Conjuring the Coca and the Inca: The Andeanization of Lima's Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression.² In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces.These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

The cases collected here reveal a gradual and progressive shift in the emphasis of ritual practice among the colony's non-indigenous ritual specialists, particularly in urban areas. First, Native Andean practices served as a key source of special powers; then a more hybridized, "colonial Andean practice" emerged that drew upon Iberian, indigenous, and African knowledge and eventually resulted in the invention of unique "colonial" ritual concepts. For instance, rites included a newly imagined Inca protector that oversaw the well-being and desires of his supplicants, as well as coca leaf ceremonies that showcased the plant's curative and divinatory powers. As these practices developed, particularly over the course of the 17th century, Lima's Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists often led the way in creating a new collection of ritual practices and ideas about the supernatural, rooted in established, but still dynamic, traditions.

From the 1580s to the 1690s, many Africans and their children and grandchildren figured prominently in establishing common practices of witchcraft and amatory magic in Peru's cities. In an initial phase (1580s and 1590s), Afro-Peruvians helped adapt Iberian and Catholic traditions to the Andes.³ Early Afro-Peruvian and Spanish involvement in Native Andean ritual remained limited to hiring indigenous practitioners under special circumstances. In the 1620s and 1630s, a second phase began as Afro-Peruvian specialists took the lead in tentative experimentation with Andean products and techniques. By the 1650s, tentative exploration of indigenous knowledge gave way to urban specialists' desire to more directly control and revise indigenous methods of exposing the occult and activating supernatural power. Afro-Peruvian specialists, therefore, incorporated and then reinterpreted Native Andean concepts in urban witchcraft. Black specialists coupled these colonial versions of indigenous ideas with their own magical inventions utilizing colonial drinks and pre-Hispanic remains. From the 1660s to the 1690s, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists helped blend together Catholic prayers, Native Andean coca leaves, invocations of a re-imagined Inca ruler, grape brandy and other colonial drinks, into a unique and coherent body of urban witchcraft that the Catholic Church failed to effectively suppress, even when using ecclesiastical investigations and the Inquisition.

Lima's skilled ritualists worked to serve clients and developed their body of specialized knowledge during a period of intense Church interest in the colonial population's religious beliefs and ritual activities. The campaigns to extirpate idolatries launched by Lima's archbishops (1609-1622, 1649-1670, 1720s), and the Inquisition established in Lima in 1570, constituted the two principal institutional means used to expose, document, and control the populace's religious beliefs and ritual practices in Lima and its surrounding hinterland.⁴ These sporadic efforts were designed to re-direct or suppress beliefs in specific ways, and they created the documents that historians rely upon to reconstruct those beliefs.⁵ Idolatry investigations in Lima's archbishopric began in 1609, following the denunciation by the rural priest Francisco de Ávila that his indigenous parishioners were continuing to worship their former deities during Christian celebrations. Over the years, the idolatry investigators burned ancestor mummies and other sacred items (sometimes in...