Part One: Mythology and Ritual of the Goddess and Her Son
Coatlicue (kwat-LEEK-way) was the Great Mother Goddess of the Aztecs (or Mexica, as they called themselves). She gave birth to the moon, the stars and the sun.
Coatlicue maintained a shrine on the top of Coatepec (Snake Mountain). One day, as she was sweeping, a ball of feathers descended from the heavens, and when she tucked it into her belt it miraculously impregnated her. The resulting child was the solar war god Huitzilopochtli.
However, her outraged daughter Coyolxauhqui and her sons the Huitznahua planned to kill her. The plot came unstuck when one of the Huitznahua lost heart and warned the still unborn Huitzilopochtli. Rising to his mother’s defense, he sprang from the womb fully-grown and armed and swiftly defeated his siblings (who became the stars) and Coyolxauhqui, whose head he cut off and threw into the sky to become the moon.
The Aztecs commemorated this battle at (what the Spaniards would later call) the Templo Mayor in their capital of Tenochtitlan (site of the future Mexico City). The giant pyramid was covered in sculptures of snakes and a relief at its base displayed the dismembered Coyolxauhqui. Some say that this myth depicts the daily birth of the sun and the consequent “destruction” of the moon and stars as the sun replaces them in the sky. The dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui also suggests the moon’s various phases as it waxes and wanes as well as its disappearance between cycles.
Much of the myth’s meaning turns on the opposition between male sun and female moon. Huitzilopochtli defends his mother while Coyolxauhqui betrays her; he stands alone bravely, while she acts only with many followers. He vows to defend Coatlicue while he is still in her womb. His birth from one female (conceived without any male parent) precedes his destruction of another female. A female gives him birth; he takes a female life.
But the Aztecs knew that with the coming of night Huitzilopochtli would also be metaphorically destroyed, swallowed by the female earth. This further reversal (he destroys a female and is then destroyed by one) also suggests the nature of cosmic reality, which both creates and destroys life. When the sun is at its midday height (suggested by his temple at the top of the pyramid), the moon will be in the land of the dead. Just as the coming of the night would reverse those positions, they believed that their own individual vitality – and their empire – would eventually perish in the cyclic flux of the cosmos, only to be reborn.
So the killing of Coyolxauhqui paradoxically guaranteed the rebirth of Huitzilopochtli and the continuation of the cosmic cycle of life, just as the sacrifice of captured warriors at his temple and the rolling of their dead bodies down the pyramid to the stone of Coyolxauhqui at the base was seen as vital to the continuation of life and the life of the sun. Both slaves and prisoners were regularly sacrificed in these grizzly rituals, their hearts torn out of their living bodies and offered to the sun, and their bodies (like that of Coyolxauhqui) hurled down the long temple steps to the underworld.
The Aztecs also performed many sacrifices to Coatlicue, who was also known as Toci, “our grand-mother” and Cihuacoatl, “the lady of the serpent”. She was monstrous – part animal, part human and part deity – but also victim of her children’s jealously. Almost every aspect of her appearance depicted sacrifice, as we will see.
She represented birth, death and rebirth – reality in its starkest form. She both consumed and regenerated life. In her body lived the greatest paradoxes: nourishment and famine, sacred and profane, ecstasy and horror. To the Mexica, life and death were not opposites; rather, birth and death were opposites, and both were aspects of life.
All this came together in the notion of the necessary, continuing sacrifice of the outmoded for the greater purpose of the new. As mythologist Mercea Eliade put it:
Generation, death, and regeneration were understood as the three moments of one and the same mystery, and the entire spiritual effort of archaic man went to show that there must be no caesuras between these moments...The movement, the regeneration continues perpetually.
She was the insatiable monster who consumed everything that lived. In this regard, she had few parallels with the compassionate mother goddess of Christianity. In all of world mythology few deities, perhaps only India’s Kali, share the terrifying fullness of Coatlicue.
Part Two: History of a Statue
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. – Will Durant
The conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men encountered a terribly complex reality when they invaded Mexico in 1519.
On one level, Huitzilopochtli symbolized the creative, regenerative power of the world of the spirit. Sacrifices to him provided the food that might ensure the daily rebirth of the sun, whose creating life for man must be reciprocated by man’s providing life for it. The Aztec / Mexica called themselves the “People of the Sun”, and they (or at least their leaders) believed they had a divinely imposed responsibility to perform that alchemy. They needed to feed him in the form of human hearts and blood. If they did not constantly sacrifice lives – thousands of them, according to the Spaniards – he would desert them.
