Witches, Idolaters, and Franciscans PDF

Witches, Idolaters, and Franciscans: An American Translation of European Radical Demonology
(Logroño, 1529-Hueytlalpan, 1553)

Author(s): Fabián Alejandro Campagne
Source: History of Religions, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Aug., 2004), pp. 1-35
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3519624
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Fabian Alejandro Campagne WITCHES, IDOLATERS,
AND FRANCISCANS: AN
AMERICAN TRANS-
LATION OF EUROPEAN
RADICAL DEMONOLOGY
(LOGRONO, 1529-
HUEYTLALPAN, 1553)
I. FROM LOGRONO TO HUEYTLALPAN
Hueytlalpan,1553: It has been fourteenyears since Fray Andres de Olmos

began his residence in the heart of the Totonacan region, fifty leagues
away from Mexico. The friar has resumed an intense rhythm of intellec-
tual production,which, along with his heroic efforts as a preacher,would
transform him into one of the pillars of the seraphic utopia in Nueva
Espaha. In 1547, he finishes his Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana,
the first grammar to deal with Nahuatl. At the beginning of 1552, he
finishes his Siete sermones principales sobre los siete pecados capi-
tales. And in 1553, he writes in Nahuatl his Tratado he hechicerias y
sortilegios. 1
This Tratadode hechicerias is a special work for two reasons. First, it
is considered the first text written in Mexico devoted strictly to the issue
of demonology.2 Second, instead of creating an original treatise, Olmos
devoted himself to translatingand adapting a manual published in Spain
I would like to record my profounddebt to Jos6 Emilio Burucdafor his inspirationin the
early days of my researchprojects.
1
Georges Baudot, Utopia e historia en Mexico: Los primeros cronistas de la civilizacion
mexicana (1520-1569) (Madrid:Espasa-Calpe, 1983), pp. 146-50.
2 Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The
Impact of Diabolism in New
Spain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 25.
? 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0018-2710/2004/4401-0001$10.00
2 Witches, Idolaters, Franciscans
many years before by anotherfranciscanfriar:Martinde Castafiega'sTra-

tado de las superticiones y hechizerias (Logroiio, 1529).3
The intellectual strategy of Olmos is a clear exception in the history of
evangelization in the New World. The authorsof catechisms, confessors'
manuals, and homiletic collections could seldom find European works
suitable for providing an explicit matrix for their American manuals. The
uncompromisingnovelty of the continent demanded original creations.4
Therefore, the effort carriedout by Olmos provides the historian with the
rare privilege to observe, in an almost experimental way, the tensions to
which 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.5In fact, in the few cases in which they are considered together,
specialists tend to believe that Olmos's treatise follows Castafiega's
original without substantialchanges.6However, the comparativeanalysis
of both texts demonstratesthe opposite thesis: in his effort to adapt and
translate,Olmos introducedprofound alterationsin the original text. His
Tratadode hechicerias is a radically new work. Upon reading his Span-
ish source, it becomes clear that fray Andres developed his own discourse,
which strikingly diverges from the radical Europeandemonology that at
first seemed to have inspired him.
II. FRAY MARTIN, FRAY ANDRES

Fray Martin de Castaiega is definitely a mysterious person. His name
would have been forgotten but for his Tratado de las supersticiones y
hechizerias, whose title page and preface provide most of his known bio-
graphical facts. Strangely enough, none of the histories edited by the
Franciscan order in the sixteenth and seventeenth century provide data
about him. Fray Pedro de Salazar, who in 1612 in Madrid published
Coronica y historia de la fundacion y progreso de la provincia de Castilla
de la Orden de San Francisco, does not mention Castafiegaat all.7
3 The
complete title as it appearson the title page is Tratadomuy sotil y bienfundodo 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
pdches du Nouveau Monde: Les manuels pour la confession des
Indiens, XVIe-XVIIesiecle (Paris:Albin Michel, 1993), p. 43.
5 The exception is Daniel Mosquera,who limits his comparisonto the discursive and rhe-
torical aspects of both texts. See Daniel 0. Mosquera, "Motolinfa, Olmos and the Staging
of the Devil in Sixteenth-CenturyNew Spain" (Ph.D. diss., WashingtonUniversity, 1998),
pp. 183-93.
6 See Baudot, Utopia e historia, pp. 133, 243-44, 246; Cervantes,p. 25.
7
Agustin G. de Amezda, "Pr6logo,"in Tratadode las supersticiones y hechicerias del
R. P. Fray Martinde Castaiega, ed. Agustin G. de Amezua (Madrid:Sociedad de Bibli6filos
Espafioles, 1946), p. viii.
History of Religions 3
We know, nevertheless, that this Franciscan spent most of his life in

Burgos and in the Basque country. In 1516, he was released by Leo X
from an inquisitorial prison where he had been confined because of his
public defense of a member of the order condemned by the Holy Office.
In 1531, Castafiegaappearedas guardian of the Conventode Santa Maria
de Jesus, in Navarrete;twenty-four years later, we find him as guardian
of the monastery of Aranzazu, in Guipuzcoa.8
Most of Castafiega's fame results from the publication of his manual
one year before Pedro Ciruelo's Reprobacion de las supersticiones y
hechizerias (Alcala de Henares, 1530), the most famous treatise of the
Spanish literature of superstition.9This circumstance suffices to cause
modern 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 remarkableeditorial success, the Tratado
by Castaniegawas not reprinted until the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury.10Whereas at present there are many samples of Ciruelo's work,
Castafiega's book is considered by Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo to be
"extremelyrare."11
Martin de Castafiega's treatise was commissioned by don Alonso de
Castilla, bishop of Calahorra y la Calzada, who paid for the edition out
of his own pocket. In the Provision, at the beginning of the book, the prel-
ate described the Franciscan as a "theologian and philosopher of great
subtlety, and a preacherof the Holy Office assigned by His Majesty."12In
his inquisitorialposition, Castafiegamust have been involved in the witch-
craft enquiries that affected Navarra and the Basque Country between
1525 and 1527. In his book, Castafiega assigns himself the role of eye-
witness to the events. There is no doubt that the Tratadode las super-
sticiones has a direct relationship with these early persecutions in the
farthestnorth 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 Castafiega, see Tratadode las supersticiones y he-
chicerias de Fray Martinde Castaiega, ed. JuanRobertoMuro Abad (Logrofio:Institutode
Estudios Riojanos, 1994).
9 Up to now there are still discussions about the date of the first edition of Ciruelo's Rep-
robaci6n. See Ver6nica Mateo Ripoll, "Sobre una edici6n ignota de la Reprobaci6n de su-
persticiones del maestro Ciruelo,"Dynamis 22 (2002): 437-59.
10The third modem edition, besides those carriedout by the Sociedad de Bibli6filos Es-
pafioles and the Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, is Fray Martinde Castafiega,Tratadode las
supersticiones y hechicerias, ed. Fabian Alejandro Campagne (Buenos Aires: Universidad
de Buenos Aires, 1997). I use this edition for quotationsthroughoutthis article.
1l Marcelino Men6ndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espaiioles (Buenos Aires:
Emec6, 1945), p. 389.
12Castaiega, p. 12: "muy artizado te6logo y fil6sofo, y predicadorpara el dicho Santo
Oficio por su majestad sefialado."
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 attributedto
witches produced perplexity among Spanish inquisitors and theologians.
One of the consequencesof these northerntrialswas the meeting of ajunta
de notables in Granadato advise the Consejo Supremode la Inquisicion
about the reality of the events attributedto the bruxas, especially the
nocturnalflight.'4 As we will see later, these witchcraft prosecutions are
the only possible contact in the biographies of our two Franciscans.
Paradoxically,Fray Andres de Olmos, polyglot and an outstandinglin-
guist, is a better-knownfigure. Fray Jer6nimo de Mendieta points out his
importanceas a chronicler, when he describes him as "the fountain from
which all streamson this matterflow."'5Olmos must have been born near
Ona, not far from Burgos, around 1480. He joined the Franciscan order
in Valladolid. In 1527, Fray Juan de Zumarraga-future first bishop of
Mexico-chose him as his assistant during a witchcraft inquiry in Vis-
caya.'6 As a consequence, Castafiega and Olmos found themselves in-
volved in the same northern witch hunt, in Navarra and in the Basque
Country, respectively. This coincidence has led to the speculation of a
possible encounter between the friars.17This meeting that could explain
why Olmos chose Castafiega's Tratado-a minor text, practically ignored
by the theologians of the time-as the source of inspiration for his own
book.18 However, this supposed meeting has never been actually con-
firmed. Nevertheless, Fray Andres's career in Castle would be brief:
when Zumarragamoved to New Spain, he took Olmos with him. On De-
cember 6, 1528, the Franciscanarrivedin Mexico-Tenochtitlan.In his re-
maining forty years he never returnedto Spain.
13 See Florencio
Idoate, La Brujeria aen Navarra y sus documentos (Pamplona: Insti-
tuci6n Principe de Viana, 1978), pp. 23-59; William Monter, La otra Inquisici6n: La In-
quisicion en la Coronade Aragdn,Navarra,el Pais Vascoy Sicilia (Barcelona:Critica, 1992),
pp. 306-10.
14 Henry Kamen, La Inquisicion Espaiola (Barcelona: Critica, 1988), pp. 275-77; Iiiaki
Reguera, La InquisicidnEspanola en el Pais Vasco (San Sebastian:Txertoa, 1983), pp. 197-
98; Henry Charles Lea, Historia de la Inquisicion Espanola, 3 vols. (Madrid: Fundaci6n
UniversitariaEspafiola, 1983), 3:605-6.
15Quoted by Baudot, Utopia e historia (n. 1 above), p. 128: "fuente de donde todos los
arroyosque de esta materiahan tratado,emanaban."
16Julio Caro Baroja, Brujeria Vasca (San Sebastian:Txertoa, 1985), pp. 52-53; Baudot,
Utopia e historia, p. 133.
17 Georges Baudot, "Introducci6n,"in Fray Andr6s de Olmos, Tratadode hechicerias y
sortilegios, ed. Georges Baudot (M6xico: UNAM, 1990), p. x.
18 Scholars record
only two quotationsfrom Castafiega'streatise throughoutthe sixteenth
century. One of these is the one by Fray Andr6s de Olmos. See Lu Ann Homza, Religious
Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
p. 183.
The list of positions held by Andres de Olmos in the Mexican plateau

is long, but he always managed to combine preaching with intellectual
production, which he conceived as an instrumentof evangelization. By
1553, Olmos was finishing a long period of residence in Hueytlalpan. In
the prologue of the Tratadode hechicerfas he acknowledged his weari-
ness and contemplateddeath: "my end is near."19He could not have been
more wrong. Between 1554 and 1568 he would carry out the titanic task
of evangelizing the inhospitable Huasteca. In spite of his age he traveled
through the whole region, where he made contact with chichimecan
groups, some of whose chiefs accepted baptism. When they raised up in
armsin 1568, Olmos-at aboutninety years of age-demanded to be taken
to the scene of the rebellion, where he preached his message for the last
time. Suffering asthma and dermatological illnesses, he died in Tampico
on October 8 of the same year.20
III. SEPARATION, TRANSLATION, AND CONVERSION

We are going back now to the moment when the intellectual biographies
of Fray Martin and Fray Andres meet, when Olmos chose Castafiega's
forgotten Tratadode las supersticiones as the inspirationfor his own Tra-
tado de hechicerias. Olmos decided then to undertakea fascinating exer-
cise of translationbetween two unique and radicallydifferentcivilizations.
During the last three millennia B.C.E.,religion appears to have func-
tioned as an importantpromoterof interculturaltranslatability.The civi-
lizations from the EasternMediterraneanand Near East compareddeities
beginning with the definition of their cosmic manifestations. Theological
onomasiology, which starts from the referent and asks for the correspon-
dent word, displaced theological semasiology, which startsfrom the word
and asks for its correspondentmeaning. The first strategy tries to per-
ceive the way in which a certain semantic unit is expressed in different
languages, thus resultingin an intrinsicallycross-culturaland interlinguis-
tic project of translation.Starting from the conviction that other peoples
worshipped the same gods, religion constituted a foundation for toler-
ance, a neutralizingprinciple of the effects of the "pseudo-speciation,"a
term coined to describe the formation of artificial subgroups within the
same biological species.21
19The
quotations I reproduce in notes are taken from Baudot's Spanish version of the
original Nahuatl text. The English translationsin the main body of the article are my trans-
lations from the Spanish. p. 4: "yo me voy llegando al fin."
20 Baudot,
Utopia e historia, pp. 158-59.
21 JanAssmann,
"TranslatingGods: Religion as a Factorof Cultural(Un)Translability,"in
The Translabilityof Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Stanford Budick and
Wolfgang Iser (Stanford,Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 25-27.
But conditions changed radically in those places where a hegemonic

culturethreatenedto absorban ethnically differentminoritygroup.In these
contexts, much like an immune reaction, a deliberate counter-identityis
generated to oppose the dominant system, a process that may be charac-
terized as second-degree or counter-distinctive pseudo-speciation. It is
under these typical conditions of resistance that religions of a new kind
appear,religions which defy the efforts of translation,which can only be
joined through conversion, and which are abandoned through apostasy.
Judaism is the paradigmaticmodel for religions of second degree.22The
most clear sign that we are in presence of a second-degree religion is the
phenomenon of conversion. As long as the possibility of intercultural
translationexists, there will be no need for conversion. A demand of this
kind will only arise when a certain religion claims the monopoly of the
supreme truth, nullifying any possibility of translation. Cosmotheistic
deities, so long as they embody the universe in its totality, possess names
with rich signifiers. On the contrary,the God of Israelrepresentsthe 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 of
communication with the other not only reflects the linguistic dimensions
of different paradigms but also the conscious strategies of the partici-
pants in the dialogue.24The translationstrategies of Christianpreachers
in the New World could not escape from these conscious limitations. The
incommensurabilitywillingly constructed by Christianity and its agents
made impossible the complete translationof the conquerors' culture into
that of the dominatedpeople. But it did not prevent preachersfrom learn-
ing the languages of the latter.25Translationthen became the most appro-
22
Ibid., p. 29.
23 Ibid., 32.
p.
24
Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Cultureof Absolutism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 215-16.
25 In its most
enlightened periods, the Churchhad the conviction that the best way to per-
suade the Jews of their mistake was to mastertheir language and sacredbooks. Transcending
mere humanistic erudition, trilingual colleges were founded with the evangelic purpose of
providing the necessary techniques to preach Christianityin a more efficient way (Colin P.
Thompson, La lucha de las lenguas: Fray Luis de Le6n y el siglo de oro en Espana [Sala-
manca:Juntade Castilla y Le6n, 1995], p. 148). In America, the Franciscansfanatically de-
fended the preaching of Christianityin the local languages, trying to show themselves as
apostles of an autonomous religion ratherthan agents of a colonial power. Of 109 works
written in indigenous languages in America during the sixteenth century,minor friars wrote
eighty. The firstgenerationsof FranciscansspreadNahuatleven in places in which it was not
spoken. In fact, the friars were responsible for the survival of classical Nahuatl, which the
natives did not use. But mendicantpreachersalso used many other languages. In the specific
case of catechisms, we can find texts in Tarascan,Zapotecan, Otomi, Guastecan,Guatemal-
tecan, Chichimecan, Chontal, Mixtecan, Tzotzil, Quichua, Aymarf, and Timucuan, among
many others (Luis Resines Llorente,Catecismos Americanosdel siglo XVI[Salamanca:Junta
de Castilla y Le6n, 1992], p. 33).
priate tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established by the

conquest itself.26
With regard to the translationof Christiancosmology into native lan-
guages, preachershad to adopt one of two possible strategies. They could
keep European words without translating them, preserving theological
accuracy but risking a lower level of comprehension, fixing Christian
notions in the indigenous mind as something perpetually strange. Alter-
natively, they could attempt the translation of some words, looking for
equivalences in the native languages or expressing the notions through
paraphrasing,at the risk of Amerindianwords retaining part of their an-
cient pre-Christianmeaning.27
The Franciscans chose a halfway path. For the deity and those terms
associated with his image, they resorted to a strategy close to that of
theological semasiology, blocking any possible translation, as in a typi-
cal second-degree religion. For God's opponent, Satan, they resorted to
theological onomasiology, matching the pagan gods with the evil spirits,
using Amerindianterms to describe the devil and his actions. This double
strategy, which postulated simultaneously commensurabilityand incom-
mensurabilitybetween both rival cosmologies, exemplifies how the devil's
symbolism served to bridge the gulf between Europeanand Amerindian
cultures in New Spain.28But the unyielding opposition between God and
Satan 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 an
identification with the other, but rather a violent desire to destroy every
expression of paganism in America, the last terrestrialbulwark of Luci-
fer. The native spirits were thus incorporatedinto the eve'nementsans fin
of Christiancosmology, turnedinto an aspect of the prehistoryof Chris-
tianity.29God was the great absentee in the indigenous past, and the devil
its 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 total
structureis dependent on the total set of relationships;it is not a result of
their meaning as isolates, disconnected from other isolates. Things are
26 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges

and Border Thinking(Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 3.
27 Robert Ricard, La conquista espiritual de Mdxico: Ensayo sobre el apostolado y los
metodos misioneros de las ordenes mendicantes en la Nueva Espana de 1523-24 a 1572
(Mdxico: EditorialJUS, 1947), p. 144; Resines Llorente, p. 33.
28
Mosquera (n. 5 above), p. 9.
29 I use this notion of
evenementsans fin in the sense used by Alain Boureau in L'evene-
ment sansfin: Recit et christianisme au Moyen Age (Paris:Belles Lettres, 1993).
relationships,and these relationshipsare ontological ratherthan logical.30

Thus, what we mean by "swan" depends on what we mean by "duck."
How can we translateour "swan"into a language of a culture whose uni-
verse does not contain ducks?31The center of gravity and the total design
of a culture may give a society a distinctiveness, a uniqueness as a spe-
cial crystallizationof components.32This is why the evangelizers' conceit
that a common denominatorhad been found in the concept of the devil
allowed a paradoxical proximity between the two cultural universes to
develop, inevitably producing serious categorical errors.
The Nahuas and the Spanish were able to operate for centuries based
on false but functional presumptions,pretendingthat analogous concepts
from the other culture were essentially identical to their own, a phenom-
enon that allowed the preservationof the indigenous structuresfor a long
period of time. These multiple distortions are better perceived if we take
into considerationthe essential irreducibilitythat characterizesboth cos-
mologies: Christianduality and Nahuamonism. In the indigenous cosmos,
order and chaos were complementary aspects of a singular reality. The
notion of a totally good god was an absurdityin mesoamerican thought.
Such a being would have lacked the essential power to disrupt in order
to create. Likewise, a totally evil spirit would have lacked the power to
create, which in turn would enable it to disrupt.33But the Franciscans
subsumed 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.34The mis-
sionaries also tried to introducethe notion of Trinity,a concept based on
a phenomenal paradox, in cultures that completely lacked such a logical
category. They even wrote supposed Amerindiangrammarsthat, because
they were made to conform to the model of classical grammars,precluded
the missionaries from recognizing that in many local languages abstrac-
tions had a verbal rather than a nominal form.35They thought that the
Christianhell could be assimilated to the nahua mictlan, without realiz-
ing that this was a cold northernplace where every individual would go
after death anyway.36In this subjugation of content to form, it is clear
30Michael T.Taussig, TheDevil and CommodityFetishism in SouthAmerica (ChapelHill:
University of North CarolinaPress, 1980), p. 137.
31
Biagioli, p. 233.
32
Stanley JeyarajaTambiah,Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cam-
bridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), p. 127.
33 Cervantes (n. 2 above), p. 42.
34 Louise Marie Burkhart,"The
Slippery Earth:Nahua-ChristianMoral Dialogue in Six-
teenth-CenturyMexico" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), pp. 34-41.
35 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of
ComparativeEthnology (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982), pp. 182, 184.
36 ChristianDuverger,La conversiondes Indiens de Nouvelle Espagne (Paris:Seuil, 1987),
p. 189; Burkhart,p. 55.
that the native structuresmanaged to impose themselves on the compo-

nents of the Christianideology. In the new Spanish scenario, the logical
structure of the universe remained Nahua, and the Christian elements
were transformedto function within it.37
When in 1553 Fray Andres de Olmos decided to base his Tratadode
hechicerias on Castafiega's own Tratadode las supersticiones, he was
ready to begin an impossible task, an adventurethat was in itself an oxy-
moron: the translation of a pair of opposites, God and Satan, the first
one irreducible to any previous Amerindian experience, and the second
one with clear analogies between himself and the deities of the nahua
cosmology.
IV. A NEW TITLE, A NEW STRUCTURE, AND A NEW TREATISE

It is inaccurate to claim that Olmos's work simply plagiarized Casta-
fiega's Tratado.38The mere formal alterationswith respect to the Tratado
de las supersticiones, leaving aside the substantialtheological differences
or the translationinto Nahuatl itself, transformFray Martin'smanualinto
a 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 will
outline the formal alterations introducedby the American preacher into
Castaiiega's original.
a) In the first place, there is a very importantfact: the change in title.

