Codex Escalada
Encyclopedia
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
on which there have been drawn, in ink and in the European style, images (with supporting Nahuatl
Nahuatl
Nahuatl is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl , Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua...
text) depicting a Marian apparition, namely that of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe , also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe is a celebrated Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary.According to tradition, on December 9, 1531 Juan Diego, a simple indigenous peasant, had a vision of a young woman while he was on a hill in the Tepeyac desert, near Mexico City. The lady...
to Juan Diego which is said to have occurred on four separate occasions in December 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac
Tepeyac
Tepeyac or the Hill of Tepeyac, historically known by the names "Tepeyacac" and "Tepeaquilla", is located inside Gustavo A. Madero, the northernmost delegación or borough of the Mexican Federal District. It is the site where Saint Juan Diego met the Virgin of Guadalupe in December of 1531, and...
north of central Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
. If authentic, and if correctly dated to the mid-16th century (as tests so far conducted indicate), the document supplies a gap in the documentary record as to the antiquity of the tradition regarding those apparitions and of the image of the Virgin associated with the fourth apparition which is venerated at the Basilica of Guadalupe. The parchment first came to light in 1995, and in 2002 was named in honour of Fr. Xavier Escalada S.J. who brought it to public attention and who published it in 1997.
Description
The document is not a codexCodex
A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...
as the term is generally understood, but a single sheet of parchment (approximately 13.3 by 20 cms, or 5¼ x 8 inches) prepared from what is probably deerskin. In Mesoamerican studies, the word "codex" is applied to every type of pictorial manuscript, irrespective of form, executed in the indigenous tradition. The codex Escalada bears several significant creases both lengthwise and laterally, and the edges are abraded which, together with a deep yellowish patina, impedes a clear reading of it; however, the main features can be distinguished. The principal image comprises a rocky landscape dotted with sparse scrub flanked on the left by an Indian kneeling at the foot of a mountain and facing in three-quarter profile across the plain towards the Virgin who, in turn, flanks the landscape on the right. She is is contained within a nebulous mandorla, and at her feet are traces of what seems to be a horned moon. This depicts the apparition which is said to have occurred on 12 December 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac located six kilometers (four miles) north of the main plaza of Mexico City. The sun is rising over the hills behind the Virgin. Above the central landscape is the date "1548" beneath which are four lines of Nahuatl
Nahuatl
Nahuatl is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl , Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua...
text written in the Latin alphabet which can be translated as:- "In this year of 15[0]31 there appeared to Cuauhtlactoatzin our dearly beloved mother Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico". Below the landscape and a little off-centre to the right, is the imposing signature of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529, and spent more than 50 years conducting interviews regarding Aztec...
(ca. 1499-1590), the renowned Franciscan missionary, historian and pioneering ethnologist. High in the cliffs above the kneeling Indian is a much smaller depiction of a man on the hill. Directly beneath the kneeling Indian is more Nahuatl text written in the Latin alphabet, the first part of which can be translated as:- "Cuauhtlactoatzin died a worthy death"; and the second as:- "in 1548 Cuauhtlactoatzin died." From other sources, this is known to be the native name of Juan Diego, although the normal orthography for the mid-16th century is "Quauhtlahtoatzin". It is these last details which have led the parchment to be regarded as a type of "death certificate" of Juan Diego.
The right margin of the parchment constitutes a distinct register of images. The top half is a continuation of the landscape, below which is an indistinct rectilinear image. Below that again, and in the extreme right-hand corner, is a left-facing pictogram in the indigenous style of a man brandishing an upright staff while seated on a ceremonial chair. The chair is surmounted by a glyph depicting the head of a bird from which streams flow. Beneath this pictogram are the words "juez anton vareliano [sic]" taken to be a reference to Antonio Valeriano
Antonio Valeriano
Antonio Valeriano was a colonial Mexican, Nahua scholar and politician. He was an assistant to fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the compilation of the Florentine Codex, and served as judge-governor both of his home, Azcapotzalco, and of Tenochtitlan.-Question of authorship of the Nican Mopohua:The...
(ca. 1525-1605). Valeriano was juez-gobernador (or judge-governor) of his home town of Azcapotzalco
Azcapotzalco
Azcapotzalco is one of the 16 delegaciones into which Mexico's Federal District is divided. Azcapotzalco is in the northwestern part of Mexico City...
from 1565 to 1573, and of San Juan Tenochtítlan thereafter, and he had been a pupil and later associate of Sahagún in the compilation of an encyclopedic account of Nahua
Nahua
The Nahuas are a group of indigenous peoples of Mexico. Their language of Uto-Aztecan affiliation is called Nahuatl and consists of many more dialects and variants, a number of which are mutually unintelligible...
life and culture before the Spanish conquest assembled between approximately 1540 and 1585 and known most famously through the Florentine Codex
Florentine Codex
The Florentine Codex is the common name given to a 16th century ethnographic research project in Mesoamerica by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Bernardino originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana...
.
