Ixchel: The Maya Goddess of Medicine and Moonlight: 4

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.