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

spanish america  Afterlife  Ramón Mujica Pinilla Translated by Kenneth Mills I n 1806 José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa, one of Spain’s last viceroys of Peru, arrived in Lima. By this time, the secularizing views of the French Enlightenment had triumphed in Spain, inaugurating new public health policies. Indeed, as early as 1789, royal decrees issued from Madrid forbade the limeños’ deeply ingrained habit of burying their dead inside churches. But clergymen, as much as parishioners, were reluctant to comply with these decrees. Upon his arrival in Lima,Viceroy Abascal confirmed that the churches of this city emitted an “intolerable stench, all of which contributed to a pestilential spring which made the place very unhealthy.” One suitably enlightened reader of the limeño periodical Minerva Peruana (1805–1810) complained to his fellow citizens: “How long will we go on infesting the air we breathe, profaning the august majesty of our temples,” surrounding the altar of God “with the sad remains of our bodily corruption and misery?” He also wondered whether it was not a vain superstition born of false belief to burn “sacred incense” over a “stinking pile of corpses.” Does this not sully the purity of Christ’s sacrifice on the altar?1 The underlying problem was cosmological, as Carlos Eire suggests in his discussion of Padre Juan de Talavera Salazar’s will, in that God made Himself physically present in the sacrament through the ritual of the Eucharist. Traditional baroque Lima resisted the modernizing changes of the French Enlightenment precisely because they went against their religious beliefs about the afterlife. The proximity of the buried corpses to the altar encouraged the intercession of the saints and allowed the souls of the dead to benefit from the redemptive effects of the Eucharist, Masses prayed and sung for the dead, plenary indulgences, and the prayers of the faithful. According to the Twenty-­ Fifth Session of the Council of Trent, saints, angels, and humans combined to form the “mystical body” of Jesus Christ, the spiritual head of all. And from within this transcendent unity, through his sacrifices and prayers, people might summon supernatural favors to relieve suffering and help the souls in purgatory. The latter had not died in the state of mortal sin and thus needed only to be cleansed of their sins before entering heaven. Purgatory was an intermediate place between heaven and hell, where the newest “New Christians”—in the New World, predominantly indigenous peoples—came to reside afterdeath, deemed undeserving either of direct entrance into heaven or of hell’s eternal damnation. In the iconography of the Last Things in viceregal art of New Spain and Peru, the “Indian” is commonly represented in purgatory, ready to enter heaven. The Inca king, however, is sometimes represented as resurrected and being led to the glory of heaven. Indigenous painters also employed representations of the afterlife as part of a religious and political discourse, as a revindication of their people. In some early Andean images, the Spanish conquistador was even depicted as the ultimate emblem of Lucifer’s arrogance and greed. Thinking most broadly, this Christian vision of the afterlife derives from the baroque notion of physical reality as desengaño (illusion) or as the earthly theater of ephemeral vanities, which justified countless kinds of bodily mortification to strengthen the spirit. The novohispano Jesuit Juan Antonio Pérez Espinoza (1676–1747) slept in leather sheets inside a coffin, fasted frequently, and wore dark green glasses so that he might see the world darkly.2 The same practice of converting black crystal into glasses was used by Jesuits in Cusco, Peru, during the procession of the Corpus Christi, as documented by an anonymous painting in the famous series from the late seventeenth century. Physical eyes were “mortified”during periods ofabstinence to direct the gaze inward and to keep sin and death from entering the house of the body through the windows of the eyes. One Franciscan friar burned his arm with a lighted candle in mid-­ sermon in order to demonstrate to parishioners something of the pain suffered by the damned in hell and purgatory. The baroque conception of the afterlife made itself felt across political, religious, and social realms of life in the Spanish American viceroyalties. In his treatise on political emblems (1653) the Spanish jurist and humanist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira (1575–1655) represented God the Father upon a cloud, crowned with a papal tiara, carrying a scepter and holding the cosmos with both...

Share