Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [17]
The growing evidence of the failure of Christian conversion, especially after decades of apparent success in New Spain in the sixteenth century, encouraged despondent priests to look to the Devil as the cause. They blamed him for deceiving the Spanish with false conversions. Some priests worried that converts used their old rituals in a new Christian form, and had been instructed on how to do so by the Devil.57 Especially insidious, Acosta explained, was the Devil’s habit of creating rituals that mimicked Christian practice. Thus Acosta reported monasteries of virgins in Peru and women in Mexico who lived like nuns for the space of a year. The consecration of Indian priests with sweet-smelling oils was another trick of Satan—these oils were made of noxious animal excretions. It was a simple step to conclude, as Acosta did, that the gods of the Americans were identical to the Devil.58 And the Devil encouraged resistance to the Christian message. When the Jesuits encountered Tepehuan Indians in North America in the early seventeenth century who did not want to convert to Christianity, they readily blamed Tepehuan religious leaders whom they identified as witches.59
Even a priest who initially had doubts about the presence of the Devil found that his experience among the Indians of New France altered his views. The French Jesuit Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664) originally thought that the Devil was in South America but was not pervasive in New France. There were sorcerers there, he believed, but not the Devil himself. But knowledge, it turns out, can breed distrust as well as understanding. The more Le Jeune learned of the Indians among whom he lived and preached, the more he began to believe that the Devil was in their midst. His view was reinforced by Indian resistance to his Christian message.60 In the end, the Jesuits in New France came to rely on Satan as a way to explain Indian resistance to Christian conversion.
Europeans associated resistance of all sorts, both to conversion and to secular rule, with diabolism. One case from northern New Spain reveals the connection. In 1599, Spanish officials executed an Indian woman for witchcraft. She was a Guachichil Indian, and she was tried in the region of San Luis Potosí, a part of the northern frontier of New Spain that had only recently come under Spanish control. The Guachichiles were one of several hunter-gatherer tribes that resisted Spanish occupation and conquest between 1548 and 1590 in a protracted series of conflicts called the Chichimeca Wars. The Spanish, propelled by the discovery of silver in Zacatecas in 1546, were highly motivated to expand commerce and settlement into this region, and the result was regular conflict. The Spanish, and the sedentary Indians who accompanied them in their movement northward, feared the Guachichiles. “So frightening” were they, decorated with animal figures when they fought, “that they even scare mules.” But the Spanish moved from fear to irritation, irked by the “audacity” of the Indians who resisted their occupation.61
The link between witchcraft and resistance was not subtle in this case. Estimated at approximately sixty years old, the accused woman had endured the ravages of conquest. She lived in a neighborhood occupied by Tlaxcallan and Tarascan Indians who had been moved north with the Spanish. They were Christian converts. The alleged witch went into their churches, removed the sacred images, and broke the crosses. The Indians who reported the case to Spanish authorities were troubled by her powers as a witch. Indians were ready to follow her because she had threatened to destroy them if they did not—and they believed she had the ability to do so. She was alleged to have killed a Tarascan Indian with magic (by grazing his ear with a stick). She turned herself into animals