In
Search of La Conquistadora, One
Woman’s Journey – Part 3
Conversations
with Prof. Amy Remensnyder, author of La
Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary and War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2014.
By Jeffrey Richardson
After
relating how the Spanish veneration of the Virgin Mary evolved over centuries
on the Iberian Peninsula both in peace and war, Prof. Remensnyder’s narrative
sets the stage for the Spanish entrada
in the New World. As the violent, breathtaking saga of the Conquest in the New
World unfolds in her book, we sense that indeed we have stepped onto a more
familiar shore, yet beyond the fringe of that shore is a land laced with
mysterious trails and full of secrets.
One
of the important findings from Remensnyder’s research revolves around the way
in which indigenous people of the New World came to welcome the Virgen Mary
among them.
“[Another]
surprising thing was to discover indigenous peoples accepting Mary as a
conquistador, not simply as a replacement for Native goddesses,” says
Remensnyder.
As
she had been doing for several hundred years in helping Christian armies
re-take the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, Mary arrived in the New World
as the patron of military men. But also as in Spain, she came with two distinct
identities: Mary, the author of military victories through her support of
men-at-arms in the cause of Christianity, and Mary, the compassionate mother
figure of infinite love and forgiveness.
The
priests who would take up the all-important task of evangelizing to the
indigenous people in the Americas didn’t arrive in numbers until a quarter
century or more after the first contacts. It was the conquistadors who came
with weapons, and with Mary. Their own veneration of the Virgin compelled them
to erect shrines at every place they camped or conquered, and her dual nature
was not lost on the native onlookers.
“The
indigenous people knew her from the outset as both a conquering and a
compassionate figure,” says Remensnyder. “Over time, she didn’t simply become a
stand-in for the goddesses among the pantheon of deities vanquished by the
Europeans, she was incorporated in her own right [into their spiritual lives].”
Remensnyder
notes that as a cultural historian her task in researching and writing the book
was not to iterate all, nor prove any, of the miracles or other extraordinary
occurrences that gave rise to Mary’s emergence as a favored saint among the
warring Spaniards. Rather, she says, “I tried to understand people in their own
world, undoing notions of what we think about the past”
Additional
comments from our interviews with Dr. Remensnyder:
Did you get the
impression that Marian veneration of the conquistadors lost a little something
of its sincerity in the rarified air of the New World, in the avaricious
pursuit of gold and silver? Or put another way, given their circumstances, were
accounts of Marian veneration left by conquistadors likely to be more
self-serving than those of the Spaniards who won back the Iberian Peninsula?
It’s
easy for us in this secular age to look back at the pre-modern era and say how
easy it must have been for them to use religion to justify conquest, to justify
the pursuit of wealth and power. And while they did use religion to justify
their actions, that doesn’t mean they didn’t truly believe in the precepts of
their faith. Just think of all the treasure of the Americas that went to adorn
churches in Spain. Just last summer I went to Granada in Spain and had a chance
to see the San Juan de Dios Church, a church that is just covered in New World gold.
Can you
elaborate on the idea of indigenous peoples accepting Mary in her own right,
not simply as a replacement for native goddesses.
On
one level, the Spanish presented Mary to the New World as a powerful spiritual intercessor,
and also brought with them a hierarchical political and economic structure in
which intercession by a patron at a higher level of society was the norm. So,
Mary became a go-to intercessor in spiritual as well as temporal matters, accessible
to anyone including the indigenous peoples with little or no leverage in the
Spanish system, a way for them to cope on a daily basis with this new, imposed
colonial system.
On
perhaps a more emotional level Mary came to the indigenous peoples of the
Americas as a spiritual figure markedly different from the goddesses of their
pre-contact pantheon. While she could be stirred to anger and action, she was
more consistently kind and nurturing than some of the more complicated,
fearsome, even bloodthirsty goddesses to whom they had paid homage.
This
is not to say that Native peoples universally or immediately embraced Mary upon
the arrival of the Spaniards. Aside from the omnipresence of Spanish arms, the
waves of friars who soon followed the conquistadors strategically targeted
indigenous youth, indoctrinating them from an early age, setting up painful
generational conflicts with their elders. But again, we have to be careful to
not categorically dismiss as insincere the power of Marian veneration that grew
up among native peoples in the New World. It is interesting to note that in the
late 17th and 18th centuries there were in Mexico and
Peru a number of anti-Spanish rebellions among indigenous peoples with the
Virgin Mary at their heart. They had adopted her in a very deep way.
What if France
had colonized Mexico and Central/South America instead of Spain?
It’s
really hard to answer that. It’s true that the French had a long tradition of
Marian veneration, and included proselytizing as part of their colonial
enterprise in the New World. They even, like the Spanish, had known Mary in
peace and at war. But one key difference is that, unlike the Spanish, they
lacked the centuries-long collective experience with people of another faith
and culture in which Mary figured so prominently in framing the inter-cultural
relationship. I also wonder if the French would have been quite as intent upon
re-claiming or co-opting the indigenous spiritual space, the temple, as part of
establishing Christian domination.
