Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World

María Jesús Zamora Calvo, Anne J. Cruz, María Jesús Zamora Calvo

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807176450
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World investigates the mystery and unease surrounding the issue of women called before the Inquisition in Spain and its colonial territories in the Americas, including Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. Edited by María Jesús Zamora Calvo, this collection gathers innovative scholarship that considers how the Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned as a closed, secret world defined by patriarchal hierarchy and grounded in misogynistic standards.Ten essays present portraits of women who, under accusations as diverse as witchcraft, bigamy, false beatitude, and heresy, faced the Spanish and New World Inquisitions to account for their lives. Each essay draws on the documentary record of trials, confessions, letters, diaries, and other primary materials. Focusing on individual cases of women brought before the Inquisition, the authors study their subjects' social status, particularize their motivations, determine the characteristics of their prosecution, and deduce the reasons used to justify violence against them. With their subjection of women to imprisonment, interrogation, and judgment, these cases display at their core a specter of contempt, humiliation, silencing, and denial of feminine selfhood. The contributors include specialists in the early modern period from multiple disciplines, encompassing literature, language, translation, literary theory, history, law, iconography, and anthropology.By considering both the women themselves and the Inquisition as an institution, this collection works to uncover stories, lives, and cultural practices that for centuries have dwelled in obscurity.

II

WOMEN

AND THE

INQUISITION

IN THE

NEW WORLD

Toward an Inquisitorial History
of Binding Spells or Ligatures

The Case against María de la Concepción,
a Gypsy in New Spain

ALBERTO ORTIZ

And those [books] wherein there are spells, sorcery, omens, auspices, cursed incantations, and superstitions banned by the aforementioned index, under the censures and punishments contained therein, are forbidden to be read or in any way retained by all Christians, who should turn them over to the bishops and locals, or present and remand them to the inquisitors.

Y aquellos, en que haya sortilegios, hechicerías, agüeros, auspicios, malditas encantaciones, y supersticiones en el dicho índice vedados, debajo de las censuras y penas en él contenidas leerse de cualquier cristiano, o de alguna manera detenerlos, debiendo darlos a los obispos, y a los ordinarios de los lugares, o presentarlos, y consignarlos a los dichos inquisidores.

—PAPAL BULL OF POPE SIXTUS V, 1586

The Workings of the Enchantment Called
Amarre or Ligadura (Ligature)

Throughout the history of human culture, part of the collective imagination has endowed language with alleged magical abilities. Special expressions are used to exert a chimerical power at a distance by one person over another, be it to injure, heal, convince, reject, drive away, or attract. These are usually short texts, wishful prayers that are meant to command express lyrical and emotional attributes. This magical and superstitious tradition entails a hermetic immanence of language, a secret power from beyond this earth encouraged or revealed through precise words, recited at the same time that complex rituals are performed. In the field of semantics of western magic, the speech forms have been called incantations, conjurations, and spells, among other commonly accepted terms. The catalog of these magical formulations is very broad, despite their brevity and reiterated format, thanks to the hundreds of years during which this western magical thought has been accumulated, repeated, adapted, and renewed. Among such formulas those deployed for erotic purposes stand out, in accordance with their own superstitious tradition.

From Athens, third century CE, comes the following fragment of a magical prayer:

[. . .] Powerful Beptu, I deliver to you Leosthenes and Peios, who frequent Juliana, to whom Marcia gave birth, so you may freeze them and their intentions, so that they may not speak to each other or walk together, take a seat at Juliana’s brothel, or send messages to Juliana, or to Leosthenes or Peios. And also freeze those who bring them together in your gloomy atmosphere. Chain them to the unilluminated atmosphere of oblivion, freeze them, and do not allow Proclus, Leosthenes or Peios to have sexual intercourse. (López Jimeno 2001, 90)1

Here the utterance comes from a woman. By contrast, the following example of a formulaic mandate, written during the fourth century CE, seems to be designed for male use:

Arise to serve me, whoever you may be, male or female, and go forth to every place, down every path, into every dwelling, and bring and bind her. Induce (insert the name of the petitioner’s loved one), whose identity you possess, to love me (insert the name of the petitioner), son of (the petitioner’s father); that she not have sex either from the front or from behind, or seek pleasure with any other man but me (the petitioner). Make it so that she may not eat, drink, love, suffer, or enjoy health; that she may not be able to sleep without me (the petitioner); because I conjure you, by the name of the most terrible and fearsome, whose name when pronounced will open up the earth, whose terrible name when heard will fill demons with panic, whose name when heard will destroy the rivers and stones.

I conjure you, demon of death, [. . .] that on the contrary, you drag (the petitioner’s loved one) by her hair, her insides, her soul, toward me, (the petitioner), at every moment of her life, night and day, until at last she comes to me (the petitioner), and remains inseparably united with me (the petitioner). (Luck 1995, 131)2

For practical purposes for the facilitator or conjurer and the concerned complainant or petitioner, conjurations such as the previous ones do not employ gender. They are prefabricated like a mold; a one-size-fits-all format or a general template to which the names of the petitioner and the target are to be inserted. Therefore, in the first example, a restraining spell, it would not be an exaggeration to state that the names of the targets, the regular attendants to Juliana’s brothel, Leosthenes and Peios, were added in later. The “freezing” referred to implies the incapacity to exercise any sexual activity with other women besides the issuer. The second magical conjuration exhibits a format that in fact still exists in books of love magic or grimoires to this day: the main statement remains basically the same and it is only necessary to add the names of each suitor and desired person for each petition.

There is a notoriously strong intentional charge from the petitioner, as he or she aims to achieve—without the protocol of formal courtship, family pact, religious license, mutual agreement, or even courteous romancing—total domination of another’s affections, the desired one, who has neither voice nor decision in the face of the supposed strength of the amatory spell. The spell, for its part, expresses a demand for control, thus becoming utilitarian and turning the subjectivity of amatory feeling into a pragmatic matter. At the center of its meaning is the forced exclusivity, which the other must obey without hesitation. It is not only about achieving love through the magical verbal spell; it is just as important to prevent the desired person from making contact with one’s competitors or obtaining pleasure from other bodies. Hence the insistent craving for exclusivity, which comes from possessive demand and works within the magical illusion for the hope of nullifying the other’s will and imposing the spell caster’s personal and intimate desire.

This seemingly delusional demand for erotic control, with the pretense of exclusivity over the body of the desired subject, by means of a conjuring formula and, at the same time, precluding the pleasant exchange in amatory affairs with other people, is called ligadura (ligature), atadura (tether), or amarre (binding spell); these terms accord with the defining lexicon of magical semantics described and censored by demonologists in the treatises that dealt with magic, the devil, and witchcraft that were written in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The terms may be used as synonyms; the differences between them are very minor and their meanings are regularly confused. One of those small differences lies in ligadura being often mentioned in cases and discussions regarding magical involvement with an overtly sexual nature, whereas the term amarre appears repeatedly in inquisitorial trials occurring in New Spain: “the ligadura is a state of impotence, produced by sorcery, which is generally carried out by making knots in threads or skeins [licia in Latin] and also by administering potions” (Robbins 1991, 370).3

If anything characterized the early modern myth of witchcraft it was an ability to increase, or better said, overflow its own narrative boundaries. The editorial and legal success of scholarly treatises, written to denounce and combat a supposed witch infestation within Christian villages, involved inserting lurid details in the popular imaginary surrounding devil worship and the threats to Christian morality and order.

Amatory bonding had taken place in medieval love stories, as exemplified in the theater, chivalric romances, poems, and novels, by way of a sensual enchantment, far removed from diabolical overtones, although necessarily close to erotic magic. Such an idea of love was typical of court poetry and exercised amidst the codes of the perfect gentleman and the courtier lover. Tristan and Isolde and Calisto and Melibea are archetypal examples from medieval literature.4 The passionate bond, then, depended on an amatory case acknowledged by literature: the philocaptio.

Witchcraft inherited from the inquisitorial jurisdiction this possibility of influencing human passion as, in the end, erotic love was seen as a disease, an outburst, an alienation, a violence against reasoning, a detour from the straight path traced by God and His representatives. Therefore, all manifestations of overwhelming, violent passions, subject to sensuality, were abhorred and associated with sins because they drove the subject away from spiritual purification and closer to the corruption of the body. In addition, Church doctrine stated that if human flaws caused greater evils and culminated in capital sins such as vanity, pride, and lust, amid scandal and immorality, they must be fostered by the lord of lust, the devil.

Legal treatises helped to modify the perspective of love, already constantly related to the notions of sin and heresy. El manual de los inquisidores (The Inquisitors’ Manual), written circa 1376...