The Black Nazarene: Morphed from Aztec and Mayan gods’

image?
By RIGOBERTO D. TIGLAO

January 13, 2019

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 The Black Nazarene: Morphed from Aztec and Mayan gods’ image?

RIGOBERTO D. TIGLAO

Ever since I accompanied my mother in my youth to visit – and kiss the foot of – the Black
Nazarene figure in Quiapo Church (and suffered several nightmares for it), it had been a big
mystery for me why that image of Jesus Christ was black-skinned .

After all, the images of Jesus in the minds of most Filipinos, including mine –– actually
depictions by Renaissance artists commissioned by the Vatican –– were that of a bearded
Caucasian, just like the blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter in the first Christ movie I saw, “King of
Kings”.

The mystery deepened for me when I learned later in life that medieval Spain had been among
the most racist of European countries, partly because of its wrath in having been conquered by
the black-skinned Moors from North Africa in the 8th century. Despite its declarations that all
men are equal in the eyes of God, there had been a legacy of institutional racism in the Catholic
Church. Why, the Jesuits, up to the 18th century, not just owned African slaves, but also traded
in slaves.
 So many that there
are books on it.

Why would the Catholic Church in the Philippines have an object of veneration –– its annual
procession attended by hundreds of thousands of Filipinos risking life and limb –– a black-
skinned Jesus Christ in this country where there is such an underlying strand of racism, where
schoolchildren normally bully a dark-skinned classmate and refer to him in the pejorative
“negro” and “egoy” (the “e” pronounced as in elephant)?

The Catholic Church in the Philippines, realizing the incongruity of the Messiah depicted as
black-skinned, spread the explanation that it was due to a fire on the galleon that brought it here
it from Mexico that charred its originally white skin. Another explanation was that the image had
darkened because of the smoke from the countless candles put in front of it by devotees for three
centuries.

Anyone who has actually seen the image would dismiss those explanations as garbage. If it had
been in a fire, the image would have been damaged, looking charred like charcoal, in contrast to
the smoothness of the sculpted Nazarene’s face and its sculptural flawlessness.

Dark wood
The Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene (Quiapo church), the keeper of the image, has
officially declared over the past several years that the dark color was made by a Mexican
sculptor who used a dark-tinted wood.

So why would a Mexican sculptor depict Christ as black-skinned, known to be the distinctive
attribute of Black Africans whom Europeans considered as an inferior race and enslaved for
centuries? Why would the Spanish-dominated Catholic Church in the Philippines encourage the
veneration of a Black Jesus in the biggest religious procession in the country held by hundreds of
thousands of Filipinos every January?

Information in a recent column — carefully written to avoid offending religious sensibilities —

by Gemma Cruz Araneta drove me to a research path that led me to an incontrovertible
conclusion why this Nazarene statue is black. Araneta knows of which she speaks — she is an
expert and possesses deep interest in Mexican culture, having lived there for more than 20 years
during the martial law regime.

Araneta pointed out that one of the principal deities of the Aztecs (also called the Mexica , which
ruled the central American region — Mesoamerica — before they were massacred by the
Spanish conquistadores) was a black-skinned god of commerce and travel, “Yacatecuhtli.”
 Left, image of
Aztec god Yacatecuhtli into the Black Christ (right)

Araneta wrote:

“In the Fejervary-Mayer Codex, a very rare manuscript on deerskin that survived the iconoclastic
Spanish conquest, there is an elaborate profile of Yacatecuhtli with an exaggeratedly large nose
looming over a red mouth; that was probably why he was also called Señor de la Nariz (Lord of
the Nose). Behind this black figure is a large X signifying the trade routes, well-trodden paths
with footprints along the X. Yacatecuhtli’s arms are outstretched, as if directing traffic on the
busy crossroads of commerce.

“The early Spanish missionaries cleverly made use of some local beliefs and practices with
remote similarities to the Catholic religion to facilitate the conversion of the natives. Because of
his outstretched arms, the Aztec god Yacatecuhtli must have looked like the crucified Christ,
even if he was black. So, he was one of the local deities that were purposely made to morph into
Jesus Christ.

“King Philip II was probably apprised of this efficient amalgamation of pagan and Christian
(now called syncretism), so he commissioned a famous sculptor to make a life-size Christ on the
Cross. In fact, he ordered three. . . but we do not know whether they were originally black or
were blackened through time. . . The image sent to a town (that was the center of its colony, New
Spain) never reached its intended destination. According to legend, it was sent by river transport,
securely tied to a raft, but along the way, a terrible typhoon swept it to Otitlan, a remote town in
Oaxaca (in Mexico).

“Since the miraculous arrival of the life-size crucifix in 1597, it was called El Señor de Otitlan;
dark as Yacatecuhtli, it has held the townspeople in its thrall for six centuries.”

Araneta’s description of how the El Senor de Otitlan is venerated is almost exactly the same as
how Filipinos venerate the Black Nazarene, especially in the Traslacion procession every year:
“They flock to the image, wipe flowers . . . towels and handkerchiefs on its feet and body,
pleading for miraculous cures . . . safety from physical harm, endurance and fortitude, a happy
life after death.”

Mayan god

What Araneta did not discuss was that it wasn’t only the Aztec god Yacatechutli that the Spanish
missionaries morphed into Jesus Christ’s image but also another Mesoamerican deity, the
Mayans’ Ek Chuaj, who was depicted as black-skinned. The Spanish missionaries cleverly
introduced in 1595 its statue of the Black Christ in Esquipalas, which had been the sacred site of
Ek Chuaj, also known as Ek-Kampulá. They, thus, very successfully confused the Mayans that
the god of their civilization was really the Messiah.

The Black Christ of Esquipulas in Guatemala has become the most venerated Catholic image in
South America, and visited by hundreds of thousands of Christians in Central America. Even
Pope John Paul 2nd paid a visit to its basilica and called it the “spiritual center of Central
America.”

The reality that emerges is that, starting in 1597, and in the early part of the 17th century, the
Spanish missionaries concocted a clever scheme to convert to Catholicism the pagans of Central
America by confusing them that the gods they had been venerating since antiquity, Yacatechutli
Ek Chuaj, was the Jesus Christ of Christianity. To convince them more easily, Jesus Christ –– in
that era believed by nearly all of Christianity to be a Caucasian, as depicted by Renaissance
artists –– was depicted as black-skinned as they and their gods were.
The Black Christ: one in Panama, the other in Manila

To understand how this all led to the Black Nazarene of Quiapo, we have to realize that the
widespread notion that we were colonized, politically and religiously, by Spain is false. As it
were, we were “ruled” from “New Spain” Mexico. What worked in the conversion of Central
America to Catholicism –– the depiction of Christ as black-skinned –– was exported to that far-
flung colony, whose inhabitants had the same skin color as the Mesoamericans, the Philippine
Islands.

Revealingly, the official website of the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene basically agrees
with this explanation of why the Black Nazarene is black. The website’s history section, which
narrates how the Black Nazarene statue came to the Philippines, says:

“The statue . . . was brought across the Pacific Ocean in the hold of a Galleon which arrived in
Manila from Mexico at an undetermined date. They brought with them a dark image of Jesus
Christ…. The dark portrayal of Christ reflected the native culture of its Mexican sculpture:
(emphasis mine).

Thus, the image of the Black Christ — similar in facial features to that of the Black Nazarene ––
is a common idol in central America, all supposedly also having miraculous powers.

There are a number of churches devoted to these “Cristos Negros” that are centers of worship,
among them: the earliest and most famous Cristo Negro of Esquipulas in Guatemala; the Cristo
Negro shrine in Arena Blanco in Honduras ; that in Chalma, one of the most-visited pilgrimage
sites in Mexico, with more than 2 million visitors each year, and with the Cristo Negro there
morphing from another Aztec god Ostoc Teotl; the Cristo Negro in Portobello, Panama; the
Cristo Negro of El Sauce in Nicaragua and the Cristo Negro in Arena Blanco, Honduras.

Most of these Cristos Negros started emerging in the last decade of the 16th century. According
to the website of the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene, the image was brought to the
Philippines in 1606, venerated in huge processions in January.

The Spanish missionaries who invented the Black Christ image merely did what the early
Christians did when they spread the Catholic religion in the Roman empire. Instead of depicting
the Jewish rabbi as a dark-skinned, black-haired man, just a bit taller than the average Filipino
man and similar in looks to an undernourished modern Palestinian, they depicted him in the
common image of the Roman gods Jupiter, Neptune, Dionysus, even the sun god Apollo —
regal, tall, with Caucasian features.

In Central America obviously, the Spanish missionaries took the tack of making Christ look like
the Aztec and Mayan gods. The natives, barely out of the stone-age in those godforsaken islands
as were probably estimated, would accept any image of Christ as they were, after all, also dark-
skinned.

And other than a fuzzy image of an all-powerful god Bathala, we didn’t have the gods the Aztec
and Mayans developed in their more developed civilizations. That is the reason that the
veneration of the Black Christ had really not caught on throughout the country. The most popular
Christian images are those of the Virgin Mary and the weird-looking Santo Nino.

For many reasons, it was really only in the 1980s or 90s that crowds in the Black Nazarene
procession grew as mammoth as they have been in the past few years.
I suspect it was media that encouraged Filipinos to join this mammoth display of superstition that
was a diabolical invention of Spanish friars, glorifying the event as an “affirmation of faith” and
casually reporting as fact devotees’ claims of miracles and prayers answered. I remember one
devotee interviewed a few years back saying: “Two years ago, after joining the Black Nazarene
(procession) I got my wish for an Innova. Now I’m praying for a Fortuner.”