{"id":55731,"date":"2025-12-10T06:31:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T04:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.omnesmag.com\/?p=55731"},"modified":"2025-11-28T15:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T13:03:12","slug":"guadalupe-the-heart-of-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omnesmag.com\/en\/foco\/guadalupe-el-corazon-de-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Guadalupe: the heart of Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 12 is a very important date for Mexico and the entire American continent: the Marian apparitions of Guadalupe (1531).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is even a saying: a Mexican may not be Christian, but he is undoubtedly a devotee of Guadalupe. Let's try to understand why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The context<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Mexicas, also known as the Aztecs, had dominated some three hundred tribes and peoples in the Mesoamerican region. The Spanish were impressed by their large cities, aqueducts, water canalization systems, and political organization, but above all by the precision with which the Mexicas observed and recorded celestial movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This precise knowledge of astronomy was related to their religious conception of the cosmos. For them, everything was sacred, and the balance of the universe was based on a series of fundamental rituals, including human sacrifices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The diverse Mexica pantheon included deities such as Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Coatlicue, and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huitzilopochtli was the main deity: linked to the sun and war, he was depicted as a fierce being. The Mexicas believed that, in order for the sun to rise each morning, it was necessary to feed Huitzilopochtli with the blood and entrails of human sacrifice victims, so that the god would not devour the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huitzilopochtli's mother (and \u00abcollective\u00bb mother) was Coatlicue, which in Nahuatl means \u00abclothed in serpents.\u00bb In Nahua mythology (a term that defines all peoples who speak the Nahuatl language, including the Mexicas), the snake is a symbol of fertility, and Coatlicue was an ambivalent deity: mother of the earth and living beings on the one hand, destroyer on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huitzilopochtli had his main temple where Mexico City's cathedral now stands, in the Z\u00f3calo. His mother Coatlicue, on the other hand, probably had hers on a hill called Tepeyac.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the fall of Tenochtitl\u00e1n in 1521, brought about not only by the Spanish but also by other Nahua peoples opposed to the Mexicas and allied with the Europeans to defeat their rulers, a period began for the Mexicas that, in Nahuatl, is called nepantla: \u00abbeing in the middle.\u00bb In fact, they felt \u00absuspended,\u00bb without roots and without their cultural and religious reference points. With the temples destroyed and the impossibility of continuing human sacrifices, the possibility of the world moving forward also came to a halt for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arrival of the Spanish was interpreted as the end of the Fifth Sun. The Mexicas believed, in fact, that the history of the universe was divided into five Suns (Tonatiuh), each of which was destined to end in catastrophe. The \u00ablight-skinned men from the east\u00bb coincided with the return of the god Quetzalcoatl, and their weapons, horses, epidemics, and the fall of Tenochtitl\u00e1n marked precisely the end of the era of the Fifth Sun, that is, of their sacred, political, and cosmic order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the sun continued to rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mother arrives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In those dramatic times, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, a Nahua convert to Christianity, of noble but poor origin, was walking at dawn on the slopes of Tepeyac Hill, the same place where the Nahua mother goddess Coatlicue (or, in any case, a female deity called Tonantzin, \u00abour beloved mother,\u00bb which could be a title attributed to Coatlicue), he heard a sweet woman's voice calling him in Nahuatl, using a poetic and ritualistic register (Nahuatl is an extremely complex language with different colloquial registers among speakers, depending on social class or degree of affection or kinship).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman named him Juandiegotzin (like saying: Juandieguito) and addressed him with terms of endearment such as noicnocahuatzin, noconetzin (\u00abmy beloved, my little son\u00bb), delicate linguistic forms, typically Mexica, which we find today in Mexican Spanish (hijito, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juan Diego did not immediately understand who she was, because the mestizo features of this female figure did not correspond to the image of the Virgin that the Spanish missionaries had shown him. He understood when the woman, dressed like a Nahua princess, introduced herself as the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of the true God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The apparitions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For a detailed reconstruction of the events, I invite you to read Nican Mopohua, the chronicle written in Nahuatl around 1550 by Antonio Valeriano. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here we will only give a chronological summary of the five apparitions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n