BROTHERS OF LIGHT, BROTHERS OF BLOOD
The Penitentes of the Southwest

FOREWORD TO THIS EDITION
      by
      Marta Weigle, Ph.D.
     
     
      I was first acquainted with the Penitente Brotherhood of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado during my initial visit to Santa Fe in the summer of 1961. My family and I stayed at the guesthouse of Sallie Wagner (1913-2006) and her then husband William Lippincott, near the site for the new campus of St. John’s College. Sallie and Bill had operated a trading post on the Navajo reservation at Wide Ruins, Arizona, from 1938 until 1950, and she continued to trade with many of the northern New Mexico pueblos as well as with several Hispano woodcarvers in Chimayó and Córdova. Accompanying her on several trips in late June and early July, we were introduced to a New Mexico that I determined someday to make my home.
      Late one morning we were on the “high road” north between Chimayó and Taos, having visited the Córdova home/woodcarving shop of George and Silvianita López and the main sanctuary of the old adobe church at Las Trampas. We were passing the village of Ojo Sarco when Sallie told us that this was “Penitente country” where villagers observed secret Easter-time rites of flagellation and crucifixion. Not long ago, she said, a Newsweek reporter had been murdered for trying to expose these practices. I was struck but told no one that I there resolved one day to know about this remarkable “Spanish” and not Indian mystery.
      That day came seven or eight years later while doing graduate work in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. I wrote a term paper on the Penitente Brotherhood for Professor Don Yoder’s folk religion class. It became the subject of my dissertation, which I was able to research and write in New Mexico during the last eighteen months of a generous four-year University Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. “‘Los Hermanos Penitentes’: Historical and Ritual Aspects of Folk Religion in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado” was submitted and accepted in the summer of 1971, almost precisely ten years after that morning in Ojo Sarco.
      The identity of the murdered “Newsweek reporter” had been revealed during the latter stages of my research, when I was allowed to examine the then privately held Dorothy Woodward Penitente Papers. Among them were sensational newspaper clippings about alleged Brotherhood involvement in the February 5, 1936, murder near Cedar Crest of free-lance journalist Carl N. Taylor. Taylor came to New Mexico from the Philippines and had written about penitent flagellants there; he had just submitted a Penitente article, “Agony in New Mexico,” to Today Magazine (see pages 107-109 of this volume). Woodward’s invaluable papers were later accessioned into the State of New Mexico Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe.
      Dorothy Woodward (1895-1961) wrote the first full-length, fully documented study of the Brotherhood, “The Penitentes of New Mexico” (Yale University dissertation, 1935) and the sole available until mine. Upon receiving her doctorate she joined the History Department at the University of New Mexico. Woodward remained active on campus and in musical and civic affairs around her adopted state until shortly before her death on April 2, less than three months before my first visit to Santa Fe.
      Woodward’s student Myra Ellen Jenkins (1916-1993), archivist and later state historian, wrote a foreword to and supervised the retyping of her mentor’s dissertation for publication by Arno Press in 1974. In her foreword Dr. Jenkins reports that “Professor Woodward had intended to revise the Penitente study, incorporating newly-discovered documentary source materials, later editions of Spanish accounts of exploration and settlement and trustworthy first hand accounts such as Alice Corbin Henderson’s Brothers of Light, printed in 1937,” but never completed the project. She honors me as “in recent years [one of] at least three serious scholars [Fray Angélico Chávez (1910-1996), E. Boyd (1903-1974), Marta Weigle] working within different disciplines [who] have made and are making significant contributions to the role of the Penitentes in Hispanic New Mexico [and who] fortunately...have had access to the ecclesiastical records in the archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and other sources which were not made available to Dorothy Woodward,” stating: “The slender volume by Marta Weigle entitled The Penitentes of the Southwest, published in 1970 [by Ancient City Press], and the as yet unpublished extensive study on the same subject by this specialist in folk culture contribute new insights and additional information.”
      In August 1972 I began teaching folklore and Southwest studies in the Anthropology and English Departments at the University of New Mexico while continuing to revise my 826-page dissertation. All such work was suspended following a serious automobile accident on September 28, 1972. When finally I was able to submit material to the University of New Mexico Press, expert critique from the press’s editors and the outside reviewers helped me completely revision my work into this book and its 1976 companion compilation A Penitente Bibliography.
      For a time during the mid-1960s my family stayed in the Camino del Monte Sol studio of artist William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943), who came to Santa Fe with his wife in 1916. He drew the illustrations for her 1937 book on the Brotherhood. Poet Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) entitled her important work Brothers of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest. In tribute and with trepidation I entitled mine Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest.