Our Lady of Guadalupe
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Our Lady of Guadalupe |
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This article is about the Mexican Marian icon. For the Spanish icon, see Our Lady of Guadalupe (Extremadura).Our Lady of Guadalupe or the
Virgin of Guadalupe is a
Roman Catholic icon and Mexico's most popular image:
Nobel laureate Octavio Paz is quoted as saying that "the Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery" (Paz 1976). Most often described as a manifestation of the
Virgin Mary, her
feast day,
December 12, on the
Roman Catholic calendar of saints commemorates her appearance to St.
Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on the hill of
Tepeyac near
Mexico City from
December 9 through December 12,
1531.
The name
Virgin of Guadalupe refers both to this
Marian apparition and to the
icon which is housed in the
Basilica of Guadalupe today.
Her popularity and cultural significance are multifaceted:
*
Catholics honour her as the manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the Americas,
*She is also an important symbol of Mexican
nationalism. When
Miguel Hidalgo launched the Mexican independence movement in 1810, he is said to have shouted "Death to bad government, and long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!"
Emiliano Zapata's men wore the Virgin's image on their hats during the
Mexican Revolution, and the modern-day
EZLN has named a "mobile town" after Our Lady.
*Some theologians also associate the apparition and veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe with a special relationship between the indigenous peoples of the American continents and the Catholic Church, and therefore salvation. This perspective developed in the scriptural terms of truths "hid ... from the wise and prudent" but "revealed...unto babes" (
Matthew 11:25), but that later developed into the more complex approaches of the "spiritual
mestizaje of the Americas" (Elizondo 1997), and the "option for the poor" provided by
Liberation theology.
*Others see her as a
syncretic manifestation of the
indigenous goddess Tonantzin.
Traditional account of the Virgin of Guadalupe
The
Nican mopohua is considered to be the "primordial account" of the
apparition because it is written in the
indigenous Nahuatl language. It describes the 1531 meeting between
La Virgen and Saint Juan Diego on Tepeyac.
In the Nican mopohua, "it had been ten years since [...] Mexico had been conquered" when Juan Diego, a widowed convert to Roman Catholicism, was on his way to "attend to divine things" when, upon passing the hill of Tepeyac, the sky became bright and he heard "singing on top of the hill, like the songs of various precious birds". He stopped, wondering if he was in "Xochitlalpan", "a preconquest Nahuatl expression for heaven or a place of bliss". At the end of the song, as he stood looking toward the top of the hill, he heard a woman calling him from there. At the top of the hill he saw a young lady whose "clothes were like the sun". He prostrated himself in front of her, and she asked him where he was going. He replied that he was going to her "home" of Mexico-Tlatelolco to hear the sermons of the friars there. The woman then identified herself as "the eternally consummate virgin Saint Mary, mother of the very true deity, God, the giver of life, the creator of people, the ever present, the lord of heaven and earth." She then asked Juan Diego to relate to the Bishop her wish for a temple to be built on the very spot, where she would attend to the "weeping and sorrows" of "you and all the people of this land, and of the various peoples who love me", "in order to remedy and heal all their various afflictions, miseries, and torments." The Virgin is said to have asked
Saint Juan Diego to pick
Castilian roses from the top of Tepeyac hill, and to gather them in his tilma (cloak) to present to
Bishop Juan de Zumárraga as proof of Her miraculous presence. (Castilian roses were not common in Mexico in 1531, and certainly not in the dead of winter.) When Juan Diego opened his cloak to show the roses to the Bishop, it is said that both men were astonished to see the image of the Virgin emblazoned on its
cactus fabric.
The Nican mopohua is not the first published document regarding the apparition, but it is the most highly regarded. There is controversy regarding its
authorship: many believe it was written in the
sixteenth century by a Nahuatl speaker named
Antonio Valeriano; others believe it was the seventeenth-century creation of Tepeyac's
vicar Luis Laso de la Vega. The debate over authorship is fierce: it is generally felt that advocates for Laso de la Vega are denying the
historicity of the apparition account.
