Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire

Mina García Soormally

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781607328001
• eBook ISBN: 9781607328018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An ethnohistory on the spiritual and governmental conquest of the indigenous people in colonial Mexico, Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire examines the role played by the shifting concept of idolatry in the conquest of the Americas, as well as its relation to the subsequent construction of imperial power and hegemony.
 
Contrasting readings of evangelization plays and chronicles from the Indies and legislation and literature produced in Spain, author Mina García Soormally places theoretical analysis of state formation in Colonial Latin America within the historical context. The conquest of America was presented, in its first instances, as a virtual extension of the Reconquista, which had taken place in Spain since 711, during which Spaniards fought to build an empire based in part on religious discrimination. The fight against the "heathens" (Moors and Jews) provided the experience and mindset to practice the repression of the other, making Spain a cultural laboratory that was transported across the Atlantic Ocean.
 
Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire is a wide-ranging explication of religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy during Spain's medieval and early modern period as they relate to idolatry, with analysis of events that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic. The book contributes to the growing field of transatlantic studies and explores the redefinition that took place in Europe and in the colonies.
 

1

The Limits of Idolatry

DOI: 10.5876/9781607328018.c001

Downtown is packed. There are thousands of chairs aligned all over the city, and the population has doubled again this year. As the nazarenos process, the spectators eat their sandwiches and enjoy the parade. Suddenly, silence takes over the street as the first image shows up far, far away. The marching bands stop playing, and the sandwiches find their way back into the plastic bags as we all make an effort to see over everybody’s heads. A white shadow approaches and, as it comes closer, the spectators become practitioners, a category that includes everybody, if only this week. The sepulchral silence is suddenly broken as a loud applause fills the air.

“Está andando, está andando!”1—somebody screams as he follows the wave in the tunic of the image as it is rocked right in front of us. And el Cautivo passes by, in his white robe, followed by an estimated 5,000 people who rely on this image to heal a relative, get out of bankruptcy, or even pass final exams, since nothing is too difficult for this image of Christ which is said to be the most miraculous one in the Holy week in Málaga.2 Not the ones in front or behind, not the ones still to come in the following days (it is only Monday of Holy Week), but this very one, this image that seems to walk over the crowd. And, what to say about the images of the Virgin, processed all over the city followed by people screaming”: “¡Guapa!”?

These scenes are repeated year after year in southern Spain where, for a week, the general public establishes a relationship with these figures that only a small percentage maintains during the rest of the year. The images become real. They are cared for, dressed, and adorned with special devotion. They walk the streets; they become the object of our prayers and songs, of our devotion, our affection and the source of our rivalries, since the member of the other cofradías will always say that their images are the best looking this year. And, in the view of this spectacle that forms part of some of my dearest memories, I wonder: am I an idolater? Is this paganism happening in the core of the very Catholic Spain? What would Erasmus, Luther, or Calvin say if they saw this? How would Spaniards have reacted if, instead of the Virgen del Rocío it had been Pachamama on that throne; that is, if the Incas were celebrating like this? Would they have been punished for idolatry? And if so, why are we not?

The goal of this chapter is to offer a corpus of the most necessary definitions when dealing with idolatry in the context of the cultural encounter between the Spaniards and the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, and I aim to answer a number of simple but underexplored questions: What is heresy? What is its use in the period around the “discovery” of America?3 How is this concept transformed because of the “discovery”? What is the relationship between heresy and idolatry? What is the significance of the concept of “idolatry” in Europe in the period around the “discovery”? How was it used and to whom did it refer? To anticipate my conclusion, I argue that idolatry does not have a single meaning and, though I make an effort to offer my own definition in relation to the context of colonial Mexico in the moment of the first encounter with the Spanish invaders, I really want to emphasize the polyvalent nature of the concept, a feature that makes it possible to be used and redefined constantly, in very different instances and contexts. It is a malleable concept and so are its applications, making it a very interesting point of reference that crosses the main debates of the period. Therefore, in my opinion, recovering this concept not only speaks about some crucial behavior that was taking place in a particular space and time, but it is also embedded in the process of colonization itself. It refers both to the nature of the “Indians” and to that of their colonizers, to the Catholic understanding of the nature of God himself and his worst enemy, and reaches very deeply into the fundamental mechanisms of hegemony and coloniality.4

True versus False Religion

Christianity has tried to define what is true versus false religion, what is accepted or not and, therefore, who belongs and who doesn’t, setting the boundaries for what is considered the norm in a particular context, while encoding beliefs and behavior in everyday life. Following this tradition, Pedro Ciruelo (1470–1548)—professor of theology, author of A Treatise Reproving all Superstitions and Forms of Witchcraft (1538), and teacher to King Phillip II of Spain—when discussing the meaning of false doctrine wrote that “what superstitions teach is false and deceitful and it is not the teaching of God, who abhors superstitions: rather, it is the devil, the father of lies (as Christ said), who takes delight in vain superstitions” (1977: 90–91). But this idea was completed by including a component of inclusiveness/exclusiveness that makes the doctrine the perfect instrument to appeal to the right people: “That witchcraft and superstition deserve heavy punishment both from the prelates and by civil judges, as well as expulsion from the lands of Christian peoples as very evil and poisonous things which are known to be extremely prejudicial to the honor of God and very dangerous and hazardous for Christian souls, will be seen as a certainty. In the end, they draw down the anger of God upon the nations, cities and villages where they are tolerated” (77).

