Part One (ii):
Justin Lyons’ parallels
Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés
Ambiguous Legacies of Leadership (2015)
Justin D. Lyons
This is a biographical pairing of two of the greatest conquerors in human history, drawing its inspiration from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Like Plutarch, the purpose of the pairing is not primarily historical.
While Plutarch covers the history of each of the lives he chronicles, he also emphasizes questions of character and the larger lessons of politics to be derived from the deeds he recounts. The book provides a narrative account both of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire and Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec Empire while reflecting on the larger questions that emerge from each. The campaign narratives are followed by essays devoted to leadership and command that seek to recover the treasures of the Plutarchian approach shaped by moral and political philosophy. Analysis of leadership style and abilities is joined with assessment of character. Special emphasis is given to the speeches provided in historical sources and meditation on rhetorical successes and failures in maintaining the morale and willing service of their men.
Book review at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/alexander-the-great-and-hernan-cortes-ambiguous-legacies-of-leadership/oclc/898161610
Part Two: Would a C16th AD Spaniard likely have encountered an Aztec empire?
“When Worlds in Collision was published, four Yale University professors had collaborated in preparing a rebuttal in the American Journal of Science, where one of them ridiculed the suggestion that the Mesoamerican civilization appeared to be much older than conventional history allowed. Five years later, the National Geographical Society announced: "Atomic science has proved the ancient civilizations of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been believed." The Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution declared this to be the most important archeological discovery in recent history”.
James P. Hogan wrote this paragraph in his book, Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible.
I recently wrote to a Canadian correspondent along the lines that:
My own view is that a Cortes, had he really gone to Meso-America in the 1500's AD, would have had as much likelihood of encountering a thriving Aztec civilisation as would Napoleon have had of encountering a full-blown Ramesside civilisation when he rode up to the pyramids on his camel around 1800 AD.
Part Three: Cortes a composite character
In this series Hernán Cortés will emerge as a composite character based upon
some great luminaries of the BC past: Moses; Alexander the Great; even Saint Paul.
Matthew Restall introduces his article, “Moses, Caesar, Hero, Anti-hero: The Posthumous Faces of Hernando Cortés” (2016):
‘There is so much to say about the prowess and invincible courage of Cortés that on this point alone a large book could be written.’ 1 These words, written by Toribio de Motolinía, one of the first Franciscans in Mexico, were more far-sighted than the friar could have imagined.
When Motolinía penned that prophecy, Hernando Cortés (1485-1547) was still alive, and his secretary-chaplain, Francisco López de Gómara was soon to begin composing a ‘large book’ on the famous conquistador that would first see print a decade later as The Conquest of Mexico. 2 Using Cortés’s own so-called ‘Letters to the King’ as crucial building material, Gómara laid the foundation for a literary tradition that combined a narrative of the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519-1521, styled as a glorious, predestined Conquest of Mexico, with a life of the conqueror as a hagiography, hero-worshiping and legend-forming. Gómara’s book and Cortés’s Second and Third Letters were thereby planted as the urtexts, the trunk from which all branches of the traditional Conquest narrative grew. 3
Blooms of intense popularity have periodically blossomed, but the topic’s essential popularity has remained deeply rooted for five centuries. 4
Serious attempts to uproot the legend, or see ‘beyond’ it (to quote the subtitle of one recent biography), are few and far between; almost every book has sought to lionize or demonize, to celebrate the hero or denounce the anti-hero. As the author of that recent biography noted, Cortés was long ago transformed from a man into a myth,
To see ‘beyond the legend’, its nature must first be understood. To that end, the discussion that follows traces the posthumous development of Cortés as Caesar, Moses, Hero, and Anti-Hero. The latter pair are two sides to the same coin, for the Anti-Hero image has tended to maintain the Cortés myth rather than undermine or shatter it. I suggest that two mythical Cortesian qualities (identified at the essay’s end) underpin his legend; upending them might lead to a deeper understanding of both the historical Cortés and the era of the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519-1521. ….
Part Four:
Cortes to Mexico ‘like a new Moses to Egypt’
As an historical revisionist I cannot help being suspicious whenever I read of a supposed historical character being described as a ‘second’ or ‘a new’ version of someone earlier.
A ‘second David’, or ‘a new Solomon’, ‘a second Judith’, and so on.
In this case, Hernán Cortés - considered to have been ‘like a new Moses’.