Historical documentation of the apparition
The primary historical documents supporting Our Lady of Guadalupe's apparition account are, one, the Nahuatl-language
Huei tlamahuiçoltica ("here it is recounted"), a tract about the Virgin which contains the aforementioned Nican mopohua, and which was printed in 1649; two, a Spanish-language book about the apparitions titled
Imagen de la Virgen María ("
Image of the Virgin Mary"), printed in 1648; three, a seventeenth-century
engraving by Samuel Stradanus which used the Virgin's image to advertise
indulgences; and four, the
Codex Escalada, a pictographic account of the Virgin on
Tepeyac, printed on deerskin and said to date back to 1548.
The apparition account is also said to be strengthened by a document called the
Informaciones Jurídicas of 1666, which is a collection of transcribed
oral histories gathered near Juan Diego's hometown of
Cuautitlan: oral histories are considered to be important in cultures without a strong written tradition. In this document, various persons reaffirmed, in interview format, basic details about Saint Juan Diego and the Guadalupan apparition story.
Problems with documentation of the apparition
Various historians and clerics, including the U.S. priest-historian
Stafford Poole, the famous Mexican historian
Joaquín García Icazbalceta, and former abbot of the
Basilica of Guadalupe,
Guillermo Schulenberg, have expressed doubts about the historicity of the apparition accounts. Schulenberg in particular caused a stir with his 1996 interview with the obscure
Catholic magazine
Ixthus, when he said that Juan Diego was "a symbol, not a reality."
One problem with the apparition tradition is that Juan Diego is said to have met the Virgin in 1531. The first extant account published about their meeting was written by a man named
Luis Laso de la Vega in 1648. Some historians and devotees of the Virgin respond that the Nican mopohua was actually written in the 1500's by a man named
Antonio Valeriano, and that de la Vega was merely the first person to publish a Nahuatl account of the apparition. The debate over the
authorship of the Nican mopohua is vigorous.
When dealing with the argument of the "117 years of silence" between the apparition and the earliest extant published accounts of it, some historians also point to the
Codex Escalada, which tells the story of the meeting on Tepeyac and which dates to 1548. Finally, the archived oral histories provide some support for the apparitionists.
There is no explicit mention of Juan Diego nor the Virgin of Guadalupe in any of Zumárraga's extensive writings. In a catechism he wrote the year before his death he clearly stated: "The Redeemer of the world doesn't want any more
miracles, because they are no longer necessary." His silence and his position on later-day miracles lead some historians to believe that the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe was started after his death.
Zumárraga's successor, the archbishop Fray
Alonso de Montúfar, is said to have commissioned
Marcos Aquino to paint the Virgin around 1556, the same year the first
Basilica de Guadalupe was built: the church built in 1533 would have been originally dedicated to the Spanish icon. Montúfar sent a reproduction of the image to
King Phillip II of Spain in 1570.
The first person to really use Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol of Mexico was
Miguel Sánchez, the author of the first Spanish-language apparition account. Sanchez identified Guadalupe as
Revelation's
Woman of the Apocalypse, and said that "this New World has been won and conquered by the hand of the Virgin Mary...[who had] prepared, disposed, and contrived her exquisite likeness in this her Mexican land, which was conquered for such a glorious purpose, won that there should appear so Mexican an image (Brading 2001)".
In 1810
Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla initiated the bid for Mexican independence with his
Grito de Dolores, when he yelled words to the effect of "
Death to the
Spaniards and long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!" (the exact phrasing is widely debated). When Hidalgo's mestizo-indigenous army attacked
Guanajuato and
Valladolid, it was written that they had placed "the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was the insignia of their enterprise, on sticks or on reeds painted different colors" and that "they all wore a print of the Virgin on their hats" (Krauze 1997).
When Hidalgo died, leadership of the revolution fell to a mestizo priest named
Jose Maria Morelos who led insurgent troops in the Mexican south. Morelos was also a Guadalupan partisan: he made the Virgin the seal of his
Congress of Chilpancingo, stating "New Spain puts less faith in its own efforts than in the power of God and the intercession of its Blessed Mother, who appeared within the precincts of Tepeyac as the miraculous image of Guadalupe that had come to comfort us, defend us, visibly be our protection" (Krauze 1997). He enscribed the Virgin's feast day,
December 12, into the
Chilpancingo constitution, and declared that Guadalupe was the power behind his military victories. One of Morelos' officers, a man named
Felix Fernandez who would later become the first Mexican president, even changed his name to Guadalupe Victoria (Krauze 1997).
