Masturbation, Salvation, and Desire: Connecting Sexuality and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico
On 23 January 1621 a Spanish priest and commissary of the Mexican Holy Office of the Inquisition in Querétaro, Fray Manuel de Santo Thomas, came forth to denounce the twenty-year-old Agustina Ruiz, who had, according to him, never completed the confession that she had begun with him on the eve of Pascua de Reyes (Feast of the Three Kings) a few weeks earlier. He told the Inquisition that Ruiz had begun to confess her sins to him in the church of the Carmelite convent of Santa Theresa, asking for mercy and forgiveness, and then declared that since the age of eleven she had carnally sinned with herself nearly every day by repeatedly committing the act of pollution (polución)—masturbation. Most unsettling to the priest, however, was not the act of masturbation itself but rather the vivid, obscene, and sacrilegious descriptions that went alongside her masturbatory fantasies. According to the priest's denunciation, Ruiz confessed that she had spoken dishonest words with San Nicolas de Tolentino, San Diego, and even Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and that they had carnally communicated with her in a variety of sexual positions: "They join themselves with her [Ruiz] in different ways, with her underneath them, and from the side, and her on top of them, and also with her lying facedown while they conjoin themselves with her through both of her dishonest parts [ambas partes deshonestas]," meaning both vaginally and anally.1 Given that the [End Page 355] primary aim of the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition—established in 1569 by royal decree of Phillip II of Spain and founded in 1571—was to extirpate heresy, it is no surprise that the Mexican Inquisition would take a strong interest in Ruiz, who was eventually sentenced to spend three years in a Mexico City convent.2
What most perturbed this priest and local judge of the Inquisition was Ruiz's declaration that at times when she attended mass and saw the Eucharist being raised, she would see Jesus Christ with his genitals exposed, feel sexually excited—experiencing "carnal alteration" (alteración carnal)—because of this sight, and would sin with herself right there in the church: a heretical profanation of the sacraments. She also alluded to having sinned in a similar manner with the image of the Virgin Mary in mind.3 This is merely the beginning of a unique and richly detailed Inquisition case in which the issues of female sexuality and religiosity merge through the experiences of one young woman charged with a variety of heretical sins relating to her visions, her actions, and her body. Any close reading of this case, however, should be placed within a proper historiographical framework. In her influential essay, "Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma," Asunción Lavrin examines the gap between the proper types of sexual behavior described in treatises of moral theology and confessional manuals and the quotidian and transgressive behaviors of the population at large. Discussing the large number of criminal and Inquisition cases dealing with sexuality, Lavrin asserts: "These cases were either self-confessions or denunciations of breaches of the ecclesiastical norms, and they represent the reality of daily life for those who failed to practice fully the teachings of the [End Page 356] church."4 Lavrin's discussion of this undeniable disjunction offers valuable insight into colonial Mexican society. Especially interesting, however, is that many whose actions and sexual behaviors did fall short of church teachings often envisioned themselves as good Christians and veritably thought that their actions did little or nothing to challenge church dogma. By situating sexuality and religiosity as not necessarily antagonistic, historians have opened up other ways to think about sexuality and its complex relationship to religion and spiritual devotion.
As the Inquisition case of Agustina Ruiz demonstrates...
