CAMPAGNE. History of Religions 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 (August 2004), pp. 1-35
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Fabián Alejandro Campagne W I T C H E S , I D O L AT E R S ,
A N D F R A NC I S C A NS : A N
AMERIC AN T RANS-
L AT I O N O F EU RO P E A N
R A D I C A L D E MO N O L O G Y
( L O G RO Ñ O , 1 5 2 9 –
H U E Y T L A L PA N , 1 5 5 3 )
i. from logroño to hueytlalpan

Hueytlalpan, 1553: It has been fourteen years since Fray Andrés 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
España. 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 hechicerías y
sortilegios.1
This Tratado de hechicerías 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 translating and adapting a manual published in Spain
I would like to record my profound debt to José Emilio Burucúa for his inspiration in the
early days of my research projects.
1 Georges Baudot, Utopía e historia en México: Los primeros cronistas de la civilización
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.
ç 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0018-2710/2004/4401-0001$10.00

2 Witches, Idolaters, Franciscans
many years before by another franciscan friar: Martín de Castañega’s Tra-

tado de las superticiones y hechizerias (Logroño, 1529).3
The intellectual strategy of Olmos is a clear exception in the history of
evangelization in the New World. The authors of catechisms, confessors’
manuals, and homiletic collections could seldom find European works
suitable for providing an explicit matrix for their American manuals. The
uncompromising novelty of the continent demanded original creations.4
Therefore, the effort carried out 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.5 In fact, in the few cases in which they are considered together,
specialists tend to believe that Olmos’s treatise follows Castañega’s
original without substantial changes.6 However, the comparative analysis
of both texts demonstrates the opposite thesis: in his effort to adapt and
translate, Olmos introduced profound alterations in the original text. His
Tratado de hechicerías is a radically new work. Upon reading his Span-
ish source, it becomes clear that fray Andrés developed his own discourse,
which strikingly diverges from the radical European demonology that at
first seemed to have inspired him.
ii. fray martín, fray andrés

Fray Martín de Castañega 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 fundación y progreso de la provincia de Castilla
de la Orden de San Francisco, does not mention Castañega at all.7
3
The complete title as it appears on the title page is Tratado muy sotil y bien fundodo 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 péchés du Nouveau Monde: Les manuels pour la confession des
Indiens, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), p. 43.
5
The exception is Daniel Mosquera, who limits his comparison to the discursive and rhe-
torical aspects of both texts. See Daniel O. Mosquera, “Motolinía, Olmos and the Staging
of the Devil in Sixteenth-Century New Spain” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1998),
pp. 183–93.
6 See Baudot, Utopía e historia, pp. 133, 243– 44, 246; Cervantes, p. 25.
7
Agustín G. de Amezúa, “Prólogo,” in Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías del
R. P. Fray Martín de Castañega, ed. Agustín G. de Amezúa (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos
Españoles, 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, Castañega appeared as guardián of the Convento de Santa María
de Jesús, in Navarrete; twenty-four years later, we find him as guardián
of the monastery of Aránzazu, in Guipúzcoa.8
Most of Castañega’s fame results from the publication of his manual
one year before Pedro Ciruelo’s Reprobacion de las supersticiones y
hechizerias (Alcalá de Henares, 1530), the most famous treatise of the
Spanish literature of superstition.9 This 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 remarkable editorial success, the Tratado
by Castañega was not reprinted until the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. 10 Whereas at present there are many samples of Ciruelo’s work,
Castañega’s book is considered by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo to be
“extremely rare.”11
Martín de Castañega’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 Provisión, at the beginning of the book, the prel-
ate described the Franciscan as a “theologian and philosopher of great
subtlety, and a preacher of the Holy Office assigned by His Majesty.”12 In
his inquisitorial position, Castañega must have been involved in the witch-
craft enquiries that affected Navarra and the Basque Country between
1525 and 1527. In his book, Castañega assigns himself the role of eye-
witness to the events. There is no doubt that the Tratado de las super-
sticiones has a direct relationship with these early persecutions in the
farthest north 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 Castañega, see Tratado de las supersticiones y he-
chicerías de Fray Martín de Castañega, ed. Juan Roberto Muro Abad (Logroño: Instituto de
Estudios Riojanos, 1994).
9
Up to now there are still discussions about the date of the first edition of Ciruelo’s Rep-
robación. See Verónica Mateo Ripoll, “Sobre una edición ignota de la Reprobación de su-
persticiones del maestro Ciruelo,” Dynamis 22 (2002): 437–59.
10
The third modern edition, besides those carried out by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Es-
pañoles and the Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, is Fray Martín de Castañega, Tratado de las
supersticiones y hechicerías, ed. Fabián Alejandro Campagne (Buenos Aires: Universidad
de Buenos Aires, 1997). I use this edition for quotations throughout this article.
11 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1945), p. 389.