Simón Bolívar, "the George Washington of South America", noticed the Guadalupan theme in these uprisings, and shortly before Morelos' death in 1815 wrote: "...the leaders of the
independence struggle have put
fanaticism to use by proclaiming the famous Virgin of Guadalupe as the queen of the patriots, praying to her in times of hardship and displaying her on their
flags. In this way, political enthusiasm has been mixed with religion to produce a vehement fervor in favor of the sacred cause of liberty. The
veneration for this image in Mexico far exceeds the greatest reverence that the shrewdest
prophet might inspire" (Brading 2001).
In 1914,
Emiliano Zapata's peasant army rose out of the south against the government of
Porfirio Diaz. Though Zapata's rebel forces were primarily interested in
land reform when Zapata's peasant troops penetrated
Mexico City, they carried Guadalupan banners.
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Our Lady of Guadalupe (reproduction)
San Juan Bautista, Coyoacán, DF |
Despite disputes as to the veracity of the legend, the Virgin of Guadalupe has proved very popular in Mexico over the years. A church was built in 1533, dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Thereafter, Spanish missionaries used the story of her appearance to help convert millions of
indigenous people in what had been the
Aztec Empire. Our Lady of Guadalupe still underpins the faith of Catholics in Mexico and the rest of
Latin America, and she has been recognized as
patron saint of Mexico City since 1737 with her patronage extended piece by piece until it included all of
America and the
Philippines by 1946. Much of the recent increase in
Marianism in the Catholic Church, including the call to recognize Mary as co-redemptrix, stems from the cult of Guadalupe. Today many make the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe, on the Cerro of Tepeyac, some crawling on their knees for kilometres, or even from their homelands in other cities, or evenstates, to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. It is said that she can cure almost any sickness. Also, many problem drinkers, instead of going to
Alcoholics Anonymous or similar programmes, go there to promise her that they will never drink again, or abstain for a certain period; it is reported that the majority of these find the strength to fulfill their promise. That can illustrate how much love Mexicans pay to their
Virgencita, the affectionate diminutive by which she is called.
The apron containing her image has been hung in the church built on the spot through the building's various versions, including today's
Basilica of Guadalupe. The picture is of a woman with olive skin, rather than the white skin of European iconography, that appealed to both indigenous Mexicans and their
mestizo descendants as one of them. Similarly, the man to whom she is supposed to have appeared, Juan Diego, was an Indian, not a Spaniard. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been used by advocates of indigenous rights throughout Mexico's history, most recently by the
Zapatista movement.
Replicas can be found in thousands of churches throughout the world, including
Notre Dame Cathedral in
Paris and the
Basilica of Saint Peter in
Rome, and numerous
parishes bear her name. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe today is widespread among Catholics in every part of the globe.
María Guadalupe, or just
Lupe, is a frequent
female name in the Spanish language.
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is often read as a
coded image. Miguel Sanchez, the author of the 1648 tract
Imagen de la Virgen María, described the Virgin's image as the Woman of the Apocalypse from the
New Testament's Revelation 12:1: "arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars".
Mateo de la Cruz, writing twelve years after Sánchez, "argued that the Guadalupe possessed all the iconographical attributes of Mary in her
Immaculate Conception".(Brading, 76) Likewise, a 1738 sermon preached by Miguel Picazo argued that the Guadalupe was the "best representation" of the Immaculate Conception.
