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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Offers a Transubstantiation of Myths

October 14, 2024

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According to an ancient Aztec myth, Coatlicue, the mother of the moon and the stars, after having given birth to all her children, retired into a life of chastity. As she was sweeping the temple she had made her home, she found a ball of feathers which she picked up and stuffed into her dress. Once her chore was done, she attempted to retrieve the feather ball but could not find it. She knew immediately that she was pregnant. When her daughter Coyolxauhqui (the moon) and her sons (the stars) found out, they were outraged. They set out to kill their mother and her—they assumed—illegitimate child. Upon their arrival, the child leapt forth in full armor from his mother’s womb, armed with a fiery serpent. He dispatched his older sister while his frightened brothers fled, scattered across the heavens. Thus was Huitzilopochtli, the tutelar god of the Aztecs, born. The cosmic battle recounted in the myth was repeated every morning, the sunrise being Huitzilopochtli’s foray in pursuit of his hostile siblings.

There are some noticeable parallels between this myth and some biblical stories. More so than Christ’s virgin birth, the war-like imagery in the myth brings to mind St. John’s vision in the book of Revelation: 

A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Rev. 12:1–5, 7–9) 

Huitzilopochtli, for all his precocious might, required being fed to sustain his heavenly battle. Without the chalchiuatl, the “precious liquid” of human blood, he would become too weak to continue his daily warring, and the universe would collapse. Like their god, the Aztecs were a war-like people. They fought wars for the sole purpose of capturing warriors who were then sacrificed, their still-beating hearts offered as food for the sun. Huitzilopochtli was “generous” as well. Once he was fed, he would feed his devotees. We read in Friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s account of the religious practices of the Aztecs,1 that in the month of Panquetzaliztli, after eighty days of fasting and self-sacrifice, followed by days of dancing and singing and many other rituals—including more human sacrifices—a statue of Huitzilopochtli made of dough, amaranth seeds, honey, and the blood of sacrificial victims was given to his people to eat.

Sor Juana takes the retelling of myths to a higher level, engaging with the Aztec religion by means of a myth from classical antiquity.

Skeptics new and old delight in pointing out these similarities between the myths and religious practices of ancient peoples and Christian rites and beliefs, as if that were proof that all are false. And while skeptics rejoice in these similarities because they seem to support this position, they completely ignore the differences, which are far greater than the likenesses. 

What the skeptic fails to notice is that similar images can be used to communicate radically different ideas. They can be used to refute the very things they originally meant to convey. There is a very ancient and venerable custom, inherited by Christians from our Jewish brethren, of repurposing other peoples’ mythological images to replace their false beliefs with divine truths. This has been done from the very beginning. Many of the images we find in the first chapters of Genesis are taken from Babylonian myths, refurbished to rebut these very same myths: Instead of expressing that at the heart of creation was something corrupt and decayed, the Jewish “myth” maintained that creation was very good.2 Likewise, one cannot read Dante’s The Divine Comedy without encountering creatures, characters, and heroes from the myths of classical antiquity now at the service of a Christian story.

When Spanish missionaries first crossed the Atlantic, they found themselves face to face with living, breathing pagans. Europeans had been in contact with Jews and Muslims, but there had not been paganism in Europe for many years. Paganism was encountered in the writings of the ancients, not in the flesh. Here, idol-worshipping pagans were alive and well. How could they communicate to them the truths of the faith? The answer lies in what Christians had done from the days of St. Paul who, seeing some truth mixed up with much falsehood in the religion of the Athenians, clung to that truth as a starting point. In the New World, this approach was used by the Virgin Mary herself, who appeared to Juan Diego on the Tepeyac hill where from times immemorial, the natives had worshipped Tonantzin, the mother of the gods. The old, false myth was replaced by the true one they could read on St. Juan Diego’s tilma, expressed in the pictorial language they understood. With the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, myth appropriation received divine sanction.

Inserting herself into this long tradition, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun of the convent of St. Jerome in Mexico City, published a play in 1689 titled The Divine Narcissus. This play belongs to a genre known as auto sacramental, plays which rely heavily on allegory to touch on some aspect of the mystery of the Eucharist. Sor Juana takes the retelling of myths to a higher level, engaging with the Aztec religion by means of a myth from classical antiquity. The main play is preceded by a short play that serves as a prologue. Two native characters, a man and a woman named America and Occident—representing the New World—are partaking in a ritual in honor of the “god of seeds,” Huitzilopochtli. An armed Spanish captain, Zeal, and a Spanish lady, Christian Religion, both enter the scene, and Religion tries to persuade them to abandon their idolatry. When Religion asks them what god it is they worship, Occident answers:

He is a God who makes fertile
the fields that produce our harvests; . . .
the same God who washes away
our sins, no matter how vile, then
becomes the food he offers us.

