THE WHITE GODDESS IN MEXICO:
APULEIUS, ISIS, AND THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE IN LATIN, SPANISH, AND NAHUATL SOURCES¹

ANDREW LAIRD

In The White Goddess (1948) Robert Graves linked the origins of poetry to the veneration of a lunar Muse. According to Graves,

Although there was no mention of Mexico in his book, the attributes of the goddess whom Graves described (named by Apuleius as Isis) have a remarkable affinity with those of the white-clad Aztec divinity Cihuacoatl.³ In turn, Cihuacoatl has long been associated with the Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe: in the decades that followed the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a cult of the Virgin, supplanting that of the Aztec goddess at Tepeyac, came to be promoted by creoles or American-born Spaniards from the mid-1600s.

The present chapter will contend that Isis, Cihuacoatl, and the Virgin of Guadalupe were connected by the rich and complex afterlife of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or Golden Ass in New Spain (as colonial Mexico was known). The discussion to follow will survey the first glancing allusions to Apuleius in Nahuatl texts and Latin manuscripts from the 1500s (I), before examining some more sustained evocations of the Metamorphoses in seventeenth-century narratives of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe and in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ Neptuno alegórico (II). It will be argued in the final section (III) that apparent analogues between different religious traditions highlighted by the reading of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses may have originally served as a caution against connecting or comparing the Christian Virgin to any pagan divinity.

I. Apuleius in early Mexican literature

Following the Spanish conquest of 1521, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the former seat of the Aztec empire, was soon transformed into a colonial metropolis.⁴ Mexico City functioned as an imperial and educational centre in the New World even before Madrid became the capital of Spain in 1561. The Royal University of Mexico, inaugurated in 1554 with the same ordinances as Salamanca, was a match for any in Europe.⁵ But the religious orders had already instituted several convents and colleges in Mexico City, including the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco which the Franciscans established in 1536 to provide youths from native elites with a Latin humanist education.⁶ A large number of manuscript and printed works were produced and there was a flourishing book trade: among many classical works, El asno de oro, the Spanish translation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses first published in 1513, was imported to New Spain.⁷ The translator, Diego López de Cortegana, had a longstanding association with the volume’s Sevillian printers, the Crombergers, who helped to establish the first press in Mexico City, at the prompting of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga in 1539.⁸

There is an early trace of the story of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in the indigenous Mexican language of Nahuatl. The Basque missionary Fray Andrés de Olmos’ Tratado de hechicerias y sortilegios, ‘Treatise on sorcery and spells’ (c. 1553), makes reference to a description in Augustine’s City of God of how the Devil could cause people to confuse dreams with reality:

The passage of Augustine cited by Olmos contains a reflection on the possibility of Apuleius’ transformation into an ass:

Olmos deemed it appropriate to discuss such questions with native converts because the belief that sorcerers or ‘naguales’ had the capacity to transform themselves into jaguars, wolves, and other animals was widely held at the time. Indeed, it continues to this day throughout Mesoamerica.¹¹

Indigenous fascination with ‘nagualism’ could explain why elements from Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche becoming incorporated into two fables (‘zazanilli’) in Nahuatl, which were transcribed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the folklorist and linguist Pablo González Casanova.¹² There are parallels for the rendition of classical texts into the Mexican language in the 1500s, and interactions between missionary friars and their native students may have led to the first Nahuatl version or versions of Cupid and Psyche.¹³ Such a percolation into Mexican oral narrative is of interest because the Madauran Apuleius’ story may itself have originated in oral narratives—those of the ancient Berbers which were precursors of North African folktales recorded in the twentieth century.¹⁴ But such a percolation is also important because it might help to account for connections between European texts and Mesoamerican traditions which are otherwise difficult to explain: on this basis, a parallel between the manifestations of Cihuacoatl and Apuleius’ Isis discussed below (III) may not be coincidental.

Two sixteenth-century Latin letters in Mexico City recall Apuleius’ language, rather than the content of his work. A letter to Philip II of Spain by an indigenous noble, Pablo Nazareo of Xaltocan, contains the following captatio benevolentiae:

The final two words of the Latin sentence, ‘salo mentis’ (‘sea of the mind’), were used in Apuleius’ De deo Socratis; there are similar formulations—‘isto cogitationis salo’ and ‘mentis salo’—in the Metamorphoses.¹⁶ Although Saint Augustine could also have transmitted ‘salo mentis’ to Nazareo, the evocations above of Virgil and of Quintilian’s remark on Horace’s ship of state ode (as well as a quotation from Ovid’s Ars amatoria in his previous sentence) demonstrate the writer’s acquaintance with classical sources.¹⁷