Matthew Restall points out some comparisons between Moses and Cortes in his article, “Moses, Caesar, Hero, Anti-hero: The Posthumous Faces of Hernando Cortés” (2016): https://www.academia.edu/32132886/Moses_Caesar_Hero_Anti-hero_The_Posthumous_Faces_of_Hernando_Cort%C3%A9s_Restall_2016_
Moses
Following the logic of the Cortés legend, political disunity among Mesoamericans has traditionally been read as the conqueror’s achievement, with the question being whether his ‘divide and rule’ strategy was influenced more by Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli, or the Bible. 20 The Christian element (Solana’s ‘mystical crusader’) inevitably gave Cortés the moral edge over any of his possible influences (the Bible aside). Thus beginning with the earliest writings on the Conquest by Franciscans and other ecclesiastics, Cortés was promoted as a pious version of a classical general, better than the ancients because he carried the true faith with him.
‘I do not wish to deride the noble achievements of the Romans,’ wrote Diego Valadés in 1579. ‘Yet one must exalt with the highest praise and with new and illuminating phrases the unprecedented fortitude of Hernando Cortés, and the friars who came to these new worlds.’ Comparing the possessions of the Roman Empire with ‘the parts of the Indies that have come into our hands, ours are infinitely greater.’ But for Valadés, it was not just a question of size. The Cortesian achievement was a religious one, and thus ‘the sign of how Cortés exercised his power for the good’ was how he and the earliest friars destroyed temples, expelled priests, and prohibited ‘diabolic sacrifices.’ It was thus the nature, as well as the magnitude and speed, of the enterprise that made it ‘the most heroic.’ 21
Valadés, the son of a Spanish conquistador and a Nahua mother from Tlaxcala, was the first mestizo to enter the Order of Saint Francis. 22 His perspective was thus as much colonial Tlaxcalan as it was Franciscan. Valadés was one of the earliest to articulate the invented tradition that Tlaxcalans were the very first – at Cortés’s urging – to receive baptism as new Christians in Mexico. Another Tlaxcalan mestizo, Diego Muñoz Camargo, likewise the offspring of a Spanish conquistador and Nahua mother, also contributed to this core element of the Cortés-as-Moses legend. His History of Tlaxcala, completed in 1592, recounted a meeting that supposedly took place in 1520 between Cortés and the four rulers of Tlaxcala in the middle of the Spanish-Aztec War. At the meeting, Cortés delivered a virtual sermon, confessing that his true mission in Mexico was to bring the true faith. Explaining Christianity and its rituals, he urged the lords to destroy their ‘idols’, receive baptism, and join him in a vengeful campaign of war against Tenochtitlan. The lords then persuaded their subjects, who all gathered for a public mass baptism, at which Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado acted as godfathers. 23
This incident, part of a mythistory that survived into the modern era, 24 was likely a combination of Muñoz’s imagination and Tlaxcalan folk history. 25 But it took root as fact, because it placed both Tlaxcala and Cortés in positive light, promoting one as the voluntary starting point for Christian baptism, and the other as an effective agent of proselytization. This Cortés was a pacifier, not a violent conquistador, a spiritual conqueror who deployed the word not the sword, inspiring conversion without coercion.
This Franciscan promotion of Cortés as a New World Moses, both during and long after his lifetime, had three roots. First, the twelve founding fathers of Catholicism in Mexico were Franciscans, arriving in 1524 with Cortés’s support. Second, many of the Twelve shared a millenarian vision of their mission; their goal was to convert indigenous Mexicans in order that Christ could return, a holy task made possible by Cortés. 26
Third, the Cortés-Franciscan alliance became cemented by the political schism that divided Spanish Mexico in the 1530s. The Franciscans were forced to compete in Mexico with secular clergy and rival orders, especially the Dominicans, who aligned themselves with the first royal officials sent to govern New Spain, all critical of Cortés; the Franciscans penned narratives that praised him. 27
One such Franciscan was fray Gerónimo de Mendieta. He spent the last quarter of the sixteenth century composing his Historia Eclesiástica Indiana in the Franciscan convent in Tlatelolco, once part of the Aztec capital and in Mendieta’s day a Nahua neighborhood of Mexico City. Although Mendieta’s history of the evangelization in Mexico was denied publication permission, it reflected opinion of the day and influenced subsequent chronicles and accounts of the Spiritual Conquest.
