I can't believe I missed this one. What fun. I raise you 2 Jan Van Eycks to your Guadalupe.
Quoting Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>:
>
> ``...This is partly about the difficult and hotly debated
> incorporation of various non-Christian histories and figures into the
> Virgin as canonical text, so there was a long and important excess
> that hung around her. Also some of the most circulated apocryphal
> texts extend and expand those references to give the Virgin her own
> godliness, and the Church was a long time agreeing to exclude them and
> didn't do so uniformly. There is some persistence in these kinds of
> apocryphal roles...'' Catherine
>
> ----------
>
> It was raining and cold yesterday, so I blew off the entire day
> surfing the web on Guadalupe, the Virgin, Madonna, and so on. I have
> to say it was much more fascinating that wondering how the jihad of
> the al-Bushid will turn out.
I guess, but both have that whole symbolic/economic colonisation thing going on.
> In my earlier forays into Christianity, I spent most of my reading on
> the Old Testament and never really bothered much about Jesus, Mary,
> etc. So it was interesting to consider the difficulties that Mary
> presents.
Tis (a Catholic and) a colony thing, because 19th-20thc Christianity in the centre is very new testament oriented.
> So, just some notes.
>
> It seems to me there is a tangible distinction between Guadalupe and
> Mary. Here's the story, first.
Sure, yeah, if you have the tools for dividing them. I mean, it's a major, an integral, element of Catholicism that it takes whatever is to hand and works it into th Catholic mythos. Guadalupe is a fabulous instance. She's one of my favourites (too important even to be secreted when people like Doug&Liza sleeps in my bedroom).
I loved all of this post, and odn't have any objections or qualifications except that the variations -- the not at all hebraic BVM -- is entirely a tool of the RC church from the beginning. I mean, cause they weren't at all hebraic either.
> Speaking of which, have you ever seen a Madonna nursing? It just
> occurred to me, that I haven't. It is implicit in some compositions,
> but I can think of one explicitly depicted.
Sure. Yes. Major theme. You want names of painters or places of works?
Catherine
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