Ixtab- Maya GodDeity"Rope Woman"

Guardian of the Hanged

Ixtab, "Rope Woman," receives the souls of those who died by hanging. In Diego de Landa's sixteenth-century account of Yucatec Maya beliefs, she appears as a hanged woman with a noose around her neck and her eyes closed in death. Where most of the dead faced the trials of Xibalba, the hanged went directly to Ixtab. She guided them past the underworld entirely.

Landa's account is the primary source for her existence. The image he recorded or transcribed, a single figure dangling from a rope, has survived in colonial manuscripts. Whether she was widely worshipped before the Spanish arrival or belonged to a local Yucatec tradition, the record does not say.

Paradise Beneath the Ceiba

The dead whom Ixtab received found rest beneath the shade of the great ceiba tree. They had abundant food and drink and freedom from all labor and suffering. The ceiba was the axis of Maya cosmology, its roots in the underworld, its trunk passing through the earth, its branches reaching into the heavens. To rest beneath it was to dwell at the center of creation.

Only hanging qualified. Warriors killed in battle and women who died in childbirth had their own paths past Xibalba's torments, but Ixtab's paradise was reserved for one method of death alone. Whether this encompassed sacrificial hanging as well as voluntary death, Landa did not clarify. What he recorded was the destination: a rope from this world, then the ceiba's shade forever.