12
Castañega, p. 12: “muy artizado teólogo y filósofo, y predicador para el dicho Santo
Oficio por su majestad señalado.”

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 attributed to
witches produced perplexity among Spanish inquisitors and theologians.
One of the consequences of these northern trials was the meeting of a junta
de notables in Granada to advise the Consejo Supremo de la Inquisición
about the reality of the events attributed to the bruxas, especially the
nocturnal flight.14 As we will see later, these witchcraft prosecutions are
the only possible contact in the biographies of our two Franciscans.
Paradoxically, Fray Andrés de Olmos, polyglot and an outstanding lin-
guist, is a better-known figure. Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta points out his
importance as a chronicler, when he describes him as “the fountain from
which all streams on this matter flow.”15 Olmos must have been born near
Oña, not far from Burgos, around 1480. He joined the Franciscan order
in Valladolid. In 1527, Fray Juan de Zumárraga—future first bishop of
Mexico—chose him as his assistant during a witchcraft inquiry in Vis-
caya.16 As a consequence, Castañega 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.17 This meeting that could explain
why Olmos chose Castañega’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 Andrés’s career in Castle would be brief:
when Zumárraga moved to New Spain, he took Olmos with him. On De-
cember 6, 1528, the Franciscan arrived in Mexico-Tenochtitlán. In his re-
maining forty years he never returned to Spain.
13
See Florencio Idoate, La Brujería aen Navarra y sus documentos (Pamplona: Insti-
tución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), pp. 23–59; William Monter, La otra Inquisición: La In-
quisición en la Corona de Aragón, Navarra, el País Vasco y Sicilia (Barcelona: Crítica, 1992),
pp. 306–10.
14
Henry Kamen, La Inquisición Española (Barcelona: Crítica, 1988), pp. 275–77; Iñaki
Reguera, La Inquisición Española en el País Vasco (San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1983), pp. 197–
98; Henry Charles Lea, Historia de la Inquisición Española, 3 vols. (Madrid: Fundación
Universitaria Española, 1983), 3:605–6.
15
Quoted by Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 128: “fuente de donde todos los
arroyos que de esta materia han tratado, emanaban.”
16
Julio Caro Baroja, Brujería Vasca (San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1985), pp. 52–53; Baudot,
Utopía e historia, p. 133.
17
Georges Baudot, “Introducción,” in Fray Andrés de Olmos, Tratado de hechicerias y
sortilegios, ed. Georges Baudot (México: UNAM, 1990), p. x.
18
Scholars record only two quotations from Castañega’s treatise throughout the sixteenth
century. One of these is the one by Fray Andrés 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 Andrés de Olmos in the Mexican plateau

