The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru 0292756941, 9780292756946

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The Power of Huacas

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The power of huacas Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru

By claudia brosseder

 Austin

University of Texas Press  

This book was produced with the help of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Heidelberg University. Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brosseder, Claudia, 1973–  The power of huacas : change and resistance in the Andean world of colonial Peru / by Claudia Brosseder. — First edition.   pages  cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-292-75694-6 (hardback) 1. Indians of South America—Peru—Religion. 2. Indians of South America— Peru—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Shamanism—Peru. 4. Peru—Religious life and customs. 5. Peru—History—1548–1820. I. Title. F2230.1.R3B76 2014 299.811'44—dc23 2014002682 doi:10.7560/756946

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 chapter one. A Land Obsessed with Confessions;

or, The Historians’ Insights into the World of Colonial Andean Religious Specialists 26

chapter two. Civil Versus Ecclesiastical Authorities 47 chapter three. The Sickening Powers of Christianity: A Response by Andean Religious Specialists 68 chapter four. Talking to Demons: The Intensified Persecution of Andean Religious Specialists (ca. 1609–1700) 104 chapter five. From Outspoken Criticism to Clandestine Resistance 136 chapter six. Glimpses of the Protective Powers of Andean Rituals in the Highlands 175 chapter seven. Andean Notions of Nature and Harm, and the Disempowerment of Andean Healers 192 chapter eight. Weeping Statues: The End of Jesuit Demonology and the Survival of an Andean Culture 229 chapter nine. Epilogue 254

Notes 273 Glossary 369

Consulted Archives and List of Abbreviations 373

Bibliography 375 Index 443

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Acknowledgments

To write the book was an odyssey, and my travels opened up a great many possibilities. I am deeply indebted to the many scholars whom I met. How can I thank them all? Let me try. Chance brought me ashore on the beaches of Peru and then led me further into the Andes. What began as an adventure transformed into an intellectual voyage, which could not have been more felicitous. The Bavarian state, in granting me the Bayerische Habilitationsförderpreis, made it possible. I am particularly grateful to Walter Ziegerer, who trusted that my ship would not drift apart on the seemingly endless ocean of transatlantic history. Trust humbles any scholar during his or her research. It serves like an anchor dropped in the dark sea, more necessary to a scholar than to a captain. Without Anthony Grafton, of Princeton; Winfried Schulze and Wulf Oesterreicher, both from Munich, who knew me from my previous endeavors and kindly served as referees; Paula Findlen, at Stanford, and Tamar Herzog, now at Harvard; and finally the referees from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, my journey would have ended on the river Rhine. Almost miraculously they all trusted that the archival material and the immense scholarship in the various seas through which I would sail would smooth the rough ideas I had in my mind. Special thanks goes again to Anthony Grafton, who was willing to read and comment on earlier drafts of this book, giving generous help when questions arose. I am grateful to the above-­mentioned scholars, who live the wonderful practice of scholarly give-­and-­take, for enabling me to see from the northern Pacific in Stanford what was distinctive about the southern shores of the same ocean. Stanford provided the tranquility I needed to reflect on what I had collected on my many trips to the Andes. It was particularly during these voyages to South America that I collected much more than flotsam. When I arrived there, especially in Peru, the various archives, libraries, and convents of Cuzco, Lima, Arequipa, Trujillo, Cajamarca, Chiclayo, Piura, Quito, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Santiago de Chile, and La Paz all made available their treasures. They welcomed a total stranger who was searching for information on so suspicious a matter as hechizería, sorcery, in colonial Peru. Though these collections provided deep insights into colonial as well

viii  The power of huacas

as modern South America, they did not contain what I was looking for. As I traveled back and forth to the Andes, on stays both long and brief, I was able to make the acquaintance of many people who helped me in my investigations. In Peru, I must name in particular Ramón Mujica Pinilla; Manuel Marzal († 2005); Julian Heras, OCD; Armando Nieto; Jeffrey Kleiber; Jorge Flores Ochoa; Marcos Cueto; Luis Millones; Cesar Quiroanga, OBVM; Padre Armando, OP; Jean Jacques Decoster; and the staff of the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. In Lima, Ramón Mujica Pinilla shared his abundant knowledge about colonial art with me, while Marcos Cueto familiarized me with the world of the colonial scientists. In Cuzco, Jorge Flores Ochoa introduced me into the world of Andean ethnographers. I thank them all. I also thank the members of the Jesuit, Dominican, Franciscan, and Mercedarian orders in Lima and Cuzco. The Mercedarians in Cuzco and the Dominicans in Lima decided to lock me into their rich colonial libraries, and my days there determined the paths I would take. Laura Gutiérrez Arbulú from the Archivo Arzobispal in Lima and the ever-­helpful staff of the National Library of Lima allowed a gringa to dive into Peruvian documents while keeping her from drowning. Without the personnel of the various archives, museums, and libraries in South America, Mexico City, Spain, and Rome, I would not have fished out any information. Special thanks go to Monseñor the Archbishop Héctor Miguel Cabrejos Vidarte of Trujillo and Antonio Vasco of the national library of Quito. I am grateful for the wonderful conversations I had with the Jesuits in Santiago de Chile and the help of the director of the library in Cuzco. I am particularly indebted to Nasario Turpe Condori, the altomisayuq from the Auzangate region, who showed me what trust in the powers of stones truly means. Unfortunately, he can no longer share his visions with us. My insights gained from archival material from New Spain and modern-­day Mexico provided the yardstick necessary to measure differences between the various colonial Latin American areas. They will be analyzed in a separate study. My life would be so much poorer without my friends in Peru: Gudrun Mayer-­Ullmann and Karl-­Heinz Horner, Marina Ascue Cabrera and Señora Raquel Cabrera Antezana, Edilma Samalvides and Douglas Stewart, Pablo Segovia, Holly Wissler, Wendy Weeks, and especially Mauro Condori, Joaquin Garcia Ttito, Fabian Condori Villaga, Timoteo Melo García, Fortunato Condori Condori, and their families from Junuta, Tinqui, and Chaupimayo. They taught me a world of respect for life in the Andes. Some of them showed me an everyday existence that humbles and enriches a researcher’s life.