Perhaps it had not always been this way. Throughout Mesoamerica, the bleeding of ears, tongues, and genital organs by members of the priesthood had been a daily ritual occurrence, sometimes reaching ghastly proportions, but always with the same ritual intentions: ensuring the movement of the great cosmic wheels of life. The ritual year followed a solar calendar with eighteen months, each of these 20-day periods marked by elaborate public ceremonies celebrating stages in the agricultural cycle. Since each of these ceremonies celebrated fertility, sacrifice played a key role. Roberta and Peter Markman, inMasks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica, write:
...to understand human sacrifice in Mesoamerican terms, we must see it as they did...“to sacrifice an image of the god to the god.” A vital part of the ritual, therefore, involved a symbolic transformation of the sacrificial victim into the god...metaphorically possible because man was both spirit and matter and could, through ritual, “become” spirit.” Accordingly, not only was the correct godly attire important, but also the sex, age, physical condition, and proper emotional attitude of the deity impersonator…the victim became the god to whom he was sacrificed, costume and the physical body functioning as the ritual mask in making the inner reality outer, spiritualizing the physical...the “mask” of the physical body was removed, leaving the spirit to travel to its proper home, the realm of the gods...A prodigious amount of time, energy and wealth was expended in ceremonial activities...human sacrifice was practiced on a scale not even approached by any other ritual system in the history of the world.
The harvest festival of Ochpaniztli (”Sweeping of the Roads”) symbolized the clearing of the way for the arrival of the fertility gods. It celebrated both the earth’s provision of sustenance and the return of the dead stalks to the earth to proceed the renewal of life in the spring. A woman was selected (we don’t know if she volunteered) to represent Coatlicue /Toci. Priests purified her, gave her the goddess’ name and kept her in a cage for a month to ensure her abstention from sin. Then, prior to the sacrifice, she was expected to dance so that all could worship her as a divinity, transformed from matter to spirit.
After her death, priests removed most of her skin and placed it upon a man appointed for the purpose to represent the goddess a second time. Later, he placed this skin regalia on a straw figure, transforming it into Toci. Each change marked a stage in the cyclic movement of the ripened corn from earth to human and back to earth, from the heart of the cosmic realm into the natural world.
A related goddess, Mictēcacihuātl (”Lady of the Dead”), was consort of Mictlāntēcutli, god of the dead and ruler of Mictlān, the lowest level of the underworld. Her role was to watch over the bones of the dead and preside over their festivals. Having been sacrificed as an infant, she was represented with a flayed body and with jaw agape to swallow the stars during the day. We will meet her modern incarnation later.
But here we move from archeology and religion into history. Ptolemy Tompkins writes:
Long before the arrival of Cortés, Mesoamerican civilization had grown materially beyond the bounds of the religious worldview that the geniuses of this civilization had designed to validate and direct it...The populace would now be told, instead of shown, that the gods existed, and the pyramids and other sacred structures no longer served as entrances to the supernatural realms but instead as barriers to them...The Earth was no longer a living reservoir of collaborative spiritual energies but an ever hungry reptile whose many mouths led nowhere.
Myth and ritual had become literalized. The growth of a massive, authoritarian – even fascist – national state had forced an inevitable shift in the idea of sacrifice from the symbolic to the literal, from a deeply meaningful (if terribly cruel) public ritual to a state ceremony in which the political implications vastly outweighed its original world-sustaining intention. Whereas the community had originally existed as an integral part of a religious cosmos, now religion was constructed to serve the aims of the state.
No one would argue that human sacrifice in Mexico shouldn’t have ended. However, I caution readers to avoid slipping into the easy position of demonizing the Aztecs as unique, because Catholicism and its Inquisition were serving the Spanish empire at precisely the same time in a very similar manner. Even 400 years later, the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen would write:
Behold, a ram caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
By this time, Huitzilopochtli symbolized not so much the sun as the military might of the Aztec state, very much as the Spaniards’ Santiago Matamoros – “Killer of Moors” – served them. While warfare provided captives for the divinely required sacrifices, it was also a means to extend the dominions under Aztec sway. Human sacrifice had taken on its central role in Aztec society precisely because it met both mythic and political needs. Now it was a 16th-century equivalent of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, or the auto-de-fe sacrifices occurring at that precise moment in Madrid’s Plaza Major.
The Spaniards gaped in astonishment at the sight of Tenochtitlan, the fabulous Aztec capital, five times as large as London, perhaps the largest and wealthiest city in the world (pictured below). Cortés admitted that the Emperor Moctezuma “…had a palace in the town of such a kind, and so marvelous, that it seems to me almost impossible to describe its beauty and magnificence…there is nothing like it in Spain.”
The only thing that equaled the awe they felt viewing these marvels was the horror they experienced watching the mass sacrifices, with hearts torn out and bloody, headless bodies being hurled down the steps of the pyramid.
Sacrifice took on a dual meaning for a second time. Human values dictated that the appalling spectacle must end. But the Spaniards (who within 30 years would import the Inquisition to Mexico) had their own reasons. They aspired to both confirm their military conquest (attained only with the aid of tribes who hated the Aztecs) and to replace the indigenous paganism with the one true faith. So they eradicated both the old rituals and the magnificent places where they occurred. After the final victory (which occurred two years later, precisely on August 13th), they destroyed the great buildings, using the stones to build a new capital city, and buried the idols. Their new cathedral arose atop the ruins of the Templo Mayor, which wouldn’t be rediscovered until 1978.
But some of these ancient sacred places retained their sense of mystery. Understanding this, the Spaniards chose the hill of Tonantzin-Coatlicue, which used to house a formidable statue of the Goddess, to establish the cathedral of the Lady of Guadalupe, whose image had appeared to a peasant in 1531. Only with such transposition of deities could the Spanish conquistadores manage to banish the Mexica cult of the terrible mother. Raphael Jesus Gonzalez writes:
Some Christian beliefs were similar to the ancient ones: the Sun had demanded bleeding hearts torn from sacrificial victims to pay for life; God the Father required the bloody sacrifice of his only Son to pay for salvation. Coatlicue had conceived Huitzilopochtli without intercourse; the virgin Mary had also miraculously conceived Jesus. The Indians ate the “flesh of the god’’ in a piece of amaranth dough; Christians ate the flesh of Christ in a piece of unleavened bread.
But some of the Christian beliefs were entirely new to the natives, such as the notion of a place where the dead went as either reward or punishment for how they had lived their lives: a happy heaven, with angels, saints, and gods (as they perceived the Trinity) and a painful hell, full of demons and evildoers. The new Mother of God was not terrible, as Coatlicue was, but sweet and demure as she stood on the black obsidian moon in front of the sun and wore the starry night sky for her cloak. Tonantzin, Mother of Us All, was now called Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Then followed two and a half centuries: a new nation; the blending of two races; massive exploitation of natural resources; urban development; cultural genocide; and the flowering of a profoundly syncretistic Catholic faith.
The conquered people merged their old symbols with those of the conquerors. The indigenous cross of the four cardinal points became the Christian cross. The Tree of Life came to refer to the Garden of Eden as well and eventually gave rise to the beautiful clay árboles de la vida with birds on flowering branches that we know today. The amaranth-dough offerings were replaced by the popular wheat pan de muerto (bread of the dead).
This faith was tested on August 13, 1790 – the anniversary of the collapse of Tenochtitlan – when workers unearthed a colossal statue near the site of the old Templo Mayor during the repaving of Mexico City’s Zocalo, or public square. Coatlicue, with her skirt of serpents and necklace of skulls, saw the light of day for the first time in 269 years.
The colonial authorities placed her among their collection of plaster replicas of Greco-Roman works. But soon they decided that in comparison, the Aztec sculpture was a vulgar insult to the idea of beauty. More importantly, they realized that Coatlicue was a serious threat to another monolith: Catholicism itself. The attraction of the old religion had never died, and the “horrible effigy” was reburied.
In 1803, at the request of the archaeologist Alexander Humboldt, it was dug up again. He made a cast, which he displayed in London. But church authorities still considered it too repulsive – or too threatening – for public display, and the sculpture was soon reburied again. Bishop Benito Marin wrote:
The Indians, who observe all the monuments of Europeans art with such stupid indifference, came with a lively curiosity to contemplate their famous statue. At first it was thought that they were moved to this by national pride...Nonetheless, in their frequent visits there was some secret religious motive. It was thus essential to prohibit their access absolutely; but their fanatical enthusiasm and their incredible cunning made a mockery of this decision. They watched for moments when the patio would be empty of (white) people...Then they would take advantage of the silence that reigns in this home of the Muses. They would leave their towers and hurry to adore their Goddess Teoyaomiqui (Coatlique). A thousand times the beadles, returning from outside, caught the Indians by surprise, some on their knees, others prostrate before the statue, and holding in their hands burning candles and other offerings of the sort their elders used to present to their idols. And these things which were done and later observed with care by many grave and learned persons…led to once more placing the statue beneath the ground.