This way the root of his concept of true religion is presented at the same time that he demonizes any ritual not sanctioned by the Catholic Church, establishing who, in his point of view, is in or out, who belongs to it and who does not. But as Christianity expanded and it came in contact with other peoples and other forms of worshipping, it became impossible to keep realities so neatly divided into what was true or false doctrine, and acceptable levels of syncretism seemed a much more difficult goal to attain.5 Christian religion and its practice thus resulted in an ever-changing reality, playing differently in diverse circumstances and constantly defining and rearticulating the reality that it was trying to label. This process of encountering the other normally results in the coexistence of a multilayered religiosity that combines orthodox Christian beliefs together with pre-Christian rituals; that is, with other behaviors and beliefs that the Christian dogma would end up labeling as “superstition,” “heresy,” “idolatry,” and so on. This dichotomy—which can be seen as an expected differentiation between an “official religion,” defended by the Christian authorities, and a “popular religion” that collects the excess—the native rituals not contemplated by the Christian norm, has not always coexisted in peace but rather has resulted in animosity and persecution.6

Heresy and idolatry are two concepts that, throughout history, have determined the life and, more accurately, the death of many individuals in Europe and its colonies. Understood differently in different parts of the world at different times, these two concepts were closely interwoven in the discourses about imperialism and construction of hegemony that were developing in the times around the “discovery” of America, a period when the position relative to these terms could close the distance between life and death.

But what exactly is heresy, according to Catholic dogma? What are the characteristics that make it unique? What is the relationship between heresy, apostasy and idolatry? What was its use in the period around the “discovery” of America? And how was this concept transformed because of the “discovery”? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer below.

Etymologically, the term heresy means choice; that is, it refers to the possibility of choosing to believe in things other than what a particular faith establishes and, therefore, in the eyes of that established faith, heresy is seen as erroneous in such a way that the believers should try to separate themselves from the heretic and that the church, as a whole, ought to create a distance from all who choose differently (Eimeric and Peña 1983: 57). It is important to take into account that we are not talking about a decided abandonment of a particular religion but rather a deviation in some aspects of that faith, a choice about what dogmas to believe in and what not within that religion. This is, therefore, the main difference between “apostasy” and “heresy” in that whereby the believer accepts the whole deposit of dogmas as proposed by the church, the heretic accepts only the parts of it that meet his own approval, and the apostate abandons the faith altogether. Ciruelo relates these terms when talking about the ill influence of spells, or ensalmos:

Any man or woman who seeks a cure through spells tacitly accepts a return to health with the aid of the devil and thus makes a pact of friendship with the enemy of God and man. This pact is a most serious sin of idolatry; it violates the first commandment. It is also apostasy from the virtue of Christian religion sealed at baptism. Apostasy calls down the wrath and anger of God upon such an individual and his household. One day he will experience punishment at God’s hand, and that punishment will be an affliction much greater than the one healed by the devil by means of the lips and hands of the enchanter. (208, my emphasis)

Nevertheless, in all cases, for these deviations to take place it is necessary that the heretic be a previous believer; that is, he needs to belong to structured religion such as the Catholic Church before he can distance himself from it; in other words, in this case baptism becomes a necessary requirement for becoming a heretic and also the main ingredient that differentiates heretics from idolaters, as understood in the New World, since the latter had not been baptized when they worshipped a god other than the Catholic one and, therefore, could not choose to deviate from the doctrine.

This emphasis on choice has been stressed in the Catholic inquisitorial literature for a long time, and Nicholas Eimeric’s Directorium Inquisitorum (1376) dwells heavily on it. Eimeric (1320–1399) was a Catalan Roman Catholic theologian and inquisitor general of the Inquisition of the Crown of Aragón in the latter half of the fourteenth century. In his best-known work, the Directorium Inquisitorum, he placed the heretic between the total sum of truths revealed in the true doctrine and the perverse and erroneous version of it chosen by the sinner (Eimeric and Peña 57). Heresy, thus, is presented as an intellectual error perhaps motivated by pride or exaggerated trust in one’s own insight, the illusions of religious purity, the attractiveness of political or ecclesiastical power, or the relationship with material interests and personal status. According to Eimeric, it isolates the person or group that falls in it and weakens the community as well as the church that has to fight it. The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the most famous treatise against heresy and witchcraft and the most widely circulated all over the Catholic world, shares this point of view and defines heresy, in relation to witchcraft, as the infidelity carried out by a person already baptized (“Quienes tratan de inducir a otros a realizar tales maravillas de malvada índole son llamados brujos o brujas. Y como la infidelidad en una persona bautizada se denomina técnicamente herejía, esas personas son lisa y llanamente herejes”7 (Kramer and Sprenger 1975: 21), stressing the intellectual aspect of heresy and the importance of free will after baptism in this religious deviation.8

