Our Lady of Guadalupe

For the following account I am deeply indebted to a book by Grzegorz Górny and Janusz Rosikoń called Guadalupe Mysteries: Deciphering the Code. For details, see the Bookshelf.

In December 1531, things were not going well for the Catholic Church in newly-conquered Mexico. The Spanish had succeeded in stopping the human slaughter of the Aztecs – but getting them to believe in Christianity was a whole different matter.

One of the first converts, Cuauhtlatoa (which means “Talking Eagle” in the Aztec language) had taken the Christian name of Juan Diego. He was on his way to catechism classes (Sunday School for grown-ups) in Mexico City on 9^th December when he heard the sound of heavenly music coming from the top of a hill called Tepeyac. There he met a beautiful woman who told him to go and ask the local bishop for permission to build a chapel at the bottom of the hill.

Inevitably Bishop Juan de Zumárraga was not impressed with this request out of the blue. The woman met Juan Diego a few days later on the 12^th December, and asked him how the chapel project was going. Knowing what had transpired, she then told him to climb the hill again and pick some flowers from the top to take to the bishop. Juan was amazed to find that despite the season and the frost on the ground, there were indeed flowers growing at the top of the hill – and they were of an unfamiliar type. The woman helped Juan to arrange the flowers in his Aztec cloak or “tilma”, and sent him on to the bishop.

This visit went a bit differently than the last one.

On arrival, Juan opened his tilma to show the bishop the flowers. They fell to the ground and the bishop was astonished to see his own favourite Castilian Roses, native to Spain. But all the other people present were fixated on Juan’s tilma, for an image had miraculously formed upon it.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe changed the course of history in Mexico, and indeed, the whole world. Within six years, nine million Indians had renounced their former beliefs and practices and become Christians.

What the Spanish did not realise at the time was that the image was specifically addressed to people of the Aztec culture. The Aztecs used written communications called “pictograms”, diagrams with symbols expressing a message. This image showed Mary the mother of Jesus with Mexican features. All Aztec gods were depicted wearing masks, so being maskless, Mary must be a human, not a god. Standing on the moon and covering the sun, she was clearly greater than their own sun and moon gods, but her eyes are downcast in prayer, showing that she herself acknowledges a greater God. Her hair is loose, signifying that she is a virgin, but the black band round her waist shows she is pregnant. Her dress is adorned with flowers in arrangements that matched the Aztec pictogram system. The flower over her womb depicted perfection and transcendence. Suddenly, the whole Christian belief system snapped into focus for them.

But that was not the end of the story.

The image still exists in the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, which is visited annually by 20 million pilgrims – the global number one pilgrimage destination. That alone is pretty remarkable since the Aztec tilmas were made from agave thread, which typically only lasted 20-40 years before falling to pieces. Something supernatural is holding this tilma together.

Scientists who tried to analyse the pigments used for the painting of the image were completely baffled when they found that there is no paint pigment on the material at all. It looks different from different viewing angles, an optical effect known as diffraction. Still today, after four centuries of study, scientists have no idea how the image was formed – or how it endures.

Our Lady’s mantle shows stars, which look at first sight as if they have been placed at random. Closer study however shows that they form a mirror image of the arrangement of stars over Mexico City on 12^th December 1531.

The image’s eyes, although downcast, are not entirely closed and much investigation of them has occurred in the last few years. The magnified images of the eyes appear to show the reflected outlines of people, and it is suggested that these were the people who were present in the bishop’s residence as the image on the tilma was revealed.

Finally, a stethoscope held over the womb area of the image registered heartbeats at the same rate as a normal baby in the womb.

So the image was not just for the Aztecs of the sixteenth century but, guided by modern scientific investigations, is also for us too.

What does all this mean for us?

Well, first off, see how effortlessly heaven achieved the conversion of the Aztec peoples, a process that eventually led to the Christianisation of the whole of native Central and South America. A set of encounters over four days paved the way for hundreds of millions of converts to Christianity.

Secondly, note that in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe we have an example of an “acheiropoieton”: an image not made by human hands. There is a second example of such an image – the Shroud of Turin, which has interesting parallels with the Guadalupe image. Hopefully we’ll look into that in a future article.

Thirdly, observe how the image fulfils Holy Scripture in the Book of Revelation:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. Rv 12:1

The image does show Mary clothed with the sun, and standing on the moon, but where are the twelve stars around her head? If one extends the star map indicated by the visible stars on the cloak, there is an extra constellation added around the head of the image: the Northern Crown Constellation (Corona Borealis). This, when combined with several stars from the constellation of Boötes does indeed make a crown of twelve stars: see https://theheavensdeclare.net/stones-of-a-crown/.

Whoever said that everything in Revelation had to occur right at the End of the Age?