Three Books Trace The History Of The Virgin Mary. By Margaret Regan DOWN IN MEXICO CITY on December 12, some two million pilgrims flocked to the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the beloved, brown-skinned Mexican Virgin Mary. Prayer, songs and fireworks all helped the faithful celebrate her feast day. Here in Tucson, a splendid Virgin of Guadalupe shrine graces the University of Arizona Museum of Art's current show of Mexican-American arts, La Cadena Que No Se Corta. Tucsonan Alicia Alvarado decorated her dazzling church-sized statue of the Virgin with a mirror, artificial cacti and flowers, and blinking colored lights. The minimalist portrait of Mary offered in the Scriptures certainly doesn't refer to anything along the lines of Guadalupe's trademark crescent moon and shining rays of light, not to mention flashing bulbs and fireworks. How did western culture get from the New Testament's humble girl of Nazareth, who obediently agrees to be the mother of Jesus ("Be it unto me according to thy word," she tells the angel Gabriel in Luke 1:38) to the Queen of Heaven glorified in countless cathedrals and paintings? Three recent books help shed some light on the centuries-long evolution of Mariology, the branch of theology that studies Mary. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale University Press, $25) is an erudite but accessible guide to two millennia of Mariology by Yale history professor Jaroslav Pelikan. In a book beautifully illustrated with masterpieces of art, he shows how Mary's role as the official Mother of God grew ever more important as early theologians painstakingly tried to prove that Christ, born of a real woman, was truly human. Her virginity was crucial to the companion doctrine that Jesus was also truly the son of God, with no human father. The problem of her scant appearances in the New Testament was readily solved by early church scholars. They pored over the Old Testament to locate female references, which they nearly always interpreted as prophecies that Mary later fulfilled. Thus Miriam, the sister of Moses, Wisdom in the book of Proverbs and the Bride in the Song of Solomon all become precursors of Mary, paving the way for much of the allegorical art and prolific folk traditions of the Middle Ages. This inventive "development of doctrine" later scandalized the Protestant reformers. Luther and others scaled Mary back down to a merely human, but eminently worthy, model of faith. The Catholic Church's continuing idealization of the Virgin Mother, as feminist writers such as Marina Warner have pointed out, is a debilitating paradox utterly unattainable by real women. But Pelikan notes that Mary is nevertheless a powerful cultural archetype whose particularly female story has spoken to women across the centuries. Stafford Poole, C.M., an historian who is also a Catholic priest, dissects the origins of the Guadalupe story in Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (University of Arizona Press, $40 cloth, $19.95 paper). Billed as "scholarly detective work," this readable book asserts that there's no historical evidence for the celebrated miracle at Tepeyac in 1531. While it's commonly held that the apparition of a brown-skinned Mary to an indigenous man just 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico triggered mass Indian conversions to the new faith, Poole finds that the cult did not even begin until more than a hundred years later. The earliest written account was published in 1648 by a Mexican priest. And the earliest devotees were criollos, Mexican-born descendants of the Spanish, who were eager to increase their political power via a Mary who had chosen to visit their native land. Nowadays, writers often identify Guadalupe with the pre-Christian mother goddess Tonantzin, whose temple is supposed to lie beneath Guadalupe's basilica, and argue that Indians embraced the Christian apparition because of this duality. Poole questions whether there was a Tonantzin temple on the site and notes that Mexican Indians only became adherents of the cult sometime in the 18th century, following official church efforts "to propagate the devotion." The writers in Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas, Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (Riverhead Books, $24.95), edited by the novelist and poet Ana Castillo, are generally not concerned with theological debates or historical evidence. They're mining the terrain of cultural archetype and myth, and for many of them the pregnant Guadalupe is another face of the ancient Mother Goddess. Margaret Randall, a political activist who once worked as a midwife among Mexico City's poor, writes that intense devotion to Guadalupe among women is a subversive response to an official church that excludes their concerns. In difficult births, "I could be sure of it--Guadalupe would be invoked. Perhaps by name: Our Lady. La Morenita. She who stays with us, who understands our pain...even when the Church does not." In recent years, Guadalupe, already a symbol of the Mexican nation, has been transformed into an emblem for liberation theology and struggles against injustice. Tucson author Nancy Mairs, converted from icon-free Congregationalism to Catholicism, writes that she associates Guadalupe with social action, with good works like those of the Tucson soup kitchen Casa María. There are profound reasons for the elaborate devotion to Mary and her continuing power in a secular age, concludes feminist theologian Jeanette Rodriguez. "The Marian phenomenon throughout history has been powerful precisely because it is a female representation of the divine...In official religiosity, the feminine face of God has been suppressed and excluded, and female images of God have migrated to the figure of Mary."

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