GUADULUPE HOLY OR HOAX?

GUADULUPE HOLY OR HOAX?

 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4201


The apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Guadalupe in Mexico are unique in the annals of Marian apparitions because this Lady allegedly left physical evidence behind her. The evidence is the painting of the vision made by herself in an instant of time on the cloak of the only witness, Juan Diego. This image is called the Tilma. If she did this then apparitions without this or similar evidence have to be dubious. Why give stronger proof for the Lady of Guadalupe and not the Lady of Lourdes or Pontmain or Fatima? And as for her strong evidence, why did she even bother considering that there is no evidence that the cloth and the image go back to 1531 when she supposedly presented them to the world!

The first vision took place on the site of the pagan mother Goddess in 1531. The bishop was informed that a beautiful Lady had appeared saying she was the Virgin Mother of God. The bishop asked for a sign before he would believe. His name was Zumarraga and in his writings there is no mention of visions or Tepeyac where they supposedly happened - see page 183, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986. And I add that there was no mention of Juan Diego! Accounts of images at Tepeyac at the time speak of statues being venerated there not the tilma (page 185, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986). It probably did not exist then.

In other apparitions, the Virgin gives no sign but the conviction and normalcy and rapid spiritual progress of the witness so one wonders why that did not suffice here. Please do not think that spiritual progress is a great sign for anybody would pretend to be good when the eyes of their fans are on them. The Church will shout that we must not be so cynical and why not just believe? I have two things to say. Realistically people do often pretend to be better than what they are. All we are doing is acknowledging that fact. And as for the why not just believe advice we can ask why just not believe? The Church cannot complain if we don’t believe for it is our right not to. Yet it does complain. There is no way I can stand the Church complaining – its just a sign of its intolerance. If you have an equal choice between believing a strange claim and not believing in it, evidently if you are rational you will not believe.

Jesus said that asking for signs before being willing to believe was tempting God. God does signs when he wishes and not for people who urge him to do a sign before they will believe. Here, the Virgin evidently disagrees with Jesus and the Bible and God panders to the bishop’s wish for a sign. She gives him a miracle picture and roses that bloomed out of season to boot. She must be better than God. Theologically, the visions must be ascribed to Satan which implies that Satan wants Mary to be prayed to and believed to be mother of God and ever-Virgin. They really refute Christendom and Catholicism. The perpetual Virginity and the Virgin birth are unbiblical legends. And the deity of Christ appears nowhere in the New Testament. The whole story is too similar to a Spanish legend that is much older. The place name, Guadalupe, even appears in both stories (page 31, Looking for a Miracle).

And in both stories a miracle image is provided of Mary, the vision happens to an older man on a hill, a man who had been married, a relative was granted salvation from death and a shrine was asked for (page 187, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986).

The miracle that most believers associate with the image is that the cloth supposedly should have decayed centuries ago. This claim is untrue. The favourite lie is to say it is made of cactus fibres - the cloth then should last for a decade at the most if it is.

Brother John M. Samaha, S.M. put the following on the internet when he wished to publish a scientific perspective on the tilma. "Those who subscribed to the European origin theory said the tilma could not be a local Mexican product because it has lasted so long. Local cloth made from woven cactus fibers lasts about a decade at most. The tilma is almost five hundred years old, and has been on display in public daily. People behind this theory said the tilma must be woven from European linen or cotton. Two fibers of the tilma were lent to Professor Chiment for testing. These fibers had been removed from the outer edge of the tilma when it was stored during the Mexican Revolution. The test results showed that the fibers did not come from native cactus plants, nor did they come from cotton, wool, or linen -- fibers that might have been used in Europe. Rather, the tilma seems to have been woven from hemp, a plant native to Mexico. Hemp is one of the strongest fibers known, and hempen cloth can last hundreds of years. This could explain the tilma's remarkable state of preservation." http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/samaha7.html