Mendieta believed that Martin Luther and Cortés were born the same year, and that this was part of God’s plan for the Spaniard. This providential numerology was reinforced by the bloody orgy of human sacrifice that Mendieta thought occurred in Tenochtitlan that same year. God’s remedy for ‘the clamor of so many souls’ and ‘the spilling of so much human blood’ was Cortés, dispatched to Mexico ‘like a new Moses to Egypt.’ 28 ‘Without any doubt,’ wrote the friar, ‘God chose specifically to be his instrument this valiant captain, don Fernando Cortés, through whose agency the door was opened and a road made for the preachers of the Gospel in this new world.’ Mendieta’s nineteenth-century editor printed in the margin: ‘Cortés chosen as a new Moses to free the Indian people.’ Proof of Cortés’s role, divinely appointed since birth, was another meaningful synchronicity with Luther: in the same year that the German heretic ‘began to corrupt the Gospel,’ the Spanish captain began ‘to make it known faithfully and sincerely to people who had never before heard of it.’ 29 No less a ‘confirmation of the divine election of Cortés to a task so noble in spirit’ was the ‘marvelous determination that God put in his heart.’ 30
Down through the centuries, authors writing in multiple languages wove these threads of Cortés’s religious devotion and the evidence of God’s intervention in the Conquest story. The conquistador guided indigenous people to the light so effectively that ‘the reverence and prostration on their knees that is now shown to priests by the Indians of New Spain was taught to them by don Fernando Cortés, of happy memory’ (as García put it in 1607).
31 In the hands of Protestant authors in later centuries, the Moses leitmotif shifted into something slightly different – ‘religious fanaticism,’ one American historian put it in 1904 – but the core legendary element persisted. Upon assuming command of the expedition to Mexico, Cortés took up his ‘heavenly mission’ with the zeal of ‘a frank, fearless, deluded enthusiast.’ His destiny was ‘to march the apostle of Christianity to overthrow the idols in the halls of Moctezuma, and there to rear the cross of Christ.’ 32 In the less judgmental words of another turn-of-the-century historian, Cortés’s ‘religious sincerity’ was ‘above impeachment.’ Indeed, he was virtually a saint, ‘a man of unfeigned piety, of the stuff that martyrs are made of, nor did his conviction that he was leading a holy crusade to win lost souls to salvation ever waver.’ 33
….
Part Five:
Cortes as a Caesar, Julius or Cesare?
“Meanwhile, Cortés was promoted inside and outside the
Spanish world as a model, modern Caesar”.
Matthew Restall
Comparisons of anyone - or any supposed someone - with Julius Caesar are not helped by the fact (that is, if I am right) that ‘Julius Caesar’ and certain other legendary and most famous Roman Republicans (and don’t even start me on the Roman Imperialists) were composite, non-historical characters. See e.g. my article:
Horrible Histories. Retracting Romans
In what follows, Matthew Restall will point to some comparisons between the historically most dubious Cortes and Julius Caesar (and even with Cesare Borgia and others) in his article, “Moses, Caesar, Hero, Anti-hero: The Posthumous Faces of Hernando Cortés” (2016):
Caesar
The motto chosen by Cortés for his coat of arms was Judicium Domini apprehendit eos, et fortitudo ejus corroboravit bracchium meum (The judgement of the Lord overtook them, and His might strengthened my arm). Taken from an account of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus Flavius Josephus, the line implied that Cortés had besieged and captured a second Jerusalem. 6 The reference reflected Cortés’s own embrace of the exalted notion that his actions in Mexico were divinely guided, that his role was that of a universal crusader. It also reflected the Spanish tendency, commonplace in the early modern centuries, to compare Spain’s imperial achievements to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. 7
A specific leitmotif developed, within that larger pattern, whereby Cortés was compared to Julius Caesar. Cortés made no such claim, the purpose of his Letters was, after all, to display his undying loyalty to a king who, as Holy Roman Emperor, was the Caesar of the day. But the clerics and intellectuals who formed the pro-Cortés, anti-Bartolomé de Las Casas faction in Spain during the conquistador’s final years pointed out three supposed similarities: both men were remarkable generals; both were unique literary figures for recording detailed accounts of their greatest campaign (Cortés’s Letters; Caesar’s Gallic Wars); and both had administrative vision, guiding the Mexican and Roman worlds respectively into new eras. Comparisons were not restricted to Julius Caesar – in his ode to Cortés of 1546, for example, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar also compared Cortés to Alexander the Great and to St. Paul – but, the Caesar reference tended to predominate. 8
