Idolizing Mary

Why did Mayas of the Yucatán readily venerate Marian images soon after Spanish evangelization? Amara Solari uses the case of Our Lady of Itzmal, a miraculous Marian statue introduced into the Mayan town of Itzmal by Diego de Landa in 1558 that eventually gained significant indigenous and Spanish devotion, to broach that broader question.Solari views two common explanations for indigenous adoption of Catholic imagery as inadequate. Scholars have emphasized either iconographical similarities between Catholic saints and precontact divinities or placement of Catholic imagery in locations associated with precontact sacrality. To explain devotion to Our Lady of Itzmal, Solari posits a third explanation: some Catholic images, and certainly Our Lady of Itzmal, aligned with preconquest Mayan conceptions of sacred materiality, or with how Mayas understood that, under certain circumstances, the divine could manifest in physical objects.Solari argues that precontact Maya sacred materiality rested on how religious images were crafted. Images could house divine power if they were properly commissioned, produced by ritually purified specialists who remained apart from the community during the image's production, and, once finished, appropriately revealed to the community. The production history of Our Lady of Itzmal uncannily aligned with these ideas. Residing in the Franciscan friary of Itzmal, Diego de Landa commissioned a renowned artisan of Antigua Guatemala to fashion the statue. Landa journeyed a great distance to retrieve it, brought it back to Itzmal hidden in a case, and installed it in the church. In short, because the creation of the image of Our Lady of Itzmal fit Mayan conceptions of how a physical object could become sacredly active, Mayas of the Yucatán could easily incorporate her into their religious practice.Solari argues that Mayan religious understandings continued to inform this religious practice throughout the colonial period in at least three ways. First, pre-Columbian Maya deity effigies absorbed individual and communal harm and acted largely as healing agents. Our Lady of Itzmal served this function. Many miracles attributed to her in Spanish-authored pious accounts involved the healing of Mayan devotees. Second, colonial Mayan-language documents, such as last wills and testaments, often referred to her as “suhuy.” This term has often been translated as “virgin,” but Solari argues that a better equivalent is “ritually prepared” (pp. 116–18). This translation captures the Mayan term's emphasis on the process of ritual purification rather than a perpetual state of purity or virginity. Describing Our Lady of Itzmal as suhuy thus allowed Mayan devotees to maintain Mayan understandings of the rationale for her sacred power. Third, the Mayas appear to have viewed Our Lady of Itzmal as a new Mayan divinity, whose apotheosis heralded a new era. The anonymous author of the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel used precontact imagery of new Mayan divinities descending on cords from the heavens to usher in a new age of Mayan existence after the destruction of the previous era in order to depict Our Lady of Itzmal's arrival. Furthermore, the author portrayed her as a new divinity, distinct from precontact ones. In other words, Our Lady of Itzmal was not simply a traditional Mayan god in Christian garb but a new Mayan divinity for a new epoch.Although Solari focuses on Mayan understanding of Our Lady of Itzmal, she also examines creole devotions to her. Creoles resorted to her to stem the yellow fever epidemic of 1648. With the agreement of Itzmal's inhabitants, they processed the image to Mérida and installed her in the Franciscan friary, where they honored her with a novena. In gratitude for her intervention, the Mérida town council vowed to celebrate a feast day dedicated to her in perpetuity. Why would the Spanish population of Mérida seek aid from an image so closely associated with the Mayan population? According to Solari, the creoles saw Mayan devotion to Our Lady of Itzmal as the orthodox inverse of rampant indigenous idolatry. As such, she was an especially powerful advocate before God.The evidentiary base for reconstructing the Mayan perspective of Our Lady of Itzmal is thin. Nonetheless, Solari builds a compelling case using the fragments that remain. Her main thrust is to foreground Mayan agency in colonial religious change and thus localize Mayan Catholicism. Practices that at first glance appear as wholesale Mayan adoptions of traditional early modern Spanish devotions to a Marian image take on deeper and subtler meanings in her careful analysis. My one critique is that Solari tends to assume that everyday Spanish understandings of religious images faithfully reflected the Council of Trent's edicts. Thus, she overstates the distinction between Spanish and Mayan conceptions of divine presence within miraculous images. But Spanish religion is not her focus, and this minor quibble certainly does not detract from this work's significant contributions

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Indigenous · Materiality (auditing) · Maya · Statue · History · Latin American history and culture