Oración de la rosa de Jericó

Divina rosa de Jericó: Por la Bendición que de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo recibiste, por la virtud que tu encierras y por el poder concedido ayúdame a vencer las dificultades de la vida, dame salud, fuerzas, felicidad, tranquilidad y paz para ganar más dinero con que cubrir mis necesidades y las de mi hogar y toda mi familia.

Divina ROSA DE JERICO: Todo esto te lo pido por la virtud que tú encierras en amor a Cristo Jesús y su grandiosa misericordia. AMEN

(SE DICEN TRES PADRES NUESTROS)

INSTRUCCIONES: La rosa debe ponerse en un platillo hondo con agua a las nueve o a las tres, del día Martes o Viernes, Déjese en agua por tres días consecutivos, quitándose a la misma hora en que se puso y hagase la oracion con todo fervor religioso.

La FE es la que salva y si usted no tiene FE, nada podrá alcanzar de las muchas virtudes atribuidas a esta planta, tenga presente que una planta completamente seca, recobra la vida y su color verde natural al contacto del agua. Úsese el agua que queda después de sacar la planta para rociar las esquinas de la puerta del frente de la casa para ahuyentar las malas influencias, trayendo al hogar la Paz, Poder y Abundancia.

The myth of “interiority”

I read the other day a post on the Lonely Goth’s blog concerning the Khrist Bhaktas or Indian devotees of Christ who are not baptized into the Church. Apparently, according to an article linked to on this site, a great number of people who make pilgrimages to Christian shrines and fills the pews on Sunday are not technically “Christians” as we would call them. They are devotees of Christ who do not seek baptism, since “receiving baptism is perceived as relinquishing one’s entire social and cultural patrimony and becoming assimilated to an alien culture”. Some Catholic priests even encourage this type of devotion to Christ, saying that they are there not to baptize people, but to “preach the Gospel”.

“Syncretic, cowardly compromise”, you might be thinking. The funny thing is, however, that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, that bête noire of integrist Catholicism, when he was working in the Lord’s vineyard in French-speaking west Africa, almost did the exact same thing with many of the Muslim and animist populations. Realizing that many people due to tribal or marital circumstances (polygamy was common in many places) could not seek baptism, he created a class of “believer”, a sort of perpetual catechumenate, for those not quite ready to take the plunge of becoming an “official Christian”. His aim of course was to convert everybody, but he was realistic about what that really meant in practice. By creating a “third way”, he and other missionaries felt that some people were at least leaving the door partially open to the Church, and that such a committment should at the least be acknowledged by the hierarchy.

New to the blogroll

From The Lonely Goth’s Guide to Independent Catholicism

Found this essay, on fairies in early modern Scotland, from of all people, David B. Hart, and from all places, First Things. Seriously, I like what they are smoking over there, because this essay is completely jaw-dropping. Maybe the world is finally coming around after all.

Secondly, a comment by the blogger himself, on the book, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:

The author makes an ugly and sharp high magic/low magic distinction (also going back to his Neoplatonic sources – the old distinction between theurgy in which magic is transformational and sacramental and witchcraft in which magic is directed towards instrumental goals). I think this betrays serious class bias, since only the most elite have the luxury to divorce their practice of magic entirely from practical concerns in order to realize this absolute distinction. It also amounts to a kind of slick polemic – my magic, the magic of the right and authorized group of people, is spiritual and good, but everyone else’s magic is mere technical trickery and a manifestation of technological will-to-power rather than spiritual Gelassenheit. (He didn’t claim to have read Heidegger or directly reference him, but the basic Heideggerian opposition between techne and Gelassenheit and critique of modern technological society seems operative in much of his work). In the end, it’s not necessarily that I thought anything the author came up with was wrong or dreadfully uninsightful. It’s just that the implicit spirituality came across as tedious, over-codified, and ideologically-overdetermined – pretty much exactly how I feel reading medieval scholastic commentaries on Indian philosophy like the Tattvasamgraha.

This is something that I have also perceived as a problem in the Neoplatonic system: the completely hierarchical, ordered descent of all things from the One, and the stark distinction between theurgical or sacramental acts and their dark, “superstitious” counterparts. Basically, if we like you and you are from a civilization we consider “civilized” (i.e. you’re white), you practice theurgy, or at the very least, you have a “real religion”. If we don’t like you, and you are black or brown, what you practice is demonic and dangerous. Athena and Zeus, good. Yemanja and Erzulie, bad. Get how this works?