Gómara made much hay with the comparison to ancient Rome, featuring Cortés’s coat of arms in the frontispiece to his Conquest of Mexico, and in his larger History of the Indies (see Figure 1). ‘Never has such a display of wealth been discovered in the Indies, nor acquired so quickly,’ enthused Gómara; not only were Cortés’s
many great feats in the wars the greatest [of any Spaniard in the New World] but he wrote them down in imitation of Polybius, and of Salust when he brought together the Roman histories of Marius and Scipio. 9
Gómara used his giddy comparisons of Cortés to the great generals of ancient Greece and Rome – and to their historians – as buildings blocks for his construction of the exemplary conquistador. By contrast, the other famous conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, was portrayed as illiterate, ignoble, and avaricious. This allowed Gómara to better promote Cortés as the noble, pious model of a literate man-at-arms, and his invasion of Mexico as ‘a good and just war.’ 10 Gómara went a little too far–his criticism of the Conquest of Peru prompted his History to be quickly banned in Spain. But by century’s end there were ten Italian editions, nine in French, and two in English, making it ‘so widely read that it served, almost by default, as the official history of the Spanish New World.’ 11
The Cortés-Caesar leitmotif lasted for centuries.
In his 1610 account of the Spanish conquest campaigns in New Mexico, composed as an epic poem, Gaspar de Villagrá repeatedly invoked Cortés as the paradigmatic conquistador. When, in Villagrá’s telling, Cortés’s efforts to campaign in northwest Mexico were opposed by Viceroy Mendoza of New Spain, the conflict had classical echoes: ‘Greed for power, like love, will permit no rival. Even as Caesar and Pompey clashed over their rival ambitions for world power, so now Cortés met with opposition.’ 12 Similarly, the splendors and religious devotion of Mexico City were
‘all due to the noble efforts of that famous son who set forth to discover this New World, whose illustrious and glorious deeds, after the years have passed, will surely be seen as no less great and admirable than those of the great Caesar, Pompey, Arthur, Charlemagne, and other valiant men, whom time has raised up.’ 13
The theme was prominent too in Bernal Díaz’s history, as in Antonio de Solís’s–the latter prefaced with the assertion that ‘whoever will consider the Difficulties he overcame, and the Battles he fought and won against an incredible Superiority of Numbers, must own him little inferior to the most celebrated Heroes of Antiquity.’ 14 Solís’s book was a bestseller in multiple languages for well over a century. 15 Meanwhile, Cortés was promoted inside and outside the Spanish world as a model, modern Caesar. For example, in his History of the Conquest of Mexico, By the Celebrated Hernan Cortes (first published in 1759 but seeing dozens of editions into the twentieth century), W. H. Dilworth sought to improve and entertain ‘the BRITISH YOUTH of both Sexes.’ The book claimed to contain ‘A faithful and entertaining Detail of all [Cortés’s] Amazing Victories,’ with a story ‘abounding with strokes of GENERALSHIP, and the most refined Maxims of CIVIL POLICY.’ 16
From Dilworth to Prescott to modern authors (who have devoted entire books comparing Cortés to Caesar or to Alexander) the Spaniard has generally come off well in relation to ancient generals, 7 be the focus on military logistics, governmental vision, or moral justification. For a 1938 Mexican biographer of the conqueror, Julius Caesar was more self-interested than Cortés: the Spaniard was not only glorified, but also sanctified, an ‘epic boxer’ and ‘mystical crusader’ who embodied his age more than his own personal ambitions. 18
Other Latin American intellectuals suggested that Cortés ‘was a Caesar, but more like Caesar Borgia than Julius Caesar’ – meaning Cesare Borgia, the duke made famous by Machiavelli in The Prince – and that Cortés’s ‘political vision’ was so similar to Machiavelli’s that one imagines him reading The Prince. That is an impossible scenario, for the now-classic political treatise was not published until 1532, as literary scholars acknowledge. But some have argued that Machiavelli’s ideas were circulating before his book saw print, allowing Cortés to be ‘the practical Spaniard’ to Machiavelli’s ‘theoretical Italian.’ 19
….
