So many gods and goddesses lost throughout the long stretch of human history!
Many gods of our European past were lost during the violence of Roman colonization, or absorbed, their ancient lineage lost when these divinities were given Roman names. After the Romans, came the new religion, Christianity, and the old gods and goddesses were this time baptized as "saints," which either cloaked their origins in a doctrinally acceptable story, or simply twisted the story until it fit--often uneasily--with the new religion's teachings.
When European colonizers reached the Americas, the same thing happened to the divinities of these "newly discovered" lands. Some of those stories are lost forever, but a few kept their names. Among these surviving rarities is IxChel, a Meso-American goddess, who could be maiden/mother/crone depending on the season of the year, the age the devotee, or the phase of the moon.
IxChel was a goddess whose survival partially rests on the written record left by priests who observed what remained of her original religion after the Spanish conquest. From what we can glean, she was a lunar goddess, and, like so many others around the ancient world, the animals which are associated with her worship, are the rabbit (fertility) and the serpent (bringer of rain.) Below is a modern rendering of the goddess from Sacred Source's catalog. To synch with our modern preoccupation with youth, this IxChel appears as a young woman, although in the few remaining Mayan texts, her "rain" hieroglyph depicts her as Crone.
https://sacredsource.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoogCd36tvDfkvTP9t_CCNoPGWpntD6DE7UZFj9UNwT0lpuIFBYC
Like the Moon, however, Ixchel waxes and wanes; she changes. She, like so many European Great Goddesses, is a triple goddess. She was a special patroness of women, whose reproductive cycles are governed by the moon. Young women prayed to her maiden self for beauty, or for a husband. To the married women, she was Mother Ixchel, to whom you prayed for sons to please a warrior husband or for continued fertility and good health. Women of all ages prayed to Ixchel as Life Giver, asking this fruitful deity for the blessing of good harvests, as well as for good fortune and for safe delivery during the travail of childbirth. She knew the secrets of all herbs, and was known as a skillful healer.
In Meso-America, where droughts could (and historically did) bring famine and collapse to powerful city states, IxChel's sacred serpent governed the powerful hurricane rains, whose appearance was necessary to "fill the water pots" (the cenotes which dot the permeable limestone of the Yucatan) with the precious liquid which nourished the maize, beans and squash upon which the communities depended. "Water is Life" was as real then as it is now.
As the Moon, Ixchel governed the night. She opened the womb and then cared for the child growing inside. Her pale face radiated blessings upon her sister-children here on earth; the stars were her offspring. In some of the surviving stories, she dies and is reborn again, a miracle that, in so many religions, only male gods perform. As a goddess of vegetation, she is a kind of Persephone figure, entering the underworld and then being reborn again.
Ixchel is also said to be first weaver, the woman who taught her human children this civilizing skill. The spindle she holds and the thread she spins governs both life and death. Like the Fates of ancient Europe, she creates the fabric of our lives, and ends them when she wishes, breaking the threads. As a destroying goddess, she is called "Keeper of Bones" and crossed bones often appear in her iconography.
Cozumel, as it is known today, was once Isla Muheres, the Island of Women, sacred to Ixchel, the home of her temples. Mayan women were supposed to make pilgrimage there at least once in their lives. If you today are a fortunate traveler, you might still go and visit Ixchel there today. Offer her copal incense, cocoa beans, or small clay female statuettes, as her devotees once did on that lovely island so long ago.
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Goddess Knowledge Cards,
Pomegranate
Art by Susan Eleanor Boulet
Here she is with an avatar--her powerful jaguar self, a creature who hunts on land and in the water--for she is a shape-shifter too. Though she was married to the Sun, she, like the cat, was a law unto herself, coming and going as she chose. Not even the Sun God could own her.
~~Juliet Waldron
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