THE CREOLE VIRGIN VIRGIN OF MEXICO. No permanent change takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs and usages of that race. The truth which Aristotle enunciated, that all intellectual teaching is based upon what is previously known to the person taught, is applicable to a race as well as to an individual, and to beliefs even more than to knowledge. A religious change is, like a physiological change, of the nature of an assimilation by, and absorption into, existing elements. A LEAGUE or so to the north-east of the city of Mexico there is a rocky hill, on which, before the Spaniards came, there stood an altar dedicated to an Indian goddess. She was the chief deity of the Totonac nation, a people whom the Aztec confederacy conquered in the end of the fifteenth century. 66 The Totonacs called this goddess Tonantzin, a name meaning The Mother" or Our Mother," and brought her offerings, not of human victims, as the Aztecs did to their gods, but of flowers and fruit, and sometimes small animals, such as rabbits and doves. 66 The Aztecs are thought to have identified Tonantzin with their own Mother Goddess," Ceutotl. Ceutotl was the goddess of the maize, the chief food of the Mexican Indian, and it was she also who brought children into the world. Like the Divine Mother to whom the Spaniards prayed, she was represented with a child in her arms. The worship of this female deity, under various names, was common to all the Indian nations of tropical North America. She was the mother of their gods and of their race itself. This ancient goddess, whose worship in America dates from beyond the dawn of legendary history, is still the chief deity in the Mexican pantheon, for the Catholic Church, justifying its name, has adopted her, and has placed her in the calendar under the title of The Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. Amid conquest and reconquest, changes of rule, of religion, of language, and even of lineage, her worship has continued without a break. The Christian Mexican of to-day adores, under her new name, the Mother Goddess of his pagan ancestors, and makes his pilgrimage to her shrine on the same rocky hill where her altar stood ages before America was discovered. How this has come about I propose to relate. Cortés landed on the coast in 1519. He dealt with the different tribes in turn. The Totonacs were the first to ally themselves with him against the Aztecs. Other nations joined to attack the common enemy. By the middle of 1521 he had conquered the Aztec Confederacy, slain its war-chief, Moctezuma, and destroyed its power. Cortés had no sooner taken the Aztec city than he sent to Spain for missionaries to convert the heathen. There were five ecclesiastics already in his army, one of them a seller of indulgences to the soldiers. Three Flemish Franciscans came out in the next year, and then, in response to Cortés's entreaty, twelve more Franciscans came from Spain two years later that is, in 1524. These last were known as the twelve apostles.' They landed at what is now Vera Cruz, and marched barefooted the three hundred miles or so to the capital, climbing through mountain passes twice as high as Ben Nevis. They were followed by small parties of Dominicans, Augustinians, and others. In 1527, six years after the conquest, Fray Juan Zumárraga, a Franciscan, was appointed Bishop of Mexico, and took up his residence in the city. The success of the Spanish missionaries in Mexico was probably never equalled, or even approached, by that of any other missionaries in the world. Without some explanation it is incredible. They had to begin by learning the native languages, which were, as they still are, very numerous, unwritten, of great diversity, and without affinity in words or grammatical construction to the languages of Europe. In the course of twenty years some eighty friars altogether were in the field, and they had converted and baptised over ten millions of Indians. Bishop Zumarraga has earned for himself an unenviable immortality as a representative of the spirit of his age and country by the destruction of the Mexican picture-writings, which he regarded as works of the Devil. He collected every scrap of them on which he could lay his hands (and no one else ever had such an opportunity), and made a bonfire of them, to the everlasting grief and rage of American historians. But his zeal was also conspicuous in his proper business. There still exists an autograph letter written by him to Charles V., in which he tells the Emperor that in six weeks he has confirmed 400,000 souls, after careful examination in each case to make sure that none of them had been confirmed before. One Toribia Motolinia kept a register of the baptisms performed by the Franciscans alone in certain provinces during the first fourteen years. They amounted to more than five and a half millions, including over half a million in the year 1537. Several individual friars baptised from one to three hundred thousand. Miracles have generally accompanied the introduction of new religions, and this would seem to be one of the most stupendous. Postponing for the moment an inquiry into the real nature of these wonderful achievements, let us turn to a tale which will illustrate, as I think, the "conversion" of the Mexicans. It is the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. According to the legend, there was living in the village of Tolpetlac a few years after the conquest a certain Indian who had been converted to Christianity by the Franciscan friars. He was fifty-four years old. His Indian name was Qualitlatohua, but he had received at his baptism the name of Juan Diego, anglicé, John James. His wife was called in the same way Maria Lucia, and in the house with them there lived his uncle, a cacique, or chief, who had also been converted and had been baptised by the name of Juan Bernardino. In the great marketplace at Tlaltelulco, in the city of Mexico, on the spot where their church of San Francisco de Tlaltelulco still stands, the Franciscans had set up a seminary, which Juan Diego attended for religious instruction. On Saturday evening, the 9th of December, 1531, he was returning to his village, which was about two leagues from the capital. His way lay first along the northern causeway, one of the three which at the time of the conquest connected the islandcity with the mainland. Then the path rose on the shoulder of a barren rocky hill, a spur of the mountains