The image fits the tradition of forged self-portraits of the Virgin Mary and there is a picture of the Merciful Virgin that was painted in Spain that is several decades older than the Guadalupe image that looks too similar to it for the latter to have been of divine origin (page 32, ibid).
It is striking that the Virgin called herself the Virgin and Mother of Mercy in her first appearance. The Catholic missionary magazine, Far East (May/June 2003), candidly confessed the following things. The angel bearing the body of the Virgin in the picture has nearly the same wings as the wings of an Aztec god who was worshipped locally. The colour of the mantle the lady was wearing matched the blue colour worn by Aztec nobility. The picture confirmed the Aztec astrological prediction of the times that there would be a imminent new age and the lady’s hands indicate that this new age was indeed nigh. The picture then is definitely occult. 
It backs astrology which is clearly censured in the Bible and by the Church. The Church will say the picture is not sanctioning astrology but using it to get people’s attention. But the Church is only assuming that. We don’t want assumptions here. It is most likely that the lady is sanctioning astrology for we would not say the Virgin would use soft porn to get attention though she disapproves of soft porn.
The image is occult and therefore stands condemned by the strict teaching given by God in the Law of Moses to avoid any semblance of paganism. When God comes first as the Law states it is clear that keeping anything that might lead to the worship of something else is forbidden and keeping it in the name of art is no excuse. The image is of man or of Satan or of a pagan god. Did Juan lie about the apparition really being Mary?

Science and its instruments have shown that there is evidence that the Lady was sketched before she was painted and the fingers have been shortened and the irises are outlined. This tells against the idea that the picture appeared as a result of an instant miracle by the Virgin Mary. The images of the people in the room are supposed to appear reflected in the right eye. But these images are so vague that they could be anything. Such delusions show what tone that books that defend the miracle take.

The evidence is that this image was naturally painted.

The Virgin’s mantle is off-centre on the head and it hugs the sides of the face and the top floats above the top of the head. These errors betray a human origin. There is also the flaking that has taken place along the fold in the middle. A real miracle would not flake. The Lady stands on the moon which comes from the Book of Revelation which symbolises the Church as a woman on the moon. The Virgin is misidentified as the woman of Revelation which indicates forgery. Her crown was painted out. She is too short and broad. Her arms would stretch out to below her knees like a monkey if she laid them by her sides. There is an unnatural fold in the mantle next her left thigh where it bends one way and then the opposite way for no reason. And why does the angel hold her by the robes and not by the moon on which she stands? The robe even bunches up a bit under her where he holds her. But even then the bunching takes a rectangular shape which is unnatural and can’t be explained by her feet and the bunching should fit the shape of the crescent moon but it does not.

The face of the Lady is in shadow which is strange when she is so luminous that she gives of a burst of light. The pro-Guadalupe book, The Wonder of Guadalupe (page 51) states that this is because no Lady likes being stared at! But it is only a picture and moreover the Virgin appears to people to be stared at in an ecstatic state. The shadowing shows a bad choice of colouring which refutes those who say the face is a miracle painting.

The allegedly miraculous three-dimensional quality that mainly surrounds the mouth which is due to roughness in the fabric (page 132, The Wonder of Guadalupe) could just be coincidence. It does not appear on the whole face or image which it would do if it were a true miracle.

The Lady does not look very Jewish so she is not Mary’s self-portrait. Her face does not resemble the supposed face of Jesus her son on the Turin Shroud so the two miracles are in conflict. The two would have been nearly identical if Jesus inherited all his genes from Mary and had no father. The Turin Shroud is more convincing than the image of Mary so it should be taken to refute it even if it is a fake itself.

The Wonder of Guadalupe, admits on page 76 that the hands were shortened and the image was painted over to hide cracks. The sunburst surrounding the painting was repainted as were the tassels and the moon and the stars on the mantle and the brooch and the border on the mantle. Still, the book unconvincingly boasts about the ability of the image to survive damp and exposure to the smoke of burning candles and frequent kissing and handling through the years. When the forged parts of the picture are so durable why can’t the original parts naturally be the same – the argument for miraculous preservation of the picture is unacceptable. There are horizontal lines showing fading and cracks on the image. Two of them can be seen on photographs even in The Wonder of Guadalupe which run along between the hands and the sash round the waist.

Perhaps the image has been replaced a few times like the Turin Shroud was. The replacement would be intended to defeat the countless objections to authenticity by artists and researchers who examined it so the image would be improved with every new forgery. The Church could not let the original image alone so why could and would it not forge a new image when the old deteriorates? It must have been replaced if it was able to withstand so much carelessness. In 1753, the image was subjected to rapid and frantic touching, kissing and rubbing five hundred times in two hours (page 118, The Wonder of Guadalupe). Could it be that a duplicate passed of as the original was used when the public were allowed to handle the cloth so that the original would be safe?

