Ixchel and the Maya Moon goddess: Cozumel, the codices, a debated identity

In the contemporary imagination Ixchel is the great Maya goddess of the Moon, weaving and childbirth. The documentary reality is more complex and, for that reason, more interesting. The name Ixchel appears in Spanish sources of the colonial period, while the images of the lunar goddess come from vases, figurines and codices of different periods. Piecing these testimonies together into a single figure was one of the great themes of twentieth-century Maya studies, and the debate remains open.

The women pilgrims of Cozumel

The most frequently cited source is the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa, written around 1566 and surviving in an abridged copy. Landa mentions Ixchel as a goddess linked to the birth of children and reports that women in labour placed an image of her under the bed. Other chroniclers describe the pilgrimages that went from the Yucatán peninsula to the island of Cozumel, where an important sanctuary of the goddess stood.

The name of Isla Mujeres, the island of women, also dates from those years. According to tradition it was given by the Spaniards of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba's expedition in 1517, after they found many female figures of stone there. We do not know for certain whether they represented Ixchel, but the report bears witness to the importance of female deities along that coast.

The young and the old goddess of the codices

In the Maya codices, and particularly in the Dresden Codex, scholars distinguish two main female figures, designated by conventional letters. Goddess I is young and is often associated with the Moon, love and fertility. Goddess O, by contrast, is an old woman, sometimes with claws and serpents in her hair, who pours water from a jar and is linked to torrential rains and medicine.

In the Classic period, between the third and ninth centuries AD, the lunar goddess appears on painted vases and figurines as a young woman seated within the crescent moon, often holding a rabbit in her arms. The image recalls the same reading of the lunar markings found throughout Mesoamerica. Some figurines from the island of Jaina also show women at the loom, and this has fostered the link between the Moon and weaving.

An identification to be reconsidered

In the course of the twentieth century the British scholar J. Eric S. Thompson proposed recognising in Ixchel the lunar goddess of the Maya, combining the young and the old woman into a single character. His synthesis was very successful, but more recent research, based also on the decipherment of the hieroglyphs, tends to regard Ixchel mainly as the old Goddess O, whose name in the codices seems to read Chak Chel, and to distinguish her from the young Moon goddess.

The case of Ixchel shows how ancient deities often reach us through successive filters: the memory of indigenous peoples, the gaze of missionaries, the interpretations of modern scholars. What remains certain is the importance of a female goddess linked to birth, to the pilgrimage of Cozumel and to the night sky, worshipped for centuries in the lands of Yucatán.