Castafiega's Tratadode las supersticiones y hechizerias becomes 01-
mos's Tratadode hechicerias y sortilegios.
b) Second, Olmos makes a suggestive cut from Castafiega's original.
Out of the twenty-four chaptersof the Tratadode las supersticiones,
Fray Andres only keeps the first eleven. Far from signifying a simple
recognition of the irrelevance of the description of the European
superstitionsfor the new American conversos, this mutilation is part
of a conscious strategy that destroys the original sense of Casta-
fiega's treatise.
c) Between chapters2 and 3 of his Tratadode hechicerias, Olmos inter-
polates the only completely new chapter, which is absent from Cas-
tafiega's Tratado.Curiously enough, Fray Andres avoids enumerating
correlatively the interpolatedchapter, which has then no number.
d) The prologue from the original is replaced by a new one, the only
fragment 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 Encounters
between European and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. StuartSchwartz (Cam-
bridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 219, 228-29.
38 Baudot,
Utopia e historia (n. 1 above), p. 243.
e) The brief original preface-"El autor al discreto lector"-is replaced

by an "Exortacional indiano lector," in this case written in Nahuatl.
f) Apartfrom the narrationsemployed by Castaniegain his Tratado,some
of them glossed by Fray Andres, the American preacher adds some
new exempla, extracted from the American context, especially in the
interpolatedchapter and in chapter4.
The totality of these formal changes transforms the Tratado de hechi-

cerfas into something more than a lineal adaptationof the Tratadode las
supersticiones. Olmos constructs an original work, whose radical alter-
ations I will analyze in the following section.
V. FROM SUPERSTITIONTO IDOLATRY: THE SUBJECT OF

DISCOURSE
The subjects of Castaiega's and Olmos's particulardiscourses radically
differ from each other. The difference transcends the originality of the
spatial and temporal contexts as well as the simple divergence between
the superstitionsof the Europeanpeasantryand the idolatry of American
Indians.Both Franciscansattemptedthe constructionof complex fictional
narrationsand the creationof imaginaryidentities functionalto the groups
they represented:the high theological culture, on the one hand, and the
missionary Franciscan enterprise, on the other. Castafiega and Olmos
exemplify in this way a central aspect of the Renaissance ethos, the in-
creasing self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a
manipulableprocess.39Fray Martin's and Fray Andres's treatises can be
considered as clear expressions of symbolic power par excellence, that
is, the capacity to create groups, both existent groups that have to be con-
secrated and nonexistent groups that have to be established.40To accom-
plish this, both friars possessed the necessary symbolic capital to impose
on other spirits a vision of social divisions derived from the social author-
ity acquired in previous struggles, and from the support of established
institutions (the Holy Office, the Spanish episcopate, and the mendicant
orders).
Neither of the Franciscanscould escape the intrinsic logic that governs
the functioning of cultures, which seem unable to exist as self-sufficient
entities. Cultures must juxtapose themselves against each other to ascer-
tain what makes them unique and different.41People know who they are
39 Eva Kushner,"TheEmergenceof the ParadoxicalSelf," in ImaginingCulture:Essays in
Early ModernHistory and Literature,ed. JonathanHarta(New York:Garland,1996), p. 45;
StephenGreenblatt,Renaissance Self-Fashioning:FromMore to Shakespeare(Chicago:Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 2.
40 Pierre Bourdieu, "Espacio social y poder simb6lico," in his Cosas dichas (Barcelona:
Gedisa, 1993), p. 140.
41 Wolfgang Iser, "Codato the Discussion," in Budick and Iser, eds. (n. 21 above), p. 299.
only when they know who they are not, and frequently, only when they
know who they are against. It is easier to love what we are if we are in-
duced to abhor what we are not.42As a consequence of this, borders and
frontiers are not so much the limits, but the nucleus of cultures, in the
same way that the beach upholds the concept of island.43When a culture
defines itself as the center of the world, it requiresthe peripherythat sur-
roundsit as partof its own self-definition: it is the sum of the interiorand
the exteriorthatconstructsthe whole identity,the totality outside of which
nothing exists.44Thus, otherness is independentfrom any real knowledge
of 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, replacing
real origins with fictional ones.46Martinde Castafiegaand Andres de 01-
mos are a perfect example of the process of constructingfictional groups
and opposed identities.
CASTANEGA'S SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE: SUPERSTITIOUS MEN AND

THE DIOCESAN CLERGY
Martinde Castafiegaorganizes his discourse aroundtwo sets of opposed
identities, one of them explicit and the other implicit. In regard to the
first one, Fray Martin develops to an extreme the well-known image of
the two churches, the Catholic against the counter-satanicchurch.47Each
chapterof the Tratadois internally organized with this ontological oppo-
sition. The counter-churchincludes, at the same time, those who have
established explicit and implicit pacts with the devil. This second-degree
opposition organizes the whole structure of the book: the first eleven
chaptersdescribe those who have declared themselves to be worshippers
of the devil; the other thirteenchaptersdescribe those who are partof the
diabolic church without even knowing it.
In search of a paradigmatic image to represent the counter-satanic
church, Castafiegaresorts to the stereotype of the witches' Sabbath.The
portrayalof 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 reconfiguraci6ndel orden mundial (Buenos Aires: Paid6s, 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, TravelWrit-
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 Witchcraftin Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997),
chaps. 3-6.
divinity, and who are depicted gathered arounda fictional ritual, allowed
theologians to integrate particularatrocities into the scene of a powerful
subversive organization intrinsically dedicated to evil.48 This is why an
image that transcended the limits of a simple metaphor was useful and
functional for a strategy of demonization of simple superstitions (Cas-
tafiega) and of pagan ritual practices (Olmos). But is Castafiega'smanual
a demonological treatise similar to those composed by Jean Bodin, Henri
Boguet, Pierre de Lancre, Heinrich Institoris, Martin Del Rio, and Fran-
cesco Maria Guazzo, which have the aim of hunting witches and un-
masking their diabolical conspiracy?49The answer is certainly no. In
the title itself, the Franciscanpresents his book as a treatise of reproba-
cion de supersticiones. La Rioja and the bishopric of Calahorra y la
Calzada-consignee of the Tratado-were never the scenario of massive
persecutions of witches, not even when the trials in the neighboring re-
gions multiplied in the middle of the 1520s. Castafiega served the Holy
Office during the witchcraft prosecutions in Navarra and the Basque
Country.Perhapsthis 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 superstitions
scattered 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.
Castafiega's Tratadois nothing but a didactic display of the Augustin-
ian model of superstition.50Superstitions are condemned since, as vain
practices and beliefs, they cannot produce the effects they preach, par-
ticularly from the perspective of the two orders of legitimate causalities
in the traditionalChristian cosmos: the natural and supernaturalorders.
When the homo superstitious practiced vain rituals, who were expected
to produce the desired effects if these could not be produced through
natural forces, and if those practices were not instituted by God or the
Church?Theymust appeal to a third order of causalities that, although il-
legitimate, was capable of producing real effects: the preternaturalorder,
48 See David
Frankfurter,"Ritualas AccusationandAtrocity:SatanicRitualAbuse, Gnostic
Libertinism,and Primal Murders,"History of Religions 40 (2001): 353, 355, 363.
49 For a synthesis of the traditionaldemonological positions, see Sidney Anglo, ed., The
Damned 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 KathrinUtz Tremp, eds.,
L'imaginaire du sabbat: tdition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.-1440 c.) (Lau-
sanne: Universit6 de Lausanne, 1999); Armando Maggi, Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Re-
naissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
50 See Fabidn
Alejandro Campagne,Homo Catholicus, Homo superstitiosus: El discurso
antisupersticioso en la Espaia de los siglos XV a XVIII (Madrid: Miiio y Davila, 2002),
pp. 53-77.
the actions of angels and demons.5l Since it was believed the former
were alien to any deed contraryto the divine design, the evil spirits were
undoubtedly the agents expected to produce the desired effects. The
mise-en-scene of any superstitiouspractice-the words, the gestures, the
materials, and the numerical patterns involved-should then be consid-
ered conventional signs or an established pact between those evil spirits
and the homines superstitiosi.52
As a matter of fact, vain practices were not based on a system of
causes but on a system of signs, possessing not a causal but a semantic
function. For this reason, within the framework of this Christian model
of superstition-unlike other earlier and later ones-it was expected that
practices that are intrinsically vanae could indeed produce real effects.
These are not achieved throughnaturalor supernaturalvirtue but through
the actions of the devil, who quickly responds to produce effects stipu-
lated beforehandwhenever he observes the agreed-uponsigns (the images
and charactersused in the vain rituals). Thomas Aquinas improved the
model when he developed the notion of the implicit pact, by means of
which the performance of any vain ritual always opened a door to the
devil's intervention, even when the practitionerdid not conjure its pres-
ence, did not sign pacts, or did not take part in sacrilegious nocturnal
assemblies.53
Martinde Castaiiegareproducedthis Christianmodel of superstitionin
his Tratado.The title itself induces us to consider that it is not the first
eleven chapters, but the latter thirteen, that constitute the core of the
work.These describethe practicesand beliefs that actuallyexisted in Span-
ish territory:saludadores (healerof rabies), mal de ojo (evil eye), nominas
(written spells), ensalmos (oral spells), excomulgadoresde langostas (ex-
communicationof locusts), conjuros de tormentas(cloud conjuring), and
so on.54 When Castainegainterposes the first eleven chapters-that de-
scribe the counter-church,under the specific form of the Sabbath-with
the remainingthirteen-that describe the actuallyexistent vain practices-
he tries to strengthenthe Augustinian-Thomistidea thatbetween the former
and 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 FabidnAlejandroCampagne,"Witchcraftand the Sense of the Impossible in Early

Modem Spain,"Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003): 33-39.
52 Saint
Augustine,De doctrina christianaII, 20, 30-31; II, 24, 36; II, 25, 37; andII, 29,45.
53 Campagne,Homo Catholicus, pp. 69-72.
54 For a brief description of these practices, see Juan Francisco Blanco, Brujerfay otros
oficios populares de la magia (Valladolid, Spain: Ambito, 1992), pp. 105-30; 209-60; He-
liodoro CordenteMartinez,Brujernay hechiceria en el obispado de Cuenca (Cuenca; Dipu-
taci6n Provincial, 1990), chaps. 8-17; Maria Tauasiet, Ponzonia en los ojos: Brujeria y
superstici6n en Aragon en el siglo XVI (Zaragoza:Instituci6n Fernandoel Cat6lico, 2000),
pp.251-371.
through explicit pacts, as well as those who facilitate his work in the
world through tacit pacts. Superstition in this way becomes a litotes of
the witches' Sabbath,and this was precisely the feeling Castafiegawanted
to generate, a few years after the beginning of the first importantwitch
hunt in Spanish territory.55The theologian tried to show the existence of
a conductive threadamong the superstitions,apparentlysimple and harm-
less, and the hideous parodies of the Sabbath, which was an extremely
useful relationship to disqualify the former.
Who, then, is the subject of Castafiega'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 literatureof superstition, Castafiega
builds a generic homo superstitiosus, which he identified with aged men,
children, or women, images that evoke intellectual deficiencies. But from
reading the bishop's Provision we can deduce the real homines supersti-
tiosi to whom Castafiega's manual is addressed: the clergy of the Cala-
horra dioceses. The common priests were the first who should learn the
subtleties of the superstitionmatterbefore being able to eradicatethe vain
practices and observances from the people. The bishop and the author
conceived the Tratadoas an illustration for the parish priests, who were
themselves 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 bishopricto have the aforementionedtreatises ... ; bearing
in mind that if they do not possess them and read them, they will be liable
to be guilty of superstition, and they will be severely punished."56Cas-
tafiega reinforced don Alonso de Castilla's admonitions: "[this book] to
my own understanding,is not only useful for the simpleminded to refrain
them from making errors and falling for diabolical deceit, even more, it
is necessary to do away with the ignorance of many, that assuming them-
selves as learned deny the ways of the superstitions and sorceries, that
are included, declared and persuadedhere."57
The high theological culture, represented in this case by an agent of
the inquisitorialpower and a bishop, presentsitself as the only holderof the
truth, the custodian of the power to distinguish between orthopraxis and
55 See Fabian
Alejandro Campagne, "El otro-entre-nosotros: Funcioanlidadde la noci6n
de superstitio en el modelo hegem6nico cristiano (Espania,siglos XVI y XVII)," Bulletin
Hispanique 102 (2000): 52-53, 57.
56
Castafiega(n. 10 above), p. 12: "mandamosa todos los curas,y rogamos y amonestamos
a los otros eclesiasticos deste nuestroobispado, y a cada uno dellos, que todos tengan sendos
de estos tratados... ; avisandolos que si por no lo tener y leer, en alguna culpa de super-
sticidn cayeren, los mandaremosmas gravementecastigar"(my emphasis).
57 Ibid., p. 2: "[este libro] a mi ver, no solo
aprovecharaa los simples para apartarlosde
sus errores y enganiosdiabolicos, mas aun es necesario para quitar muchas ignorancias de
muchos, que, presumiendode letrados, niegan las manerasde las supersticiones y hechize-
rias, que aqui se ponen, declarany persuaden."
heteropraxis, orthodoxia and heterodoxia. In opposition to the commu-

