Moonlady Showcase

Searching for Ix Chel in Cozumel 
An American Copadilla Goes to the Yucatan

• Epiphany on the Beach
• Dinner with Ixchel
• In the Jungle
• Cozumel

I wasn't just looking for a goddess, nor was centuries of intellectual progress being abandoned for me to begin believing in a myth. After so many years of studying world religions and philosophies, my sense of spirituality had become wholly intellectual, no longer a breathing part of life, locked in analytical stasis. I wanted to place a personal face on these philosophies for them to become alive, to understand these truths with the body that binds me to this Earth. Goddess was a metaphor for an inner intuitive voice I'd silenced inside myself. The search for Ix Chel was a search for balance between the high abstraction of modern thought and the fearful superstition of the past. 

And a part of it was to learn about the homeland of the Copadillas, a Mayan group of midwives and shamans who are in charge of keeping that culture's complex calendar system. Likely candidates become inducted into a guild and undergo training in the Copan region of the Yucatan before returning to their community to organize community observances of important calendar dates. When I learned of them several years ago, it inspired me to start doing the same thing with the natural calendar (New and Full Moons, solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days) in Dallas. 

In the process of searching for Ix Chel, the ever-patient Scooter and I had a few more vacation adventures than anticipated. The hotel room in Playa del Carmen, a mid-sized town south of Cancun, had the ceiling fans, balcony and ocean view as touted. But in reality the sea breeze only wafted a few feet into the room and the fans were wimpy. Too hot to hang out in, we spent most of those first days on the beach, which is not so bad. But sleeping at night meant folding our over-40 bones into the reclining patio chairs on the balcony and trying to nod off while bad disco music blared from the nightclub down the road. 

One morning we woke to discover that the breezy beach weather had turned completely still; temperature and humidity levels soared. The sky was so hazy you could stare straight at the Sun and at night the Moon was blood red. Chiapas was burning, word on the street said. Each year just before the rainy season begins in May, farmers burn last year's crop debris and clear jungle for new fields, letting rain soak in nutrients from charred residue. This year, the rainy season was late again - global warming, the concerned cautions spoke - and the fires never fully went out, embers fanning to flames with each breeze. 

The trip southward to Tulum, where we'd rented rustic sans-electricity beach bungalows, was certainly no longer an option. We joined the rush of vacationers who abandoned deposits, switched accommodations and rented hotel rooms in Playa del Carmen with air-conditioning. We found a lovely place - Treetops Hotel, set in a shady patch of jungle and just a half-block from the beach. Then on Wednesday, we woke to blue skies once again. 

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Ix Chel Epiphany on the Beach

When the Sun is out and the breeze is blowing, you're out on the beach getting kissed by the waves, this area of the Yucatàn  - called the Mayan Riviera in tour books - is pretty close to paradise. Spectacular flowers grace even the most mundane plants. Trees everywhere are laden with fruit and nuts. The white sand extends beyond the beach, continuing out to sea contained by shallow reefs, and you can walk for thirty yards without going under (but watch those rocks!). The bright Sun reflects off this whiteness through the turquoise water, everything shimmers and sparkles as the waves become laced with diamond-like patterns of light reflected from above and below.

Finally relaxed into coma condition from three beach-bum days of swimming, sunning and imbibing cold wine and incredibly fresh guacamole while enjoying a parade of topless women (très European) and men in Speedos against this Bali Hi' backdrop. On the evening of Mother's Day we walked down the beach to explore less inhabited terrain. A luxurious Full Moon hung low in the sky. The elbow to elbow beach-front hotels spaced to the occasional outpost. Scrubby lowland jungle crept up to just beyond the high-tide mark. A spit of reef extended up to the beach, and amid the rocks the waves were stilled, providing pools of calm clear water. 

My search for Ix Chel had so far been disappointing. I spent hours cruising the shops and book stores for anything about the goddess with whom this coastal area and Cozumel had been so entwined. Everywhere I asked, no one knew. Not even Iguano, the snorkeling excursion leader who came from a Mayan fisherman family. I'd just get this strange blank look: no one asks this question. 

Yet Cozumel and its temples to Ix Chel was one of three main centers of Mayan spiritual activity, along with Uxmal and Chichèn Itzà. Stone sacbè roadways led from these and others such as Tulum and Coba to the natural port of Xelha'. (The Mayan "X" is pronounced "sh".) Boats then transited people on to Cozumel where they walked to the main temples at San Gervasio and other sites on the easterly moonrise side of the island. But now, no one here seems to think of her much, even though small towns along the coast still echo her name: Xcaret, Xcacel, Xpuha. The Xelha' lagoon is now a national snorkeling park with scant reference to the goddess with which it was once connected. 

