The Black Virgin of Guadalupe

In a large Perspex display case just inside the entrance to the small airport in Granada is a reminder of the culture of the remote past. This is a copy of a fourth century stone statue of a woman, seated on a throne. Her skin is a pale, powdery golden colour, the borders of her robe bear the traces of red decoration, her forward gaze is stern and steadfast, and she is wearing a pair of huge stone tassels dangling from her ears. She is the Lady of Baza, unearthed in Baza, a small town close to Granada, in 1971. The original is in the National Archeological Museum in Madrid, in the good company of the ancient Lady of Elche whose headgear resembles two gigantic cartwheels. These Ladies are thought to be funerary portraits of noblewomen.

On my recent visit to Granada I travelled north west by road to Guadalupe to see another statue, this one a representation of the Virgin Mary, known as ‘Our Lady of Silence, Queen of all the Spains’. She also was brought up from beneath the earth. The quietly staring Lady of Baza at the airport had been an unexpected figure of welcome to me, a serenely seated woman carrying a promise of power and mystery that is embedded in the past of the Iberian Peninsula.

My companion on the 500km drive through the hills to Guadalupe was Gerardo from the University of Granada. We arrived at our destination at dusk. Swifts wheeled and darted in the remnants of late sunlight high above the great stone bowl of the fountain in the medieval square, the scene of the baptism of the first two indigenous men brought to Spain from the Americas by Columbus. The basilica facing the square was where Ferdinand and Isabella granted Columbus permission to sail to the New World in their name. With him he took a facsimile of the black statue of the Virgin Mary, known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, The Powerful Lady, Our Lady of Silence. The shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico has become infinitely more widely known than the original Spanish shrine from which it springs, the shrine that I was visiting.

The golden façade of the church resembled a fortress castle, yet the wide staircase and twin arched Gothic doorways were very inviting. Above the doors the decoration consists of large abstract geometric Mudejar carvings that move in rhythms that counterpoint the Gothic arches and square Romanesque towers. Peeping from the roofs behind we could see little green, blue and pink candy-striped fairytale witch’s hats on the tops of narrow turrets. As darkness descended, the swifts whipped through the last splashes of light and disappeared.

We entered the basilica and there, above the high altar on her throne, sat Our Lady of Silence. From the distance of our position on the church floor she floated as a glittering pyramid of jewelled mantle, wearing a lavish crown backed by an elaborate and precious filigree aureole. We could see, a black, black dot in the splendid blue-green surrounds of her clothing, her little face, and below it the smaller dot of the face of the Child. In her one visible hand she held a sceptre at an angle, reminiscent of the action of a drum major. From the top of her crown to the hem of her garment she probably measures a metre and a half.

Inside her gown, however, I believe the statue proper is just over half a metre high, made from cedar in Asia Minor, probably in the fourth century. From a photograph I know that her clothing is painted in viridian, vermilion and ochre, decorated with faded splodges of white flowers. The whites of her eyes are stark silvery moonlight, and her mouth is solemn, severe, sad. Like the secular Lady of Baza she is seated on a little throne. Her feet in pointed slippers are resting on a fresh green ground. The child on her knee wears a rust red dress and raises his right hand with the index finger extended. As I looked up, up at the figure floating high above the altar I could see only the face and hands of both mother and child. Otherwise they were encased in their large and glittering robes.

The story goes that the original was in the possession of the sixth century Pope Gregory who sent it as a gift to the Archbishop of Seville. During the Moorish invasions of the eighth century the statue was taken for safe-keeping by Christians to the banks of the Guadalupe River where it was buried. In the early fourteenth century an apparition of the Virgin led a shepherd to its burial place among oak trees, and its miraculous qualities caused a shrine to be built in its honour. Throughout Spain and France in particular, but in other Mediterranean centres and elsewhere, there are similar and related stories that have always held a deep fascination for me. The mysterious dark power of the hidden feminine, reaching back before the Song of Songs, is located in these black images which show the other face of the sweeter pink and white manifestation of the Virgin in such places as Lourdes and Fatima.

The day after our arrival in Guadalupe we joined a tour of the Franciscan monastery and the basilica. Our aim was to come face to face with the statue.  We were led through a glorious labyrinth of rooms filled with treasures, along the Gothic cloister and the gardens, up stairs and down stairs until we came at last to a broad staircase of glowing red marble at the top of which was the arched white ‘camarin’ of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The closest English word I can find for ‘camarin’ is ‘boudoir’. Well, this woman does have a vast wardrobe of amazing clothes.

The camarin, with its high vaulted ceiling, is an octagonal baroque addition to the basilica and was built at the end of the seventeenth century. Our guide handed us over to a Franciscan father who first drew our attention to the eight statues of ‘strong women’ from the Old Testament that encircle the chamber: Deborah, Jael, Judith, Sarah, Ruth, Abigail, Esther and Mary the Prophet. He counselled us to approach the coming moment of revelation in reverence. Then a light went on in the high central niche of the camarin, and a silent turning mechanism delivered to our sight the statue, face to face, in a blaze of glory, reversed from the high altar in the church far below. 

The priest led his little congregation in prayer and then invited us to come forward, very close to the statue, and to kiss a holy relic that I assume was the miraculous blood that appeared during Mass in the church in 1420. Our Lady of Silence presided in sweet dignity as I stared up at her before she was whisked away, and her niche became a blank space, as if she had perhaps never been there at all.

While we had lunch we took the time to adjust to reality after partaking in such a piece of mystery-theatre. From our table we looked out across the higgledy piggledy tiled roofs of the houses, across fig tree and cherry trees, to the smooth wild breasts, and rugged peaks, all olive green and soft purple, of the mountain ranges. Somewhere there the shepherd once discovered the little statue that is the height and centre of the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Essay first published in The Age - Melbourne – November 1, 2008)