Stories of Holy Dirt: Myth, Ethnicity, and the New Age at the Santuario de Chimayó

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• Stories of Holy Dirt:Myth, Ethnicity, and the New Age at the Santuario de Chimayó
• Karl Isaac Johnson (bio)

The Santuario de Chimayó, the most popular Catholic pilgrimage site within the United States, is said to be inspired by a shrine of Our Lord of Esquípulas in Guatemala and is built atop a former Tewa Indian healing pool. Scholars, most recently including Brett Hendrickson in his monumental study The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America's Miraculous Church, have traced the complex ethnic relations in the history of the shrine, which is known for healing earth drawn from el pocito, a hole in the ground in the Santuario's side room. Hendrickson focuses on the concept of "religious ownership" and competition between ethnic groups, including Hispanos, Tewas, genízaros, and Anglos. But rarely have the stories that have been told about the shrine, and how they have changed, been analyzed to show how ethnic relations have unfolded over time.¹ Within the last century, and especially since Stephan F. de Borhegyi's short 1953 study, it has become increasingly common for those writing about the Santuario to present the case that the practice of rubbing or consuming holy dirt for healing purposes has Tewa Pueblo origins, and to place el pocito within Tewa Indian cosmology as a sipapu, a sacred hole of emergence,² without critically tracing the development of the myths (or origin stories) of the shrine, which was built by Hispano Penitente Bernardo Abeyta in 1816.

Interacting with origin myths from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and with New Mexican social history from the same period, in this paper I argue that Anglos, using the Tewa version of the shrine's origin, have credited Tewa Indian religion and culture with the shrine's healing powers over and against Hispano Catholic religion and culture, and paradoxically claimed religious ownership of the site.³ Among other groups, non-Catholic Anglos and New Agers are relatively new pilgrims to the site; if, as Victor and Edith Turner claim, pilgrimages reinforce existing beliefs,⁴ then the Santuario has expanded beyond its original Hispano Catholic [End Page 314] identity in order to draw pilgrims and tourists from other walks of life.

It is natural for religious shrines and their accompanying myths to change over time; as Turner and Turner (1978) have written, pilgrimage sites are subject to historical change, and thus "accrete rich superstructures of legend, myth, folklore, and literature," while the foundational symbols, which give meaning to the pilgrimage, change as well, as "[n]ew meanings may be added by collective fiat to old symbol vehicles."⁵ However, this foundational change is problematic because it functions as one of many tools by which Anglos have used an idea of Indianness to denigrate Hispano identity in New Mexico—and not to aid Tewa Indians, but for the glorification of and appropriation by Anglos, particularly in the New Age movement.

In this paper, I do not intend to identify what "really" happened at the Santuario's founding, or to discover if there "really" was a Tewa Indian healing pool at the site of the shrine before its erection. Neither do I intend to demythologize the healing power of the shrine for Hispano, Native American, and non-Catholic pilgrims to the shrine. While I am skeptical that Abeyta and 19th-century pilgrims either knew of or cared about previous Indigenous spiritual practices at the site, I follow Douglass Sullivan-González's example in his study of the Santuario's parent shrine of Esquípulas in Guatemala: I primarily examine how the myths, functioning as truth-telling stories, demonstrate the structure of society within the sacred, and how this structure changed.⁶ In particular, it will become evident that modern ideas of Native American spiritual power cannot be projected onto 19th century and early 20th-century Hispano Catholics, whose myths had striking parallels to those of medieval Spain. Modern retellings of the founding stories elide their development over time, collapsing them into a larger narrative, and de-emphasizing their cultural and historical development for the sake of continuity; as Jeremy Ricketts writes, "the cultural labor" of creating these stories is obscured...