An undeniably powerful deity, Ix Chel was mistress of the Moon and medicine, married to Itzamnà, god of the sky and sciences. She wove not only civilizing attire for us but the web of the world into existence. A powerful serpent and wise rabbit were her animal companions. The ever present and ever-receptive ocean was her domain, she of the waves and floods that cleanse. Myths relate that Ix Chel was so pleased to have an isle of her own surrounded by lovely and protective reefs in the most beautiful and bountiful waters of her domain, she gave to the people there a graceful bird and bestowed the name Isla de Cuzumil, Island of Swallows, now called Cozumel. 

Of special affection to women, Ix Chel was the rare and esteemed triple goddess, encompassing maiden, mother and crone in her various forms. As the young Ix Ch'up she was the epitome of fertility with long flowing hair and full breasts, the promise of the Moon in its new and waxing phases. In her Full Moon mother facet, she governed childbirth and formed the facial features of babies while still in the womb. As the dark Moon crone, she was most powerful, set to bring the world-ending deluge prophesied in the Mayan calender to occur in 2012. In her phasing Moon, Ix Chel represented eternity as being cyclical rather than a static forever. In the crone glyph she gazes one way while the serpent on her head looks Janus-like the other. 

Standing there in the protective reef, up to my knees in turquoise waters, I was surrounded by Ix Chel's pulsating web of light refractions,  moonlight melting into the waves. The ocean was alive. Though not really the psychic sort, I had a vision of life centuries ago: women along the shore casting flowers into the fluid moonlight web in hopes of Ix Chel's blessing for safe passage to Cozumel. Standing in supplication waist-deep in water, they raised their arms toward the Moon and bared their breasts in hopes of lunar bestowment of ample milk. Gathering in the tranquil lagoon bay of Xelha', hundreds of small boats set forth for Ix Chel's island, each laden with women now ritually bathed and clutching their offerings, icons of their hopes and dreams all riding off on moonlit waves. 

I sat on the beach and created an altar, drawing a counter-clockwise circle of thirteen dots representing the lunar phases in a year. With the hands of women who'd had prayed so hard all these eons, I pressed one (heels at the rim and fingers toward the center) for each phase, chanting the sequence of elements through the astrological signs as visited by the Moon: fire, earth, air, water. In the center, I drew a Crescent Moon and at the bottom I wrote her name: Ix Chel. We left it there on the beach for the rising tide to take as an offering to her sea. 

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Our Dinner with Ix Chel 

Scooter, my mate, had been a patient co-conspirator on my search for Ix Chel, giving me space or support as I needed it. The journey had been scenic and leisurely paced as he wanted and along the way there were additional perks beyond the delightful European swim-wear customs. One of them was a Mayan cafe, Yachbe, near our hotel where we had the apex version of the local specialty, Tikin Xic: fish covered with onion, pepper and tomato strips, wrapped in a banana leaf and baked until tender. 

Yaxche was dedicated to showcasing the more peaceful aspects of Mayan culture such as the culinary arts and the mystical side of its spirituality. Quoting a Mayan text, the menu (folded like the Mayan codice, or book) reads: "So the good souls will rest under the shadow of the sacred tree 'Yaxche' where food and peace reign." Sounds like my kind of afterlife, especially if it has tsotobilchay - chaya (or Mayan spinach) tamales with boiled egg, pumpkin seeds and fresh tomato sauce - or any of the Mayan vegetable soups. 

Striking up a conversation with the restaurant owner, a dashing young man whose Cuban grandfather had married a Mayan woman, we paid complement to him for naming a coconut-shrimp dish on his menu after Ix Chel. 

"I have a statue of her, see?" He led me out to the street where a four-foot tall wooden statue of Ix Chel stood, the open mouth of the serpent on her head holding menus for passers-by to peruse. In a young maiden form I'd never seen before, the face was round and Moon-like, eyes open yet unsurprised. The whole meal she'd been just a few feet away. 

Over the course of a couple more culinary encounters, we exchanged information about Ix Chel and other Mayan matters, such as prophesy. They had predicted with amazing accuracy the founding of Mexico City and the coming of Cortes. What about 2012?, I asked, when Ix Chel's waters are said to close the Mayan era begun with the Spanish Invasion. His smiling face fell and he turned away. Some aspects of Ix Chel are evidently best not talked about over dinner.