Twenty years later, Mexico had won its independence. Its leaders, reflecting new attitudes about the past and a new sense of the nation, dug Coatlicue up yet again.
But they kept her hidden in a corner of the university, behind a screen. Later she took up a more visible location, as an object of scientific and historic study. In 1879, she was placed in the garden of the new National Museum of Anthropology. Even then, however, Coatlicue was not open to public view. She only attained her current stature as a world-class work of art when the new museum building opened in 1964.
Today she has lost none of her magnetism.
Part Three – We are Astonished
Standing today in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Coatlicue amazes us first by her sheer size. The colossal statue is some three meters high and 1.5 broad and weighs several tons. Soon, emotions arise: one observer marvels at the sculptural craftsmanship, while another is repulsed at the violent images that configure her body, because we are in the presence of the goddess in her most terrible form.
She is dressed in the skin of a flayed woman. In the front, two large snakes representing flowing blood form her hideous face. Her necklace holds severed hands and hearts and a large skull pendant. Her skirt is composed of entwined snakes, while her hands and feet have large claws that she uses to rip human corpses and eat them. Her legs are covered in ornamental regalia with geometric motifs. A cluster of eagle plumes lead to feet sculpted to form a monstrous motif with stylized eyes and fanged talons.
At her back, her hair hangs down in 13 tresses symbolizing the 13 Aztec months and heavens. Her shoulders, feet and elbows are depicted as fanged monsters. The hands are snakes that mimic those of the head and appear to be claws when viewed from the front. The human skull fastened to the belt in the center of her back attaches to two layers of straps made in the likeness of rattlesnake ends.
Mystery upon mystery: the revolting imagery is somewhat balanced by her human breasts, which sag in a manner that suggests she has given birth and nourished children. And the serpent lodged between her legs: does it indicate that she is also a he? How much more impact would the statue (like those of Greek antiquity) have had when painted – as it originally was – with bright colors?
…as it did 400 years ago, the statue both attracts and repels us, producing both seduction and horror...paralyzes our sight. The exact nature of the sensation that overcomes us in this moment of stillness is unimportant: admiration, horror, enthusiasm, curiosity. Without ceasing to be what we see, the work of art once more reveals itself as that which lies beyond what we see…a concept turned to stone. If the concept is one of terror – in order to create, the earth must devour – the form through which it is expressed is an enigma: each attribute of the deity…is represented in realistic style, yet the totality is an abstraction. The Coatlicue is at the same time a charade, a syllogism, and a presence that condenses within it a mysterium tremendum.
…after you have seen her, it is unthinkable that the mother of the gods could be expressed in any other way. There is nothing warm or consoling about her. She does not invite caresses, and she is wholly absorbed in her own affairs: imperturbable and final. She is death, and out of her womb there flows an abundant life.
…the earth, but also the sun, moon, spring, rain, light, life, death, the necessity of human sacrifice, humanity, the gods, the heavens, and the supreme creator: the dual principle. Further it represents the stars, Venus and...Mictlantecutli, the Lord of the Night and the World of the Dead. His is the realm to which the sun retires to die in the evening and wage its battle with the stars to rise again the following day. Coatlicue, then, is a complete view of the cosmos carved in stone…
Paz was describing the reciprocal relations between the worlds:
The function of art is to open the doors that connect us to the other side of reality…Movement is dance, the dance is a play, and the play is the war of creation and destruction. Mankind is not at the center of this game…tied to the turning cosmic wheel, (he) is a toy in this cruel game played by the gods, a game that revolves around the single obsessive theme of creative sacrifice. Nevertheless, it is precisely for this reason that mankind is the axis of the universe; each and every act, all of his works, are rituals or prayers that nourish the hungry gods. Without human blood, life would cease to flow and the universe would come to a halt.
