Ixtab

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Image:Ixtab.jpg

According to Diego de Landa, Ixtab 'Rope Woman' was the Yucatec Mayan goddess of suicide. In Yucatec society, suicide, especially suicide by hanging, was under circumstances considered an honorable way to die. Ixtab would accompany such suicides to paradise (thus playing the role of a psychopomp). The picture of a dead woman with a rope around the neck in the Dresden Codex is often taken to represent the goddess. Since it occurs in a section devoted to eclipses of sun and moon, it may have been used to symbolize a lunar eclipse and its dire consequences for women. No other pictures possibly representing Ixtab are known.

[edit] Sources

  • Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ed. A.M. Tozzer (1941).
  • J.E.S. Thompson, A Commentary on the Dresden Codex. Philadelphia 1972.
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