Installment 2

[Guadalupe] is an archetype whose origins stretch farther back than the Conquest. The dust of Mexico is heavy with stories of how and when the Virgin has graced humanity with her presence—usually it is in a field to a peasant farmer—and she would like a shrine built, thank you very much. These stories have served the Catholic Church very well in converting an indigenous “pagan” population to a more institutionalized form of worship. But farmers and their conquerors move about on the surface of the earth. Mary’s roots go deeper. There is a reason she thrives in Mexico. Beneath the topsoil lie older roots, tenacious and enduring. Entwined in the subterranean consciousness of a modern nation are the tresses of ancient goddesses. Now, transplanted south of the border, every fiber Virgin Territory of my being seeks connection to these goddesses. Like roots underground seek out moisture and nutrients, I tap into what they represent. In the process I make contact with something earthy, vital, and nourishing. I hear goddess stories as if they were my own.

Oldest is Coatlicue. Her immense statue dominates a large space in Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology. With two serpents as a head, talons for hands, and drooping breasts from nursing her many babies, her image is, to say the least, formidable.

Legend has it that Coatlicue gets pregnant by a ball of feathers that fall from a bird as she sweeps her temple on the top of a mountain.

“Don’t you hate it when that happens?” interjects my friend Ann, as I tell her this story. She has a tendency towards sarcasm.

“Hush,” I respond. “This is a serious legend. It gets better.”

Coatlicue’s first four hundred children grow jealous when they hear of Mom’s condition. Led on by their sister Coyolxauhqui, they get ready to kill the new baby as soon as she “gives it light.”

“’Gives it light?’” Ann asks. “What does that mean?”

“Dar a luz. It’s Spanish for ‘to give birth,’” I explain. “The mother brings the baby out of darkness and gives it to the light, see? It’s a pretty image, sort of.”

Ann shrugs. I have to shrug back. Neither of us have children. What do we know? I continue with the legend.

But a hummingbird tells the baby in Coatlicue’s womb what’s waiting for him on the outside. So Huitzilopochtli emerges, not as a baby, but fully grown, armed with a sword (“Don’t even go there, Ann”) ready to defend his mother. He decapitates his sister, tosses her head to the sky where it becomes the moon, and takes his place as ruler.

Ann is silent. Then, “That’s one of the most amazing accounts of sibling rivalry I’ve ever heard.” Not everyone appreciates Mexican legends.

Coatlicue is reincarnated through the centuries in a variety of goddess figures. Nowadays there is usually a shrine to the Virgin, in one form or another, wherever one of these goddesses held sway. The most recent incarnation is a distinctly softer, sweeter version, Tonantzín. Tonantzín was the goddess whose temple sat on the promontory above Lake Texcoco when Cortez first gazed across it. Her names were many—Goddess of Sustenance, Honored Grandmother, Mother of the Corn, Mother of the Earth and Creation. Her temple didn’t last long after the Conquest. It is now the site of the Capilla, the chapel, which crowns the hill behind the Basilica of our Lady of Guadalupe north of Mexico City.

Is Guadalupe the reincarnation of a pagan goddess? Was her legend promulgated by the Spanish to replace Tonantzín and convert the indigenous population to Roman Catholicism? Or could it be possible, as more recent theories surmise, that the legend of “Our Lady” was created by the indigenous population themselves, to preserve and protect their goddess in a form acceptable to the conquerors? Or, does the image of a woman, clothed in the sun, the moon under her feet, on the verge of delivering a man child whose destroyers stand ready to slay him have a more universal origin and resonance? It’s a story handed down in one form or another on every continent, in every culture. We find it today in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 12:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. … and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

Perhaps it is time to “unpack” this ancient feminine archetype, take a fresh look at it, and speculate what message it might have for the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century religious reformer Mary Baker Eddy wrote about one possibility in a letter dictated to her (male) secretary late in 1900:

The masculine element has had precedence in history, but the history of time is temporal—it is not eternal. … The masculine element must not murmur if at some period in human history the verdict should take a turn in behalf of woman, and say,—Her time has come, and the reflection of God’s feminine nature is permitted consideration, has come to the front, and will be heard and understood.

With the ascendancy of Guadalupe, perhaps that time has come. She is the plant that tells me of the root beneath. More than any other icon, Guadalupe epitomizes a popular religiosity unconfined to any institution. She is a current symbol of an ancient ethos, a touchstone for what is colorful, primitive, and fundamental to life itself. For me she is a symbol of a universal spiritual ideal, the untapped potential of what lies at the core of every individual. On a personal level, she is the memory of what I once was and what I can yet become, if I am indeed created “in the image of God,” a biblical concept that has given grief to women over centuries, in the degree that it has been quoted by men, and taken literally. But Guadalupe is a metaphorical mirror offering an image close to my own, an unmediated experience of divinity that is no longer the privilege of an ordained few or of a specific gender.

In 1810, Mexico’s Father Hidalgo raised a flag inscribed with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It encouraged rebellion of the oppressed mestizos of Mexico against the despotism of the patrician Spaniards. Guadalupe still symbolizes resistance to “the man,” as street gangs and narco-traficantes have appropriated her image for their own purposes. I’ve seen it emblazoned on the forearms of inmates in county jails in Los Angeles and neighboring Orange County. “She’s got my back,” a young man tells me earnestly, his deep brown eyes contrasting with the orange jumpsuit he wears. He means it literally, referring to the tattoo on that part of his anatomy.

But Guadalupe also provides a rallying point for more creative rebellion across the Americas. For anyone tilling old fields of sterile doctrine and root-bound tradition, she offers fresh mental and spiritual landscapes to explore. For the hurt or wounded, the mentally, physically, or sexually abused, she reflects an image that is unbroken, unharmed, intact—powerful. Heavy with child, she represents new life, a fresh start. And for anyone who longs to claim a unique identity and intrinsic value above and beyond conventional roles and relationships, the Virgin embodies a one-in-herself-ness, which says, “You are complete and worthy right now, just the way you are and just because you are.”

For anyone who longs for a new spiritual ideal, I dedicate these pages. Welcome to Virgin Territory.
Susan Cobb
Rincón de Guayabitos, Mexico
2009

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

Editors Note: We plan to publish an instalment 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.