Part Six:
Juan Diego and
the tilma image
“In
a post-conciliar era which featured the excising of certain saints from the
Church's official calendar of saints, the proposed action of canonizing Juan
Diego seemed to resurrect the historical peccadilloes of previous centuries.
Canonizing Juan Diego, they argued, would
be akin to canonizing the Good Samaritan. Some pro-apparitionist interlocutors
impugned the anti-apparitionists' motives as racist”.
As a Catholic, Marian devotion (to Mary) is an
essential aspect of my piety and prayer life.
A New or Second Adam (1 Corinthians
15:45), Jesus Christ, would
seem to necessitate also a New Eve. See e.g. my article:
Necessity of
Virgin Mary
And, although the Church does not command
that we follow any private revelations:
“When the Church approves private
revelations, she declares only that there is nothing in them contrary faith or good morals, and that they may
be read without danger or even with profit; no obligation is thereby imposed
on the faithful to believe them”….
I have accepted as authentic and cosmically
significant the Marian revelations of both Fatima and Lourdes. In fact, I gave
up professional work as a Librarian at the University of Tasmania in 1976 to
join a Fatima apostolate (“Fatima International”) in Canada and the US.
And I have long accepted, together with Fatima and
Lourdes, the apparition to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in 1531 by Our Lady of
Guadalupé, whilst vehemently rejecting unapproved apparitions, such as
Garabandal, Bayside and Medjugorje. See e.g. my multi-part series:
Medjugorje
and the Mad Mouthings of the ‘Madonna of the Antichrist’
commencing with:
https://www.academia.edu/18657854/Medjugorje_and_the_Mad_Mouthings_of_the_Madonna_of_the_Antichrist_
I have also written a book on Fatima:
The Five
First Saturdays of Our Lady of Fatima
Lately, though, with my view of the Cortesian
Conquest of Mexico being historically impossible and derived from a concoction
of ancient people and events, see e.g. my multi-part series:
Alexander
the Great and Hernán Cortés
commencing with:
and also my multi-part series:
Hysterical
AD 'History'
commencing with:
then I have had seriously to reconsider as well
Juan Diego whose historical background was, supposedly, this very Conquest of
Mexico.
Coupled with all this are some strong arguments
against the authenticity of Juan Diego, especially those raised by Fr Stafford
Poole (CM).
The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico. By Stafford Poole
“Mexico was born at Tepeyac,” says an aphorism about the
legends surrounding the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a poor Indian
neophyte named Juan Diego. But senior historian Stafford Poole disputes the
historical veracity of these apparition narratives and their subsequent
embellishments.
Poole previously penned Our
Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol
(University of Arizona Press, 1995), which, with David Brading's more recent Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), offers the most authoritative
English-language historical reckonings of the origins of the cult. The Guadalupan Controversies is
written for specialists of Latin American religious history, and offers a
historiographical account, from early colonial-era New Spain to present-day
Mexico, of the scholarly disputes, ecclesial politics, and journalistic
imbroglios surrounding the investigation and promotion of devotion to Mexico's
national patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Poole's book highlights controversies among elites, and
his reliance upon clerical sources eclipses attention to the popular role in
the cult. Of course, there is no shortage of theological and anthropological
interpretations of the popular cult, and in any case, the presumed autonomy of
“popular” from “elite” devotions should not be too sharply drawn. But Poole
could have included an analysis of the lay devotions that also played a part in
the Guadalupan controversies that the book examines. For instance, Poole gives
scant attention to the early colonial-era objections of Franciscan missionaries
to the “new” Marian devotion under the name of Guadalupe at Tepeyac (40).
Franciscan friars in the 1550s denounced the “false miracles” attributed to the
shrine's Marian image, which was reportedly painted by a local Indian artist.
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún deplored as “idolatry” the fact that Indians flocked
to Tepeyac—a site that, according to Sahagún, had formerly hosted festivals
dedicated to Tonantzín, an indigenous goddess (210–212, 216). Unfortunately,
such reports appear only in an appendix written by another historian, and Poole
does not examine these data—other than to caution readers against collapsing
these sixteenth-century accounts of Marian devotion at the Tepeyac shrine with
the apparition legends that emerged a century later (172). Guadalupan devotion,
Poole maintains, originated with the circulation of seventeenth-century
apparition legends that were written by clergymen (ix).