surrounding the Valley of Mexico, and called by the Indians Tepeyacac, a word meaning the point (literally nose) of the ridge. This is the hill on which there was the ancient altar of the Indian Mother Goddess." As he picked his way among the rocks Juan Diego heard a strain of strange and beautiful music. He stood still in wonder, and there suddenly appeared before him a bright rainbow having a luminous cloud within its arch. The cloud opened and he saw a radiant Lady. Her feet seemed to stand on the new moon, and stars were sprinkled on her mantle. The rocks round about shone like precious stones and burnished gold in the brilliance of the apparition. Juan Diego fell on his knees. Then he heard the voice of the Lady speaking to him. She told him she was the Mother of God, and said she wished a church to be built in her name on the site of the ancient altar, and she would come and dwell in it, and give her blessing and protection to those who should seek her there. She charged Juan Diego to tell the Bishop what he had seen and heard. Then the cloud closed over her and she disappeared, the light faded, the music died away, and he found himself alone on the dark hill. Next day he rose up early in the morning, went to the Bishop and told his story. But the Bishop set the vision down to hallucination caused by the excitement of recent conversion, and heard him without believing. But at night, as Juan Diego was returning to his village, the Lady appeared to him again and repeated her message. He reached home greatly agitated, and found his uncle, Juan Bernardino, unwell. Juan Diego remained with him all the next day. At night he seemed to be dying, and Juan Diego set out for Mexico to fetch a confessor. He was afraid to take the usual path again, and therefore made a circuit, crossing the hill higher up. But when he reached a spot immediately above the scene of his previous visions, he heard the strange music once more, and the Lady appeared before him again. Throwing himself on his knees he protested that the Bishop would not believe his story. But she spoke graciously to him, saying— I will give thee a sign which shall cause the Bishop to believe. Go not for a confessor, for I have made Juan Bernardino well. But go now to the summit of this hill, gather some of the roses which thou wilt find growing there, and bring them to me. Now Juan Diego knew that the hill top was a mere heap of rocks, as it is still, and that scarcely a stunted mezquite bush or dwarfed cactus grew there. Besides it was winter, and Tepeyacac is nearly 8,000 feet above the sea. Nevertheless he obeyed. As he ascended the hill he felt the perfume of flowers, and on the hitherto barren summit he found a garden of blooming roses. He gathered some and carried them to the Lady. She took the flowers in her hands for a moment and then gave them back to him, saying Carry them in thy tilma (the Indian mantle) to the Bishop, for a token that thou speakest the truth. Juan Diego had some difficulty in seeing the Bishop again. He sent him a message, however, that he brought a token from the Madre de Dios, and upon hearing this the Bishop rose and came out from his chamber, followed by several ecclesiastics and attendants. The Indian told his story, and then, opening his tilma, let the roses fall upon the ground. They were fresh and dewy. But that was not all. Miraculously painted on the mantle's inner side was discovered the portrait of the Virgin as she had appeared to him on the hill. The astonished spectators fell on their knees before the Wonder, and with due reverence the Bishop immediately placed the picture in his oratory. Next day he and his household, guided by Juan Diego, visited the scenes of the miraculous apparitions. They went to the summit of the hill, where the garden of roses had been. That had disappeared, but on the spot where the Virgin had stood there bubbled up through the arid soil a spring of medicinal water. Several of the Franciscans accompanied Juan Diego to his dwelling in Tolpetlac, where they found that Juan Bernardino had been restored to health at the same hour in which Our Lady had spoken. The fame of these things spread rapidly, and so many people flocked to visit the picture that the Bishop found it necessary to remove it to the Cathedral. Meantime, as the Virgin had commanded, a church was built on the site of the former heathen altar on The Point of the Ridge, and next year the picture was carried there by a joyful procession, the Spanish ecclesiastics marching in all their official pomp, and the Indians in their gayest dresses singing and dancing. Near the church Juan Diego built himself a hermitage, in which he lived for sixteen years guarding the sacred image, till he died in 1548 at the age of 74. Such is the legend according to the best authorities. It was inevitable that as time went on the imagination of the pious should embroider it with fancies, and zealous churchmen add an edifying incident or two. Thus in a later version the Bishop, not being quite at ease in his mind after the first hearing of Juan Diego's story, sends two spies to follow him on his way home and report what he does; and they return in the morning saying that, themselves concealed, they kept him in view till he reached a certain stream, when he suddenly disappeared, and they could find no further trace of him. Another tells that while Juan Diego waited for the Bishop some of the bystanders tried to steal the flowers from his tilma, but these instantly turned into flowers painted on the cloth, changing back again into real flowers as soon as the Bishop appeared. One writer, concerned that the Virgin should have chosen roses as her token instead of lilies, her own special flower, and unable even to place a lily in her hand in the picture, was fortunately able to discover that while she waited for Juan Diego she stood at the foot of a wild palm tree of the sort called by the Indians cuatzahuatl, i.e., the tree of the spiders' web, which bears white flowers resembling white lilies. Leaving legend and returning to history, we find that the Virgin was immediately established as the special Patron of the Mexicans, and was known as Our Lady of The Rocky Hill, in the Nahua language Tequatlanópeuh, which the Spaniards, who changed the Indian names of many places in Mexico into Spanish names of somewhat similar sound, presently corrupted into Guadalupe, and the Indians, who had no phonetic alphabet till |