According to some scholars and as indicated by Alets Marat Torah in his “Cartography of What Is”, the image of the Virgin of Taüll shows the moment of childbirth, the position of the arms and hands of the Virgin suggests the moment in which she is expelling it from her uterus represented by the blue “vee” that forms the mantle. As well as the position of the hands and arms of the devil (with the exact position of the Virgin) suggests that she is helping the child to come out of her womb.
Among other things, iconography has the property of being able to capture many moments in a single scene and its strokes, colors and shapes may be consistent with those of another image with which it apparently bears no relation. Its characteristics can be observed ontologically, that is, the consonance between the different paintings or existing elements can be studied, even though they are far apart both in time and space: The universal color red, for example, with the red of that particular flower drawn or the relationship between a scene and the elements represented in it, such as Jesus turning water into wine and the jars, shape, color or number of them, among other things.
Saving the distances, we could compare it with gematria, which interprets words symbolically from the numerical value of their letters and vice versa, the voices having the same numerical value being reciprocal even though they mean different things. This is a discipline that provides an alternative world that is much more transcendent than the strictly literal one and that does not reject other interpretations but rather expands them.
In the case of the representation of the she-devil of Cifuentes, there is a quite popular explanation in which it is reported that due to resentment and family wrongs, the irritated client could have proposed to represent the birth of King Alfonso X in this way.
Using the simile of the “iconographic gematria” and insisting that other interpretations are not rejected but that they are expanded, we return to the Virgin of Taüll to observe her portrait. We see the Child “rising from the womb” raised and straightened, sitting on her lap (as usual). He is straightened and lifted up because “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up” and because that is how Tradition tells us that we must do to advance.
We are born into the world of forms that, like a mocking headboard on which the demonic midwife rests her feet, traps us in it, inverted without realizing it, just like the son of the devil, imperfect, naked and unpurified. That is our aspect and we are born with the scepter of our power that we can use to stay that way or transcend.
We too must reverse our position, straighten our soul to be able to see with the eyes of the spirit and restore the knowledge we lost when we fell.
Inside the apse of Santa María de Taúll, at the central and most sacred point of the temple, the Mother is represented giving birth to her upright son; In the outermost archivolt of the temple of San Salvador de Cifuentes, in the material and sinful world, the mother is represented giving birth to her son inverted from her.
Let us enter the temple with a firm foot and above all, STRAIGHTENED.
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