There is a word; entheogen, coined in the 1970's, that literally means "that which causes God to be within an individual", and was derived from the notion that hallucinogenic drugs played a significant role in the development of religion. Although there is no proof, one might be excused for suspecting that it had a significant role in the conception of the church of Santa Maria Tonantzintla in 1536.
To enter La Iglesia de Santa Maria Tonantzintla, surrounded by volcanoes in the high fertile valley of Cholula, 15 kilometers west of Puebla, Mexico, is to be enveloped in a dream, a hallucination, a confusion of real and surreal both strange and familiar. The church is a dizzying profusion of ornamentation, a turbulence of enormous, intricately carved plaster moldings painted in vibrant hues layered with gold leaf that cover every inch of the church’s interior walls and ceilings. Between billowing clouds, angels - blond and European as well as dark and Indigenous - pile up like the thousands of faces gathered for the final judgement. Woven between these figures local vines, fruits, and flowers dance and swirl. The space behind the main altar is a baroque profusion of dozens of intricately carved and gilded alcoves stacked one atop another, sheltering images of martyrs and saints, each flanked by golden columns entwined with golden garlands of flowers and fruit.
Some scholars have suggested that surrealism and magical realism as manifest in much of the art and literature of Latin America is a natural outcome of a postcolonial world which must make sense of at least two separate realities; the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered, the confusion, uncertainty, chaos and madness of a scarred country, their ancient customs and religion torn from them, struggling to be whole. This New World reality combines the "rational" elements of the European invaders and the "irrational", magical or superstitious elements of indigenous Mesoamerica. But Santa Maria Tonantzintla turns all that around and offers a world view that is not based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality but a belief that the supernatural is as real and as integral to this world and as central to our belief systems as any European rationality.
Here in La Capilla de Santa Maria de Tonantzintla, as in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the murals of Diego Rivera, two themes seemingly intertwine; the first is "horror vacui", or "fear of open spaces". It is the impulse to fill gaps, to layer meanings, to cram negative space so that no facet is left ungilded, unexamined, unexplored. Literally every crevice must be stuffed, jammed with something. The second is "coincidence of opposites"; opposing forces rather than canceling each other out, hold each other in abeyance, the enormous tension heightening the energy between opposites: the natural and the transcendent, the sacred and the profane, Spanish and Indigenous, love which must meet with eventual decay.
The interior of La Capilla de Santa Maria Tonantzintla is a fever dream possessed with a holy terror of leaving some aspect of this chimeric canon unexplored. Negative space is perceived as a demon in need of exorcism. Every surface is seemingly barnacled with elaborately carved angels, seraphim, martyrs, and saints. There is an entire archway of naked women, all pregnant, and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of heads peeking from behind billowing white clouds and terrestrial garlands intertwining the heavenly visage that is the ceiling. The cupola alone contains 260 heads. No one has counted how many exist in the church overall. There are flowers and fruits of every description - magueys, pomegranates, huaya, pitaya, and mamey hover in the clouds - reminders of the fertile valley that lies beyond these walls. The entire space is an exaggerated and overwrought baroque fugue evoking images of a celestial heaven. But a fugue is not singular, it's plural, it's a conversation, and it becomes increasingly clear that this is perhaps not solely the heaven of the christian world, but that of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. In fact, the entire domed ceiling is a manifestation of Tlalocan, the celestial paradise of ancient Mexico ruled by Tlaloc, the god of rain.
Rain, it is said, is the descent of the divine, the connection between heaven and earth. It is the giver of life and sustenance, the source of purification, the means of cleansing, dissolving, and washing away sin, it is birth, renewal, and redemption. Paradise in the Mesoamerican world, at least in part, is conceived in much the same way as the christian paradise; an unending springtime, a fertile place with exuberant vegetation, flowers and fruits, birds, butterflies and rivers of crystalline water.
In Mesomerican belief there is more than one paradise, but those who died from floods, drowning, being struck by lightening or some sickness related to water, arrive in this paradise of the rain god, and the multitude of heads carved with indigenous features spread across the heavens that form the cupola of the church are believed to be images of those people who died in this manner.
But the center of all this, the source of conflicting opposites, the focus, if you can indeed focus amidst the turmoil and calamity all around you, is a vision of the christian Virgin of the Apocalypse; Santa Maria Tonantzintla, "a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars," as described in the Book of Revelations. This is, after all, a Franciscan church.
The 12 Franciscan missionaries who first stepped foot in the New World were presaged by the apostles of early christianity and brought with them a worldview forged in the apocalyptic and millennial beliefs of Joachim of Fiores. Convinced that the indigenous people of the Americas were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and that the Franciscan Brotherhood was beginning the last great preaching of the Gospel before the end of the world, and believing that the New World was, in fact, the prophesied land for the third and final age of history, the "Age of the Spirit"; this was their justification for their complicity in the conquest of Mexico. The Franciscans believed that they were the chosen few to lead the spiritual conquest of the New World on the eve of the apocalypse, to spiritualize humanity at the dawn of the millennium, and establish the new Jerusalem.
This apocalyptic vision of the Virgin Mary mirrors another apocalyptic vision - also a construction of the Franciscan brotherhood - Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose apparition is said to have been witnessed by a poor farmer, Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepeyac just two hours north of here in 1531. In Mesoamerican belief the hill at Tepeyac was the home of Tonantzin, the ancient Aztec mother goddess of fertility and the earth. And so the transformation of indigenous legend to christian orthodoxy comes full circle in the church of Santa Maria Tonantzintla. The word apocalypse means revelation; that which is uncovered. Tonantzin the indigenous goddess of the earth is revealed by the Franciscans to be Our Lady of Guadalupe or Santa Maria; the virgin mother of Jesus ascending to heaven to witness the unfolding of the apocalypse. And so the religious conquest of Mesoamerica was complete, at least in the eyes of the Spanish.
The silence here is as staggeringly incongruent as the breathtaking visual cacaphony is overwhelming. This is after all a triumphant celebration of the Age of Spirit, a manifestation of all that the Franciscans held to be true; a divinely preordained prophesy, a promise of a transcendent heaven, the melding of the new world and the old, and the space should seemingly resonate with a thunderous, euphoric, operatic echo, the turbulent swell of a church organ and blazing trumpets. But the quiet hush heightens the awareness of something profound and otherworldly. Everywhere you look the drama and emotional turmoil is overpowering. To stand amidst all this is exalting and, like an opera, makes one want to belong to something higher, to something even beyond this universe. If this were the final act of an opera the heroine would sing an excruciatingly beautiful aria... and then kill herself.
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Santa Maria Tonantzintla, San Andres Cholula, Puebla, Mexico
Bill Sheehan, October, 2023