The Virgin of Guadalupe

It is quite hard for a European protestant to understand the nature and significance of Our Lady, the Virgin of Guadalupe whose 'day' it is today (12th December).

Having a named 'day' casts her somewhat in the nature of a saint. But is she a saint? Without any training in the theology of Catholicism, I have nevertheless developed a working  understanding of the word and the concept of a saint –– as of a mortal raised some way towards the status of a divinity by virtue of some act of extraordinary charity or of extraordinary steadfastness in her (or his) expressed devotion to the Catholic Faith. We understand that at least two confirmed miracles are required at proof (a) that the being is now in heaven, and (b) that heaven is in support of the nomination (canonisation). 

But if 'sainthood' merely means having some 'quality of the divine', then of course 'Mary-mother-of God' qualifies, a fortiori. So the remarkable feature in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe is that she appeared to the native Indian Juan Diego (born Cuauhtlatoatzin) in that place 6.5 Km to the north of the recently (13 Aug., 1521) conquered and destroyed Aztec city of México/Tenochtitlán. It seems only right that he should get some credit for being chosen.

Therefore, the processes of the canonisation  of 'The Virgin of Guadalupe' and of 'Juan Diego' were linked, complex and long drawn out. How could one tell if the tale Juan Diego told, of seeing a pregnant lady on the hillside on 9th Dec 1531, were truly an apparition or just a dream or a passer-by? Well, she appeared again the next day. And the next day she told Juan Diego to ask the Bishop to build a shrine on that site. Finally, on the 12th December 1531 she showed Juan Diego where to pick roses. He filled his cloak with roses and took them to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. When the roses were tipped on the floor the cloak was revealed to have on it a picture of a lady resembling both the Nahua goddess Tonantzin and 'Mary, mother of Jesus. [Ref1][Ref3]

Juan Diego died 17 years later. His relics and his Tilma cloak remain at the spot. These events made an enormous impression on the native population, and a cult of devotion and enormous gratitude developed somewhat independently of the Spanish Catholicism that also existed in Mexico. A church was built but that is now buried under a subsequent church, the Capilla de Indios (built in 1649), built to accommodate the native way of worshipping.

What a genuinely marvellous leap of imagination was that made by Juan Diego in realising the close affinity between Mary the Mother of Jesus and Tonantzin, Goddess of the Universe!  Add the moon and some stars to the pregnant Mary and lo! there is Tonantzin.  

Isolated native communities may retain many elements of their old religion [Ref2], but in modern Mexico there are many millions who embrace this hybrid; the devotion shown to Our Lady, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is beyond anything seen in modern Britain. On the 12th December each year some 12 million people flock to the church on the hill of Tepeyac , now a giant Basilica and a religious complex with library.  Over the space of four centuries the two faiths have grown together.

At noon on 11th December 2025, as we drove out of Mexico City we saw gaggles of 'pilgrims' gathering. Busses from more distant parts, walkers from nearer. We saw several pilgrims in running gear carrying flaming  torches (like the Olympic torch-bearer) each followed by a pickup truck crammed with spectators and supporters, standing or sitting on the edge of the vehicle.   That evening I lay in bed listening to the erratic "bang.......bang-bang" as giant, 'devotional', fire-crackers went off all over the city. 

'Our Lady of Guadalupe' was made a Catholic saint on July 31, 1979. Her reach is still extending. From Patagonia to Canada she is now OUR Lady, of the Americas. But above all she is Mexican (or perhaps Palestinian).

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was beatified in 1990, and made a Catholic saint on July 31, 2002; 471 years after he was afforded that seminal interview with the Mother of Jesus. He was given 9th Dec as his 'saint's day'. [Ref4]

References:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe 

[2] https://www.everyculture.com/Middle-America-Caribbean/Nahua-of-the-Huasteca-Religion-and-Expressive-Culture.html

[3] https://www.catholictime.com/catholic-life/articles/15320-saint-juan-diego-the-chosen-messenger-of-our-lady-of-guadalupe

[4] https://www.britannica.com/biography/St-Juan-Diego

Adverisements in Search Results

I made DuckDuckGo my default browser and search engine a year ago, fearing what would happen if Google ended up as the only browser and the only search engine. It seemed to work fine; gave much the same results as Google. I was quite satisfied.

I did not notice anything wrong till I come over to Mexico two months ago. Then I noticed that with every search there were some nonsense results (advertisements) at the top of the list of 'relevant finds'.  A very typical results was obtained when I searched for "King Henry the eighth". I got:

[1] "Compra Henry king - Sitio oficial de Amazon.com.mx 

Millones de productos de México y EEUU. Pago con tarjeta, efectivo y vales de despensa. Devoluciones en un plazo de 30 días a partir de la entrega para un reembolso total."

[2] "eBay Official Site - Henry Viii Books On eBay 

Looking For Henry Viii Books? We Have Almost Everything On eBay. But Did You Check eBay? Check Out Henry Viii Books On eBay. Under $10 · Money Back Guarantee · Daily Deals · Buy It Now Available Types: Fashion, Motors, Electronics, Sporting Goods, Toys"

Both were marked 'AD', I suppose admitting that they were advertisements. The third entry was Wikipedia. 

I admit that advertising is not my special subject. And I have heard phrases like "There is no such thing as 'bad publicity'." I also admit that these advertisements draw attention to the extraordinary range of products available from those two websites. 

However, their time-wasting arrogance annoys me. I would suggest to those two companies that these adverts might be counter-productive. And also to the DuckDuckGo search-engine. I must check when I get back to England –– does the same irritating nonsense occur back home? Perhaps not. At any rate I never noticed it. 

Remembering Guillermo Tovar de Teresa

 Remembering Guillermo Tovar de Teresa

    Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa, as Wikipedia will explain, was, at the age of 13, adviser to the President of Mexico on the subject of Baroque Paintings. So, a child prodigy. He was born in Mexico City 1956, of a well-off family (indeed of several such families), self-taught to a high level in art and culture and a noted collector; he died in 2013 aged 57. I bought on impulse a copy of his posthumous Historia de México: Tomo I (1519-1761), a strange collections of essays and remarks put together by his loyal family and published February 2025. 
    When I learnt that the family home (Valladolid 52, Colonia Roma Norte, Mexico City) had been made into a 'Guillermo Tovar de Teresa Museum' we decided to visit. It was a pleasant walk of 3.4 Km through tree-lined avenues and streets known to my companion since childhood.
    The house, a substantial two-storied town house (c. 1900) with basement, living floor and roof-terrace enclosing a gorgeous, small courtyard garden open to the sky, filled with ivy, ferns, tree-ferns, trees, rocky stairs, and mirrors.
    A gallery runs round the garden and most of the living quarters lead off the gallery. There is a narrow adjoining space for a garage, converted now to a tiny slip of a café run by young members of the family.    

    Following the prescribed route as best we could, we strolled through a chain of small, ill-lit, rooms, crammed with sulphur-darkened pictures (or prints) and religious sculptures, but found nothing that caught my eyes for a second glance. 

    Out on the street we noticed the adjoining café and ventured in. Behind a small bar at the entrance a barman greeted us, but that was immediately followed up by a much more arresting figure who bustled up. Young, a touch below median height, slight build, strikingly dark hair and eyes, wearing a generously long black coat, which barely revealed his elegantly-pointed snake-skin boots.  His effusive welcome gave us the strong impression that he was part of the family and that this was his terrain and his rôle. At one of the small square tables that ranged down the narrow and chilly ravine, the high walls of which prevented the warmth of the sun from penetrating, sat two well-wrapped young women, chatting over glasses of 'mimosa'. Our gracious host, job done, went and joined the ladies who thus also appeared as 'members of the family'. We chose Quiche Lorraine and glasses of tinto de verano. 

    The waiter brought toast on a wooden board to one of the ladies, who proceeded to describe it while the young man of the elegant boots filmed her on his mobile phone. Later he paused at our table and chatted awhile, confirming and adding to our speculations. (He kindly offered to search for Historia de México: Tomo II (1761-1988) for me. His courtesy and elegance were (for me) the high-point of the visit.)

    I think the most interesting thing about 'Guillermo Tovar de Teresa' is the spell he appears to have cast over his whole family; siblings, nephews and nieces. 

    As we headed home up Calle Sinaloa, we passed a vacant lot on which nothing remained of the vanished house except some glazed tiles. It amused me to wonder if my companion had known the occupant seventy years earlier. At that very moment she pointed across the street to a substantial house of the old style and told me that a lady had lived there who had been very kind to her grandmother when the family had lost their (two) Durango haciendas in the wake of the 1910-20 revolution.

    A few yards further up the street the wheezy yet piercing whistle of a man selling hot camotes (yams) brought back memories, for I had often heard him in the street outside our apartment, but had never seen him. Here he was in action, a plume of smoke issuing from the chimney as his boiler built us pressure for another wheezy whistle. 

    And so home, to count up our kilometers, and to reflect on fame, revolution, grandparents, snake-skin boots and the making of memories. 

 Méxicas & Narcos

Last week, when I had finished reading the classic Chinese novel "The Monkey" (by Wu Cheng-En; c. 1550, translated 1942 by Arthur Waley), I bought the "Historia de México; tomo I, (1519 - 1761)", a collection of essays and rumination on the subject by Guillermo Torva de Teresa. I learned that the Méxica tribe (i.e. the Aztecs) rose to power and wealth in the 14th century principally by extorting tribute from their neighbouring tribes – e.g. the Tlaxcala, Teotitlan, Mixteca, and Zapoteca – in a well-organised and well-documented system. The Méxica did grow their own food and they traded both near and far, but their extraordinary wealth derived from this tribute, and thus from extortion. 

Each tribe or region had to deliver what was requested. If too much was requested, they might rebel (and periodically did so), but that meant war, and defeat, slavery and human sacrifice. According to the complicated religious system imposed by the priests, the human sacrifices were necessary to maintain stability. And this claim was not without basis and, indeed, proof. The horror inspired by the blood-letting overawed everyone from the emperor down through the ranks of the elite, to the peasants and the slaves.

The killing of sacrificial victims was common practice in other early societies. Witness, Iphigenia and Isaac as two proposed victims from the ancient Greek and Arabic worlds respectively. And, from the world of medieval China, I read that one of Monkey's tasks (on the road to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures) was to save a village from the scourge of providing a boy and a girl sacrifice each year to an extortionist daemon (in truth an angry goldfish that had escaped from the fishpond of the Bodhisattva 'Kuan-yin'). 

All very scary, I thought; and how glad I am that we have put such things behind us. The scriptures arrived, and human societies learnt the sin of killing for profit. That is to say, most civilised societies. For extortion under threat of death is exactly what is happening in large parts of present-day Mexico (See my recent post and the map quoted.). 

So, even today the real threat of violence does lead to wealth, and to a sort of insidious 'stability', for the use of bribes brings a great number of people in the class of 'those who profit indirectly from extortion and the threat of violence'. What a perilously thin membrane divides the civilised from the uncivilised! What a dilemma: to fight them or to join them?