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chaPTer Three The sickening powers of chrisTianiTy: a response by andean religioUs specialisTs accordiNg To coloNial aNdeaN religious specialists, their lands’ problems could be summed up in one word: Christianity.1 Christianity was hard to bear, and its agents militant. Andeans were told by Catholic priests to call them “padre Diospayanan Diospa rantin missa rurak”— the “padre” of God, who performs a mass and exchanges it with God.2 Historians can’t know whether Andean people addressed the priests in black, brown, and white habits in the same way.3 But we do know that Andean religious specialists’ distaste for Christians was long lasting.4 They were convinced that Christianity had brought sickness into their world—a belief doubtless encouraged by its literal accuracy. As is well known, thousands of Indians were killed by European epidemics, as Hans Baldung’s and Albrecht Dürer’s figures of death on horseback became a fatal reality in the New World. Indeed, the epidemics spread faster than conquistadors could ride their horses. By the time Pizarro landed in Peru, Andeans had already had their first unpleasant contacts with the Old World. When the epidemics initially struck, Andeans were uninformed about and defenseless against these germs. Later, they tried to understand what had happened to them in their own terms. One product of this search for understanding was the following story, which hinges on a dream—a dream that, like so many in the Andes, was prophetic.5 The dreamer was the eleventh Inca, Huayna Capac, who (much like the fourth Inca, Mayta Capac) came to be known among the Andeans for his prophetic gift.6 His dream was retold and commented on by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua in 1613.7 One day while the Inca was in the north, he dreamed that thousands of unknown people appeared on an almost empty battlefield. (Nobody, Pachacuti interjected, could tell who they were.) On awakening, the wise Huayna Capac understood the dream The sickening powers of chrisTianiTy 69 and feared its message. After he returned to his camp near Quito, a chasqui—an Inca postman—appeared and approached him, dressed in a black manta (poncho). He bore a chest and the message that only the Inca was entitled to open it. The key was turned, and butterflies escaped into the air and vanished. The butterflies were interpreted (perhaps by Pachacuti) as the measles, which two days later killed an Inca general. It was said in retrospect that the unknown people of Huayna Capac’s dream were victims gathered on the death fields of the measles epidemic. The Inca himself decided to hide in a quickly erected stone house, sealed with yet another stone. Yet despite all his precautions, Huayna Capac reentered Cuzco as a dead man. And we have to ask ourselves : Was retreat the only response available to the Incas, or even to religious specialists? How could the Andean people fight something that invaded their lands as aggressively and invisibly as these germs? Pachacuti’s myth is rich in meanings. First, it contains the image of the chest; Andeans had come to associate it with the arrival of the Spaniards, who were accompanied by big and small leather chests as they traveled all over the hills and mountains.8 Second, Pachacuti mentioned butterflies. According both to Andean interpreters of signs and to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, these ephemeral creatures were bad omens: they announced sickness and ultimately death.9 Third, and the most salient feature of the story, is the curious house of stone: “[The Inca] gave the order to erect a house of stone so as to hide, and afterward he hid in it, covering it with the same stone, and there he died.”10 What does this mean? Inca houses usually had roofs made out of straw, not stone.11 The Wari people near Huamanga did, in fact, bury their high officials in stone tombs, sealing them with single massive slabs.12 But why did Pachacuti say that this house was sealed “with the same stone” and that the Inca ruler died within it? Both statements are puzzling. As we will see later in the chapter, the image of the Inca ruler dying within a stone suggests his transformation into a stone. Other mythological tales—such as the stories of Ayar Auca, Ayar Uchu, and Manco Capac—describe similar events.13 Yet this interpretation ignores Pachacuti ’s reference to the handmade stone structure and the transfer of the Inca...

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