Sceptical priests testified in 1556 that an Indian or Aztec had painted the image. Fr de Maseques named the forger as Marcos Cipac and it has been proved that there was such a painter. There was a severe persecution of Christians in the area at the time the image appeared so it could have been intended to bring in plenty of quick converts for persecutors soon give up when the intended victims become too numerous. With the bizarre errors of the image their verdict must be correct.

It is interesting that the roses which the Virgin made have rotted away. They were Castilian roses from Spain. They were unavailable in Mexico but they could have been there for the Spanish would have liked to plant the things they enjoyed in Spain in their new home. They were uncommon enough to be thought non-existent in Mexico. To nearly all simple Spaniards they would just have been roses and if Diego planned the hoax he could have managed to grow the roses out of season. Did the Bishop simply think that the roses were Castilian? They could have been the ones in anybody’s garden that look like Castilian roses. Perhaps one rose looked by chance like a Castilian rose and the rest did not but when the bishop examined that one he assumed the rest were Castilian too. It was when Diego emptied the flowers from his cloak before the bishop that it was learned that there was an image on his cloak. Perhaps the flowers were the excuse for why he had to walk about taking care not to wrinkle his cloak in case he would damage the image?

Diego claimed that his uncle who was cured by the Virgin had cocolixtle which was a fever that proved fatal to all who caught it. But was it really? Juan knew that it could not proved that it was the fever and still he paraded the cure as a miracle. The fact that he went for a priest for his uncle instead of appealing to the apparition for help has disturbed many students of the vision (page 22, The Wonder of Guadalupe). It is psychological evidence that there never had been a vision.

In December 1999, an abbot called Gullermo Shulenburg who was once associated with the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe despatched a five-page report to the Vatican stating that there was no evidence apart from legend for the existence of Juan Diego. The Vatican was enraged for it planned to canonise Diego. The abbot’s discovery has damning implications for the holy picture of the Virgin. It would mean it could be a miracle image of the Mother Goddess who was adored on the hill of Guadalupe before the Virgin allegedly appeared that has been retouched to make it look more like Mary if it is a miracle at all. The Virgin has the facial features attributed to that pagan goddess which is as good a confirmation as any about who it is supposed to be. Fr Raymond E Brown’s book, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, tells us that the image of Mary at Guadalupe is hard to examine scientifically and that the exact story about the apparitions is equally very elusive for the ancient documents contradict each other (page 98).

http://www.miraclesceptic.com/guadalupe.html
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Proof (or Not) of Saintly Existence

By PETER STEINFELS

On July 31, Pope John Paul II is scheduled to declare Juan Diego Cuauhtlahtoatzin, a humble Aztec better known simply as Juan Diego, to be a saint.

It is Juan Diego to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared in December 1531, and, when the local Spanish bishop demanded proof of the apparition, it was on Juan Diego's rough cloak that the heavenly lady miraculously imprinted her image, an image still displayed and revered in its basilica in Mexico City and now reproduced almost everywhere.

One might expect that the Rev. Stafford Poole, an American priest and author of "Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol" (University of Arizona Press, 1995), would be looking forward to July 31. He is not.

He is one of a number of scholars who do not question Juan Diego's holiness. They question whether he ever existed. Juan Diego, Father Poole says, is a "pious fiction."

David A. Brading, a Cambridge professor, author of "Mexican Phoenix" (Cambridge, 2001), a highly sympathetic study of the Guadalupe devotion, has said, "There's no historical evidence whatsoever that such a person actually existed."

The problem for historians like Father Poole or Professor Brading is that though the Guadalupe portrait and devotions surrounding it clearly date to the mid-1500's, it was not until 1648 that Miguel Sanchez, a creole priest, published the elaborate account of apparitions, Juan Diego and his miraculously transformed cloak. The same story, told more simply and movingly in Nahuatl, the native tongue, appeared a year later in a book produced by a friend of Sanchez.