is long, but he always managed to combine preaching with intellectual
production, which he conceived as an instrument of evangelization. By
1553, Olmos was finishing a long period of residence in Hueytlalpan. In
the prologue of the Tratado de hechicerías he acknowledged his weari-
ness and contemplated death: “my end is near.”19 He 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
arms in 1568, Olmos—at about ninety 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 Martín and Fray Andrés meet, when Olmos chose Castañega’s
forgotten Tratado de las supersticiones as the inspiration for his own Tra-
tado de hechicerías. Olmos decided then to undertake a fascinating exer-
cise of translation between two unique and radically different civilizations.
During the last three millennia b.c.e., religion appears to have func-
tioned as an important promoter of intercultural translatability. The civi-
lizations from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East compared deities
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 starts from the word
and asks for its correspondent meaning. The first strategy tries to per-
ceive the way in which a certain semantic unit is expressed in different
languages, thus resulting in an intrinsically cross-cultural and interlinguis-
tic project of translation. Starting from the conviction that other peoples
worshipped the same gods, religion constituted a foundation for toler-
ance, a neutralizing principle of the effects of the “pseudo-speciation,” a
term coined to describe the formation of artificial subgroups within the
same biological species.21
19
The quotations I reproduce in notes are taken from Baudot’s Spanish version of the
original Nahuatl text. The English translations in the main body of the article are my trans-
lations from the Spanish. p. 4: “yo me voy llegando al fin.”
20
Baudot, Utopía e historia, pp. 158–59.
21
Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translability,” in
The Translability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Stanford Budick and
Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 25–27.

But conditions changed radically in those places where a hegemonic

culture threatened to absorb an ethnically different minority group. In these
contexts, much like an immune reaction, a deliberate counter-identity is
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 paradigmatic model for religions of second degree.22 The
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
translation exists, 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 Israel represents the 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.24 The translation strategies of Christian preachers
in the New World could not escape from these conscious limitations. The
incommensurability willingly constructed by Christianity and its agents
made impossible the complete translation of the conquerors’ culture into
that of the dominated people. But it did not prevent preachers from learn-
ing the languages of the latter.25 Translation then became the most appro-
22
Ibid., p. 29.
23
Ibid., p. 32.
24
Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 215–16.
25
In its most enlightened periods, the Church had the conviction that the best way to per-
suade the Jews of their mistake was to master their language and sacred books. Transcending
mere humanistic erudition, trilingual colleges were founded with the evangelic purpose of
providing the necessary techniques to preach Christianity in a more efficient way (Colin P.
Thompson, La lucha de las lenguas: Fray Luis de León y el siglo de oro en España [Sala-
manca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1995], p. 148). In America, the Franciscans fanatically de-
fended the preaching of Christianity in the local languages, trying to show themselves as
apostles of an autonomous religion rather than agents of a colonial power. Of 109 works
written in indigenous languages in America during the sixteenth century, minor friars wrote
eighty. The first generations of Franciscans spread Nahuatl even 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 mendicant preachers also used many other languages. In the specific
case of catechisms, we can find texts in Tarascan, Zapotecan, Otomí, Guastecan, Guatemal-
tecan, Chichimecan, Chontal, Mixtecan, Tzotzil, Quichua, Aymará, and Timucuan, among
many others (Luis Resines Llorente, Catecismos Americanos del siglo XVI [Salamanca: Junta
de Castilla y León, 1992], p. 33).

priate tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established by the

conquest itself.26
With regard to the translation of Christian cosmology into native lan-
guages, preachers had 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 Amerindian words retaining part of their an-
cient pre-Christian meaning.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 Amerindian terms to describe the devil and his actions. This double
strategy, which postulated simultaneously commensurability and incom-
mensurability between both rival cosmologies, exemplifies how the devil’s
symbolism served to bridge the gulf between European and Amerindian
cultures in New Spain.28 But 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 terrestrial bulwark of Luci-
fer. The native spirits were thus incorporated into the événement sans fin
of Christian cosmology, turned into an aspect of the prehistory of Chris-
tianity.29 God 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
structure is 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 México: Ensayo sobre el apostolado y los
métodos misioneros de las órdenes mendicantes en la Nueva España de 1523–24 a 1572
(México: Editorial JUS, 1947), p. 144; Resines Llorente, p. 33.
28
Mosquera (n. 5 above), p. 9.
29
I use this notion of événement sans fin in the sense used by Alain Boureau in L’événe-
ment sans fin: Récit et christianisme au Moyen Âge (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993).

