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Old Belief
← Xtabay
Maya woman in an embroidered white huipil standing barefoot at the foot of an enormous ceiba tree at night, holding a wooden comb, her black hair so long it runs into the trunk behind her. The Xtabay of Yucatec legend.

combing at the ceiba

She is met combing her hair at the foot of the tree, and the hair and the trunk are not easy to tell apart. What a man follows into the dark is the ceiba.

Basis: Yucatec accounts of the Xtabay · AI-generated

About the Xtabay

A woman combing her hair beside a ceiba at night, who calls a man by name, and a legend that is inseparable from one species of tree.

  • collected oral accounts, USC Digital Folklore Archives, Yucatán entries (2018)Transcribed first-person tellings. Primary oral material from living tellers.

Read the full Xtabay entry →

More of this creature

Enormous ceiba with a smooth pale trunk and buttressed roots standing alone in cleared ground at night, its branches spread wide against a starry sky. The ceiba at which the Xtabay waitsthe ceiba at night →Close view of a green-grey young ceiba trunk studded all over with hard conical thorns, daylight and foliage showing at the edges. The thorned young ceiba of the Xtabay legendthe thorns on the trunk →Narrow white limestone path curving away into dry scrub forest under a deep blue night sky, the surrounding leaves pale with moonlight. The path past the ceiba where the Xtabay calls a traveller by namethe path past the tree →

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