Did the Maya really worship Ixtab, goddess of suicide by hanging, or was she made up by Spaniards?

by enlightendark

I read that Spanish missionaries and modern media could have fabricated the goddess Ixtab, and that her cult never existed among ancient Maya. To me it seems a very specific dominion for a goddess (suicide by hanging). In case her following existed, did the Maya have other gods for different forms of suicide?

se1ze

Here is a link to the answer to your question that I posted in an earlier thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z1rt0/is_the_mayan_godess_of_suicide_ixtab_legit/

To be brief, the answer to your question is no. The Classic Maya had a massive thematic element of literal DIY self-sacrifice in the form of self-mutilation in much of their art, which is fascinating, but there was no specific goddess of suicide.

cdaviii

Ixtab is probably not a real deity, like u/se1ze wrote in their response, but Reyes-Foster wrote an interesting article suggesting that the popularity of a Maya suicide god like Itxab is linked to the high rates of suicide in present day Yucatan. She links newspaper images of young indigenous men who commit suicide in the 1930s to this idea of a Maya predisposition to suicide, which is then reinforced through this notion that the Maya had a precolonial deity specifically for hanging. To her, believing that the Maya had a deity just for suicide by hanging is another way of perpetuating the concept of the Maya as "other."

In regards to other gods of suicide, the epigrapher Sylvanus Morley wrote about a deity associated with suicide by hanging, Ah Puch, Lord of Death “from whom evil and especially death were thought to come" (Morley 1975). However, I haven't found any references to Ah Puch as a deity in other contexts, and the closest we get to finding him in a Maya context is the mention of a Lord Ah Puch in the Chilam Balam as a regional lord.

Reyes-Foster, B. 2013. "He Followed the Funereal Steps of Ixtab: The Pleasurable Aesthetics of Suicide in Newspaper Journalism in Yucatan, Mexico." The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 7.

Morley, S. 1975. An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs. Courier Corporation: North Chelmsford, MA.