Installment 14

Chapter 7
The Backside of Tepeyac
… the symbol of God functions …
Elizabeth A. Johnson

We were going to be very late. It was already well after nine o’clock at night, and the streets of Mexico City were still filled with late evening holiday traffic. I’d flown into the Federal District that January afternoon, the day before Three Kings Day. Mexicans everywhere were winding down a long holiday season that had begun almost a month before.

The dregs of the holiday seemed to be swirling down the drain at the very center of the country. Here in the Zócalo at the city center, skaters circled round and round the temporary ice rink that covered half of the square. Around them on the perimeter streets that defined the square, cars moved slowly, taking in the lights, the music, and the general revelry. On one side the National Cathedral towered over the scene, unlit and silent. On the remaining three sides of the square, multi-colored Christmas lights festooned the building facades. At the center, like a giant swizzle stick caught in the swirl surrounding it, rose the multi-storied Christmas tree—according to some, the tallest in the world—in its last day of glory.

But we were headed away from the Zócalo, north on Avenida Insurgentes, our goal a neighborhood nestled against the hill of Tepeyac, up against the shoulder of the Basilica of Guadalupe. There were three of us in a determined little Volkswagen, swimming upstream away from the whirlpool of activity behind us. Traffic was still heavy, even going in our direction. Decisions about which lane to get in and where to turn had to be made well in advance. So we missed the turn to the Basilica. “A la derecha”—to the right—is very similar to Derecho! Derecho! which means “go straight ahead.” Jorge was driving, and though he was chilango by birth, a native of Mexico City, thirty-three years of living in San Francisco had clouded his memory of the finer points of taking directions in Spanish from a backseat driver. Wilfrido, his brother, was torn between the roles of being tour guide and being navigator. We were going to meet Wilfrido’s friend, who was an expert on the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Jorge had gone straight ahead—derecho—when he should have turned right—a la derecha. We were now committed to driving completely around the backside of Tepeyac to arrive at the house of Horacio Senties—much later than when we were expected, even given the Latin tendency of arriving fashionably past the appointed hour.

Mexican traffic has a lot to do with lack of punctuality. If competitive left-hand turning were an Olympic event, the country of Guadalupe would be able to reclaim much of the gold carried away by its conquerors. The race is not to the swiftest, I realized as we crawled northward. The traffic prize—whatever it is, maybe just arriving at all—goes to the most daring and dauntless. We were novices, and cowards, as well as semantically challenged. As a consequence, we were going to be very late.

I had known Jorge for years in the States, but I was just now meeting the part of his family that lived in Mexico. They were an impressive lot, highly educated and erudite. The majority were either university professors or medical professionals. Jorge himself had been a surgeon before he converted to Christian Science. The brother in the back seat was an engineer.

“What street are we on?” I asked.

Wilfrido answered me with a sound like a sneeze.

“Salúd!” I responded, and he had the grace to laugh.

I saw later it was Ehecatepac, a narrow two-lane road that followed the crease where the large Hill of Tepeyac rose out of the surrounding flatland. Had we turned right at any point, the intersecting street would have come to a dead end or climbed upward at a nosebleed angle in a jumble of cobblestones and stairways. I doubted seriously whether the people living in the stacks of houses attached to the hill could possibly have depended on cars to get them home. Cog trains or donkeys would have been more practical.

It was well past ten o’clock when Wilfrido started cautioning, “Despacio, despacio. A la derecha. Aquí está!”

Wilfrido’s friend, Horacio, elegant and erect with a shock of snow-white hair, was waiting for us outside a nondescript graffiti-covered gate. He signaled a porter to open it and let us in. As so often happens in Latin America, we were admitted to another world, completely different from the one that lay outside along the roadway. Behind us the door closed, and before us was a well maintained, immaculate, bricked courtyard with room for several cars parked at varying angles. We slid into a space and emerged to abrazos, explanations and assurances of no importa, no importa about how tardy we were. Horacio was going to stay up this late anyway.

We entered a small door and followed Horacio up a narrow black marble staircase that circled up a story or more. Emerging at the top, we saw rooms of a comfortable residence stretching off to the left. But we were led to the right, a la derecha, through several rooms that looked like set pieces from museums. I had paused in front of a glass case with a black woolen military jacket, its red inset covered with gold braid.

“It belonged to Morelos,” our host explained and moved on.

The name was familiar, and my mind clicked backwards through mental index cards of Mexican heroes. I had to look him up later. José María Morelos was a priest recruited to be a soldier by Father Hidalgo when he raised the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and began the Mexican War of Independence in 1810. Morelos was charged with bringing the southern part of the country under control. There is now a state there that bears his name.

