Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [18]
Witch beliefs were not simply religious; they had a political component, too, tangled as they were with resistance to properly constituted authorities. The Guachichil witch’s crime was not only her witchcraft; it was also her ability to persuade the Guachichiles to join her in her rejection of the symbols of Spanish rule. As one Guachichil attested (perhaps self-servingly), before the accused witch rebelled, all of the Indians were “quiet, peaceful, and calm, and because of the said Indian woman they have become stirred up and restless.”63 And so she was put to death. Spanish officials moved quickly, permitting no appeal, because the witch threatened Spanish security. The Spanish justice of the town whisked her to the gallows. There, she was executed in an especially cruel fashion, hanged by her feet until she died, a process that took several hours. A priest in the Andes similarly admitted that he had whipped three women not primarily because they were witches, but rather because their behavior encouraged others in their village to rise up against Spanish rule.64
The Spanish inclination to link resistance to their political dominion to witchcraft had the consequence of making witchcraft seem pervasive in the Americas where it had been of minor importance (in terms of executions and threats to community order) in Spain. In many respects, the same old notions of witchcraft continued in Spanish America, especially those centered on maleficia and love magic. These ideas played themselves out regularly in secular and ecclesiastical courts in New Mexico (see below). But a new element emerged in the context of colonization and resistance, and that was the association of witchcraft with armed resistance to Spanish authority. In this respect, witches were not only rebels against godly order (as they were throughout Europe), but also armed rebels bent on overthrowing established governments.
The Spanish confronted two major uprisings in North America in the seventeenth century, first between 1616 and 1620 at Tepehuan in the province of Nueva Vizcaya (established in 1563), and a second, the Pueblo Revolt, in New Mexico in 1680.65 Santa Fe de Nuevo México (New Mexico’s original and full name) was established in 1598. Both regions lay within the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The second revolt was so successful that it removed the Spanish from the region for some ten years. Missionaries, the Jesuits in the case of the first episode and the Franciscans in the case of the second, blamed both resistance movements on the Devil.66 Each revolt had been preceded by growing doubts of Indian converts, who were questioning both the Christian message and the entire colonial project. In both resistance movements, the indigenous leaders whom the Spanish defined as demons and witches organized millenarian movements, predicting a more perfect world and the restoration of indigenous society once pernicious outside influences were removed (see documents 4 and 5).
In the Tepehuan revolt, at least 200 Spaniards and their allies were killed, including 10 priests. Some 4,000 Tepehuanes died. The rebels destroyed numerous symbols of Spanish occupation, including mines, missions, and settlements, in Sierra Madre Occidental. They staged mock religious processions, and then desecrated the objects, flogging statues and shredding crucifixes. They deliberately humiliated priests, mocking them with Latin before clubbing them to death.67 The most elaborate account (see document 4) of the revolt came from the pen of a Jesuit, Andrés Pérez de Ribas, in his History of the Triumphs of the Holy Faith among the Most Barbarous and Fierce People of the New World (1645). Pérez de Ribas had a simple explanation for what had transpired in the Tepehuan revolt: the leader of the