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chaPTer four Talking To demons: The inTensified persecUTion of andean religioUs specialisTs (ca. 1609–1700) JesUiTs and oThers see demons Talk Throughout his life, the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio (1557–1625) genuinely cared about exchanging ideas with the native people of the southern Andes. He edited an Aymara dictionary in Julí in 1612 and, in the same year, added the Libro de la vida y milagros de nuestro Señor Iesu Christo en dos lenguas, aymara y romance to his collection of writings .1 Both books were intended to aid communication between his brethren and the Aymara Indians. The latter contained vivid accounts of Christ’s life and struggles, especially tailored to the indigenous experience . One of the parables that he accommodated to the “capacity of the Indians” treated Christ’s silencing of Apollo, whom he named the greatest oracle of the ancient world: “In those days an idol by the name of Apollo was famed as a great talker and deceiver of the human race. Being the demon’s mouth, he fell mute and no longer spoke because Christ, our Savior, was born. On one last occasion, Apollo was enabled to speak. When Augustus offered a sacrifice, Apollo confessed that he was no longer able to speak because this child who was in fact a god had told him, ‘Be quiet and return to hell.’”2 Bertonio was convinced that Apollo had obeyed and voluntarily returned to the underworld. The Jesuit was only one of the many Europeans who believed that Christianity ’s arrival had caused—or, at least, should cause—a similar silencing of idols and their demons in Peru.3 A Christian land was one in which stones, mountains, lakes, and caves were silent witnesses to God’s wisdom.4 Yet to the chagrin of the Jesuits and many others during the seventeenth century, Peruvian realities proved Christianity’s narrative of their successes over ancient idolatry wrong. Despite the expansion of Christianity into the hinterlands of Lima, Cuzco, Quito, and Talking To demons 105 Charcas, Peru’s demons did not cease to communicate with religious specialists, nor the latter with them. The plains and valleys of Peru resounded with the demons’ whisperings, vile sayings, and vicious talk. Demons continued to pull at the fragile bond between recently baptized hechizeros and their Christian faith.5 And they probed the steadfastness of many missionaries.6 In the light of this widely shared belief, priests and friars—and especially Jesuits and Augustinians—ventured into the countryside in order to find and destroy speaking idols. This search also motivated the study of many remote and uncommon indigenous languages.7 Priests not affiliated with any order, such as Bartolomé Álvarez (1540–?), also searched for these talking idols. We know little about Álvarez beyond that he lived in the second half of the sixteenth century in the diocese of Charcas and was daily busy baptizing Aymara and Quechua Indians in Sabaya, Aullagas, and Potosí.8 He was apparently successful at converting them to the Christian faith. One recorded episode gives us some insight into his daily routine. When he interviewed the young son of a deceased hechizero, he asked him what the voice of the demon sounded like. How did the devil talk to your father? The little boy, surprised by such a question, said the demon talked in the voice of a little child, and that answer marked the end of the dialogue.9 We do not know if Álvarez was satisfied with this answer. Although in this case he did not ask the source of the demonic voice, Álvarez and the Catholic clergy came to particularly suspect stones. The Augustinians were convinced that stones responded to hechizeros.10 José de Acosta summed up this issue: “Often idols show some signs of intelligence and of voice, and sometimes they even announce admonitions and decrees. When something similar happens, and this might happen, all the above mentioned arguments [about idolatry] require more decisiveness and we have to show to these barbarous people that all these things are tricks performed by the devil.”11 As we will see below, suspicion of continued communication between religious specialists and demons acquired a new quality during the seventeenth century, especially in the archdiocese of Lima; a new European demonology that varied the Catholic fear of demons conversing with indigenous religious specialists through stones lay at the heart of a series of ecclesiastical persecutions of indigenous hechizeros. In that enterprise, the key movers were Jesuits, their theological convictions , and...

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