Our Lady Of Guadalupe

          The official version of the Virgin of Guadalupe goes like this: On December 9, 1531,  as Juan Diego walked to Mass (some sources say he was walking to the shrine of the goddess), he heard celestial music and the sound of beating wings. Presently, a dark-skinned maiden appeared to him, dressed in the attire of an Aztec princess, a lovely apparition who, speaking to him in his native Nahuatl language, introduced herself to the startled peasant as Maria, the Mother of God. He reported his vision to Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, who demanded proof.

           On the next day, the farmer returned to the sight of the visitation of the Virgin, who reappeared and told Juan to climb the hill and gather an armful of Castilian roses (although they rarely bloom in December) and to take them in his tilma, or cape, to the doubting de Zumarraga.

          When Juan opened his cloak before the Bishop and out tumbled the ‘miraculous’ roses, His Grace fell astonished to his knees. Not only did the out-of-season flowers amaze the Bishop, but there on Juan’s cloak was an image of the Blessed Virgin just as the farmer had said she had appeared to him, with cinnamon-colored skin, dressed in traditional Mexican clothes, and surrounded by an oval frame of stars.

THE AZTEC GODDESS

          There are several origin stories about the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.   Before the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the hill where Juan Diego had his vision had also been the site of an ancient temple to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin (our mother), later leveled to the ground by the Spaniards. She was also known as Ilamatecuhtli (a noble old woman) and Cozcamiauh (a necklace of maize flowers). Aztec deities could be of double gender and presented many different facets of their character. It is not surprising therefore that even the great Franciscan ethnographer, Sahagun, associated Tonantzin with the goddess Cihuacoatl (a serpent woman), whom he identified not with the Virgin Mary but with our Mother Eve and her encounter with the serpent of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps it was no accident that Juan Diego's beautiful Virgin was also dark-skinned.

           We may then ask, is the apparition that of the Christian Virgin or of an Aztec goddess? Is she St. Mary or the Goddess TonanIt

         It has been suggested that the name 'Guadalupe' is actually a corruption of a Nahuatl name, 'Coatlaxopeuh', which has been translated as 'Who Crushes the Serpent'. In this interpretation, the serpent is Quetzalcoatl, one of the chief Aztec gods, whom 'the Virgin Mary' crushed by converting the Aztecs to Catholicism.  

click on image to enlarge

JUAN DIEGO

          The identity of Juan Diego is in some confusion. Juan Diego was born in 1474 in the calpulli or ward of Tlayacac in Cuauhtitlan, which was established in 1168 by Nahua tribesmen and conquered by the Aztec lord Axayacatl in 1467, and was located 14 miles north of Mexico City.  Tlatelolco, Juan Diego's village, was once an Aztec center and the place where the final battle of the Spanish conquest had taken place just a decade earlier.

          Sceptics, however, including some Catholics, have doubted the very existence of Juan Diego. The earliest written reference to him dates from 1648, in a publication by a Mexico City priest about Our Lady of Guadalupe. A 1649 publication in Nahuatl followed, referring to earlier Nahuatl sources that have not been found. Regardless of this, he is now Saint Juan Diego as he was canonized July 31, 2000

          When the Vatican came to canonize Juan Diego, their investigation reportedly revealed that the lowly farmer had been an Aztec prince, the son of a king of Texcoco, who helped Cortez defeat the Aztecs.

            It’s been suggested Juan Diego was known as Tlacateccatl (he who commands the warriors), an honorific given to generals commanding a division of 8,000 soldiers. If he were a royal this fact might account for the fact that the Spanish Catholics in Mexico baptized large numbers of Indians after this 1531 apparition.

          It is said that Juan Diego died May 30, 1548 of natural causes.

THE IMAGE

“As early as 1556, when a formal investigation of the cloth was held, one Franciscan testified that the image had been ‘painted yesteryear by an Indian.’ Another priest testified that the picture ‘was a painting that the Indian painter Marcos had done’ (a probable reference to the Aztec painter Marcos Cipac).