The history of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, as
Poole's book amply documents, is replete with initiatives from the church
hierarchy (201), rather than being the chiefly bottom-up development that is
often imagined. One of the most important clerical nudges came with Luis Laso
de la Vega's 1649 publication of the Nahuatl document known as the Nican Mopohua, which reported a
previously “forgotten” 1531 apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a humble
Indian neophyte named Diego (5). Laso de la Vega's mid-seventeenth century
account was clearly aimed at an indigenous audience, and reported that the 1531
apparition had spurred the conversion of many Indians. The problem for
historians such as Poole is that, prior to 1648, no archival source—whether
written by Mexico's first archbishop, Zumárraga (to whom Diego supposedly
appealed in 1531), or by his ecclesial successor (a known champion of
Guadalupan devotion in the 1550s), nor any documents left by the Spanish
viceroys and their coterie of colonial administrators, nor writings by the
prolific Dominican “defender of the Indians” Bartolomé de las Casas, nor the
fervent Franciscans on the lookout for dubious miracles—mentioned the report of
a Marian apparition at Tepayac or anywhere else in New Spain. Furthermore, the
data do not demonstrate a spike in native conversions, but rather depict an
evangelization process that was sporadic in nature: while baptism eventually
became widespread in many Indian communities, this was not necessarily
accompanied by a wholesale “conversion” of indigenous religious practice and
orientation (120, 198–199). ….
Then there is this
question and answer set:
Question: I have been challenged by a Catholic regarding the supposed miracle of "Our Lady of Guadalupe"
March 1, 2010
TBC Staff
Question: I have been challenged by a Catholic regarding the supposed miracle of
"Our Lady of Guadalupe" and the image of the Virgin Mary that
appeared on the cape of the peasant Juan Diego. They said that the endurance of
this account and Diego's canonization by John Paul II (July 31, 2002) is
evidence enough of the truth of this story. What do you say?
Response: Even those described as devout
Catholics have long questioned "Our Lady of Guadalupe." The head of
the Spanish Colony's Franciscans, Francisco de Bustamante read a sermon in 1556
before the Spanish Viceroy and the Royal Audience. Bustamante disparaged the
origins of the image and contradicted Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar's previous
sermon of two days earlier. Bustamante stated: "The devotion that has been
growing in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady, called of Guadalupe, in this city is
greatly harmful for the natives, because it makes them believe that the image
painted by Marcos the Indian is in any way miraculous" (Stafford Poole, Our
Lady of Guadalupe:The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol,
1531-1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). The name
"Marcos" may have meant Marcos Cipac de Aquino, an Aztec painter
active in Mexico when the icon first appeared.
The fourth viceroy of Mexico, Martín
de León, a Dominican, condemned the "cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe"
in 1611 as a syncretized worship of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin (Ibid.). Catholic missionary and anthropologist
Bernardino de Sahagún agreed with de León's judgment, writing that the Tepeyac
shrine, although popular, remained a concern because shrine visitors called the
Virgin of Guadalupe, "Tonantzin." Sahagún recognized that some
worshipers believed "Tonantzin" meant "Mother of God" in
the native Nauatl language, but he pointed out this was simply not true.
The existence of Juan Diego (the
Spanish equivalent of "John Doe") is also suspect. During the 1800s,
Mexico City Bishop Labastida appointed historian Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta,
another devout Catholic, to investigate.
Icazbalceta's confidential bishop's
report clearly doubted the existence of Juan Diego (Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta,
"Juan Diego y las Apariciones del Tepeyac," Mexico City:
Publicaciones para el Estudio Cientifico de las Religiones, 2002, pages 3-8).
David Brading of Cambridge University (among others) points out that the image
of the virgin was supposed to have been miraculously imprinted on Juan Diego's
cape in 1531 (Steinfels, "Beliefs: As sainthood approaches for Juan Diego,
some scholars call his story a 'pious fiction,''' New York Times, July
20, 2002). Nevertheless, the first recorded mention of the image of the Virgin
of Guadalupe doesn't appear until 1555 or 1556.
Further, Stafford Poole of Los
Angeles, another Catholic historian/priest, points out that
Juan Diego himself doesn't appear in any account until 1648 (Stevenson,
"Canonization Of First Indian Saint Draws Questions In Mexico,"
Associated Press, 7/1/02), the date when Miguel Sanchez, a Spanish theological
writer in Mexico, mentions Diego in his book The Apparitions of the Virgin
Mary.
