Ixtab

The principal origin for the figure of Ixtab in the provided materials is Diego de Landa’s 16th‑century Relación, which reports that Maya people in Yucatán believed those who hanged themselves went to a particular heaven escorted by 'la diosa de la horca... Ix Tab.' That colonial report is the central documentary basis; other documentary traces (comparative references to ah Tab/Tabay and an image in the Dresden Codex that some authors have linked to a suspended woman) are fragmentary and contested. Modern scholarship warns that the picture of a pre‑Spanish 'suicide goddess' rests on sparse evidence and may be an overinterpretation or later reading of Landa’s account and related imagery.

No detailed, uncontested traditional iconography of Ixtab is recorded in the provided sources. Landa’s text names her but gives no physical description. A suspended female figure with a rope around the neck appears in the Dresden Codex (DC53b) and has been proposed by some writers to represent Ixtab; the same sources emphasize that this identification is speculative and that the image occurs in an eclipse section where it may instead symbolize lunar/eclipse motifs or consequences for the Moon Goddess. Modern artistic portrayals are creative reinterpretations rather than documented traditional depictions.

In Diego de Landa’s report Ixtab’s primary function is psychopompic: she 'would bring' those who hanged themselves to their heaven, implying an intermediary role for a specific mode of death. Comparative discussion in the sources connects the name to ah Tab or ensnaring/hunting deities, proposing—hypothetically rather than as established fact—that the rope/noose functions symbolically as a snare consecrating a person to such a being. Later popular folklore figures with similar names (e.g., the Xtabay) are described as predatory seductresses who ensnare men, but that behavior is distinct from the benevolent escort role attributed to Ixtab in the colonial report. Scholarship cautions that any attribution of agency encouraging suicide or a 'cult of suicide' is likely sensationalized and not securely supported by the available evidence.