Key Info

-  Suicide goddess who accompanies suicides to the Upperworld (Heaven)

Brief Bio

At the time of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán (1527–1546), Ix Tab or Ixtab; "Rope Woman", "Hangwoman") was the indigenous Maya goddess of suicide by hanging. Playing the role of a psychopomp, she would accompany such suicides to heaven.

The only description of the goddess occurs in the Relación of the 16th-century Spanish inquisitor Diego de Landa:

They said also and held it as absolutely certain that those who hanged themselves went to this heaven of theirs; and on this account, there were many persons who on slight occasions of sorrows, troubles or sickness, hanged themselves in order to escape these things and to go and rest in their heaven [gloria], where they said that the goddess of the gallows [la diosa de la horca], whom they called Ix Tab, would bring them.

Beyond this description, there is only a very brief and somewhat obscure mention of Ix Tab in the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin and in the Pérez Codex, in a context of chaos, suffering, and hangings: "They suspended Ix Tab from their hands", or, alternatively, "Ix Tab suspended them from her hands".