Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670

3. The Conquest of Death

chapter three | The Conquest of Death Inducing the native populations to adopt Christian beliefs and customs concerning death was a crucial part of the Spanish missionary project in the Andes. This ambitious goal involved becoming familiar with Andean ideas and practices, reducing them to a concise and intelligible whole, and using what the Spaniards believed they had learned to create procedures that, while aiming to eradicate the old ways, would provide guidance in establishing the new ones. The missionaries and colonial functionaries did not, of course, conceive such a simple, straightforward program as the sequence described above might suggest. The first details began to appear during the early explorations, wars, and plundering. The importance of the ancestors in Andean societies became apparent when contact began with the native elites. As priests and officials sought to obtain a more systematic knowledge of the political and economic order prevailing in the pre-conquest Andes, the place that the forebears occupied became increasingly intelligible. The Church, in its council documents, formulated a series of guidelines and instruments designed to achieve the conversion of the native population. These documents paid special attention to Andean ideas about death and their correlative funeral customs, since these ideas and customs were considered guides for everyday existence. The recommendations of the councils on these points fell into categories much like those considered in this book: the bishops encouraged the missionaries to identify the local populations ’ sacred places, particularly tombs and cemeteries; they stressed| 61 the importance of explaining Christian ideas about the body and the individual, and they exhorted the native populations to give up their own conceptions; finally, they familiarized themselves with native funeral rites in order to oppose and eradicate them. A crucial task was to determine who, besides the missionaries, was to play a central role in this undertaking, and also—a very important point—to establish the methods that should be used. The debates on this last point were constant and involved both the ecclesiastical sphere and the state. The violence of the conquest projected an inescapable shadow on the nature and relevance of the methods employed to begin the missionary project.1 In this chapter I analyze the itinerary followed in Christianizing death in the Andes. I will deal here primarily with the formulation of policies, not their implementation (which I will discuss later). This analysis is organized chronologically. I examine three main topics: burial places and their location; the concept of the individual and the body; and, finally, the rites of preparation for death. The Question of the Tombs The conquistadors’ first contacts with Andean ancestor worship coincided with acts of looting. The company of soldiers who reached the Inca capital shortly after Atahualpa had been taken prisoner in Cajamarca walked into a temple where they found the embalmed bodies of two nobles, carefully tended by a woman. Her face was covered by a gold mask, and she held a tool with which she was brushing away the dust and flies from the mummies. She demanded that the soldiers remove their shoes before entering the temple. Although they obeyed her, the impression made on them by the reverence with which the bodies were being treated was quickly overcome by the sight of the rich ornaments they wore, and the soldiers proceeded to strip them of their jewels and adornments.2 From then on, the looting became more intense and widespread: temples and homes were sacked, and local authorities, custodians of the tombs, and the relatives of the deceased were forced to reveal the places where objects of gold and silver were kept.3 The identification of the tombs as treasure houses sparked a search that seemed endless.4 In a report addressed 62 | death and conversion in the andes to Charles V from Cuzco in 1540, the provisor Luis de Morales complained that in their eagerness to find treasures, the Spaniards “burned the living and dug up the dead” (Lissón 1943, 1: no. 3, 63). In spite of the alarm that the conquistadors’ abuses aroused in priests such as Morales, the fact that the ancestors’ graves were places of worship for the local populations made the missionaries consider them a serious obstacle to persuading the Andeans to embrace the Christian faith. In the same document written from Cuzco, Morales discusses the problems that ancestor worship presented for the teaching of the Catholic doctrine. Describing the state of...