nity of the "mayoresde pueblo de Dios," to the theologos and holy doc-
tors, Castaiiega's discourse designs two subordinatedsets of "menores
del pueblo de Dios":58in the first place, a generic homo superstitiosus,
rhetorically identified with the ignorant common people; in the second
place, a wider homo superstitiosus, made up of the low clergy and other
exponents of the lay learned culture, who had to be the first to learn the
superstition matter to avoid becoming homines superstitiosi themselves.
This constructionof a double subject of discourse runs throughthe total-
ity of the Spanish antisuperstitiousliterature,from the treatises of Lope
de Barrientos,in the mid-fifteenthcentury,to the great summae of Benito
Jeronimo Feij6o, in the eighteenth century.59All of them outline a wider
audience for the antisuperstitiousdiscourse that, depending on the case,
can include the king, the secular magistrates, the jurists, the medicine
doctors, and the naturalphilosophers. That is to say, the audience was the
totality of learned Spanish culture, which in ideal terms was supposed to
be safe from the sin of superstitio, but which was strictly subordinateto
the community of theologians whenever they had to distinguish the illicit
practices from the licit.60
OLMOS'S SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE: INDIANS AND IDOLATERS

Even if he was inspired by Castafiega's work, the subject of discourse in
Andres de Olmos is radically different. Fray Andres does not interpolate
the diocesan clergy, the true addressee of Castafiega's teaching. In his
Tratadode hechicerias Olmos leaves aside all intermediation:it is In-
dians to whom he addresses his discourse in a direct way.
Even though Andres de Olmos was not one of the twelve Franciscans
sent in 1524 to evangelize the recently conqueredNew Spain-he arrived
four years later with Zumarraga-his contributionto the seraphic utopia
cannot be exaggerated. During his residence in Spanish monasteries, his
identification with the ideals of poverty turned him into an adherent of
the Castilian branchof the Franciscanobservantia. In fact, his first Mex-
ican mission consisted of searching for Motolinfa, the most outstanding
of 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 characterizedthe first generations of Franciscans in the New
58 Both
expressions belong to Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobacion 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 Fabian Alejandro Campagne, "'Porque no les acaesca condepnar los inocentes e
absolver los reos': La superstici6n como construcci6n ideol6gica en la Espafiade los siglos
XV al XVIII," Cuadernosde Historia de Espaia 75 (1998-99): 243-72.
61 Baudot,
Utopia e historia (n. 1 above), p. 135.
World. Nevertheless, his tireless work as an itinerantpreacheras well as

his enthusiasm for the ethnographicchronicles-in the case of the Fran-
ciscans, indissolubly linked to the preparationof the millennium-clearly
demonstrate his de facto adherence to the providential mission that the
order had assigned to itself.
The origin of the Franciscanobservance seems to go back to Giovanni
della Valle, a disciple of Angelo Clareno, who joined the orderin 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 de
Guadalupe.63In 1517, the movement is named Custodia de San Gabriel,
and in 1519 it becomes independentfrom the observantprovince of San-
tiago.64Extreme poverty and missionary zeal-reinforced by the proxim-
ity of the neighboring Granada-were the two facets that characterized
this reformed observance. This Custodia de San Gabriel would become
the trigger of the legendary expedition of the twelve. The Franciscans
Jean Glampion and Francisco de los Angeles originally conceived the
American enterprise. At the beginning of the 1520s they obtained two
papal bulls with the authorization to preach freely in New Spain. But
Glampion soon died, and Francisco de los Angeles was elected in 1523
as the general of the order.Forced to surrenderhis mission, he chose Mar-
tin de Valencia for the task, at the time the superior of the Province of
San Gabriel in Extremadura.65
We cannot understand the American vocation of the Franciscan ob-
servantia without taking account of the penetration of the millenarian
Joachimist ideals. In this discourse, the arrival of the Antichrist would
put 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 seventh
one, his version of the millenariankingdom of the Apocalypse. This glo-
rious era of the Holy Spirit would take place on earth, far away from the
perpetualeternity of the eighth age outside history.66
Joachim also expected a radical conversion of the Church,transformed
into ecclesia contemplantiumor spiritualis after the establishment of the
third status. To accomplish this transformationhe expected the appear-
ance of an order of spiritual men sent ad vesperam huius seculi, at the
62
MarjorieReeves, TheInfluenceof Prophecy in LaterMiddle Ages: A Studyin Joachim-
ism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 228.
63
Melquiades AndrdsMartin,"Laespiritualidadfranciscanaen Espaia en tiempos de las
observancias (1380-1517)," Studia Historica; Historia Moderna 6 (1988): 468-69, 474.
64
Baudot, Utopia 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 lineage
of religious orders that assigned themselves this role as fulfillment of the
prophecy of the Calabrian monk. Thus, the Franciscan Petrus Joannis Olivi
took directly from Joachim of Fiore the idea that, since the synagogue
has 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 fuit
fundatus et iniciatus ordo evangelicus" (so the Spiritual Church must be
propagated by twelve evangelical men ... and that's why St. Francis had
twelve fellows and comrades, by whom and with whom the evangelical
order was founded and initiated).68
The millenarian effervescence spread over Europe at the beginning of
the sixteenth century.69 The Franciscan Order generated its own char-
ismatic prophet, the Beato Amadeo de Portugal (1431-82), who in his
Apocalipsis Nova announced the imminent arrival of an Angelic Pope.70
Cardinal Cisneros dreamed of a renovatio mundi in which, after a final
crusade led by Spain, there would be unum ovile et unus pastor, and he
himself would celebrate Mass before the Holy Sepulchre.71 At the same
time, Cardinal Bernardino L6pez de Carvajal promoted the schismatic
council of Pisa (1511-13), assembled to fulfill the prophecies of an im-
minent angelic papacy.72 The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17) tried to
put an end to these millenarian expectations, condemning as reckless any
prediction about the imminent arrival of the Antichrist, even though from
the 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., 135.
p.
68 Ibid., 196.
p.
69 See OttaviaNiccoli,
Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton,N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1990); Miguel A. Granada,"Los hechos: Mirabilia y profecias en torno
a 1500. Su inserci6n en las expectativas de renovatio,"in Cosmologia, religidn y politica en
el Renacimiento (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988), pp. 33-46; Clark, Thinkingwith Demons
(n. 47 above), chap. 22; Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement
in Florence, 1494-1545 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); JonathanB. Riess, The Renaissance
Antichrist: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 LauraAcker-
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 Ram6n Mujica Pinilla, Angeles apocrifos en la America virreinal (M6xico: Fondo
de CulturaEcon6mica, 1996), pp. 55-59.
71 Reeves, 446.
p.
72 Aldo
Landi, "Prophecyin the Time of the Council of Pisa (1511-1513)," in Prophetic
Rome in the High Renaissance Period, ed. MarjorieReeves (Oxford:Clarendon,1992), p. 58.
73 Nelson H. Minnich, "Prophecyand the Fifth LateranCouncil (1512-1517)," in Reeves,
ed., pp. 63-87.
of the world. The conversion of Jews, Tartars,Muslims, and the Orthodox

Churchwould be a certain sign that the seventh age was already a reality
on earth.The discovery of America was seen by the Franciscansfrom the
Provincia de San Gabriel as a new providentialevent, the opportunityto
accelerate the Second Coming. When making his farewell to the twelve,
Fray Francisco de los Angeles remindedthem of the importanceof their
expedition, "now when the day of the world is declining at the eleventh
hour."74That is why Martin de Valencia, leader of the twelve, tried to
embarktoward China, soon after he had settled in Mexican territory.
But the American enterprisewas also seen as the opportunityto build
a new Christendom,a new Jerusalem, a fulfillment of the monastic ideal
of the Joachimist seventh age, in which all men would carry out a con-
templativelife, exercise the apostolic poverty,and enjoy angelic natures.75
After the failure of the old EuropeanChristendom,the friars would have
to startin America from the beginning, creating on the eve of the end of
the world a terrestrialparadise, a sweet violence that would imprison the
Indians in an endless childhood-an archetypalimage of divine purity.76
In the Indians, the Franciscansbelieved they had found the ideal raw ma-
terial to build this new church. The Indians lacked the desire to acquire
material goods. They instinctively practiced the virtues of the Sermon
on the Mount. The confessors did not find any deadly sins from which to
absolve them.77The Indians seemed predestined to take the empty seats
thatthe fallen angels had left in heaven.78The new Americanchurchwould
have poor bishops, and it would be so well "orderedin good Christen-
dom" that, as fray Jer6nimode Mendieta said, "people would say nothing
but that it is all a monastery."79The Franciscan utopia expressed a pro-
gression toward the future that begins with a returnto the past,80here a
past that conflates a magnificationof the Indianprimitivism with a recon-
struction of the pre-Constantineevangelic church. The Indians and the
friars would become the perfect protagonists of this new Christendom:
the childlike Adamic innocence of the former and the seraphicandrogyny
74 AdrianoProsperi,"New Heaven and New Earth:Prophecy and Propagandaat the Time

of 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 (Mexico:
UniversidadAut6nomade Mexico, 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, authorof the biography of Toribio
Alfonso de Mogrovejo edited in 1688. CompareMujica Pinilla, p. 231.
79 Quoted by Phelan, p. 103.
80 See Michael David Bailey, "Heresy,Witchcraftand Reform:JohannesNider andthe Re-
ligious Worldof the Late Middle Ages" (Ph.D. diss., NorthwesternUniversity, 1998), pp. 85-
87. This thesis has just been released as a book: Battling Demons: Witchcraft,Heresy and
Reformin the Late Middle Ages (UniversityPark:PennsylvaniaState UniversityPress, 2003).
of the latter were themselves paradoxical images that expressed the be-
ginning of the end of history.81The fact that the Indian myths themselves
expressed with conviction the belief in the imminent destructionof their
worldwas seen as anotherconfirmationof Europeanmessianicideas and as
a justification for the exterminationof an old dream by a frantic modem
one.82 However, by the beginning of the 1550s, when Olmos wrote his
Tratadode hechicerias, the seraphic utopia in New Spain seemed to be
threatenedin various ways. On the one hand, the old Christendom,cor-
rupted and decadent, was beginning to show an interest in clipping the
wings of the new American Church.On the other hand, there were clear
signs that the evangelic virtues of the new Amerindian Christians con-
cealed an unexpected attachmentto their ancient idolatry.
At the beginning of the 1550s, this former concern was becoming
apparentin the insistence of the metropolitanauthoritiesthat the Indians
be taught Spanish, a mandate that attacked the seraphic utopia at its
heart. In fact, the crown sent a real cedula to all the provinciales of the
three mendicant orders with this new disposition.83Olmos undoubtedly
perceived the signs of what would soon become a reality: an offensive
designed to wrest the almost absolute control over Mexican Christendom
that up to that point had been exercised by the mendicantorders.The por-
tentous landmarkswould soon start appearingone after another:the first
Mexican Council in 1555, the death of the viceroy Velasco in 1564, the
coming of the Jesuits,the formalsettlementof the Inquisition,and the sup-
pression of the apostolic privileges of the mendicantorders-all of these
occurredin 1572.84
The second threatthat disturbedthe Franciscanutopia was the appear-
ance of worrying signs regarding the sincerity of the Indian conversos,
the matrixof the new Christendomthat would acceleratethe end of times.
The first instance of this awareness was in November 1539, when Olmos
prosecuted and punished the lord of Matlatlan, principal exponent of a
shrewish expression of crypto-idolatry.Olmos allowed himself to be pes-
simistic: "it is twenty years since the scriptures have been explained to
them; nevertheless, they persist in their idolatry as obstinate as before."85
In that same month Bishop Zumarraga condemned to death a former
pupil of the Colegio de Tlatelolco, the lord of Texcoco.86It was in this
81 See Mircea
Eliade, "Mefist6feles y el andr6gino o el misterio de la totalidad,"in Me-
fist6feles y el Andr6gino (Barcelona: Kair6s, 2001), p. 119.
82 J. M. Le Clezio, Le reve mexicain ou la
pensee interrompue(Paris: Gallimard, 1988),
p. 208.
83 Baudot,
Utopia e historia (n. 1 above), pp. 104-5.
84
Duverger (n. 36 above), p. 255.
85 Quotedby Ricard(n. 27 above), p. 468: "veinte afnosha que se les explica el Evangelio,
y sin embargo persisten tan obstinados como antes en su idolatria."
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 the
massive failure of evangelization was still to be discovered. Francisco
Marroquin,bishop of Guatemala,found what he called a surprising and
alarming"amountof idols and ritual objects in the south of Chiapas, dur-
ing the visitas he carried out between 1551 and 1554.88This prompted
the prelate to commission the Dominican Dimingo de Vico to write his
Tratadode idolos, practicallyat the same time that Olmos was working on
his own Tratadode hechicerfas in Hueytlalpan. One of the greatest dis-
appointmentswould occur in 1562, when the Franciscans from Yucatan
discovered idolatrouspractices at the heartof their missionary enterprise.
The violence of the following repression revealed the magnitude of their
disillusionment.89The 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 are
quasi-hystericalreactions, typical of situations of real or imagined forms
of pressure that seem to question the security of their own identity and
that of others.92The Franciscanutopia seemed to become, in the stressful
situation beginning in the 1550s, an appropriatemeans to reinforce the
positive self-definitions and the differences that separatedthe new Amer-
ican Christendom from other groups. The Tratado de hechicerias by
Andres de Olmos can then be conceived as an attempt to rescue the se-
raphic project from its announced decadence. Its interlocutors are the
Indians, without intermediaries: that is why the manual is written in
Nahuatl, to be read and to be directly preached in the language of the
country. Olmos thus changed the genre of Castafiega's original: from a
treatise for the formation of the diocesan clergy to an edifying sermon
for the Amerindians.This transformationcan be clearly perceived in the
numerous markersof orality present throughoutthe 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:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987), pp. 76-77.
90
Jacques Lafaye, "La utopia mexicana: Ensayo de intrahistoria,"in Mesias, cruzadas,
utopias: El judeo-cristianismo en las sociedades ibericas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Econ6mica, 1984), p. 85.
91 JoshuaLevinson, "Bodies and Bo(a)rders:EmergingFictions of Identityin Late Antiq-
uity,"Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000): 344.
9? K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, "The Black Hole of Culture:Japan,Radical Otherness,and the Dis-
appearanceof Difference (or, In JapanEverythingNormal),"in Budick and Iser, eds. (n. 21
above), p. 199.
93 For a full description of the characteristicof the sermon as a literarygenre, see Pedro
M. Cdtedra,Serm6n, Sociedad y Literaturaen la Edad Media: San Vicente Ferrer en Cas-
tilla (1411-1412) (Salamanca:Juntade Castilla y Le6n, 1994), chaps. 3, 5-6. Vicente Ferrer
To reinforce the identification of the Indians with the new millenarian

church,Olmos compares their image with two other imaginarycommuni-
ties negatively connoted, designing in this way an otherness that consists
of a relationship ratherthan a reality in itself.94 These corruptedimagi-
nary communities were the old EuropeanChristendomand the Indianpa-
gan ancestors.
In the "Exortacional Indiano lector," one of the fragments that is not
included in Castaniega'soriginal, Olmos reaffirms the new identity de-
rived from baptism, an excluding identity without returnor 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 do
not have a twofold heart, if you do not have a twofold tongue.... Now if
it is true, with your open heart that you belong to God here, behind you
... you will banish from your mind ... the unjust diabolical world."01-
mos reminds the Indians of their perpetual dependent status under the
tutelage of the friars,and of their specific role in the new AmericanChris-
tendom: "If there is something you do not understandcorrectly, immedi-
ately ask the [Franciscan]father."And he adds:"thatman who does not ask
the father,maybe desires to do good things, but he may also have thoughts
that will make him go astray.... That is why he will be very good, the
humble common man, following those who are above him."95The sera-
phic utopia condemns the Indians to a paradoxical liminal period, that,
far from being transitory, acquires a permanent character in which the
subjects find few or none of the attributesof their past or future status.96
The Indians were neither pagans nor old Christians;they would not even
be new Christiansshould they lack the permanentassistance of the friars.
To strengthen the providential qualities of the new Christendom, 01-
mos compares its image to the corrupteddescription of the EuropeanOld
Church.The choice of Castafiega's Tratado-a threateningdescription of
was an inspiring figure for Andr6s de Olmos. For the reflection on the other in medieval ex-
empla, see Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Womenand Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medi-
eval Sermon Stories (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 3-22.
94 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (n. 43 above), p. 130.
95 Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 9: "Y ahora has olvidado, cuandofuiste bautizado has odiado,
despreciado, abandonado al diablo ... paraque Dios te ayude si no tienes el coraz6n doble,
si no tienes la lengua doble. ... Ahora si de verdad,de buen coraz6n, perteneces a Dios alld,
detrds de ti .. relegaras ... al injusto mundo diab6lico" (my emphasis). "'Si algo no en-
tiendes bien, interroga al instante al padre'. Y agrega: 'aquel hombre que no pregunta al
padre, quiza desee hacer cosas buenas y tambi6n quiza abrigue pensamientos que lo pier-
dan.... Por eso mismo sera muy bueno el, el hombre del pueblo, humilde, seguird a aquel
que esta por encima de 6l."'
96 CompareVictor Turner,"Entrelo uno y lo otro: El periodo liminar en los rites de pas-
sage," in his La selva de los simbolos: Aspectos del ritualndembu(Madrid:Siglo XXI, 1990),
p. 104.
the advance of the diabolical conspiracy in the Old World-was also im-
portantfor this strategy. The Christianvirtues that the Franciscans were
anxious to recover for themselves suddenly appeared before their eyes,
incarnatedin the Amerindians, a whole race of men consecrated to evan-
gelic poverty. The friars saw themselves reflected in the simplicity of the
natives through a process of self-projection of their own identity, rather
than througha trustworthydescriptionof the other.97As opposed to friars
and Indians,EuropeanChristendomseemed confined to eternal perdition.
In the prologue of the Tratado,written in Spanish, Olmos compares the
veija christiandad with a dry tree and the new one with a green tree: "if
the old Christianityburns, it is no wonder to see the new one on fire as
well, since the enemy has no less envy, rage, and rancorthat he feels for
those who have not long before fled from his hands."The new Amerin-
dian Christians, then, seem to keep the possibility of salvation that the
old Christians had already lost. The lurking of the devil was more real
than ever: Satan would also try to corruptthe new Christendom,and his
triumphwould do nothing but hasten the end of history and his own final
defeat. Only a godly life and a strongfaith could halt the increasingattacks
of an enraged devil. The neophytes, if they accepted baptism with sin-
cerity, would have an advantage over old Christians:"and each day [the
devil] encircles and surroundshis prey to chase it anew, and only a trained
faith can impede his catch, because a tepid or dead faith does not want to
resist him."98
But the vieja christiandad was also present in New Spain. Thus the ne-
cessity to avoid any contact between the Indians and Europeancorruption:
"because this New Spain is already entangled with various nations, and
whereverthereis a crowd, there is confusion. Throughthis treatise,I want
to warn the simple ones that as it is usual that in some cases a tongue or
corrupt custom gets stuck to someone, this venom and pestilence must
not infect you or be transmittedto one another."And then Olmos finished
with a suggestive admonitionthat seems to reserve paradiseonly for friars
and Indians, the pillars of a new apocalyptic Christianity:"andI beseech
thatthe care and diligence of shepherdsand the heads of the churchshould
be awake and alive, and that they will show so much concern for those
souls they are in charge of, so that these will go with them to Heaven and
97 CompareStuartSchwartz, "Introduction,"in Schwartz, ed. (n. 37 above), pp. 3-4.

