Overture

Contact with divinity is not knowledge. For knowledge is in a certain respect separated from its object by otherness. But prior to knowledge - as one things knows another - is the uniform connection with divinity, which is suspended from the gods, and is spontaneous and inseparable from them.

-Iamblichus, De Mysteriis

On the Virgin of St. John of the Lakes, a popular devotion in Mexico.

The First Miracle:

According to legend based on eye witness accounts, a family of circus performers was passing through the region of St. John of the Lakes on its way to the city of Guadalajara. They brought with them many circus acts, including one in which a girl leaped on a trapeze over a bed of daggers. She lost her balance and fell to her death. Right before the burial, an Indian woman by the name of Ana Lucia, wife of Peter Andrew, the man who was in charge of taking care of a small chapel, upon seeing the grief of the family, implored her husband to take to them a small image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. She had given it the Nahuatl name, the Cihualpilli, or the Great Lady, since she claimed it was miraculous and would even get up and walk from the sacristy to the altar on various occasions during the night. The parents in their grief allowed Ana Lucia to place the image over the chest of the small girl, and her life was returned to her.

Below: a painting of this occurence