The Shaping of the Ritual Landscape for Worshipping Christ in the municipalities of Totoalapan and Atlatlahucan, Morelos, Mexico

Abstract

This article is part of a broader research project including the northeast of the state of Morelos. It is a region where the image of Christ currently plays an important role in the rituals conducted in the hills, ravines and springs, regarded as sacred places comprising the ritual landscape of Totolapan and Atlatlahucan. The aim is to use an anthropological and comparative perspective, framed in a lengthy historical process, to describe the religious ceremony surrounding the image of Christ the Risen in two municipal capitals in order to understand the religious re-enactments performed on three days: May 3, the Ascension of the Lord, and Pentecost. An ethnographic and historical method is used to reconstruct the process of reinterpreting the the image of the crucified Christ and its relationship with the landscape, a space reconfigured from ancestral elements underpinning the religious expressions of communities, re-interpreted within the sphere of the Catholic religion.