“Witches, Idolaters and Franciscans: An American Translation of European Radical Demonology...

Witches, Idolaters, and Franciscans: An American Translation of European Radical Demonology(Logroño, 1529–Hueytlalpan, 1553)Author(s): Fabián Alejandro CampagneSource: History of Religions, Vol. 44, No. 1 (August 2004), pp. 1-35Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426653 .

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Fabián Alejandro Campagne

W I T C H E S , I D OLAT E RS , A N D F R A NC I S C A NS : A N A M E R IC A N T R A NS -LATIO N O F EU ROPE A N R A DIC A L DE MO NOLO G Y ( LO GRO Ñ O , 1 5 2 9 –H U E Y TLA L PA N , 1 5 5 3 )

ç

2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2004/4401-0001$10.00

i. from logroño to hueytlalpan

Hueytlalpan, 1553: It has been fourteen years since Fray Andrés de Olmosbegan his residence in the heart of the Totonacan region, fifty leaguesaway from Mexico. The friar has resumed an intense rhythm of intellec-tual production, which, along with his heroic efforts as a preacher, wouldtransform him into one of the pillars of the seraphic utopia in

NuevaEspaña.

In 1547, he finishes his

Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana,

the first grammar to deal with Nahuatl. At the beginning of 1552, hefinishes his

Siete sermones principales sobre los siete pecados capi-tales.

And in 1553, he writes in Nahuatl his

Tratado he hechicerías ysortilegios.

1

This

Tratado de hechicerías

is a special work for two reasons. First, itis considered the first text written in Mexico devoted strictly to the issueof demonology.

2

Second, instead of creating an original treatise, Olmosdevoted himself to translating and adapting a manual published in Spain

1

Georges Baudot,

Utopía e historia en México: Los primeros cronistas de la civilizaciónmexicana (1520–1569)

(Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1983), pp. 146–50.

2

Fernando Cervantes,

The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in NewSpain

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 25.

I would like to record my profound debt to José Emilio Burucúa for his inspiration in theearly days of my research projects.



Witches, Idolaters, Franciscans

2

many years before by another franciscan friar: Martín de Castañega’s

Tra-tado de las superticiones y hechizerias

(Logroño, 1529).

3

The intellectual strategy of Olmos is a clear exception in the history ofevangelization in the New World. The authors of catechisms, confessors’manuals, and homiletic collections could seldom find European workssuitable for providing an explicit matrix for their American manuals. Theuncompromising novelty of the continent demanded original creations.

4

Therefore, the effort carried out by Olmos provides the historian with therare privilege to observe, in an almost experimental way, the tensions towhich the European discourses were subjected by the American reality:the alterations they needed, the concessions they required, or the omis-sions they demanded.

The two works have never been compared in a systematic and exhaus-tive way.

5

In fact, in the few cases in which they are considered together,specialists tend to believe that Olmos’s treatise follows Castañega’soriginal without substantial changes.

6

However, the comparative analysisof both texts demonstrates the opposite thesis: in his effort to adapt andtranslate, Olmos introduced profound alterations in the original text. His

Tratado de hechicerías

is a radically new work. Upon reading his Span-ish source, it becomes clear that fray Andrés developed his own discourse,which strikingly diverges from the radical European demonology that atfirst seemed to have inspired him.

ii. fray martín, fray andrés

Fray Martín de Castañega is definitely a mysterious person. His namewould have been forgotten but for his

Tratado de las supersticiones yhechizerias,

whose title page and preface provide most of his known bio-graphical facts. Strangely enough, none of the histories edited by theFranciscan order in the sixteenth and seventeenth century provide dataabout him. Fray Pedro de Salazar, who in 1612 in Madrid published

Coronica y historia de la fundación y progreso de la provincia de Castillade la Orden de San Francisco,

does not mention Castañega at all.

7

3

The complete title as it appears on the title page is

Tratado muy sotil y bien fundodo d[e]las supersticiones y hechizerias y vanos conjuros y abusiones: Y otras cosas al casp to-ca[n]tes y de la possibilidad y remedio dellas.

4

Martine Azoulai,

Les péchés du Nouveau Monde: Les manuels pour la confession desIndiens, XVIe–XVIIe siècle

(Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), p. 43.

5

The exception is Daniel Mosquera, who limits his comparison to the discursive and rhe-torical aspects of both texts. See Daniel O. Mosquera, “Motolinía, Olmos and the Stagingof the Devil in Sixteenth-Century New Spain” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1998),pp. 183–93.

6

See Baudot,

Utopía e historia,

pp. 133, 243–44, 246; Cervantes, p. 25.

7

Agustín G. de Amezúa, “Prólogo,” in

Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías delR. P. Fray Martín de Castañega,

ed. Agustín G. de Amezúa (Madrid: Sociedad de BibliófilosEspañoles, 1946), p. viii.



History of Religions

3

We know, nevertheless, that this Franciscan spent most of his life inBurgos and in the Basque country. In 1516, he was released by Leo Xfrom an inquisitorial prison where he had been confined because of hispublic defense of a member of the order condemned by the Holy Office.In 1531, Castañega appeared as

guardián

of the

Convento de Santa Maríade Jesús,

in Navarrete; twenty-four years later, we find him as

guardián

of the monastery of Aránzazu, in Guipúzcoa.

8

Most of Castañega’s fame results from the publication of his manualone year before Pedro Ciruelo’s

Reprobacion de las supersticiones yhechizerias

(Alcalá de Henares, 1530), the most famous treatise of theSpanish literature of superstition.

9

This circumstance suffices to causemodern scholars always to quote both works together. However, the for-tune of both

tratados de las supersticiones

was quite different: while the

Reprobacion

by Ciruelo had a remarkable editorial success, the

Tratado

by Castañega was not reprinted until the middle of the twentieth cen-tury.

10

Whereas at present there are many samples of Ciruelo’s work,Castañega’s book is considered by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo to be“extremely rare.”

11

Martín de Castañega’s treatise was commissioned by don Alonso deCastilla, bishop of

Calahorra y la Calzada,

who paid for the edition outof his own pocket. In the

Provisión,

at the beginning of the book, the prel-ate described the Franciscan as a “theologian and philosopher of greatsubtlety, and a preacher of the Holy Office assigned by His Majesty.”

12

Inhis inquisitorial position, Castañega must have been involved in the witch-craft enquiries that affected Navarra and the Basque Country between1525 and 1527. In his book, Castañega assigns himself the role of eye-witness to the events. There is no doubt that the

Tratado de las super-sticiones

has a direct relationship with these early persecutions in thefarthest north of the country. The events were mostly confined to the pro-ceedings initiated by the

licenciado

Balanza, magistrate of the

Consejo

8

For biographical information on Castañega, see

Tratado de las supersticiones y he-chicerías de Fray Martín de Castañega,

ed. Juan Roberto Muro Abad (Logroño: Instituto deEstudios Riojanos, 1994).

9

Up to now there are still discussions about the date of the first edition of Ciruelo’s

Rep-robación.

See Verónica Mateo Ripoll, “Sobre una edición ignota de la

Reprobación de su-persticiones

del maestro Ciruelo,”

Dynamis

22 (2002): 437–59.

10

The third modern edition, besides those carried out by the

Sociedad de Bibliófilos Es-pañoles

and the

Instituto de Estudios Riojanos,

is Fray Martín de Castañega,

Tratado de lassupersticiones y hechicerías,

ed. Fabián Alejandro Campagne (Buenos Aires: Universidadde Buenos Aires, 1997). I use this edition for quotations throughout this article.

11

Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo,

Historia de los heterodoxos españoles

(Buenos Aires:Emecé, 1945), p. 389.

12

Castañega, p. 12: “muy artizado teólogo y filósofo, y predicador para el dicho SantoOficio por su majestad señalado.”



Witches, Idolaters, Franciscans

4

Real de Navarra.

This witch hunt may have produced at least fifty exe-cutions and can be considered the major prosecution prior to the well-known events of Zugarramurdi.

13

The novelty of the crimes attributed towitches produced perplexity among Spanish inquisitors and theologians.One of the consequences of these northern trials was the meeting of a

juntade notables

in Granada to advise the

Consejo Supremo de la Inquisición

about the reality of the events attributed to the

bruxas,

especially thenocturnal flight.

14

As we will see later, these witchcraft prosecutions arethe only possible contact in the biographies of our two Franciscans.

Paradoxically, Fray Andrés de Olmos, polyglot and an outstanding lin-guist, is a better-known figure. Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta points out hisimportance as a chronicler, when he describes him as “the fountain fromwhich all streams on this matter flow.”

15

Olmos must have been born nearOña, not far from Burgos, around 1480. He joined the Franciscan orderin Valladolid. In 1527, Fray Juan de Zumárraga—future first bishop ofMexico—chose him as his assistant during a witchcraft inquiry in Vis-caya.

16

As a consequence, Castañega and Olmos found themselves in-volved in the same northern witch hunt, in Navarra and in the BasqueCountry, respectively. This coincidence has led to the speculation of apossible encounter between the friars.

17

This meeting that could explainwhy Olmos chose Castañega’s

Tratado—

a minor text, practically ignoredby the theologians of the time—as the source of inspiration for his ownbook.

18

However, this supposed meeting has never been actually con-firmed. Nevertheless, Fray Andrés’s career in Castle would be brief:when Zumárraga moved to New Spain, he took Olmos with him. On De-cember 6, 1528, the Franciscan arrived in Mexico-Tenochtitlán. In his re-maining forty years he never returned to Spain.

13

See Florencio Idoate,

La Brujería aen Navarra y sus documentos

(Pamplona: Insti-tución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), pp. 23–59; William Monter, La otra Inquisición: La In-quisición en la Corona de Aragón, Navarra, el País Vasco y Sicilia (Barcelona: Crítica, 1992),pp. 306–10.

14 Henry Kamen, La Inquisición Española (Barcelona: Crítica, 1988), pp. 275–77; IñakiReguera, La Inquisición Española en el País Vasco (San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1983), pp. 197–98; Henry Charles Lea, Historia de la Inquisición Española, 3 vols. (Madrid: FundaciónUniversitaria Española, 1983), 3:605–6.

15 Quoted by Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 128: “fuente de donde todos losarroyos que de esta materia han tratado, emanaban.”

16 Julio Caro Baroja, Brujería Vasca (San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1985), pp. 52–53; Baudot,Utopía e historia, p. 133.

17 Georges Baudot, “Introducción,” in Fray Andrés de Olmos, Tratado de hechicerias ysortilegios, ed. Georges Baudot (México: UNAM, 1990), p. x.

18 Scholars record only two quotations from Castañega’s treatise throughout the sixteenthcentury. One of these is the one by Fray Andrés de Olmos. See Lu Ann Homza, ReligiousAuthority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),p. 183.



History of Religions 5

The list of positions held by Andrés de Olmos in the Mexican plateauis long, but he always managed to combine preaching with intellectualproduction, which he conceived as an instrument of evangelization. By1553, Olmos was finishing a long period of residence in Hueytlalpan. Inthe prologue of the Tratado de hechicerías he acknowledged his weari-ness and contemplated death: “my end is near.”19 He could not have beenmore wrong. Between 1554 and 1568 he would carry out the titanic taskof evangelizing the inhospitable Huasteca. In spite of his age he traveledthrough the whole region, where he made contact with chichimecangroups, some of whose chiefs accepted baptism. When they raised up inarms in 1568, Olmos—at about ninety years of age—demanded to be takento the scene of the rebellion, where he preached his message for the lasttime. Suffering asthma and dermatological illnesses, he died in Tampicoon October 8 of the same year.20

iii. separation, translation, and conversion

We are going back now to the moment when the intellectual biographiesof Fray Martín and Fray Andrés meet, when Olmos chose Castañega’sforgotten Tratado de las supersticiones as the inspiration for his own Tra-tado de hechicerías. Olmos decided then to undertake a fascinating exer-cise of translation between two unique and radically different civilizations.

During the last three millennia b.c.e., religion appears to have func-tioned as an important promoter of intercultural translatability. The civi-lizations from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East compared deitiesbeginning with the definition of their cosmic manifestations. Theologicalonomasiology, which starts from the referent and asks for the correspon-dent word, displaced theological semasiology, which starts from the wordand asks for its correspondent meaning. The first strategy tries to per-ceive the way in which a certain semantic unit is expressed in differentlanguages, thus resulting in an intrinsically cross-cultural and interlinguis-tic project of translation. Starting from the conviction that other peoplesworshipped the same gods, religion constituted a foundation for toler-ance, a neutralizing principle of the effects of the “pseudo-speciation,” aterm coined to describe the formation of artificial subgroups within thesame biological species.21

19 The quotations I reproduce in notes are taken from Baudot’s Spanish version of theoriginal Nahuatl text. The English translations in the main body of the article are my trans-lations from the Spanish. p. 4: “yo me voy llegando al fin.”

20 Baudot, Utopía e historia, pp. 158–59.21 Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translability,” in

The Translability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Stanford Budick andWolfgang Iser (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 25–27.



Witches, Idolaters, Franciscans6

But conditions changed radically in those places where a hegemonicculture threatened to absorb an ethnically different minority group. In thesecontexts, much like an immune reaction, a deliberate counter-identity isgenerated to oppose the dominant system, a process that may be charac-terized as second-degree or counter-distinctive pseudo-speciation. It isunder these typical conditions of resistance that religions of a new kindappear, religions which defy the efforts of translation, which can only bejoined through conversion, and which are abandoned through apostasy.Judaism is the paradigmatic model for religions of second degree.22 Themost clear sign that we are in presence of a second-degree religion is thephenomenon of conversion. As long as the possibility of interculturaltranslation exists, there will be no need for conversion. A demand of thiskind will only arise when a certain religion claims the monopoly of thesupreme truth, nullifying any possibility of translation. Cosmotheisticdeities, so long as they embody the universe in its totality, possess nameswith rich signifiers. On the contrary, the God of Israel represents the oppo-site extreme. When He says “I am who I am,” he denies any external ref-erent, every tertius comparationis, and thus any possibility of translation.23

These rhetorical strategies of nondialogue reveal that the capacity ofcommunication with the other not only reflects the linguistic dimensionsof different paradigms but also the conscious strategies of the partici-pants in the dialogue.24 The translation strategies of Christian preachersin the New World could not escape from these conscious limitations. Theincommensurability willingly constructed by Christianity and its agentsmade impossible the complete translation of the conquerors’ culture intothat of the dominated people. But it did not prevent preachers from learn-ing the languages of the latter.25 Translation then became the most appro-

22 Ibid., p. 29.23 Ibid., p. 32.24 Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 215–16.25 In its most enlightened periods, the Church had the conviction that the best way to per-

suade the Jews of their mistake was to master their language and sacred books. Transcendingmere humanistic erudition, trilingual colleges were founded with the evangelic purpose ofproviding the necessary techniques to preach Christianity in a more efficient way (Colin P.Thompson, La lucha de las lenguas: Fray Luis de León y el siglo de oro en España [Sala-manca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1995], p. 148). In America, the Franciscans fanatically de-fended the preaching of Christianity in the local languages, trying to show themselves asapostles of an autonomous religion rather than agents of a colonial power. Of 109 workswritten in indigenous languages in America during the sixteenth century, minor friars wroteeighty. The first generations of Franciscans spread Nahuatl even in places in which it was notspoken. In fact, the friars were responsible for the survival of classical Nahuatl, which thenatives did not use. But mendicant preachers also used many other languages. In the specificcase of catechisms, we can find texts in Tarascan, Zapotecan, Otomí, Guastecan, Guatemal-tecan, Chichimecan, Chontal, Mixtecan, Tzotzil, Quichua, Aymará, and Timucuan, amongmany others (Luis Resines Llorente, Catecismos Americanos del siglo XVI [Salamanca: Juntade Castilla y León, 1992], p. 33).




priate tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established by theconquest itself.26

With regard to the translation of Christian cosmology into native lan-guages, preachers had to adopt one of two possible strategies. They couldkeep European words without translating them, preserving theologicalaccuracy but risking a lower level of comprehension, fixing Christiannotions in the indigenous mind as something perpetually strange. Alter-natively, they could attempt the translation of some words, looking forequivalences in the native languages or expressing the notions throughparaphrasing, at the risk of Amerindian words retaining part of their an-cient pre-Christian meaning.27

The Franciscans chose a halfway path. For the deity and those termsassociated with his image, they resorted to a strategy close to that oftheological semasiology, blocking any possible translation, as in a typi-cal second-degree religion. For God’s opponent, Satan, they resorted totheological onomasiology, matching the pagan gods with the evil spirits,using Amerindian terms to describe the devil and his actions. This doublestrategy, which postulated simultaneously commensurability and incom-mensurability between both rival cosmologies, exemplifies how the devil’ssymbolism served to bridge the gulf between European and Amerindiancultures in New Spain.28 But the unyielding opposition between God andSatan in Christian cosmology generated a destructive conclusion for lo-cal religions: if the gods of one were the devils of the other, the trans-latability of the meanings of the indigenous world would not generate anidentification with the other, but rather a violent desire to destroy everyexpression of paganism in America, the last terrestrial bulwark of Luci-fer. The native spirits were thus incorporated into the événement sans finof Christian cosmology, turned into an aspect of the prehistory of Chris-tianity.29 God was the great absentee in the indigenous past, and the devilits exclusive protagonist.

Although consistent with the political objectives of material and spiri-tual colonization of the New World, this twofold strategy produced un-expected results. The specific meaning of any of the terms within a totalstructure is dependent on the total set of relationships; it is not a result oftheir meaning as isolates, disconnected from other isolates. Things are

26 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledgesand Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 3.

27 Robert Ricard, La conquista espiritual de México: Ensayo sobre el apostolado y losmétodos misioneros de las órdenes mendicantes en la Nueva España de 1523–24 a 1572(México: Editorial JUS, 1947), p. 144; Resines Llorente, p. 33.

28 Mosquera (n. 5 above), p. 9.29 I use this notion of événement sans fin in the sense used by Alain Boureau in L’événe-

ment sans fin: Récit et christianisme au Moyen Âge (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993).




relationships, and these relationships are ontological rather than logical.30

Thus, what we mean by “swan” depends on what we mean by “duck.”How can we translate our “swan” into a language of a culture whose uni-verse does not contain ducks?31 The center of gravity and the total designof a culture may give a society a distinctiveness, a uniqueness as a spe-cial crystallization of components.32 This is why the evangelizers’ conceitthat a common denominator had been found in the concept of the devilallowed a paradoxical proximity between the two cultural universes todevelop, inevitably producing serious categorical errors.

The Nahuas and the Spanish were able to operate for centuries basedon false but functional presumptions, pretending that analogous conceptsfrom the other culture were essentially identical to their own, a phenom-enon that allowed the preservation of the indigenous structures for a longperiod of time. These multiple distortions are better perceived if we takeinto consideration the essential irreducibility that characterizes both cos-mologies: Christian duality and Nahua monism. In the indigenous cosmos,order and chaos were complementary aspects of a singular reality. Thenotion of a totally good god was an absurdity in mesoamerican thought.Such a being would have lacked the essential power to disrupt in orderto create. Likewise, a totally evil spirit would have lacked the power tocreate, which in turn would enable it to disrupt.33 But the Franciscanssubsumed the oppositions that expressed a monist cosmogonical image(center-periphery, purity-pollution, health-illness, or abstinence-excess)in order to use them to reflect their own binary oppositions.34 The mis-sionaries also tried to introduce the notion of Trinity, a concept based ona phenomenal paradox, in cultures that completely lacked such a logicalcategory. They even wrote supposed Amerindian grammars that, becausethey were made to conform to the model of classical grammars, precludedthe missionaries from recognizing that in many local languages abstrac-tions had a verbal rather than a nominal form.35 They thought that theChristian hell could be assimilated to the nahua mictlan, without realiz-ing that this was a cold northern place where every individual would goafter death anyway.36 In this subjugation of content to form, it is clear

30 Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 137.

31 Biagioli, p. 233.32 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 127.33 Cervantes (n. 2 above), p. 42.34 Louise Marie Burkhart, “The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Six-

teenth-Century Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), pp. 34–41.35 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of

Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 182, 184.36 Christian Duverger, La conversion des Indiens de Nouvelle Espagne (Paris: Seuil, 1987),

p. 189; Burkhart, p. 55.




that the native structures managed to impose themselves on the compo-nents of the Christian ideology. In the new Spanish scenario, the logicalstructure of the universe remained Nahua, and the Christian elementswere transformed to function within it.37

When in 1553 Fray Andrés de Olmos decided to base his Tratado dehechicerías on Castañega’s own Tratado de las supersticiones, he wasready to begin an impossible task, an adventure that was in itself an oxy-moron: the translation of a pair of opposites, God and Satan, the firstone irreducible to any previous Amerindian experience, and the secondone with clear analogies between himself and the deities of the nahuacosmology.

iv. a new title, a new structure, and a new treatise

It is inaccurate to claim that Olmos’s work simply plagiarized Casta-ñega’s Tratado.38 The mere formal alterations with respect to the Tratadode las supersticiones, leaving aside the substantial theological differencesor the translation into Nahuatl itself, transform Fray Martín’s manual intoa radical new text. In the next section, I will try to show the intrinsic re-lations between formal changes and changes in content, but first I willoutline the formal alterations introduced by the American preacher intoCastañega’s original.

a) In the first place, there is a very important fact: the change in title.Castañega’s Tratado de las supersticiones y hechizerias becomes Ol-mos’s Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios.

b) Second, Olmos makes a suggestive cut from Castañega’s original.Out of the twenty-four chapters of the Tratado de las supersticiones,Fray Andrés only keeps the first eleven. Far from signifying a simplerecognition of the irrelevance of the description of the Europeansuperstitions for the new American conversos, this mutilation is partof a conscious strategy that destroys the original sense of Casta-ñega’s treatise.

c) Between chapters 2 and 3 of his Tratado de hechicerías, Olmos inter-polates the only completely new chapter, which is absent from Cas-tañega’s Tratado. Curiously enough, Fray Andrés avoids enumeratingcorrelatively the interpolated chapter, which has then no number.

d ) The prologue from the original is replaced by a new one, the onlyfragment in Olmos’s treatise wholly written in Spanish.

37 Burkhart, p. 235; James Lockhart, “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Cul-ture,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encountersbetween European and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 219, 228–29.

38 Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 243.




e) The brief original preface—“El autor al discreto lector”—is replacedby an “Exortación al indiano lector,” in this case written in Nahuatl.

f ) Apart from the narrations employed by Castañega in his Tratado, someof them glossed by Fray Andrés, the American preacher adds somenew exempla, extracted from the American context, especially in theinterpolated chapter and in chapter 4.

The totality of these formal changes transforms the Tratado de hechi-cerías into something more than a lineal adaptation of the Tratado de lassupersticiones. Olmos constructs an original work, whose radical alter-ations I will analyze in the following section.

v. from superstition to idolatry: the subject of

discourse

The subjects of Castañega’s and Olmos’s particular discourses radicallydiffer from each other. The difference transcends the originality of thespatial and temporal contexts as well as the simple divergence betweenthe superstitions of the European peasantry and the idolatry of AmericanIndians. Both Franciscans attempted the construction of complex fictionalnarrations and the creation of imaginary identities functional to the groupsthey represented: the high theological culture, on the one hand, and themissionary Franciscan enterprise, on the other. Castañega and Olmosexemplify in this way a central aspect of the Renaissance ethos, the in-creasing self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as amanipulable process.39 Fray Martín’s and Fray Andrés’s treatises can beconsidered as clear expressions of symbolic power par excellence, thatis, the capacity to create groups, both existent groups that have to be con-secrated and nonexistent groups that have to be established.40 To accom-plish this, both friars possessed the necessary symbolic capital to imposeon other spirits a vision of social divisions derived from the social author-ity acquired in previous struggles, and from the support of establishedinstitutions (the Holy Office, the Spanish episcopate, and the mendicantorders).

Neither of the Franciscans could escape the intrinsic logic that governsthe functioning of cultures, which seem unable to exist as self-sufficiententities. Cultures must juxtapose themselves against each other to ascer-tain what makes them unique and different.41 People know who they are

39 Eva Kushner, “The Emergence of the Paradoxical Self,” in Imagining Culture: Essays inEarly Modern History and Literature, ed. Jonathan Harta (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 45;Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 2.

40 Pierre Bourdieu, “Espacio social y poder simbólico,” in his Cosas dichas (Barcelona:Gedisa, 1993), p. 140.

41 Wolfgang Iser, “Coda to the Discussion,” in Budick and Iser, eds. (n. 21 above), p. 299.




only when they know who they are not, and frequently, only when theyknow who they are against. It is easier to love what we are if we are in-duced to abhor what we are not.42 As a consequence of this, borders andfrontiers are not so much the limits, but the nucleus of cultures, in thesame way that the beach upholds the concept of island.43 When a culturedefines itself as the center of the world, it requires the periphery that sur-rounds it as part of its own self-definition: it is the sum of the interior andthe exterior that constructs the whole identity, the totality outside of whichnothing exists.44 Thus, otherness is independent from any real knowledgeof others: if they did not exist, then cultures would need to invent them.45

In this way, to displace identities is typical of human cultures, replacingreal origins with fictional ones.46 Martín de Castañega and Andrés de Ol-mos are a perfect example of the process of constructing fictional groupsand opposed identities.

castañega’s subject of discourse: superstitious men and

the diocesan clergy

Martín de Castañega organizes his discourse around two sets of opposedidentities, one of them explicit and the other implicit. In regard to thefirst one, Fray Martín develops to an extreme the well-known image ofthe two churches, the Catholic against the counter-satanic church.47 Eachchapter of the Tratado is internally organized with this ontological oppo-sition. The counter-church includes, at the same time, those who haveestablished explicit and implicit pacts with the devil. This second-degreeopposition organizes the whole structure of the book: the first elevenchapters describe those who have declared themselves to be worshippersof the devil; the other thirteen chapters describe those who are part of thediabolic church without even knowing it.

In search of a paradigmatic image to represent the counter-satanicchurch, Castañega resorts to the stereotype of the witches’ Sabbath. Theportrayal of a congregation of those who are considered enemies of the

42 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order(New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996). I quote the Spanish edition: El choque de las civiliza-ciones y la reconfiguración del orden mundial (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1997), pp. 20–22.

43 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York:Routledge, 1993), p. 150; Greg Denning, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land:Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), pp. 33–34.

44 Mignolo (n. 26 above), pp. 115, 338.45 See Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European

Otherness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 4, 10, 204.46 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writ-

ing and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 196.47 On the demonology attachment for dual classifications, see Stuart Clark, Thinking

with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997),chaps. 3–6.




divinity, and who are depicted gathered around a fictional ritual, allowedtheologians to integrate particular atrocities into the scene of a powerfulsubversive organization intrinsically dedicated to evil.48 This is why animage that transcended the limits of a simple metaphor was useful andfunctional for a strategy of demonization of simple superstitions (Cas-tañega) and of pagan ritual practices (Olmos). But is Castañega’s manuala demonological treatise similar to those composed by Jean Bodin, HenriBoguet, Pierre de Lancre, Heinrich Institoris, Martín Del Río, and Fran-cesco Maria Guazzo, which have the aim of hunting witches and un-masking their diabolical conspiracy?49 The answer is certainly no. Inthe title itself, the Franciscan presents his book as a treatise of reproba-ción de supersticiones. La Rioja and the bishopric of Calahorra y laCalzada—consignee of the Tratado—were never the scenario of massivepersecutions of witches, not even when the trials in the neighboring re-gions multiplied in the middle of the 1520s. Castañega served the HolyOffice during the witchcraft prosecutions in Navarra and the BasqueCountry. Perhaps this explains why he resorted to the image of the noc-turnal meetings of the bruxas. Yet, there is also no doubt about the wor-ries of the bishop Alonso de Castilla: his concern was the superstitionsscattered all around his dioceses. The prelate and the friar’s true objec-tives were not the witches but the most banal superstitions that impreg-nated the everyday life of the christianos viejos.

Castañega’s Tratado is nothing but a didactic display of the Augustin-ian model of superstition.50 Superstitions are condemned since, as vainpractices and beliefs, they cannot produce the effects they preach, par-ticularly from the perspective of the two orders of legitimate causalitiesin the traditional Christian cosmos: the natural and supernatural orders.When the homo superstitious practiced vain rituals, who were expectedto produce the desired effects if these could not be produced throughnatural forces, and if those practices were not instituted by God or theChurch?They must appeal to a third order of causalities that, although il-legitimate, was capable of producing real effects: the preternatural order,

48 See David Frankfurter, “Ritual as Accusation and Atrocity: Satanic Ritual Abuse, GnosticLibertinism, and Primal Murders,” History of Religions 40 (2001): 353, 355, 363.

49 For a synthesis of the traditional demonological positions, see Sidney Anglo, ed., TheDamned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1977); Sophie Houdard, Les sciences du diable: Quatre discours sur la sorcellerie (Paris:Cerf, 1992); Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp, eds.,L’imaginaire du sabbat: Édition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440 c.) (Lau-sanne: Université de Lausanne, 1999); Armando Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Re-naissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

50 See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, Homo Catholicus, Homo superstitiosus: El discursoantisupersticioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII (Madrid: Miño y Dávila, 2002),pp. 53–77.




the actions of angels and demons.51 Since it was believed the formerwere alien to any deed contrary to the divine design, the evil spirits wereundoubtedly the agents expected to produce the desired effects. Themise-en-scène of any superstitious practice—the words, the gestures, thematerials, and the numerical patterns involved—should then be consid-ered conventional signs or an established pact between those evil spiritsand the homines superstitiosi.52

As a matter of fact, vain practices were not based on a system ofcauses but on a system of signs, possessing not a causal but a semanticfunction. For this reason, within the framework of this Christian modelof superstition—unlike other earlier and later ones—it was expected thatpractices that are intrinsically vanae could indeed produce real effects.These are not achieved through natural or supernatural virtue but throughthe actions of the devil, who quickly responds to produce effects stipu-lated beforehand whenever he observes the agreed-upon signs (the imagesand characters used in the vain rituals). Thomas Aquinas improved themodel when he developed the notion of the implicit pact, by means ofwhich the performance of any vain ritual always opened a door to thedevil’s intervention, even when the practitioner did not conjure its pres-ence, did not sign pacts, or did not take part in sacrilegious nocturnalassemblies.53

Martín de Castañega reproduced this Christian model of superstition inhis Tratado. The title itself induces us to consider that it is not the firsteleven chapters, but the latter thirteen, that constitute the core of thework. These describe the practices and beliefs that actually existed in Span-ish territory: saludadores (healer of rabies), mal de ojo (evil eye), nóminas(written spells), ensalmos (oral spells), excomulgadores de langostas (ex-communication of locusts), conjuros de tormentas (cloud conjuring), andso on.54 When Castañega interposes the first eleven chapters—that de-scribe the counter-church, under the specific form of the Sabbath—withthe remaining thirteen—that describe the actually existent vain practices—he tries to strengthen the Augustinian-Thomist idea that between the formerand the latter there is not a qualitative difference, but only one of degree.The members of the diabolical church are those who worship the devil

51 See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Witchcraft and the Sense of the Impossible in EarlyModern Spain,” Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003): 33–39.

52 Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana II, 20, 30–31; II, 24, 36; II, 25, 37; and II, 29, 45.53 Campagne, Homo Catholicus, pp. 69–72.54 For a brief description of these practices, see Juan Francisco Blanco, Brujería y otros

oficios populares de la magia (Valladolid, Spain: Ámbito, 1992), pp. 105–30; 209–60; He-liodoro Cordente Martínez, Brujería y hechicería en el obispado de Cuenca (Cuenca; Dipu-tación Provincial, 1990), chaps. 8–17; María Tauasiet, Ponzoña en los ojos: Brujería ysuperstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2000),pp. 251–371.




through explicit pacts, as well as those who facilitate his work in theworld through tacit pacts. Superstition in this way becomes a litotes ofthe witches’ Sabbath, and this was precisely the feeling Castañega wantedto generate, a few years after the beginning of the first important witchhunt in Spanish territory.55 The theologian tried to show the existence ofa conductive thread among the superstitions, apparently simple and harm-less, and the hideous parodies of the Sabbath, which was an extremelyuseful relationship to disqualify the former.

Who, then, is the subject of Castañega’s discourse? We find the in-tended audience of the book in his second set of implicit opposed iden-tities. As was very common in the literature of superstition, Castañegabuilds a generic homo superstitiosus, which he identified with aged men,children, or women, images that evoke intellectual deficiencies. But fromreading the bishop’s Provisión we can deduce the real homines supersti-tiosi to whom Castañega’s manual is addressed: the clergy of the Cala-horra dioceses. The common priests were the first who should learn thesubtleties of the superstition matter before being able to eradicate the vainpractices and observances from the people. The bishop and the authorconceived the Tratado as an illustration for the parish priests, who werethemselves as far from the ideal homo catholicus as the average parish-ioners. This is why the prelate warns “all the priests” and “all the eccle-siasts from this bishopric to have the aforementioned treatises . . . ; bearingin mind that if they do not possess them and read them, they will be liableto be guilty of superstition, and they will be severely punished.”56 Cas-tañega reinforced don Alonso de Castilla’s admonitions: “[this book] tomy own understanding, is not only useful for the simpleminded to refrainthem from making errors and falling for diabolical deceit, even more, itis necessary to do away with the ignorance of many, that assuming them-selves as learned deny the ways of the superstitions and sorceries, thatare included, declared and persuaded here.”57

The high theological culture, represented in this case by an agent ofthe inquisitorial power and a bishop, presents itself as the only holder of thetruth, the custodian of the power to distinguish between orthopraxis and

55 See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “El otro-entre-nosotros: Funcioanlidad de la nociónde superstitio en el modelo hegemónico cristiano (España, siglos XVI y XVII),” BulletinHispanique 102 (2000): 52–53, 57.

56 Castañega (n. 10 above), p. 12: “mandamos a todos los curas, y rogamos y amonestamosa los otros eclesiásticos deste nuestro obispado, y a cada uno dellos, que todos tengan sendosde estos tratados . . . ; avisandolos que si por no lo tener y leer, en alguna culpa de super-stición cayeren, los mandaremos mas gravemente castigar” (my emphasis).

57 Ibid., p. 2: “[este libro] a mi ver, no solo aprovechara a los simples para apartarlos desus errores y engaños diabolicos, mas aun es necesario para quitar muchas ignorancias demuchos, que, presumiendo de letrados, niegan las maneras de las supersticiones y hechize-rias, que aquí se ponen, declaran y persuaden.”




heteropraxis, orthodoxia and heterodoxia. In opposition to the commu-nity of the “mayores de pueblo de Dios,” to the theologos and holy doc-tors, Castañega’s discourse designs two subordinated sets of “menoresdel pueblo de Dios”:58 in the first place, a generic homo superstitiosus,rhetorically identified with the ignorant common people; in the secondplace, a wider homo superstitiosus, made up of the low clergy and otherexponents of the lay learned culture, who had to be the first to learn thesuperstition matter to avoid becoming homines superstitiosi themselves.This construction of a double subject of discourse runs through the total-ity of the Spanish antisuperstitious literature, from the treatises of Lopede Barrientos, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the great summae of BenitoJerónimo Feijóo, in the eighteenth century.59 All of them outline a wideraudience for the antisuperstitious discourse that, depending on the case,can include the king, the secular magistrates, the jurists, the medicinedoctors, and the natural philosophers. That is to say, the audience was thetotality of learned Spanish culture, which in ideal terms was supposed tobe safe from the sin of superstitio, but which was strictly subordinate tothe community of theologians whenever they had to distinguish the illicitpractices from the licit.60

olmos’s subject of discourse: indians and idolaters

Even if he was inspired by Castañega’s work, the subject of discourse inAndrés de Olmos is radically different. Fray Andrés does not interpolatethe diocesan clergy, the true addressee of Castañega’s teaching. In hisTratado de hechicerías Olmos leaves aside all intermediation: it is In-dians to whom he addresses his discourse in a direct way.

Even though Andrés de Olmos was not one of the twelve Franciscanssent in 1524 to evangelize the recently conquered New Spain—he arrivedfour years later with Zumárraga—his contribution to the seraphic utopiacannot be exaggerated. During his residence in Spanish monasteries, hisidentification with the ideals of poverty turned him into an adherent ofthe Castilian branch of the Franciscan observantia. In fact, his first Mex-ican mission consisted of searching for Motolinía, the most outstandingof the twelve, who was believed to have disappeared in Guatemala.61

Scholars do not find in Olmos’s work the fanatical millenarian expecta-tions that characterized the first generations of Franciscans in the New

58 Both expressions belong to Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechi-zerias: Libro muy util y necesario a todos los buenos christianos (Medina del Campo, 1551),fol. 31v.

59 Campagne, Homo Catholicus, pp. 295–322.60 See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “ ‘Porque no les acaesca condepnar los inocentes e

absolver los reos’: La superstición como construcción ideológica en la España de los siglosXV al XVIII,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 75 (1998–99): 243–72.

61 Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 135.




World. Nevertheless, his tireless work as an itinerant preacher as well ashis enthusiasm for the ethnographic chronicles—in the case of the Fran-ciscans, indissolubly linked to the preparation of the millennium—clearlydemonstrate his de facto adherence to the providential mission that theorder had assigned to itself.

The origin of the Franciscan observance seems to go back to Giovannidella Valle, a disciple of Angelo Clareno, who joined the order in 1325.62

In Spain, the period of the reforms and observances begins around 1380.Then, after a failed first phase, centered on the eremitic ideal, a new re-form began in Extremadura, carried out successfully by Fray Juan deGuadalupe.63 In 1517, the movement is named Custodia de San Gabriel,and in 1519 it becomes independent from the observant province of San-tiago.64 Extreme poverty and missionary zeal—reinforced by the proxim-ity of the neighboring Granada—were the two facets that characterizedthis reformed observance. This Custodia de San Gabriel would becomethe trigger of the legendary expedition of the twelve. The FranciscansJean Glampion and Francisco de los Ángeles originally conceived theAmerican enterprise. At the beginning of the 1520s they obtained twopapal bulls with the authorization to preach freely in New Spain. ButGlampion soon died, and Francisco de los Angeles was elected in 1523as the general of the order. Forced to surrender his mission, he chose Mar-tín de Valencia for the task, at the time the superior of the Province ofSan Gabriel in Extremadura.65

We cannot understand the American vocation of the Franciscan ob-servantia without taking account of the penetration of the millenarianJoachimist ideals. In this discourse, the arrival of the Antichrist wouldput an end to the sixth age, and the eighth age would begin after the de-feat of Gog and Magog and the consummation of the Last Judgment.However, between these two ages, Joachim of Fiore predicted a seventhone, his version of the millenarian kingdom of the Apocalypse. This glo-rious era of the Holy Spirit would take place on earth, far away from theperpetual eternity of the eighth age outside history.66

Joachim also expected a radical conversion of the Church, transformedinto ecclesia contemplantium or spiritualis after the establishment of thethird status. To accomplish this transformation he expected the appear-ance of an order of spiritual men sent ad vesperam huius seculi, at the

62 Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachim-ism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 228.

63 Melquíades Andrés Martín, “La espiritualidad franciscana en España en tiempos de lasobservancias (1380–1517),” Studia Historica; Historia Moderna 6 (1988): 468–69, 474.

64 Baudot, Utopía e historia, p. 93.65 Duverger (n. 36 above), pp. 30–37.66 Reeves, p. 132.




end of the seventh age.67 The Franciscans were the first of a large lineageof religious orders that assigned themselves this role as fulfillment of theprophecy of the Calabrian monk. Thus, the Franciscan Petrus Joannis Olivitook directly from Joachim of Fiore the idea that, since the synagoguehas been founded by twelve patriarchs and the church by twelve apostles,“sic finaliter ecclesia . . . est per XII viros evangelicos propaganda . . .unde et Franciscus habuit XII filios et socios per quos et in quibus fuitfundatus et iniciatus ordo evangelicus” (so the Spiritual Church must bepropagated by twelve evangelical men . . . and that’s why St. Francis hadtwelve fellows and comrades, by whom and with whom the evangelicalorder was founded and initiated).68

The millenarian effervescence spread over Europe at the beginning ofthe sixteenth century.69 The Franciscan Order generated its own char-ismatic prophet, the Beato Amadeo de Portugal (1431–82), who in hisApocalipsis Nova announced the imminent arrival of an Angelic Pope.70

Cardinal Cisneros dreamed of a renovatio mundi in which, after a finalcrusade led by Spain, there would be unum ovile et unus pastor, and hehimself would celebrate Mass before the Holy Sepulchre.71 At the sametime, Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal promoted the schismaticcouncil of Pisa (1511–13), assembled to fulfill the prophecies of an im-minent angelic papacy.72 The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) tried toput an end to these millenarian expectations, condemning as reckless anyprediction about the imminent arrival of the Antichrist, even though fromthe twelve homilies of the council it is clear that the prelates seemed con-vinced that the Roman Church has entered the last phase of its history.73

One of the signs that the arrival of the millennium would be acceler-ated was the preaching of the Christian faith in the most remote confines

67 Ibid., p. 135.68 Ibid., p. 196.69 See Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton University Press, 1990); Miguel A. Granada, “Los hechos: Mirabilia y profecías en tornoa 1500. Su inserción en las expectativas de renovatio,” in Cosmología, religión y política enel Renacimiento (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988), pp. 33–46; Clark, Thinking with Demons(n. 47 above), chap. 22; Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movementin Florence, 1494–1545 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Jonathan B. Riess, The RenaissanceAntichrist: Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1995). For a period slightly previous to the former, it is very useful to consult Laura Acker-man Smoller, History, Prophecy and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly,1350–1420 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

70 See Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Ángeles apócrifos en la América virreinal (México: Fondode Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 55–59.

71 Reeves, p. 446.72 Aldo Landi, “Prophecy in the Time of the Council of Pisa (1511–1513),” in Prophetic

Rome in the High Renaissance Period, ed. Marjorie Reeves (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 58.73 Nelson H. Minnich, “Prophecy and the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517),” in Reeves,

ed., pp. 63–87.




of the world. The conversion of Jews, Tartars, Muslims, and the OrthodoxChurch would be a certain sign that the seventh age was already a realityon earth. The discovery of America was seen by the Franciscans from theProvincia de San Gabriel as a new providential event, the opportunity toaccelerate the Second Coming. When making his farewell to the twelve,Fray Francisco de los Ángeles reminded them of the importance of theirexpedition, “now when the day of the world is declining at the eleventhhour.”74 That is why Martín de Valencia, leader of the twelve, tried toembark toward China, soon after he had settled in Mexican territory.

But the American enterprise was also seen as the opportunity to builda new Christendom, a new Jerusalem, a fulfillment of the monastic idealof the Joachimist seventh age, in which all men would carry out a con-templative life, exercise the apostolic poverty, and enjoy angelic natures.75

After the failure of the old European Christendom, the friars would haveto start in America from the beginning, creating on the eve of the end ofthe world a terrestrial paradise, a sweet violence that would imprison theIndians in an endless childhood—an archetypal image of divine purity.76

In the Indians, the Franciscans believed they had found the ideal raw ma-terial to build this new church. The Indians lacked the desire to acquirematerial goods. They instinctively practiced the virtues of the Sermonon the Mount. The confessors did not find any deadly sins from which toabsolve them.77 The Indians seemed predestined to take the empty seatsthat the fallen angels had left in heaven.78 The new American church wouldhave poor bishops, and it would be so well “ordered in good Christen-dom” that, as fray Jerónimo de Mendieta said, “people would say nothingbut that it is all a monastery.”79 The Franciscan utopia expressed a pro-gression toward the future that begins with a return to the past,80 here apast that conflates a magnification of the Indian primitivism with a recon-struction of the pre-Constantine evangelic church. The Indians and thefriars would become the perfect protagonists of this new Christendom:the childlike Adamic innocence of the former and the seraphic androgyny

74 Adriano Prosperi, “New Heaven and New Earth: Prophecy and Propaganda at the Timeof the Discovery and Conquest of the Americas,” in Reeves, ed., p. 290.