acknowledgments  ix

In the United States, I extend my gratitude to James Sheehan, Stanford University, who kindly served as contact for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I thank Tom Cummins, Harvard University, for our unplanned meeting in Lima, when he advised me to think about mulatto hechizeros. I thank Sabine MacCormack (†2012) for the intense conversation we held in her office. I thank Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin, who cordially helped me explore baroque science. Charles Walker, University of California, Davis, generously shared his knowledge about Andean postcolonial times, and Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto, kindly posed the right questions about Andean religious specialists. Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University, offered valuable insights into the world of colonial scientists. Laura Smoller knows more about the discourse of magic and the saints than seems possible. Though I was a stranger, they all greeted me like an old friend. I thank them all. Paula Findlen gave me the opportunity to enjoy the amenity of the wonderful place called Stanford and teach a seminar there. I thank her deeply for this learning opportunity and her generous support. Tamar Herzog, with her admirably steadfast will, persuaded me that English was the proper language for this book so that it might reach an international audience beyond the German-­ speaking academic world. I thank her for her generous support over the years and her lucid critique of the manuscript. William Taylor of the University of California, Berkeley, invited me to give a presentation at the Latin American Studies Seminar at Berkeley after kindly having read the first forty pages of this book. I am grateful for his conversations and the critique I received from him and the members of this stimulating circle. I thank the staff of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped dig out unanticipated riches in books originating in colonial Peru. The Harvard Atlantic History Seminar was one of the harbors that provided time to explore, discuss, and laugh about history. I thank Bernard Bailyn, Allan Greer, my young colleagues, and especially David Tavárez for his keen and supportive comments on the entire manuscript. Thanks go as well to Nicholas Griffiths and Gabriela Ramos, both in the United Kingdom, who gave valuable advice. The members of the Cambridge Seminar on Astrology gave valuable comments on a draft, related to this study, of an article on the history of science in the New World. I want to thank José Carlos Farrago, whose enthusiasm for the Quechua language opened a new door into an unknown world. I extend my gratitude to Oriana Bleecher, who showed me how to fare in

x  The power of huacas

the rough seas of English, and to Alice Falk, who is an extremely sharp and helpful copy editor. In Stanford, good fortune brought me into a seminar taught by Nathan Wachtel. I joined his mind- and heart-­opening voyage into the past. I want to thank him for his pointed question: And what about the Andean side? I also want to express my gratitude to him for having read and commented on the entire manuscript. I want to thank Tristan Platt for generously sharing his great knowledge about the Andean world with me and helpfully asking the right questions when reading the manuscript. Likewise, I am indebted to Sabine Hyland for her valuable comments. All shortcomings, however, are my responsibility. When colleagues in the United States encouraged me to apply for a job at an American university, I landed at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. There, Bob and June Sitler, Bill and Nize Nylen, Margaret Venzke, Kimberly and Michael Reiter, Grady Ballenger, and particularly Elisabeth Poeter and Susanne Eulen opened their doors for the unknown Ms. Brosseder. I thank them all for their warm welcome, their great collegiality, and their friendship. I thank the students in my Latin American history seminars, who helped the almost shipwrecked German to see that Latin American history requires knowledge, enthusiasm, and an awareness of social injustice. I thank Hyman Sternthal, who encouraged me to learn to see in a different direction. But there are also many friends in many areas of the world I was so lucky to meet, who established a stable home for the passerby. I want to express special thanks to Philippe Buc. Without his encouragement, help, and constant critique, I would have underestimated that it “all makes deep sense.” During the long absences, my German friends Stefan Mauerer, Karl Sattler, Brigitte Irmler and Bruno Zackskorn, and Christa Benecke have been truly needed and trustworthy companions. I thank Tankred Steinicke for the maps. A scholar who only briefly drops his or her anchor in a mooring is grateful to the people who provide shelter for this fleeting stay. Shan March let me live in her cabin near Stanford, a wonderful place with unexpected visitors who made the long days behind the computer screen yet another adventure. I want to thank her dearly. Supporting me through both smooth and rough seas while this book was produced was my family. The constant help of Gerlinde, Johannes, and Ursula Brosseder was much needed and much appreciated. Leni Klingele accompanied me on the many journeys in her mind. Wherever I was, she found encouraging words. Eberhard Weiger lives what I study, and I thank him dearly for his great help. During all these voy-

acknowledgments  xi

ages my husband kept my ship on the right course. I am deeply grateful for his patience, sensitivity, openness to social injustice, happiness, and strength. I hope he knows what I owe him. Our two sons bring the greatest joy. Therefore, to my husband, to my sons, and to our dear friends in the southern Andes, especially in the Vilcanota Cordillera, I want to dedicate this book. Note: Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are by Claudia Brosseder.

