Hellish Behavior

Today is the feast day of O.L. of Guadalupe. This lovely Marian entity is of course representative of so many things, including the Catholic traditions within the Hispanic community, cultural pride and yes of course she also represents the Spanish bringing Catholicism over in the first place. Let’s face it, she is a much prettier image than many of the ancient deities which she replaced, or simply mutated from. “The one who crushes the serpent” is what her Nahuatl name means. I wonder who the serpent is? Hmmm. I suppose that in the eyes of the Church, the serpent would be Quetzalcoatl, the ancient Aztec deity. Or perhaps the serpent is the native people. After all, St. Patrick didn’t really rid Ireland of snakes, but he did a damn fine job ridding the country of pagans. So perhaps the beautiful brown-skinned Mary was representing the squishing of the native people of our lovely land? Or…is O.L. of Guadalupe a gorgeous, sensual representation of everything powerful within the native population, which had to hide in order to reinforce itself. Does the snake beneath Mary’s feet, the same snake beneath St. Patrick’s feet…represent the cancerous cult which grew to such numbers, less due to love and more out of the imposing of fear and physical strength. Don’t get me wrong, I love Catholicism. It’s a grand religious establishment, a beautiful religion, and more corrupt and outdated than modern government.
Most of us, if we have to, mold ourselves into what we need to be in order to survive. The survival of our heritage, our bloodlines, our history, our culture, even our names are important to us, even if we don’t realize it.
So what’s to say that our beautiful lady, is not the mask that an ancestral deity might wear? What’s to say that the beautiful lady in whatever her form, isn’t simply the face of ancestral deities from all over the world? It does make sense, our nature being tribal, our ancestry no matter where we originate, is in fact tribal, so why wouldn’t our ancestral gods see this image, take it on as their own, so as to not be stamped out, to not disappear?
Then again, perhaps she is her own entity, her own self. Perhaps she is full of love of her people, regardless of whether we believe that she is a version of the mother of Jesus, or whether we believe that she is something else. It doesn’t matter really, she is representative of something magnificent either way. She is a beautiful statement that the Hispanic culture, the Latino people are watched over…the tribe cared for from above. She is a message to those who would have us in roles as servants and slaves that we are descended from royalty, from priests of the ancient gods, from women who were powerful and from men who were strong. She is a reminder to us that we do not have to be absorbed and assimilated, that we are as we have always been…survivors.
In a time when there are laws which say that we cannot freely move from one place to another, in a time when we are told that we have to have papers to prove that we are legal, she is a reminder that our tribe was here long before the Church arrived. She is a standing symbol with her mouth curled into a smirk, whispering before her scream, that we are home. We are where we choose to be. She is a representation of our feet, blackened by the earth, standing on the hatred that makes no sense, on the prejudice that holds no truth, and crushing its neck like the evil that it is. She is a magnificent face of pride and elegance, culture and heritage, and of the beauty of the color brown.