98 Olmos, p. 4: "si la vieja christiandadse quema, no es de marauillarque ardala nueva,
pues el enemigo no menos embidia tiene, enojo y rencortiene destos que poco hase se le es-
caparonde las ufias.""Y cada dia [el demonio] cerca y rodea la presa por la tornara correr
al qual sola la fe formadale es impedimento,porque la fe tibia o muerta,poco o nada se es-
panta"(p. 4).
forever rule there."99As in some particularmoiety systems described by

anthropology,both extremes-the old and the new Christianity-are not
conceived here as a pair of complementaryopposites that together make
up a harmonious whole, halves that exchange between them their neces-
sary opposing qualities. Instead, the opposites are here two differentways
of conceiving the hierarchythat orders the relationshipbetween the new
and 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. But
each moiety depends on the reversed image of that hierarchy (embodied
in the opposite moiety) to reproduceits own hierarchy.?00Thus, whereas
the old Christianityprovided the Indians with a subordinatestatus-the
blemish of the converso-the new Christendomtransformedthe corrupted
faith of the old Christianinto the reality that Amerindianneophytes were
forced to overcome.
The radical condemnation of EuropeanChristianityseems to turn 01-
mos's discourse into a fracturedenunciationthatchallenges the hegemonic
discourse from a subordinateperspective. However, his Tratadois less a
discourse of resistance than a discourse claiming its own centrality.Even
though the Franciscan establishes a different place of enunciation from
the periphery,his purpose is to rescue the purity of Christianity,which he
considers the supreme value of European civilization and whose purity
he aspiresto recreateon anothercontinent. Hence Olmos's discourse does
not surpassthe limits of a universalizing narration,the supreme truthsof
a revealed religion that prevent the complete recovery of the differences
of the local culture.'10To see non-Westernpeoples as having themselves
become the standard-bearersof Western culture is in some ways a more
profound form of colonization, the search for its own idealized image in
the imperfect copies fabricatedby other cultures, ethnocentrismthinking
itself as antiethnocentrism.102
But the vieja christiandad was not the only inverted image that Olmos
used to strengthenthe new providentialidentity of Amerindianneophytes.
99 Ibid., p. 5: "porqueya esta Nueva Espainase va mezclando de diuersas naciones, y

donde ay muchedumbreay [sic] esta la confusi6n. Deseo con esto avisar a los unos y a los
otros simples en tal maneraque asi como a algunos se les pega la lengua o costumbre cor-
rupta la tal poncona y pestelencia o semejanteno se pegue o traspasede unos en otros" (my
emphasis). "Y ruego se abiue y despierteel cuidado y diligencia de los pastoresy rectoresde
[la] yglesia, y que tal solicitud pongan en las animas que a cargo tienen, que al fin con ellas
en el cielo para siempre reynen."
100 See Valerio Valeri, "ReciprocalCenters:The Siwa-Lima System in the CentralMoluc-
cas," in The Attractionof Opposites: Thoughtand Society in the Dualistic Mode, ed. David
Maybury-Lewis and Uri Almagor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp.
135-36.
101See
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 past

and their present, between their new religion and the diabolical paganism
of their ancestors. Like the rabbis after the destruction of the Second
Temple, the friars tried to replace a genealogical model with a contractual
model for the construction of fictitious ethnicities. In the first, the inside
and the outside were established accordingto biological descent, whereas
in the second, identity was built on the acceptance of a certain institu-
tionalized system of beliefs.103Baptism should then replace ancestralre-
lationships as the articulatingaxis of this new imaginary community.104
To achieve this, a vast pedagogical industryhad to compel the neophytes
to a permanentexercise of oblivion-recollection of the past. The pagan
ceremonies had to be remembered,but only as expressions of a diaboli-
cal cult, not as legitimate exercises of latria. Out of these amnesias spring
narratives,as when an adult is informed that the baby in the picture if no
other but himself. Out of this estrangementcomes a new identity, which,
because it cannot be "remembered,"must be narrated.105As Olmos re-
minds the Indians, "you should know that a long time ago, at the time of
your grandfathers,the Devil penetrateda stone, a stick, a person that was
used 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 the
memory of idolatry, that intrinsic evil that children learnt in their cra-
dles.107For the time being, the friars banished to hell the venerated an-
cestors in toto: "ourgrandfathersdid not take shelter in a good deity, and
in this way they would not know any charity."'08Thus, every object that
representedin any way some form of solidarity within the lineage, such
as the small reliquariesin New Spain or the mummies in CentralAndes,
deeply angeredthe preachers.109Fray Andres 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:
Reflectionson the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:Verso, 1991), p. 6: "themem-
bers of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members,meet them or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."
105Ibid.,
pp. 200-204.
106 Olmos
(n. 17 above), p. 17: "sabreis que hace ya mucho tiempo, de cuando los abue-
los, el Diablo penetrabaen una piedra, en un palo, en una persona que servia de intermedi-
ario, para hablar,paraengafiarmucho" (my emphasis).
107 See Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De la idolatrna:Una arqueologia de las
ciencias religiosas (Mexico: Fondo de CulturaEcon6mica, 1988), pp. 101, 154.
108 Olmos, p. 23: "nuestros abuelos ne se refugiaban en una buena divinidad, y asi no
conocerdn ninguna caridad" (my emphasis).
109See Serge Gruzinski,La colonizacion de lo imaginario: Sociedades indigenas y occi-
dentalizacion en el Mdxico espanol. Siglos XVI-XVIII(Mexico: Fondo de CulturaEcon6-
mica, 1988), p. 136; cf. Sabine MacCormack,Religion in the Andes: Visionand Imagination
in 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 grandmotherto
show thatthey leave to him the task to become friendswith the Devil, even
if the son does not believe in this; if a man even holds the things given by
the devil's adept without despising them, it seems that he is in this way
allowing the Devil to do that which his mother has done in his name or
whoever left him those diabolical things."'10
This disturbanceof memory compelled the Indians to construct a false
being, a Christian autobiographyof sin. As in the examination of con-
science, Olmos assumes that in every Indian there exists not one self but
two: one that bears the marks of an unexamined past and anotherthat re-
ordersand reads those marks,a temporaldivision between a self thatreads
and one that is read."' As Olmos argues, "neitherwould you believe in
dreams,in deceiving words, in the bad things whose memoryyour parents
or your grandparents had left, blind people who did not believe in the
real 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 new
Amerindianchurch:"in the middle of the people, among the people lived
the wicked, . . . and they drag people to ruin, to disease, they make them
wretched, they punish them severely with pulque, with mushrooms, so
that they would become evil."'l3 As with witchcraft in Europe, the idiom
of idolatry was a way of defining the limits of the moral community, a
frontier that prohibited relationships, that authorized interchanges, and
that created marginalities.114That is why Olmos recounted the responsi-
bilities of those who, because of not avoiding contact with wicked men,
would fall again underthe power of the devil: "thenahual would leave us
his tyrannyas a memory, his hypocrisy, his wickedness. ... It is said that
110Olmos, p. 73: "si un hombre recibe

alguinsigno de su padre, de su madre o de una
abuela paramostrarque le dejan el trabajode hacer amistadcon el Diablo, aunqueel hijo no
crea en esto, si quiza aun un hombre agarralas cosas dadas por el adepto del Diablo sin de-
spreciarlas,parece como si asi permitieraal Diablo hacer aquello que hizo en su nombre su
madreo aquel que le dej6 estas cosas diab6licas."
1ll Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translationand Christian Conversion
in Tagalog Society underEarly Spanish Rule (Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996),
p. 100.
112 Olmos, p. 21: "tampocoirds a creer en los sueios, en la palabraengafiosa, en las cosas
malas cuyo recuerdo han dejado tus padres, tus abuelos, ciegos que no creian en el verda-
dero Dios, que no lo conocian. Y ahoradescubre la falta, tu que la conoces" (my emphasis).
113 Ibid., p. 28: "en medio de la gente, entre la gente viven los malvados... y arrastrana
la gente a la ruina, a la enfermedad, los hacen desgraciados, los castigan muy duro con
pulque, con hongos, paraque vengan a ser malvados" (my emphasis).
114 See David WarrenSabean, "The Sacred Bond of
Unity: Communitythroughthe Eyes
of a Thirteen-Year-OldWitch (1683)," in Power in the Blood: Popular Cultureand Village
Discourse in Early Modem Germany(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984), pp.
109-10.
he could transmitthis 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 blind
them. But... he would not be able to do this job if it is not out of
willingness.... Because truly if he, the nahual, takes away from her
mother a young maiden to become friends with the Devil, it would be
only because it is the maiden's will."115
The radical alterationof the subject in Olmos's Tratadois useful to ex-
plain the formal alterations that Fray Andres introduced in Castafiega's
original. First, there is the change of title: from Tratadode las supersti-
tiones (Treatyregarding superstitions) to Tratadode hechicerias (Treaty
regarding sorcery). Second, there is the excision of the thirteen chapters
that make up the second part of Castafiega'swork. The objective of Fray
Martin was to remind the old Christians that those apparentlyharmless
superstitioneswere ways of contractinga tacit pact with the devil, scarcely
separatedby a difference in degree with respect to the Sabbathatrocities.
That is why the chapters of the second part were really the core of Cas-
tafiega's Tratado.The first eleven chapters that describe in detail the dia-
bolical counter-churchwere nothing but dependent on the other thirteen.
That theological fiction of the first part justified the intrinsic diabolical
characterof the real practices described in the second. On the contrary,
Olmos's aim was more urgent. The Amerindians still lived very near to
that real idolatry from which they had been rescued. The counter-church
here was not a mere theological fiction, like the Sabbath of the witches.
Fray Andres's concern then was not the vulgar superstitions of the old
Christians (the tacit pact) but the relapse into paganism of the New
Christians (the explicit pact). In New Spain, the former seemed dilute
comparedwith 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 the
Tratadode las supersticiones becomes the Tratadode hechicerias, and
both original parts transformthemselves into one text, in which only the
counter-churchthat includes idolaters and apostasies is described. The
new Amerindianchurch-the axis of the providentialmission to which the
Franciscans believed themselves predestined-had to be preserved from
this diabolical counter-church.
115
Olmos, p. 71: "el nahual dejarden el recuerdo su tirania, su hipocresia, su maldad.
... Se dice que esto lo podra transmitira alguien, darselo, cubrirle con ello; en cuanto se
acerquena 61,entonces se lo comunicard,lo cegard. Pero ... no se podra tomar este tributo
de trabajosi no es por voluntad propia.... Porqueefectivamente, si 61, el nahual le toma a
una madresu joven doncella paraque trabe amistadcon el Diablo, s6lo sera por voluntad de
la joven doncella."
VI. OLD DEVIL, NEW WORLD: SATAN AS A TRICKSTER

The alterationof the subject of discourse was not the only substantialin-
novation introducedby Olmos in his resignification of Castafiega's Tra-
tado de las supersticiones. Forced by necessity to adapt that text to the
American reality, Fray Andres had to display an interpretationof the di-
abolical power significantly different from the radical demonology that
was triumphingat 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 limited
by Augustinian providentialism, his figure did not obsess-at least out-
side the monastic cloister-the laity and the clergy with the intensity that
it would from the last centuries of the Middle Ages onward. 16After the
resurrectionof Christ, the demon did not have a chance: the battle was
inexorably 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, transformingitself into one of the more dynamic disciplines
within theology, a true naturalscience of demons.118No other period of
the history of Christendomwas more obsessed with the figure of the devil
than the period that covers the fifteenthto the seventeenthcentury.In fact,
our interaction and dialogue with the supreme adversaryof the Christian
god is establishedat 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 physical
harm, as the cause of material misfortunes rather than as the result of
sin.120The symptoms of this early moder obsession with the demon are
widely known, in particularwitch-hunting,a unique and paradigmatically
modern phenomenon.121This pessimism and tragic vision is reproduced
116 Robert
Muchembled, Une histoire du diable, XIIe-XXe siecle (Paris: Seuil, 2000),
p. 24; cf. Hans Peter Broedel, "The Malleus Maleficarumand the Constructionof Witch-
craft:Encounterswith the Supernaturalbetween Theology and PopularBelief" (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,II diavolo trafede e ragione (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2000),
pp. 85-118.
118 See StuartClark, "The Rational Witchfinder:Conscience, Demonological Naturalism
and PopularSuperstitions,"in Science, Cultureand Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe,
ed. Stephen Pumfrey,Paolo Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski (Manchester:ManchesterUniver-
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. IconographyrepresentedSatan with