And so it went as we passed through several rooms and finally into the reception office of Horacio Senties Rodríguez, a retreat that might have belonged to a Latin American Dumbledore with a penchant for images of popular religiosity. Among the many representations of Guadalupe, the shelves and shelves of gilt-trimmed books, African masks, framed engravings, photographs, and certificates, there was a life-size Jesus on a massive cross, an authentic Egyptian sarcophagus, a Buddha’s head, several carved heads of Nefertiti, and an ebony statue of Shiva. From the ceiling hanging from an opulent glass-beaded light fixture, was a large Oaxacan alijibri dragon. Unobtrusively displayed on the far wall, modestly but elegantly framed, was a signed citation with a gold medal beneath it.

For Horacio is a recognized expert in the field of Guadalupana. He quickly warmed to his subject when he realized he could speak freely in Spanish and I would understand. Over the next two hours he spun the tale of the research he had followed in establishing the actual existence of Juan Diego and the real role the Indian had played in promulgating the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was for this research and the resulting canonization of Juan Diego that Horacio had received papal recognition, the gold medal, and gratitude from John Paul II.

“’Did the Virgin really appear to Juan Diego?’ is the question everyone asks,” Horacio initiated his soliloquy (this is a translation). His answer, spreading his hands and shrugging his shoulders: Probably not. “But that doesn’t matter,” he assured us. “What matters is that the story was told in the first place. What matters is who told it. What matters is the effect it has had on the history of Mexico and the place of the church in that country. What matters,” Horacio emphasized as he wound up his introduction, “is that Juan Diego was real. It is his story that is most important to understand if we are to understand the influence of Guadalupe.”

First of all, Juan Diego was not a poor peasant farmer. His genealogy stretches back to the progenitors of the indigenous community on the shores of Lake Texcoco, a husband and wife named Azcaxochitli and Netzahuálpilli. He was in fact, Chichimec royalty. The Chichimec society was suffused with worship of the benevolent earth goddess Tonantzín, and Juan Diego was a direct descendant of Tonantzín’s most prominent priest, Netzahualcóyotl. But how was it that a devoted servant of a pagan goddess could become an earthly messenger for such a thoroughly Christian figure as the Virgin Mary?

Because between Tonantzín and Mary, there wasn’t that much difference. Tonantzín had appeared in many forms through the ages. Just like Roman gods are layered on top of Greek gods, why wouldn’t Tonantzín appear once more in the form of the Virgin as Guadalupe? Besides that, according to some scholars (Horacio tilted his head forward and raised his eyebrows, giving an indication that he counted himself among that “some”), the image of Mary had already arrived on Mexico’s shores long before Cortés and his entourage made their appearance.

“Christianity was present in Mexico before the conquerors arrived?” I asked. Now here was an alternative historical account indeed! Horacio settled into telling the story, and I struggled to follow it.

Tradition has it that different apostles were responsible for bringing Christianity to various parts of the world. Peter established the church at Rome, Phillip the one in Ethiopia, James brought Christianity to Spain. According to Mexican tradition, it was Thomas and Luke who arrived in Mexico.

Luke, it seems, was a painter and sculptor, and it is to him the world owes the privilege of knowing what the Virgin Mary looked like. From where exactly this tradition comes is not certain, but evidently it was common “knowledge” in the Renaissance when several artists of the time depicted Luke painting the Virgin Mary’s portrait. Evidently he continued his creative efforts on this side of the globe, fashioning a gift for the indigenous converts to Christianity, a statue of the Virgin. What is more, with this particular statue, Luke depicted the Virgin with a dark face to match their own complexions. This, Horacio informed us, was the statue found by Gil Cordero some twelve hundred years later on the banks of the Wadi Lub in Spain.

“Wadi Lub?” I wondered. “Was the origin of Guadalupe’s name actually Arabic?”

The Moors ruled Spain for almost 700 years, and I knew the Spanish language is chock-a-block with Arab derivatives. Practically every Spanish word beginning with al has its origins with the Moors. Many of these have to do with water: alberca (swimming pool), and aljibe (water storage tank). Then there is the wistful ojalá, which precedes a spoken desire, meaning “if Allah wishes.”

Wadi is also an Arabic word that, though it doesn’t appear intact in Spanish, has been adopted as a universal geographic term. It refers to those steep-sided washes in the desert that are filled with rushing torrents after rainstorms. Most of the year, the bed of a wadi is bone dry, but underground there’s water waiting to break through for those who seek it and dig deep enough. Such a stream must have been the Wadi Lub in northwestern Spain. Lub is Arabic for “black gravel, black lava, or black stones.” It can also simply mean “hidden.” It was along the banks of the Wadi Lub in late thirteenth century Spain that a humble shepherd Gil Cordero tended sheep. There he stumbled upon a statue of a Black Madonna. Perhaps a rainstorm had flushed it out of its hiding place, secreted from the invading Moors who had swept through the Iberian Peninsula some five hundred years before. Slowly the Spaniards were expelling the Moors, and finding such a statue of Mary would have given fresh impetus to what was considered a holy cause. It was reason enough to build a chapel, which grew into a shrine, which eventually became a royal monastery. For four centuries, it was the most important monastery in all of Spain, named for the Virgin who inspired it, Santa Maria de Guadalupe. Christopher Columbus, on his return from the New World he had discovered, made his first pilgrimage to that shrine.