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The Power of Huacas

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Introduction

Almost all of the Spaniards who came to the Andes from 1532 onward and left written records found the many different Quechua and Aymara terms for denoting what we can call, for lack of a better term, religious specialists highly problematic: achik, achicoc, achiycamayok, amauta, aucachic, ychuri, calparicu, camasca, soncoyoc cauchu, ru­ napmicuc, condeviza, hacarícuc, cuyrícuc, hacchini, hampicamayoc, hampioc or hampicoc, guacamayoc, huasca, huachachik or hua­cha­ chi­cuc, huatuc or watoq, layca, macsa, villac, móscoc, omo, umu or homo, miuycamayoc, pacharícuc, rápiac, socayoc, vacanqui camayoc, vallaviza, viropiricoc, vizaconas, yacarcaes, yachaccunacta, tala, tutu, phuu, supayona alicomata haque, toqueni, and hamuni.1 As the Spaniards transformed Quechua and Aymara into written languages, they spelled these terms in various ways. They also debated how the words should be translated, most often rendering them “diviners,” “priests,” “people who cast lots,” “wise men,” “confessors,” “sorcerers,” “high priests,” “herbalists,” “people who kill with poison,” “midwives,” and “practitioners of love magic.” Spaniards subcategorized “diviners” according to their “instruments”; for example, spiders, beans, spittle, entrails, llama dung, dreams, tremors of the arm, coca leaves, and grains of maize.2 Colonial Aymara was particularly rich in verbs indicating actions that Spaniards interpreted as divinations, including arokhaatha, coca phahuatha, hacchitha, hacchirapitha, huankona ul­ latha, huanko cchaatha, piuirutatha, huankona anocarapana ullatha, hamuttatha, hamuttatha and acahamani, and sapinitha.3 These different terms provided more detail than the blanket term “diviner” by specifying the instrument of divination. Yet despite this diversity and specificity in native terminology and native arts, lexical univocality reigned in Spanish discussions of indige-

2  The power of huacas

nous beliefs and practices. Most Spaniards simply resorted to the concept of hechizero (sorcerer) to label Andean religious specialists, and hechizería (sorcery) to encompass his or her acts. Evidently, Spaniards used the category of hechizería as a blunt tool, ignoring differences between Quechua, Aymara, and many other religious specialists.4 In early sixteenth-­century Spain and colonial Peru, the meanings of hechizería were basically threefold: “false god, false cult, false actions,” or “idolatry, superstition, sorcery.” In his orderly cosmos, Thomas Aquinas elevated superstitio above sorcery, divination, magic, and idolatry.5 According to him, superstitio was “a-­religio,” and the label belonged properly to any cult or belief deviating from the official religion, Catholicism. In this way, a concept of hechizería with implications of superstition and idolatry came to dominate Peruvian sources and Spanish actions toward certain Andean people. Even more, the dynamics of this Spanish discourse about hechizería and its constant dialogue with the Andean people had sociopolitical consequences that changed the Andean world in an unprecedented way.6 To date, a few books have reconstructed the European discourse on Andean hechizería and its effects on Andean religious specialists.7 Important studies on which this book builds have treated different aspects of the complex history of colonial hechizería as it reached into many contexts that historians of the colonial Andes have examined: the Spanish and Creole extirpation-­of-­idolatry campaigns in the archdiocese of Lima during the seventeenth century; the emergence of an Andean Catholic world; the history of gender relations and, in part, of witches in a colonial setting; the history of the relationship between Andean and Spanish political institutions premised on colonialism; the history of the persecution of non-­Andean Spanish, Creole, and Afro-­Peruvian ritual specialists; and the ongoing history of Andean and Inca religious- and sociopolitical-­economic structures, by Pierre Duviols, Kenneth Mills, Juan Carlos García Cabrera, Frank Salomon, Luis Millones, Gabriela Ramos, José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Sabine MacCormack, Ana Sánchez, Nicholas Griffiths, Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Laura Larco, Bonnie Glass-­Coffin, Irene Silverblatt, Maria Manarelli, Iris Gareis, Polia Meconi, Tristan Platt, Therèse Bouysse-­ Cassagne, Thierry Saignes, Gabriel Martínez, Josep Barnadas, and many others on the Inca and Andean world.8 No single book, however, has analyzed the evolution of Andean rituals and their symbolic makeup during colonial times in more detail in an effort to reconstruct the effects of the discourse of hechizería on

Introduction 3

the Andean world and of accompanying transcultural interactions and dialectical dynamics between Spaniards, Creoles, and Andeans. Analyzing Andean rituals and especially their symbolic makeup allows this book to show in which respect the world of Andean religious specialists changed; how it changed, on both the level of concepts and beneath the level of theoretical discourse, on the basis of practices and due to the practical give-­and-­take between Spaniards, Andeans, and, in part, Afro-­Peruvians; and why it changed. The book argues that certain elements within the complex world of Andean religious specialists’ rituals changed owing to the Spanish invasion and to cultural influxes that came in its wake, and yet maintained something that might be called an Andean logic. Among these elements, and one especially preserved among Andean religious specialists in the highlands, is an Andean concept of the embodiment of specific powers (which we might call a concept of the “holy”),9 of nature, and of an Andean understanding of sickness, social harmony, and the coexistence of cultures. Most of these principles continued to work as fundamental organizational principles of the Andean world and even dictated the responses that ritual specialists gave to transcultural interactions and, in particular, the European invasion and the introduction of Christianity—despite changes that can be observed in the function of Andean religious specialists in colonial Andean society, within their rituals, their performances, and their symbolic makeup. The European introduction of a distinction between natural and supernatural spheres most radically challenged Andean concepts of nature.10 A nuanced tracing from an Andean perspective of where change and resistance to change—from precolonial to early and later colonial times—were located is one of the principal aims of this book, as is the analysis of the evolution of the European discourse on hechi­ zería in Peru and in Europe, as the vicissitudes of the European discourse reflected back and forth across the Atlantic. This European discourse on magic serves as a mirror of the Andean world. It was also an important vehicle for change in the Andean world. As the book strives to present explanations for either change or resistance on both sides, it analyzes the dynamics of the dialogue between Andean religious specialists and European and Creole Christians by analyzing shifts—existing or nonexisting—within the structure of Andean concepts of sickness, health, the embodiment of powers, nature, coexistence of two cultures, and social harmony; and within Christian concepts of representation, the natural, the preternatural and

4  The power of huacas

the supernatural, salvation, social harmony, and the “holy”—­something that in both worlds, even though it was differently conceived, required human respect and veneration and was, perhaps, beyond human reach. Analysis of these parameters of the interaction between European and native perceptions reveals that within the encounter of these different cultures, the grounding principles changed more radically in Europe and among Europeans in the Andes than among Andeans, where ritual specialists and commoners may have adopted Christian images and rites but retained the same basic understanding of what was important and how it could be defended, what was holy and what was the relationship between what Europeans perceived as natural versus the supernatural sphere. The book will also examine what assimilation really meant for different inhabitants of the Andean world. This book relies on the perspective of a historiography that is at once historicist (taking into account historical change) and structuralist (uncovering underlying structures with a quality of longue durée). In doing so, the intent is to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of transcultural processes in the Andean world—a world that was neither trapped in cultural stagnation nor upended by total cultural change.11

The focus of the book My investigation of the history of hechizería from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century and its related intellectual parameters from the perspective of the transcultural processes rests on many different types of sources. The main informants of this history are the various chroniclers, the Huarochirí Manuscript, Jesuit cartas annuas (or litterae annuae, the annual letters, which are most explicit during the first half of the seventeenth century), reports by individual Jesuits, and other Jesuit manuscripts. Crucial are visitation records produced by the extirpation-­of-­idolatry campaigns in the archdiocese of Lima (sometimes identical with the information contained in the cartas an­ nuas). I also make use of the records of civil visitas that were conducted mainly to collect tributes if they contain information relevant to our understanding of the world of Andean religious specialists. The same holds true for the relaciones geográficas, as these official reports to the Council of the Indies in Seville sometimes contained information on local Andean customs and knowledge. Scholarly treatises of both Peruvian and European origin (provided that they found their way into the Andes) were consulted, in addition to sermons by secular priests—

Introduction 5

mainly in Cuzco and Lima—and by priests who belonged to the various orders. Inquisition records from Lima documenting the persecution of Spanish, Creole, and Afro-­Peruvian ritual specialists; colonial paintings, statues, and other objects from the central and southern highlands; and annotated books that I found in former colonial libraries in several Peruvian cities all provided vital information on how the Spanish and Creole discourse on hechizería evolved in its interaction with the Andean world and how the world of Andean religious specialists and of commoners changed.12 In all this, as the reader will notice, I concentrate on Jesuit sources and visitation records, given that the Jesuits undoubtedly were the most meticulous in describing the acts performed by Andean religious specialists from the late sixteenth century onward. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Jesuits considered Andean religious specialists to be their greatest rivals and focused a great deal of effort on persecuting hechizeros. This book, however, does not attempt to add to the existing histories of the Jesuit order in colonial Peru; doing so would require comparing their Peruvian engagements with their many other evangelical projects in other parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, as well as in Europe and Asia.13 Instead, the Jesuit views presented in this book are used mainly to provide an entry into the Andean world. In sketching the world of Andean religious specialists from an Andean perspective, the book has to overcome a number of methodological traps—the major one being that colonial Andeans, with the exception of a very few documents from the early seventeenth century, left no written record of their world that is understood today.14 But one of the most meaningful spheres for grasping the world of Andean religious specialists during the colonial period is that of rituals centered on “instruments,” or objects, used by healers, diviners, and priests. Such objects included stones, sebo (fat), maize, coca, guinea pigs, powders, feathers, toads, certain plants, and yllas (objects of various forms; sometimes stones that resembled maize or llamas). Members of two institutions paid particular attention to the enumeration of these objects, which were considered to be “idols,” often recording their Quechua (and, sometimes, Aymara) names: the Jesuits and the visitators (or notaries) in the extirpation-­of-­idolatry campaigns in Lima. The Jesuit reports indirectly drew on insights from private confessions that were products of psychological pressure. The visitators’ records were the outcome of public confessions and persecutions that threatened the Indians with corporal punishment. And even though the Jesuits’ or visitators’

6  The power of huacas

notaries did not describe these items as explicitly as an archaeologist would do today and, unlike ethnological data on modern-­day mesas,15 often did not capture their exact place within a ritual performance, the obsessive documentation of the objects for the sake of their destruction provides many clues about cultural resistances and transformations, as these records show little influence of a Spanish interpretation. In contrast, when chroniclers, Jesuits, visitators, or notaries tried to record Andean narratives about ritual practices and performances, or to grasp an underlying intellectual foundation, Spanish concepts heavily influenced their narrative. As this book will show, most of these objects—as well as practices of Andean ritual specialists and paradigms—were not necessarily only of local or regional importance, or even of importance only for an individual Andean religious specialist. Instead, each had a long tradition, and some of the objects had long-­established symbolic meanings in various archaeological cultures or within various sociopolitical or ethnic Andean groups. These symbols and objects were embodied powers that retained a notion of sacredness and were conceptually tied to huacas.16 In examining some of these symbols and objects (such as stones, birds, villca, toads, the color white, huacanquis, yllas, bezoar stones, fat, coca), this book seeks to capture shifts in these objects over time, including their symbolic meanings and use in rituals. The first step toward that end is to decode some of these significations by carefully drawing on seventeenth-­century practices, local Andean myths, Inca history, colonial Quechua/Aymara-­Spanish dictionaries, and a close analysis of a European rendering.17 In some instances, we will look at archaeological and semiotic fields of some of the above-­ mentioned objects and symbols. The second step will be to examine how the importance of these symbols and objects changed for religious specialists during the colonial period. The book also contextualizes Andean religious specialists’ practices as they, in the representation of the Europeans, were the ones that got most heavily imprinted by a European understanding (such as communication with huacas, taking “confessions,” use of hallucinogens, fabricating figurines, healing, divination, inflicting harm). By contextualizing Andean symbols, objects, and practices in an Andean and (sometimes necessarily) Inca setting, as well as in its representation in the European discourse, Andean cultural paradigms are uncovered, layer by layer, as they were: notions of embodiment, nature, sickness, health, coexistence of culture, fertility, and social harmony.

Introduction 7

Assimilations in the realms of symbolic meanings, practices, and beliefs are particularly difficult to grasp, especially in a society that possessed many local traditions. Adding to the challenge in the case of Andean religious specialists is the variability of their practices: their rituals depended on the cultural conventions of each specific ayllu, or even on the customs of one particular individual. But as archaeologists and ethnohistorians such as John Murra and many others have shown, one of the central features of the pre-­Columbian (pre-­Inca, Andean, and Inca) world was its remarkable exchange network, which enabled goods, ideas, and symbols to travel rapidly from the coast through the Andes to the Amazon region and vice versa.18 This ease of transmission, in turn, caused many symbols and practices to be shared by different sociopolitical communities and ethnic groups.19 During Inca and colonial times, Indians were forced to move between various regions at an astonishing rate, leading to more intermingling.20 As this book argues, religious specialists relied in essence on a supralocal cosmos of pre-­ Columbian symbolism and practices, with slight regional variations. Religious specialists throughout the Andes trusted in the meaning and power of a fairly limited set of symbols, though each specialist decided individually on the arrangement of these symbols within a ritual.21 The performance thus varied. The careful employment of archaeological and ethnological evidence to scrutinize the shifts in Andean beliefs and symbolic meanings that resulted from assimilation and the contextualization of Andean practices in Andean and European contexts, and especially the European discourse on magic, is new to this volume, as is the recognition of parallel processes of assimilation between Andean, Spanish, and Creole specialists with respect to love magic, and—with respect to sympathetic magic—Afro-­Peruvian ritual specialists. Throughout the colonial period, as this book shows, religious specialists took different approaches to including symbols in their mesas and practices. As the array of sources suggests, many religious specialists (particularly those from the central and the southern highlands),22 despite changes in their social status and in their function, continued to adhere to long-­established Andean symbolic meanings and powers throughout the colonial period and beyond (even to this day, in some local traditions). In the highland regions, although the material carrier of the symbol sometimes changed over the course of the later seventeenth century—for example, hard liquor might substitute for chicha (maize beer), tobacco leaves for ground tobacco, and smoke for colored powders—its meaning and associated power did not. Often the place of