imperial attributes,sitting on the throne like the perfect inverse of God
the Father,the Pope, or the absolute monarchs.122The period that stretches
from the Reformationto the Enlightenmentwas the only one in Western
history 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 affirmthat
this theological discipline was not inscribed in the medieval religious dis-
course, that it had emerged abruptlyin a very disconcerting discontinu-
ity.124Several explanationsfor this radical transformationof the religious
discourses have developed, all of them centeredon changes initiated from
the twelfth centuryon. One such change was the concern with the menace
of Cathardualism.125A second was the dissemination from the cloisters
of an image of the devil that seemed, by dramaticexigency of the monas-
tic exempla, a figure with a high degree of autonomy, the indefatigable
enemy of virtuous men ratherthan the deserved scourge of sinners.126A
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Nicole Jacques-
Chaquinet Maxime Pr6aud,eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe-XVIIIesiecles (Grenoble:Mil-
lon, 1994); Robert Muchembled, ed., Magie et sorcellerie en Europe du Moyen Age a nos
jours (Paris: Colin, 1994); James Sharpe, Instrumentsof Darkness: Witchcraftin England
1550-1750 (London:Penguin, 1996); ChristinaLarner,Enemies of God: The Witch-Huntin
Scotland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); John Putnam Demos, Enter-
taining Satan: Witchcraftand the Cultureof Early New England (New York:Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1983); Wolfgang Behringer, WitchcraftPersecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic,
Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Per Sorlin, "WickedArts": Witchcraftand Magic Trials in South-
ern Sweden, 1635-1754 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Eva P6cs, Between the Living and the Dead:
A Perspective on Witchesand Seers in the Early Modem Age (Budapest:CentralEuropean
University Press, 1999); Gustav Henningsen, El abogado de las brujas: Brujerfa vasca e
Inquisici6n Espaiola (Madrid:Alianza, 1983). It is fascinating to comparethis with an extra
Europeancase study: cf. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1990).
122 See J6erme Baschet, "Satan ou la majeste
malefique dans les miniaturesde la fin du
Moyen Age," in Le mal et le diable: Leursfigures a lafin du Moyen Age, ed. Nathalie Nabert
(Paris:Beauchesne, 1996), pp. 187-210. See also RobertMuchembled, Culturepopulaire et
Culture des elites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIesiecle) (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 Teufelsbiicher
(Bern: HerbertLang, 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 Witchcraftin the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 101-32; NormanCohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An In-
quiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt(New York:Basic, 1975); I quote the Spanish edi-
tion: Los demoniosfamiliares de Europa (Madrid:Alianza, 1980), pp. 85-89.
126 See EdwardPeters, The Magician, the Witch,and the Law (Philadelphia:University of
PennsylvaniaPress, 1978), pp. 92-93.
third was the replacement of a moral theology centered in the Seven

Deadly Sins by anothercentered in the Old TestamentDecalogue.127The
figure of Thomas Aquinas has been frequently considered in relation to
the genesis of modern demonology. Aquinas essentially developed an
angelology, which insisted on the infinite distance that separated the
angelic powers vis-a-vis the potentia Dei absoluta.'28 Nevertheless, his
detailed and systematic description of the fantastic virtues of seraphic
natures later facilitated the comprehension, in theological terms, of the
deeds attributedto demons and witches since the middle of the fifteenth
century.129A second contributionof Saint Thomas was his reformulations
of the problem of evil: by clearly differentiatingdivine will from divine
permission, Aquinas allowed a considerable expansion for the devil with-
out affecting the omnipotence and goodness of the Creator.130
The Tratadode las supersticionesby the FranciscanCastafiegais a clear
expression of this moder radical demonology. A historian has recently
made it clear that, even though Fray Martin never quotes the Malleus
Maleficarum, it is evident that he displays the same topics in the same
order.13'Castaniegarepresents a moderate version of moder demonol-
ogy, typical of Spanish Renaissance theology. Even when he accepts the
reality of the Sabbath and the witches' flights, Castafiegaalso holds that
the same phenomena frequently occur only in the imagination of the
bruxas. This modem interpretationwas remote from the more radicalized
versions of moder demonology, which tried to impose the thesis that
imaginary flights were the exception and real flights the norm. In any
case, the common element between both demonological conceptions was
the acceptance of the extraordinarypreternaturalpowers of the devil, de-
rived from his angelic nature, which made possible and plausible the di-
verse components of the Sabbath stereotype.'32"We read,"-Castafiega
states, "thatthe angel took Habakkufrom Judeato 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. EdmundLeites (Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 215-30.
128On the evolution of medieval angelology, see David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the
Middle Ages (New York:Oxford University Press, 1998); Renzo Lavatori,Gli angeli: Storia
e pensiero (Genova: Marietti, 1991); Jean-Marie Vernier, Les anges chez Saint Thomas
d 'Aquin(Paris:Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1986).
129 See CharlesEdwardHopkin, The Share of ThomasAquinas in the Growthof the Witch-
craft Delusion (1940; reprint,New York:AMS Press, 1984), pp. 174-84.
130Broedel
(n. 11 above), pp. 228-30.
131 Homza (n. 18 above), p. 204. At present, critics tend to consider Heinrich Institorisas
the real author of the Malleus Maleficarum, reducing Jacob Sprenger's participationto a
minimal collaboration. See Broedel, pp. 90-92.
132On the notion of the supernaturalorder,see Campagne,Homo Catholicus(n. 50 above),
pp. 566-600; LorraineDaston and KatherinePark, Wondersand the Orderof 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 by
a hair of his head, only to show the virtue and power of the angel to carry
a man."133
Modem demonology, which Castafiega's Tratadoexpressed, presented
serious problemsfor Olmos, as well as for Americanpreachersin general.
For the theology derived from Saint Augustine and Aquinas, the devil
could produce real effects on the material world. For the former, super-
stitious practices were supposed to resort to the illegitimate but effective
preternaturalcausality derived from the devil's natural powers.134Saint
Thomas did not doubt the capacity of separateintelligences to act on the
material world, from their dominance of local movement: for Aquinas,
diabolic magic could be effective.135Such a degree of power attributedto
the enemy of the ChristianGod complicated the evangelization of those
peoples that had recently abandonedpaganism.Added to the identification
of the old local gods with the demons of Judaism and Christianity,such
interpretation strengthened the belief in the real powers of the ancient
pagan pantheon and the temptation to take possession of your enemy's
enemy.136There were also theological reasons that could even apply to
the superstitions of EuropeanChristians:while the illocutionary acts di-
rected to God by the pious believer not always produced the desired
effects-Castafiega develops a whole section on the reasons that prayers
are often not heard by the deity-those directed to the demon by sorcer-
ers and homines superstitiosi paradoxically always produced the desired
effects.137How can you introduce to the idolaters such a demon-hidden
face of their old gods, deities that not only possess powers to produce
real effects, but also to carry out the wishes of their followers more fre-
quently than the Christiangod hears his followers' prayers?
That is why, at the time of the conversion of Europe, preachers were
temptedto spreadthe image of an impotentdemon, lacking enough power
to produce real effects in the created world. This was the case with the
first Council of Braga (561); the Indiculus Superstitionum,appendedto a
copy of the canons of the Council of Leptinnes (ca. 743); the De Singulis
Libris Canonicis Scarapsus by Pirmin of Reichenau (d. ca. 754); the
Penitencial de Silos (ca. 800); the De Grandine et Tonitruisby Agobard
of Lyon (d. 840); the famous Canon Episcopi, reproduced for the first
time by Regino of Priim in his De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis et Religione
133
Castafiega(n. 10 above), p. 67: "leemos que el angel llev6 a Abacuc de Judea a Babi-
lonia con la comida que llevaba para ... Daniel... ; y dice que lo llev6 de un cabello de la
cabeza, s6lo paradenotarla virtudy poder del angel para llevar a un hombre."
134
Campagne,Homo Catholicus, pp. 56-62.
135 See
Hopkin, p. 115.
136
Taussig, The Devil and CommodityFetishism (n. 30 above), p. 43.
137
Maggi (n. 49 above), p. 88.
Christiana (c. 906); and the tenth and ninth books of the Decretum by
Bishop Burchardof Worms (c. 1008-12)-particularly the latter, tradi-
tionally known as Corrector.38
Some American texts reproducedthe image of a demon radically im-
potent.139Nevertheless, the evolution of scholastic angelology and the
spreadof modern demonology made it difficult to hold such a position in
theological terms. In the case of Olmos, an additional complication re-
sulted in the choice of Castafiega's Tratadoas a source of inspiration,
since it was an example of radical modem demonology.
Fray Andres had to resignify the image of the demon in accordance
with various simultaneous strategies. To begin with, he had to reinforce
the creaturenessof the demon with an even greateremphasis than is found
in the patristic and scholastic traditions.For this, following a convention
typical of the first generation of Franciscans in Mexico-later contested
by Bernardinode Sahaguin-Olmos identifies the devil with the figure of
the tlacatecolotl, the owl-man: "you should know that this owl-man is
mentioned, he is really called by a multitude of names: bad angel Devil,
Demon, Satan."140The 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 himself
into different animals.141In any case, this choice placed the demon in a
138For the Council of

Braga, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval
Europe (Princeton,N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991), p. 111; for the Indiculus Super-
stitionum, see John T McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A
Translationof the Principal Libri Poenitentiales" (1938; reprint,New York:Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1990), pp. 419-21; for Pirminof Reichenau,see ClaudeLecouteux, Au-dela du
merveilleux: Des croyanes au Moyen Age (Paris:Presses de l'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne,
1995), pp. 57-59; for Penitencial de Silos, see McNeill and Gamer, p. 285; for Agobard of
Lyon, see Jean-ClaudeSchmitt,Historia de la supersticidn(Barcelona:Critica, 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 of
Witchcraft,3 vols. (New York:Yoseloff, 1957), 1:143-44; for Canon Episcopi, see Russell,
Witchcraftin the Middle Ages (n. 125 above), pp. 291-93; and for Decretum, see Giordano,
pp. 263-69.
139 We read in the Doctrina ChristianaMexicana by Juande la Plaza (Mexico, 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 further
on, 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 Christianiex-
ercent et operantursunt fraudes Demonis? R. Ita est, et qui illis credunt, et operanturqueae
dicunt, peccant contra fidem et obliganturInferno"(Resins Llorente [n. 25 above], p. 658).
140Burkhart 34
(n. above), p. 44; Cervantes(n. 2 above), p. 47. Quotationis from Olmos
(n. 17 above), p. 13: "vosotros habeis de saber que este hombre-biho se nombra, se llama
verdaderamentepor una multitudde nombres:mal angel Diablo, Demonio, Sathan."
141 See Hugo Nutini and John M. Roberts, Bloodsucking Witchcraft:An Epistemological
Study of AnthropomorphicSupernaturalismin Rural Tlaxcala (Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press, 1993), pp. 87-88.
dimension closer to the human sphere, removed from divine status, a

