A close examination of the eyes of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Many are familiar with the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  This miraculous image appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego shortly after he saw Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico in 1531.  When the image of Our Lady was miraculously imprinted on the cloth it became a large reason for the conversion of more than 5 million to the Catholic Faith.  When the people heard about and saw the image, “the whole city was shaken by the event and so the Lord Bishop transferred the beloved Image of the Girl from heaven to the main church.  She [the image] was taken from his private chapel to where everyone could see and wonder at her beloved figure.  People came to acknowledge the divine [miraculous/supernatural] character of the ayate [the tilma].” (Francis Anson, Guadalupe – What Her Eyes Say, p. 53)

Many are also familiar with the miraculous aspects of the eyes of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.   A close examination of the eyes of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has revealed many miraculous features, including a microscopic image of a bearded man that can be seen within the eye of Our Lady.  This is covered on our Creation and Miracles DVD.  But it gets even more incredible.  When a person looks at an image, the way that the eye works is that three different aspects of what one sees are contained in three different parts of the eye.  This law, which was discovered by Purkinje and Samson, is called the Samson-Purkinje law:

“The Polish Purkinje and the Frenchman Samson, independently discovered this law that carries their names.  Three images are formed in the human eye: one upright and brilliant in the anterior part of the cornea; a second one, seen deeper in the anterior part of the crystalline lens, is also upright but less brilliant; and the third one, in the posterior surface of the crystalline lens, is inverted, smaller, and with an immediate depth and brilliancy…” (Francis Anson, Guadalupe – What Her Eyes Say, p. 108)

Well, the microscopic image of the “bearded man” that can be seen within the eye of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe follows this law precisely:

“We are also talking of another impossible phenomenon: the image of the ‘bearded man’ appears three times in the eyes of the ayate [the tilma of Juan Diego], following the laws of Samson-Purkinje with mathematical precision.  One image, four millimeters high and one millimeter wide, upright and brilliant, seems to come out of the cloth; a second one, of the same size, the deepest one and the least brilliant, can be perfectly distinguished at the bottom of the eye; and a third one, hardly a millimeter high, is located halfway between the other two and is inverted and displaced toward the left, as it happens in a living human eye… but this is just a piece of cloth.” (Francis Anson, Guadalupe – What Her Eyes Say, p. 109)

Obviously, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not a painting.  It’s a miraculous image of Our Lady which God and Our Lady miraculously imprinted on Juan Diego’s tilma. 

The significance of the discovery of the bearded man in the eye of the image is that Our Lady was looking at the bearded man, Juan Diego, when the image was imprinted on the cloth.  That’s why his image appears three times in her eye just as it would in a living eye!  Other aspects of the eyes show that they are like living eyes.  It makes sense that heaven would leave the world with one miraculous and true image of Our Lord on a cloth (the Shroud of Turin) and one miraculous and true image of Our Lady on a cloth (the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe).