For those of you who aren’t familiar with the account, here are the basics:
The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is celebrated on December 12, commemorating traditional accounts of her appearances to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (d. 1548) on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City from December 9 through December 12, 1531.
There were four separate appearances of the Lady to Cuauhtlatoatzin over that period of days, and several miracles: a miraculous healing of Cuauhtlatoatzin’s uncle, who had either been struck gravely ill of a sudden or had been gravely ill before but, in any event, was close to death and then was saved; the appearance of Castilian roses on the Tepeyac hillside in December (not their blooming time); and the appearance of a permanent image on Cuauhtlatoatzin’s woven mantle in which he had wrapped the roses he picked to present to the non-believing Bishop. Supposedly, the original mantle hangs yet today in the Basilica dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, Mexico.
Convinced, the Bishop became a believer in the apparitions, and it was eventually officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. A shrine was built in 1533 at the hillside of Tepeyac, on the location of an ancient shrine of the Aztec corn goddess Tonantzin, and over the years, a greater complex grew.
There are several things that point to the Lady in question being someone other than the Virgin Mary:
(1) Tepeyac had for centuries been of significance to the Aztecs and their descendants as the site of a shrine to the goddess Tonantzin, the corn goddess.
(2) Tonantzin, associated with the snake goddess Coatlique, was worshipped in the Winter Solstice celebrations at around this time of year (note the dates of the apparitions). Tonantzin wore a white robe covered in feathers and seashells, which adorned her as the goddess promenaded among the worshippers and was ceremonially killed in a scene reminiscent of the apparent death of the sun of winter. The goddess was also known by the name of Ilamatecuhtli (‘a noble old woman’) and Cozcamiauh (‘a necklace of maize flowers’). (The traditional appearance of this Goddess in a white gown may be significant, because in many later apparitions of the "Virgin Mary" in Europe, the apparitions were dressed in white. In the Zeitun appearances in Egypt from 1968-1971, the apparition was invariably white light in the form of a woman).
(3) It has been suggested that the name 'Guadalupe' is actually a corruption of a Nahuatl (Aztec) name, 'Coatlaxopeuh', which has been translated as 'Who Crushes the Serpent' – and that this means the Virgin Mary. In some of her depictions, the Virgin Mary is seen with a "crown" of stars circling her head and standing barefoot on a snake/serpent resting on a half-globe. However, the Bible does not say that Mary crushed the serpent, it says that the offspring of the woman crushed the serpent’s head. The "offspring of the woman" is Jesus Christ and this scripture is believed to be a prophecy of Christ's eventual conquest and destruction of Satan, the Great Serpent, at The End of Days.
Personally I find it fascinating and quite ingenious how the Roman Catholic Church twisted the meaning of a goddess symbol 180 degrees. The Serpent had been an ancient symbol of the Mother Goddess. Serpents represented the Cycle of Eternal Life, death and resurrection/rebirth via the shed skin, also the "circle of life" represented by the Ouroboros – a serpent biting tail to form a circle, thus representing eternity. And yet, the serpent became a symbol of Ultimate Evil to this Church. It is not within the scope of this blog or my inclination to publish a full-fledged study of this usurpation here! But if you want to read a paper I wrote about goddess symbolism in ancient board games that I presented to a symposium on board games back in 2001, check it out here.
And yet, the Church has not managed to erase ancient 'indicators' of the Mother Goddess in the image that was somehow emblazoned on Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin's cloak that is yet revered today: the rays of the sun surrounding Her in glory; Her cloak of stars; and the crescent moon upon which She stands, which are sometimes depicted as "horns" in other, older, visions of the Goddess.
I’m not a linguist, although I find it a fascinating field of study. I wonder if anyone else has seen the similarity in Juan Diego’s Aztec name, CUAUHTLATOATZIN, to those of the two Aztec Goddesses: COATLIQUE and TONANTZIN. I wouldn’t be at all shocked if the 57 year old Aztec Cuauhtlatoatzin had actually been a Priest of either one or both of those ancient Goddesses before his "conversion" to Roman Catholicism.
It would be supremely ironic if the ancient corn goddess Tonantzin had the last laugh on the Roman Catholic Church, masquerading as the Theotokos – the Mother of the Roman Catholic god.
For general information, see entry at Wikipedia and the public version (online) of the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia.
For various accounts, interpretation and information, see http://www.sancta.org/nican.html; http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/guadalup.html;
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