Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780199790852)

Mexican statues and paintings like the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Ser de Chalma are endowed with sacred presence and the power to perform miracles. Millions of devotees visit their shrines to request miracles for health, employment, children, and countless everyday matters. When miracles are granted, devotees reciprocate with votive offerings. Collages, photographs, documents, texts, milagritos, hair and braids, clothing, retablos, and various representative objects cover walls at many shrines.

Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico explores such petitionary devotion in depth through extensive fieldwork supported by research in a vast body of interdisciplinary scholarship. The study's principal themes include sacred power and human agency, reification, projective animation, faith as a cognitive filter, sacred power transfer, social and narrative construction, positive framing, collaborative and deferred control, vows (juramentos), and miracle attribution.

The book is written in two alternating voices, one interpretive to provide an understanding of miracles, miraculous images, and votive offerings, and the other narrative to illustrate the interpretive chapters and to bring the reader closer to experiences at the shrines. Among the many miraculous images treated in the book are the Cristo Negro de Otatitl疣, Ni del Cacahuatito, Ser de Chalma, Ser de la Misericordia (Tepatitl疣), Ser del Rayo, Ser de las Tres Ca冝as (Teotilalpam), Virgen de los Dolores de Soriano, Virgen de Guadalupe, Virgen del Pueblito, Virgen de Juquila, Virgen de los Remedios, Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos, Virgen de Talpa, Virgen de Tonatico, and Virgen de Zapopan.

Author: Frank Graziano
ISBN-10: 019979085X
ISBN-13: 9780199790852
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 12/02/2015
Pages: 354
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d