Similarly, if a priest prays some weird prayer in Latin, baptizes bells, or excommunicates locusts, that is God-given, real religion. If a curandero sweeps you with rue or a Creole treater whispers a French prayer over you, that is superstition. No wonder people think religion is such bullsh*t. The categories that we often consider obvious these days are really very arbitrary.

On the margins of theology – III

photo credit

On magic (black, white, and various shades of gray)

Veracruz is known as the “witch capital” of Mexico. Many of the esoteric movements in underground Mexican Catholicism are believed to have started there. For those who know their history, you will also know that it was near Veracruz that Cortes first landed, beginning the conquest of all of Mexico and its subjugation to the powers of altar and crown. The reasons for the reputation of Veracruz, however, do not have to do solely with survivals of autochthonous tendencies in the religious consciousness of the people. Equally important are the contributions of European and African elements. If anything, some of the more bizarre practices in Mexican “folk Catholicism” have less to do with indigenous belief than with the survival of religious elements that the Spaniards brought with them from the Old World.

Oración de la ruda

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Ruda bendita, poderosa Ruda milagrosa que en el Monte del Calvario, por las lágrimas de Magdalena derramaste, lágrimas por mí tráeme, rendido a mi querido NN. Me hago este baño, dadme suerte y la persona que yo quiero, que sienta amor y desesperación por mí y que sus ojos y sus pensamientos se fijen solamente en mí. Por las gotas de sangre que derramó el Rey de Reyes, te pido derrames en mi, dinero y atenciones de mis semejantes, especialmente de (mencione el nombre de la persona). Tráeme prosperidad al momento de bañarme con este preparado, es para que derrames sobre mi prosperidad y suerte. Así pido, Ruda Bendita, que des buenos y bastantes negocios, que entre felicidad y dicha en mi cuerpo y alma. Amen.

Beautiful Rue, powerful miraculous Rue, that on Mount Calvary shed tears for the tears of Magdalene, bring my beloved NN. subdued before me. I take this bath, grant me luck and the person who I want, that he may feel love and desperation for me and his eyes and thoughts may be focused on me alone. For the drops of blood that the King of Kings shed I ask that you shed on me money and the attention of my peers, especially of NN. Bring me prosperity at the moment of bathing myself in this water. It is so that you can pour on me prosperity and luck. Thus I ask, Blessed Rue, that you grant good and plentiful business, that happiness and joy enter into my body and soul. Amen.

On the margins of theology – 2.5

The lodestone cultus in Mexico

The men in Mexico still carry lodestones to give them success and great virility. They regard the stone as a living being, every Friday placing it in water, then in the Sun, and giving it iron filings to “eat”. However, they also believe that this stone has a devil inside and will not enter a church with it. Another belief is that if a lodestone is rubbed on a knife blade, anyone wounded by that blade will die of the poison left there.

-found here

Some may discount the above as coming from a disreputable source, or think that it is the result of some bizarre “New Age” thinking influencing the minds of Mexican men. The only problem with such a supposition is that the cult to the lodestone is an established “tradition” in many parts of Mexico, and I have even translated a prayer to it here.

Isabel Kelly, in her book, Folk Practices in North Mexico, has a significant section on the lodestone cultus. Although she speculates that it is a “recent cult” (keep in mind that the field work for this book was done in 1953), she nevertheless goes into quite a bit of detail regarding how it manifested itself in daily life. The “theology” behind it is stricly oral (of course), and oddly based on dubious Christological origins, as was explained to the anthropologist by an herbalist in Torreon:

The [lodestone] is where Christ is kneeling. Have you not seen the picture? A “light” woman [presumably Mary Magdalene. The Libro de San Cipriano twice mentions "the Samaritan woman" in connection with the lodestone] cut a piece of the stone for luck…

Window – Roof – House – Soul

Michael Carroll in his book, Veiled Threats, tells of the following:

Gian Matteo Gilberti, bishop of Verona… instructed his priests to root out superstition, and singled out in particular “the practice of uncovering the roof so that the soul [of the dead] can get out, something that suggests the soul could be held back by a roof.” In fact, Italians have long believed that the human soul has a physical substance and so can be blocked by physical barriers like a roof. This is why those present at a death leave an exit for the soul of the dead person by removing a slat from the roof or opening a window. The fact that diocesan synods throughout Italy continued to condemn these practices into the modern era… is an indication of just how rooted and widespread this view was.

“A quaint superstition”, you might think. Mircea Eliade, however, further elaborates:

… the soul of the dead person departs though the chimney or the roof and especially through the part of the roof that lies above the “sacred area”. In cases of prolonged death agony, one or more boards are removed from the roof, or the roof is even broken. The meaning of the custom is patent: the soul will more easily quit the body if the other image of the body-cosmos, the house, is broken open above. Obviously all these experiences are inaccessible to nonreligious man, not only because, for him, death has become desacralized, but also because he no longer lives in a cosmos in the proper sense of the word and is no longer aware that having a body and taking up residence in a house are equivalent to assuming an existential situation in the cosmos.

-The Sacred and the Profane

If we are to give any creedence to Eliade, institutional spiritual institutions are not always the best apparatus in preserving the ancient religious ethos. It is probably not to be doubted that such an Italian practice originated with paganism, but the reasoning behind it (again, if we give Eliade creedence) transcends even the tired pagan/Christian divide.

For Eliade, reality only has meaning insofar as it conforms to the symbols of the divine. Once the language of these symbols breaks down, even the spiritual gatekeepers begin to conceive of the universe in increasingly desacralized terms. That is perhaps behind the sectoralized and atomized character of religion today, “orthodox” or not. In a place where even basic religious paradigms are separated from everyday life, any sense of continuity with the past becomes boderline farcical. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…

On the margins of theology – II

The primitive ontology of the Laguna region of Mexico in the 1950’s

In the year 1953, my mother was born on the U.S. – Mexico border, in the town of Sullivan City, Texas. Within three months, she and her parents returned to their native village of Florencia, in the state of Coahuila, just outside the city of Torreon, in what is known as the Laguna region of northern Mexico.

That same year, an American anthropologist, Isabel Kelly, began to do field studies into the healing practices and popular beliefs in that same region of Mexico. She would later compile these into a small book titled, Folk Practices in North Mexico: Birth Customs, Folk Medicine, and Spiritualism in the Laguna Zone. While her book appears more as a series of field notes, almost verbatim accounts of various practices from the area around the city of Torreon, they reveal that the popular vision of the world was shaped by various cross currents, both ancient and modern, that informed the how people from my mother’s homeland dealt with the various travails of their harsh existence.

On Sight

But, that there is some light, though small, in the eyes and brain, many animals which see at night can attest. Their eyes glow in the dark. And also, if anyone has pressed the corner of his eye in some certain way with his finger and twisted it, he seems to see a certain luminous circle inside himself. And it is said that the deified Augustus had eyes so bright and shining that when he stared at someone very hard, he forced him to lower his eyes, as if before the glow of the sun. Tiberius also is said to have had very large eyes which (this would be amazing) saw at night and in the dark, but only for a short time, and when they first opened from sleep; then they grew dim again.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

In Mexico, it is said that people who give small children the evil eye (el mal de ojo) have la vista muy fuerte (a strong sense of sight). It is even said that a person can kill someone if his sense of sight is strong enough. This is almost always completely involuntary. Spanish speakers can see the short documentary, El Mal Visto, regarding this phenomenon. One wonders if such beliefs are remnants of the esoteric sciences of the Renaissance and earlier.

Are we all Hindus?

Over at the OrthoCuban blog, Father Ernesto cites a Newsweek article on how the religiosity of most Americans more closely resembles Hinduism than it does traditional Christian belief. He cites how more Americans would agree with the line of the Rig Veda, “Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names”, than they would with the idea of “you shall have no other gods but me”. The Orthodox cleric adds his own reflection saying:

Any of us might claim that we are not Hindu. But, if we are really honest, we need to admit that we chose which part of Christendom to follow rather than letting the Church tell us how to follow. If we are honest, we all need to admit that we probably hold some beliefs and opinions that contradict the “official” beliefs of the group of which we are a part. And, in that contradiction, and in the refusal to change our opinion despite the contradiction, we show the effects of a “cafeteria” view of Christianity.