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n 245 CHAPTER 11 Seeking Light after the Great Night: Tinieblas Este mundo es el camino para el otro, que es morada sin pesar; mas cumple tener buen tino para andar esta jornada sin errar. Jorge Manrique The Tinieblas, from the Latin tenebrae, is the last ceremony before Easter Sunday conducted by the La Cofradía de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (also known as Los Hermanos Penitentes) [the Penitent Brotherhood]).* Tinieblas is conducted on Holy Thursday or on Good Friday and always after sunset in darkened moradas (lay chapels) in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.† The term tinieblas (darkness and death) provides a contrast between light and darkness, sin and death, perdition and eternal life. This contrast can be subsumed under el ciclo de vida y muerte (the cycle of life and death) in New Mexico (Medina 1983). Under the general rubric of el ciclo de vida y muerte, one can subsume three contrasts: death and regeneration, darkness and light, and grief and praise (or, in more general terms, despair, trial, and tribulation compared to transcendence and joy). In this chapter, I consider the contrast between light and darkness as a metaphor *New Mexico historian Fray Angelico Chávez makes the point that Jesús Nazareno and the nazarenos do not derive their names from Jesus of Nazareth but from “Nazarite,” a Hebrew term applied to one “consecrated to God.” One exterior feature of the Nazarites is that they never trimmed their hair. Sampson and Samuel were Nazarites (Chávez 1954, 118–19). †The word morada (dwelling place or lodge) is from the verb morar (Chávez 1954, 122). 246 n Chapter 11 for life and death. As Jung has shown, the contrast between light and darkness is primordial and archetypal: When the great night comes, everything takes a note of deep dejection, and every soul is seized by an irrepressible longing for light. That is the pent-up feeling that can be detected in the eyes of primitives, and also in the animal’s eyes, and we never know whether that sadness is bound up with the soul of the animal or is a poignant message which speaks to us out of that still unconscious existence [unreflective consciousness]. That sadness also reflects the mood of Africa, the experience of its solitudes. It is a maternal mystery, this primordial darkness. That is why the sun’s birth in the morning strikes the natives as so overwhelmingly meaningful. That moment in which light comes is God. That moment brings redemption, release. To say that the sun is God is to blur and forget the archetypal experience of that moment. . . . In reality a darkness altogether different from the natural light broods over the land. It is the psychic primal night which is the same today as it has been for countless millions of years. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness. (Quoted in von Frantz 1998, 66–67) This paragraph has all the elements for the analysis of tinieblas. All of the themes in Jung’s vision are rife with meaning and symbolism. The themes are applicable in a consideration of Hispano thought and spirituality and have applications to other cultural groups as well. The task involves the need to amplify—in the Jungian sense—the symbolism of darkness and light to reach the deeper intentionality of tinieblas. Consciousness is always intentional, which is to say that consciousness is always “consciousness of” something (Stewart and Mickunas 1974, 64). This concept from phenomenological philosophy refers to that mechanism by which consciousness—as awareness or a perception of an object or a state of being—cannot be disrelated from the object or from the concern of the moment. How does the experience of tinieblas, either the ceremony or the broader sense of darkness, affect a participant’s consciousness? What do people experience when they participate in such a ceremony? Does this ceremony, conducted in darkness, bring a new consciousness of spiritual meanings? How do immersions in total darkness affect the modern person? One of the first tasks in this inquiry involves the need to amplify the ideas of light and dark as metaphors for life and death as well as for resurrection. One needs to “suspend one’s belief,” to use the phenomenological method of “bracketing” and, as noted in earlier chapters, to hold in abeyance what we think we know to be the reality of everyday life. In the mundane rising and setting of the sun we...

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