• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 687 0

Inquisition for making a pact with the Devil, confessed that he had sought an herb from an Indian that he could use on a fast day to attract the attention of a woman. His consultation with an Indian expert suggests that he had absorbed the Spanish notion that Indians were likely witches. And in that same year, he continued, he met an African who introduced him to demonology. Rivera was born in Seville and went to Mexico when he was thirteen, and it is interesting that it was his journey out of Europe and to the New World that introduced him to not one but two new forms of magical and religious practice. The African sold Rivera a book with demons painted in it. The African’s belief (as reported by Rivera) that the Devil was powerful suggests that the man was a Christian (or possibly a skilled salesmen), and it is also possible that Rivera’s confession was designed to play into the cultural assumptions that Spanish officials had—that Indians and Africans were likely to be witches and to consort with the Devil.83 This recourse to indigenous practitioners was in fact commonplace in much of Latin America. Indians, Africans, and people of mixed race found careers as healers—curanderos, as they were called. In a witchcraft trial in New Mexico in 1708, two Indians, Juanchillo and Josepha, called as witnesses in the case, reported to the court that they worked as healers and had cured many Spaniards (see document 12). Widely accepted as legitimate and skilled healers, sometimes curanderos were reported to the Inquisition and accused of being witches or sorcerers by their own clients.84

A New Mexico case in 1733 hints at the intersection of healing, witchcraft, and the law. In that year, an Isleta Indian named Melchor Trujillo was accused of bewitching two Spaniards, who fell sick. If Trujillo touched them, he could either heal them or make them worse. Trial depositions revealed that the victims seemed to have had a prior relationship with the accused Indian since they testified that they had received peyote from him—perhaps seeking his expertise for cures or magic. Trujillo, who was a cacique (or leader) of the Isleta pueblo, confessed that he had practiced witchcraft with numerous other Indians. In their witchcraft, they used idols and he described other indigenous practices, including rubbing rocks and using the rocks’ dust in their magic. The accused gave the officials a variety of objects, including four dolls, rocks, and a string with beads. Trujillo also reported that there were several Spanish victims, although precisely because the victims had also sought the assistance of the alleged witches, and because of some difficulties with interpreters, officials had trouble sorting out who the witches and

victims were—a legal morass that resulted in part from Spanish expectations of magical and medical help from Indian curers (and witches).85

Europeans linked products unique to the Americas and important to indigenous ritual life, such as peyote and tobacco, to diabolical practice as well. Peyote is a small, spineless cactus; the name comes from the Nahuatl word, peyotl. Inquisition records from 1631 and 1632 suggest some of peyote’s uses in New Mexico: it could help a person suffering from bewitchment to identify the witch, and once the witch was revealed, the possessed person would be able to recover. Peyote could also enable a person to have visions that would show who was traveling through New Spain en route to Santa Fe, just the type of unnatural knowledge that Europeans associated with witchcraft. Peyote might help one recover lost objects, and it had medicinal powers, too, since one man of mixed Spanish and African descent reported that he had been told it was a good palliative for a broken arm.86 The Inquisition tended to be hostile to hallucinogenic drugs offered by indigenous healers, especially those drugs that caused users to fall into trances or that helped users to gain contact with the sacred world.87

Tobacco proved similarly puzzling to Europeans, who were not sure if the plant was diabolical. Europeans learned