Other viewers have interpreted different aspects of the image as coded messages to the
indigenous people of Mexico. Her blue-green
mantle is said to be the color once reserved for the divine couple
Ometecuhtli and
Onecihuatl; [
1] her
belt is read as a sign of
pregnancy; and a cross-shaped image symbolizing the cosmos and called
nahui-ollin is said to be inscribed in the image beneath her sash.[
2]
Yet another interpretation of the image is described by the historian
William B. Taylor, who says Guadalupe was "acclaimed goddess of the
maguey [cactus]" and that pulque was drunk on her feast day. A 1772 report is said to have described the rays of light around Guadalupe as maguey spines. (Taylor 1979)
The origin of the name "Guadalupe" in the American context is something of a mystery. According to a report at the time the Virgin identified herself that way in a later apparition to Juan Diego's uncle,
Juan Bernardino. Others state that the 1533 Church was dedicated to the Spanish Lady of Guadalupe (see above), with the American version developing later. Finally it has been suggested that the name is a corruption of a
Nahuatl name "Coatlaxopeuh", which has been translated as "Who Crushes the Serpent". In this interpretation, the serpent referred to is
Quetzalcoatl, one of the chief
Aztec gods, whom the Virgin Mary "crushed" by inspiring the conversion of the natives to Catholicism.
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Alleged image of a bearded man found in a magnification of the Virgin's eye by Dr. Javier Torroella Bueno. |
Ever since its origin, the
icon has been subject to great controversy. As early as 1556
Francisco de Bustamante, head of the
Franciscans in the Colony read a sermon in which he dismissed the miraculous origin of the icon: "The devotion that has been growing in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady, called of Guadalupe, in this city is greatly harmful for the natives, because it makes them believe that the image painted by Marcos the Indian is in any way miraculous." This may have been the Aztec painter
Marcos Cipac de Aquino, who was active in Mexico when the icon appeared. Some claim that for this painting to be a work of "the Indian painter Marcos" he must have been a
maestro at the level of great European masters of the time; for he used the joint of the two pieces of cloth as the central axis of his work and used the
golden ratio to compose the painting.
In 1787, Dr. Jose Bartolache commissioned several painters to make copies of the original. The copies were hung in the Pocito de Guadalupe chapel to study the effects of humidity, candle smoke and other environmental factors. By 1796 the reproductions were all seriously deteriorated and the paintings had cracked away. The original, although never varnished or provided with any protective layer, has not deteriorated over the last 475 years, even though it was exposed directly for the first 116 years of its existence to temperature changes, humidity, candle smoke, the kisses of thousands of devotees and touches with scapulars and rosaries.
It is frequently mentioned that
Richard Kuhn, who received the 1938
Nobel Chemistry prize analyzed a sample of the fabric in 1936 and stated the colouring of the fabric was not from a known mineral, vegetable, or animal source; however no source is cited when making this claim. Disputing the claims that the paint used on the apron could not be identified, the Spanish-language magazine
Proceso (2002) reported the work of the art restoration expert José Sol Rosales who examined the cloth with a
stereomicroscope and identified
calcium sulfate, pine soot, white, blue, and green "tierras" (earths), reds made from
carmine and other pigments, as well as
gold. All in all he found the work consistent with 16th century materials and methods.
Studies started in 1956 and continuing to the present by several
ophthalmologists, including
Dr. Javier Torroella Bueno (1956) and Dr. José Aste Tonsmann (
El Secreto de sus Ojos, 2001), who claim to have found images reflected in the eyes of the Virgin after amplifying the photographs to 2500x
magnification. Joe Nickell and John F. Fischer, reporting in
Skeptical Inquirer in 1985, found that the images seen in the Virgin's eyes may be the result of the human imagination's ability to form familiar shapes from random patterns, much like a psychologist's
inkblots, a phenomenon known as
pareidolia.
In 1979 Philip Serna Callahan studied the icon with
infrared light. He stated that portions of the face, hands, robe, and mantle had been painted in one step, with no sketches or corrections and no paintbrush strokes. Another study was commissioned in 1999 to
Leoncio Garza-Valdés, professor of Microbiology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, by the Archbishop of Mexico,
Norberto Rivera Carrera in hopes of proving the age of the cloth.
Garza-Valdés had previously done similar studies to the
Shroud of Turin.
