the painted vases and the carved scenes of the Classic period — the centuries before the great lowland cities were left to the forest — there appears a beautiful young woman bound to the moon, often shown seated within the curve of a lunar crescent, sometimes holding a rabbit, the creature the Maya saw in the moon’s face as others have seen a man. She is the moon waxing rather than the moon of the spent month: fertility, sexual love, the bright phase. The scholars give her, too, an inventory-letter — Goddess I — and her name is read as Ixik, “Lady,” or by descriptive titles such as the White Moon Lady.

Whether these are one goddess or two has divided the field. The older synthesis, associated above all with the British Mayanist J. Eric Thompson, gathered the aged flood-goddess and the young moon-goddess together under the single name Ix Chel, reading them as two ages of one deity — the crone and the maiden, the spent moon and the new, the same divine woman seen at the turning-points of her cycle. Later epigraphy and iconography pulled them apart again. The work of Karl Taube on the major gods of Yucatan tied the name Ix Chel specifically to the aged Goddess O of the codices, and identified her among other things by the so-called Birth Vase, a Classic vessel showing the old goddess presiding over a childbirth — leaving the young moon-goddess as a separate figure, Goddess I, who only later, in the colonial reading, was folded into the same name. The current scholarly tendency is to keep the two apart in the ancient record and to treat their merger as something that happened in the sources rather than in the cult. This is a contested matter, and the reader should hold it as such: the name Ix Chel as it comes down to us covers at least two divine women, and the seam between them is exactly where the argument runs. Within the tradition the seam need not show. A goddess who governs the moon governs all the moon’s phases, the dark and the full alike, and a goddess of birth is by the same logic a goddess of the waters that break.

The things of women, and the moon that counts them

Whatever the count, the domain is consistent, and it is the domain of women’s work and women’s bodies.

She is the goddess of childbirth. The bishop Diego de Landa, who set down the fullest colonial account of Yucatec religion in the years after the conquest, named her the goddess of making children, and the codical scenes bear him out: the old goddess attends the laboring woman, and the midwife — herself one of the most respected practitioners in a Maya community — worked under the goddess’s patronage, as the keeper of the knowledge by which a child was brought safely into the air. Birth and medicine were not separate arts but one continuous one. Ix Chel is the goddess of healing as such, of the curing of sickness and of the bundle of medicinal plants that the curer gathers and administers; in some readings the curers’ divining stones and the casting of lots for diagnosis fell under her as well, knotting healing to divination in the single figure of the wise old woman who knows both the herbs and the future. The same hands that the codices arm with claws are the hands that deliver and that cure.

She is the goddess of the loom. Weaving was women’s labor and women’s prestige in the Maya world — the spun thread, the backstrap loom stretched between a post and the weaver’s own waist, the dyed cloth that clothed the living and wrapped the dead — and it was set under her care, so that the goddess who spins the thread and the woman who spins it are doing the same work at two scales. One of her titles, Ix Chebel Yax, has been read as touching the brush and the first colors, the painter’s and dyer’s art beside the weaver’s.

And she is the moon, by which all of this is reckoned. The moon’s circuit is the measure of the month, and the month is the measure of the woman: the same cycle that swells and empties the lunar disk governs the courses of the body and the count of a pregnancy. To make Ix Chel the moon-goddess is to make her the timekeeper of the very things she patronizes — the births she attends arrive on a count she herself turns. The Maya were exact reckoners of the sky; their astronomers tracked the moon alongside the sun and the planet Venus, and the lunar count rides inside the dated inscriptions of the Classic cities, woven through the workings of the Long Count calendar that fixed each carved date in the running tally of days. The goddess of women is in this sense a goddess of measure.

Her place in the upper order is given by her partners. The colonial sources and much of the later reading make her the consort of Itzamna, the aged creator and high god of the sky, so that the old goddess of the codices stands beside the old god as the female pole of the divine pair — the two elders from whom the rest descends. In the lunar reading she is paired instead with the sun, Kinich Ahau, in the old and widespread Mesoamerican logic of the sun and moon as husband and wife or as brother and sister crossing the same sky by turns. Both pairings belong to her, as both faces do.

