• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 672 0

how to consume tobacco first from Americans, and then from experienced Europeans who brought new habits of consumption across the Atlantic with them. But tobacco also featured in theological discussions. Was it a suitable food for Christians? Could it be consumed during Lent? If America was the home of the Devil, what about the plants that were unique to the Devil’s lair? The first chroniclers of the New World latched on to Native American beliefs that tobacco was a sacred substance and transformed them, ultimately perceiving tobacco as supernatural and demonic.88 And so it is no surprise that tobacco crops up in Europe in the context of witch accusations and trials. The women of the Labourd grew tobacco plants in their gardens and smoked the substance, according to the Jesuit witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre, both to clear their heads and to stave off hunger. The tobacco made them smell so bad that it inured the women to its terrible stench and made them more accepting of the still more dreadful smells of the Devil.89 The road to hell, it seems, was strewn with tobacco leaves. And in the same way that Europeans saw the Americas as Satan’s bastion, they supposed American people and American plants might be diabolical.

New Mexico witchcraft cases reveal a variety of features of colonial life in New Mexico that did not exist in other colonized areas of North America. For example, they show the physical proximity in which Indians and Europeans lived and the increasingly intertwined beliefs they shared—about power, about magic, about healing, and about witches. These characteristics of New Mexico society were especially pronounced after the Spanish returned to the colony in 1706. Witchcraft was so much a part of New Mexico in the eighteenth century that Ramón A. Gutiérrez has suggested that it was one of three main issues that affected life there (the other two being Indian attacks and the important economic and governmental reforms of the 1770s).90 Document 12 contains extensive excerpts from a trial in 1708 concerning a Spanish woman who believed that she had been bewitched by three Indian women. As the trial testimony unfolds, we learn of a tangled web of relationships, a cheating husband, a young and possibly exploited Indian woman, and a betrayed Spaniard.

Nothing comparable exists among the surviving records in British or French North America, at least as far as indigenous people are concerned. (Readers will have the opportunity to decide for themselves if witchcraft played a similar role in interactions between enslaved Africans and their owners in British America.) It was proximity in New Mexico that enabled Europeans to seek out Indian curers—and it was both the exploitation and new kinds of human relationships that prompted people to need solutions available from witches. Many Indians lived in Spanish households, and because the colony was constantly at war, there were always new Indian captives joining households, and so the number of Indians in Spanish settlements increased. These Indians lived in proximity to Spanish men—who often preyed on Indian women—and also had easy access to food, enabling them to poison those who hurt them. It was this proximity, and the fear Spaniards had of Indians in their midst, that produced so many accusations of witchcraft against Indian and mestiza women. Stories of sex and sexual power, of the sexual freedom of Spanish men, the hurt and humiliation of Spanish women, and the exploitation of and sometimes opportunities for Indian and mestiza women, emerge in these trials. It is no surprise that many of these eighteenth-century cases revolved around love magic.91 And Indians and Spaniards shared ideas about witchcraft, which is most fully illustrated during the big outbreak at Abiquiu in 1756–1763, when 38 percent of 176 accused witches were of European descent, and 62 percent were Indian.92

Spanish witch beliefs flourished and expanded in the New World. The “love magic” that Spaniards resorted to in Spain was of greater importance in the demographic and racial configurations of colonial