Ever since then, Mexican churchmen have been trying fill this gap in the record. If these 1648-49 accounts were based, as some claimed, on oral traditions, why had not a single trace of them showed up in the huge mass of religious material, both in Spanish and in native languages, that had appeared in the intervening century? Missing documents, especially earlier versions of the Nahuatl text, were hypothesized; various explanations were offered for their absence. In 1666, depositions were taken from elderly Indians and Spaniards. (The ages of four Indian witnesses were given as 100, 100, 110, and between 112 and 115.)

Many people argued that the image, which unlike the Shroud of Turin has never been scientifically examined, could not have been created by human hands - and therefore was itself proof of the 1648 account.

Still, the questions and the controversies have persisted. Writing in Commonweal, a biweekly edited by Catholic laity, Father Poole stated, "More than forty documents are said to attest to the reality of Juan Diego, yet not one of them can withstand serious historical criticism."

Obviously the Vatican officials conducting investigations for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints do not agree. But Father Poole considers their procedures "one-sided, slanted and bordering on the dishonest." No recognized scholars questioning the traditional accounts about Juan Diego were consulted, he wrote; he found out that his own book had been criticized but he was not given a chance to reply.

Other critics have been "demonized," he said in an interview, and accused of racism or heresy. In a book he is completing he calls the canonization "a sad and tawdry spectacle that does little service to the Church's mission and credibility."

Professor Brading is on a somewhat different wavelength. In "Mexican Phoenix," he praises Father Poole and declares that the American priest with two other scholars has demonstrated that the 1649 Nahuatl account was based on Sanchez's 1648 Spanish text - "a devastating criticism," Professor Brading writes, of all theories about some earlier Indian-language source.

Still, Professor Brading is ambivalent about the battle over historicity. He is enamored of the theological creativity of thinkers like Sanchez, who conceived of Juan Diego "as another Moses and the image of Guadalupe as the Mexican Ark of the Covenant," showing that God's own mother had founded Christian Mexico.

The Guadalupe tradition has a theological truth, he says, that cannot be discerned by "ill-judged questions about historicity," but only by thinking of the image the way Eastern Orthodox Christians think of icons and thinking of the story the way that Catholic theologians now regard many of the miraculous Gospel stories about Jesus' birth.

So Professor Brading, in a letter to the London Tablet, a Catholic weekly, ended up, on the one hand, calling the story of the Virgin and Juan Diego "a sublime parable" and, on the other hand, concluding, "To canonize Juan Diego makes as much sense, and as little, as to canonize the Good Samaritan."

That leaves some important questions. First, can what Father Poole calls "a pious fiction" be transmuted by centuries of devotion into what Professor Brading calls "a sublime parable"? Second, can the church really sidestep the problem of historical fact? Christianity, after all, is notorious for considering itself a history-based religion.

THE CASE AGAINST SCEPTICS

Believers think oral tradition that allegedly goes back to the early sixteenth century, the existence of the picture, its remarkable preservation like God was protecting it, Rome suggesting the story was true by approving a Mass for the apparition in 1754 are okay evidences.  But it is wrong to even call this rubbish.   
Spanish Jesuit Xavier Escalada supposedly had a drawing of the visions dated from the 1540s.  That is a good try but again that is not documentary evidence for we don't have the drawing. "The attentive reader will easily perceive, by means of this bibliography, the abundance and variety of Guadalupan writings produced in the course of more than four and a half centuries: manuscripts starting in 1531 and, from 1610, printed documents. The manuscripts mentioned show plainly that the eminent Mexican historian, Joaquín Garcia lcazbalceta, was mistaken when he thought that there were no 16th century documents extant proving the historical event of the apparitions and the subsequent devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Even if his assertion may have corresponded to the situation at the time when he was writing (1888), it cannot, of course, be reaffirmed today" (G. Grijales -E. J. Burrus, Bibliografia Guadalupana 1531-1984).   
Believers cherry pick the data to pick what suits.  It is even argued that experts say the oral traditions were reliable despite the big time scale!  (Miguel León Portilla, El destino de la palabra. De la oralidad y los glifos mesoamericanos a la escritura alfabética, FCE, Mexico City 1996, pp. 19-71).  The material is often dated earlier than what it is and interpretations are fanciful.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986 page 193 states that the image was altered to fit the Juan Diego tale better. The story was woven around the image. It was popular practice in the past to put images painted on cloth in churches. The tilma is probably just another such image. The book points out that drugs were used in the area when Diego allegedly lived which makes it suspect that the story that when he was having his vision that the cactus leaves shone like emeralds and the pricks like gold could be true! (page 192).