The pictogram of Valeriano is very close to one of him extant on the Aubin Codex
Aubin Codex
The Aubin Codex is a textual and pictorial history of the Aztecs from their departure from Aztlán through the Spanish conquest to the early Spanish colonial period, ending in 1607...
in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, which probably dates from 1576 hence its alternative name of "manuscrito de 1576". The purpose and function of Sahagún's signature and of the Valeriano pictogram remain uncertain.
Iconography
The disposition of Juan Diego and the Virgin on the parchment and their physical attributes are paralleled to some extent by an engraving by Antonio Castro which ornaments the second (and posthumous) edition of a work by Luis Becerra Tanco first published in Mexico in 1666 as Origen milagroso del santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and republished in Spain in 1675 as Felicidad de México. The iconography of the Virgin on the parchment is notable for the absence of three features which have been an enduring part of the image:- the aureole or golden rays framing her, the crown on her head, and the angel with folded cloth at her feet (the first and last of which are still currently visible in the image preserved in the Basilica of Guadalupe on what is said to be Juan Diego's tilma or mantle). All three features can be seen in the earliest known representation of the tilma, painted in oil on panel dated 1606 and signed Baltasar de Echave Orio. A sequence of marks on the fringe of the Virgin's mantle falling down over her left shoulder have been interpreted as stars but (as with the possible moon) are too vestigial to permit a secure identification. Following an infrared and ocular study of the tilma in 1979, Philip Callahan concluded that the moon, angel with folded cloth, aureole, and stars, were all later additions to the original image, made probably in that order beginning at an indeterminate time in the 16th century and perhaps continuing into the early 17th century.Circumstances of its publication, ownership and location
The parchment first came to public notice in August 1995 when Father Escalada – a Spanish Jesuit and long-time resident of Mexico who had devoted his life to Guadalupan studies and who was at that time preparing for the press his Enciclopedia Guadalupana – announced that the owners of the parchment had brought it to his attention while at the same time requesting that their identity remain confidential. The original announcement came almost mid-way between the beatificationBeatification
Beatification is a recognition accorded by the Catholic Church of a dead person's entrance into Heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his or her name . Beatification is the third of the four steps in the canonization process...
and the canonization
Canonization
Canonization is the act by which a Christian church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints. Originally, individuals were recognized as saints without any formal process...
of Juan Diego in 1990 and 2002 respectively, and the parchment helped to allay doubts in some quarters about the historicity both of Juan Diego himself, and of the antiquity of the tradition as to the apparitions. Before the discovery of the parchment, the earliest documented reference to Juan Diego which has survived had been Miguel Sánchez
Miguel Sánchez
Miguel Sánchez was a Novohispanic priest, writer and theologian. He is most renowned as the author of the 1648 publication Imagen de la Virgen María, a description and theological interpretation of an apparition to Juan Diego of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe which is the first published...
's Imagen de la Virgen María, published in Mexico in 1648. Nevertheless, the parchment contributes no previously unknown facts relative to Juan Diego or the apparitions, for his native name and the year of his death were already known from other sources, as was the role of Valeriano in promoting the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe , also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe is a celebrated Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary.According to tradition, on December 9, 1531 Juan Diego, a simple indigenous peasant, had a vision of a young woman while he was on a hill in the Tepeyac desert, near Mexico City. The lady...
(if, indeed, the Nican Mopohua is to be attributed to him, as it traditionally has been, recent tentative challenges notwithstanding).
Provenance
One José Antonio Vera Olvera found the parchment, by chance, enclosed in a manila envelope and lodged between the pages of a 19th century devotional work on sale in a second-hand book market, and from him it passed to the Guerra Vera family of QuerétaroQuerétaro
Querétaro officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Querétaro de Arteaga is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 18 municipalities and its capital city is Santiago de Querétaro....
who revealed its existence to Fr. Escalada in 1995. On the occasion of the formal donation of the parchment to the Archbishop of México on 14 April 2002, the owners requested that it be known as the Codex Escalada in honour of Fr. Escalada's life-work researching the apparitions. Fr. Escalada died in October 2006.
Doubts and suspicions
In 1996 and 1997 the parchment and Sahagún's signature were subjected to technical and critical analysis the results of which were all favourable to the document's authenticity (see below under Investigations as to authenticity). Nevertheless, the owners' initial stipulation for anonymity added an air of mystery to what was already a highly fortuitous discovery both as to its timing and as to the nature and number of the historical data to which it seemingly attests, although it was not the only such discovery in or around this period which aided the case for the historicity of Juan Diego. Baltasar de Echave Orio's painting of 1606 has already been mentioned in this regard. To this can be added the discovery by Eduardo Chávez Sánchez in July 2001 of a copy (dated 14 April 1666) of the original translation of the Informaciones Juridicas de 1666Informaciones Jurídicas de 1666
is a Spanish document that helped support the apparition of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin at the hill of Tepeyac in 1531. The apparition is also known today as the iconic Virgin of Guadalupe...
, formerly known only from a copy dated 1737 and first published by Hipólito Vera Fortino in 1889. In April 2002, on the eve of the canonization of Juan Diego, the owners waived their right to anonymity and, in a public ceremony, donated the parchment to the Archbishop of Mexico, since when it has been kept in the Historical Archives of the Basilica of Guadalupe.
Some scholars found the mode and timing of the discovery suspicious and the convergence of data on it little short of miraculous. The puzzling features which require elucidation and explanation were gathered by one eminent Mexican scholar (Rafael Tena) under six headings as follows:- provenance (his comments predated the release of new information in 2002, as to which see under Provenance above); materials analysis (where Tena urged destructive investigatory techniques despite the document's exiguous dimensions); art-historical criticism (including orthography); graphology (where Tena, despite Dibble's expert opinion, expressed the view that access to the original is indispensable for a conclusive attribution of Sahagún's signature); historiography (where Tena appears to have made one error in assuming that Valeriano was not a judge-governor before 1573, and another in contending that Sahagún's signature on the codex is irreconcilable with his known opposition to the cult – as to which, see below); and finally linguistic analysis.
While many of the puzzling features have still not been fully explained or accounted for (including alleged anachronisms which presume that the date 1548 is the date of composition as opposed to the date of record), and while further tests can be devised, no critics have impugned (i) the integrity and expertise of those who have subjected the document to investigation, or (ii) (subject to reservations over Dibble's lack of access to the original) the reliability and coherence of such tests and investigations as were actually performed or conducted, or (iii) the conclusions drawn from the results of those tests and investigations. Rafael Tena, among others, contended that even if Sahagún's signature is authentic, its presence on a document such as this constitutes a serious internal inconsistency arising from Sahagún's known hostility to the cult of Guadalupe. While Sahagún did indeed express reservations as to the cult in his historical works, that comparatively late criticism was based on what he considered to be a syncretistic application to the Virgin Mary of the Nahuatl epithet "Tonantzin
Tonantzin
In Aztec mythology and among present-day Nahuas, Tonantzin 'Our Revered Mother' is a general title bestowed upon female deities. Informants of Sahagún, for example, called a frightening goddess of war and childbirth, Cihuacoatl, by this title...
" ("our dear mother") which, however, he himself had freely used with the same application in his own sermons as late as the 1560's.
Materials and inks
The parchment was consigned by Escalada to a team of 18 experts of various disciplines assembled at the Centro de Física Aplicada y Tecnología Avanzada UNAMUnam
UNAM or UNaM may refer to:* National University of Misiones, a National University in Posadas, Argentina*National Autonomous University of Mexico , the large public autonomous university based in Mexico City...
(Querétaro campus) and coordinated by Professor Victor Manuel Castaño, who subjected it to a range of non-destructive tests to determine the age, authenticity and integrity of the materials. In their report issued on 30 January 1997 they concluded that the parchment and inks were consistent with an origin in the 16th and that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that the document itself was of 16th century origin. More than ten years after the tests, Castaño noted that the team operated under time constraints (although he gives no indication as to their origin, or how urgent they were). He also adverted to the impermissibility of subjecting the sample to destructive tests which prevented a conclusive assessment, but he conceded that the creativity and ingenuity of the team members – who worked in groups deliberately isolated from each other in order that their conclusions might all be arrived at independently – sufficiently overcame these limitations as to permit them the conclusions at which they did arrive.
Sahagún's signature
A copy of the signature as it appears on the parchment was sent to Dr. Charles E. DibbleCharles E. Dibble
Charles E. Dibble was an American academic, anthropologist, linguist, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. A former Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, Dibble retired in 1978 after an association with the university as lecturer and researcher spanning...
a former distinguished professor of anthropology of the University of Utah and one of the leading scholars in Sahagún studies. In a letter of 12 June 1996 he wrote:- "l have received a copy of codice 1548. I have studied the signature, and I believe it to be the signature of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. I base my conclusions on the indications of three crosses; the form of the 'Fray', the 'd' and the 'b'. In my opinion the signature is not the same as, that is not contemporaneous with the 1548 date of the codice. I would assign the signature to the 50's or the 60's' ." In his report of 18 September 1996, Don Alfonso M. Santillana Rentería, head of the Office of Documentoscopy and Photography of the Bank of Mexico in Mexico City, verified Sahagún's signature in these terms:- " . . la firma cuestionada, atribuida a Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, que aparece en el Códice 1548, fue hecha por su puño y letra; por lo tanto es auténtica." (the signature in question, attributed to Fray Bernadino de Sahagún, which appears on codex 1548, was made by his own hand; therefore it is authentic) Professor Castaño's' team identified the ink used for Sahagún's signature (as also they did with the ink used for the date "1548") as being not identical with that used on the rest of the parchment.
Publication of the results
The results of all these analyses and investigations were published by Escalada in July 1997 as an 80 page fifth volume or appendix to his Enciclopedia Guadalupana, complete with photographs and technical data.Pro-authenticity sites
- http://guadalupe.luxdomini.com/index.html
- http://www.virgendeguadalupe.org.mx/