María Lionza

The mud on the path up Sorte is warm and it holds a footprint for hours. In the second week of October the mountain fills with people carrying flowers wrapped in newspaper, bottles of rum, cheap cigars and candles by the boxful, and by nightfall the whole flank of the hill is speckled with small flames. Drums start somewhere below and do not stop. A woman in white walks into the brown river up to her waist, comes out shivering, and lies down on the ground while three men chalk a circle around her. Somewhere further up, a medium in a horned helmet is being ridden by the spirit of Eric the Red, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a Venezuelan goddess, and yet there he is, and nobody at Sorte finds it strange.

At the top of all this sits María Lionza, and the first thing to understand about her is that she will not hold still.

The story most often told begins in Yaracuy, five centuries ago, with a daughter born to the chief of the Nívar. She had green eyes. That was the problem. The old warning in her people’s lore held that a green-eyed girl born among them would bring ruin, and so, depending on who is telling it, she was hidden away in the mountains, or guarded by twenty-two warriors, or simply sent by her father to live in the forest above the river. What everyone agrees on is water. She went down to the river alone and looked at her own reflection, which she had been forbidden to do, and the guardian of the water came for her. An anaconda rose and swallowed her whole. From inside the serpent she called out to the mountain for help, and the mountain answered. She came apart and became Sorte itself, its rivers, its trees, its animals. Some versions have the snake swelling until it burst, and the torrential rains that batter Yaracuy every year are what came out.

She kept the tapir. In the imagery that runs from cheap devotional prints to a five-ton stone monument in Caracas, María Lionza rides one: a heavy, dark, hoofed animal with a prehensile snout, the largest wild mammal in South America and one of the least glamorous. It is an unusual mount for a goddess. It is also exactly right, because she is not a sky power. She is the queen of the things that live in the wet green places, and her animal is a browser that swims.

Under Spanish rule her name went through the mill. The prevailing account holds that the Nívar’s forest lady was christened by the missionaries as Nuestra Señora María de la Onza del Prado de Talavera de Nívar, and that the long title wore down through María de la Onza to María Lionza. Other explanations circulate. One says the name belonged to a wealthy colonial woman of Chivacoa who kept her fortune in gold ounces, an onza being a coin as well as a cat. Another suspects that a copyist misread “Santa María de la Victoria” in an old manuscript and produced “de la Onza” from it, in which case an entire goddess owes her name to bad handwriting. Take your pick.

Here the honest part. The María Lionza whose myth is retold above was written down, and to a degree written up, in the twentieth century. The Venezuelan folklorist Gilberto Antolínez published the Nívar legend in 1937 and again in a fuller literary telling in 1945, working from oral material he gathered in Yaracuy, and the polished, princess-shaped version everyone now repeats bears his fingerprints. The anthropologist Daisy Barreto, whose genealogy of the myth is the standard work, traces the earliest firm references only to peasant and Afro-Venezuelan devotion to a queen of the Sorte mountains in the early 1900s. Angelina Pollak-Eltz dated the rites at Sorte to the 1920s, spreading into the cities a decade later. None of this makes her false. It makes her recent, and it makes her a genuinely popular invention rather than an ancient survival, which is a more interesting thing to be.

The cult she anchors is a braid of three strands: indigenous nature devotion, African religion carried through slavery and later reinforced by Cuban Santería and Palo, and Catholicism, with a heavy dose of the nineteenth-century French spiritism of Allan Kardec supplying the machinery of mediumship. It has no scripture, no central church, no ordained priesthood and no agreed doctrine. Anyone can build an altar. The spirits are organised into courts, ranked like a heavenly civil service: the Indigenous Court, the African Court, the Liberators, the doctors, a Viking court, and the Corte Malandra, made up of dead street criminals from the Caracas slums, who are asked for help precisely because they know how the violence works. At the apex stand the Tres Potencias, the Three Powers: María Lionza, the indigenous war leader Guaicaipuro who fought the conquistadors, and Negro Felipe, a black soldier of the independence wars for whom no historical record exists at all. Between them they hold the three bloodlines of Venezuela in one image, which is a large part of why the country cannot leave her alone.

What she can do is broad and vague, which is the point. She heals. She reads the future through her mediums. She commands the animals and the weather of her mountain, protects the forest and the water, grants luck in love and money, and grants nothing at all to people who arrive without respect. Her power is unlimited in the way a landscape is unlimited and useless in the way a landscape is useless: she does not act on request. Everything must be routed through a human body in trance, and mediums are unreliable, exhausted, sometimes drunk, sometimes cutting themselves with razors as they go under. The conversation is the religion. Where she has been made to hold still she has cracked. The dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez commissioned Alejandro Colina’s monumental statue of her for the 1951 Bolivarian Games, a muscular naked woman astride a tapir that stands on a serpent, holding a woman’s pelvis over her head, and then had it moved off the university campus to a traffic median in case her devotees started gathering around it. In 2004 the statue broke in half at the waist and toppled backwards, and Venezuelans, being Venezuelans, read it as a message. In 2022 the original was taken out of the warehouse where it had been stored, without permission, and driven to Sorte. Even in stone she keeps leaving.

The other limit is money. Rum, tobacco, candles and flowers are cheap until hyperinflation, and in the collapse of the last decade many marialionceros have simply not been able to afford the offerings. A goddess who runs on gifts is exposed when nobody can buy any.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is María Lionza?

María Lionza is the central goddess of Venezuela’s largest folk religion, a nature deity revered as queen of the Sorte mountain in Yaracuy state. She sits at the head of a spirit hierarchy that devotees, called marialionceros, contact through mediums who enter trance. She is one of the Three Powers alongside Guaicaipuro and Negro Felipe.

What is the legend of María Lionza?

The most widely told legend makes her the green-eyed daughter of a Nívar chief in Yaracuy, born under a prophecy of ruin and sent to live in the mountains. She went to the river, looked at her reflection, and an anaconda swallowed her. She called on the mountain from inside the serpent and became Sorte itself, its rivers, forests and animals.

Why is María Lionza shown riding a tapir?

The tapir is her mount in almost all devotional imagery and in Alejandro Colina’s famous 1951 statue in Caracas. It marks her as a power of the forest and the water rather than the sky, since the tapir is a heavy South American browsing animal that lives in wet lowland forest. The statue shows her naked on the tapir, which stands on a serpent, holding a female pelvis above her head as a sign of fertility.

Is the cult of María Lionza ancient?

No. The devotion is documented from the early twentieth century, with rituals at Sorte dating to the 1920s, and the polished princess legend was published by the folklorist Gilberto Antolínez in 1937 and 1945. Older indigenous nature devotion probably fed into it, but María Lionza as she is now worshipped is a modern religion, not a pre-Columbian survival.

What happens at the María Lionza pilgrimage?

Every October, around the 12th, tens of thousands of followers climb Sorte mountain near Chivacoa to bathe in the rivers, light candles, and consult the spirits. Mediums go into trance so that spirits from the courts can speak, advising on health, money and love, and devotees perform the baile de las brasas, a dance across hot coals. Rum, cigars, drumming and flowers are the standard offerings.

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