relationships, and these relationships are ontological rather than logical.30

Thus, what we mean by “swan” depends on what we mean by “duck.”
How can we translate our “swan” into a language of a culture whose uni-
verse does not contain ducks?31 The center of gravity and the total design
of a culture may give a society a distinctiveness, a uniqueness as a spe-
cial crystallization of components.32 This is why the evangelizers’ conceit
that a common denominator had 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, pretending that analogous concepts
from the other culture were essentially identical to their own, a phenom-
enon that allowed the preservation of the indigenous structures for a long
period of time. These multiple distortions are better perceived if we take
into consideration the essential irreducibility that characterizes both cos-
mologies: Christian duality and Nahua monism. In the indigenous cosmos,
order and chaos were complementary aspects of a singular reality. The
notion of a totally good god was an absurdity in 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.33 But 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.34 The mis-
sionaries also tried to introduce the notion of Trinity, a concept based on
a phenomenal paradox, in cultures that completely lacked such a logical
category. They even wrote supposed Amerindian grammars that, 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.35 They thought that the
Christian hell could be assimilated to the nahua mictlan, without realiz-
ing that this was a cold northern place where every individual would go
after death anyway.36 In this subjugation of content to form, it is clear
30
Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 137.
31
Biagioli, p. 233.
32
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 127.
33
Cervantes (n. 2 above), p. 42.
34
Louise Marie Burkhart, “The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Six-
teenth-Century Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), pp. 34– 41.
35
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of
Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 182, 184.
36
Christian Duverger, La conversion des Indiens de Nouvelle Espagne (Paris: Seuil, 1987),
p. 189; Burkhart, p. 55.

that the native structures managed to impose themselves on the compo-

nents of the Christian ideology. In the new Spanish scenario, the logical
structure of the universe remained Nahua, and the Christian elements
were transformed to function within it.37
When in 1553 Fray Andrés de Olmos decided to base his Tratado de
hechicerías on Castañega’s own Tratado de las supersticiones, he was
ready to begin an impossible task, an adventure that 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-
ñega’s Tratado.38 The mere formal alterations with respect to the Tratado
de las supersticiones, leaving aside the substantial theological differences
or the translation into Nahuatl itself, transform Fray Martín’s manual into
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 introduced by the American preacher into
Castañega’s original.
a) In the first place, there is a very important fact: the change in title.
Castañega’s Tratado de las supersticiones y hechizerias becomes Ol-
mos’s Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios.
b) Second, Olmos makes a suggestive cut from Castañega’s original.
Out of the twenty-four chapters of the Tratado de las supersticiones,
Fray Andrés only keeps the first eleven. Far from signifying a simple
recognition of the irrelevance of the description of the European
superstitions for the new American conversos, this mutilation is part
of a conscious strategy that destroys the original sense of Casta-
ñega’s treatise.
c) Between chapters 2 and 3 of his Tratado de hechicerías, Olmos inter-
polates the only completely new chapter, which is absent from Cas-
tañega’s Tratado. Curiously enough, Fray Andrés avoids enumerating
correlatively the interpolated chapter, 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. Stuart Schwartz (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 219, 228–29.
38
Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 243.

e) The brief original preface—“El autor al discreto lector”—is replaced

by an “Exortación al indiano lector,” in this case written in Nahuatl.
f ) Apart from the narrations employed by Castañega in his Tratado, some
of them glossed by Fray Andrés, the American preacher adds some
new exempla, extracted from the American context, especially in the
interpolated chapter and in chapter 4.
The totality of these formal changes transforms the Tratado de hechi-

cerías into something more than a lineal adaptation of the Tratado de las
supersticiones. Olmos constructs an original work, whose radical alter-
ations I will analyze in the following section.
v. from superstition to idolatry: the subject of

discourse
The subjects of Castañega’s and Olmos’s particular discourses radically
differ from each other. The difference transcends the originality of the
spatial and temporal contexts as well as the simple divergence between
the superstitions of the European peasantry and the idolatry of American
Indians. Both Franciscans attempted the construction of complex fictional
narrations and the creation of imaginary identities functional to the groups
they represented: the high theological culture, on the one hand, and the
missionary Franciscan enterprise, on the other. Castañega 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
manipulable process.39 Fray Martín’s and Fray Andrés’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.40 To 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 Franciscans could 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.41 People know who they are
39
Eva Kushner, “The Emergence of the Paradoxical Self,” in Imagining Culture: Essays in
Early Modern History and Literature, ed. Jonathan Harta (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 45;
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 2.
40
Pierre Bourdieu, “Espacio social y poder simbólico,” in his Cosas dichas (Barcelona:
Gedisa, 1993), p. 140.
41
Wolfgang Iser, “Coda to 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.42 As 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.43 When a culture
defines itself as the center of the world, it requires the periphery that sur-
rounds it as part of its own self-definition: it is the sum of the interior and
the exterior that constructs the whole identity, the totality outside of which
nothing exists.44 Thus, otherness is independent from 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.46 Martín de Castañega and Andrés de Ol-
mos are a perfect example of the process of constructing fictional groups
and opposed identities.
castañega’s subject of discourse: superstitious men and

the diocesan clergy
Martín de Castañega organizes his discourse around two sets of opposed
identities, one of them explicit and the other implicit. In regard to the
first one, Fray Martín develops to an extreme the well-known image of
the two churches, the Catholic against the counter-satanic church.47 Each
chapter of the Tratado is internally organized with this ontological oppo-
sition. The counter-church includes, 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
chapters describe those who have declared themselves to be worshippers
of the devil; the other thirteen chapters describe those who are part of the
diabolic church without even knowing it.
In search of a paradigmatic image to represent the counter-satanic
church, Castañega resorts to the stereotype of the witches’ Sabbath. The
portrayal of 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 reconfiguración del orden mundial (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 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, Travel Writ-
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 Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997),
chaps. 3–6.

divinity, and who are depicted gathered around a fictional ritual, allowed
theologians to integrate particular atrocities 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-
tañega) and of pagan ritual practices (Olmos). But is Castañega’s manual
a demonological treatise similar to those composed by Jean Bodin, Henri
Boguet, Pierre de Lancre, Heinrich Institoris, Martín Del Río, and Fran-
cesco Maria Guazzo, which have the aim of hunting witches and un-
masking their diabolical conspiracy?49 The answer is certainly no. In
the title itself, the Franciscan presents his book as a treatise of reproba-
ción 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. Castañega served the Holy
Office during the witchcraft prosecutions in Navarra and the Basque
Country. Perhaps this 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.
Castañega’s Tratado is nothing but a didactic display of the Augustin-
ian model of superstition.50 Superstitions 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 traditional Christian cosmos: the natural and supernatural orders.
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?They must appeal to a third order of causalities that, although il-
legitimate, was capable of producing real effects: the preternatural order,
48
See David Frankfurter, “Ritual as Accusation and Atrocity: Satanic Ritual Abuse, Gnostic
Libertinism, and Primal Murders,” History of Religions 40 (2001): 353, 355, 363.
49
For a synthesis of the traditional demonological 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 Kathrin Utz Tremp, eds.,
L’imaginaire du sabbat: Édition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440 c.) (Lau-
sanne: Université de Lausanne, 1999); Armando Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Re-
naissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
50
See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, Homo Catholicus, Homo superstitiosus: El discurso
antisupersticioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII (Madrid: Miño y Dávila, 2002),
pp. 53–77.