poor rival for the EuropeanLucifer.
Regarding the description of the real powers of the demon, Olmos
adopts a compromising strategy: according to his source-Castaniega's
Tratado-Fray Andres displayed the virtues of the angelic nature of the
devil 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 Tratadode
hechicerias, Satan is an extremely powerful angel and at the same time
an 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 the
naturalpowers of pure spirits: "it is written that an angel took Habakkuk
when he lived there, in a place called Judea; he just picked him up from
a hair... thus proving the virtue and the strength of the angel to take
someone away."143 His control over naturecannot be denied, especially if
the deity gives him permission to exercise his powers openly: "he is able
to throw fire up there, throughthe air, and make it change places; he will
then move the air, in such a way that a whirlwind will rise, or maybe not
rise if God does not allow it."144Another of the exempla describes a
storm and shipwreck caused by the devil.145
At the same time, to neutralize this image that orthodox angelology
did not allow him to ignore, Andres de Olmos introduces the principal
change made to Castafiega's original. The sorcerers, the idolaters, and
the pagans should make no mistake: the devil never keeps his promises;
he never employs his great powers for the benefit of those who conjure
him. As in many cultures, the evil spirits are here masters of illusion. His
power over men comes from his capacity to deceive humanminds, to dis-
play a veil that distorts human ability to perceive the world as it really is,
and to apprehendthe hierarchies that order the chain of being and show
the correctplace thatdemons should occupy in the cosmos.146In Sri Lanka
142 For the tension between both

ways of demonization of the Indian religions, see Ken-
neth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial AndeanReligion and Extirpation, 1640-1750
(Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 223-24.
143 Olmos, p. 51: "estd excrito que un angel se llev6 a Abachuc cuando vivia alla, en un
lugar llamado Judea;tan s6lo lo agarr6por un cabello ..., asi probandola virtudy la fuerza
del angel parallevarse a alguien."
144 Ibid., p. 63: "bienpodrdlanzarel fuego alli arriba,por los aires, y podrdhacer que 6ste
se mude de sitio; asi acompaiiaraal viento, de tal suerte que un torbellino de viento se levan-
tara o acaso no se levantarasi 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 InstitutionPress,
1991), pp. 1-6, 155-56.
as in baroqueEurope, the task of the exorcist is to break the illusion that

blurs the pristine order of things.147
"The devil," states Olmos, "does not always offer what a wicked heart
wants, the Devil does not give him satisfaction, because he who does not
aspire to God will always be deceived by the devil."148With this last ex-
pression, Olmos abandoned one of the essential characteristics of the
demonological discourse: its intrinsic ambiguity.149If in the Augustinian
model of superstitionthe demon can often produce those effects that the
homo superstitiosus does not obtain, throughthe naturaland supernatural
ways, in Fray Andres's discourse the devil infallibly breakshis 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 many
riches, but then he mockes and laughs at people."'50
The impotence of the devil, then, is not due to his naturalincapacity to
produce real effects in the material world, but to his incurable tendency
to lie: "nobody will be consecrated to the Devil no matterhow poor he is,
since he only gives faked things, and afterward something horrible and
scary would happen to them."'5' The same happens with fortune telling.
In the few exceptions in which he avoids deceit, the devil only tries to
conceal his perfidy: "and if sometimes, seldom does the Devil say true
words, it is very often because he wants suspicion to disappear,because
he wants to swindle; it is just to simulate his lies, his slobber."152
In the same way that in the Eucharistic transubstantiationthe divinity
makes use of the disjuncturebetween substance and accidents, the demon
uses the distance that separates reality from appearanceto create in the
imagination independent images of the objects perceived through the
senses, eidola ratherthan phantasmae. 53Fray Andres states: "the Devil
is capable of blurring somebody's knowledge, what is called senses, so
in this way [the person] disappearsin a deep dream;so he ... thinks that
147
Maggi (n. 49 above), pp. 106, 111; Kapferer,p. 104.
148 37: "El diablo no ofrece
Olmos, p. siempre aquello que desea un coraz6n malvado, el
Diablo no le procurasatisfacci6n, porque aquel que no aspiraa Dios siempre serd enganado
por el diablo" (my emphasis).
149See FabianAlejandroCampagne, "El rosario del soldado o el combate por el sentido:
La polemica en el seno del discurso antisupersticioso (Espafia. Siglos XV-XVIII)," Fun-
dacidn 5 (2001-2): 353-72.
150Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 49: "el Diablo que es muy lisonjero,muy artero,prometi6,ofre-
ci6 dar muchas riquezas, y luego se burla, se rie de la gente."
151Ibid., p. 45: "nadiese consagraraal Diablo por pobre que sea, ya que solo da cosafin-
gida, algo para que luego, luego, le ocurraa uno algo horrendo,espantoso" (my emphasis).
152 Ibid., 21:
p. "y si a veces, raras veces, dice palabras verdaderas el Diablo, es muy a
menudo porque quiere hacer desaparecerlas sospechas, porque quiere embaucar;s6lo es
para disimularsus mentiras, su baba"(my emphasis).
153
CompareMacCormack(n. 109 above), pp. 25, 28, 30.
what he dreams has happened in front of him."154As for many extirpa-

dores de idolatr'as, deception and illusion were the fields of action pre-
ferred by the demon and provided the most plausible explanation for
American idolatry, that monstrous deceit.155
VII. CONCLUSIONS: TRADUTTORE,TRADITORE

The Tratadode hechicerias by the FranciscanAndres de Olmos is a crea-
tion that differs extensively from the Tratado de las supersticiones by
Martin de Castaniega.In accord with the monopoly on the revealed truth
that Christianity claims, Olmos carries out an exercise that simulta-
neously denies and affirmsthe incommensurabilitybetween Europeanand
American cultures, that denies everything pertainingto the divinity in the
local culture, but that finds everywhere in the Amerindian religions the
traces of its enemy, the devil.
Olmos introduces in his manual significant formal changes regarding
Castafiega's treaty. Castafiega's work not only loses its title, but also its
original structure, since it is reduced to only eleven out of the twenty-
four original chapters.These alterationsreflect the differentstrategiesthat
the two authorshad. If the model readerof the Spanish Tratadois the di-
ocesan clergy-the implicit subject of Castafiega's discourse-Andres
de Olmos directly addresses the Indians of New Spain, raw material for
the providentialutopia that the Franciscans promoted in the decades im-
mediately after the conquest. It was not the vulgar superstitions or the
implicit pact with the devil that worried the indefatigable preacher. By
1550s traces of doubt aboutthe success of the strategyof massive conver-
sion, carried out by the minor friars, were clearly noticeable. It is idola-
try,which for baptizedIndiansalways meantapostasy,that worriedOlmos:
in his Tratado,the explicit covenant displaces the tacit pact. This explains
his changes to the title as well as the removal of the second part of the
Castafiega'soriginal work. To strengthenthe identity of the new Amerin-
dian Christianity,Olmos compares its purity-which he believes could
be preserved-with, on the one hand, Europeancorruption,the dry tree,
the christiandad vieja that bums, and, on the other hand, with the idola-
try of his ancestors, which persisted inside the already Christiancommu-
nities, and whose menace is comparedto the counter-churchof the witches,
an image that Castainegaemploys in Spain to condemn the vulgar super-
stitions of the christianos viejos. This change in the subject of discourse
also explains the change in genre: the destiny of the Tratadoby Olmos
was not to be read, but to be preached.
154Olmos, 53: "el Diablo tiene la
p. capacidad de turbaren alguien el conocimiento, lo
que se l1amansentidos, que asi desaparecen en un profundo suenio:de tal suerte que...
piensa que se produjoante el aquello que vio en su suenio."
155 Mills (n. 142 above), pp. 211-42; Bernandand Gruzinski(n. 107 above), 47.
p.
The transformation of the original demonology displayed by Cas-

tafiega is another substantial change introduced by Olmos in his own
work. Conscious of the risks involved in fully showing the angelic power
of Satan, which were capable of producing real effects and of granting
wishes with more frequency than God Himself, the Franciscanhad to re-
sort to a compromise in his solution. His demon is in fact the powerful
angel that the scholastic angelology imagined since the middle of the
thirteenthcentury.At the same time, he is a tricksterwho in all cases in-
variably deceives his acolytes, breaks his promises, and ignores every
pact. He is the master of illusion who penetratesdreamswith delight, and
who blurs the sight and confuses the mind. He is an impotent demon not
because of his angelic powers but because of his fondness for lying.
Not only did Olmos's discourse distort the past of the Amerindian
civilization, its atavistic rituals, and its ancestralpractices, but in his own
way, waiting for the end of the world, he also declared his rupturewith
the christiandad vieja, with the corruptedfaith of his believers and with
the excessive power displayed by his demons.
Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

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

(Logroño, 1529-Hueytlalpan, 1553)

I. FROM LOGRONO TO HUEYTLALPAN

Hueytlalpan,1553: It has been fourteenyears since Fray Andres de Olmos

? 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

many years before by anotherfranciscanfriar:Martinde Castafiega'sTra-

II. FRAY MARTIN, FRAY ANDRES

We know, nevertheless, that this Franciscan spent most of his life in

The list of positions held by Andres de Olmos in the Mexican plateau

III. SEPARATION, TRANSLATION, AND CONVERSION

But conditions changed radically in those places where a hegemonic

priate tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established by the

26 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges

relationships,and these relationshipsare ontological ratherthan logical.30

that the native structuresmanaged to impose themselves on the compo-

IV. A NEW TITLE, A NEW STRUCTURE, AND A NEW TREATISE

a) In the first place, there is a very importantfact: the change in title.

37 Burkhart,p. 235; James Lockhart,"Sightings:Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Cul-

e) The brief original preface-"El autor al discreto lector"-is replaced

The totality of these formal changes transforms the Tratado de hechi-

V. FROM SUPERSTITIONTO IDOLATRY: THE SUBJECT OF

CASTANEGA'S SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE: SUPERSTITIOUS MEN AND

51 See FabidnAlejandroCampagne,"Witchcraftand the Sense of the Impossible in Early

heteropraxis, orthodoxia and heterodoxia. In opposition to the commu-

OLMOS'S SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE: INDIANS AND IDOLATERS

World. Nevertheless, his tireless work as an itinerantpreacheras well as

of the world. The conversion of Jews, Tartars,Muslims, and the Orthodox

74 AdrianoProsperi,"New Heaven and New Earth:Prophecy and Propagandaat the Time

To reinforce the identification of the Indians with the new millenarian

97 CompareStuartSchwartz, "Introduction,"in Schwartz, ed. (n. 37 above), pp. 3-4.

forever rule there."99As in some particularmoiety systems described by

99 Ibid., p. 5: "porqueya esta Nueva Espainase va mezclando de diuersas naciones, y

He also required them to maintain a radical distance between their past

103 Levinson (n. 91 above), p. 344.

110Olmos, p. 73: "si un hombre recibe

he could transmitthis to somebody, to hand it over, to cover them with it;

VI. OLD DEVIL, NEW WORLD: SATAN AS A TRICKSTER

in literature,in the arts, and in myths. IconographyrepresentedSatan with

third was the replacement of a moral theology centered in the Seven

127 See John

138For the Council of

dimension closer to the human sphere, removed from divine status, a

142 For the tension between both

as in baroqueEurope, the task of the exorcist is to break the illusion that

what he dreams has happened in front of him."154As for many extirpa-

VII. CONCLUSIONS: TRADUTTORE,TRADITORE

The transformation of the original demonology displayed by Cas-

Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

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