“I keep the waters and the weave.”
The rabbit moon
The flood
The loom
Ixchel is imaged sometimes as a young weaver, sometimes as an old woman with a jug, sometimes with a serpent headdress. She governs the cycles that make bodies and cloth: menstruation, birth, rain, the moon’s aging. She can destroy by flood and restore by water. Among Maya peoples this is not a dead story; it is part of a living sky.
To meet her in a life is to notice a cycle you have been treating as a straight line.
Inspect
INTERPRETATION
Ixchel is the intelligence of phases. A culture addicted to constant noon will call her dangerous. She is dangerous: to anything that cannot wane. Midwifery here is psychological: she is present at the births you did not schedule.
The shadow
Constant noon. A straight line drawn through a cycle that needs to wane.
Four lookings
Campbell
Where are you trying to be a full moon on a new-moon day?
von Franz
What is being born through you that you keep treating as an inconvenience?
Hillman
Which of your floods is a destruction, and which is a washing of the loom?
Coelho
What phase of the week is the omen, if you stop treating life as a straight line?