Juquila Sketch, on Workbook

That night I went to bed with a headache. Tossing and turning on a bed made of burlap I felt a woman come to me somewhere between wake and sleep. She was dark skinned and wore a white dress. She came up behind me and spread mud on the top of my head. When the mud dried it suddenly cracked in a flash of lightning.


The woman told me to send the energy, which was causing pressure in my head, out through the cracks of the dried mud and down to the river. She told me to give it away to the river. As the energy rushed out from the top of my head my headache dissolved and I fell asleep.

At breakfast the next day, over fresh papaya and watermelon, I asked our tour guide, Gordon, to tell me more about Juquila. He said all he knew was that many people made long pilgrimages to see her, often on their knees, that the mud behind her shrine was used for healing, and that she had survived a fire.

Further research still revealed a story surrounded in myth and mystery. A carved wooden figure only two feet tall, the Virgin was brought to the small Mexican town of Amialtepec by a Dominican priest, Friar Juan Jordan, in the sixteenth century. When he left a few years later for another parish he gave the statue to his servant. Miracles were reported and after word had spread, a small shrine was built for her.

In 1633 the entire town of Amialtepec burned to the ground. Under the rubble, or on top of the ashes, depending on the storyteller, the Virgin of Juquila was found completely unharmed. Though her gown of white and gold went unscathed, her face was scorched, its brown color inspiring the deep love and devotion of the local indigenous people.

While her shrine was being rebuilt she was placed temporarily in the cathedral in the town of Juquila. After she was moved into the newly rebuilt shrine in Amialtepec she mysteriously disappeared, reappearing back in the altar in the cathedral in Juquila. After doing this three times the people surrendered and she became known as the Virgin of Juquila.

I recognized by then that her familiarity came from the images of the Hindu goddesses I’d discovered through my yoga practice. With her hands in prayer position and holding a flower much like the lotus of India, her golden crown radiated like the crown chakra of an enlightened being.

She was the Catholic manifestation of what I’d already discovered through Hinduism. She was Shakti, divine feminine energy. In the book "Kundalini Vidya," Joan Shivarpita Harrigan writes, “Shakti is the divine power that permeates everything, that is, in fact, everything in the phenomenal world, no matter how subtle. Because of this generative quality, Shakti is referred to as the divine mother." 

This divine mother was that divine mother, one and the same.


***The formatting for these posts literally changes overnight, even though I haven't touched them and they look normal on the template. It drives my designer eye crazy, but after many attempts to fix it I guess I have to surrender my desire for control to the playfulness of Juquila.