During the seventeenth century, Mexico City was in the middle of a dramatic architectonic and human baroque.(1) On one hand, the houses and buildings constructed by the soldiers of Cortés had slowly been replaced throughout the seventeenth century. The new buildings were constructed either in the Renaissance or in the plateresco style. On the other hand, this was also the time when the Mexican character was beginning to take shape. The Mexican society included the Spaniards and their criollo children, hidalgos and burgueses at the top. Other groups were formed by the African and mulatto element; and the most numerous was the group formed by the mestizos.
But most importantly, among all these facts, the people in Mexico City would always find a reason to celebrate: the dedication of a church or a convent, the arrival of the Viceroy, Holy Week, Easter and the Resurrection. Any of these events provided an opportunity to organize a banquet,bullfights, tertulias, and the performance of plays either secular or religious.
This was the environment that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) encountered in Mexico City upon her arrival in 1659 when she was, some say, around eleven years old. She would live in the capital of New Spain for the next thirty-six years.
Sor Juana and the Literary Environment in Mexico City
In 1539, Mexico City had the privilege to be the first city in the New World to have a printing press. The city enjoyed a large production of books thanks to its prolific writers of poetry and stories as well as the diverse secular and religious sciences. Consequently, Sor Juana had access to all the works written by classical authors as well as the writers of the Golden Age period in Peninsular literature. Sor Juana followed the classical poets who were her models. Her favorite ones were Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, Gracián. Her works reveal that the followed the two main forms that became popular at the time in Spain: gongorismo or culteranismo and conceptismo. Both of these new trends soon reached New Spain and were established among the men of letters in Mexico. Nevertheless, her style is both innovative and profoundly intellectual. She was not merely copying her models. But, much like them, Sor Juana includes heroes and gods of the classical tradition in her poetry.
She wrote a great deal of poetry, both for religious festivals and in the tradition of the love yric. Most of her lyric production was the result of either having been asked by friends to write poetry or she would simply do it after she was ordered to do so by one of her superiors.
During Sor Juana's time there was the custom to sing villancicos during different religious festivals celebrated in churches. The villancicos, among all her production, are some of the greatest. She began to write them in 1676, and she would produce two per year until 1691. All of her villancicos have a touch of the popular, and she always included in them something either Afro-Mexican, mestizo, Indian or criollo. All of which added a mien of exoticism, and this was something the baroque poets enjoyed a lot.
Origins of the Mary Cult
Several processes led to the introduction of the Mary cult in Religion
in the Roman Catholic Church. One of the main processes is the historical
one, but sociological and psychological aspects also contributed.(2)
However, historically, as pointed out by Carroll (4) and others such as Graef(3) , there is little evidence that the Mary cult existed during the first four centuries of the Christian Church. Graef, a leader among modern Catholic apologists, responded to this criticism saying that such neglect of Mary in the beginning of the Church has been overemphasized. Her evidence to the contrary, however, is limited to four observations: two apocryphal references to Mary in the Scriptures, a reference to the apparition of the Virgin Mary to Gregory the Wonderworker (270) towards the late fourth century; and a papyrus fragment of a prayer that invokes for Mary's mediation that probably dates from the fourth century (Graef 46-48).
But Graef and many other Catholic commentators concluded that the increase in the devotion of Mary is the result of the Council of Ephesus (AD 431). There, Mary was proclaimed the Theotokos--"Bearer of God"--or as it is more popularly translated from the Greek, "Mother of God." However, there seems to be no doubt that the popular devotion to Mary increased during the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. A good evidence of this, says Carroll, is the dedication of the first church to Mary in the city of Rome soon after the Council of Ephesus. Other examples mentioned by Carroll that give proof of the increase in the devotion to Mary is the earliest feast of the Purification of the Virgin which was introduced in the latter part of the seventh century. And this was followed by the feasts commemorating the Assumption, the Annunciation, and the Nativity of Mary. Naturally, the Mary cult kept increasing in the following centuries until it reached its summit during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Carroll, 5). Almost four centuries later, the Mary cult appeared in the New World as a result of the Spanish colonization.
The Religious Symbol and the Mary Symbol
Greeley notes the following:
When one deals with religious symbols, one does not argue about them. One merely lays out the symbol for people to look at. If they are attracted to it or transformed by it, fine. If not, no amount of argument will persuade them.(4)This assumption is adopted in preparing this paper along with Greeley's method and definition of the religious symbol.
"Religion," Greeley says, "is a system of symbols which purports to illuminate and provide direction for humans as they wrestle with the most basic and fundamental ambiguities in life."(5) Greeley says that religion appears as a symbolic interpretation because symbols appeal to all aspects of the personality: will, emotions and the intellect.
