La Virgen de Guadalupe — otherwise known as Tonantzin Guadalupe — is a sacred painting held in La Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. In Catholicism, this relic is of divine origin but secularly we know it is a colonial painting, legible in style and technique. Indigenous artist Marcos Cipac is likely to be the author in the mid-sixteenth century, in the context of a Franciscan education.¹ Its composition belongs to the Mulier amicta sole (Woman of the Apocalypse), a painterly genre depicting the Virgin Mary as described in the Book of Revelation: ‘a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’²

Endless painters have drawn from this apocalyptic panorama to build upon a common language and represent the thunderous event of the Virgin Mary striking earth.³ The mandorla is a recurrent trope across these depictions, a supernatural portal drawn behind the Virgin Mary, who has recently crossed realms. In religious art, the mandorla is an ellipse that surrounds icons, such as the Virgin Mary and Christ, to stand for divine luminescence or show an opening in time and space. In Tonantzin Guadalupe, where the mandorla is manifest, it is ironic how this paranormal hole, which intends to convey the divinity of the painting, reveals the extreme humanness of its authorship — for the mandorla is a decisively terrestrial language, shaped by Judeo-Christian pictorial techniques.

The Virgin Mary’s body is the most magical element within the painting of Tonanztin Guadalupe — even though it appears to be the most normal — for she is neither corpse nor spirit. The Virgin Mary is undead and animated by unspeakable forces, like a vampire lacking the impulse to feed. Her painted image is for gazing upon but is also roaring in sonic appearance, which is incongruent with the quietness and calmness often projected onto Marian apparitions, where the Virgin Mary tends to ‘sound’ only with her voice box, as will be shown, unless there is a critical gaze upon it to uncover the wider implications of her undead corpse.

This elicits the question of specific ‘hearing’ in the Marian imagination, and its lack of intricacy in vernacular language, in contrast with vision, where this icon is excessive. Such elevation of the ocular has reached a hallucinogenic height within the Mulier amicta soletradition, across centuries. This gulf between ‘sound’ and ‘image’ in the popular representation of a pious icon is admittedly not a high value concept for the ever-urgent culture of contemporary art, where catastrophe is a fetishisised exhibition proposal, and disaster is the next hot biennale thematic (pain is how we measure artists). But not hearing the noisiness of a divine body, and the trans-dimensional vortex spiralling behind it, is a strange fracture worthy of endless, and impious thought.

The Painting and the Poem

In the painting of Tonantzin Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary is standing on a crescent moon — held by an angel — like a myriad of similar images before it, and wearing the cosmos in her clothes, minus the crown of twelve stars. A colossal expenditure of energy is behind her, as the mandorla connects our reality with an unimaginable beyond, to satisfy the inexplicable desire of this miraculous guest to crossover, with arbitrary maternalism. While it is difficult to gaze at this image outside the layered exoticism of Mexican devotion, and the pornography of ‘foreignness’, this painting of the apparition of the Virgin Mary bears a weirdly haunting composition.

In this canvas, her brown body is post-human and out of time, in alignment with Catholic dogma, ascending in body and spirit, to evade the sacrilege of human decay. Dramatic rays frame her silhouette, expanding outwards from her figure, suggesting titanic beams of sacred luminosity — unnameable and beyond language, engulfed in the occultism of mystery, immortality, and miracle — actively emanating from within her non-mortal flesh.

There is an intense dynamism in the forms, shapes and lines springing forth in the Virgin Mary’s sacred image, which leads us to the question of sound. For what are the auditory textures of this powerful deity, crossing over through a reality hole? The delicate crackle of the mandorla’s heat burning the Virgin Mary’s ageless skin; the angel at the bottom of the frame flapping their wings; the ripple effect in the space-time fabric (as the apparition exceeds the laws of reality); the inexplicable noise of molecules bouncing against holy matter; and the ‘apparent’ silence that envelops the world, when divinity arrives.

The publication of the seventeenth century Nahuatl poem Nican Mopohua is instrumental in making the painting of Tonantzin Guadalupe a relic, by narrating the encounter of Indigenous Saint Juan Diego with the Virgin Mary in 1531. The poem — which the Vatican considers a witness account — cites that the Virgin Mary miraculously imprinted her image in a cloak worn by Juan Diego, leaving behind the picture held in La Basilica de Guadalupe. Thus, the poem creates a narrative, framing the painting as a miraculous object. This is how the poem supernaturalises the colonial painting of Tonantzin Guadalupe, like a magical footnote inscribed by an enchanter, giving testimony to its so-called divine origin, becoming a voracious fiction swallowing unheard realities.

Nican Mopohua uses the sound of birds and the words of the Virgin Mary to announce her divine apparition, and create an oneiric scene. It describes how the seer Juan Diego first hears the ‘music’ of wondrous birds while crossing a hill. This ‘song’ leads him to a dreamlike and heavenly place, where he hears a voice call his name — like a mother speaking to a disoriented child, in the recesses of nostalgia. Juan Diego then describes a hallucinogenic moment, in which the Virgin Mary manifests as a point of totality, distorting the event horizon of reality that surrounds her, by turning cactus into emeralds and spikes into gold, and creating the warped perception of a displaced rainbow. If one gazes beyond the surface, the Virgin Mary is wearing the sun and emanating rays of light with surrealistic impossibility, referencing the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation, where she bears the same appearance. Then a dialogue ensues and the occult acoustics that begin with the bird’s music, become pure words. A language.

She called to him to come close to her.And when he reached where she was, he was filled with admiration for the way her perfect grandeur exceeded all imagination:her clothing was shining like the sun, as if it were sending out waves of light,and the stone, the crag on which she stood, seemed to be giving out rays;her radiance was like precious stones, it seemed like an exquisite bracelet (it seemed beautiful beyond anything else);the earth seemed to shine with the brilliance of a rainbow in the mist.And the mesquites and nopals and the other little plants that are generally up there seemed like emeralds. Their leaves seemed like turquoise. And their trunks, their thorns, their prickles, were shining like gold.⁴

Thus, the syrinx of the birds and the larynx of the Virgin Mary’s undead body, signal her divine presence within this poem. A poem where these carnal tunnels mimic the mandorla, through which the divinity travels through and from — in the shape of chirps and ‘the word’. The poem reads like an overstated act of seeing but radically understated listening, with lines that ignore the aural impact of a sacred phenomenon, such as ‘He prostrated himself in her presence. He listened to her voice [her breath], her words, which give great, great glory, which were extremely kind, as if from someone who was drawing him toward her and esteemed him highly.’⁵ This description of a miracle is so pedestrian, that it incites laughter, with its lack of regard for the sensorial impact of hearing a divine apparition.

Moments such as this create an abysmal gulf between ocular delirium and eerie aurality, for where are the sounds of rays emanating from the sun worn by the Virgin Mary, and the mutant reverberations of transforming matter. While her voice is heard, the Virgin Mary’s body is silent, which strikes as an anomaly, considering she is a non-corpse animated by an intensified spirit. Catholicism is known for its mysteries, and seers not hearing the celestial energy that the Virgin Mary deploys to create the illusion of lively movement in her body, is one amongst many. This reflects a wider tendency in the popular imagination to fixate on what the Virgin Mary looks like, rather than what her presence sounds like. Are we even listening or still, just gazing?

Following this schism, the painting of Tonantzin Guadalupe is also subject to various myths that privilege sight over hearing, claiming to uncover mysterious ‘secrets’ hidden in the relic, by building upon the seventeenth century legend of Nican Mopohua. One of the most popular examples is that the painting’s eyes reflect a scene from the poem, when the image was first born. A traumatic sight burnt in the iris and immortalised within the frame of the image, captured across a strange and ageless surface.

The Perfect Melody and Video Apparitions

Fernando Ojeda, a Mexican accountant cum Guadalupe researcher, is an interesting exception to this ocularcentrism. For Ojeda claims to have found a perfect melody⁶, which he shows with a midi composition overlaid over the image, hidden in the stars and flowers that decorate the body in the painting of Tonantzin Guadalupe, making an ‘aural-isation’ of her bodily presence. Ojeda begins this finding with a (non-crossed referenced) Pythagoras dictum, which according to him states: where there is symmetry, there is also music.⁷ He then charts vertical and horizontal lines across the painting, to match musical notes with the stars depicted in the Virgin Mary’s cloak, and flower pistils in her dress, set to a tempo.

The resulting melody sounds like random notes corresponding to repeating, yet aleatory icons within the painting — because that is what it is. However, various orchestral arrangements have reworked this arbitrary composition with greater effect, making a more spectacular sounding composition of this abstract exercise, which resembles secular sound art. While this idea bears a strong relationship with Nican Mopohua, where Juan Diego describes a melody sung by birds, it lacks the real depths of ‘audio-listening,’ the aura of an immortal body, animated by psychic or spiritual forces. For why would her stillness and/or movement tion would produce a melody, as if reality was a musical?, where movement is emphasised with an orchestral?

The video apparitions in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina is another contemporary example of this gulf in vernacular Marian sound, for the video depicts a seer receiving messages from the Virgin Mary with an alarming silence. The apparitions of Our Lady of Medjugorje began in 1981, when The Virgin Mary appeared to six children, who continue to see her today. These apparitions are available on YouTube, on the channel Medjugorje 4 World. Here I take as an example the video Medjugorje, rare and old video of the apparition of July 2nd, 2018, where Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo, one of the children who saw her in 1981, sees an apparition. Throughout this dubious ritual, the seer shows she is perceiving something grand with her eyes (expressing wonder and shedding tears) and whispering ‘responses’ to indicate she is conversing with Mary (hearing words).

The congregation of believers informs us that this event is taking place within a shared reality, rather than the spherical prison of the seer’s imagination. However, if a mystical being is truly crossing over — outside the solipsism of a mental image — one would expect sound to occur, alongside uncanny changes to the atmosphere. Yet, none of this is happening, aside from the songs and prayers vocalised by believers, which play the strange role of live special effects for a rudimentary theatrical experience. Nican Mopohuauses a similar mechanism, delegating the choir to the birds and letting atmospheric sounds form the backdrop for the Virgin Mary’s ‘unseeable’ words. Watching a seer on video rather than reading text, creates a specific instance of disbelief, missing in Nican Mopohua: for we may accept (if we are desperate enough) the seer is the only one who can see the appearing Virgin Mary, but not that she is the only one who can hear the worldly vibrations caused by the Virgin Mary’s incoming mass.

The Judeo-Christian distinction between apparitions, which publicly manifest to the eye, and interior locution, a private message to the ear, may shape this image of non-soundness. This separation unfortunately ignores the intense vibrations in air molecules that a magnanimous object would cause to become inevitably sonic. It also voids the ‘hearing’ of this representation, as if the painting was composed in silence, to carry on in this state for eternity.

One could argue the Virgin Mary is an ethereal spirit or ectoplasm.⁸ However, the Dogma of Assumption mandates that ‘the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory’.⁹ If the Virgin Mary’s body and soul ascended to an ultra-dimension, it is reasonable to expect she would descend carrying the same immortal body, soul, and voice. For manifesting only in spirit implies the Virgin Mary has left a cadaver behind, contradicting the essence of the Dogma of Assumption,¹⁰ which is protecting the sacredness of the Virgin Mary from the pollution of her corpse via the implied degradation of her sounds. The ritual of sacred silence during mass, where silence is desired, aside from the vocalisations of prayers and choir, may also explain why believers picture a revelation with silence.

However, the choir element in Nican Mopohua and Medjugorje’s video, where syrinx and larynx announce the apparition — in reminiscence to the trumpets of Revelation — signals an absence rather than a presence. For this overabundance of vision lacks its matching sonic excess, invoking something akin to an on-screen explosion halfway through Foley effects, where the listening experience does not correspond to the overflowing optics saturating reality. Edward Colless articulates this excess by comparing the miracle to cinematic special effects, where the miracle is a ‘surcharge’ to reality, same as a digital effect is a surplus to film.¹¹ This interpretation of the ‘miracle’ explains the specific sense of lack caused by the vocal sounds in Nican Mopohua and Medjugorje’s renditions of apparitions, for such phenomena are visually rich effects missing a more robust sound design — it is like undertaking Foley on Michael Bay’s Transformers¹² with only mouth noises, whispered yet still audible.

Special Effects and Unseen Apparitions

Since Hollywood readily offers a vast repository of sonic images for special effects apparitions, it is indeed difficult to gaze at a mandorla, or to imagine the aural body of the Virgin Mary, without hearing certain movies in the background of one’s mind. The sole notion of a portal in the shape of the mandorla hysterically (and tragically in a historically gendered way) conjures iconoclastic references such as Stargate (1994),¹³ where the American military uncovers an Egyptian wormhole to a different universe. Like a version of the mandorla, the vortex in this film is a curtain of gelatinous liquid in a continual state of ripple, saturated with luminous electricity. When a body crosses the interdimensional gate in Stargate, it creates vividly moist sounds, more clinical than sensual, perhaps resembling the necrotic texture of a morticians’s hand medically feeling inner vowels from a mortuary table; while also emitting the static hum of a plasma ball, reacting to contact with a hiss. The male gaze of this scene in connection to gendered bodies is cheap and overbearing. But the representation of energy as an undulating hiss is a more insightful sonic association for Marian apparitions, when filtered through the blockbuster imagination.

While the idea of a ‘perfect melody’ hidden in the painting of Tonantzin Guadalupepronounces sound to the body of the Virgin Mary, it ignores the bombast of tearing the laws of ‘reality’. A more miraculous finding within the painting would be aural textures that acknowledge these effects. The film Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019),¹⁴ where a young adult teams up with his deceased father’s Pikachu to solve a mystery, offers a rich sonic picture of how sound may support new forms of understanding. Since the movie blends digitised creatures with actual actors on screen, it relies on sound to make the unrealistic thingness of Pokémons present in the frame. More importantly, like the fleshy hallucinations of an icon in Marian apparitions, Pokémon Detective Pikachu translates two-dimensional characters to a three-dimensional space — creating a similar function and acceptance of representation is not silent. The motion of Mewtwo, as a creature that relies on telekinesis for flight and speech, is one of the most miraculous of these manifestations. As a creature, Mewtwo employs supernatural forces to move its body, similarly as the Virgin Mary, who is conjuring the divine to animate her non-corpse. But unlike the silent Virgin Mary, synthetic pulses and undulating tones bring presence to Mewtwo, manifesting the effects of its telekinesis on space, an aural emphasis that brings density, volume, and mass to its corporeality. To see Mewtwo hover, is to hear the distortions of it’s psychic body in space, and the many currents that are sightless but amplified in the fabric of the reality of sound as well as visuals. This is the aural iconism missing in the Marian imagination, where the Virgin Mary’s body is conspicuously quiet despite mobilising extreme forces to reanimate her weightful mass, like a necromancer.

This meditation is simply to identify the sense of something ‘missing’ in the iconism of Marian apparitions, where vision has built upon itself to officiate an image without regard for sound. This lack is present in the narrative of Nican Mopohua and its visualisation in Tonantzin Guadalupe, as well as the video apparitions of Medjugorje. These encounters with the divine feature choirs as live special effects to alert the incoming arrival of the Virgin Mary. Thus, bringing us closer towards the spectacular effects of cinema, which Edward Colless conflates with the miracle. Considering that many recent movies blending computer-generated imagery (CGI) and live action (used by the The Marvel Cinematic Universe media franchise), are previously based on iconic representations, such as those of the graphic novel, they are hilariously close to hierophany, where the audience is encouraged to hallucinate in two-dimensional images — such as the Virgin Mary — rather than in a three-dimensional space. Thus, the Virgin Mary’s spectacular composition, within an apocalyptic tradition, conjures hysterical movie references, such as the portal in Stargate and sounding bodies of Pokémon Detective Pikachu to assist with imaging the sonic scenery of the Virgin Mary crossing an interdimensional portal, while also animating her non-corpse, with density, mass, and now volume.

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