Cradling the Sacred: Image, Ritual, and Affect in Mexican and Mesoamerican Material Religion

Abstract

The ritual posture that I identify with the term "cradling" embodies, evokes, and performs the emotions of tenderness and affection for objects of the material world and the numina within them. Today, cradling, or holding as if of an infant, is one of the primary ritual engagements with small, three-dimensional religious images in Mexico, throughout Central America, and in Latino immigrant communities in the United States (fig. 1). This practice is particularly pronounced in devotional manifestations of the infant Jesus, but it is also the case, less predictably, with devotions to a range of adult saints, from Saint Jude to the skeletal saint of death, Santa Muerte. I have observed the cradling practice in domestic rites in rural Mexican pueblos, at bustling Mexico City shrines, and in religious processions on the streets of Latino neighborhoods in Southern California. It is as much the powerlessness and vulnerability of these diminutive images as their potency that often occupies the religious imagination. They are "pequeños y impotentes" as one devotee described to me-small, powerless, and in need of care. The cradling gesture underscores the nature of these object-entities as vital matter: they are "beings," I am grateful to my colleague Karl Taube for his assistance in interpreting the Mesoamerican archeological record and for his warm encouragement. Carolyn Dean provided helpful insights in her response to a paper I gave on this subject at a panel on material religion at the congress of the Latin American Studies Association in the spring of 2012. Colleen McDannell thoughtfully commented on my paper on cradling at the American Academy of Religion meetings in 2011. Sally Promey's generous invitation to speak at the Yale Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group advanced and challenged my thinking about the relationship between past and present practices. Candace Edsel assisted diligently in securing image permissions.

Classic Maya mirror conjurors of Waka', Guatemala

“…Directly under the plate was a jade, stylistically an heirloom (Figure 14), carved as a ruler, with hands in the cradling pose (Scheper Hughes 2016) associated with nurturing gods and activating bundles. The jade ruler is a “tuerto,” blinded in the left eye, the empty socket covered with a tiny jade patch.…”

Hieroglyphic Texting: Ideologies and Practices of Classic Maya Written Evidence

“…4), shows a distinctive two-hand/forearm-involved cradling gesture, used in Mesoamerican contexts for entities, akin to infants, that are ‘small, powerless, and in need of care’ (Hughes 2016, 55). This gesture has been argued to be a marker of the required caretaking that characterizes interaction with ‘beings’, whether human or non-human (Hughes 2016, 56–7). In contrast, touch with negative or even violent connotations (e.g.…”

Catholic devotion in the Americas

“…Suffering was not a religious motif central to Mesoamerican culture. Hughes finds that indigenous Christians understood the Cristo in ways that reflect a pre‐Columbian belief system in which the natural world is suffused with power, where the sacred is in the ordinary and is to be approached with affection and tenderness (Hughes, p. 78). This affection extends into contemporary celebrations of the Cristo, where devotees in Totolapan celebrate him with joyous fiestas as a beautiful and miraculous “reactive sentient being” (Hughes, p. 213).…”

“…In subsequent works blending historical, archeological, and ethnographic methods, she finds resonances between contemporary devotion to San Judas Tadeo (Saint Jude) and the archeological record pre‐Hispanic Maya, Olmec, and Nahua rituals in which small sacred bundles and infant effigies were cradled and carried. Engagements with the divine were centered upon human relationships to vulnerable, dependent, and fragile deities in need of love and care (Hughes, pp. 59, 106).…”

“…While scholars of Latin American religion see continuity in how devotional objects are potent “bearers of emotion” (Hughes, p. 59), scholars of U.S. Catholic life, especially those who have studied white Catholics, have charted a decline in devotionalism. According to historian Timothy Kelly (), “Catholics all across America appear to have abandoned devotional rituals by 1980” (p. 7).…”