In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Americas 59.2 (2002) 153-159



[Access article in PDF]

Introduction

Fernando Cervantes

The articles in this collection were originally presented as papers at the 1999 AHA conference in Washington, when Professor Sonya Lipsett-Rivera kindly invited me to chair a session on diabolism. The experience proved fascinating, not only because of the intrinsic interest and quality of the presentations, but also because it made clear to us just how varied and resilient a concept the devil became, and indeed remains, in the cultural history of the Americas. This is all the more remarkable given the widely accepted view that the devil was an intellectual construct imported to the Americas almost intact from its European context.

This premise should not lead to the conclusion that the process of importation was straightforward, or that the notion of the devil was so well established in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that it could be readily understood from a modern perspective. To attempt to place the devil of the first discoverers, conquerors, and chroniclers in the context of the developments that, a few decades later, would lead to the outbreak of the European witch hunts, for instance, would be a gross distortion. For the various notions of the diabolic that emerge from these accounts are in fact much more malleable and comparatively inoffensive.

Nor is it always helpful to interpret the use of the devil as a mere political expedient to justify the European invasion. It is revealing, for instance, that Hernán Cortés clearly believed in the power of the Church against demonic attacks, and that his descriptions of even the more outlandish native practices, including human sacrifice, are imbued with a sense of confidence in the goodness of indigenous cultures. The same attitude can be discerned among the mendicant missionaries in New Spain during the first decade of evangelisation, particularly in the enthusiasm that permeates the early mendicant chronicles where the euphoria with which the natives accepted the Christian message is vividly recounted.

Nevertheless, a clear change of attitude can be detected from the middle of the 1530s. It was during these years that the worrying realisation that the [End Page 153] process of conversion was far more superficial and incomplete than the friars had imagined began to sink in. Partly as a response to this realisation, the Franciscan Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, began to implement the first inquisitorial practices against Indians deemed guilty of idolatry. Zumárraga's logic was that, in a post-evangelisation context, indigenous deities could no longer be seen merely as false. Rather, as his fellow Franciscan fray Bernardino de Sahagún would put it, their persistence was proof that they were deceitful devils merely awaiting a suitable opportunity to recover what they had lost. It was no longer ignorance but Satanic intervention that seemed to be at the heart of indigenous cultures.

By the middle of the century this new attitude seemed firmly entrenched. It reached a dramatic climax in the 1560s in Yucatán, where the discovery of widespread idolatry led to the most extreme and ruthless interrogations and tortures in the history of conversion in Mexico, a sad episode that set the pattern for all subsequent initiatives to extirpate idolatry in Spanish America.

Such a sharp change of attitude is undoubtedly a response to the shock of betrayal. But it was reinforced by the growing involvement of the State in the newly discovered territories, an involvement that soon made conversion more a matter of acquiescence based on authority than of assent based on reason. Yet to interpret this "demonisation" of native cultures merely in the light of the needs of political expediency can also be misleading. For the process was intimately linked to developments in Europe at this time, where the impact of the Reformation and the hardening of doctrinal positions on both sides of the confessional front was leading to the reaffirmation of some significant developments in late medieval demonology.

A brief evaluation of these developments is therefore essential for an adequate understanding of the way in which early modern diabolism expressed itself in the Americas.

*

Since at least...

pdf

Share