Commentary

1. Perhaps it is worth remembering here the multiple re-appropriations of which the goddess Isis was the object on American soil, especially by the very baroque and Catholic work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico. READ MORE

   Sor Juana transforms Isis the mother of Neptune, thus linking him to the Egyptian universe. For this,”a method universally applied by the mythologists of the Renaissance and the Baroque Era is used,” a method that establishes that Isis, “the wisdom,” was subject to numerous transformations and denominations that, in fact, always refer to the same goddess, who “the ancient authors named with great diversity: Apuleius called her Rhea, Venus, Diana, Bellona, Ceres, Juno, Persephone, Hecate and Rhamnusia (Nemesis). Diodorus Siculus (of Sicily) says that Isis is the one who has been called Luna, Juno and Ceres; Macrobius believes that she is none other than the Earth or the nature of things.”[98] Isis is considered by Sor Juana as the mother of seeds and also the mother inventor of Egyptian letters; the goddess does not represent knowledge, she is knowledge. As Sor Juana identifies herself with Isis, Aponte can do the same with Diogenes, and with the goddess’s help, can “resurrect” the kingdom of Spain, as Isis did with her husband Osiris. Cut up into fourteen pieces, Osiris’s remains were sought by Isis during her pilgrimage around the world, in order to return and reassemble them, thus resurrecting the Egyptian god. For Octavio Paz, the maternity in Sor Juana “is resolved in the symbolic resurrection of the past and of its dead. The agents of the resurrection are the signs: letters, poetry,”[99] and for Aponte, images: picta poiesis, where “white” signifiers can become “black,” as Francisco Velásquez did with Greek mythology on the walls of the palace of the Haitian king, Henri Christophe.[100] Undoubtedly, Isis’s participation in this miracle implies the importance of the Egyptian goddess in the production and legitimisation of sovereignty according to Aponte, Isis also being identified with the Virgin of Regla, the black patron virgin of the Bay of Havana since the 17th century – transformed into the divinity Yemayá by the Lucumí-Yoruba tradition and represented in Aponte’s book along with a phrase referring to the Queen of Sheba in the Song of Songs: “Nigra sum, sed formosa.”[101] Coincidentally, and not by accident, the history of the Virgin of Regla icon is also linked to the defeat of the Spanish armies at the hands of the Moors in the 8th century: her image, the history of which was undoubtedly known to Aponte given his religious erudition, arrived in Havana in the 1680s, brought by the “pilgrim” Manuel Antonio of Cádiz. During the invasion of Spain, the image had been buried in the convent of Chipiona, named for the African San Agustín of Tagaste (Saint Augustine), founder of the Catholic Rule of the same name.[102] To this African origin of the black Virgin of Regla (like Isis and Yemayá) and of the founder of her cult (such as Aponte), we must add the arrival in Cádiz (a city which constantly reappears in the Book ofPaintings) as a consequence of the fall of the kingdom of Rodrigo, and to Havana through the care of a “pilgrim” like the Pilgrim Jesus carved and exhibited by Aponte in front of his home. Everything indicates that the pilgrimage and the melancholy of the ruins, as central motivations of the Baroque sensibility, are recovered here in a genealogy that precedes the bureaucratic rationale of the lettered city. In this genealogy, the allegory of pilgrimage is presented as a mystical practice of deterritorialisation. In fact, this concept of wisdom, engendered in Africa, as the “mother” of the political power of the sovereign is surely the principle that Aponte seeks to establish, showing that it is the philosopher, creator of signs, who, because of his privileged relationship with the African goddess of wisdom and the conception, is at the origin of legitimacy and the allegorical symbols of Spanish sovereignty. But furthermore, if the “resurrection” of the sovereign is the result of Isis’s pilgrimage, reuniting the pieces of Neptune scattered throughout the world in order to reassemble him, the ‘miracle’ of the “resurrection” of Spanish sovereignty, once lost to the Moors, and later threatened by the English, must be seen as the result of African transcontinental migration through Europe and America, as a class that becomes cosmopolitan and whose sovereignty also must be reassembled under the auspices of the universal mother of letters and oceans, wisdom and fertility. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 293-295)

2. Many of the pictures are internally syncretized and freely mix events and anecdotes from different cultures or mythologies. READ MORE

   Picture 26, for instance, represents an encounter between the Cynic philosopher Diogenes in his barrel and the Spanish king Rodrigo. Diogenes is shown as protected by the Egyptian goddess Isis, which explains, according to Aponte’s comments on the picture, why Diogenes wins a battle of wits against the king (139-40). (Fischer 2004, 45-46)

3. The details of this insight are in a painting that has a short description but important consequences and which immediately follows a self-portrait of Aponte. READ MORE

   This is plate XXVI, where “It signifies Diogenes inside a jar on a desolated Beach protected by the Goddess Isis who favoured him and who is shown in a carriage from where she alit each afternoon to provide him with whatever he needed. Of this learned King Don Rodrigo represented at the bottom ordered Diogenes to come out of the jar who answered him that whatever His Majesty the King did he as a poor man would obey him: and asked by the King what he could do he took two fistfuls of earth showing him a sceptre in the right hand and in the left the Coat ofArms and flags of Spain. The King excited by such wonder gives thanks to God and makes sure that he stays in his jar returns to his Kingdom in the boat he went in and painted more to the right Asked again, how could Diogenes in accordance with the Previous explanation have formed the Coat of Arms and Sceptre ofSpain from two fistfuls ofEarth that as the declarer ensures he took out of the jar: as that philosopher was not able to naturally make such wonders he said: that he has always been persuaded and believed that it was the effect of his understanding with the Goddess.”[96] As Juan Antonio Hernández has emphasised, this plate details the legendary encounter between Diogenes of Sinope and Alexander the Great, the latter substituted by King Rodrigo, “last of the Goths,” who lost the territories of Spain in 711 to the Muslim troops of Tarik. But the meaning of this encounter is presented in a more politicised form than in the Greek legend, since it makes reference to Rodrigo’s loss of the throne and to Diogenes’s ability to make the sceptre and the coat of arms of Spain appear from a fistful of dirt. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 292-293)

4. Responding to the judge’s question about the ability of the philosopher to produce – as if “by miracle” – these symbols of the sovereign, Aponte says that this occurs with the help and advice of the goddess Isis. READ MORE

   For Hernández, what we have here is the relationship between political sovereignty and the ‘miracle’, which in the Hobbesian tradition is constituted as the secular equivalent of the ‘state of exception’ when the sovereign decides where the miraculous or wonderous action begins and ends.[97] However, this tradition of political philosophy does not explain the recovery by Aponte of a medieval episode in synchronic relation to an episode from Greek philosophy. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 293)