8  The power of huacas

the symbol within the ritual conveyed a symbolic meaning that seems to have been established in the distant Andean past. As this book argues, mesas and their objects in the central and southern highlands condensed the essence of Andean notions of embodiment and the holy. As I will show, during the colonial period these symbols used in rituals proved to be the last bastion of resistance against Christian evangelization. Indirectly, resistance grew out of the Andean notion of embodied powers in Andean huacas. In contrast, the colonial Andean religious specialists of the northern and central coast more rapidly adopted the symbols of the Christian church.23 Moreover, as this book shows, during the colonial period the European discourse about sympathetic magic, as well as the practices of Spanish and Afro-­Peruvian ritual specialists, affected the rituals of Andean religious specialists in both coastal and highland regions, as at different times they began to use such items as pierced toads or puppets, tobacco leaves, and spirits. Another peculiarity of the reactions of indigenous religious specialists to transcultural processes will also be investigated: especially in the highlands, religious specialists were more open to including invocations of Jesus, Mary, and the saints—and thus of something “ideal”—than to using material objects from the Christian tradition. Again, this peculiar assimilation was firmly rooted in an Andean notion of the embodiment of power. The varied responses over time and space of religious specialists to Christianity will be an important focus of this book in addressing a number of questions: In which areas did members of the various cultural traditions adopt ideas, practices, and symbols from a previously foreign culture? How and where did Europeans and Andeans allow assimilations within the concept of embodiment and the realm of the holy? In which areas did these assimilations follow a cultural logic, and in which are they instead best described by using the concept of mélanges?24 The investigation of these multiple levels of interactions between Spanish, Andean, and rudimentary Afro-­Peruvian cultures through the lens of Jesuits, ecclesiastics, and Andean religious specialists pulls together the metropolitan and local histories of the central and south‑ ern Andes, some small villages, and several Jesuit missionary outposts in colonial Peru. I concentrate (in geographic terms) on the central, south-­central, and southern Andes, making reference to the coast from modern-­day northern to southern Peru.25 As viewed by the Inca empire, this area represents the heartland of Inca Tawantinsuyo. As viewed by colonial ecclesiastics, the area under investigation includes

Introduction 9

the dioceses of Lima, Cuzco, Charcas, and Trujillo. As viewed by colonial administrators, this area was mainly identical with the Audiencia of Lima.26 I give some consideration to occurrences in the Audiencias of Quito and Charcas, but little to the Audiencia of Chile. In the terminology of Jesuit political organization, I concentrate on the province of Peru, established in 1568. I make some reference to the missionary activities among the so-­called Mojos, celebrated by Jesuits as famous hechizeros, though I largely exclude the missionary regions of Maynas in the western Amazon and of Chiquitos near Santa Cruz de la Sierra. More sparing are my explorations into the Jesuit provinces of Paraguay and Nueva Granada. Colonial chroniclers considerably simplified the diversity of different ethnic groups of the Andean peoples, but from a linguistic standpoint of colonial times this book deals with Quechua- and Aymara-­speaking Indians.27 These categories embrace a considerable number of so-­called ethnic groups of the Inca and colonial era, including, among others, the Chanca, Vilca, Collagua, Chachapoya, Huamachuco, Conchuco, Chinchaycocha, Yauyo, Lupa, Cana, Canchi, Aymará, Sora, Yanahuara, Omasuyu, Atabillo, and Huanca.28 This history of the Andean-­Christian dialogue requires at once a transatlantic and local perspective, as well as a careful conceptualization. Investigations into the history of both European and Andean religion and science, into their medical knowledge and practices, and into early modern European natural philosophy are all necessary. Some scholars familiar with the complexities of Peruvian history may view writing such a book as sheer intellectual hubris. Others may question the utility of such a broad perspective, arguing that only a microhistorical approach—centering on one local tradition—can render valuable insights into the idiosyncrasies of these transcultural dynamics between Andeans and Christians.29 Yet if we are to reconstruct assimilations, changes, and resistances within Andean ritual practices and within the world of Andean religious specialists, we have to deal with the limitations of the available colonial sources. Unfortunately, they do not allow us to trace continuities and discontinuities in religious specialists’ rituals and beliefs within a certain geographic area, or even for a particular individual. An individual with his or her ritual appears—perhaps in only a glimpse—on the surface of history, and then is lost again in its unrecorded depths. Sometimes Spaniards revisited certain villages and added to the existing written record, but in most cases these new reports concerned other individuals, other huacas, and other rituals. And at least for the beginning of the early sixteenth cen-

10  The power of huacas

tury (and often beyond)—despite all the differences between Andean religious practices, rituals, and concepts of local origin—they can be clearly distinguished from the Christian rituals and concepts that missionaries, priests, and conquistadors tried to communicate to Andeans. In the beginning, Christianity is thus distinct from local Andean religions. This distinction is a necessary heuristic tool to discern assimilations, changes, and resistances—engagements that were mutual. In seeking to reconstruct these differences, and given the nature of the available sources, the book merges several local Andean traditions, almost in a macroperspective, to investigate their differences with Christianity. Only in this context does it mention an “Andean logic” and “Andean paradigms.” I hope to convince my readers that data from these various areas, cultural groupings, and different fields of knowledge are not arbitrarily lumped together, but ultimately join into a coherent conceptual framework that reveals the idiosyncrasies of the encounter of different cultures.

