Almost five hundred years ago, at dawn on 12 December 1531, on a hilltop outside Mexico City, the Blessed Virgin appeared to an indigenous Aztec man called Juan Diego. This was the fourth apparition he had received in four days, during the course of which Our Lady entrusted him with the task of convincing the naturally sceptical local bishop to build a basilica in her honour.
Juan Diego was one of the few of the indigenous population who had actually been received into the faith. Conversions were few and far between, and the Spanish Franciscan missionaries were having a hard time of it. Juan Diego needed something to convince the holy Bishop Zumárraga that this startling petition did indeed come from the Mother of God. In what must be one of the most beautiful details from any Marian apparition, the Blessed Virgin placed fresh, fragrant Castilian roses, miraculously growing on the rugged hilltop in midwinter, in Juan Diego’s outstretched poncho or “tilma,” with instructions to present this to the bishop as a sign. This he did, after finally being granted an audience with the bishop and his curia. On letting fly open the tilma to release the flowers, the gathered group gazed, stunned, at what they saw: not the roses but a beautiful image of the Blessed Virgin imprinted on the rough tilma. It is an image of the woman of the Apocalypse with a striking arrangement of stars on her blue mantle. This tilma, despite the fact that it should have decayed within a decade or two, is now seen by millions of pilgrims each year in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, close to the site of this apparition, with both the tilma and its image in perfect condition.
What is striking is the impression this image made on the indigenous Aztec population, and how it led to Christianity's largest single mass conversion event in history. In the seven or so years since the beginning of evangelisation in Mexico up to the year of the apparition, there were somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand conversions. In the years following the apparition, there were this many baptisms happening about every few days. Among the eight million Aztecs received into the faith over the next seven years, the baptismal names “María” and “Juan” predominated. The ninety-five thousand conversions a month were attributed to the apparition story spreading via oral Nahuatl songs and poems and the tilma’s display in a new chapel.
The apparition spoke to the indigenous population in a way no Franciscan missionary, no matter how holy or eloquent, could. In the image on the tilma she appeared both as the woman of the Apocalypse and as an indigenous Nahua woman, dressed as royalty, crushing the old lunar deities — in the form of a crescent moon — under her feet and reducing the solar god to a halo around her.
Modern astronomical reconstructions confirm that the stars on the tilma show the exact configuration of the sky over Mexico City at dawn on 12 December 1531, which, the old Julian calendar still being in use, coincided with the winter solstice. The winter solstice was crucial to the Aztecs because it marked the rebirth of the sun, symbolically ensuring the renewal of cosmic order. This moment was intimately tied to ritual human sacrifices, as the Aztecs sought to sustain the sun’s movement across the sky.
In the years immediately following the Spanish conquest (1519–1521), human sacrifice had been forbidden, and the indigenous peoples must have experienced deep anxiety about the continuation of cosmic order, given the discontinuation of the traditional sacrifices. But here, the image on the tilma proclaimed to them that the true Sun (Christ) is now born from a Mexican Virgin on the very day the old sun was reborn.
Does this suggest that the birth of Christ coincided — literally — with the winter solstice? The Gospels tell us nothing about the date of Christ’s birth. Since at least 306 CE, the Church in some places celebrated the Annunciation on 25 March. It appears, too, that the well-known claim that Christians were trying to co-opt the pagan Roman solstice festival of Sol Invictus on 25 December does not withstand scrutiny.
Certainly, it does seem improbable that the most important birth in salvation history would occur on an arbitrary date. It is more plausible that such a date would coincide with the “cosmic liturgy” already so central to humans’ interaction with the Creator. The winter solstice, in particular, already signified around the globe the need for a divine intervention to save the cosmic order from falling into dark chaos (as understood by the Aztecs and Romans, but also the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Norse and Celts, to name but a few). Either way, for us all — Aztecs or Celts, Romans or Norse — we are all, it appears, the people of Isaiah’s prophecy (9:2):
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.