This view of the world and of mankind is the exact opposite of our modern conception, which sees nature as an enormous reservoir of energy and resources that was given to humans to dominate and exploit…The civilization of Mesoamerica is an example of the reconciliation of man with nature, even with its more terrifying aspects.
We view her amid the great crowds in the cool, refined atmosphere of one of the world’s great museums. Schoolchildren titter; adolescents pose with her; tourists, retreating to their audio guides, move on. Few take the time to feel this profoundly disturbing presence: disturbing because of the obvious horror implied. But she is equally disturbing because of the deep sorrow and longing that might also arise, and the hunger for a life in which such a ritual imagination might still flourish. She was twice reburied for these reasons. Does she still live?
Part Four: Coatlique and Guadalupe
Sixty years after the conquest and three generations after the imposition of Christianity, Dominican friar Diego Durán complained:
These wretched Indians…On one hand they believe in God, and on the other they worship idols. They practice their ancient superstitions and rites and mix one with the other…They show off the god they are adoring right in front of us in the ancient manner. They chant the songs which the elders bequeathed to them especially for that purpose…They sing these things when there is no one around who understands, but, as soon as a person appears who might understand, they change their tune and sing the song made up for Saint Francis with a hallelujah at the end, all to cover up their unrighteousness – interchanging religious themes with pagan gods.
Clearly, nearly 450 years later, their mythic vision and (in many areas) ritual practices have been entrenched for so long that Catholicism can never entirely destroy or replace them. For much of the following I am indebted to Masks of the Spirit and to Alan Watts.
There were profound differences in the purposes of ritual within the two systems. Christianity saw an unbridgeable gulf between man in this world and God in the heavens. Through death, the individual might reach the godhead, but God was not present in this fallen world.
In the indigenous vision, one need only don the mask in the proper ritual context to allow the omnipresent world of spirit to emerge into this one, which was not only not fallen; it was the visual manifestation of the underlying spirit world. Indigenous ritual focused on humanity’s reciprocation for the creation and sustenance of life by the world of the spirit.
Christianity, said Watts, proposed that good might ultimately exist without evil, pleasure without pain, and light without darkness. But indigenous paganism conceived of unity as the joining of opposed qualities and was always aware of the simultaneous existence of both halves of those pairs of opposites. So there could be no single, universal, monolithic truth. Still, to accept the new religion (superficially at least), they had only to reject one major ritual custom, that is, to change from actual human sacrifice for the maintenance of the social-cosmic order to symbolic human sacrifice on the cross.
But, we imagine, they experienced no feeling of guilt, sadness, or repentance in connection with that sacrificial death. To the Indian, it, like their earlier rites, was a reciprocal necessity in the cyclical flux constituting the eternal and universal order of things. Death was necessary so that rebirth might occur. Thus, the image of sacrifice might be similar, but its meaning was profoundly different. Christianity came to Mexico in the form of syncretism rather than as conversion. Christian forms were adapted but the indigenous structure of spiritual thought – and the longing for a meaningful cosmos – remained intact.
In 1790, as I wrote above, Indians became so enamored of the newly discovered Coatlicue statue that the authorities had it reburied – twice – even though much of her essence as the symbolic giver and nourisher of life had long been assimilated to the image of Guadalupe, who Mexicans honor far more extensively than Father, Son or Holy Spirit. She stands before the worshippers, “...the Virgin alone without even the Christ Child in her arms”.
Ironically, Guadalupe was originally associated with the Moorish invasion of Spain, translating as “Valley of the Wolf”. Guada comes from the Arabic for river (wadi). The shrine to the Black Madonna of Guadalupe was the most important Marian shrine in Spain’s Extremadura, the region that produced Cortés and most of the other conquistadores.
Ten years after the conquest, the Virgin revealed herself to the Indian Juan Diego. Her image, appearing on his cactus fiber cloak, appealed immediately to both conquerors and conquered. The Spaniards saw in it a confirmation of their Marian devotions coupled to their mandate to discover and subjugate the Americas. They recognized their Virgin Madonna standing between the horns of a bull. The “Indios” saw her as the goddess who could block the rays of the sun and stand on the moon. She wears a dress adorned with flowers of the region and her waist sash indicates that she is pregnant. She is brown and mestizo, neither Indio nor European – the first Mexican.
Her image remains the central focus of veneration for Mexican Catholics, a symbol of the Mexican nation and a special protector of Native Americans. On December 12th, her feast day, up to six million people process past her image in the Cathedral. As I mentioned above, the Spaniards built it where she first appeared. Even today many still worship her as Tonantzin.