But this is not necessarily true in all cases, and in other contexts heresy is devoid of that emphasis on free choice and becomes, instead, the result of ignorance of the true creed, erroneous judgment, or imperfect apprehension and understanding of dogmas, leaving pride to one side to simply becoming the victim of a misinterpretation and not an agent of deviation or religious disagreement. A situation like this is what can be said to have occurred in the Spanish colonies in America where, once baptized, the Indians developed a mixture of their native rituals and the newly learned ceremonies of the Catholic cult, resulting in a syncretic combination that was considered, by the Spaniards, heretical. But, whereas in these cases preaching and deeper understanding of the doctrine could potentially alter and eventually eliminate the mixture, in the case of heresy by pride, obstinate denial or rejection of some aspects of the creed seem to be much more difficult to eradicate and can even turn into the seeds of schism.

Because of its main characteristic—that is, introducing doubt within the dogmas of an established church—heresy has frequently been punished with the total expulsion of the subject from that religion; that is, with permanent Catholic excommunication and, in most cases, the confiscation of his possessions.

But there was a time when even dreaming about things contrary to the Catholic religion was enough to be considered an infidel, since it was believed that it was the Devil himself who put these thoughts in the minds of the already confused practitioner. Therefore, whoever thought of things such as witches flying was just as guilty as if they had committed a heresy themselves and was as heretical as the flying witches they had imagined. This text, then, provided no defense for those accused of imagining heresies since who can prove what one does or does not think about? But, at the same time, this text reduced all the witches’ universe, so in vogue at the time (Sabbaths, night flights, metamorphosis, etc.) to mere illusions, imaginations engineered by the Devil with no existence beyond the heretic’s mind.

This attitude of fear and persecution was helped along by Pope John XXII, who, fearing himself victim of maleficia, decided to give the inquisitors in Toulouse and Carcassonne an incentive to fight diabolic acts and worked on a number of letters and decrees (in 1323, 1326, 1327, and 1331) in which he pushed for the prosecution of these crimes against the Catholic doctrine. Undoubtedly, one of the main measures that were attributed to this pope was contained in the bull published in 1318 in which he allowed, for the first time, the trial of dead heretics who, from then on, would be tried in effigy and submitted to the same treatment as their living equivalents.

But if that were not enough, in 1326, Pope John XXII published his bull entitled Super Illius Specula, a document in which he asserts the reality of diabolic acts, making them change from the status of mere illusions, imagined or dreamed, as they had been taken since the Canon Episcopi, to become a pagan reality, something whose existence no one could deny since it had affected the pope himself (Robbins 1991: 345–46).9 Needless to say, all these facts put together in a very short span of years started an avalanche of trials against heresy in general, and witchcraft in particular, a type of heresy considered so abominable that it seemed to justify the machinery that had been created to fight it.10

But Pope John XXII was not the only one who took interest in the fight against heresy. The attempts to fight it extended long after this initiative and, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII published his Summis desiderantes affectibus in which he specifically addressed the matter. In this bull he ratified the undoubted existence of witches and Sabbaths and, therefore, recognized the need to intensify the persecution. To better develop this important task, Innocent VIII gave more jurisdictions to the inquisitors. As a result of this petition formulated in 1484, the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacobus Sprenger answered three years later with their Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of the Witches.

This work was very popular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just the period that we are looking at, the period around the imperial moment, just following the “discovery” of America. This inquisitorial handbook, supremely misogynist, follows the path started by Eimeric’s work and opposes the Canon Episcopi in the affirmation of the reality of heresy and witchcraft, especially as performed by women. It even goes on to say that since several popes had established the existence of witches, it would be heretical not to believe in it, because the negation of a reality asserted by the maximum authority of the church becomes heresy in itself. The Malleus shows the first authorized uses of torture in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Limits of Idolatry
• 2. Idolatry in New Spain and the Peninsular Laboratory
• 3. Idolatry in New Spain: Zumárraga’s Bishopric (1528–1548)
• 4. From Idolatrous to Marian: New Spain between Zumárraga and Montúfar
• 5. Conclusion
• Appendix A: Traslado de ciertas Ordenanzas fechas por el Audiencia Real insertas en una provisión sellada con el sello real
• Appendix B: Text of the Edict of Expulsion of the Spanish Jews
• Appendix C: Apostolic Visit to Toronto, to Ciudad de Guatemala and to Ciudad de México
• Appendix D: Chronology
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index