75 John L. Phelan, El reino milenario de los franciscanos en el Nuevo Mundo (México:Universidad Autónoma de México, 1972), p. 27.

76 Azoulai (n. 4 above), p. 119.77 Phelan, pp. 90–92, 99.78 The image belongs to Francisco de Echave y Assu, author of the biography of Toribio

Alfonso de Mogrovejo edited in 1688. Compare Mujica Pinilla, p. 231.79 Quoted by Phelan, p. 103.80 See Michael David Bailey, “Heresy, Witchcraft and Reform: Johannes Nider and the Re-

ligious World of the Late Middle Ages” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1998), pp. 85–87. This thesis has just been released as a book: Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy andReform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).




of the latter were themselves paradoxical images that expressed the be-ginning of the end of history.81 The fact that the Indian myths themselvesexpressed with conviction the belief in the imminent destruction of theirworld was seen as another confirmation of European messianic ideas and asa justification for the extermination of an old dream by a frantic modernone.82 However, by the beginning of the 1550s, when Olmos wrote hisTratado de hechicerías, the seraphic utopia in New Spain seemed to bethreatened in various ways. On the one hand, the old Christendom, cor-rupted and decadent, was beginning to show an interest in clipping thewings of the new American Church. On the other hand, there were clearsigns that the evangelic virtues of the new Amerindian Christians con-cealed an unexpected attachment to their ancient idolatry.

At the beginning of the 1550s, this former concern was becomingapparent in the insistence of the metropolitan authorities that the Indiansbe taught Spanish, a mandate that attacked the seraphic utopia at itsheart. In fact, the crown sent a real cédula to all the provinciales of thethree mendicant orders with this new disposition.83 Olmos undoubtedlyperceived the signs of what would soon become a reality: an offensivedesigned to wrest the almost absolute control over Mexican Christendomthat up to that point had been exercised by the mendicant orders. The por-tentous landmarks would soon start appearing one after another: the firstMexican Council in 1555, the death of the viceroy Velasco in 1564, thecoming of the Jesuits, the formal settlement of the Inquisition, and the sup-pression of the apostolic privileges of the mendicant orders—all of theseoccurred in 1572.84

The second threat that disturbed the Franciscan utopia was the appear-ance of worrying signs regarding the sincerity of the Indian conversos,the matrix of the new Christendom that would accelerate the end of times.The first instance of this awareness was in November 1539, when Olmosprosecuted and punished the lord of Matlatlán, principal exponent of ashrewish expression of crypto-idolatry. Olmos allowed himself to be pes-simistic: “it is twenty years since the scriptures have been explained tothem; nevertheless, they persist in their idolatry as obstinate as before.”85

In that same month Bishop Zumárraga condemned to death a formerpupil of the Colegio de Tlatelolco, the lord of Texcoco.86 It was in this

81 See Mircea Eliade, “Mefistófeles y el andrógino o el misterio de la totalidad,” in Me-fistófeles y el Andrógino (Barcelona: Kairós, 2001), p. 119.

82 J. M. Le Clézio, Le rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1988),p. 208.

83 Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), pp. 104–5.84 Duverger (n. 36 above), p. 255.85 Quoted by Ricard (n. 27 above), p. 468: “veinte años ha que se les explica el Evangelio,

y sin embargo persisten tan obstinados como antes en su idolatría.”86 For a difference between both proceedings, see Duverger, pp. 231–34.




period that the Colegio, another of the pillars of the Franciscan utopia,failed to promote priestly ordinations among the Indians.87 But themassive failure of evangelization was still to be discovered. FranciscoMarroquin, bishop of Guatemala, found what he called a surprising andalarming “amount of idols and ritual objects in the south of Chiapas, dur-ing the visitas he carried out between 1551 and 1554.88 This promptedthe prelate to commission the Dominican Dimingo de Vico to write hisTratado de idolos, practically at the same time that Olmos was working onhis own Tratado de hechicerías in Hueytlalpan. One of the greatest dis-appointments would occur in 1562, when the Franciscans from Yucatándiscovered idolatrous practices at the heart of their missionary enterprise.The violence of the following repression revealed the magnitude of theirdisillusionment.89 The friars had to face the evidence: almost all the neo-phytes would have deserved inquisitorial proceedings.90

When cultures feel threatened they start telling stories.91 These arequasi-hysterical reactions, typical of situations of real or imagined formsof pressure that seem to question the security of their own identity andthat of others.92 The Franciscan utopia seemed to become, in the stressfulsituation beginning in the 1550s, an appropriate means to reinforce thepositive self-definitions and the differences that separated the new Amer-ican Christendom from other groups. The Tratado de hechicerías byAndrés de Olmos can then be conceived as an attempt to rescue the se-raphic project from its announced decadence. Its interlocutors are theIndians, without intermediaries: that is why the manual is written inNahuatl, to be read and to be directly preached in the language of thecountry. Olmos thus changed the genre of Castañega’s original: from atreatise for the formation of the diocesan clergy to an edifying sermonfor the Amerindians. This transformation can be clearly perceived in thenumerous markers of orality present throughout the text.93

87 Ricard, pp. 411, 414.88 Amos Megged, Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early Colonial

Mexico (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 66, 105.89 See Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–

1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 76–77.90 Jacques Lafaye, “La utopía mexicana: Ensayo de intrahistoria,” in Mesías, cruzadas,

utopías: El judeo-cristianismo en las sociedades ibéricas (México: Fondo de CulturaEconómica, 1984), p. 85.

91 Joshua Levinson, “Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late Antiq-uity,” Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000): 344.

92 K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, “The Black Hole of Culture: Japan, Radical Otherness, and the Dis-appearance of Difference (or, In Japan Everything Normal),” in Budick and Iser, eds. (n. 21above), p. 199.

93 For a full description of the characteristic of the sermon as a literary genre, see PedroM. Cátedra, Sermón, Sociedad y Literatura en la Edad Media: San Vicente Ferrer en Cas-tilla (1411–1412) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1994), chaps. 3, 5–6. Vicente Ferrer




To reinforce the identification of the Indians with the new millenarianchurch, Olmos compares their image with two other imaginary communi-ties negatively connoted, designing in this way an otherness that consistsof a relationship rather than a reality in itself.94 These corrupted imagi-nary communities were the old European Christendom and the Indian pa-gan ancestors.

In the “Exortación al Indiano lector,” one of the fragments that is notincluded in Castañega’s original, Olmos reaffirms the new identity de-rived from baptism, an excluding identity without return or ambiguities:“And now you have forgotten, when you were baptized you have hated,despised, abandoned the devil . . . so that God would help you if you donot have a twofold heart, if you do not have a twofold tongue. . . . Now ifit is true, with your open heart that you belong to God here, behind you. . . you will banish from your mind . . . the unjust diabolical world.” Ol-mos reminds the Indians of their perpetual dependent status under thetutelage of the friars, and of their specific role in the new American Chris-tendom: “If there is something you do not understand correctly, immedi-ately ask the [Franciscan] father.” And he adds: “that man who does not askthe father, maybe desires to do good things, but he may also have thoughtsthat will make him go astray. . . . That is why he will be very good, thehumble common man, following those who are above him.”95 The sera-phic utopia condemns the Indians to a paradoxical liminal period, that,far from being transitory, acquires a permanent character in which thesubjects find few or none of the attributes of their past or future status.96

The Indians were neither pagans nor old Christians; they would not evenbe new Christians should they lack the permanent assistance of the friars.

To strengthen the providential qualities of the new Christendom, Ol-mos compares its image to the corrupted description of the European OldChurch. The choice of Castañega’s Tratado—a threatening description of

94 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (n. 43 above), p. 130.95 Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 9: “Y ahora has olvidado, cuando fuiste bautizado has odiado,

despreciado, abandonado al diablo . . . para que Dios te ayude si no tienes el corazón doble,si no tienes la lengua doble. . . . Ahora si de verdad, de buen corazón, perteneces a Dios allá,detrás de ti . . . relegarás . . . al injusto mundo diabólico” (my emphasis). “ ‘Si algo no en-tiendes bien, interroga al instante al padre’. Y agrega: ‘aquel hombre que no pregunta alpadre, quizá desee hacer cosas buenas y también quizá abrigue pensamientos que lo pier-dan. . . . Por eso mismo será muy bueno él, el hombre del pueblo, humilde, seguirá a aquelque está por encima de él.’ ”

96 Compare Victor Turner, “Entre lo uno y lo otro: El período liminar en los rites de pas-sage,” in his La selva de los símbolos: Aspectos del ritual ndembu (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1990),p. 104.

was an inspiring figure for Andrés de Olmos. For the reflection on the other in medieval ex-empla, see Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medi-eval Sermon Stories (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 3–22.




the advance of the diabolical conspiracy in the Old World—was also im-portant for this strategy. The Christian virtues that the Franciscans wereanxious to recover for themselves suddenly appeared before their eyes,incarnated in the Amerindians, a whole race of men consecrated to evan-gelic poverty. The friars saw themselves reflected in the simplicity of thenatives through a process of self-projection of their own identity, ratherthan through a trustworthy description of the other.97 As opposed to friarsand Indians, European Christendom seemed confined to eternal perdition.In the prologue of the Tratado, written in Spanish, Olmos compares theveija christiandad with a dry tree and the new one with a green tree: “ifthe old Christianity burns, it is no wonder to see the new one on fire aswell, since the enemy has no less envy, rage, and rancor that he feels forthose who have not long before fled from his hands.” The new Amerin-dian Christians, then, seem to keep the possibility of salvation that theold Christians had already lost. The lurking of the devil was more realthan ever: Satan would also try to corrupt the new Christendom, and histriumph would do nothing but hasten the end of history and his own finaldefeat. Only a godly life and a strong faith could halt the increasing attacksof an enraged devil. The neophytes, if they accepted baptism with sin-cerity, would have an advantage over old Christians: “and each day [thedevil] encircles and surrounds his prey to chase it anew, and only a trainedfaith can impede his catch, because a tepid or dead faith does not want toresist him.”98

But the vieja christiandad was also present in New Spain. Thus the ne-cessity to avoid any contact between the Indians and European corruption:“because this New Spain is already entangled with various nations, andwherever there is a crowd, there is confusion. Through this treatise, I wantto warn the simple ones that as it is usual that in some cases a tongue orcorrupt custom gets stuck to someone, this venom and pestilence mustnot infect you or be transmitted to one another.” And then Olmos finishedwith a suggestive admonition that seems to reserve paradise only for friarsand Indians, the pillars of a new apocalyptic Christianity: “and I beseechthat the care and diligence of shepherds and the heads of the church shouldbe awake and alive, and that they will show so much concern for thosesouls they are in charge of, so that these will go with them to Heaven and

97 Compare Stuart Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Schwartz, ed. (n. 37 above), pp. 3–4.98 Olmos, p. 4: “si la vieja christiandad se quema, no es de marauillar que arda la nueva,

pues el enemigo no menos embidia tiene, enojo y rencor tiene destos que poco hase se le es-caparon de las uñas.” “Y cada día [el demonio] cerca y rodea la presa por la tornar a correral qual sola la fe formada le es impedimento, porque la fe tibia o muerta, poco o nada se es-panta” (p. 4).

