Ixtab

Ixtab (in the standardized Yucatec Maya spelling Ix Tab, literally meaning “Lady of the Rope” or “Woman of the Noose”) is the Maya mythological psychopomp documented in the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial chronicles as the guardian of the souls of those who died by hanging. According to the detailed ethnographic account of Friar Diego de Landa in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, the ancient Maya held a differentiated eschatology in which certain categories of the dead did not descend to the fearsome subterranean underworld (Mitnal or Xibalba), but ascended directly to a celestial paradise of eternal delights situated beneath the shaded canopy of the primordial Sacred Ceiba (Yaxche). Among these privileged souls—alongside warriors slain in battle, women who died in childbirth, and dedicated priests—were those who took their own lives by the cord, received and comforted in the heavens by Ixtab, whom they called “the goddess of the gallows”. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the pioneering scholar Paul Schellhas associated this account with the enigmatic female figure suspended by a cord tied to the celestial vault, painted on page 53b of the Dresden Codex. Contemporary epigraphic and archaeoastronomical research debates this identification intensely, showing that the image in the codex is set within lunar eclipse tables, where suspension by cords symbolized the astronomical strangling or the periodic death of the Moon.

6 min read · Reviewed on September 28, 2026 · How we research

The rope from the sky, the sacred tree and eternal rest

Primary sources

• Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. translation: Edition by Ángel María Garibay, Editorial Porrúa, Mexico, 1959.
• Anonymous (Yucatec Maya), Dresden Codex. translation: Facsimile edition by J. Antonio Villacorta and Carlos A. Villacorta, Guatemala, 1930.

Studies

• Karl Taube, The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan. Dumbarton Oaks, 1992.
• Paul Schellhas, Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1904.
• Jesper Nielsen e Tsubasa Okoshi Harada, The Power of the Rope: Ancient Maya Metaphors of Captivity and Eclipse. Acta Mesoamericana, 2018.