Almost five hundred years later, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe can be found everywhere, inside and outside Mexico. What was it about this image that caused families, villages, and entire tribes to travel to the capital city in the sixteenth century—not merely to see the tilma but to accept baptism—almost overnight?
There are many mysteries about that tilma, such as how something made of cactus fibers has survived for centuries. And how the image remained unharmed despite being handled by thousands of devotees in the many years before it was placed behind glass. And how it survived certain destruction from nitric acid and a bomb blast. And how the image could have been applied to the tilma in the first place. All of these mysteries continue to elude twenty-first century science, as described in Guadalupe Mysteries. But what was it that sixteenth-century Aztecs saw in that image that touched their souls so profoundly that nine million of them became Catholics in just six years?
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