Religion is taken aback by this response:

Lord save me! What crafty designs
and devices, what mimicries
do these falsehoods intend toward our
holiest, our most sacred truths?
Oh wiliest of serpents, most
venomous of snakes! . . .
How far will this malice of yours
imitate and feign the holy
miracles of our one true God?

For Sor Juana the similarities in religious belief and practice are a mockery, yet another instance of the devil aping God. But even in this false imitation there remains a kernel of truth:

But with your own lies and deceit,
if God grants this skill to my tongue,
I shall most surely convince you.

This prologue gives way to the main play where the myth of Narcissus and Echo is retold, with Narcissus being an allegory for Christ and Echo for the fallen angelic nature. In the original myth, Narcissus is the most beautiful of men but becomes vain, proud, and boastful, mocking and scorning those who fall in love with him, including the ill-fated nymph, Echo. His punishment comes as an answer to an admirer’s prayer: “I pray Narcissus may fall in love and never obtain his desire!”3 Enamored by his own reflection, Narcissus sits by a pool longing after himself, wasting away until he is consumed by the fire burning in his heart. That Sor Juana should pick Narcissus to allegorize Christ might seem an odd choice; after all, Christ is not a narcissist. To find this odd, however, is to miss the point. Sor Juana is holding on to the images of the myth—the accidents—and changing its substance. She is, fittingly for a Eucharistic allegory, transubstantiating the myth. She makes this claim in the opening scene of the play, where two nymphs, the Synagogue and Paganism, the one singing the praises of God, the other, those of Narcissus, are joined by a third, Human Nature, who tells them that she will unite their songs by taking the meaning from the Synagogue and the words from Paganism; the one shall provide the body to the idea, the other the dress.

Sor Juana ends up showing that the mythical images better fit the truth about God than they do the falsehoods of paganism. Narcissus is beautiful—and God not only is beautiful, he is Beauty itself—a stark contrast with the monstrous gods of the Aztecs. Even Coatlicue, the mother of Huitzilopochtli, is a terrifying beast: for a head, she has two snakes, and from her neck hangs a necklace of human hearts and hands. Around her waist she wears a serpent belt, fastened by a human skull, and a skirt made of snakes.

Statue of Coatlicue, Courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica

The Synagogue had sung to the beauty of God, Paganism to the beauty of Narcissus the man. The divine Narcissus is both true God and true man. In pining after his own image, the divine Narcissus is pining after the human nature that the Bible tells us was made in the image and likeness of God. Echo, here standing for Satan, in her pride had tried to take Narcissus for her husband, but being rejected, set out in a jealous rage to muddy all the waters that he might never recognize his own beloved in them. It is only when Human Nature is led by Grace to the crystalline waters of a secret pool that Narcissus can find the object of his longing. There, he dies of love only to come back to life. Since he must now return to his father, and to protect Human Nature from Echo’s snares, he leaves behind a memorial of his love: a white flower.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” that “men have not only conceived of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’ own evil.” For him the true mark of a fairy-story (and myths are a higher form of the latter) is the happy ending, the surprising joyous turn, the unexpected (and unmerited) deliverance, what he called eucatastrophe. Pagan myths were tragic, their climax reached at the catastrophe, when the characters were overcome by fate. The transubstantiated myth must bear a mark of joy, it must be an echo of the true Evangelium: “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels . . . and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.  . . . The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”4 Whereas the original myth of Narcissus and Echo ends in tragedy, Sor Juana’s retelling ends in a joyous song: St. Thomas Aquinas’ hymn Pange Lingua. The joy the Aztecs could not find in their own myths, they can now find in this retelling:

My longing
aches to see what the God is like
who will be served to me as food,
saying that only now
do the Indies perceive
who the true God of Seeds
really is! And so we
say that with tender tears
distilled by our great joy,
let all gaily repeat
and raise rejoicing voices:
Oh let us bless the day
when we came to know the great true God of Seeds! 


1 Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain, vol. 3 book 2, ch. 15.
2 Benedict XVI, The Divine Project (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022).
3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3 (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
4 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in Tales from the Perilous Realm (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).