The two deities share certain characteristics. Mary was the virgin mother of Christ, while Coatlicue bore Huitzilopochtli without a male. The people invoked both as “our Holy mother.” Guadalupe’s black sash was worn by Coatlicue during her pregnancy with Huitzilopochtli. Their similarities, however, cannot obscure significant differences. While Guadalupe is associated with the Christian ideals of love and mercy, Coatlicue’s dual nature made her both creator and destroyer of life.
The psyche seeks completion, and our ancestors saw it in certain mythic images. When historical circumstances destroy those visions, we project their unacknowledged aspects onto separate images. Over many centuries, the patriarchal conquerors of ancient Greece gradually divided the images of the Great Goddess. Aphrodite and Athena had once been aspects of a single deity. As I write in my book,
Western man divided the primal unity of the indigenous soul into irreconcilable opposites: mind/ body; male/female; white/black; culture/nature; and ultimately, Christ and the Devil. Gone was the memory that in the great cycle of existence darkness or chaos is the necessary precondition for rebirth. Two interdependent aspects of a polarity, symbolized by Dionysus and Apollo, became opposites that excluded each other. Eventually, both Dionysus and his mother were banished. First came the split of female goddesses and the male godhead, then the split of the male sun god Apollo from his dark half-brother. Finally, writes Arthur Evans, “Christians took the last version of Dionysus as it was developed by paganism and split it in two.” They assigned the “good” traits (as well as many of Apollo’s characteristics) to Christ and the “bad” traits to the Devil.
Something similar happened to Mexico’s Great Mother Goddess, and more than once. The Aztec elites had overlaid their masculine, warrior-god rituals above the older, goddess-centered religions, which, beneath the surface, still prevailed among the land-based peasantry. Now the Spanish were attempting something similar, replacing the terrible (but mythologically complete) Coatlicue with the compassionate and beautiful (but somewhat one-dimensional) Guadalupe. But Coatlicue’s breasts symbolized that she was nurturer as well as devourer. The Spanish located her nurturing aspects in Guadalupe, but where did her destructive aspects go?
Mexican culture took the Spanish concept of machismo to the extreme, and with it the denigration of certain characteristics associated with the female. From this came popular culture’s virgin / whore dichotomy. Men saw women either as stereotypically chaste, silent and obedient, or as whores, putas, embodiments of La Chingada, “the “fucked one.” Hence some Mexican expressions: ¡Vete a la chingagda! (Go to hell!); ¡Me lleva la Chingada! (”I’m fucked!”); ¡Hijo de la chingada! (Son of a bitch!); and ¡Hijo de la grande puta! (Son of the great whore!)
In folk culture, some of Coatlicue’s darker aspects may have been transferred to the figures of the “weeping woman”, La LLorona (about whom I wrote here) and La Malinche (Malintzin, the Indian woman who translated for Cortés and bore his child). Malinche has been understood in various and often conflicting aspects, as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or simply as symbolic mother of the new Mexican people. Feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua writes:
…la Chingada - the fucked one. She has become the bad word that passes a dozen times a day from the lips of Chicanos. Whore, prostitute, the woman who sold out her people to the Spaniards are epithets Chicanos spit out with contempt.
And what about her son? In Mexican liturgical art, unlike the graceful Guadalupe, Jesus suffers more than his European predecessors. In many churches, he stares directly at the viewer from the cross, in utter agony, covered with blood, reminding us of the fundamental importance of blood, death and sacrifice in the old religion, reminding us of our complicity in his and its demise.
Today, many Chicanas, following Anzaldua’s example, have reframed the meaning of Coatlicue in cultural forms that celebrate her original fullness. Their welcoming the return of the Goddess in her fullness can be an inspiration to us all.
And in many Indian villages, the Concheros (old-time ritual dancers) continue to dance and to pray, “May our ancient religion endure, as it has from the beginning to the end of all things.” These words are repeated – in a variety of ritual actions – by indigenous groups throughout rural Mexico. There, the Goddess may have taken on new names, but she has never left.