Greeley notes that symbols originate in limit-experiences when a person brushes up against bounderies. Upon doing so the person can objectively see his own existence: he encounters a grace; and a grace is something very special that is revealed to a person. The limit-experience can only take place when we let a thing invade our consciousness until it becomes a symbol, a sacrament. This symbol tells us about our limitations, but somehow, there is the promise of grace beyond our limitations. As the thing-turned symbol represents our limit-experience, we can later recall it to our memory and share it with others. Symbols seem to link us all from times past to the present because all past experiences are transmitted through time. Although, each generation discovers fuller and broader meanings in them as subsequent generations reinterpret these meanings within their own context, perspective and cultural background.
The end result of the overwhelming experience caused by a thing-turned symbol in a limit-experience is that it moves us to action. We modify our internal world in light of our new perspective on the perception of a reality. Then, we try to share the experience of our new perspective of reality with others. But as we try to explain the symbol to give it a "meaning", we realize that we have a limit-language. The limit-language seeks to describe the experience but it can only do it by odd and out of the ordinary language. Once we have assigned meaning to the symbol we turn to it to regenerate the "experience" once again.
Thus, the cycle is repeated in the individual and in the history of the religious tradition, and each time new dimensions revealed by the symbol are added with newer and richer language. However, it must be understood that the limit-experience produced by the symbol today and the experience of the same symbol produced in our predecesors must have a fundamental similarity.
It also seems inevitable to accept the fact that there are certain human experiencies common to all humankind simply because we are humans. Such experiencies as birth, life, death, rebirth of nature, the sun, the moon are all experienced by every culture on this planet. This very fact provides a unity in human religious experiencies as evidenced by Andrew M. Greeley.(6) Then, given the similarity concerning these experiencies in all the different cultures, as Greeley explains it, there is also a great possibility for different interpretations and expansion of the same sacraments, that is to say, they are open-ended. And this is the reason why there is always room for new understanding on the riches of the symbol.
Mary is the the Christian symbol which represents the experience of sexual differentiation as sacrament and as the grace that reveals to us something beyond the limits of our lives. Sexual differentiation, says Greeley, has been a source of limit-experience and religious meaning since the beginning of what we know as human culture. Mary is the life-giving mother, the life-renewing virgin, the attractive and fascinating Daughter of Zion, and the reuniting, peace-giving Pietà. Thus, Mary is Madonna, Virgo, Sponsa, and Pietà. In any of these symbols, Mary naturally activates a limit-experience, and she also helps us describe to others what went on in that experience. On one side, Mary is the symbol of the Madonna and Virgin representing life; on the other, she represents death in the symbol of the Sponsa and Pietà. This symbolism is based on the central element of the Feminine: birth and rebirth. Why so? Because Woman as a symbol reveals the universe as giving life or taking it away.
Villancico III of Sor Juana was chosen for analysis because these four symbols of the Virgin as Madonna and Virgo--the one that gives or renews life; and as Sponsa and Pietà--the one who takes life away were used by the Sor Juana in this poem.
Villancico III
This villancico corresponds to the Primer Nocturno, and
it was written by Sor Juana in honor of the Assumption of Mary and sung
in the Metropolitan Church of Mexico City in 1690. The source used is Sor
Juana's Obras Completas, published by Editorial Porrúa in
1985.
Sor Juana divided Villancico III into seven stanzas of eight verses each, and they were written following the traditional octosyllable. She used the first eight verses of the estribillo, at the beginning of the villancico, to introduce the theme, which is explained in the following six stanzas. The opening of the estribillo introduces the theme:
The same question ends the estribillo stanza:"¿Quién es aquesta hermosura?.
The inquiries in the estribillo are to be addressed in each of the six stanzas following stanzas. The inquiries in the introductory stanza refer to the four different symbols of the Virgin Mary: as Mother, Bride or Sponsa, Intercessor, and Virgin.¿Quién es aquesta Hermosura
que su salida apresura,
cual la Aurora apresurosa
y como la Luna hermosa
y como el Sol escogida
como escruadrón guarnecida
de toda fuerte armadura?
¿Quién es aquesta Hermosura?