Conclusion

The vision and miracle and of Guadalupe is nonsense.  It is no miracle when God had to make a faulty image that needed touching up! Believing scholars admit there is no documentary evidence for the story or even the existence of Juan Diego.  They use weak evidence to defend the tall tale.

BOOKS CONSULTED

Believing in God, PJ McGrath, Millington Books in Association with Wolfhound, Dublin, 1995
Bernadette of Lourdes, Rev CC Martindale, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1970
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM, London, 1969
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Spiritual Healing, Martin Daulby and Caroline Mathison, Geddes & Grosset, New Lanark, Scotland, 1998
St Catherine Laboure of the Miraculous Medal, Fr Joseph I Dirvin C.M., Tan, Illinois, 1984
The Incorruptibles, Joan Carroll Cruz, Tan, Illinois, 1977
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Supernatural A-Z, James Randi, Headline Books, London, 1995
The Wonder of Guadalupe, Francis Johnson, Augustine, Devon, 1981
The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986


THE WEB Saints Preserve Us! www.forteantimes.com/articles/159_saintspreserved.shtml

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‘Miraculous’ Image of Guadalupe

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Skeptical Briefs Volume 12.2, June 2002

Mexico’s Image of Guadalupe is a sixteenth-century depiction of the Virgin Mary that, according to pious legend, she imprinted miraculously on an Aztec convert’s cloak. The Indian, Juan Diego, is expected to be canonized as a saint, although new evidence confirms skeptics’ claims that the image is merely a native artist’s painting, the tale apocryphal, and “Juan Diego” probably fictitious.
The story of Juan Diego is related in the Nican Mopohua ("an account”) written in the native Aztec language and sometimes called the “gospel of Guadalupe.” According to this account, in early December of 1531 (some ten years after Cortez’s defeat of the Aztec Empire) Juan Diego was a recent convert who supposedly left his village to attend Mass in another. As he passed the foot of a hill named Tepeyac he encountered a young girl, radiant in golden mist, who identified herself as “the ever-virgin Holy Mary, mother of the true God” and asked that a temple be built on the site. Later, as a sign to a skeptical bishop, she caused her self- portrait to appear miraculously on Juan’s cactus-fiber cloak.
The legend obviously contains a number of motifs from the Old and New Testament as well as statements of specific Catholic dogma. Indeed, the tale itself appears to have been borrowed from an earlier Spanish legend in which the Virgin appeared to a shepherd and led him to discover a statue of her along a river known as Guadalupe ("hidden channel”). Moreover, the resulting shrine at Tepeyac was in front of the site where the Aztecs had had a temple for their own virgin goddess Tonantzin (Smith 1983). Thus the Catholic tradition was grafted onto the Indian one, a process folklorists call syncretism.
The image itself also yields evidence of considerable borrowing. It is a traditional portrait of Mary, replete with standard artistic motifs and in fact clearly derived from earlier Spanish paintings. Yet some proponents of the image have suggested that the obvious artistic elements were later additions and that the “original” portions-the face, hands, robe, and mantle-are therefore “inexplicable” and even “miraculous” (Callahan 1981).
Actually, infrared photographs show that the hands have been modified, and close-up photography shows that pigment has been applied to the highlight areas of the face sufficiently heavily so as to obscure the texture of the cloth. There is also obvious cracking and flaking of paint all along a vertical seam, and the infrared photos reveal in the robe’s fold what appear to be sketch lines, suggesting that an artist roughed out the figure before painting it. Portrait artist Glenn Taylor has pointed out that the part in the Virgin’s hair is off-center; that her eyes, including the irises, have outlines, as they often do in paintings, but not in nature, and that these outlines appear to have been done with a brush; and that much other evidence suggests the picture was probably copied by an inexpert artist from an expertly done original.
In fact, during a formal investigation of the cloth in 1556, it was stated that the image was “painted yesteryear by an Indian,” specifically “the Indian painter Marcos.” This was probably the Aztec painter Marcos Cipac de Aquino who was active in Mexico at the time the Image of Guadalupe appeared.
In 1985, forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I reported all of this evidence and more in “a folkloristic and iconographic investigation” of the Image of Guadalupe in Skeptical Inquirer. We also addressed some of the pseudoscience that the image has attracted. (For example, some claim to have discovered faces, including that of “Juan Diego” in the magnified weave of the Virgin’s eyes-evidence of nothing more than the pious imagination’s ability to perceive images, inkblot-like, in random shapes) (Nickell and Fischer 1985).
Recently our findings were confirmed when the Spanish-language magazine Proceso reported the results of a secret study of the Image of Guadalupe. It had been conducted - secretly - in 1982 by art restoration expert José Sol Rosales. Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and observed that the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It had been prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate), and the image was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium). The artist used a “very limited palette,” the expert stated, consisting of black (from pine soot), white, blue, green, various earth colors ("tierras”), reds (including carmine), and gold. Rosales concluded that the image did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century (El Vaticano 2002).
In addition, new scholarship (e.g. Brading 2001) suggests that, while the image was painted not long after the Spanish conquest and was alleged to have miraculous powers, the pious legend of Mary’s appearance to Juan Diego may date from the following century. Some Catholic scholars, including the former curator of the basilica Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg, even doubt the historical existence of Juan Diego. Schulemburg said the canonization of Juan Diego would be the “recognition of a cult” (Nickell 1997).
However, the skeptics are apparently having little if any effect, and Pope John Paul II seems bent on canonizing “Juan Diego” who is as demonstrably popular among Mexican Catholics as he is, apparently, fictitious.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of John Moffit and César Tort who helped update me on this topic, as well as CFI staff members who helped in various ways, including Tim Binga, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu.

References

• Brading, D.A. 2001. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Callahan, Philip Serna. 1981. The Tilma under Infra-red Radiation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
• El Vaticano. 2002. Proceso, May 19, 29-30.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Image of Guadalupe: myth- perception. Skeptical Inquirer 21:1 (January/ February), 9.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1985. The Image of Guadalupe: A folkloristic and iconographic investigation. Skeptical Inquirer 9:3 (spring), 243-255.
• Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/miraculous_image_of_guadalupe
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The Virgin of Guadalupe

Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe played an important role in the Catholic colonization of the Americas.  
 
by Brian Dunning

Skeptoid Podcast #201
April 13, 2010
Podcast transcript


Today we're going to travel back to the time of the Conquistadors, when Spanish soldiers marched through Aztec jungles and spread Catholicism to the New World. We're going to examine an object that is central to faith in Mexico: An image called the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is basically Mexico's version of the Shroud of Turin. Both are pieces of fabric, hundreds of years old, on which appears an image said to be miraculous. Both are considered sacred objects. But the Virgin of Guadalupe is a much more powerful icon to many Mexicans. There's hardly anywhere you can go in Mexico and not find a reproduction of the image. Its importance as a religious and cultural symbol cannot be understated, for it came from the very hands of The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.

A legend well known in Mexico tells how it came to be. In 1531, the Spanish had been occupying Mexico for about ten years. An indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, was walking in what's now Mexico City when he saw the glowing figure of a teenage girl on a hill called Tepeyac. She identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and asked him to build her a church on that spot. Diego recounted this to the Archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1468-1548). Zumárraga was skeptical and told Diego to return and ask her to prove her identity with a miracle. Diego did return, and encountered the apparition again. She told him to climb to the top of the hill and pick some flowers to present to the Bishop. Although it was winter and no flowers should have been in bloom, Juan Diego found an abundance of flowers of a type he'd never seen before. The Virgin Mary bundled the flowers into Diego's cloak, woven from common cactus fiber and called a tilma. When Juan Diego presented the tilma to Zumárraga, the flowers fell out and he recognized them as Castilian roses, not found in Mexico; but more significantly, the tilma had been miraculously imprinted with a colorful image of the Virgin herself. This actual tilma, preserved since that date and showing the familiar image of the Virgin Mary with her head bowed and hands together in prayer, is the Virgin of Guadalupe. It remains perhaps the most sacred object in all of Mexico.

