Ix Tab

Ix Tab, the 'Rope Woman,' is the Yucatec Maya goddess of the hanged and the patroness of those who take their own lives by the noose. Diego de Landa records that the Maya so honored death by hanging that Ix Tab came in person to lead such souls to the paradise beneath the sacred ceiba, the world-tree Yaxche, where the blessed rested in shade and were free of pain and want. In an image reproduced from the Dresden Codex she is shown as a corpse suspended by a rope knotted around her neck, her body marked with the black spots of decay. Her cult reflects the Yucatec belief that certain forms of death, like death in childbirth or in war, opened the way directly to a favored afterlife.

Domains

• death
• afterlife

Powers

• conduct the hanged to paradise

Epithets

• Ix Tab — the Rope WomanLanda, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. Tozzer (1941) (primary)

Sources

• Ix Tab is the Yucatec goddess of the noose who leads the souls of the hanged to paradise, described by Landa and depicted with a rope about her neck.: Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. Tozzer (1941) (primary); J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (1970) (secondary)
• Landa reports that the Yucatec Maya held those who hanged themselves to be carried by the goddess of the gibbet to the paradise beneath the world-tree.: Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. Tozzer (1941) (primary)