The organization of this book This book is mainly about discourses and their evolution. At the same time, it is about practices, as it examines their changes. Its investigation covers much of the colonial period—that is, from the early 1540s to the late eighteenth century—and the choice of time frame is not arbitrary. During the colonial period, the church, civil authorities, and especially the Jesuits turned hechizería into a public issue. After 1800, the sources use a different language in discussing hechizería and healers. By then, the often ferocious, puzzling, concerned, and stirring tone that sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century sources employed when talking about indigenous, Creole, mestizo, and mulatto forms of hechi­ zería and healing practices had all but disappeared. Within this time frame, the dialectic that evolved between Andean religious specialists and Christian (especially Jesuit) priests dictates the book’s organization; that is, the book in its structure tries to capture responses of Andeans to European actions and arguments and vice versa. The book at large is chronologically arranged, but in the attempt to get at Andean notions it is often requisite to introduce flashbacks within single chapters. Moreover, the book depends on European representations but dismantles them layer by layer so as to get to an understanding of Andean beliefs. At the end, the book weaves together the different strands of

Introduction 11

contexts in which the history of Andean religious specialists, their beliefs, and practices was placed. None of the existing frameworks in the wide range of scholarship consulted on the relationship between religion and “magic” proved adequate.30 At the end of this introduction I provide an overview of basic sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century Spanish assumptions regarding the concept of hechizería. Over the course of the book I show how this sixteenth-­century, basically medieval notion of hechizería changed. In chapter 1, I jump directly into the seventeenth century and show the urgency Jesuits and others felt in making Andean religious specialists confess in order to liberate Andean souls and lands from the grip of the demon and to outwit the Andean hechizeros, whom they viewed as rivals. By trying to (re)define alleged Andean canons of sins, these authors collected—indirectly, en passant, and detached from the individual sinner—information on rituals and on the standing of ritual specialists in Andean society as they informed the annual letters. Together with the avowals of Andean suspects in the legal framework of ecclesiastical visitation processes, those turned out to be valuable documents about colonial Andean rituals. From an Andean perspective, these catalogs of sins reveal the notion and centrality of sickness for the well-­ being of Andean society during Inca times; a notion—as will be shown in chapter 2—that acquired a new quality due to the European conquest. From a European perspective, Spaniards in those times were still interested in highlighting similarities between Andean and Christian religion in an attempt to accommodate Christianity to Andean converts. Chapter 2 takes a retrospective look into the sixteenth century to discuss how and why the issue of hechizería gained momentum in colonial society in the first place. The chapter discusses the links between the first documented Andean response of religious specialists to Christianity in the so-­called Taki Onkoy rebellion, Viceroy Toledo’s and Albornoz’s approaches to idolatry extirpation, and the execution of the last insurgent Inca, Tupac Amaru. As the Andeans presented Spanish presence as a new kind of sickness, and as the religious specialists’ argument in favor of two “republics” (another colonial Andean parameter) threatened Spanish political ambitions, Viceroy Toledo wanted to impose capital punishment for the teachers of Andean hechizerías; before long, this move was put on hold by the Jesuits, who soon after their arrival managed to gain political prominence in colonial Peru. The Jesuits ultimately became the ideologues behind the Peruvian discourse on hechizería in the archdiocese of Lima, as well as in their missions, until

12  The power of huacas

the second half of the seventeenth century. Civil authorities regained prime responsibility for a newly understood business of hechizería only during the latter half of the eighteenth century (as will be shown in chapter 8). Chapter 3 reconstructs key Andean notions about transformation, birds, stones, embodiment, huacas, and the necessity of active commemoration of the power of huacas as a precondition for the functioning of Andean society—beliefs that came under acute threat due to the conversions of Andean commoners to Christianity. This chapter also analyzes the Andean belief in the limits of the powers of Andean religious specialists, and how they were distinguished from the power of huacas, thereby showing that the prime task of an Andean religious specialist in early colonial times was to ensure and restore life with the help of huacas. It was on this fundamental level of what constituted the Andean concept of embodiment and the interrelated Andean concept of nature that a lack of understanding between Andeans and Christians with respect to notions of the preter- and supernatural, nature, and sickness was rooted. This chapter thus lays the groundwork for understanding the organizational principle of embodiment in the Andean world during early and, in many respects, as will be shown later, throughout colonial times. Only on the basis of this and the other principles mentioned above can we question, understand, and measure the impact of assimilations on the Andean world. In chapter 4, I show how Christians in the archdiocese of Lima as well as in Jesuit missions, as both Andean religious specialists and commoners responded to evangelization, slowly sharpened their ideological tools and their methods of persecution. Andeans who were first thought to have been the victims of the devil, to whom they spoke in stones, became the willful agents of the devil and made him enter idols. I add to existing accounts of this particular aspect of history31 the evidence of interconnectedness with the European discourse on magic, even in its earliest beginnings, and evidence that this trend simultaneously depended on and produced a parallel development: the convergence of the discourse on indigenous belief with the discourse on mulatto, Creole, and Spanish (and thus non-­Andean) hechizeros and witches. The representation of the Andean religious specialist within this discourse not only afflicted the lives of many, but also changed the perception of Andean religious specialists through Andean commoners and thus contributes to our understanding of why and how changes occurred. The chapter ends by discussing the impact of this discourse beyond the archdiocese of Lima, especially in Jesuit missions. In chapter 5, I enter the spheres of Andean commoners