The story is best known from a manuscript written in the Aztecs' native language Nahuatl by the scholar Antonio Valeriano (1531-1605), the Nican Mopohua. By the European watermark on its paper, it's known to have been written sometime after 1556. This was widely published in a larger collection in 1649 by the lawyer Luis Laso de la Vega. Zumárraga and Juan Diego were both dead by the time Valeriano wrote it, so where did he get his information?

A red flag that a number of historians have put forth is that Bishop Zumárraga was a prolific writer. Yet, in not a single one of his known letters, is there any mention of Juan Diego, his miraculous apparition, the roses, or the cloak bearing the image, or any other element of the story in which Zumárraga was alleged to have played so prominent a role.

Not everyone agrees. In the 2000 book in Spanish, Juan Diego, una Vida de Santidad que Marcó la Historia (A Life of Holiness that Made History), author Eduardo Chavez Sánchez gives, at some length, various quotations from letters by Zumárraga that he believes confirms the Juan Diego narrative. I found his list to be extraordinarily unconvincing, and I would honestly describe it as really desperate scraping of the bottom of the barrel to find a quote-minable quote. In fact, the only quote from Zumárraga I found that was remotely close was:

An Indian goes to Brother Toribio and all will be in praise of God.

That sounds great because he mentions an Indian talking to a Catholic figure, but there's no mention of this Indian's name, no mention in the Juan Diego stories of a Brother Toribio (that I could find), and no elements of the Juan Diego story included in this single-sentence snippet. So unless some more of Zumárraga's writings come to light, I'm going to agree with the historians who say Zumárraga wrote nothing of these events, which casts doubt on his role in something that would have been of such great importance to him.

The name Juan Diego itself suggests that the story was a fictional invention. It basically translates as John Doe, a generic everyman, whose identity is unimportant. This doesn't prove anything, since there certainly were real people named Juan Diego, but it is an intriguing element.

It is the actual image of Mary itself that tells us the most about its true history. As every schoolchild knows, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was the Spanish Conquistador who overthrew the Aztec empire and placed much of Mexico under Spanish control in 1521. He was born in a region of Spain called Extremadura, and grew up to revere Our Lady of Guadalupe, a statue of a black version of the Virgin Mary, at the Santa María de Guadalupe monastery in Extremadura. This statue is credited with miraculously helping to expel the Moors from Spain in the Reconquista. Cortés brought reproductions of this European image of Mary with him when he went to the New World. Her dark skin resembled the Aztecs, and she became the perfect icon for the missionaries who followed Cortés to rally the natives into Christianity.

One such missionary was Fray Pedro de Gante (1480-1572), a Franciscan monk from Belgium (born Pieter van der Moere) who learned the Aztec language and created the first European-style school in Mexico, San Jose de los Naturales. One of his promising art students was a young Aztec man with the Christian name Marcos Cipac de Aquino, one of three known prolific Aztec artists of the period. In 1555, the newly arrived Archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar (1489-1572), successor to the deceased Zumárraga, was looking to commission a portrait of the Virgin Mary, as a sort of teaching aide to help convert the Aztecs. Montúfar found the young artist Marcos at de Gante's school. And so, in 1555, the Aztec artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary, with dark skin, with head slightly bowed and hands together in prayer, on a common cactus-fiber canvas. The painting was named the Virgin of Guadalupe according to the tradition Cortés brought from Spain. Although the Extremadura statue was not in this pose, the pose was still one of European tradition. The most often cited example of Mary in this exact pose is the painting A Lady of Mercy, attributed to Bonanat Zaortiga and on display at the National Art Museum of Catalunya, painted in the 1430's. Marcos followed more than a century of European tradition.

There was a pragmatic element to Montúfar's introduction of this painting and allowing it to be worshipped. Before the Conquistadors, Tepeyac was home to an Aztec temple, built to honor the Aztecs' own virgin goddess, Tonantzin. So rather than replacing the Aztec goddess, Montúfar's plan was simply to introduce Mary by giving Tonantzin a name and a face (recall that Marcos had painted the Virgin with dark skin). This process of using an existing belief system to graft on a new one has been called syncretism. Understandably, this exploitation of a pagan idol caused discomfort among some of the Franciscan priests, while many of the Dominicans welcomed the way it helped baptize 8,000,000 Aztecs.

The primary corroborating documentation of Marcos' painting is a report from the Church in 1556, when this growing disagreement between the Franciscans and the Dominicans prompted an investigation into the origins of the tilma. Two of the Franciscans submitted sworn statements in which they expressed their concern that worshipping the tilma was leading the Aztecs to return to their traditional pagan ways. One described the image as "a painting that the Indian painter Marcos had done" while another said it was "painted yesteryear by an Indian". Appearing on the side of the Dominicans, who favored allowing the Aztecs to worship the image, was Bishop Montúfar himself. As a result, the construction of a much larger church was authorized at Tepeyac, in which the tilma was mounted and displayed.

Significantly, the 1556 report is the most extensive documentation concerning the Virgin tilma of its century, and it makes no mention whatsoever of Juan Diego, the miraculous appearance of the image, or any other element from the legend. If the miracle story did exist at that time, it seems inconceivable that it could have been omitted from this report. This strongly supports the suggestion that the Juan Diego legend had not yet been conceived. It also supports that Valeriano's Nican Mopohua was written later.

The legend did get its first boost of testable evidence in 1995, which (in a case of suspiciously fortuitous timing) was after Juan Diego's beatification in 1990, while there was still debate over whether he should be canonized (he ultimately was, in 2002). A Spanish Jesuit named Javier Escalada produced a deerskin which pictorially depicted the Juan Diego legend and has become known as the Codex Escalada. The Codex also mentioned several historical people, and even bore the signature of a Franciscan historian, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590), dated 1548. Basically, it was the Perfect Storm of tailor-made evidence proving that the Juan Diego legend was the accepted history at the time. A little too tailor made though; no serious historians have supported its authenticity. The best analysis I've found is by Alberto Peralta of the Proyecto Guadalupe project. Based on its dubious unveiling, numerous inconsistencies, and other factors, Peralta concludes that it's impossible for the document to be authentic.

If the Virgin tilma is indeed a painting, and not a miraculously produced image, then it should be a simple matter to determine that scientifically. There are obvious signs that are hard to argue with, notably that the paint is flaking along a vertical seam in the fabric. But a truly scientific examination involving sampling of the material has not been permitted. The most notable examination was a three hour infrared photographic session by Philip Callahan in 1981, who did note multiple layers of paint covering changes to the hands and crown, but came away with more questions than answers. Callahan found, for example, that most of the entire painting seemed to have been done with a single brush stroke. He recommended a series of more tests, but the only one allowed by the Church was a spectrophotometric examination done by Donald Lynn from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The only result released of his examination was that "nothing unusual" was found.

Much has been made of the claim that figures can be seen reflected in Mary's eyes, with some even identifying these figures as Zumárraga or Juan Diego or other characters from the legend. The Church even went so far in 1956 as to have two ophthalmologists examine the eyes under 2500× magnification. They reported a whole group of figures, including both Aztecs and Franciscans. Why ophthalmologists should be better qualified to identify Aztecs and Franciscans in random blobs of pigment has not been convincingly argued. Photos taken by another ophthalmologist in 1979 have been released, and it's quite obvious that it's simply random noise. I see a dozen or so speckles; if you want to make them into Aztecs, Franciscans, bananas, or Bozo the Clown, then you'll probably also be great at spotting dozens of Bigfoots hiding in any given photograph of a forest.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is yet more one mythical story whose believers are missing out on true facts that are actually more respectful and confer more credit upon them than the myth. The image on the Virgin tilma was painted by a native Aztec artist; and the painting had not only an important role in Mexico's early history as a nation, but also a staggering impact upon its culture ever since. Mexicans with Aztec heritage should take pride in the fact that their original culture, specifically the goddess Tonantzin, was a key ingredient in the spread of modern Catholicism. The Juan Diego myth takes that away, and whitewashes part of Mexican history clean of any Aztec influence. That's a disservice to one of humanity's greatest ancient civilizations, and it's a disservice to history.

When we see the Virgin of Guadalupe image today, most people react in one of two ways: They worship it as a miraculous apparition, or they dismiss it as someone else's religious icon. Both reactions miss the much richer true history. The Virgin of Guadalupe stands not only as an invaluable work of ancient art (possibly the most popular piece of art ever created), but also as a reminder of how the conquest of Mexico was truly accomplished: Not only its military conquest, but one of history's greatest religious conversions as well.

 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4201
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