The second Latin author, Fray Cristóbal Cabrera, a Franciscan humanist in New Spain, wrote an epistolary preface to a Latin translation of some Greek commentaries on Paul’s Epistles in 1540:

Cabrera’s words play on the first sentence of Apuleius’ prologue to the Metamorphoses:

Apuleius’ conceit of a text that could either be heard or scrutinised by sight was thus redeployed and embellished—with the mention of Latin listeners and an adversarial reader modelled on Horace’s critic with ‘swollen eyes full of ointment’ (‘oculis […] lippus inunctis’).²⁰ The friar also appropriated the term ‘Graecanicam’ (‘Greekish’) to signal his recognition of the distinction, made long ago by Isidore of Seville, between the koinē of the New Testament and classical Greek.²¹ Like Apuleius, Cabrera was translating Greek into Latin—which was not his first language either. These allusions show that the Latin text of the Metamorphoses, or at least of its opening, was known in New Spain by the mid-1500s, as well as López de Cortegana’s popular translation in El asno de oro.

II. Accounts of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Apuleius’ Prologue was also echoed more than a century later in another Mexican Latin preface: Bernardo Ceinos de Riofrío’s introduction to his Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum of 1680.²² This Virgilian cento narrated what is still the most famous miracle on the American continent: the apparition, which supposedly occurred in 1531, of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an indigenous Mexican—a foundation myth which continues to be of potent religious and political significance in Mexico today, as well as for people in many other Spanish-speaking countries and regions of the Americas (fig. 1).²³

Figure 1. Original image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the New Basilica of Tepeyac, Mexico. Public domain.

One of the first published accounts of the miracle, Luis Becerra Tanco’s Origen milagrosa del santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Mexico City 1666), was summarized by Riofrío in the Latin preface to his cento.²⁴ On the ninth of December 1531, a poor and humble Indian called Juan Diego was walking at dawn past the hill now known as Guadalupe to hear mass. He caught sight of a colourful rainbow and heard the sound of beautiful singing. As he turned towards the sound, the Virgin Mary appeared and spoke to him, declaring that she was the mother of God and that a temple should be established on the hill from where she might stretch out her hand to help him and all those devoted to her. She enjoined him to give a faithful account of this to the bishop, who at first did not believe him and sought a sign. The Indian returned and unfastened his cloak, in which the Virgin had instructed him to gather roses from the hill. The bishop then saw the image of the Virgin on the cloak and ordered a church to be built in the place she appeared: the very site where, Riofrío remarks, ‘the ancient inhabitants had once in their foolish and empty superstition worshipped an expiatory goddess whom they had persistently called the mother of gods’ (‘ubi antea inepta, vanaque veterum superstitio, expiatricem Deam colebat, quam deorum matrem appellitabat’).²⁵

The very first sentence of Riofrío’s preface, however, took the form of a captatio benevolentiae to the reader:

This resembles Apuleius’ address to his reader in the opening sentence of the prologue to the Metamorphoses quoted above, and Riofrío’s playful apology for the ‘Indian colour’ of the work corresponds to the ironic bashfulness about using ‘Egyptian paper’ and a ‘Nile reed pen’ on the part of the African Apuleius’ narrator. Riofrío characterized his cento as an ‘indicum opusculum’ because of the supposed indigenous origin of that story: the native Mexicans had indeed venerated their deity Tonantzin, ‘Our Mother’, in Tepeyac at the site where the Virgin supposedly appeared.²⁷ It was, however, creole Spaniards, not Indians, who were responsible for generating and promoting the Guadalupan myth from the mid-1600s onwards.²⁸

Riofrío’s prominent and pronounced allusion to Apuleius’ Prologue may have a further significance. The first apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Becerra Tanco’s narrative has some elements in common with the epiphany of Isis to Lucius in book 11 of the Metamorphoses. Although not in the desperate situation of Lucius, the Indian Juan Diego was still an abject figure, ‘plebeian and poor, lowly and simple’. The clothing of the ‘beautiful lady’ (‘hermosíssima señora’) he saw was described as follows:

This part of Becerra Tanco’s description is a Spanish translation of a passage from the Huey Tlamahuiçoltica (fig. 2), a version of the story that had been printed in Nahuatl in 1649:

Figure 2. Huei tlamahuiçoltica, ‘By a Great Miracle’ (Mexico 1649), title page. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

That Nahuatl version of the passage more directly recalls the iridescent raiment of the image of the goddess that was treated in equivalent detail in chapter 3 of book 11 of the Metamorphoses:

In Becerra Tanco’s narrative, the Virgin then makes a speech to Juan Diego, which parallels the speech Isis made to Lucius. Both of the speeches, reproduced below, exhibit the same thematic correspondences in the same order, here enumerated [1]–[4] and highlighted in bold type. The Virgin and Isis present themselves respectively as the mother of God and the mother of gods; both pledge their compassion and protection to their addressee, whom they charge with a mission; and both engineer a miracle in which roses are involved. The relevant parts of Becerra Tanco’s narrative are as follows:

Isis speaks these words to Lucius thus in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses:

The Virgin of Guadalupe identifies herself as a divine mother, assuring Juan Diego of her pity and compassion. Like Isis, she also issues a command and promises benefits to her mortal addressee if it is fulfilled: Juan Diego should inform the bishop of her wish for a temple to be built in Tepeyac where she has appeared. Most strikingly, roses and a high-ranking priest have a role in the resolutions of both the pagan and the Christian stories: Isis instructs Lucius to approach the high priest and snatch at the garland of roses to recover his human form; the Virgin locates some ‘fresh roses of Castile’ which Juan Diego is to wrap in his cloak to present to the bishop—an action which led to the manifestation of the Virgin’s sacred image.

Passages from Scripture and accounts of Marian apparitions in Europe were the principal sources and inspiration for the Guadalupan testimonies by Becerra Tanco and others. Even so, Venus’ appearance to her son in Aeneid book 1 offers a classical model for Riofrío’s verse narrative of the epiphany in his Virgilian cento.³⁶ What is more, his Latin prose summary of the Virgin’s speech to Juan Diego has a pronounced resemblance to Isis’ speech in Apuleius:

The convergence may not be coincidental. López de Cortegana’s translation of the Metamorphoses had circulated widely in the colony of New Spain long before it was prohibited by Gaspar de Quiroga in his inquisitorial Index of 1583.³⁸ A century later, in 1680, the same year as Riofrio’s Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum appeared, the Jeronymite nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz published her Neptuno alegórico, a prose text replete with displays of learning characteristic of much baroque literature. The Neptuno alegórico celebrated the entry of the new viceroy into Mexico City—Sor Juana playfully associated him with Neptune on account of his name, Laguna. Citing the unreliable Italian humanist Natale Conti, the poetess affirmed that Neptune’s mother ‘was the goddess Isis […] whom they called Magna mater, mother of the gods’:

Sor Juana adduced other sources for Isis, including all the names given to her by Apuleius, which she had absorbed from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (fig. 3).⁴⁰ All in all, Apuleius’ Isis and the Virgin of Guadalupe were oddly similar figures, but it remains to be shown that a direct association had already been made between them earlier in New Spain’s history.

III. Serpent women: Cihuacoatl, Isis, and Eve

The evidence is in the Monarchia indiana, an ambitious history of New Spain—reminiscent of Livy’s Ab urbe condita— from Mexico’s beginnings in pre-Hispanic myth to the time the work was brought to completion in the 1590s. Its Franciscan author, Fray Juan de Torquemada, taught in the Indian college of Tlatelolco in Mexico City and had a good command of the Mexican language of Nahuatl. In book 2 of his history, Torquemada recounted how the Aztecs left Aztlan, their mythical place of origin, often supposed to be in North America, and came to be called the Mexica. In the course of their long migration, when they reached Apanco, a strange event occurred. A witch named Quilaztli appeared before two of their commanders as a great and beautiful eagle perched on a nopal cactus. The men aimed their arrows at her, but she made fun of them, telling them not to shoot, for she was their sister, of their people, and they would pay the price if they killed her. On a second occasion, Quilaztli assumed the guise of a warrior in order to terrify the same two men. She spoke to them, listing her various names:

Figure 3. The Magna Deorum Mater, based on Apuleius’ Isis, in Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome 1652). Public domain.

Figure 4. Pre-Hispanic sculpture of Cihuacoatl, Cuernavaca c. 1325–1521 AD.
Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, inv. no. 11-3298.

Quilaztli was an unpleasant avatar of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, the Serpent Woman, who was often represented visually as framed by the mouth of a serpent, holding an ear of maize in one hand and a snake in the other (fig. 4). As Torquemada describes her, Cihuacoatl-Quilaztli has a lot in common with a female divinity described in Virgil’s Aeneid: the loathsome Allecto, an infernal agent of Discord. Allecto too is a snake-wielding goddess with many names who can take any form she likes, including the appearance of people known to those whom she aims to terrorize. Allecto also makes her entrance at the very point that the Trojans are reaching their own promised land of Italy. There is another glancing convergence: Allecto induces Aeneas’ son to kill with his arrow a pet stag cherished by the Latins, directly causing the war between them and the Trojans:

But the speech of Quilaztli also pointedly recalls that of Isis at the end of the Metamorphoses. What is more, Isis wears a crown adorned with coiled serpents, a mirror, and ears of wheat. After she too has listed her numerous names and her true identity as Isis, she says to Lucius: ‘Adsum tuos miserata casus, adsum favens et propitia’ (‘I am here to take pity on your misfortune, to favour and help you’).⁴³

Torquemada’s Quilaztli, who threatens hindrance and harm rather than providing help to the Mexicans, is a pointed inversion of Apuleius’ goddess, and indeed of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Narratives and demonologies transmitted in works of speculum literature (such as Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia considered below) could have possibly inspired Torquemada’s portrayal of Quilaztli, but Isis’ speech to Lucius has the most obvious bearing on the construction of the Mexican goddess’ speech to the Aztec leaders.

That is not accidental. The reason for this evocation emerges in the prior account of the Mexican goddess Cihuacoatl by Torquemada’s predecessor as a missionary ethnographer of pre-Hispanic Mexico, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. In his Spanish chapter on Cihuacoatl, Sahagún states that this goddess was also called Tonantzin, which means ‘Our Mother’. The friar took her two names, ‘Snake Woman’ and ‘Mother’, to mean that ‘this goddess is our Mother Eve, who was tricked by a serpent’.⁴⁴ Sahagún was drawing from a tradition of Eve herself as a serpent woman (fig. 5a). In the second century, Clement of Alexandria claimed that the aspirated Hebrew name of Eve, ‘Hevva’, translated into Greek as ‘female serpent’— both Clement and Eusebius linked this to the use of serpents and the ritual invocation of Eve (‘Euhoe’) in Greek Bacchic orgies.⁴⁵

The association of women with snakes became a more general convention, and depictions of Eve directly associating her with a serpent were widespread in medieval Europe: the restored bas-relief on the Portail de la Vierge of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris shows Eve almost as a reflection of Lilith, who is rendered as a serpent with a woman’s head (fig. 5b).⁴⁶ A passage in Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, an influential work composed in the thirteenth century for the Holy Roman Emperor Otto, helps throw light on this convention and also has a tangential relation to the story of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses:

Figure 5a. Drawing of Snake Woman, Florentine Codex c. 1577, book 8, fol. 12 r, detail. World Digital Library.

Figure 5b. Relief showing Adam, Eve, and Lilith, Portail de la Vierge, Notre Dame, Paris. Photograph by author.

The rest of Gervase’s chapter is taken up with a purportedly veridical account he heard in Aix of a local knight whose wife changed into a serpent. Such a discussion of women who turn into snakes, which incorporates legends about men being transformed into asses, would naturally bring Apuleius’ Metamorphoses to mind—the protagonist and principal narrator became an ass and was relieved from his predicament by a goddess adorned with snakes, while a monstrous serpent intruded into the embedded narrative of Cupid and Psyche.⁴⁸

Gervase of Tilbury’s discussion, however, has a further resonance with native Mexican testimony about Cihuacoatl—at least as it was given in Sahagún’s Nahuatl text: the goddess imposed heavy burdens and toil on menfolk and was clad all in white with a womanly hairdress (fig. 6).⁴⁹ The Aztec goddess could thus be seen to conjoin the European snake women in their white headbands with the Mediterranean enchantresses who imposed heavy loads and labour on the men they had turned into asses. In the end, Sahagún’s alignment of Cihuacoatl with Eve was probably disingenuous. The Franciscan missionary’s real concern was with a far more threatening identification fuelled by the secular clergy and prompted by Cihuacoatl’s alternative name of Tonantzin: the church of the Lady of Guadalupe in Tepeyac had been built on the site of the Aztec temple of Tonantzin, which means ‘Our Mother’. ‘Now’, Sahagún complained, ‘the Indians also call her “Tonantzin”’.⁵⁰

Torquemada attributed the association of Cihuacoatl with Eve to Sahagún—perhaps because he did not subscribe to it himself. Instead, Torquemada decided to discredit the woman snake goddess with figures who were not biblical but classical: the nightmarish Allecto and the Mother goddess Isis, as she was characterized in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. But all the Franciscans of the sixteenth century objected to the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe because of its connections with the veneration of Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin. This is why Torquemada inverted the portrayal of Isis as a benign mother in Apuleius. The friar wanted to emphasize the danger and the threat posed by these resemblances and he used Isis to highlight the dangerous ambivalence of the Guadalupan Virgin and her confusing identification with an Aztec divinity.⁵¹

Conclusions

Lexical echoes of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses indicate that the Latin text was available in New Spain from as early as 1540, even before the first imports of Diego López de Cortegana’s Spanish translation were recorded. A citation of the Florida by Fray Juan de Torquemada suggests that other works by Apuleius circulated as well.⁵² The popularity of the Metamorphoses, or at least of El asno de oro, in sixteenth-century New Spain may have been due to the influential commendations of Erasmus—Thomas More’s Utopia and his Latin versions of Lucian were also enthusiastically absorbed by missionary friars and educators.⁵³

Figure 6. Cihuacoatl dressed in white, Florentine Codex (c. 1577), book 1, preliminary folio, detail. World Digital Library.

Although separated by an interval of 150 years, the Latin prefatory texts of Fray Cristóbal Cabrera’s letter and of Bernardo Ceinos de Riofrío’s introduction to his cento were both modelled on the opening of the Metamorphoses. As well as the stylistic debt to Apuleius in his opening sentence, Riofrío’s account of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s speech to Juan Diego in the same preface calls attention to the thematic and structural correspondences between narratives of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the description of Isis in Metamorphoses book 11. Those formal correspondences bring into greater relief the essential similarities between the two divinities: each was called the ‘queen of heaven’; the Virgin Mary was the Mother of God, while Isis, also associated with virginity, was the mother of the gods.⁵⁴ Moreover, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz recognized the multiple divine identities Apuleius had accorded Isis. The Egyptian deity who had been called different names by the different races of the ancient Mediterranean was also comparable in that respect to the Virgin whose cult had originated in Tepeyac, where there had been a pre-Hispanic temple to a goddess whom the Aztecs had called Tonantzin.

Yet Apuleius’ Isis had already provided Fray Juan de Torquemada with a formula for countering misleading identifications of the Virgin of Guadalupe with the Aztec mother goddess. In addition, the coherent presentation of paganism in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, popularized in Spanish translation, may well have offered other missionary friars a ready and engaging (if unofficial) resource for making sense of the alien polytheism they encountered in New Spain. After all, Sahagún had openly drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid as well as from Augustine’s City of God in his analysis of Mexican belief—and accounts of Greco-Roman religion in Renaissance encyclopaedias and speculum literature were used in a similar way.⁵⁵

The particular example of Gervase of Tilbury’s testimony considered in this chapter also serves as a salutary reminder that boundaries between some classical texts and popular tradition (or ‘folklore’) in ancient and early modern Europe alike were never as firm as is often supposed. On that basis, the passage of Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche into Nahuatl oral narrative in sixteenth-century New Spain should be no more surprising than the transmission of Augustine’s insights on metamorphosis to indigenous Mexican audiences by Fray Andrés de Olmos.

Brown University

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¹ The discussion that follows, versions of which were presented at the Warburg Institute in May 2016 and at the UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas in September 2017, is a more systematic extension of an earlier paper ‘Les Métamorphoses et le métissage religieux au Mexique colonial’, in La Réception de l’ancien roman du Moyen Âge au début de l’époque classique, eds C. Bost-Pouderon and B. Pouderon (Lyon 2015) 163–79. I am grateful to the editors and anonymous readers of the present volume, and especially to Claudio García Ehrenfeld, for comments on what follows.

² R. Graves, The White Goddess (London 1997) 91 (orig. 1949). Graves’ own translation of The Golden Ass was first published as The Transformations of Lucius (Harmondsworth 1951).

³ Graves visited Mexico in 1965, but his interest in the teonancatl mushroom, which led to an indirect association with María Sabina, the celebrated Mazatec curandera, had begun in 1949: M. Pharand, ‘The mythophile and the mycophile: Robert Graves and R. Gordon Wasson’, Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society 1.2 (December 1996) 204–15. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s influential description of Cihuacoatl in book 1, chapter 6 of his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, compiled in the later 1500s, is translated in Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 1: The Gods, eds A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble (Santa Fe 1970) 11.

⁴ B. E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City (Austin 2015) is an authoritative account of the transition.

⁵ A. María Rodríguez Cruz, Salmantica docet: la proyección de la Universidad de Salamanca, 2 vols (Salamanca 1977) I 53–82.

⁶ R. Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (Berkeley 1974) 217–37; M. Mathes, Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco: la primera biblioteca académica de las Américas (Mexico City 1982); A. Laird, ‘The teaching of Latin to the native nobility in Mexico in the mid-1500s: contexts, methods and results’, in Learning Latin and Greek from Antiquity to the Present, eds E. Archibald, W. Brockliss, and J. Gnoza (Cambridge 2015) 118–35.

⁷ Diego López de Cortegana, Apuleyo, ‘El asno de oro’ (Seville 1513), ed. C. García Gual (Madrid 1988). López de Cortegana is discussed in J. H. Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the ‘Golden Ass’: A Study in Transmission and Reception (Princeton-Oxford 2008) 269–78. N. Maillard Álvarez, ‘The early circulation of classical books in New Spain and Peru’, in Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America, eds A. Laird and N. Miller (Chichester 2018) 26–40 describes the sixteenth-century book trade. A discussion of the Inquisition’s suppression of El asno de oro in New Spain is cited at n. 38 below.

⁸ J. García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI: catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 a 1600 (Mexico City 1954); C. Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford 1988) 82–9.

⁹ Fray Andrés de Olmos, Tratado de hechicerias y sortilegios, ed. G. Baudot (Mexico City 1990). Olmos’ manuscript work was a translation of Fray Martín de Castañega, Tratado muy sotil y bien fundado de las supersticiones y hechicerias (Logroño 1529): V. Ríos Castaño, ‘El Tratado de hechicerias y sortilegios que “avisa y no emponzoña” de Fray Andrés de Olmos’, 1611: Revista de historia de la traducción 8 (2014), unpaginated [http://www.traduccionliteraria.org/1611/art/rios.htm (accessed 12 November 2019)].

¹⁰ August. C. D. 18.18.12–15.

¹¹ D. G. Brinton, Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folk-Lore and History (Philadelphia 1894) was a pioneering account. A. López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología. Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas (Mexico City 2012) 1, 420–30, and R. Martínez González, ‘Sobre el origen y significado del término nahualli’, Estudios de cultura náhuatl 37 (2006) 95–105 are among more recent studies.

¹² ‘The Virgin and the Beast’, recounted by Juan Hidalgo, a native of Tepotzlan, south of Mexico City; and ‘A sickness afflicting three girls’, related by Ignacia Maldonado from the neighbouring town of Milpa Alta: P. González Casanova, ‘Un cuento griego en el folklore azteca’, Ethnos 3 (1925) 16–24, reprinted in P. González Casanova, Estudios de linguística y filología nahuas (Mexico City 1977) 199–208. The linguist assumed that the story’s features were common to many peoples of the world but G. Baudot, ‘La belle et la bête dans le folklore náhuatl du Mexique central’, Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 27 (1976) 53–61 introduced his French translation of ‘The Virgin and the Beast’ (‘Cizuanton huan yolcatl’) with the suggestion that the Mexican story may have resulted from ‘transfert littéraire et métissage culturel’.

¹³ Fray Juan de Torquemada, Monarchia indiana (Seville 1615), book 15, chapter 43 attests a sixteenth-century translation of Cato’s Distichs into Nahuatl, and there are manuscripts of a version of forty-seven of Aesop’s fables from the same period: A. Laird, ‘A Mirror for Mexican princes: Reconsidering the context and Latin source for the Nahuatl translation of Aesop’s Fables’, in Brief Forms in Medieval and Renaissance Hispanic Literature, eds B. Taylor and A. Coroleu (Newcastle 2017) 132–67.

¹⁴ O. Weinreich, ‘Eros und Psyche bei den Kabylen’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 28 (1930) 1–2, 88–94; É. Dermenghem, Contes kabyles (Algiers 1945) and ‘Les mythes de Psyché dans le folklore nord-africain’, Revue africaine 89 (1945) 41–81; and J. Öjvind Swahn, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: Aarne-Thompson 425 & 428 (Lund 1955) compared Apuleius’ story to the north African traditional accounts; E. Plantade and N. Plantade, ‘Libyca Psyche: Apuleius’ narrative and Berber folktales’, in Apuleius and Africa, eds B. Todd Lee, E. Finkelpearl, and L. Graverini (New York-Abingdon 2014) 174–202 make a strong case for Libyan oral sources informing the literary narrative of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Such investigations, though, are problematic: K. Dowden, ‘Ass-men and witches’, Classical Review 35.1 (1985) 41–3, a short review of A. Scobie, Apuleius and Folklore: Toward a History of ML 3045, AaTh 567, 449A (London 1983).

¹⁵ Pablo Nazareo de Xaltocan, Sacrae Catholicae Magestati Hispaniarum Indiarumque, 17 March 1566 [ms. Archivo General de Indias, F 1229/P37], fol. 2. The letter is edited in Ignacio Osorio Romero, La enseñanza de latín a los indios (Mexico City 1990) 11–34.