Garza-Valdés states in an interview in
Proceso that he found three distinct layers in the painting, with the first layer showing a signature; M.A. and a date, 1556. He also states that in the first painting the virgin had a child on her left arm and was lighter skinned. The original painting shows striking similarities to the original
Lady of Guadalupe found in
Extremadura Spain. A secondvirgin was painted over the first one, and this portrait shows facial features of strong native American origin. The second portrait is painted 15 cm to the right of the current depiction. Apparently this second virgin may have been painted by
Juan de Arrue around 1625.
Garza-Valdés also found the fabric to be made of
hemp and
linen, not
agave fibers, as popular wisdom holds. It should be pointed out that the photographs of these putative overpaintings are not available in the Garza-Valdés 2002 publication, and those who saw the photographs do not agree with his interpretations. Therefore, the issue remains open until a more scholarly work is published.
It is also said that in 1791 a silversmith cleaning the frame with a mixture of concentrated
nitric acid and water spilled some of the liquid which then seeped behind the glass. Despite the corrosive effect of the acid, the only damage suffered by the
tilma was a yellow stain which is disappearing with time. In 1921 a factory worker placed a bomb a few feet away from the icon; the explosion demolished the marble steps of the main altar, the windows of nearby homes and it bent a brass crucifix, but the fabric suffered no damage. Since 1993, the apron has been protected by bullet-proof glass in the
Basilica of Guadalupe in
Mexico City and an automated mechanism transfers the icon to a
safety vault every night.
In 1569,
Martín Enríquez de Almanza, fourth viceroy of Mexico, denounced the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a harmful deception, a disguised worship of the Aztec goddess
Tonantzin.
Anthropologists consider the "the virgin of Guadalupe" to be a "
Christianized"
Tonantzin which the clergymen needed in order to convert the Indians to their True Faith. The Spaniards raided the temple of
Tonantzin on
Tepeyac before erecting the
Basilica de Guadalupe in 1533.
It is important to note that there are several other supposed apparitions of virgins in colonial Mexico. In the town of
Tlaltenango, in the state of
Morelos, a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared "miraculously" in the inside of a box that two unknown travelers left in a hostel. The owners of the hostel called the local priest after noticing enticing aromas of flowers and
sandalwood coming out of the box. The image has been venerated on September 8 since its finding in 1720, and is accepted as valid apparition by the local Catholic authorities.
The importance of the Lady of Tepeyac, is the union that her story holds with the Spanish-Catholics and the Pre-Hispanics. The Pre Hispanics recognize her and portray her with darker skin tone, while the Spanish Catholics portray her closer to the traditional European way, but to both groups she is a symbol of Mexico united under Christianity. For the Mother of God to accept a native as her messenger in what subsequently would become one of the most revealing accounts of divinity, gives the Mexican natives, not of Spanish decent much pride and a separate connection to the church from simply of being assimilated into it.
Guadalupe's importance today still carries on as she provides women with positive models of an ideal self, nurturing, family and community devotion, and even self control. Her legendary status is one of reverence and of example. Optimism for Mexican American women as well as strength, hope and liberation have established the Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of feminism in Mexico. Everyone can hold the virgin of Guadalupe close to their hearts, as she unites two major Mexican heritages, and additionally is simply an ethically right on role model.
*Brading, D.A.
Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001.
*Elizondo, Virgil.
Guadalupe. Mother of a New Creation. Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York, 1997.
*Krauze, Enrique.
Mexico, Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico 1810-1996. HarperCollins: New York, 1997.
*Taylor, William B.
Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1979.
*Paz, Octavio. Foreword.
Quetzacoatl and Guadalupe. The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness. By Lafaye, Jacques. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
*Poole, Stafford.
Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797. University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1995.
*
Spanish article by ITAM Researcher Elsa C. Frost on "El Guadalupanismo"*
Official website (in Spanish)*
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal's article on Our Lady of Guadalupe*
A Catholic site dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe*
Narrative (in Spanish) of Leoncio Garza-Valdés, University of Texas at San Antonio specialist who analyzed the painting in 1999.*
New York Times article narrating Guillermo Schulenburg's resignation*
12 December festivities in
San Miguel de Allende,
Gto. (BBC photo essay)
*
The Catholic Encyclopedia*
Legend of the Virgin of Tlaltenango (in Spanish)
