Places of Old power....The legend of Chimayo

When you talk about places of great mystical power... then surely the tiny mountain village of Chimayo, thirty miles north of Santa Fe New Mexico, should be on your top ten list.

Pronounced (Chim), as Chimney, (My) as in Myself and (O) as in, 'Oh' no you didn't!

(Chim-My-O)

People from all over the world come to this holy place, the sick the lame, the devout. Some come on crutches, in wheelchairs or supported in the arms of worried yet hopeful loved ones. They come here to kneel upon, to touch and sometime eat the sacred earth of Chimayo.

Then they raise, healed, healthy, hearty and whole, restored and made strong again in faith and body. This is no mere myth, it has happened time and time again, as the canes and crutches hanging from the walls of the Santuario de Chimayo attest to that fact!

This secluded little valley tucked away in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains has always been a special place, one of magic and mystery, hope and renewed life. Long before the first Spanish settlers arrived, (1701) and long before the sanctuary was built (1816) This place goes back to the creation myths of the Tewa people, the local Native Americans.

Back in in a time of prehistory... when the Twin War Brothers slew the evil giant Yeitso, causing fire, smoke and boiling water to erupt from the ground. Those great geysers becoming New Mexico's steaming hot springs.

Most of you reading this already know of the medicinal nature of hot springs. The Tewa people certainly did and for countless generations they came here to soak and breath in the vapors of the steaming mineral springs.

The Tewa word for “Pool” of water is (pok-wi) and this pool they named (Tsimajopkwi). Later, when the pool dried up the name was changed to (Tsimayo) Later still the Spanish settlers called it Chimayo.

The creation of the Santuario de Chimayo begins with a man named “Bernardo Abeyta” And to tell you about Bernardo I have to tell you about a group of zealots who have frankly scared the crap out of me since I was a kid! I'm talking about the kind of freaky-deeks that would give author Dan Brown a woody! And when I was about eleven years old my dad took me down to San Rafael to see for myself what the Penitentes did... Afterward I had nightmares for several years.

You see, by all accounts Bernardo Abeyta, was a pratcing member of Los Hermanos Penitentes del Tercer orden de Franciscanos (The Brotherhood of the Penitentes)

The Penitentes go back at least as far as the 13th century, when organized societies of flagellants in Europe flogged themselves to appease a wrathful God who had brought the Black Plague down upon the less faithful. Just like the albino in the Dan Brown movie who liked to whip himself.

Well ... Penitentes take things a bit further.

Every Good Friday they perform a literal reenactment of the biblical Crucifixion! Nowadays they have to do it in secret, but sure enough, every year one particularly devout Penitente will volunteer to be staked threw his hands and feet, impaled, upon an upright cross. I will not go into detail as to what they do with cactus studded whips or how women will fill their shoes with more cactus spines for the long painful procession up a hill following the three Penitente brothers who lug a heavy wooden cross.

What I will say however, is they believe if the volunteer survives his ordeal he becomes revered and within the Penitentes, he becomes a politically powerful person. If on the other hand he dies, he has earned his place in heaven, not just for himself but all the members of his family as well.

Are you beginning to see why I said Dan Brown would love these guys?

Moving on... Bernardo Abeyta, Penitente, and it probably occurred during holy week in 1813. started the modern legend of Chimayo ...

So there's old Bernardo Abeyta whip in hand performing his penances on a hillside just above the Rio Santa Cruz. Somewhere between self-inflected lashes he looks up and see's a light shining from the ground not far from the river.

He rushes over, kneels and starts digging with his bare hands. Within minutes he has uncovered a large and wondrous cross baring the image of Our Lord of Esquipulas!

This is the part where things get strange... you see the cross Bernardo had found bore the image of Nuestro Senor de Esquipulas AKA the Black Christ of Guatemala. The town of Esquipulas is over 2,000 miles away from Chimayo and in 1813 it was very unlikely ether town knew of the other existence!

But maybe... you see the legend of the Black Christ and his miraculous cures at the massive baroque in Esquipulas predate Chimayo by more than 300 years... sooo maybe this wasn't a complete coincidence?

Anyway... Bernardo takes his amazing discovery to one Father Sebastian Alvarez who quickly organized a procession to deliver and place the crucifix in the church at Santa Cruz a few miles away. They put in in a place of honor, in a niche above the main alter ...and all was well... until the very next morning they found it had vanished?