the actions of angels and demons.51 Since it was believed the former
were alien to any deed contrary to the divine design, the evil spirits were
undoubtedly the agents expected to produce the desired effects. The
mise-en-scène of any superstitious practice—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 through natural or supernatural virtue but through
the actions of the devil, who quickly responds to produce effects stipu-
lated beforehand whenever he observes the agreed-upon signs (the images
and characters used 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 practitioner did not conjure its pres-
ence, did not sign pacts, or did not take part in sacrilegious nocturnal
assemblies.53
Martín de Castañega reproduced this Christian model of superstition in
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 describe the practices and beliefs that actually existed in Span-
ish territory: saludadores (healer of rabies), mal de ojo (evil eye), nóminas
(written spells), ensalmos (oral spells), excomulgadores de langostas (ex-
communication of locusts), conjuros de tormentas (cloud conjuring), and
so on.54 When Castañega interposes the first eleven chapters—that de-
scribe the counter-church, under the specific form of the Sabbath—with
the remaining thirteen—that describe the actually existent vain practices—
he tries to strengthen the Augustinian-Thomist idea that between 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 Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Witchcraft and the Sense of the Impossible in Early
Modern Spain,” Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003): 33–39.
52
Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana II, 20, 30–31; II, 24, 36; II, 25, 37; and II, 29, 45.
53
Campagne, Homo Catholicus, pp. 69–72.
54
For a brief description of these practices, see Juan Francisco Blanco, Brujería y otros
oficios populares de la magia (Valladolid, Spain: Ámbito, 1992), pp. 105–30; 209–60; He-
liodoro Cordente Martínez, Brujería y hechicería en el obispado de Cuenca (Cuenca; Dipu-
tación Provincial, 1990), chaps. 8–17; María Tauasiet, Ponzoña en los ojos: Brujería y
superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 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 Castañega wanted
to generate, a few years after the beginning of the first important witch
hunt in Spanish territory.55 The theologian tried to show the existence of
a conductive thread among the superstitions, apparently simple 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 Castañega’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 literature of superstition, Castañega
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 Provisión we can deduce the real homines supersti-
tiosi to whom Castañega’s manual is addressed: the clergy of the Cala-
horra dioceses. The common priests were the first who should learn the
subtleties of the superstition matter before being able to eradicate the vain
practices and observances from the people. The bishop and the author
conceived the Tratado as 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 bishopric to have the aforementioned treatises . . . ; 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.”56 Cas-
tañega 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 persuaded here.”57
The high theological culture, represented in this case by an agent of
the inquisitorial power and a bishop, presents itself as the only holder of the
truth, the custodian of the power to distinguish between orthopraxis and
55
See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “El otro-entre-nosotros: Funcioanlidad de la noción
de superstitio en el modelo hegemónico cristiano (España, siglos XVI y XVII),” Bulletin
Hispanique 102 (2000): 52–53, 57.
56
Castañega (n. 10 above), p. 12: “mandamos a todos los curas, y rogamos y amonestamos
a los otros eclesiásticos deste nuestro obispado, 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-
stición cayeren, los mandaremos mas gravemente castigar” (my emphasis).
57
Ibid., p. 2: “[este libro] a mi ver, no solo aprovechara a los simples para apartarlos de
sus errores y engaños diabolicos, mas aun es necesario para quitar muchas ignorancias de
muchos, que, presumiendo de letrados, niegan las maneras de las supersticiones y hechize-
rias, que aquí se ponen, declaran y persuaden.”

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

nity of the “mayores de pueblo de Dios,” to the theologos and holy doc-
tors, Castañega’s discourse designs two subordinated sets of “menores
del pueblo de Dios”:58 in 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 construction of a double subject of discourse runs through the total-
ity of the Spanish antisuperstitious literature, from the treatises of Lope
de Barrientos, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the great summae of Benito
Jerónimo Feijóo, in the eighteenth century.59 All of them outline a wider
audience for the antisuperstitious discourse that, depending on the case,
can include the king, the secular magistrates, the jurists, the medicine
doctors, and the natural philosophers. 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 subordinate to
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 Castañega’s work, the subject of discourse in
Andrés de Olmos is radically different. Fray Andrés does not interpolate
the diocesan clergy, the true addressee of Castañega’s teaching. In his
Tratado de hechicerías Olmos leaves aside all intermediation: it is In-
dians to whom he addresses his discourse in a direct way.
Even though Andrés de Olmos was not one of the twelve Franciscans
sent in 1524 to evangelize the recently conquered New Spain—he arrived
four years later with Zumárraga—his contribution to 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 branch of the Franciscan observantia. In fact, his first Mex-
ican mission consisted of searching for Motolinía, 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 characterized the first generations of Franciscans in the New
58
Both expressions belong to Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechi-
zerias: Libro muy util y necesario a todos los buenos christianos (Medina del Campo, 1551),
fol. 31v.
59
60
See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “ ‘Porque no les acaesca condepnar los inocentes e
absolver los reos’: La superstición como construcción ideológica en la España de los siglos
XV al XVIII,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 75 (1998–99): 243–72.
61
Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), p. 135.