Father Poole stated in Commonweal,
a Catholic biweekly, "More than forty
documents are said to attest to the reality of Juan Diego, yet not one of them
can withstand serious historical criticism'' (Vol. 129, June 14, 2002).
Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National
Symbol, 1531–1797
Hispanic American Historical Review (2019) 99 (1): 160-162.
Originally published in 1995 at
the height of the controversy surrounding
the beatification (1990) and eventual canonization (2002) of Juan Diego,
Stafford Poole's study of the historical evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl
for the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego in 1531 is now
available in a revised edition. As well as showing definitively that the
standard account of the apparition was an invention of the mid-seventeenth
century, Poole also makes a number of other important claims. Despite Bernardino
de Sahagún's statement that the Virgin of Tepeyac was dangerously pagan, she
was, Poole argues, not a syncretic product of a European Marian devotion and
the pre-Columbian cult of Tonantzin (if this word ever referred to a particular
Mesoamerican deity at all). Furthermore, the devotion to the apparition story
was largely restricted to the ethnically Spanish, not the indigenous
population. In other words, the real early modern Guadalupe was not the mestizo
mother of the nation that modern Mexican popular religion, the church
hierarchy, and the historiography have made her out to be.
As in the original edition, from which this revised edition differs only
in the addition of a new introduction, the occasional discussion of a new
document, and updated bibliographical references (including citations of the
important work of David Brading and Jeanette Favrot Peterson), the focus
throughout is on the precise evidence for the apparition and the relationship
between the cult and the rise of creole patriotism. This means that those
looking for an introduction to the life and times of the antiquarians and
ecclesiastics who helped build and then eventually began to critique the
apparition story should look elsewhere. The focus here is on the precise
content and significance of the surviving documentation.
When compared to the original edition, the main novelty is the new
introduction, a significant proportion of which is taken up with a demolition
of the work of Richard Nebel, Serge Gruzinski, Timothy Matovina, and a number
of Mexican theologians and ecclesiastics (including Cardinal Norberto Rivera
Carrera), whom Poole takes to task for either their blinkered piety or their
uncritical acceptance of standard narratives about the apparition. He also
dismisses as a “clumsy forgery” the Codex Escalada, a purportedly
sixteenth-century document signed by Sahagún and Antonio Valeriano (who many
claim wrote the Nican mopohua) brought to light by a Mexican Jesuit in
1993 (p. 14). In this jeremiad against historical credulity and devotional
works masquerading as serious history, Poole does, however, find time to praise
the work of Xavier Noguez, Ana María Sada Lambretón, and, to some extent, David
Brading.
If the book were written de novo today, it would no doubt take a fuller
account of the archival work of Cornelius Conover on Mexico City's
eighteenth-century cabildo and the recent reframing of the creole
patriotism debate by Peter Villella, Tamar Herzog, and me. Indeed, on the
latter subject, while Poole makes clear that the devotion was largely
restricted to those who claimed and were assigned an identity as Spaniards, the
book has a tendency to fixate on the role of a supposed nascent Mexican
identity in the formation of the apparition myth. This is a historical
development that Poole rather takes for granted, in contrast to the current
scholarly consensus that such a historiographical framework can all too easily
blend into teleology. While the creole authors discussed in the book certainly
celebrated the specific “Mexican” location of the apparition, echoing and
citing the words of Psalm 147 (“non fecit taliter omni nationi”), the
connection between any embryonic political identity and the gradual rise of the
Virgin of Tepeyac is not as self-evident as Poole makes out, which leads him to
neglect important countervailing evidence. For instance, he dismisses the
foundation of a Guadalupan congregation in Madrid by Philip V in 1743 as an
aberration: “Why a criollo devotion would have appealed to a Spanish king is
not clear, unless it was an attempt to blunt its political potential” (p. 5).
If the book were written today, it would probably also include discussions of
the devotion in the Philippines, where it had a significant following among
both the Novohispanic diaspora and peninsular missionaries like Gaspar de San
Agustín. Considering the historiographical context in which it was written,
however, the book as it stands is unimpeachable.
In sum, Poole's account remains required reading for all historians of
early modern and modern Mexican religion, society, and culture. This revised
edition represents the single most comprehensive and most thoroughly researched
work on the origin of the apparition story and the rise of what would become a
lodestar of Mexican and Chicano culture. This book is the product of a lifetime
of careful scholarship and is likely to last several more.