To paraphrase the official version... the congregation flipped the 'F' out!... Until good ole Bernardo happens to find the missing crucifix right back in the same hole he found it. So another procession was formed and the crucifix redelivered back to the church in Santa Cruz.

Sure enough the very next morning Our Lord of Esquipulas had mystically made his way back to the hole, not just twice but when it happened a third time, everyone agreed the crucifix did not want to be moved, period... thus ground was broken on what would be the tiny chapel to be named the Santuario de Chimayo

The disappearing, reappearing act of the cross may have been the first miracle, but it would certainly not be the last.

A short time later, Bernardo, gravely ill, probably from flogging himself with cactus spine embed whips, drags his butt out of bed and makes his way to the chapel. As he nears the holy place he sees the figure of Our Lord of Esquipulas beckoning him to come closer. Staggering forward the apparition vanishes and when Bernardo falls on the very spot where the figure had stood, he is instantly healed!

And thus we have the first of many well recorded miraculous cures at the Santuario de Chimayo...

Now surely any small mountain village would be proud to have such a renowned religious icon to call their own, but Chimayo has not 'One but 'Two such places!

Story continued below in second post

Sometime between 1850 and 1860 another miracle would take place when a villager named Severiano Medina was driving his cattle to his fields accompanied by his daughter. As they walked the child suddenly heard the sound of a church bell ringing underground beneath her feet. She calls her daddy over and he hears it too! So they start digging and you guessed it, they find a bell, but they keep on digging and they soon uncover a wooden statue. “Santo Nino de Atocha”

The story goes on to say that when the villagers came out to check out this second miraculous find those who were sick were also healed and with lessons learned about holy relics not liking to be moved... a second private chapel was build to house the Santo Nino just west of the original Santuario de Chimayo. Since then the two chapels have this rivalry over who performs the most healing? But ah, Santo Nino cheats and likes to stack the odds in his favor.

Unlike the Santuario de Chimayo where you have to go there in person, the Santo Nino is said to come to you. It is widely believed that at night the tiny doll-like figure leaves his chapel and travels the countryside listening to the prayers of the people and sometimes, if they pray hard enough, he will grant their earnest requests. And those late night forays is the reason the Santo Nino's little shoes are all scuffed and wore out.

There you have it...The legend of Chimayo... and it's a real place you can visit.

Chimayo is about 30 miles north of Santa Fe New Mexico. It's not hard to find, and if you go during holy week, you simply follow all the people walking along the road, all headed to the chapel... You take highway 285 north for about 23 miles then turn right on State Highway 76 for about 5 more miles.., there you turn South on Juan Medina Rd. and follow the signs to the Santuario. The best time of year to visit is over Good Friday/Easter (Holy Week). That way you get to see and maybe join the thousands of people making their pilgrimage... and if that's not your gig... then at least go for the superb Tamales!


Foot note...Sorry to take up two posts but I kind of got a little wordy while putting this together... Ah well ... let me know if you like it...

Hmmm...I never heard of this place before. It's interesting. S&F They eat the dirt and get healed. Must be some good B12 in that dirt to give them a boost of energy like that.. Must be some magnesium in the springs too. That will boost someones energy if they are deficient.

I was there for Easter service in 2011. It was a big part of my 2011 pilgrimage. I have a vial of Chimayo sand on my altar.

Very beautiful place!

I stayed the night there in a small motel. I could feel the energy of the place.

reply to post by rickymouse


Not everyone eats the dirt...
My grandma had a small glass vial with just a few grains of soil taken on her visit...
she wore that around her neck for as long as I can remember

reply to post by BlueMule

I made my trip back in 2005...

So... was I right about the Tamales?

HardCorps
reply to post by BlueMule

 

I made my trip back in 2005...

So... was I right about the Tamales?

I dunno... I was fasting. But I did buy some chili powder and mailed it home. Delicious.

reply to post by HardCorps


Good story, well told.

F&S

I was there just last summer. There is something mystical and soothing about the place. I never considered myself much of a religious person, however I sat there while the priest recited the entire rosary and prayed along with everyone else. I don't know why. It just felt right being there.

reply to post by Mover


There are places in this world that while your there
you feel connected to something bigger...
you don't even need to be devote or follow any belief
frankly it doesn't care if you believe or not, it's always been there and always will be
Chimayo in one of those places...

reply to post by HardCorps


one obvious question - why has this aledged ancient site been hijacked by Catholicism ?

