-
Chapter 8: French Jesuits and Indian Dreams in Seventeenth-Century New France
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter French Jesuits and Indian Dreams in Seventeenth-Century New France leslie tuttle On the evening of August 5, 1671, thousands of stylish Parisians gathered before the stage at the Collège de Clermont in Paris for the prestigious Jesuit school’s annual theater performance. That year, the main event was a five-act tragedy about the Old Testament king Belshazzar and divine prophecies of his downfall. Many in the audience had probably come, however , less to view the Latin tragedy than to see the elaborate ballet intervals danced by students between the acts. It was these ballet interludes for which the school was particularly renowned. The offering for 1671 was Le Ballet des songes [The dream ballet].1 The Jesuits used their theater as an opportunity to entertain, but also sought to instruct their audiences on contemporary spiritual topics. Le Ballet des songes fit the bill by providing orthodox Catholic answers to a perennial question: where do dreams come from, and what—if anything—do they mean? Guided by the program, the audience followed a complex argument about the visions they saw while sleeping. The first two ballet interludes deployed characters from mythology and concepts from premodern European medicine to explain how human physiology generated dreams. Jesuit students danced to illustrate how an individual’s humoral character —was he or she melancholic? choleric?—combined with the residue of daytime experience and a half-digested dinner to create images in the soul. The second part of the danced argument affirmed that however much dreams might feel meaningful to the dreamer, it was a mark of foolishness to believe in dreams. The ballet dramatized this cautionary message with French Jesuits and Indian Dreams 167 comic dances ridiculing popular traditions of dream interpretation. The audience was supposed to laugh as peasants searched vainly for the treasures whose hiding places had been revealed in dreams, and chuckle as cripples toppled over after placing their faith in dreams of miraculous healing . Finally, however, the concluding interval entitled ‘‘true dreams’’ alluded to figures from the Old Testament whose dreams had been divinely granted and prophetic. As the written program reminded viewers, the ‘‘empire of truth’’—a reference to the timeless omnipotence of God—could make meaning even from material as unpromising, chaotic, and incoherent as dreams.2 As the ballet concluded, then, the final scenes dancing in the audience’s head held open the possibility that dreams might after all be a channel for communication of insights directly from the divine realm. Tellingly , what the ballet did not offer was a method for discerning which dreams were true and which were false. The 1671 Ballet des songes captured the ambivalent attitude toward dreams typical of Catholic theology and spirituality in mid-seventeenthcentury France. Its preoccupation with the problem of dreams would have been familiar to another Jesuit audience, the reading audience of the Jesuit Relations, mission reports published between 1632 and 1673 that traced Jesuit evangelization across the Atlantic.3 In forty years of annual accounts penned on the margins of France’s nascent colonial empire, hardly a year went by without Jesuit missionaries lamenting the Amerindian proclivity to look to dreams as an authoritative source of spiritual guidance and practical knowledge. Readers of the Relations were, in fact, regularly immersed in stories in which dreaming figured prominently. Missionaries wrote often of the ways that New France’s native peoples looked to their dreams to know where to hunt, what remedies would cure their illnesses, and how to avoid the threats posed by enemies or an uncertain future. Dreams, they noted, could suggest political strategies, such as alliances to pursue. A man telling his dream during council meetings could expect his opinion to be heard. In their dreams, men and women traveled to otherwise unseen worlds; sometimes, in dreams, spirits or the dead interacted with the living.4 Indeed, after surveying the diverse uses his Huron hosts made of their dreams, Jean de Brébeuf concluded in 1636 that ‘‘the dream does everything and is, in truth, the principal God of the Hurons.’’5 A generation later, in 1669, missionary François Le Mercier echoed the same theme while working among the Onondaga Iroquois, writing that dreams ‘‘seem to constitute this country’s sole Divinity, to which they defer in all things’’ and ‘‘regard (2024-03-19 14:49 GMT) 168 Intercultural Encounter as the thing that makes them live.’’6 Although the 1671 Ballet des songes did not represent Amerindians among its cast...