Introduction 13

and religious specialists to discuss their respective assimilations of and resistances to Catholicism, arguing that there were at least three “republics” during colonial times. For Andean religious specialists of the central and southern Andes, even though their role in society had changed and they worked clandestinely, assimilations never replaced Andean symbolic meanings and challenged but did not alter the concept of embodiment, and Catholic objects were not incorporated into southern Andean rituals. Therefore, along the lines of the Andean notion of embodiment, adopting Christian notions proved for some Andean religious specialists simpler than the adoption of objects. When Jesuits saw this resilience and, above all, became more critical about their order’s own evangelization methods and the perceived failure of a forceful persecution of Andean religious specialists, they resorted to different approaches. In part, they were willing to modify their own missionary strategies and symbols so as to disempower Andean religious specialists. Chapter 6 continues with the Andean perspective, discussing the function and structure of Andean rituals during the seventeenth century and providing insights into the Andean notion of sickness and healing rituals performed by ritual specialists from the central Andes (to the extent that the sources allow). The role of healers, which has always been fundamental to the role of Andean religious specialists in precolonial and early colonial Andean society, became the official profile of Andean religious specialists, one result of previous persecutions. It will be argued that many Andean ritual specialists continued to adhere to a notion of sickness that required a sacred geography in the lands they inhabited and required them to carry the sacred geography of Andean huacas in the minds and bags of Andean religious specialists, thereby maintaining an early colonial Andean notion of embodiment and of sickness despite assimilations. The Andean vision of two “republics,” which had already been formulated in times of the Taki Onkoy movement was now projected into the realm of sicknesses and healings and the competence of Andean versus Spanish healers. For some, the Incas rose to guarantors of health. Yet the role of Andean religious specialists, as will be shown in chapter 7, continued to change. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century discourse on hechizería with its many facets, unfolded up to here, and interactions between Afro-­ Peruvian and Creole and Andean religious specialists challenged an Andean understanding of nature and fostered the introduction of a notion of sympathetic magic, challenging for the first time most radically the Andean concepts of natural processes. Simultaneously, the

14  The power of huacas

notion of sympathetic magic changed the way evil was believed to be inflicted during Inca times (and, for others, still valid during colonial times) and the way Andeans thought that evil was brought into the world (something that is also shown in chapter 3). By way of the fusion of concepts and symbols (such as evil harm and the symbol of toads) and practices (such as piercing puppets or toads) in instances related to sympathetic magic changed once more the role of Andean religious specialists in their society. Increasingly, they were sought after as protectors against evil as well as masters of it. Finally, in chapter 8, turning to the evolution of the Andean-­Christian transcultural dynamics beyond the late seventeenth century, and after having analyzed how fundamental Andean principles (such as sickness, embodiment, a belief in huacas and the commemoration of their powers, and the vision of the separation of two cultures) dictated reactions of either assimilation or resistance to transcultural influxes, I show how the Jesuit interest in hechi­ zería was replaced both by a new kind of naturalism and, framed in the words of the European discourse on magic, by an interest in natural and technical magic. Criticism of demonology was introduced into the Andes indirectly via the reception of Athanasius Kircher’s writings on technical magic. Nationwide interest in indigenous hechizeros dwin‑ dled, and it flared up again only in the provinces in contexts that exhibited a notion of hechizería that was new—different from the one that had dominated late sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century discourse— and enforced by different agents: no longer the Jesuits, but now civil institutions and a local clergy under the tutelage of local bishops (Arequipa, Quito, Cuzco, and Cajamarca), and enforced for different ends: no longer for the salvation of “barbarian territories” or for the sake of “two republics,” but for social peace and cultural homogenization in Creole society, and as a response to a new kind of Andean ritual specialist, one that was a product of colonial encounters. Throughout the book I have been careful in my use of language to avoid Eurocentrism, “essentialism,” and other red flags that scholars— sometimes rightly, sometimes polemically—have waved at those entering the history of the colonial world.32 Despite talk of the religious specialist or the Spaniards or the church, we should never forget that alternative voices existed in every sector of society. Whenever the book speaks of the Andean highland ritual specialist, this implies the majority of them but never all. Just as the worlds of indigenous religious specialists varied, the Spanish church also encompassed great diversity. In fact, the persecution of hechizeros was often shaped largely by t