Ultra-baroque Catholicism: Multiplied images and decentered religious symbols

Abstract

This article addresses the effects of the mass production of religious images that is decentering the institutional management of Catholic symbols in Mexico. How do mass production and the global circulation of religious images in various types of media create new ways of practicing religion and professing faith today? In the search for answers to this question, two cases are presented. The first, Catholic baroque as a popular initiative, addresses the mass production of Catholic icons and how it deinstitutionalizes Catholic symbols. In the second, the case of the Mayan prophesy for 2012, the manner in which cultural industries are generating transmedia beliefs is revealed. The author argues that the synergy between popular baroque religiosity and the videocracy creates a new sort of ultra-baroque Catholicism based on superimposing images.

Introduction

This article addresses the loss of an established base for religious images and the deregulation of the Catholic religious field in Mexico. ¹ This process is being accelerated by cultural industries, the media and by manufactured religious merchandise, which has freed the production, circulation and purchase of goods such as Catholic icons and images that used to be the exclusive realm of an ecclesiastical regimen. In this context, such goods were relegated to the institutional religious field, where a group of authorized priests held a monopoly on the objects associated with salvation and which discredited the secular competitors of salvation, accusing them of heretic practices (Bourdieu, 1971).

A range of scholars have noted that one of the main effects of the IT revolution is the overvaluation of images in today’s society, a trend Debray has referred to as the ‘mediatizing of the videosphere’ (Debray, 2004: 149). In this context, images have replaced the discourses that used to sustain dogmas and theologies, establishing a new visual regimen that is also referred to as a ‘videocracy’. The predominance of the image has also led to a metamorphosis of aesthetics, introducing forms that highlight the concept of beauty as a source of pleasurable feelings that serve as the basis for aestheticizing the contemporary world (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2013).

The media, advertising and IT codes all incorporate the language of images: attractive, ephemeral and consumable, constantly creating innovative and hybrid trends that cross the borders which used to separate the specialized spheres of modern society. My specific interest is to present some of the effects of mediatizing sacred symbols (such as saints and virgins), along with the beliefs and transcendental world views that pave the road towards salvation in the context of popular religiosity in Mexico today.

The cultural industry is responsible for producing and circulating this innovated religious imagery upon which myths, beliefs and rituals are based. However, its use and consumption are addressed within the context of popular religiosity, affecting three of the blasphemous manifestations in the Catholic religious field as suggested by Pierre Bourdieu (1971): a) practices that challenge the religious order imposed by the church hierarchy; b) the people’s own control over sacred practices and rituals; and c) freedom of conscience and religious self-determination.

To appreciate the effect that the mediatizing of mass produced religious images has had on popular Mexican religiosity, it is important to bear in mind that the country’s religion works like an ‘iconophilic religion’. According to Victor Turner, iconophilic religions ‘often develop complex and elaborate systems of ritual; symbols tend to be visual and exegesis is bound up with the ritual round’ (Turner, 1975: 155). This religiosity differs from iconoclastic religions such as Protestantism and Islam, which take stands against faith in images because they are considered idolatrous. In contrast, the professed meaning of popular Catholic religiosity, as an iconophilic set of practices, is difficult to comprehend without considering the dynamic symbolism surrounding its iconography, which serves as a base for beliefs in miracles and is part of expressing one’s faith. Popular Mexican religiosity is syncretic, combining festive Catholicism based on the worship of saintly images (saints, virgins and different versions of Christ) with certain animistic elements corresponding to indigenous faiths such as the belief in souls, the Day of the Dead, wakes held for spirits, ritual cleansings, etc.

In summary, this article examines the effects of the predominance of the image and the aesthetic logic guiding the uses and meanings of key religious symbols in popular Mexican Catholicism. Two case studies were developed as part of this analysis. The first is Catholic baroque as a popular initiative, where I will present the dynamics of the mass production of religious images – images produced and commercialized as merchandise but ritualized autonomously as sacred symbols – and examine how it has freed the religious field from regulation. The second case deals with the new role that transmedia cultural industries are playing in the production of images that serve as a base for stories of salvation and postmodern beliefs, focusing on the case of the Mayan Apocalypse (December 2012). This prophecy was transformed into a multimedia belief which, though short-lived, reached across the globe.

More generally, the goal is to develop the hypothesis that these transmedia images represent a break with the established bases that allowed churches to protect the symbols and limit access to specialists. Before analyzing the two cases described above, I will provide a theoretical outline on two dynamics that are often analyzed separately but which currently overlap, creating new meanings for religiosity.

Videocracy versus religious symbols

There is undoubtedly competition and a tension between the videocracy – which results from the productions of the cultural industry, advertising and merchandising – and religious symbols. This can be seen in practices involving images considered holy, and the miraculous powers attributed to deities, Madonnas, saints and prophets: devotional practices that are part of what is called popular religiosity. In previous works, I have argued that popular religiosity is a crossroad (or an ‘in-between’, as Bhabha (2002) would call it) between colonial domination and indigenous resistance, between tradition and the new forms that contemporary religiosity adopts. It functions as a point of tension within inculturation, where the dynamics of assimilation and the rejection of modernity are inscribed and redefined but the cultural resistance of traditions and their adaptability to modernization are also negotiated. Finally, popular religiosity is even a point where the performative force of its rituals is activated to confront and create alternative ways of inhabiting and appropriating the contemporary world from the margins (De la Torre, 2013). Popular religiosity is guided by practical knowledge and by the efficacy of symbols, but not by scholarship, dogma, doctrine or ideological coherence. In other words, as Bourdieu (1971) argues, religiosity as it is practiced and lived represents the practical sense of religion, as opposed to the orthodox, which is protected by specialists of the sacred. The practical sense of religion, loaded with magic and miracles, is unaffected by accusations of heresy or by the secularizing trends of rational modernity.

According to Pablo Semán, this practical sense of the sacred ‘provides a cosmological sense with which the meanings of cults are constantly being subverted’ (Semán, 2008: 302). The two main ways in which popular cosmology re-semanticizes the cultures of modernity (including Evangelical Christianity, Pentecostalism and the New Age) are through the miraculous – a synonym of the exceptional and unexplainable – and through magic and occult forces, as a strategy for diminishing and handling the economic crisis and social problems. In this sense, many of the cultural goods put into circulation by the cultural industries, the mass media, tourism, advertising and religious merchandise have themselves been re-signified by popular cosmology. They are often transformed into talismans for success or good luck or amulets to protect against negative forces. Specialists in magic and witchcraft healing use them, and they have even been brought into ritual practice to amplify the virtues and miraculous powers of images and sacred forces.

Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest number of Catholics in comparison to its population in the world; 86% of Mexicans are Catholic, according to the last national census (INEGI, 2010). Catholic practices, beliefs and rituals continue to be widespread, especially due to the important tradition of the festive customs associated with virgins, saints and Christ that are part of what we refer to as popular Catholicism (De la Torre et al., 2014). Thus, in addition to having the most followers, Catholicism continues to shape traditional collective bonds, which in turn form the ‘infrastructure of social and political action’ (Bastian, 2011: 34).

To provide an example and corroborate Bastian’s statement, I will present the findings of a survey on religious beliefs and practices conducted in the city of Guadalajara. Besides being the country’s second largest city, Guadalajara boasts one of the highest percentages of Catholics in Mexico (above 90%). According to the survey, the population has very high rates of church commitment, with 52% meeting the obligation to attend mass weekly. Forty-five percent have images and altars at home, and about half go on pilgrimages to sanctuaries (43.5%) or make ritual offerings to virgins or saints believed to work miracles (41.8%). Also, over half believe in miraculous images (58%) (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2012).

Catholicism in Mexico, which is commonly referred to as popular Catholicism, is a syncretic expression of a historic process of cultural mixing, mainly between the indigenous population and the Catholic Spaniards. This religious syncretism is expressed as a mixture of two religious systems but cannot be characterized as a watered down version of orthodox Catholicism or as merely the resistance to a dominant religion imposed to abolish practices considered idolatrous, magical and pagan. Instead, as Bonfil Batalla (1990) describes, popular religiosity is first and foremost the renovation of meanings of identity and belonging.

