The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru

Introduction

inTrodUcTion almosT all of The sPaNiards who came to the Andes from 1532 onward and left written records found the many different Quechua and Aymara terms for denoting what we can call, for lack of a better term, religious specialists highly problematic: achik, achicoc, achiycamayok, amauta, aucachic, ychuri, calparicu, camasca, soncoyoc cauchu, ru­ napmicuc, condeviza, hacarícuc, cuyrícuc, hacchini, hampicamayoc, hampioc or hampicoc, guacamayoc, huasca, huachachik or huacha­ chicuc, huatuc or watoq, layca, macsa, villac, móscoc, omo, umu or homo, miuycamayoc, pacharícuc, rápiac, socayoc, vacanqui camayoc, vallaviza, viropiricoc, vizaconas, yacarcaes, yachaccunacta, tala, tutu, phuu, supayona alicomata haque, toqueni, and hamuni.1 As the Spaniards transformed Quechua and Aymara into written languages, they spelled these terms in various ways. They also debated how the words should be translated, most often rendering them “diviners,” “priests,” “people who cast lots,” “wise men,” “confessors,” “sorcerers,” “high priests,” “herbalists,” “people who kill with poison,” “midwives,” and “practitioners of love magic.” Spaniards subcategorized “diviners” according to their “instruments”; for example, spiders, beans, spittle, entrails, llama dung, dreams, tremors of the arm, coca leaves, and grains of maize.2 Colonial Aymara was particularly rich in verbs indicating actions that Spaniards interpreted as divinations, including arokhaatha, coca phahuatha, hacchitha, hacchirapitha, huankona ul­ latha, huanko cchaatha, piuirutatha, huankona anocarapana ullatha, hamuttatha, hamuttatha and acahamani, and sapinitha.3 These different terms provided more detail than the blanket term “diviner” by specifying the instrument of divination. Yet despite this diversity and specificity in native terminology and native arts, lexical univocality reigned in Spanish discussions of indige- 2 The power of huacas nous beliefs and practices. Most Spaniards simply resorted to the concept of hechizero (sorcerer) to label Andean religious specialists, and hechizería (sorcery) to encompass his or her acts. Evidently, Spaniards used the category of hechizería as a blunt tool, ignoring differences between Quechua, Aymara, and many other religious specialists.4 In early sixteenth-century Spain and colonial Peru, the meanings of hechizería were basically threefold: “false god, false cult, false actions,” or “idolatry, superstition, sorcery.” In his orderly cosmos, Thomas Aquinas elevated superstitio above sorcery, divination, magic, and idolatry.5 According to him, superstitio was “a-religio,” and the label belonged properly to any cult or belief deviating from the official religion, Catholicism. In this way, a concept of hechizería with implications of superstition and idolatry came to dominate Peruvian sources and Spanish actions toward certain Andean people. Even more, the dynamics of this Spanish discourse about hechizería and its constant dialogue with the Andean people had sociopolitical consequences that changed the Andean world in an unprecedented way.6 To date, a few books have reconstructed the European discourse on Andean hechizería and its effects on Andean religious specialists.7 Important studies on which this book builds have treated different aspects of the complex history of colonial hechizería as it reached into many contexts that historians of the colonial Andes have examined: the Spanish and Creole extirpation-of-idolatry campaigns in the archdiocese of Lima during the seventeenth century; the emergence of an Andean Catholic world; the history of gender relations and, in part, of witches in a colonial setting; the history of the relationship between Andean and Spanish political institutions premised on colonialism; the history of the persecution of non-Andean Spanish, Creole, and Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists; and the ongoing history of Andean and Inca religious- and sociopolitical-economic structures, by Pierre Duviols, Kenneth Mills, Juan Carlos García Cabrera, Frank Salomon, Luis Millones, Gabriela Ramos, José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Sabine MacCormack, Ana Sánchez, Nicholas Griffiths, Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Laura Larco, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Irene Silverblatt, Maria Manarelli, Iris Gareis, Polia Meconi, Tristan Platt, Therèse BouysseCassagne ,Thierry Saignes, Gabriel Martínez, Josep Barnadas, and many others on the Inca and Andean world.8 No single book, however, has analyzed the evolution of Andean rituals and their symbolic makeup during colonial times in more detail in an effort to reconstruct the effects of the discourse of hechizería on inTrodUcTion 3 the Andean world and of accompanying transcultural interactions and dialectical dynamics between Spaniards, Creoles, and Andeans. Analyzing Andean rituals and especially their symbolic makeup allows this book to show in which respect the world of Andean religious specialists changed; how it changed, on both the level of concepts and beneath the level of theoretical discourse, on the basis of practices...