Part Five: La Catrina and Her Friends
It is a most sincere truth
that this adage makes us see:
only one who was never born
can never a death’s-head be. – Mexican Corrido (folk song)
The worship of Mexico’s Great Mother Goddess is still alive. As I have explained, she reappeared in the 16th century as Guadalupe, then as the rediscovered Coatlique and later in folklore as La LLorona, the Weeping Woman. In the early 20th century, during the Mexican Revolution, she took on yet another form, this time in popular culture: La Catrina, the ironically humorous image we associate with Dia De Los Muertos, Day of the Dead.
One great change that developed in the colonial period is that peculiar note of humor, whimsy, irony, and irreverence that informs the Day of the Dead as it has come to us and which gives it its peculiarly Mexican flavor. Nowhere is it recorded, to my knowledge, that humor or irreverence about death had a place in indigenous Mexican sensibility, but in medieval and renaissance Spain it did…(It) informed the medieval Feast of Fools…and not suppressed until the Counter-Reformation, and even then survived in the Feast of Carnaval (carne vale, farewell to flesh)…all social hierarchy is leveled and nothing is beyond levity, criticism, and ridicule. And what greater leveler of hierarchies, the memento mori tradition reminds us, than Death?
At some point, Mexican peasants began to place skull-shaped sugar confections on their altars for the dead. They added toy skeletons and little skeleton dolls depicting every station of social life and common activity from canonization to defecation. With brightly painted clay skulls adorning the altars, they made death itself somewhat less fearful and its pain somewhat less sharp. And they created “calaveras” – funny, often scurrilous verses that commented on current events and lampooned prominent ecclesias-tical and political figures (calavera means “skull” but also “empty-headed fool”). Artists such as José Posada produced graphic images of skeletons, such as the lady Catrina.
But Catrina is much more than a comic icon. González suggests that we examine the central section of Diego Rivera’s magnificent mural “Sunday Dream in the Alameda Park” (housed in Mexico City’s Museo Mural Diego Rivera). Here, the Calavera Catrina rests her left hand on Posada’s arm and holds the hand of Rivera (depicted as a young boy) with her right. Frida Kahlo, his nursemaid, stands behind, her hand on his shoulder.
The Calavera Catrina is the focus around which the entire composition pivots...the most pertinent of post-colonial Mexico’s memento mori icons. In Posada’s engraving, only the grimacing skull is portrayed, and she wears the ostentatious hat of lace, velvet flowers and ostrich plumes favored by the women of the newly empowered middle-class…The adjective catrín means elegantly dressed but with a strong suggestion of affectation.
In Rivera’s mural she is more; she is Coatlicue, but dressed all in white, almost bridal. This is accented by Posada’s formal black Sunday attire so that the pair make a couple such as might adorn a wedding cake. As Death she is united to Life and she wears as a stole or boa the God of Life, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, and...she wears embossed on the buckle of her belt the glyph ollin, Movement, designation of the Fifth Universe, the present world. This Life-Death duality is further reinforced by the figure of the boy Rivera who has in his pockets a snake and a frog, pre-Hispanic symbols of generation and regeneration, and he holds an umbrella whose handle is the head of a vulture, a bird associated with death, while Frida, his nursemaid, holds the yin-yang image between the figures of Diego and Doña Calavera. These are deeply significant images, writes González, who reminds us that
…in the pre-Hispanic cosmology Life and Death are not only indivisibly united but equal as indeed they are in the psychological paradox of Eros and Thanatos; to deny one is to deny the other…(but here) the plumed serpent, god of life, hangs limp and dead about the neck of the lively figure of Death.
This is the image, Rivera’s dream seems to say, of the modern world; Coatlicue is robbed of her terrible majesty and appears as a somewhat commonplace, over-dressed matron of the bourgeoisie. Life hangs impotent and limp about her neck…If I have paused so long on one particular work, it is to give evidence that the Mexican cult of death is not merely a quaint folk custom but informs high art to the very present. And art is not merely a precious amenity but intensifies perception and brings into consciousness and into the social context the truths, intuitions, concerns of the human condition which we may ignore only at great risk.
The image catapults us into the present moment, back into a demythologized world (Joseph Campbell’s phrase) in which men – uninitiated men who cannot grieve – continue to drive us all toward an apoca-lyptic future (apocalypse: to drop the veil). And it leads González to note the fascination in the past 30 years with Dia De Los Muertos among gringos:
…the industrial age, which Mexico did not enter until late in the nineteenth century, was born of the Reformation. Protestantism, with its suspicion and distrust of the body…attempted to suppress the erotic and, corollary to this, made death banal.