Catholic baroque as a popular initiative

Although official Catholicism has tried to discredit the religious practices of indigenous societies, accusing the ancient cults of idolatry, superstition and witchcraft (Parker, 1993), contemporary Mexico has witnessed a remarkable invigoration of popular traditions that appeared doomed to die off with the older generations just a few decades ago. Today popular religion, shamanism, indigenous rites and paganism are being adopted and practiced by new generations from different social classes who use them to give meaning to the problems they face today. The forms and meanings of these practices have also been renovated, to such an extent that some speak of neo-shamanism, neo-Indianism and neo-paganism (De la Torre, 2011).

Undoubtedly, the best example of this mechanism of appropriation and transformation of tradition is the Virgin of Guadalupe. A dark-skinned virgin who appeared in a vision to an indigenous man named Juan Diego, she left her image stamped on the man’s tilma or cloak. Eventually, she was recognized by the Church as the virgin of Mexico and was utilized for the religious conquest of the country’s indigenous population. Since its origin, Catholic religion in Mexico has operated on a logic of substitution, with monks building their churches on top of demolished indigenous temples and substituting their idols for images of Christ and Catholic saints and virgins. ² On the other hand, however, the indigenous practices at the time of the conquest involved simulating a religious conversion. While in public, the native people actively participated in the rituals associated with Catholic images; they were in fact ‘moonlighting’, as they secretly continued worshipping their old gods. ³

The Virgin of Guadalupe is unquestionably the predominant Mexican symbol not only in the sphere of religion (Florescano, 2004) but also in the cultural sphere, where she is viewed as an emblem of national unity (Wolf, 1958). As a dominant symbol, this virgin is also highly polysemous (Turner, 1967). The Spaniards could identify with her, since they considered her as a Mexican version of their own Lady of Guadalupe (from Extremadura, Spain); the natives identified with her as the old goddess Tonatzín, our mother in Nahuatl; ⁴ and later, the criollos (children born in Mexico to Spanish parents) used her as a symbol for independence (Brading, 2002: 27). The Virgin of Guadalupe is above all else an emblem of Mexican mestizaje, though this does not imply that she means the same thing for everyone (Valenzuela Arce, 1999).

As a symbol, however, Guadalupe is more than the keeper of ancestral beliefs and a symbol of national syncretism. She is constantly being reformulated through stylistic interventions that give her new meanings. Below I provide a few examples of contemporary aesthetic reformulations of the virgin and certain saints.

The faith store

The virgin has also been transformed through the advertising of the Mexican company Distroller for its ‘Virgencita Plis’ (‘Please Dear Virgin’) brand, created by Amparo Serrano. These hybrid cartoon images full of color, contemporary styles and friendly shapes have brought the ritual of Guadalupe offerings to an adolescent pop market that had been impervious to the virgin in the past (Zires, 2014). Distroller is now a successful chain with 30 stores in Mexico, the US and Europe. In addition, since 2008 its products have been sold at Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in Mexico, and at Palacio de Hierro, Mexico’s upscale department store. Distroller products – which include decorative objects, school supplies, clothes, jewelry, greetings cards and even king cakes and cookies – are also sold at stands in malls across the country and can be purchased online as well (Moreno, 2010). In addition, Virgencita knockoffs are widespread, with street sellers offering them at more accessible prices. All of the products include a prayer to the Virgencita or thanks for favors received. These are printed on the product package and written in the everyday language of the middle class, a mixture of slang and Anglicized phrases used to ask for day-to-day miracles; the word plis in the brand’s name is the Spanish spelling of ‘please’ and is often used by the Mexican middle classes. Thanks to the marketing of Virgencita Plis, the new generations have adopted votive practices in which they ask the virgin to intercede on their behalf. In this regards, young women seek the virgin’s help for day-to-day problems such as passing a test, attracting boys, not getting in trouble with parents, sticking to a diet or shedding extra pounds.

