Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and its Indigenous Agents, 1583-1671

5: Idolatry Through Andean Eyes

132 Untold Alliances Studies of the Lima see’s campaigns to extirpate idolatries often begin with Francisco de Ávila’s well-known achievement of 1609: the capture, punishment , and forced atonement of Hernando Pauccar, the curaca and chief huaca minister in the parish of San Pedro de Mama. Ávila, the cura de indios of nearby San Damián, departed from the central highlands to Lima ten days following the investiture of Archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero, bringing with him a sizeable collection of the Checa people’s ritual objects and mummified ancestors, as well as the imprisoned Pauccar, minister of the huaca Chaupi Ñamca. Within weeks of the display, the archbishop orchestrated an auto-da-fé outside the Lima cathedral in which Ávila, before the viceroy, high officials of the Church and royal audiencia, and hundreds of the city’s Spanish and Indian residents, denounced from the pulpit the crimes of idolatry and superstition that still endured eighty years after the Europeans’ initial invasion. Ávila drew a portrait of a war between Christianity and the devil’s false religion, in which God’s ministers, through divine grace and personal sacrifice, would eventually triumph. Following the sermon , the cathedral’s attendants bound Pauccar to a pole, sheared his hair, and flogged him two hundred times, then set the sacred objects and the bodies of his ancestors ablaze. An ecclesiastical notary recorded his confession of idolatry for preservation in the archives and read aloud the sentence: perpetual banishment to a Jesuit house of penitential reform in Santiago de Chile (Ávila [1648] 1918, 67–69).1 The extirpator and the idolater constitute the rival pillars upon which the traditional historiography of extirpation in the Andes has rested. Ávila described a religious landscape in which the enemy huaca minister had Chapter 5 Idolatry Through Andean Eyes Idolatry Through Andean Eyes 133 revitalized pre-Columbian beliefs and practices in defiance of the Church. Repeating the views of Ávila and other colonial missionaries, pioneering studies of the extirpation campaigns have attributed the survival of autochthonous beliefs and models of identity to native resilience in the face of Spanish colonial authority. According to this view, evangelization in the Andes was marked by the capacity of native religious specialists to undermine the work of the clergy.2 Yet while it is true that many Andeans such as Pauccar opposed extirpation’s advance, hardened resolve does not account for the whole of indigenous experience under Catholic rule. Consideration of the native officials who assisted Ávila and other priests in uprooting the Indians’ sacred objects and sites of worship illuminates a history in which the effort to contain traditional Andean religiosity owed as much to the indigenous forces within native parishes as to the European forces without. Few accounts of extirpation mention the central part that Indian officials had in carrying out its mandate. In his classic history of Peru’s socalled Inquisition for the Indians, Pierre Duviols ([1971] 1977, 283–85) was first to observe that bilingual Andean mediators collaborated with church magistrates in the extirpation of idolatries and were often the source of the inspectors’ most important discoveries.3 More recently, Rolena Adorno (1991) has examined how Guaman Poma and Pachacuti Yamqui perceived their role in similar campaigns in the regions of Huamanga and Cuzco, respectively. Still, the native assistants of extirpation in the central sierra remain anonymous masses whose individual contributions to anti-idolatry efforts are mostly unknown. Duviols’ landmark 1986 publication of idolatry trial manuscripts, produced in the province of Cajatambo between 1565 and 1664, privileges the unmistakably heterodox testimonies of Indian ministers who upheld ancestral cults. Ethnographically oriented scholars have profitably examined this vast record for narratives of cultural revitalization, subaltern resistance to Catholicism, and inventive adaptation. Yet the published corpus supplies limited data on the activities of the native fiscales de la idolatría: extirpating Indian prosecutors, highly literate in Castilian, who directed judicial investigations of huaca priests, elicited confessions of sorcery , and recommended punishments.4 Additional trial documents of the Archive contain the stories of the native officials who joined the Spanish side and became practitioners of its cultural and political forms. These documents present an alternative model for understanding indigenous social action and cultural practices in the process of coercive evangelization. 134 Chapter 5 Indians throughout the Americas recognized the power of writing as an instrument of colonization, and many used it to challenge Christianity. But not all native literary activity...