Ix Chel is named in sixteenth-century Yucatec sources as a Maya goddess of childbirth, medicine and weaving, whose shrine on the island of Cozumel, off the eastern coast of the Yucatan, drew women as pilgrims, especially women seeking to conceive and to be safely delivered. This much is reasonably secure: the colonial-period accounts describe her cult, her association with the crafts and concerns of women, and the pilgrimage to her island shrine, and she is connected with medicine and healing. It is important, however, to distinguish this attested goddess from a more elaborate figure that has become popular in modern writing. The familiar contemporary portrait of Ix Chel, as a moon goddess, imagined as young and old at once, ruling the tides and presiding over the whole cycle of a woman's life, is a good deal more than the early sources actually support, and represents a modern reconstruction and expansion, drawing together various strands (including a distinct aged goddess of the codices) into a single rounded deity that the ancient evidence does not clearly attest.
Scholars have urged caution here, warning against reading the rich modern Ix Chel back into the Maya past. What can be said with confidence is that the Maya honoured a goddess associated with childbirth, healing and weaving, worshipped particularly by women at Cozumel. The Maya are a living people, and midwifery, healing and weaving remain meaningful in Maya women's lives today; but the fuller mythology often attached to Ix Chel should be understood as partly a modern construction, and the honest position is that the ancient goddess is known only in outline.