Religious Significance
The iconography of the Virgin is impeccably Catholic: Miguel Sanchez, the author of the 1648 tract Imagen de la Virgen María, described her as the Woman of the Apocalypse from the New Testament's Revelation 12:1, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars," and she is also described as a representation of the Immaculate Conception. Yet despite this orthodoxy the image also had a hidden layer of coded messages for the indigenous people of Mexico which goes a considerable way towards explaining her popularity. Her blue-green mantle was the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl; her belt is interpreted as a sign of pregnancy; and a cross-shaped image symbolizing the cosmos and called nahui-ollin is inscribed beneath the image's sash. She was called "mother of maguey," the source of the sacred beverage pulque, "the milk of the Virgin", and the rays of light surrounding her doubled as maguey spines.
Read more about this topic: Our Lady Of Guadalupe
Famous quotes containing the words religious and/or significance:
“I have been grateful to you from the day you turned your attention to the follies and fanaticisms of religious sects. Against those fools and impostors you employ the most appropriate weapons: to use others would be to imitate them. It is by ridicule that they must be attacked, and by scorn that they must be punished.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)