They said also and held it as absolutely certain that those who hanged themselves went to this heaven of theirs; and on this account, there were many persons who on slight occasions of sorrows, troubles or sickness, hanged themselves in order to escape these things and to go and rest in their heaven [gloria], where they said that the goddess of the gallows [la diosa de la horca], whom they called Ix Tab, would bring them.
It has been claimed that the Pre-Spanish Maya did not have a suicide goddess, or a significant narrative of suicide by hanging.[8] Originally, Ix Tab may only have been a hunting goddess (see above, Comparisons).[9] Today, the sensationalist idea of a "cult of Ix Tab" appears to be invoked by popular Yucatecan media to portray suicide as an indigenous problem, given that Yucatán has a suicide rate more than twice that of Mexico at large.[10]
It's tough to say whether or not this god was legit. Fabrication about death was the norm for conquistadors, though; the claims of mass human sacrifice, for example, are almost certainly fictitious, and human sacrifice was only an occasional and small-scale thing - maybe in the tens per year, rather than the tens of thousands in single days of orgiastic barbarian violence that Cortez claimed.
"LOOK AT THOSE SAVAGES MURDERING THEIR OWN!"
"Hang the boy for stealing a loaf of bread."
"And this is the machine that renders natives into a thin paste"
"What the fuck?"
"No no, they like being paste" Taps head
