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INTRODUCTION
The incantations of the Yucatec Maya manuscript known as the Ritual of the Bacabs are our earliest surviving source for how Maya cosmology provided a framework for Maya healing practices. Although the extant text-artifact dates to the late eighteenth century, it is the culmination of centuries of cultural, linguistic, and intellectual interaction with other Mesoamerican peoples and, ultimately, Spanish and African colonists. The incantations make frequent use of archaic terminology and metaphors, some of which are found almost exclusively in Classic period hieroglyphic texts (Knowlton 2012). At the same time, the Ritual of the Bacabs contains material without parallel in other Maya sources, including what appear to be innovations in the healing cosmology that emerged as a result of the interethnic intellectual exchange that characterized Mesoamerica during the Late Postclassic period (ca. A.D. 1200-1500). This paper analyzes the role and attributes of the Maya goddess Ix Hun Ahau. This feminine manifestation of the better-known Maya deity Hun Ahau is at present only known from references in the Ritual of the Bacabs. Although it is common in the Postclassic Maya codices to render female counterparts to male deities (as their "wives," y atan), the accoutrements and roles ascribed to Ix Hun Ahau in the incantations identifies her as a Maya parallel to Tlazolteotl-Ixcuina, the Nahua goddess of weaving, sexuality, pollution, and its purification. Pollution concepts and purification practices that are otherwise peripheral in the Ritual of the Bacabs are specifically related to Ix Hun Ahau in that text, suggesting that intellectual exchange between Mesoamerican peoples in the pre-Columbian period extended to medical cosmologies as well.
RITUAL OF THE BACABS AS SOURCE
Although recent decades have witnessed major advances in scholarly knowledge of many domains of ancient Maya civilization, we have very little direct evidence of pre-Columbian Maya medical concepts and practices. Despite early claims to the contrary (Thompson 1958), no extant Maya hieroglyphic texts are known that explicitly address the topic of medicine, and so much of what we think we know is reconstructed from colonial sources.1Indigenous pharmacopeia is well represented in the instructions for remedies (u oacal) contained in the corpus of Yucatec Maya documents from the northern Maya lowlands during the Colonial period (Roys 1931), especially in...