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forever rule there.”99 As in some particular moiety systems described byanthropology, both extremes—the old and the new Christianity—are notconceived here as a pair of complementary opposites that together makeup a harmonious whole, halves that exchange between them their neces-sary opposing qualities. Instead, the opposites are here two different waysof conceiving the hierarchy that orders the relationship between the newand the old. Both elements are already present in each of the moieties.That is why they do not embody values that need to be exchanged. Buteach moiety depends on the reversed image of that hierarchy (embodiedin the opposite moiety) to reproduce its own hierarchy.100 Thus, whereasthe old Christianity provided the Indians with a subordinate status—theblemish of the converso—the new Christendom transformed the corruptedfaith of the old Christian into the reality that Amerindian neophytes wereforced to overcome.

The radical condemnation of European Christianity seems to turn Ol-mos’s discourse into a fractured enunciation that challenges the hegemonicdiscourse from a subordinate perspective. However, his Tratado is less adiscourse of resistance than a discourse claiming its own centrality. Eventhough the Franciscan establishes a different place of enunciation fromthe periphery, his purpose is to rescue the purity of Christianity, which heconsiders the supreme value of European civilization and whose purityhe aspires to recreate on another continent. Hence Olmos’s discourse doesnot surpass the limits of a universalizing narration, the supreme truths ofa revealed religion that prevent the complete recovery of the differencesof the local culture.101 To see non-Western peoples as having themselvesbecome the standard-bearers of Western culture is in some ways a moreprofound form of colonization, the search for its own idealized image inthe imperfect copies fabricated by other cultures, ethnocentrism thinkingitself as antiethnocentrism.102

But the vieja christiandad was not the only inverted image that Olmosused to strengthen the new providential identity of Amerindian neophytes.

99 Ibid., p. 5: “porque ya esta Nueva España se va mezclando de diuersas naciones, ydonde ay muchedumbre ay [sic] está la confusión. Deseo con esto avisar a los unos y a losotros simples en tal manera que así como a algunos se les pega la lengua o costumbre cor-rupta la tal ponçoña y pestelencia o semejante no se pegue o traspase de unos en otros” (myemphasis). “Y ruego se abiue y despierte el cuidado y diligencia de los pastores y rectores de[la] yglesia, y que tal solicitud pongan en las ánimas que a cargo tienen, que al fin con ellasen el cielo para siempre reynen.”

100 See Valerio Valeri, “Reciprocal Centers: The Siwa-Lima System in the Central Moluc-cas,” in The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode, ed. DavidMaybury-Lewis and Uri Almagor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp.135–36.

101 See Mignolo (n. 26 above), pp. 4, 123.102 See Spurr (n. 46 above), pp. 36–41.




He also required them to maintain a radical distance between their pastand their present, between their new religion and the diabolical paganismof their ancestors. Like the rabbis after the destruction of the SecondTemple, the friars tried to replace a genealogical model with a contractualmodel for the construction of fictitious ethnicities. In the first, the insideand the outside were established according to biological descent, whereasin the second, identity was built on the acceptance of a certain institu-tionalized system of beliefs.103 Baptism should then replace ancestral re-lationships as the articulating axis of this new imaginary community.104

To achieve this, a vast pedagogical industry had to compel the neophytesto a permanent exercise of oblivion-recollection of the past. The paganceremonies had to be remembered, but only as expressions of a diaboli-cal cult, not as legitimate exercises of latria. Out of these amnesias springnarratives, as when an adult is informed that the baby in the picture if noother but himself. Out of this estrangement comes a new identity, which,because it cannot be “remembered,” must be narrated.105 As Olmos re-minds the Indians, “you should know that a long time ago, at the time ofyour grandfathers, the Devil penetrated a stone, a stick, a person that wasused as an intermediary, to talk, to deceive a lot.”106

As a chronicler once imagined, it would have been necessary to exter-minate all the elderly at the end of the conquest to eradicate forever thememory of idolatry, that intrinsic evil that children learnt in their cra-dles.107 For the time being, the friars banished to hell the venerated an-cestors in toto: “our grandfathers did not take shelter in a good deity, andin this way they would not know any charity.”108 Thus, every object thatrepresented in any way some form of solidarity within the lineage, suchas the small reliquaries in New Spain or the mummies in Central Andes,deeply angered the preachers.109 Fray Andrés warned: “if a man receives

103 Levinson (n. 91 above), p. 344.104 I use this term in the sense provided by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6: “the mem-bers of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them oreven hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

105 Ibid., pp. 200–204.106 Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 17: “sabréis que hace ya mucho tiempo, de cuando los abue-

los, el Diablo penetraba en una piedra, en un palo, en una persona que servía de intermedi-ario, para hablar, para engañar mucho” (my emphasis).

107 See Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De la idolatría: Una arqueología de lasciencias religiosas (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), pp. 101, 154.

108 Olmos, p. 23: “nuestros abuelos ne se refugiaban en una buena divinidad, y así noconocerán ninguna caridad” (my emphasis).

109 See Serge Gruzinski, La colonización de lo imaginario: Sociedades indígenas y occi-dentalización en el México español. Siglos XVI–XVIII (México: Fondo de Cultura Econó-mica, 1988), p. 136; cf. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imaginationin Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 68, 70–71,419, 427.




something from his father, from his mother, or from his grandmother toshow that they leave to him the task to become friends with the Devil, evenif the son does not believe in this; if a man even holds the things given bythe devil’s adept without despising them, it seems that he is in this wayallowing the Devil to do that which his mother has done in his name orwhoever left him those diabolical things.”110

This disturbance of memory compelled the Indians to construct a falsebeing, a Christian autobiography of sin. As in the examination of con-science, Olmos assumes that in every Indian there exists not one self buttwo: one that bears the marks of an unexamined past and another that re-orders and reads those marks, a temporal division between a self that readsand one that is read.111 As Olmos argues, “neither would you believe indreams, in deceiving words, in the bad things whose memory your parentsor your grandparents had left, blind people who did not believe in thereal God, who did not know Him. And now you discover their mistakes,not that you know them.”112

In the same way that the old Christianity was present in New Spain,however, the diabolical idolatry cunningly disguised itself inside the newAmerindian church: “in the middle of the people, among the people livedthe wicked, . . . and they drag people to ruin, to disease, they make themwretched, they punish them severely with pulque, with mushrooms, sothat they would become evil.”113 As with witchcraft in Europe, the idiomof idolatry was a way of defining the limits of the moral community, afrontier that prohibited relationships, that authorized interchanges, andthat created marginalities.114 That is why Olmos recounted the responsi-bilities of those who, because of not avoiding contact with wicked men,would fall again under the power of the devil: “the nahual would leave ushis tyranny as a memory, his hypocrisy, his wickedness. . . . It is said that

110 Olmos, p. 73: “si un hombre recibe algún signo de su padre, de su madre o de unaabuela para mostrar que le dejan el trabajo de hacer amistad con el Diablo, aunque el hijo nocrea en esto, si quizá aún un hombre agarra las cosas dadas por el adepto del Diablo sin de-spreciarlas, parece como si asi permitiera al Diablo hacer aquello que hizo en su nombre sumadre o aquel que le dejó estas cosas diabólicas.”

111 Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversionin Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996),p. 100.

112 Olmos, p. 21: “tampoco irás a creer en los sueños, en la palabra engañosa, en las cosasmalas cuyo recuerdo han dejado tus padres, tus abuelos, ciegos que no creían en el verda-dero Dios, que no lo conocían. Y ahora descubre la falta, tú que la conoces” (my emphasis).

113 Ibid., p. 28: “en medio de la gente, entre la gente viven los malvados . . . y arrastran ala gente a la ruina, a la enfermedad, los hacen desgraciados, los castigan muy duro conpulque, con hongos, para que vengan a ser malvados” (my emphasis).

114 See David Warren Sabean, “The Sacred Bond of Unity: Community through the Eyesof a Thirteen-Year-Old Witch (1683),” in Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and VillageDiscourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.109–10.




he could transmit this to somebody, to hand it over, to cover them with it;as long as they get near him, then he will communicate it, he will blindthem. But . . . he would not be able to do this job if it is not out ofwillingness. . . . Because truly if he, the nahual, takes away from hermother a young maiden to become friends with the Devil, it would beonly because it is the maiden’s will.”115

The radical alteration of the subject in Olmos’s Tratado is useful to ex-plain the formal alterations that Fray Andrés introduced in Castañega’soriginal. First, there is the change of title: from Tratado de las supersti-tiones (Treaty regarding superstitions) to Tratado de hechicerías (Treatyregarding sorcery). Second, there is the excision of the thirteen chaptersthat make up the second part of Castañega’s work. The objective of FrayMartín was to remind the old Christians that those apparently harmlesssuperstitiones were ways of contracting a tacit pact with the devil, scarcelyseparated by a difference in degree with respect to the Sabbath atrocities.That is why the chapters of the second part were really the core of Cas-tañega’s Tratado. The first eleven chapters that describe in detail the dia-bolical counter-church were nothing but dependent on the other thirteen.That theological fiction of the first part justified the intrinsic diabolicalcharacter of the real practices described in the second. On the contrary,Olmos’s aim was more urgent. The Amerindians still lived very near tothat real idolatry from which they had been rescued. The counter-churchhere was not a mere theological fiction, like the Sabbath of the witches.Fray Andrés’s concern then was not the vulgar superstitions of the oldChristians (the tacit pact) but the relapse into paganism of the NewChristians (the explicit pact). In New Spain, the former seemed dilutecompared with the generalized presence of the latter, the naked worship-ping of false idols. In the New World, superstition developed into idol-atry, and idolatry evolved inevitably into apostasy. That is why theTratado de las supersticiones becomes the Tratado de hechicerías, andboth original parts transform themselves into one text, in which only thecounter-church that includes idolaters and apostasies is described. Thenew Amerindian church—the axis of the providential mission to which theFranciscans believed themselves predestined—had to be preserved fromthis diabolical counter-church.

115 Olmos, p. 71: “el nahual dejará en el recuerdo su tiranía, su hipocresía, su maldad.. . . Se dice que esto lo podrá transmitir a alguien, dárselo, cubrirle con ello; en cuanto seacerquen a él, entonces se lo comunicará, lo cegará. Pero . . . no se podrá tomar este tributode trabajo si no es por voluntad propia. . . . Porque efectivamente, si él, el nahual le toma auna madre su joven doncella para que trabe amistad con el Diablo, sólo será por voluntad dela joven doncella.”

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vi. old devil, new world: satan as a trickster

The alteration of the subject of discourse was not the only substantial in-novation introduced by Olmos in his resignification of Castañega’s Tra-tado de las supersticiones. Forced by necessity to adapt that text to theAmerican reality, Fray Andrés had to display an interpretation of the di-abolical power significantly different from the radical demonology thatwas triumphing at the same time in Europe.

During the first Christian millennium, the demon was a discrete char-acter. Ignored by the art of the catacombs, his freedom of action limitedby Augustinian providentialism, his figure did not obsess—at least out-side the monastic cloister—the laity and the clergy with the intensity thatit would from the last centuries of the Middle Ages onward.116 After theresurrection of Christ, the demon did not have a chance: the battle wasinexorably won. In fact, until the awakening of the scholastics, demonol-ogy did not exist as an autonomous discipline.117

But from the fifteenth century onward demonology acquires new di-mensions, transforming itself into one of the more dynamic disciplineswithin theology, a true natural science of demons.118 No other period ofthe history of Christendom was more obsessed with the figure of the devilthan the period that covers the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In fact,our interaction and dialogue with the supreme adversary of the Christiangod is established at the beginning of what we call modernity.119 If Augus-tine seemed to conceive diabolical wickedness in terms of inner tempta-tion, the Malleus Maleficarum considered it more in terms of physicalharm, as the cause of material misfortunes rather than as the result ofsin.120 The symptoms of this early modern obsession with the demon arewidely known, in particular witch-hunting, a unique and paradigmaticallymodern phenomenon.121 This pessimism and tragic vision is reproduced

116 Robert Muchembled, Une histoire du diable, XIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2000),p. 24; cf. Hans Peter Broedel, “The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witch-craft: Encounters with the Supernatural between Theology and Popular Belief ” (Ph.D. diss.,University of Washington, 1998), pp. 212–14.

117 For the evolution of the devil during the Middle Ages from a theological perspec-tive, see Renzo Lavatori, Il diavolo tra fede e ragione (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2000),pp. 85–118.

118 See Stuart Clark, “The Rational Witchfinder: Conscience, Demonological Naturalismand Popular Superstitions,” in Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe,ed. Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski (Manchester: Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1991), pp. 222–48.

119 Maggi (n. 49 above), p. 5.120 Broedel, p. 163.121 For a wider and more general approximation to the problem of witch-hunting in its

diverse regional variants, see Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries,




in literature, in the arts, and in myths. Iconography represented Satan withimperial attributes, sitting on the throne like the perfect inverse of Godthe Father, the Pope, or the absolute monarchs.122 The period that stretchesfrom the Reformation to the Enlightenment was the only one in Westernhistory to present an image of the pact with the devil in which he was un-doubtedly the winner.123

The novelty of positive demonology has made some scholars affirm thatthis theological discipline was not inscribed in the medieval religious dis-course, that it had emerged abruptly in a very disconcerting discontinu-ity.124 Several explanations for this radical transformation of the religiousdiscourses have developed, all of them centered on changes initiated fromthe twelfth century on. One such change was the concern with the menaceof Cathar dualism.125 A second was the dissemination from the cloistersof an image of the devil that seemed, by dramatic exigency of the monas-tic exempla, a figure with a high degree of autonomy, the indefatigableenemy of virtuous men rather than the deserved scourge of sinners.126 A

122 See Jérôme Baschet, “Satan ou la majesté maléfique dans les miniatures de la fin duMoyen Age,” in Le mal et le diable: Leurs figures a la fin du Moyen Age, ed. Nathalie Nabert(Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp. 187–210. See also Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire etCulture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1978),pp. 295–96; Marvin Harris, Vacas, cerdos, guerras y brujas: Los enigmas de la cultura(Madrid: Alianza, 1980), p. 205.

123 See Keith Roos, The Devil in 16th Century German Literature: The Teufelsbücher(Bern: Herbert Lang, 1972), pp. 43–49.

124 See Alain Boureau, “Un seul diable et plusiers personnes,” “Preface,” in Houdard(n. 49 above), pp. 12–13.

125 See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-nell University Press, 1984), pp. 185–90, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 101–32; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An In-quiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic, 1975); I quote the Spanish edi-tion: Los demonios familiares de Europa (Madrid: Alianza, 1980), pp. 85–89.

126 See Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 92–93.

ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Nicole Jacques-Chaquin et Maxime Préaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Grenoble: Mil-lon, 1994); Robert Muchembled, ed., Magie et sorcellerie en Europe du Moyen Age à nosjours (Paris: Colin, 1994); James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England1550–1750 (London: Penguin, 1996); Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt inScotland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); John Putnam Demos, Enter-taining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1983); Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic,Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997); Per Sörlin, “Wicked Arts”: Witchcraft and Magic Trials in South-ern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead:A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (Budapest: Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 1999); Gustav Henningsen, El abogado de las brujas: Brujería vasca eInquisición Española (Madrid: Alianza, 1983). It is fascinating to compare this with an extraEuropean case study: cf. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).




third was the replacement of a moral theology centered in the SevenDeadly Sins by another centered in the Old Testament Decalogue.127 Thefigure of Thomas Aquinas has been frequently considered in relation tothe genesis of modern demonology. Aquinas essentially developed anangelology, which insisted on the infinite distance that separated theangelic powers vis-à-vis the potentia Dei absoluta.128 Nevertheless, hisdetailed and systematic description of the fantastic virtues of seraphicnatures later facilitated the comprehension, in theological terms, of thedeeds attributed to demons and witches since the middle of the fifteenthcentury.129 A second contribution of Saint Thomas was his reformulationsof the problem of evil: by clearly differentiating divine will from divinepermission, Aquinas allowed a considerable expansion for the devil with-out affecting the omnipotence and goodness of the Creator.130

The Tratado de las supersticiones by the Franciscan Castañega is a clearexpression of this modern radical demonology. A historian has recentlymade it clear that, even though Fray Martín never quotes the MalleusMaleficarum, it is evident that he displays the same topics in the sameorder.131 Castañega represents a moderate version of modern demonol-ogy, typical of Spanish Renaissance theology. Even when he accepts thereality of the Sabbath and the witches’ flights, Castañega also holds thatthe same phenomena frequently occur only in the imagination of thebruxas. This modern interpretation was remote from the more radicalizedversions of modern demonology, which tried to impose the thesis thatimaginary flights were the exception and real flights the norm. In anycase, the common element between both demonological conceptions wasthe acceptance of the extraordinary preternatural powers of the devil, de-rived from his angelic nature, which made possible and plausible the di-verse components of the Sabbath stereotype.132 “We read,”—Castañegastates, “that the angel took Habakku from Judea to Babylon with the food

127 See John Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,” in Con-science and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), pp. 215–30.

128 On the evolution of medieval angelology, see David Keck, Angels and Angelology in theMiddle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Renzo Lavatori, Gli angeli: Storiae pensiero (Genova: Marietti, 1991); Jean-Marie Vernier, Les anges chez Saint Thomasd’Aquin (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1986).

129 See Charles Edward Hopkin, The Share of Thomas Aquinas in the Growth of the Witch-craft Delusion (1940; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. 174–84.

130 Broedel (n. 11 above), pp. 228–30.131 Homza (n. 18 above), p. 204. At present, critics tend to consider Heinrich Institoris as

the real author of the Malleus Maleficarum, reducing Jacob Sprenger’s participation to aminimal collaboration. See Broedel, pp. 90–92.

132 On the notion of the supernatural order, see Campagne, Homo Catholicus (n. 50 above),pp. 566–600; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998), pp. 120–26, 159–71.




that he took to feed Daniel . . . ; and it is said that the angel took him bya hair of his head, only to show the virtue and power of the angel to carrya man.”133

Modern demonology, which Castañega’s Tratado expressed, presentedserious problems for Olmos, as well as for American preachers in general.For the theology derived from Saint Augustine and Aquinas, the devilcould produce real effects on the material world. For the former, super-stitious practices were supposed to resort to the illegitimate but effectivepreternatural causality derived from the devil’s natural powers.134 SaintThomas did not doubt the capacity of separate intelligences to act on thematerial world, from their dominance of local movement: for Aquinas,diabolic magic could be effective.135 Such a degree of power attributed tothe enemy of the Christian God complicated the evangelization of thosepeoples that had recently abandoned paganism. Added to the identificationof the old local gods with the demons of Judaism and Christianity, suchinterpretation strengthened the belief in the real powers of the ancientpagan pantheon and the temptation to take possession of your enemy’senemy.136 There were also theological reasons that could even apply tothe superstitions of European Christians: while the illocutionary acts di-rected to God by the pious believer not always produced the desiredeffects—Castañega develops a whole section on the reasons that prayersare often not heard by the deity—those directed to the demon by sorcer-ers and homines superstitiosi paradoxically always produced the desiredeffects.137 How can you introduce to the idolaters such a demon-hiddenface of their old gods, deities that not only possess powers to producereal effects, but also to carry out the wishes of their followers more fre-quently than the Christian god hears his followers’ prayers?

That is why, at the time of the conversion of Europe, preachers weretempted to spread the image of an impotent demon, lacking enough powerto produce real effects in the created world. This was the case with thefirst Council of Braga (561); the Indiculus Superstitionum, appended to acopy of the canons of the Council of Leptinnes (ca. 743); the De SingulisLibris Canonicis Scarapsus by Pirmin of Reichenau (d. ca. 754); thePenitencial de Silos (ca. 800); the De Grandine et Tonitruis by Agobardof Lyon (d. 840); the famous Canon Episcopi, reproduced for the firsttime by Regino of Prüm in his De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis et Religione

133 Castañega (n. 10 above), p. 67: “leemos que el angel llevó a Abacuc de Judea a Babi-lonia con la comida que llevaba para . . . Daniel . . . ; y dice que lo llevó de un cabello de lacabeza, sólo para denotar la virtud y poder del ángel para llevar a un hombre.”

134 Campagne, Homo Catholicus, pp. 56–62.135 See Hopkin, p. 115.136 Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (n. 30 above), p. 43.137 Maggi (n. 49 above), p. 88.




Christiana (c. 906); and the tenth and ninth books of the Decretum byBishop Burchard of Worms (c. 1008–12)—particularly the latter, tradi-tionally known as Corrector.138

Some American texts reproduced the image of a demon radically im-potent.139 Nevertheless, the evolution of scholastic angelology and thespread of modern demonology made it difficult to hold such a position intheological terms. In the case of Olmos, an additional complication re-sulted in the choice of Castañega’s Tratado as a source of inspiration,since it was an example of radical modern demonology.