In 2012, El Semanario de la Fe, a religious publication of the Mexican Archdiocese, released an article on the pros and cons of the Virgencita Plis product. The aim was to assess whether the product contributed to Catholic worship or represented a deviation from the faith. Although the authors warned of the risks of making the virgin into a disposable and exchangeable consumer object, they noted how children and adolescents had taken to her revamped image. In addition, while the recognition of the Virgencita was comparable to the figures of other brands, the authors argued that she was a better character to have in vogue than superheroes or other cartoon characters associated with non-Catholic values (Sosa Elízaga, 2012). The Catholic faith thus incorporated her in order to get closer to the new generations as they request favors and miracles. Today, Virgencita products are very popular presents at baptisms and first communions, and her image is stamped on medallions and cards and sold outside of churches.

This case reveals how consumerism contributes to commercializing a religion, which increasingly resorts to advertising and propaganda for its missionary activities; it also competes with religions through merchandise that allows consumers to experience the sacred in a different way. There is no longer a clear separation between consumption and religiosity but a tension (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2005) that frequently affects the control of religious life. This control, as we mentioned earlier, corresponds to the specialized field of religion (Bourdieu, 1971). On the one hand, the commercialization of Catholic goods and services allows sacred objects-turned-merchandise to circulate; these for-profit products are replacing the symbols consecrated by religion and its specialists.

Artistic interventions as political appropriations

In 1994, the Virgin of Guadalupe was appropriated by the indigenous people in Chiapas who joined the uprising of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation). ‘La Guadalupe’ – as she is colloquially known – had her mouth covered by a balaclava, the distinctive garment of the Zapatistas, and was used as the emblem for this indigenous war against the State.

Guadalupe has also been transformed into ‘Lupita’ through the aesthetic intervention of Chicano art, a political-cultural movement of Mexican migrants to the United States. In the paintings of Yolanda López, she is portrayed as a young contemporary woman who symbolizes feminist values, no longer with the features of a serene and passive mother. According to Zires (2007: 65), López’s paintings create a new meaning: ‘Although the sacred body of the virgin is desacralized, a real woman’s real body becomes sacred’. Other Chicana artists such as Laura E Pérez, Alma López and Esther Hernández have reworked the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe in order to weave narratives against racism and in favor of gender equality, making her a political icon of the Chicano movement in the United States. Because she is seen as an ‘in-between’ symbol, she has been recovered by this artistic, cultural, political and spiritual movement in order to break with the dichotomies inherent to discourses of nation, class, race and gender (Román-Odio, 2012: 283). This image of the Chicana Guadalupe has circulated broadly on the Internet, and although it initially sparked controversy with the Church, it is now acknowledged as an emblem of the Hispanic feminist movement.

Tradition turned politics: Dressing the Son of God

The mass production of religious images affects more than just consumption, as popular access has led to the political appropriation of certain symbols. This is the case of the re-symbolizing of the Christ Child by members of the Popular Assembly of the Pueblos of Oaxaca. APPO (its Spanish acronym) is a teachers’ movement that arose after violent repression in 2006. A year later, the group modified the tradition of the feast of Candlemas, which is celebrated on February 2 and involves dressing a statue of the Christ Child in lace. Instead, the group dressed him like a guerrilla soldier (wearing a Che Guevara beret, with a rifle over his shoulder and a military badge), thus transforming him into the Holy APPO Child. ⁵

In this case, because reproduced images are now within the reach of believers – and no longer the exclusive realm of priests – the Catholic tradition of dressing saints has been invigorated. If the baroque was achieved by cloning canonical images while preserving hidden meanings through the use of the same materials that the old indigenous idols had been made of (Gruzinsky, 1990), contemporary neo-baroque is achieved thanks to the mass reproduction of religious images (some of them even made in China). These are acquired on the market and then taken to be blessed in churches; finally, they are placed on domestic altars, where popular religion is practiced in a festive manner outside of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It is a popular activity that allows the symbolic to be subverted through the simple action of making ad hoc clothes. Here, then, the act of dressing is transformed into a kind of symbolic appropriation that contributes to the rewriting of the carefully drafted biographies of the saints canonized by the church.

Secular saints: Merchandise made sacred outside the Church

Another example of re-signification is that of folk saints, who are considered martyrs by sectors of the population in spite of the fact that they have not been canonized by the Church. There are more and more followers of these profane saints, who are recognized thanks to popular initiatives which utilize Catholic rituals but in profane locations. These are generally figures who protect their followers during dangerous, illegal, forbidden or morally questionable acts – acts which the Church generally has no room for. The profane saints are the protectors of life in the face of death. They are all considered magnanimous, and they watch over mortals to keep them from danger and accompany them in their borderline, illegal or forbidden activities; they are often censored or ignored by the State and Church. They also help with the woes of love and illnesses. And in some cases, they can serve to do harm to enemies. For example, migrants and others along the Tijuana border chose Juan Soldado (literally ‘Johnny Soldier’) because he was martyred in a miscarriage of justice (Valenzuela Arce, 2001). Mexican drug dealers have chosen the outlaw Jesús Malverde as their miraculous protector (Jónsdóttir, 2014). Devotees of Santa Muerte (Holy Death or ‘Saint Death’) in Mexico pray to a skeleton statue because she represents equity and justice, as the only thing that all of us have in common is death (Argyriadis, 2014).

In Mexico, these figurines are sold on street markets. Anyone can buy a saint. They come in all different sizes and many different looks in order to appeal to a broad range of users. In folk Mexican Catholicism, Santa Muerte has been attracting more and more followers. Although she is portrayed as a female skeleton, she comes with several different looks. There is a disembodied angel version and an embodied angel version; the latter is said to protect pregnant women. They come in different colors that correspond to those used for magical work. Some come ‘activated’, that is, esoteric specialists have already enabled their extraordinary powers. Some are sold with other symbols of power in order to strengthen their potential for working miracles. All come with instructions on what to do so that the ‘saint’ will grant one’s requests: offerings such as cigarettes, alcohol, money and jewels are all common. Users are also warned that if they do not follow through on what they promise the saint, he or she may take revenge. All of these elements are common to the secular saints, who are believed to have a great amount of power, which can be used for either good or evil. Therefore, they must be loved and respected, but also feared. The images are placed on home or neighborhood altars, expanding their faith within the home, on the street, at workplaces. Printed on cards, engraved on medallions, worshipped as figurines or tattooed on the body, the protective images often accompany their devotees on a daily basis, serving as good luck charms or protecting against bad omens. They are consumer products made of plastic but because of the personal relationship the believer establishes with them, they are thought of more as flesh and blood than the saints locked up in their churches. Devotees have a close relationship with their saints, keeping them at home, dressing them the way they dress and taking them wherever they go. In a similar trend, there has been a re-signification of canonical saints in Mexico like Saint Toribio Romo who was recently (in 2000) canonized as a martyr from the Cristero War (1926–1929) but has been popularized as the saint of undocumented migrants, and Saint Judas Thaddeus who has now become the protector of illegal businesses (De la Torre, 2011).

The Mayan Prophecy and media-apocalypse

The mass media, the entertainment industry, tourism and social networks are all channels for creating and spreading contemporary beliefs that we shall refer to as postmodern.

Hence every day these channels become a new land for missions, not just to expand proselytism by various churches and religious movements, but mainly as a new stage for religious experience and knowledge. In short, it can be said today that the Internet is creating mediatized forms of producing, experiencing and perceiving the religious. The religious as imparted by religious authorities (priests, ministers, shamans or gurus) is thus shifting from the usual institutions (churches) to cultural industries, which produce it for massive worldwide consumption. In this process, the teachings, images and rituals belonging to religion are mixed with entertainment and even with fiction. This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘online religion’, where websites are used as information sources of churches and religious movements, though these are not necessarily the spaces where the religious is experienced (Helland, 2005).

It has become increasingly common for the media to serve as a channel for the ‘virtual’ rituals or liturgies that are transforming the traditional and institutional ways of accessing grace, miracles, blessings, purification, transcendence, protection against the evil eye and contact with the spiritual world. They are also changing the very notion of the transcendental and the ways of interacting with the divine (Cowan and Hadden, 2004).

The case of the belief in the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, also known as ‘2012iology’ (Sitler, 2006), is an example of a ‘postmodern belief’, that is, a belief that is born and spread globally without churches or religions. Its narrative is hypertextual, since it is constructed in a communicational process through its transmedia display in which one message continually interferes with another message coming from another source (Renó, 2012: 205). Scolari (2013: 25) proposes that transmedia narratives ‘make reference to the expansion of a narrative world through different media and their platforms, in which meaning is constructed through the articulation of texts in different languages and channels’. One of its most important features is that it is collaborative and interactive, allowing users to participate. The world of users and the world of cultural industries are not separate spheres; while users take and reprocess elements from mass culture, the industries commercialize the cultural dynamics of the users. Mayan millenarianism is a narrative that generated a transmedia millennium belief, the product of a synergy of cultural industries of different sorts that converged to commercialize a prophecy. These cultural industries correspond to different genres of story production, from the production of media spectacles (music, films, music videos), advertising, television documentaries and science fiction circulated by the publishing industry to blockbuster films, music and music videos. These stories are written through a series of images that create sequences; these sequences represent an interesting way of linking arguments and generating the illusion of temporal and spatial continuity. In the case of the Mayan millenarianism, this story managed to become a belief when it expanded outside the media channels: both virtual and off-line communities began springing up, and in these communities information circulated on how to protect oneself from the forthcoming end of the world. Between the media attention and the viral response on the Internet, this belief spread all over the world in less than a year, thanks to the synergy between different cultural industries (Campechano, 2013).

The narrative of Mayan millenarianism is a patchwork of stories and images that formed synergies, creating an eclectic and hybrid belief. The narrative started with a New Age reinterpretation of Mayan millenarianism by José Argüelles, a leader of The New Age global network. Argüelles interpreted the Mayan calendar as a way of synchronizing with cosmic time and thus recovering the harmonious balance of humanity’s relationship to nature and the universe (Argüelles, 1978). This was the basis of the New Age interpretation of Mayan archaeological inscriptions, which in his view forecasted a new era that would lead to a change of consciousness. This new era, however, suddenly acquired an apocalyptic tone in conjunction with the pseudo-scientific explanations provided by Adrian Gilbert and Maurice Cotterell, the two British authors of The Mayan Prophecies, a book published in 1995 that achieved widespread distribution by the publishing industry worldwide. By the beginning of 2010, belief in the Mayan apocalypse had spread to bookstore, supermarket and airport shelves, with some entirely devoted to the subject of 2012. The belief expanded even further thanks to a series of videos made by Fernando Malkún. It also became the backdrop of science fiction films like 2012 (the fifth most popular movie at box offices worldwide in 2009, and since then the 50th), and video clips with top pop music artists of the day like ‘Till the World Ends’, recorded in 2011 by Britney Spears, who appears in apocalyptic scenes referring to December 21, 2012. But the mass merchandising of the belief can be particularly attributed to the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, which started to produce television documentaries on the subject: The Mayan Code, Apocalypse 2012 (2009) and the series Mayan Apocalypse (2011) by Graham Townsley reached an audience of over 80 million viewers all over the world. These documentaries include interviews with different scientists, including archaeologists, historians and physicists, as well as esoteric gurus who speak of the unveiling of a mystery. Though presented out of context, the video lends support to their fragmentary arguments with sequences of juxtaposed or alternating images that give an air of truth to the presentations.

Another important channel for spreading the belief was the Internet, with websites, Google groups, chats and social network groups springing up to investigate, respond or take action to deal with the threatening change in the weather forecast by the ancient Mayan priests. ⁶ In the two years before the date arrived, the belief in the so-called ‘Mayan Prophecy for 2012’ had spread the world over. According to a 2012 survey in 24 countries by Ipsos Global Public Affairs and Reuters News, 10% of those questioned believed that the Mayan calendar did in fact announce the end of the world. The belief had an impact not only on the virtual imaginaries of social networks, but also in the real world. For instance, spiritual-mystical tourism increased in the Mayan area of Mexico and Guatemala. ⁷

Nine days before December 13, 2012 – the date when the change of era or end of the world was expected to begin – Campechano (2013) counted 889 websites in Spanish and 3,360,000 in English where this subject was addressed. Before the end of the year, the numbers had multiplied. The topic had gone viral, but was also ephemeral because just a year later it had become passé and the number of websites mentioning it had been reduced by nearly half.

However, following the commercial success it had brought, on May 9, 2015 the History Channel released ‘The God Particle’, an episode in the series ‘Ancient Aliens’. The episode defines the God particle as:

The key to the universe and perhaps the most important scientific discovery of all time. The so-called God particle may be capable of revealing the truth about our origins, and extraterrestrials may have left clues to its importance here on Earth thousands of years ago. The millenary question ‘Where do we come from?’ is still a mystery, but in 2012 scientists at the CERN laboratory announced the discovery of the God particle, a sub-atomic particle that is believed to give matter mass and offers a better explanation as to how the universe began. This discovery has almost set science against religion, but aren’t science and religion part of the same family? Many ancient religions and mythologies describe the origins of the universe in much the same way as today’s scientific explanations do, and they claim their information was revealed to them by beings from another world. (History Channel, 2012)

The documentary is based on rapid sequences of images lacking a cultural or historical context but put together to suggest that the ancient Mayans had predicted that the God particle would be found in 2012. According to the documentary, this powerful discovery would give humans the ability to create or destroy a new universe. The images on screen lend proof to the argument: the circular design of the Mayan calendar emphasized by Argüelles and 2012, the year when the change of era or the end of the world would occur. Then, in an ellipsis, the program moves to a building near Geneva which houses the great collider or sub-atomic particle accelerator; suddenly, the symbol of the dancing Shiva appears; as it happens, Shiva is standing outside the physics laboratory and his circular form coincides with the outline of the particle collider. As these images are juxtaposed, the narrator’s voice provides some coherence to the story by speculating on the root causes of coincidences. According to the documentary, the ancient Hindus and the Mayans had made ‘the most important scientific discovery of all times’, which harkened a great change for the universe.

Belief in the Mayan change of era may be considered a classic narrative of postmodern culture and, as a transmedia production, it is instantaneous, global, distributed commercially, ephemeral, made up of patched together images. It is a hybrid product and, above all, it is virtual but real at the same time. For Fukuyama (1992), the first quality of postmodern times is their proclaiming the end of history, anticipating a change of mentality that will recover the values and sensibilities Western modernity has left behind: a return to nature as spirit and the sacred energy of the cosmos, and a re-appreciation of ancient non-Western civilizations. Postmodernity also questions the sources that had sustained absolute truths, and re-constructs a new eclectic spirituality made up of micro-stories (a patchwork of different religious and philosophical traditions), which are amalgamated through collages of images that form a neo-esoteric nebula (Champion, 1995). With the backing of transmedia productions, the images are tasked with establishing sequences (for example, making the Mayans intergalactic travelers) which are unfettered by historical coherence. On the other hand, postmodern beliefs, unlike modern and traditional beliefs, are born institutionally orphaned, with no attachment to any sacred writings, temples, dogmas or concrete traditions (Campechano and De la Torre, 2014; De la Torre and Campechano, 2014). Postmodern beliefs are spread not only on paper, which is what was used to distribute the linear thinking of the Enlightenment, but through the ‘media convergence’, also called transmedia, of the cultural industries, which includes the new social networks used on the Internet (Lyotard, 1990). These beliefs have attained worldwide reach thanks to the material infrastructures and mass distribution channels brought by the commercial production and consumption generated by present-day cultural industries (Martín-Barbero, 2007). They form a hybrid, ephemeral, dynamic and global narrative that results from fragments of images interacting on transmedia channels, and start to establish a new way of writing a prophecy with a ‘hypertext’ pen and an abundance of images. The new prophets are the producers, the presenters and the pop artists of the cultural industries. Their temples are the screens that project apocalyptic visions onto the real world of futuristic science fiction. Their ritualization occurs outside of any temples, and is practiced by connecting multimedia messages to tourism or spectacle, making the media and the social networks the latest missions for spreading the faith in new lands. The advent of the end of the world and the beginning of a new age, then, is spent shopping instead of praying (Campechano and De la Torre, 2014).

Conclusions

We have seen two cases that show how the videocracy mediates ways of believing and practicing popular religiosity in Mexico today. The first has to do with the mass production of Catholic religion icons, which now circulate and are worshipped outside the Catholic institution’s own systems for managing the sacred. These icons undergo a dynamic popular resignification in this process, the result of the aesthetic interventions of the market, art, popular movements and the cultural industries (including the media and the Internet). Production and the multiple interventions are thus decentralizing religiosity. While José María Mardones (2003) voiced concern on the role the image plays in emptying the religious symbol of its transcendental and sacred importance, what is at work here is an enormous strengthening of the hierophanic potential of images. As images are multiplied, they become symbols that evoke magic and transcendence, while the epiphany of religious icons is spread into the most surprising of places.

The large-scale production of sacred icon replicas and the aestheticizing of the symbols decenter the specialists’ management of the religious symbol which, going back to Pierre Bourdieu, took place in sacred spaces with access restricted to the religious specialists. Today the images cloned on multiple physical or virtual mediums recover religious symbols, displacing them and at the same time making them ubiquitous, as they can now be found in the religious sphere, in advertising and in political propaganda. This also results in multiple appropriations of meanings, uses and aesthetic modifications. This process has two consequences. On the one hand, the image works to make merchandise sacred; on the other, the image trivializes objects that were once the carriers of sacred meanings protected by the churches and their religious specialists. Today consumption and spectacle mediate access to sacred symbols, transforming their stylized forms; their material nature; their portability; their contents; their association with norms, values and feelings; and their functional uses as well.

All of this contributes to the deregulation of the institutions that used to govern the religious field, and at the same time they are helping to reshape the practical and popular meaning attributed to the religious symbol. How are these new mobile communicative channels of religious symbols transforming the nature of contemporary religiosity? Where are these changes heading?

This has occurred because the religious symbol today is no longer bound to the sacred places preserved for sacred practice, and jealously guarded by religious specialists. It has become ubiquitous, expanding into the realm of specialized fields of knowledge and crossing the borders between the sacred and the profane. The symbol defies controls and management, and does not respect copyright. It no longer belongs to anyone. Like the image, the religious symbol is mobile, but most of all because it is fleeting. This characteristic makes the symbol portable, malleable, reproducible, cloneable and transmutable by lay or non-specialized users within religious fields. Thus it revitalizes popular religiosity, its creativity and its magical sensibility. Popular religion does not tend towards privatization, but places the symbol on the public scene and practices its devotions collectively. The religious symbol is also a transmutable object, which admits the duality of meanings, due to the changes in the materials it is produced with and appears in. This symbol can take the form of a statue worthy of tourists’ attention, a figure placed on altars or taken home as one’s closest companion, a medallion that is attributed with the powers of a relic, a talisman for success, an image tattooed on the body; it can even be represented digitally (in pixels) that move from online communities to the real world off line. It is encoded by advertising, an imaginative medium which enchants the symbol yet again (Rojas Mix, 2006) and allows for the return of magical thought, of popular religiosity.

The symbols are also interactive, subject to transformation through aesthetic recreations that maintain recognizable elements intact while renewing aesthetic aspects and giving them new cultural meanings. I therefore consider that the new state of the religious symbol is ultra-baroque, constructed through superimposing images and reloaded with transmutable forms and meanings. Its hybrid nature creates what might be called hinge or ‘in-between’ symbols (Bhabha, 2002), objects condensing more than one meaning. Religious symbols are thus representations that are always transgressing, moving from what is permitted to what is prohibited, from religion to the market, from the individual to the universal, from the sacred to the profane. This sense of transgression defies predetermined classifications, but also stretches them into new realms.

This awakening of the religious ultra-baroque also provokes violent reactions from fundamentalists and iconoclasts, and as examples we can cite the return of mass exorcisms to the Catholic Church and Evangelical congregations, which view the exteriorizing of religious images and of magic as the Devil’s work.