Horacio nodded and smiled, as I was obviously familiar with this part of history. We agreed. How, shall we say, symmetrical that she should appear less than forty years later on the other side of the Atlantic, again to a peasant, again to offer comfort in the face of conquest. Again, a shrine was built.
On how this image of the Virgin that Luke was supposed to have fashioned for the ancient indigenous people of Mexico found its way back to Spain, I was unclear. Horacio explained it in detail, but I was growing fuzzy with the late hour, and his professorial Spanish washed over me like a warm bath. I felt my head drooping.

Horacio was far from finished, however. I revived once more to hear him describe how Luke was not the only one to leave a gift in the New World. His companion Thomas, whose gospel full of feminine images of God would emerge almost nineteen hundred years later in an urn at Nag Hamadi, had gifted the American Indians with his cape, a cape emblazoned with the image of the Virgin Mary. It was, in fact, Horacio maintains, this same image that the Indian artist, Marcos Cepac, had copied onto the tilma presented to Archbishop Zumárraga in 1531, as evidence of the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego. Yes, the very image attributed to a divine hand was actually the work of an Indian craftsman. Did we want to see a copy of the cape of Santo Tomás? Horacio happened to have one. It was hanging in the next room. It was, indeed.

But why would the Chichimecs and their successors have maintained this image of a woman with rays of the sun emanating from behind her, the moon (or a serpent) under her feet, a cloak of stars thrown round her shoulders, and a vessel hanging from the belt around her waist? Could it have been that she fit right in with a pantheon of other feminine images to whom they were already accustomed to paying homage?

The goddess figure, whether she was called Coatlicue or any of her intervening incarnations, had been worshiped on the hill of Tepeyac for centuries. Cihuacoatl, Chicomecoatl, Huixtocihuatl, Xochiquetzatl, and Tonantzín were all feminine deities, earth goddesses all, each known for either a star-studded gown, standing on the moon, a maternity belt, or something that was mirrored in the image of Guadalupe. In order to preserve the cult of the last incarnation, Tonantzín, it would have been expedient for Juan Diego to espouse an image that incorporated combinations from all of them. When asked her name, he supposedly replied, “Tecuauhtlcupeuh,” a Nahuatl term meaning, “she who comes flying from the region of light like an eagle of fire,” definitely a sign from the Aztec gods.

“Sounds like Guadalupe to us!” responded the Christian Spaniards, thinking of the image found by Gil Cordero and enshrined back home.
Thus both groups, conquering Europeans and conquered Aztecs, could claim the feminine image on Juan Diego’s tilma as a sign from their deity, could revere her divine origin, and be certain of her purpose for their particular theology. A one-in-herself, one-size-fits-all, honest to whatever-God-you-claim Virgin, enshrined for posterity.

Juan Diego was eventually canonized by the Roman Catholic church on July 31, 2003. It was a victory for the mestizo population of Mexico. That he also descended from and perhaps continued the traditions of a high priest of Tonantzín is not, however, mentioned in the official account of the church.

It’s hard to kill the goddess. She will “crop up” in many unexpected places, especially if she accompanies the seed in the earth itself. Several years ago I spent a week in Morelia, Mexico, at a language school, just to get the feel of Spanish on my tongue before giving talks in Guadalajara and Mexico City. On my own, I explored the colonial city and its museums. The pre-Columbian displays of tiny terracotta figures held no interest for me at the time. I breezed past the display cases of little fertility goddesses doing—hmmm—fertility things. Evidently the fields around Morelia and throughout Mexico held great numbers of these figures, planted as they were along with the crops. What I was drawn to was a larger image of herself, Guadalupe, a carefully crafted icon suitable for carrying through the streets on a palanquin on feast days. The attendant explained how the indigenous population had learned new handicrafts through making the Catholic images for the shrines and churches that were being installed all over Mexico. The actual work of manufacturing the images of saints, Jesus, and the Virgin fell in the category of manual labor, no matter how skilled, and was thus consigned to the native artisans.

“Did you see the images in the first room?” the attendant asked. I nodded. I’d seen them. I hadn’t given them more than a cursory glance. “Very rough work,” he said, “primitivo.” The Spaniards forbade goddess worship when they came, and ordered all the little idols destroyed. But you know what, Señora? There are those in Morelia who still remember when the image of The Virgin fell off the platform when they were carrying her through the streets. She broke, Señora. Her backside split completely open. And can you imagine? She was filled with little idols! They were stuffed inside of her!”

© 2010 by Susan J. Cobb. All rights reserved.

Editors Note: We plan to publish an installment of Virgin Territory periodically for the next year and a half. If you cannot wait that long you can always buy the book from the publisher’s web site here. For even more information visit Susan’s web site.