Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ixchel: The Maya Goddess of Medicine and Moonlight

Ixchel: The Maya Goddess of Medicine and Moonlight

Hunter, E. L.

Paperback

Series: From Altar to Archive, Book 4

Religion General Mythology & FolkloreGeneral Latin American History

ISBN13: 9798292470052
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 14 2025
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.77
Height: 0.31 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
The Maya goddess of childbirth could tip her water jar and drown the world.

Ixchel was a healer, the goddess women prayed to in childbirth. She was also the weaver at the cosmic loom. But the Maya drew her differently too: a crone with a jaguar's claws and a skirt of crossed bones, tilting her jar until the water poured out as a flood. It was the same goddess. They saw no strangeness in a deity who could nurse a newborn and end the world. Their gods moved in cycles of making and unmaking.

Her most famous shrine stood on Cozumel, and women sailed across open water to reach the oracle there. When Spanish friars reached the Yucatán, one of them recorded that the people called Ixchel the mother of the gods. He wrote it down while his order was burning the books that would have told us the rest.

The friars did not erase her. In Yucatán and Guatemala, Maya midwives still say her name over a labouring woman. Weavers bless the loom in words older than the conquest. This book follows Ixchel from the surviving codices to those living rooms, a goddess who was never only one thing.

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Hunter, E. L.

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General Latin American History

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