Myth -perception
A radio announcer asked his listeners to brace themselves for a report that would "shock all of Mexico. " When it came, it did not announce an assassination, as some had assumed, but for many it was even worse. It concerned the most popular shrine in the Roman Catholic world next to the Vatican. As the San Antonio Express-News reported in its five-column headline: "Faithful aghast as abbot paints Virgin story as myth" (" Faithful" 1 996) .
The reference is to the tale that in 1 5 3 1 (some 1 0 years after Cortez ' s defeat of the Aztec Empire) , the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian peasant named Juan Diego and gave him a "sign" : her full-length image miraculously imprinted on the inside of his cloak. The reputed miracle was instrumental in effecting the mass conversion of the Aztecs to Catholicism (Smith 1 983) .
Now, though, Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg, abbot of the Basilica of Guadalupe where the Image is enshrined, was admitting that the whole story was a myth. The Italian magazine 30 Giorni (" 30 Days") quoted Schulemburg as saying that Juan Diego was fictitious, "a symbol, not a reality" (cited in "Faithful" 1 996) . He also stated, according to the magazine, that Juan Diego ' s 1 990 beatification by Pope John Paul II (a step preparatory to sainthood) was simply " a recognition of a cult. It is not a recognition of the physical, real existence of the person" (cited in "Faithful" 1 996) .
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N OT AN C I ENT ATT�TU D E 0 1=' PRAVe:qFIGURE 7-1. Supposedly a "miraculous" portrait of the Virgin Mary, the Image of Guadalupe actually exhibits artistic motifs and evidence of painting.
In an extensive folkloristic and iconographic investigation of the Image, forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I learned that the
Guadalu-pan story was quite similar to an earlier Spanish legend, and that the portrait of the Virgin in the Image was typical of Spanish art of the period. Although obvious evidence of paint throughout the Image areas has prompted miraculists to claim that the paint was added later, infrared photographs indicate otherwise, revealing apparent preliminary sketch lines and other evidence that the picture was produced in the usual manner for a painting. (See FIGURE Moreover, during a formal investigation of the cloth in 1 556, one priest testified that the Image had been "painted yesteryear by an Indian, " and another that it was "a painting that the Indian painter Marcos had done. " An Aztec painter, Marcos Cipac, was active in Mexico at the time the Image of Guadalupe appeared (Smith 1 983, Nickell and Fischer 1 985) .
As the faithful reacted bitterly to Schulemburg' s reported statements, the office of the beleaguered, 80-year-old abbot issued a statement saying the comments attributed to him were
"absolutely false. " However, my colleague, Skeptical Inquirer magazine ' s Mexico City correspondent, Patricia Lopez Zaragoza, provided this informed assessment:
Schulemburg has repeatedly said that the apparitions are a myth. He has pointed this out since some years ago. After this scandal Schulemburg insisted a couple of times on his version of the story. However, after political pressure grew against him he somewhat retreated to a safer position, claiming the value of the apparitions as a mere symbol of Mexican Catholicism. "It must be said, " she added, "that he hasn ' t really retracted his previous antiapparitionist position. "
In early September 1 996, the Roman Catholic Church announced Abbot Schulemburg ' s resignation as head of the basilica. According to an Associated Press dispatch, the church "gave no reason for his departure. "
In 2002, the results of a secret 1 982 scientific study of the Image were reported by the Spanish-language magazine Proceso (in its May 1 2 and 1 9 issues) . Art restoration expert Jose Sol Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and
determined that it had not originated supernaturally, but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century.
According to Rosales, the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It was prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate) , and the painting was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium) . The artist used a "very limited palette, " stated the expert, consisting of black (from pine soot) , white, blue, green, various earth colors ("tierras "). reds (including carmine) ,
and gold (Vera 2002a; Vera 2002b) .
Rosales ' s report confirms and amplifies what skeptics had determined from early records, infrared photographs, and other evidence (Nickell and Fischer 1 985) . In addition, new scholarship suggests that, whereas the Image was painted not long after the Spanish conquest (when miraculous powers were almost immediately attributed to it) , the pious legend of Mary's appearance to Juan Diego may date from the following century
(Vera 2002c; Poole 1 996) .
Meanwhile, none of this appears to have had any effect on the Vatican, which proceeded to canonize "Juan Diego" as a saint, fictitious or not.
REFERENCES
Faithful aghast as abbot paints Virgin story as myth. 1 996. San Antonio, Texas. Express-News, 2 June. Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1 985. The Image of
Guadalupe: A folkloristic and iconographic investigation. Skeptical Inquirer 9, no. 3 (Spring 1 985) : 243-55.
Poole, Stafford. 1 996. Our Lady of Guadalupe. Tucson:
Arizona University Press.
Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, N.Y. : Double-day.
Vera, Rodrigo. 2002a. Manos humanas pintaron la Guadalupana. Proceso. May 1 2 , 27-30.
---- . 2002b. EI analisis que ocult el Vaticano. Proceso, May 19, 28-3 1 .
---- . 2002c. Hacer la biografia del supuesto pin tor de la Guadalupana. Proceso, June 2 , 66-68.