Having rid Christianity of the Goddess, Protestantism then removed the corpus, the body of Christ, from the cross itself. Not only did it deny Christ his mother, but it also took away his humanity. And without the body, the cross upon which he suffered and died became a purely abstract, dehumanized – and depotentiated – symbol. Gonzalez continues:
… when we deny or suppress a drive or impulse…we become obsessed with its objects and its techniques. The suppressed icon of the fully sensual Madonna and the fully erotic classic nude goddess become the modern icon of woman as sex-object in advertising and entertainment…And in the resultant obsession, passion gives way to technique.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman agreed, arguing that our modern suppression of the pagan gods – especially Aphrodite / Venus – has resulted in a situation in which the only way she can appear to us now is through “pink madness”, or pornography. Similarly with death, says Gonzalez:
Eliminating the bleeding, dying Christ from his cross leaves us merely with the instrument, the techne, of his death. Death becomes an obsession without feeling at best as can be seen in the never-ending depiction of violent death on television, in the movies, in video games.
And, I would add, in our streets and our politics. As Octavio Paz wrote, “A civilization that denies death ends up by denying life.”
Michael Meade takes this insight and argues that since America denies death more than any culture in history, it must inflict it upon others. How else can we explain (the terminology of empire is insufficient here) why the United States has overthrown or attacked over forty sovereign nations since the end of World War Two and, since its beginning, intervened nearly 400 times? How else do we explain its support of genocide in Palestine? How else explain our own mass shootings?
Mexicans have never denied death. Indeed, they have always known the necessity of personifying it as a female figure. As recently as the 1940s, anthropologists noted the new presence of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death), or Santa Muerte. Her veneration remained a primarily occult practice for three generations. However, by the beginning of the 21st century, her popularity was growing exponentially, to the point where some consider her to be at the center of the single fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas.
She usually appears as a skeletal figure, clad in a long robe and holding objects such as a scythe or a globe, or with an owl, which was associated with Mictēcacihuātl, the old Aztec goddess of death. She was first associated in popular consciousness with drug gangs. Indeed, in 2009 the government demolished 40 roadside shrines to her near the U.S. border. But now her devotees approach her for healing, love, protection (especially from Covid) and/or safe delivery to the afterlife.
As Señora de la Noche (”Lady of the Night”), she is often invoked by taxi drivers, bar owners, police, soldiers, LGBTG people and sex workers, as well as petty criminals. Predictably, considering the Church’s long opposition to Mexico’s regular upsurges of paganism, both Catholic and Protestant leaders have condemned devotion to Santa Muerte as blasphemous and satanic.
But, asks Gonzales, “…die we all must; it can’t be helped. And when we do, how do we celebrate it?” He notes our sterile, unemotional American funerals, where “…mourners leave before the water-proof box is lowered into the hole. Where to, we don’t know, the unexpressed grief to be aired months or years later in the consultation room of a psychotherapist.” In Mexico, however,
…we are not cheated of our sorrow that easily, or of our joy. We crowd the rooms of our dying ...We die to the whispers, caresses, prayers of family and friends, in someone’s arms or with someone holding our hand. And we celebrate our dead with crying and lamentation and laughter and sometime curses and song in the long velorio (wake.) There is food and tequila and beer, frothy sweet chocolate and black bitter coffee. We tell long stories and praise the dead as we wish we had done more often while they lived. Yes, and we also voice our rancors and resent-ments toward them. We wear black and say our rosaries in unison punctuated by an occasional wail or fit. And we are not satisfied until we see the box lowered into the hole and we have thrown our shovel or fistful of dirt upon it with a flower or two. Then on to more feasting and carrying on.
And then we invite our dead to join us at least once a year. We put food out for them, their favorite dishes and drink, especially baked bread, tequila or mezcal, and yellow marigolds to make them glad. And lights, candles in the Trees of Life which have also adorned the wedding altars, for life and death are a continuum in the adventure of being human…We laugh a little with death and cry a good bit because little can sweeten the loss of those we love. We keep our memories lively because our dead are precious to us.
And here is the key, the insight that gringos have begun to listen to, the reason for our need to engage in meaningful ritual:
Only by celebrating their preciousness do we learn to hold precious the living, for it may be that at any moment the living may leave us or we them and join the vast ranks of the dead. Así es la vida.
And it is the reason we welcome the return of the Great Mother Goddess:
