Our Lady of Guadalupe's Mountain: Tepeyac Hill

The Virgin of Guadalupe might be the most famous image to come out of Mexico, and no other Christian site worldwide receives more visitors than her hilltop shrine in Mexico City: the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. With an estimated 20 million visitors annually, the number of pilgrims visiting her basilica is four to five times greater than those visiting the Vatican. Yet beneath the prostrations and genuflections of the 20 million pilgrims who visit her shrine is Tepeyac Hill, a small but prominent hill that is central to understanding Mary’s apparition within Spain’s political and religious conquest of the New World.

A Mountain and a Vision

In early December 1531, Juan Diego, a recent Nahua convert to Christianity, was walking from his home in Cuauhtitlan to Tlatelolco to continue his religious instruction. Tlatelolco occupied the northern half of the island it shared with Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was connected to the mainland by a series of causeways. The path skirted around a small but conspicuous hill called Tepeyac, which stood at the end of the causeway on the mainland side of the lake.

As Juan Diego passed the hill, an extraordinary, heavenly birdsong emanating from its summit stopped him in his tracks. Looking up, he saw a radiant woman who beckoned him to ascend. The woman, who shone with a beauty and vitality that transformed the barren, rocky hillside into a lush, flowering paradise, spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl and presented herself as the Mother of God. She instructed him to go to the local bishop and ask that a “house” be built for her on the summit of the hill.

Juan Diego went to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga with Mary’s request, but the bishop was unmoved. Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac Hill to tell Mary that the bishop required a sign. Mary directed him back to the top of the hill, where he would find that one: flowers. Juan Diego was astonished not only because these flowers were growing out of season in December, but because they were growing at all on that craggy, barren, dusty hill. He gathered them into his cloak and carried them to the bishop.

When Juan Diego opened his cloak before Bishop Zumárraga, the flowers fell out of his cape. There, imprinted on the inside of his cloak, was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as we know it today. It was the sign the bishop needed. Zumárraga ordered a shrine built on Tepeyac Hill without delay.¹

https://www.loc.gov/item/2021668313/

The Glyphs in the Virgin’s Gown

Much has been written about the image of Mary that appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak. But one element of the image that has drawn particular attention from historians is the pattern of flowers on the Virgin’s gown, some of which appear to echo the Nahua glyphs for mountain and water.

The Nahua glyph for mountain (tepetl) takes a bell-like form, often with rounded, knuckle-like protrusions along its sides. The glyph for water (atl) is recognizable by its sinuous, turquoise bands threaded with darker lines suggestive of currents.

From The Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs

I was skeptical of the relationship between these Nahua glyphs and the flowers on Guadalupe’s dress at first. But the more I researched the topic, the more connections I found.

If the flower on Guadalupe’s dress alludes to the Nahua glyphs for water (atl) and mountain (tepetl), it also makes an allusion to the social and political organization of the Nahua people. Together, atl and tepetl form the compound word altepetl, the Nahuatl term and idea signifying a community of people or a place much like the English word “nation” or the Spanish word “pueblo” do. That mountains and water together gave the Nahuatl-speaking civilization its socio-political organizing principle speaks to how deeply embedded these two elements were in the culture’s sense of identity and place.

From the Codex Osuna, 1565, page 34

The water-mountain pairing carries additional significance in the Guadalupe story itself. Mary requests her temple on the summit of Tepeyac Hill, and Sánchez reports a natural spring bubbled at its foot.²

Tepeyac Hill

Tepeyac Hill wasn’t remarkable as far as hills are concerned. What made it remarkable was that it stood out, quite literally. The Nahua name Tepeyac refers to something nose-like, a protrusion jutting from the landscape the way a nose juts from a face. The Nahua glyph for Tepeyac includes a nose. Positioned at the northern side of the main causeway crossing Lake Texcoco into Tenochtitlan, Tepeyac was a landmark known to anyone traveling in or out of the Aztec capital. One late 16th century Spanish writer remarked on the expansive view its summit provided.

Tepeyac appears on one of the first European maps depicting the transformation of Mexico City after the Spanish conquest. The Uppsala Map of 1550, created a few decades after the apparition, prominently depicts a hill with the label Tepeacc at the end of the causeway linking the island city to the mainland (See the image above. Tepeyac Hill is to the right).

Beyond its height and its views, however, the hill was unremarkable. The two earliest narrative accounts of the apparition, both written in the late 1640s, describe Tepeyac at the time of Juan Diego’s encounter as desolate, barren, a wasteland.

Yet before Mary appeared there, the hill had not been empty of spiritual significance. According to primary and secondary sources, Tepeyac “had been the site of a pre-colonial pilgrimage shrine dedicated to a group of earth goddesses collectively called Tonantzin.”³

The most striking testimony to this comes from the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who arrived in New Spain in 1529 and spent decades documenting Nahua culture, language, and religion in his book, The General History of the Things of New Spain (better known as the Florentine Codex). It is a richly illustrated, bilingual (Spanish and Nahuatl) manuscript running to more than 2,500 pages.

Writing within a few years of the apparition itself, Sahagún observed:

“Near the mountains, there are three or four places where [the native population] were accustomed to perform very solemn sacrifices and they came to them from very distant lands. One of these is here in Mexico where there is a small mountain they call Tepeyacac. The Spaniards call it Tepeaquilla; now it is called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. At this place they had a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods whom they called Tonantzin, which means Our Mother. There they performed many sacrifices in honor of this goddess. And they came to them from more than twenty leagues away, from all the border regions of Mexico, and they brought many offerings. Men and women, youths and maidens came to these feasts. There was a great conflux of people on these days, and they all said: “We are going to the feast of Tonantzin.” And now that a church of Our Lady of Guadalupe is built there, they also call her Tonantzin, being motivated by the preachers who called Our Lady, the Mother of God, Tonantzin. […] It appears to be a Satanic invention to cloak idolatry under the confusion of this name, Tonantzin. And they now come to visit this Tonantzin from very far away, as far away as before, which is also suspicious, because everywhere there are many churches of Our Lady and they do not go to them. They come from distant lands to this Tonantzin as in olden times.”⁴

Sahagún’s account is striking on several counts. He documents the pre-Columbian claim to Tepeyac as a shrine to an earth mother goddess and watches as it is transformed into a Marian cult. He is suspicious. Are the indigenous pilgrims venerating the Virgin, or are they quietly continuing to worship Tonantzin under a new name? It is also striking because he makes no mention of Juan Diego, no mention of Mary’s apparition, and no mention of the image. It is unusual that Sahagún, so careful in detailing so much about the life in his area, would fall silent on matters so miraculous. The hill for Sahagún was just a place of pre-Christian worship that the Spanish colonial church had claimed and rededicated.

A Message Built for its Audience

Why was Mary so insistent that her “house” and “temple” be built on Tepeyac Hill? Is there a Biblical connection between Mary and mountains? Not really. The Bible says surprisingly little about Mary in general, and certainly there is no explicit or strong Biblical connection between Mary or Marian devotion to mountains or hills. While mountains do play a prominent role in the Bible, her wanting a house on the summit of Tepeyac Hill might have more to do with pre-Columbian Aztec culture than it does with Judeo-Christian theology.

One of the two earliest textual records of the apparition story, the Huei Tlamahuiçoltica, written in Nahuatl in 1649 by Laso de la Vega, sheds some light on the matter. The text was deliberately composed in Nahuatl to reach a Nahua audience, to tell the story of the faith in a language and idiom the common people of Central Mexico could understand. In his preface, which he addressed to the Virgin Mary, Laso de la Vega notes that he is offering the story in Nahuatl so that the “humble commoners see here and find out in their language all the charitable acts you have performed on their behalf.”⁵ He also draws a comparison between the translation and image of the Virgin painted on Juan Diego’s cloak: “Your image that you yourself colored and painted by your own hand is also great, lofty, and wonderful; through it you wish us your children to cry out to you, especially the local people, the humble commoners to whom you revealed yourself.”⁶

The significance of the image on a cloak must not be overlooked. Even the central narrative within the Huei Tlamahuiçoltica is careful to point out that the type of cloak the image appeared on was not the type of cloak a Bishop or well-to-do nobleman would wear. It was the cloak of the commoner, what the Indians would wear.⁷ And within the apparition story itself, Mary insists that the message be carried by Juan Diego, a Nahua commoner.

This suggests that the choice of Tepeyac Hill as a site for a temple was not accidental. Spanish colonial missionaries, aware of how central pyramids, mountains, and mountaintop shrines were to Aztec religious life, may have deliberately situated the apparition on a hill already sacred in indigenous memory, replacing one mother-goddess cult with another, one mountain shrine with another. The engineered relationship would have made the new faith legible to its intended audience.

That the Spanish colonial administration was paying close attention to significance of mountains in its territories is suggested by a telling bureaucratic detail. In 1577, King Philip II of Spain dispatched a detailed questionnaire to local administrators across his overseas dominions, requesting historical, cultural, and geographical information about their regions. Question 18 asked administrators to report on any nearby remarkable mountains or mountain ranges, their distance, their direction, and their names. Mountains, it seems, were never far from the colonial imagination.

The Codex Escalada

Primary Sources

The principle primary sources about the Virgin of Guadalupe are as follows:

• Codex Escalada (1548): A disputed piece of parchment depicting Juan Diego kneeling before Mary on the summit of Tepeyac. The document functions as a kind of death certificate for Juan Diego, records his death date, and notes that the Virgin appeared to him in 1531. See image above.
• Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (The General History of the Things of New Spain) (1545–1590). A bilingual (Spanish and Nahuatl), richly illustrated manuscript of over 2,500 pages, now recognized as a foundational work in cultural anthropology. It describes the shrine at Tepeyac with notable suspicion, but makes no mention of the Juan Diego apparitions.
• Miguel Sánchez, Image of the Virgin Mary (1648). The first published account of the Guadalupe apparitions and the miracles attributed to her image.
• Luis Laso de la Vega, Huei Tlamahuiçoltica (1649). A Nahuatl-language account of the Guadalupe apparitions, composed for a Nahua audience. Scholars believe much of this account was borrowed from Sánchez.

Secondary Sources

• D.A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix (2023).
• Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness (1987).
• Cayetano Reyes, El Altépetl, origen y desarrollo: construcción de la identidad regional náhuatl (2000).
• Carl Anderson, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love (2017).
• Mary Joan Winn Leith, The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction (2022).