The crossing to Cozumel

Of all the goddess’s sanctuaries, one made her famous, and it stood on the island of Cozumel off the northeastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

Cozumel was a place of pilgrimage on a scale the colonial observers found striking; one account ranks it among the foremost destinations of the peninsula, second only to the great well-city of Chichen Itza in the draw it exercised. The shrine — its ruins survive at the site now called San Gervasio, set inland among the island’s low forest — was an oracle as well as a temple: the goddess was understood to speak there, her answers given out from within the building, and pilgrims came not only to leave offerings but to be told. The crossing itself was the difficult part. The mainland coast launched its canoes from the harbors opposite the island, and the open channel — its current strong, its weather treacherous — had to be paddled across in the dugout craft of the region, a passage that was itself part of the petition. Women came for the things the goddess governed: a fruitful marriage, conception, a safe delivery, the cure of an illness. The pattern that the colonial sources preserve — the daughter brought by the mother, the woman returning later with a daughter of her own — made the pilgrimage a thing done across the generations, a rite of passage built into the shape of a life.

The neighboring island carries the cult’s other monument in its very name. When the expedition of Hernández de Córdoba touched the smaller island a little to the north in 1517, the Spaniards found it set with the clay images of the goddess and her companions, the female figures standing in the shrine-buildings, and they named the place Isla Mujeres — the Island of Women — for the idols of the goddesses they had found there. The name has outlasted everything it was given for. The shrines are gone, the figures scattered, the cult driven under by the conversion that followed the conquest; the name remains, a Spanish phrase that is also, without meaning to be, an accurate account of whose island it had been.

Source-distance, and what survives

What can be known of Ix Chel comes through a narrow and damaged channel, and the narrowness shapes everything said about her.

The Maya wrote real books — folded screens of bark paper, painted with the glyphs and the figures of the gods — and on the matter of religion these would have been the central record. Almost none survive. In 1562, at Mani in the Yucatan, Bishop Diego de Landa gathered the books and images he could find and burned them in an auto-da-fe meant to break the old worship; the libraries of the lowland Maya went into that and other fires, and of the painted codices only some four are now known, the Dresden, the Madrid, the Paris, and the contested Maya (or Grolier) fragment. It is one of these, the Dresden, that preserves the aged goddess with her overturned jar. The paradox sits at the center of the record: the man who destroyed the books then wrote, in his account of the things of Yucatan, one of the fullest descriptions of Maya religion that survives, including the goddess of childbirth and the pilgrimage to Cozumel. The destroyer is also a chief source, and his testimony — a missionary’s, set down to be refuted and replaced — has to be read at that angle. How far Landa can be trusted is itself a standing scholarly question.

The rest comes from the things the fires could not reach: the painted vases and carved stones of the Classic centuries, read anew since the twentieth-century decipherment of the glyphs opened the inscriptions to reading; the archaeology of the island shrines; and the iconographic work — Thompson’s, then Taube’s and others’ — that sorted the lettered gods of the codices and argued out which figure the name belonged to. From these the two faces of the goddess are reconstructed, and from these the argument over her count proceeds. None of it is whole. The seam in her identity is partly the seam in the record itself: a tradition reassembled from four books, a hostile bishop, and the painted dead.

Statue of Ix Chel at Punta Sur, Isla Mujeres. Photo by CesarNS1980, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The goddess returns to her island

The Maya did not vanish. Several million of their descendants live today across the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, and Chiapas, and among them the old practices around birth and healing have not wholly lapsed — the midwife and the curer remain figures in many communities, working an art that has roots older than the conquest. In that continuity Ix Chel was never altogether gone.

But she has also come back in a louder way. In the present revival of Maya tradition, and in the wider currents of contemporary goddess-spirituality that reach for her from outside, Ix Chel has become a chosen emblem of the divine feminine and of the old medicine — invoked at healing retreats and birth circles, painted and sculpted anew, made the patroness of a women’s spirituality that often owes as much to modern sensibility as to the codices. The two faces serve this revival well: the maiden and the crone, the moon waxing and waning, map readily onto a contemporary language of the woman’s life-cycle, and the goddess who governed both is easily read as a goddess of transformation as such.

The crossing has returned too. The Spanish coast that the old canoes once launched from now sends out, each year in the early summer, a fleet of dugouts paddled by hundreds of rowers retracing the passage to Cozumel — a reenactment of the pilgrimage revived in the 2000s by the tourist parks of the Riviera coast, staged as cultural festival and spectacle, but tracing, stroke for stroke, the route the women once took to the goddess’s shrine. The figures are gone from the island, and what comes now is a different kind of pilgrim, paddling for a heritage as much as for a cure. The water between the mainland and the island is the same water, and the goddess it was once crossed for is, by name at least, the same goddess. The Island of Women keeps its name, and the canoes come back across the channel toward it.

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