Aged Goddess of Midwifery, Medicine, and Weaving
In the codices Ix Chel appears as an old woman, catalogued as Goddess O and named in the glyphs Chak Chel, "Great Rainbow": a serpent coils on her head as a headdress, crossed bones pattern her skirt, and her hands and feet sometimes end in jaguar claws. On page 74 of the Dresden Codex she upends her water jar to pour out the flood that drowns the world, while a sky serpent vomits water above her and the black God L stands by with his spear. It is the most famous doomsday image on any Maya page.
Her provinces are the affairs of women and the body: childbirth, medicine, the sweatbath, weaving, and divination. Landa's Relación records that physicians and shamans honored her at the feast of the month Zip as a goddess of healing, and expectant mothers kept her image under their beds. A Yucatec woman tried at least once in her life to reach the island of Cozumel to consult her idol about children; Landa compared the pilgrimage to those of Christians to Jerusalem and Rome. The masonry shrine the Grijalva expedition saw there in 1518 was this sanctuary, and colonial accounts add that the idol was hollow, with a priest hidden behind it to speak the oracles.
The popular label "moon goddess" comes from colonial conflations; modern scholarship separates the youthful moon goddess (Goddess I) from the aged Chak Chel. Her name is usually read as "Lady Rainbow."
