Ixchel’s worshippers gathered at the United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancun to pray to the Mayan moon goddess on the forty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the Process Church of the Final Judgment on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Chris Huhne, The UK's energy and environment secretary, was especially excited to finally arrive – he had been delayed in London because, for the second year in a row, England was experiencing some of the worst winter weather in over a century.
It didn’t matter to Chris Huhne and other members of the Church of Settled Science that, almost eleven years earlier, in March of 2000, Dr. David Viner (a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia), falsely prophesied, British "snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” And within a few years snowfall in England will become "a very rare and exciting event" because "children aren't going to know what snow is.” It didn’t matter electronic documents would later show that same CRU to be perpetrating the largest scientific fraud in history. The gathering of Ixchel’s worshippers in Cancun had nothing to do with real science, and everyone at the event knew it. Climate changes every day. A tax on carbon changes nothing.
The worshippers were led in a prayer to the goddess Ixchel by the Convention's Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres;
"May she inspire you – because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools … Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads. I am convinced that twenty years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel."
The opening prayer to a pagan goddess set the tone for representatives from one hundred and ninety-three countries. The allusion to weaving a “tapestry … of many threads” derives from the belief that this particular goddess taught humanity the art of weaving. Mesoamerica’s depiction of Ixchel's snake headdress and talons are curiously reminiscent of a Sumerian moon goddess more than four thousand years earlier.
