| DAY 12 - OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE |
| DEC 12 - OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE |
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She is the Patron Saint of Mexico and The Americas.
So Our Lady of Guadalupe's feast day, December 12, is a major day of celebration
and religious ceremony in Mexico, and some areas of the American southwest.
Our first music here is a religious lullaby in Spanish, "A La Nanita Nana,"
performed by the Vancouver Chamber Choir, on a 2006 recording
found on the Greenbriar label.
Below that is one of the earliest published works in the Western Hemisphere (1610),
by an unknown Incan composer from Peru. It is a hymn to a "Lady of the Flowers,"
sung in Quechan, the Incan language. This is performed by I CANTORI, from
their A CHOIR OF ANGELS CD, released in '95 on the Civic Classics label.
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MESTIZO CULTURE
"The Aztecs…had an elaborate, coherent symbolic system
for making sense of their lives. When this was destroyed by the Spaniards, something new was needed to fill the void and make sense of New Spain…the image of Guadalupe served that purpose."
Hernan Cortez, the Conquisador who overthrew the Aztec empire in 1521,
was a native of Extremadura, home to Our Lady of Guadalupe. By the 16th century the Extremadura Guadalupe, a statue of the Virgin said to be carved by Saint Luke the Evangelist, was already a national icon. It was found at the beginning of the 14th century when the Virgin appeared to a humble shepherd and ordered him to dig at the site of the apparition. The recovered Virgin then miraculously helped to expel the Moors from Spain, and her small shrine evolved into the great Guadalupe monastery. One of the more remarkable attributes of the Guadalupe of Extremadura is that she is dark, like the Americans, and thus she became the perfect icon for the missionaries who followed Cortez to convert the natives to Christianity.
According to the traditional account, the name of Guadalupe was chosen
by the Virgin herself when she appeared on the hill outside Mexico City in 1531, ten years after the Conquest. According to secular history, Bishop Alonso de Montúfar, in the year 1555, commissioned a Virgin of Guadalupe from a native artist, who gave her the dark skin which his own people shared with the famous Extremadura Virgin.[ Whatever the connection between the Mexican and her older Spanish namesake, the fused iconography of the Virgin and the indigenous Mexican goddess Tonantzin provided a way for 16th century Spaniards to gain converts among the indigenous population, while simultaneously allowing 16th century Mexicans to continue the practice of their native religion.
Guadalupe continues to be a mixture of the cultures which blended to form Mexico,
both racially and religiously, "the first mestiza", or "the first Mexican". "bringing together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness." As Jacques Lafaye wrote in Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, "...as the Christians built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient pagan temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own cult purposes." The author Judy King asserts that Guadalupe is a "common denominator" uniting Mexicans. Writing that Mexico is composed of a vast patchwork of differences—linguistic, ethnic, and class-based—King says "The Virgin of Guadalupe is the rubber band that binds this disparate nation into a whole." The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once said that "... you cannot truly be considered a Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe." Nobel Literature laureate Octavio Paz wrote in 1974 that "the Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the
Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery".
From Wikipedia
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AZTEC PRAYER
TO THE MOTHER OF THE GODS
Teleoinan was the Mother Goddess of
the Aztec people and patroness of midwives
and childbirth. It was near the site of
Teleoinan's old temple at Tepeyacac in Mexico
that the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to
Juan Diego, the dark-skinned native.
This version of the hymn to Teleoinan has been
adapted from Daniel Brinton's
Rig Veda Americanus, 1890.
Hail to our Mother, who caused
the yellow flowers to blossom,
who scattered the seeds of the
maguey as she came forth from Paradise.
Hail to our Mother, who poured
forth flowers in abundance,
who scattered the seeds of the
maguey as she came forth from Paradise.
Hail to our Mother, who caused
the yellow flowers to blossom,
she who scattered the seeds of the
maguey as she came forth from Paradise.
Hail to our Mother, who poured
forth white flowers in abundance,
who scattered the seeds of the
maguey as she came forth from Paradise.
Hail to the goddess
who shines in the thorn bush
like a bright butterfly.
Lo! She is our Mother,
the goddess of the earth.
She supplies food in the desert
to the wild beasts,
and causes them to live.
Thus, thus, you see her
to be an ever-fresh model
of liberality toward all flesh.
And as you see
the goddess of the earth
do to the wild beasts,
so also she does toward
the green herbs and the fishes.
From Healing Prayers by
Joanne Asala
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Jose Guadalupe Esparza's CD came out in '07 on Fonovisa Records.
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