HardCorps
reply to post by Mover

 

There are places in this world that while your there
you feel connected to something bigger...
you don't even need to be devote or follow any belief
frankly it doesn't care if you believe or not, it's always been there and always will be
Chimayo in one of those places...

They don't call New Mexico the "Land of Enchantment" for nothing.

I discovered a power center behind my house in Jemez.
And a place of absolute evil in Mora co.

ignorant_ape
reply to post by HardCorps

 

one obvious question - why has this aledged ancient site been hijacked by Catholicism ?

I wouldn't say "Hijacked" as much as I would say "Developed"
The Tewa people only visited this site... their home being some distance to the East...
It was the Spanish who settled here and with them brought their own culture religion and history.
So while 'yes' it is a kind of Mecca to Catholic's this is a place that transcends any one faith... and no one will argue that the Tewa people were coming to this very same place for the very same reasons centuries before the Spanish showed up with their European god,

olaru12

HardCorps
reply to post by Mover


I discovered a power center behind my house in Jemez.
And a place of absolute evil in Mora co.

Are you sure it was evil you felt?
I'm just saying... Val Kilmer lives that way...
He sold the biggest part of his ranch down near Las Vegas a few years back but he still has his place up at Morphy lake....

Just saying Val Kilmer...Evil...could go either way ya know
winks

My Geography of the American West professor at NMSU Las Cruces passed around a box of sanddirt from Chimayo when he was discussing with us soils of various regions of NM. He invited anyone to have a scoop. I was happy to be sharing in a university environment an appreciation for an authentic NM almost tribal-seeming mystical 'sacrament' of the genus loci. A place of intensity, in my perception, is the Hondo Valley. Different areas have different 'feels'- the pass between WSMR & Organ feels like a power place on the NE side, but going down the other side it always felt like a past place of power now in slumber. Some areas feel 'empty', sometimes the place has an 'observer' feel,
Well, dont I sound like a crackpot.

reply to post by kkrattiger


I've written my own academic paper submitted for peer review on the subject of places of power and how the peoples of the Southwest interacted with them...

you mention a few places that feel empty and another poster said they felt one place that felt evil...

Well while I've was doing my post grad thing a lot of my research came from old Spanish 17th century Spanish records... and in them I learned that many of the priests who accompanied the settlers here took issue with many of these spots held sacred by the natives... and destroyed or locked up their natural inherent power.

Powerful places: caves, clearings, indigenous ritual sites. For example, in an eighteenth-century witchcraft trial in Abiquiu, individuals possessed by demons were said to have led a crusading priest to centers of demonic activity, which included rock walls covered in petrogylphs and rock towers surrounded by offerings of tobacco, herbs, and maize. These loci, which sound like Pueblo religious sites, were exorcised by the priest, who defaced the petroglyphs and marked crosses in their place. Some of these sites may have been relocated by Richard Ford, who found a number of crosses in association with petroglyphs in rock art sites located within a mile radius of Abiquiu.

So similar to what happened in Salem blame was cast not on a person, but one of these places of power, ritual sites set up by the Natives. Our places of worship declared Librorum Prohibitorum.

In an odd way it was kind of nice to be on the Church's Prohibitourm list... I mean that put us NA's on the list with some other famous neerdowell's, people like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and Hugo Grotius. Charles Darwin

kind of makes an old Red Skin Proud to be included on that list...

reply to post by HardCorps


What is NA

Interesting reply post. Are you a NM resident? I'd be interested to talk about "the feel of places" (if u will, for lack of better term for the "way a place feels")
Although as we will be moving to Northern NM in the summer, I don't want prior knowledge to inform my subconscious & affect the "feel" I may get from a place!
Woowoo
But some places have a feel, there's no denying that for me. I notice more in grand expanses, not had experience with small areas casting an energy net. That sounds Castaneda-esque and is not what I'm getting at, so much, with the "feel of a place" of vast expanse of which I've explained my own perception.

reply to post by kkrattiger


Oh, Native American, I gather. Got it.

reply to post by kkrattiger


I live in South West Colorado between Durango and Cortez.... Four Corners... but Southern CO and Northern NM have been my stomping grounds since I was a kid... Got my BCS over at UNM in Albuquerque... My oldest daughter was Born over in Farmington... you could say this whole rocky mountain region has been our home for countless generations and I just love collecting and sharing stories about out unique Myths and culture

reply to post by HardCorps


Have you been to the great sand dune? Magical place.