Fray Andrés had to resignify the image of the demon in accordancewith various simultaneous strategies. To begin with, he had to reinforcethe creatureness of the demon with an even greater emphasis than is foundin the patristic and scholastic traditions. For this, following a conventiontypical of the first generation of Franciscans in Mexico—later contestedby Bernardino de Sahagún—Olmos identifies the devil with the figure ofthe tlacatecolotl, the owl-man: “you should know that this owl-man ismentioned, he is really called by a multitude of names: bad angel Devil,Demon, Satan.”140 The term could make reference to a variety of sor-cerers, who could be hired to cast spells, or to a wicked nahual, a quasi-shamanstic human figure possessing the power to transform himselfinto different animals.141 In any case, this choice placed the demon in a

138 For the Council of Braga, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early MedievalEurope (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 111; for the Indiculus Super-stitionum, see John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: ATranslation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales” (1938; reprint, New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1990), pp. 419–21; for Pirmin of Reichenau, see Claude Lecouteux, Au-delà dumerveilleux: Des croyanes au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne,1995), pp. 57–59; for Penitencial de Silos, see McNeill and Gamer, p. 285; for Agobard ofLyon, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Historia de la superstición (Barcelona: Crítica, 1992), pp. 59–62; Oronzo Giordano, Religiosidad popular en la alta edad media (Madrid: Gredos, 1983),pp. 142–43, 277–78; Flint, pp. 108–16; Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History ofWitchcraft, 3 vols. (New York: Yoseloff, 1957), 1:143–44; for Canon Episcopi, see Russell,Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (n. 125 above), pp. 291–93; and for Decretum, see Giordano,pp. 263–69.

139 We read in the Doctrina Christiana Mexicana by Juan de la Plaza (México, 1585): “P.Qualiter honorabimus Deum cum fide? R. Non credere Idolis, neque dare fidem haeresi-bus, somniis, maleficiis, et superstitionibus, quae sunt uanitates et fraudes.” A little furtheron, a second question takes up the problem again in an even more explicit way: “P. Secun-dum omnia, quae docent melefici homines, quae non sunt conformia his queae Christiani ex-ercent et operantur sunt fraudes Demonis? R. Ita est, et qui illis credunt, et operantur queaedicunt, peccant contra fidem et obligantur Inferno” (Resins Llorente [n. 25 above], p. 658).

140 Burkhart (n. 34 above), p. 44; Cervantes (n. 2 above), p. 47. Quotation is from Olmos(n. 17 above), p. 13: “vosotros habéis de saber que este hombre-búho se nombra, se llamaverdaderamente por una multitud de nombres: mal ángel Diablo, Demonio, Sathán.”

141 See Hugo Nutini and John M. Roberts, Bloodsucking Witchcraft: An EpistemologicalStudy of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in Rural Tlaxcala (Tucson: University of Ari-zona Press, 1993), pp. 87–88.




dimension closer to the human sphere, removed from divine status, apoor rival for the European Lucifer.

Regarding the description of the real powers of the demon, Olmosadopts a compromising strategy: according to his source—Castañega’sTratado—Fray Andrés displayed the virtues of the angelic nature of thedevil in accord with scholastic theology. But at the same time, the Fran-ciscan puts extreme stress on the predisposition of the demon to deceive,to lie, and to perform illusions or carry out frauds. In the Tratado dehechicerías, Satan is an extremely powerful angel and at the same timean inveterate trickster.142

Olmos reproduces the exploit of the biblical angel that carried Ha-bakkuk through the air holding him from a hair, a definite proof of thenatural powers of pure spirits: “it is written that an angel took Habakkukwhen he lived there, in a place called Judea; he just picked him up froma hair . . . thus proving the virtue and the strength of the angel to takesomeone away.”143 His control over nature cannot be denied, especially ifthe deity gives him permission to exercise his powers openly: “he is ableto throw fire up there, through the air, and make it change places; he willthen move the air, in such a way that a whirlwind will rise, or maybe notrise if God does not allow it.”144 Another of the exempla describes astorm and shipwreck caused by the devil.145

At the same time, to neutralize this image that orthodox angelologydid not allow him to ignore, Andrés de Olmos introduces the principalchange made to Castañega’s original. The sorcerers, the idolaters, andthe pagans should make no mistake: the devil never keeps his promises;he never employs his great powers for the benefit of those who conjurehim. As in many cultures, the evil spirits are here masters of illusion. Hispower over men comes from his capacity to deceive human minds, to dis-play a veil that distorts human ability to perceive the world as it really is,and to apprehend the hierarchies that order the chain of being and showthe correct place that demons should occupy in the cosmos.146 In Sri Lanka

142 For the tension between both ways of demonization of the Indian religions, see Ken-neth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 223–24.

143 Olmos, p. 51: “está excrito que un ángel se llevó a Abachuc cuando vivía allá, en unlugar llamado Judea; tan sólo lo agarró por un cabello . . . , así probando la virtud y la fuerzadel ángel para llevarse a alguien.”

144 Ibid., p. 63: “bien podrá lanzar el fuego allá arriba, por los aires, y podrá hacer que éstese mude de sitio; así acompañará al viento, de tal suerte que un torbellino de viento se levan-tará o acaso no se levantará si Dios lo impide.”

145 See ibid., p. 35.146 See Bruce Kapferer, A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Heal-

ing in Sri Lanka (Providence, R.I.: Berg; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,1991), pp. 1–6, 155–56.




as in baroque Europe, the task of the exorcist is to break the illusion thatblurs the pristine order of things.147

“The devil,” states Olmos, “does not always offer what a wicked heartwants, the Devil does not give him satisfaction, because he who does notaspire to God will always be deceived by the devil.”148 With this last ex-pression, Olmos abandoned one of the essential characteristics of thedemonological discourse: its intrinsic ambiguity.149 If in the Augustinianmodel of superstition the demon can often produce those effects that thehomo superstitiosus does not obtain, through the natural and supernaturalways, in Fray Andrés’s discourse the devil infallibly breaks his promises.That conventional language of superstitious signs mentioned by Augus-tine, those pacta cum daemonibus, would always be broken by the devil:“the Devil who is a flatterer, very shrewd, promised and offered manyriches, but then he mockes and laughs at people.”150

The impotence of the devil, then, is not due to his natural incapacity toproduce real effects in the material world, but to his incurable tendencyto lie: “nobody will be consecrated to the Devil no matter how poor he is,since he only gives faked things, and afterward something horrible andscary would happen to them.”151 The same happens with fortune telling.In the few exceptions in which he avoids deceit, the devil only tries toconceal his perfidy: “and if sometimes, seldom does the Devil say truewords, it is very often because he wants suspicion to disappear, becausehe wants to swindle; it is just to simulate his lies, his slobber.”152

In the same way that in the Eucharistic transubstantiation the divinitymakes use of the disjuncture between substance and accidents, the demonuses the distance that separates reality from appearance to create in theimagination independent images of the objects perceived through thesenses, eidola rather than phantasmae.153 Fray Andrés states: “the Devilis capable of blurring somebody’s knowledge, what is called senses, soin this way [the person] disappears in a deep dream; so he . . . thinks that

147 Maggi (n. 49 above), pp. 106, 111; Kapferer, p. 104.148 Olmos, p. 37: “El diablo no ofrece siempre aquello que desea un corazón malvado, el

Diablo no le procura satisfacción, porque aquel que no aspira a Dios siempre será engañadopor el diablo” (my emphasis).

149 See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “El rosario del soldado o el combate por el sentido:La polémica en el seno del discurso antisupersticioso (España. Siglos XV–XVIII),” Fun-dación 5 (2001–2): 353–72.

150 Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 49: “el Diablo que es muy lisonjero, muy artero, prometió, ofre-ció dar muchas riquezas, y luego se burla, se ríe de la gente.”

151 Ibid., p. 45: “nadie se consagrará al Diablo por pobre que sea, ya que sólo da cosa fin-gida, algo para que luego, luego, le ocurra a uno algo horrendo, espantoso” (my emphasis).

152 Ibid., p. 21: “y si a veces, raras veces, dice palabras verdaderas el Diablo, es muy amenudo porque quiere hacer desaparecer las sospechas, porque quiere embaucar; sólo espara disimular sus mentiras, su baba” (my emphasis).

153 Compare MacCormack (n. 109 above), pp. 25, 28, 30.




what he dreams has happened in front of him.”154 As for many extirpa-dores de idolatrías, deception and illusion were the fields of action pre-ferred by the demon and provided the most plausible explanation forAmerican idolatry, that monstrous deceit.155

vii. conclusions: traduttore, traditore

The Tratado de hechicerías by the Franciscan Andrés de Olmos is a crea-tion that differs extensively from the Tratado de las supersticiones byMartín de Castañega. In accord with the monopoly on the revealed truththat Christianity claims, Olmos carries out an exercise that simulta-neously denies and affirms the incommensurability between European andAmerican cultures, that denies everything pertaining to the divinity in thelocal culture, but that finds everywhere in the Amerindian religions thetraces of its enemy, the devil.

Olmos introduces in his manual significant formal changes regardingCastañega’s treaty. Castañega’s work not only loses its title, but also itsoriginal structure, since it is reduced to only eleven out of the twenty-four original chapters. These alterations reflect the different strategies thatthe two authors had. If the model reader of the Spanish Tratado is the di-ocesan clergy—the implicit subject of Castañega’s discourse—Andrésde Olmos directly addresses the Indians of New Spain, raw material forthe providential utopia that the Franciscans promoted in the decades im-mediately after the conquest. It was not the vulgar superstitions or theimplicit pact with the devil that worried the indefatigable preacher. By1550s traces of doubt about the success of the strategy of massive conver-sion, carried out by the minor friars, were clearly noticeable. It is idola-try, which for baptized Indians always meant apostasy, that worried Olmos:in his Tratado, the explicit covenant displaces the tacit pact. This explainshis changes to the title as well as the removal of the second part of theCastañega’s original work. To strengthen the identity of the new Amerin-dian Christianity, Olmos compares its purity—which he believes couldbe preserved—with, on the one hand, European corruption, the dry tree,the christiandad vieja that burns, and, on the other hand, with the idola-try of his ancestors, which persisted inside the already Christian commu-nities, and whose menace is compared to the counter-church of the witches,an image that Castañega employs in Spain to condemn the vulgar super-stitions of the christianos viejos. This change in the subject of discoursealso explains the change in genre: the destiny of the Tratado by Olmoswas not to be read, but to be preached.

154 Olmos, p. 53: “el Diablo tiene la capacidad de turbar en alguien el conocimiento, loque se llaman sentidos, que así desaparecen en un profundo sueño: de tal suerte que . . .piensa que se produjo ante él aquello que vio en su sueño.”

155 Mills (n. 142 above), pp. 211–42; Bernand and Gruzinski (n. 107 above), p. 47.




The transformation of the original demonology displayed by Cas-tañega is another substantial change introduced by Olmos in his ownwork. Conscious of the risks involved in fully showing the angelic powerof Satan, which were capable of producing real effects and of grantingwishes with more frequency than God Himself, the Franciscan had to re-sort to a compromise in his solution. His demon is in fact the powerfulangel that the scholastic angelology imagined since the middle of thethirteenth century. At the same time, he is a trickster who in all cases in-variably deceives his acolytes, breaks his promises, and ignores everypact. He is the master of illusion who penetrates dreams with delight, andwho blurs the sight and confuses the mind. He is an impotent demon notbecause of his angelic powers but because of his fondness for lying.

Not only did Olmos’s discourse distort the past of the Amerindiancivilization, its atavistic rituals, and its ancestral practices, but in his ownway, waiting for the end of the world, he also declared his rupture withthe christiandad vieja, with the corrupted faith of his believers and withthe excessive power displayed by his demons.

Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina)



“Witches, Idolaters and Franciscans: An American Translation of European Radical Demonology...

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