Maria Lionza and the New Television Religions

Moreso than any other geographic space, Latin America and her live-in siblings (the Anglo and Dutch Caribbeans) are realms where what seems to be concrete can melt into air at the slightest changing of the winds. Wars and revolutions aside, the Western hemisphere's real schizophrenic love affair is with God. American Religion, be it the semi-myth of Revolution-era Haitian Vodou or contemporary US evangelicalism, doesn't work under the same physics as in other places. Perhaps only the Indian Subcontinent is comparable to the Americas in sheer joy for syncretism, seduction at the hands of the image, lust for idol-breaking and re-consecration.

It might be possible to connect this to the particular zeal of Iberian militaristic Catholicism (and its consequences), or to the diversity of the region's population, or to the religious anguish of the slave trade and genocide, however in my opinion none of these really hit the core of the issue entirely in themselves. What causes Latin America's tortuous and volatile love?

I could go on and on, but in the interest of keeping this blog-like I'll try and get back on track. This issue has resurfaced in my mind due to my recent discovery of Maria Lionza, a wildly popular contemporary religious figure/complex in Venezuela and Colombia. According to Rafael Sanchez's essay "Channel-Surfing," which provided me with most of the information I present here, the Maria Lionza figure emerged first in the 1930s and 40s as a side effect of Venezuelan nationalist intellectuals' attempts at creating a sort of populist mythology to rally the people around. Her image was sculpted and her exploits transposed into poetry long before the national religious imagination took her into its own hands. Shades of the similarly-grassroots Jose Gregorio Hernandez cult should be obvious, but it seems as though Maria Lionza is now even more popular than the Good Doctor who preceded her. As a benevolent Indian princess who holds motley court over an ever-swelling retinue of spirits ("spirit" being a loose terming), the Maria Lionza cult embodies the Latin American syncretic tradition in a way which is decidedly modern. In the cultic practices of Lionzan congregations, and in the homemade altars of individual adherents, we can see how this religious movement moves with the gait of television; without friction, unabashedly inclusive, and appearance-loving.

Sanchez, observing the wildly diverse imaging habits of pilgrims and devotees gathered around the holy mountain of Quiballo, compares the jarring precession of images -- vikings, dictators, Pocahontai, saints and TV presenters -- to that of television channel surfing. Much like television consists of an endless juxtaposition of imagery, the Maria Lionza cult, using the motif of the spirit court, creates a space for unhinged combination, a virtually endless pantheon and theology. Instead of essence preceding form, the image props up the spiritual value of these figures. This is not the same as the syncretism of the "first generation" of Latin American religions, where (so the story goes) African divinities collided with Catholic imagery, and only later began to integrate elements of popular culture (the "Indio Poderoso" motif, for example). Here, as with the television set, the medium is relatively indifferent to that which it carries. Maria Lionza's cult did not develop because of a particular encounter, in the sense that Santeria was born out of a very specific cultural exchange, and resulted in a (somewhat) specific set of syncretic motifs and concepts. Maria Lionza's snycretism begins and ends with The "spirit court" is inherently an empty space, an indifferent space. Like Marshall McLuhan said of TV, Maria Lionza and her cult are "cool" media; they require the audience to fill in more blanks. She exists not because of an encounter, but rather is created with the encounter(s) in mind. Given her celebrity status, this is an interesting indication of where Latin American popular religion is heading.



References:

Sanchez, Rafael. "Channel-Surfing: Media, Mediumship, and State Authority in the Maria Lionza Possession Cult" in "Religion and Media" (ed. de Vries & Weber). Stanford University Press, 2001.