After the introduction, the poetic voice explains each of the questions asked in the opening stanza; then, each stanza is introduced by a question. The second stanza asks:
This stanza, then, is focused on the symbol of the Mother, and Sor Juana refers to the beauty of the Virgin coming from the moon, filled with light that comes from the Sun. Concerning this cosmological aspect, Warner (1976) notes the following:
In some Greek thought, the moon was believed to retain the sunlight, to preserve it for the following day, and thus to mother each new sun into being.(7)Sor Juana, then, uses this association of the sun and moon to emphasize the perfect and harmonious relationship that exists between Christ and the Virgin. The moon's light, being a reflection of the sun's, is subdued. Thus Sor Juana says, "[P]ero ella alumbra y no abrasa, y es luz que el ardor no pasa." That is, the Virgin Mother is tender and sweet. She gives love and asks anything in return, and she is not vengeful, because she "hace favor sin desdén. Further,
In the The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, the saint describes the sinner's mind when it is anxious with fear:María sólo acaricia,
Cristo es Sol, que en luz propicia
conserva su Majestad,
entre luces de piedad,
los rayos de la Justicia;
y como es sólo Abogada,
sólo defender le agrada
y atender a nuestro bien.
The intercession of the Virgin Mother with her son gives piece of mind, healing and consolation to the living. Therefore, one of her roles is to play the "merciful mother," full of sweet and tender love for the sinner. She is the advocate and defender of the cause of all humankind before we are judged by God as it is explained in the following verses:
The following stanza focuses on a different role of Mary. She is referred next as the Bride or Sponsa of Christ.
There is a long tradition of nuptial imagery in the Bible, one of the most well-known being the mystical love song Cantica Canticarum, or Song of Songs. Because early in Christianity the Virgin had been identified with the Church--the bride of Christ--it was possible to interpret the passionate poetry of the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love of God. Later, Christian exegetes would identify the lover of the Song of Songs as Christ and his beloved with the Church, each Christian soul and the Virgin Mary. Hence, there is an echo of the Song of Songs and also the Song of Solomon in the next group of verses:
But why did God choose her--asks Sor Juana: "¿Por qué razón es electa como Apolo?." The response:
She is the life-renewing force as the second Eve. Mary as Eve gives us a new chance to begin again, because through her virgin birth Mary conquered the post-Eden natural law that man and woman couple in lust to produce children. Chaste, she is set apart from the debt of Adam and Eve. As Sor Juana says:
In sum, when the Virgin Mary gave birth to the Redeemer, she became the second Eve and the mother of all the living in a new spiritual sense. Saint Paul declared Christ the second Adam. All had been reborn again pure and incorrupt.
The final stanza refers yet to another symbol of Mary. Here she is referred as the Pietà. The Pietà is the loving mother who presides over the destruction of old life and its renewal in baptism. She is also the loving mother who oversees death and resurrection at the end of our lives. Baptism, according to Christians, is the anticipation and guarantee of our salvation.
There are also many similarities between Mary the Pietà and Isis or Nut as goddesses of death: all have been depicted holding a beloved son in their arms in death as a prelude to rebirth. They all show a very tender, sweet and loving side in death. Mother Mary gives life and receives it back in death.
Despite this, there seems to be another side to Mary as symbol of death, a side which cannot be found in the scriptures except in popular accounts of piety.
Mother Mary can be a fierce and destructive protector of those who attack her children. There are many accounts of Mary as a symbol of national identity. She can be the religious rallying point of those who suffer persecution. In many eastern apocalypses, the Virgin Mary descends into the underworld, not to fight death but to see the fate of the wicked.
In these apocryphal revelations Mary appears preying on Golgotha before her death. Michael appears and takes her to the infernal areas. There she sees all kinds of sinners being tortured, including murderers, adulterers, abortioners and blasphemers. She is appalled at the spectacle, and calls out to Christ for mercy. He shows her the wounds in his hands saying that humanity did that to him. Later, he relents, grants his mother's prayers, and lets the tormented souls rest during Pentecost (Warner 321). Thus, the Virgin becomes the symbol of a promised eternal life before which the powers of darkness with all its torments are brought to nothing.
According to Greeley, the militant, violent, warlike mother who protects her children appears to have no basis in scripture, but nonetheless has a source in history and psychology. Numerous examples give testimony of Marian cults that identify themselves with the oppressed and the persecuted who seeks religious or political freedom as well as a national identity. Our Lady of Guadalupe was the religious symbol of persecuted Mexicans. Another example is the Black Virgin of Czestochowa, the main emblem of Polish nationalism.
Thus, the militancy, anger, and fury, that is, the "dark side" of Mary, as defined by Greeley, can be found in the next lines of the villancico:
3. Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and
Devotion, vol. 1 (Sheed and Ward: New
York 1963) 32-161.[Back
to Text]
4. Andrew M. Greeley, The Mary Myth: On the Femininity
of God. (Seabury: New York,
1977) 105.[Back
to Text]
5. Greeley 221[Back to Text]
6. Greely 35[Back to Text]
7. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth
and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, (Random
House: New York, 1976)
257.[Back to Text]
8. Warner, 315[Back to Text]
9. Warner, 316[Back to Text]
10. Graef, I:51 [Back to Text]