¹⁶ Apul. Soc. 12; Met. 4.2 and 9.19: S. J. Harrison, ‘Waves of emotion: an epic metaphor in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, in Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, Ancient Narrative Supplementum 4, eds S. J. Harrison, M. Paschalis, and S. A. Frangoulidis (Groningen 2005) 163–76.

¹⁷ August. C. D. 9.3 and 9.6–7; Verg. Aen. 4.441–6; Hor. Odes 1.14; Quint. Inst. 8.6.44: ‘navem pro re publica, fluctus et tempestates pro bellis civilibus’.

¹⁸ Fray Cristóbal Cabrera, Argumenta in omnes Beati Pauli Epistolas (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. Lat. 1164, 1540), ed. Fr. Leopoldo Campos, ‘Métodos misionales y rasgos biográficos de Don Vasco de Quiroga según Cristóbal Cabrera’, in Don Vasco de Quiroga y el arzobispado de Morélia, ed. M. Ponce (Mexico City 1965).

¹⁹ Apul. Met. 1.1.

²⁰ Hor. Sat. 1.3.25.

²¹ Isid. Etym. 10.4–5.

²² Riofrío, Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum mirabilis apparitionis purissimae Virginis Mariae de Guadalupe (Mexico City 1680); A. Laird, ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe and the birth of Latin epic in Mexico: Bernardo Ceinos de Riofrío’s Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum’, in Mexico 1680: Cultural and Intellectual Life in the ‘Barroco de Indias’, eds. J. Andrews and A. Coroleu (Bristol 2007) 199–220.

²³ J. Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: the Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531– 1813 (Chicago 1987) 276–302; D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge 2001); J. Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Austin 1994).

²⁴ L. Becerra Tanco, Origen milagrosa de santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Mexico City 1666) in Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, eds E. de la Torre Villar and R. Navarra de Anda (Mexico City 2005) 309–33.

²⁵ Riofrío, Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum (n. 22, above) ‘Ad lectorem’, fol. 13 (unnumbered).

²⁶ Riofrío, Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum (n. 22, above) ‘Ad lectorem’, fol. 12 (unnumbered).

²⁷ Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Introductory Volume, eds A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble (Santa Fe 1982) 90; A. Laird, ‘Aztec and Roman gods in sixteenth-century Mexico: classical learning in Sahagún’s missionary ethnography’, in Altera Roma: Art and Empire from Mérida to Mexico, eds J. Pohl and C. Lyons (Los Angeles 2016) 147–67 (161).

²⁸ This consideration is central to Brading, Mexican Phoenix (n. 23, above).

³⁰ Luis Laso de la Vega, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (Mexico City 1649), edited and translated as The Story of Guadalupe, eds L. Sousa, S. Poole, and J. Lockhart (Stanford 1988) 62–5.

³¹ Apul. Met. 11.3, ed. D. S. Robertson (Paris 1945) II 140; other texts have ‘vestis’ for ‘tunica’. Compare El asno de oro, trans. López de Cortegana (Madrid 1988) 308 (book 11, chapter 1 of this translation): ‘traía un vestido de lino tejido de muchos colores: ahora era blanca y muy luciente, ahora amarilla como flor de azafrán, ahora inflamada con un color rosado, que aunque estaba yo lejos, me quitaba la vista de los ojos, traía encima otra ropa negra, que resplandecía la obscuridad de ella’.

³² Becerra Tanco, Origen milagrosa (n. 29, above), ‘Primera aparición’ 313.

³³ Becerra Tanco, Origen milagrosa, ‘Cuarta aparición’ 318.

³⁴ An initiate seeking or being bidden to make an ascent is a topos of Christian protreptic and humanist writing (Petrarch, Epistolae familiares 4.1) with precedents in classical literature (Lucian, Hermot. 59; Cebetis Tabula 15).

³⁵ Apul. Met. 11.5–6, ed. Robertson, II 143 (n. 31, above).

³⁶ Verg. Aeneid 1.327–34, recalled in Riofrío, Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum (n. 22, above) v. 201–8. Laird, ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe and the birth of Latin epic’ (n. 22, above) 208.

³⁷ Riofrío, Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum (n. 22, above), ‘Ad lectorem’.

³⁸ I. A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge, MA 1967) 248.

³⁹ Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neptuno alegórico (Mexico City 1680) in Obras completas, ed. A. G. Salceda, (Mexico City 1957) IV 355–410 (360–2).

⁴⁰ Athanasius Kircher, Œdipus ægyptiacus hoc est vniuersalis hieroglyphicæ veterum doctrinae […] instauratio, vol. 1 (Rome 1652) 189.

⁴¹ Fray Juan de Torquemada, Monarchia indiana (Seville 1615) book 2, chapter 2.

⁴² Verg. Aen. 7.324–6, 7.328–9.

⁴³ Apul. Met. 11.5. Isis’ crown is described in Met. 11.3.

⁴⁴ Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, book 1, chapter 6, ed. J. C. Temprano (Madrid 2009).

⁴⁵ Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 2.12.2: ‘The exact pronunciation of the aspirated Hebrew name of “Eve” translates into Greek as “female serpent”’. Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 2.3.3: ‘The bacchants celebrate with their orgies the madness of Dionysus, and organize a festival day each month on which they eat raw flesh and when they distribute the flesh of slaughtered victims; they are crowned with garlands of serpents, and they invoke Eve, that Eve through whom every treachery was admitted and who was closely followed by death’.

⁴⁶ A. Giallongo, The Historical Enigma of the Snake Woman from Antiquity to the 21st Century, trans. A. C. Foster (Newcastle upon Tyne 2017). A. Rojas Silva, ‘Gardens of origin and the Golden Age in the Mexican Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552)’, in Antiquities and Classical Traditions (n. 7, above) 51, suggests that an image of two snakes in a native Mexican herbal could allude to Eve and Lilith, noting that ‘coatl’, serpent in Nahuatl, also means ‘twin’.

⁴⁷ Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, eds and trans S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford 2002) 87 [1.15] (my translation). Book 1 relates the creation and early history of the world as a kind of commentary on Genesis. Banks and Binns note ad loc. that (i) Petrus Comestor’s twelfth-century work on Genesis was the proper source for the remark Gervase misattributed to Bede; and (ii) that Augustine (C. D. 18.18) had heard of Italian landladies who turned their guests into beasts of burden. Augustine (cited in n. 10, above) next mentions Apuleius’ transformation, having considered werewolves in his preceding chapter (18.17), but makes no mention of women who changed into snakes.

⁴⁸ D. Felton, ‘Apuleius’ Cupid considered as a Lamia (Metamorphoses 5.17–18)’, Illinois Classical Studies 38 (2013) 229–44.

⁴⁹ Sahagún, Historia natural, book 1, ch. 6: Florentine Codex, Book 1: The Gods, eds A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble (Santa Fe 1970) 11: ‘Ciuacoatl (sic) […] was an evil omen to men; she brought men misery. For it was said: she gave men the digging-stick, the tump-line; she visited men therewith. And as she appeared before men, she was covered with chalk, like a court lady. She wore ear-plugs, obsidian ear-plugs. She appeared in white, garbed in white, standing white, pure white. Her womanly hair-dress rose up’.

⁵⁰ Sahagún, Historia natural, book 11, ch. 12 para. 6: Florentine Codex, eds A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble (Santa Fe 1982) 90.

⁵¹ S. Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (London 2002) 19– 21 outlines the evident problems and contradictions inherent in the notion of ‘syncretism’; Theological and Philosophical Responses to Syncretism: Beyond the Mirage of Pure Religion, eds P. Fridlund and M. Vähäkangas (Leiden 2018) seeks to rehabilitate the term.

⁵² Torquemada, Monarchia indiana (n. 41, above), book 15, chapter 30.

⁵³ R. Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley 1974) 299– 300; M. Bataillon, Érasme et l’Espagne: recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du XVI e siècle (Geneve 1998; orig. Paris 1937) 580– 90; G. Bataillon, Érasme au Mexique (Algiers 1932); S. Zavala, Sir Thomas More in New Spain: Utopian Adventure of the Renaissance (London 1955); A. Laird, ‘The classical foundations of Utopia in sixteenth-century Mexico: Lucian, Virgil, More, and Vasco de Quiroga’s Información en derecho (1535)’, Comparatismes en Sorbonne 6 (2015), 1– 9 [Online: http://www.crlc.paris-sorbonne.fr/pdf_revue/revue6/1-Laird.pdf (accessed 15 January 2020)]. In Lucian’s Dream, the narrator describes how as a youth he was accosted by female personifications of Sculpture and Eloquence, but the accounts of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Quilaztli have far more salient parallels to Apul. Met. 11.5– 6.

⁵⁴ W. Drexler, ‘Isis (mit Jungfrau Maria identifiziert)’, Ausführliches Lexikon der Mythologie, ed. W. H. Roscher, 2.1 (Leipzig 1890–4) 428–32; R. E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World (Baltimore 1971) 270–8; J. McGuckin. ‘The early cult of Mary and inter-religious contexts in the fifth-century church’, in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. C. Maunder (London 2008) 23–40 are among the many treatments.

⁵⁵ Laird, ‘Aztec and Roman gods’ (n. 27, above) 152–7.