World. Nevertheless, his tireless work as an itinerant preacher as well as

his enthusiasm for the ethnographic chronicles—in the case of the Fran-
ciscans, indissolubly linked to the preparation of the millennium—clearly
demonstrate his de facto adherence to the providential mission that the
order had assigned to itself.
The origin of the Franciscan observance seems to go back to Giovanni
della Valle, a disciple of Angelo Clareno, who joined the order in 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.63 In 1517, the movement is named Custodia de San Gabriel,
and in 1519 it becomes independent from the observant province of San-
tiago.64 Extreme 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 Ángeles 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 surrender his mission, he chose Mar-
tín 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 millenarian kingdom of the Apocalypse. This glo-
rious era of the Holy Spirit would take place on earth, far away from the
perpetual eternity of the eighth age outside history.66
Joachim also expected a radical conversion of the Church, transformed
into ecclesia contemplantium or spiritualis after the establishment of the
third status. To accomplish this transformation he expected the appear-
ance of an order of spiritual men sent ad vesperam huius seculi, at the
62
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachim-
ism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 228.
63
Melquíades Andrés Martín, “La espiritualidad franciscana en España en tiempos de las
observancias (1380–1517),” Studia Historica; Historia Moderna 6 (1988): 468–69, 474.
64
Baudot, Utopía 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 López 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., p. 135.
68
Ibid., p. 196.
69
See Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1990); Miguel A. Granada, “Los hechos: Mirabilia y profecías en torno
a 1500. Su inserción en las expectativas de renovatio,” in Cosmología, religión y política en
el Renacimiento (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988), pp. 33– 46; Clark, Thinking with Demons
(n. 47 above), chap. 22; Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement
in Florence, 1494–1545 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Jonathan B. 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 Laura Acker-
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 Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Ángeles apócrifos en la América virreinal (México: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 55–59.
71
Reeves, p. 446.
72
Aldo Landi, “Prophecy in the Time of the Council of Pisa (1511–1513),” in Prophetic
Rome in the High Renaissance Period, ed. Marjorie Reeves (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 58.
73
Nelson H. Minnich, “Prophecy and the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517),” in Reeves,
ed., pp. 63–87.

of the world. The conversion of Jews, Tartars, Muslims, and the Orthodox
Church would be a certain sign that the seventh age was already a reality
on earth. The discovery of America was seen by the Franciscans from the
Provincia de San Gabriel as a new providential event, the opportunity to
accelerate the Second Coming. When making his farewell to the twelve,
Fray Francisco de los Ángeles reminded them of the importance of their
expedition, “now when the day of the world is declining at the eleventh
hour.”74 That is why Martín de Valencia, leader of the twelve, tried to
embark toward China, soon after he had settled in Mexican territory.
But the American enterprise was also seen as the opportunity to 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-
templative life, exercise the apostolic poverty, and enjoy angelic natures.75
After the failure of the old European Christendom, the friars would have
to start in America from the beginning, creating on the eve of the end of
the world a terrestrial paradise, a sweet violence that would imprison the
Indians in an endless childhood—an archetypal image of divine purity.76
In the Indians, the Franciscans believed 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.77 The Indians seemed predestined to take the empty seats
that the fallen angels had left in heaven.78 The new American church would
have poor bishops, and it would be so well “ordered in good Christen-
dom” that, as fray Jerónimo de Mendieta said, “people would say nothing
but that it is all a monastery.”79 The Franciscan utopia expressed a pro-
gression toward the future that begins with a return to the past,80 here a
past that conflates a magnification of the Indian primitivism with a recon-
struction of the pre-Constantine evangelic church. The Indians and the
friars would become the perfect protagonists of this new Christendom:
the childlike Adamic innocence of the former and the seraphic androgyny
74
Adriano Prosperi, “New Heaven and New Earth: Prophecy and Propaganda at 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 (México:
Universidad Autónoma de México, 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, author of the biography of Toribio
Alfonso de Mogrovejo edited in 1688. Compare Mujica Pinilla, p. 231.
79
Quoted by Phelan, p. 103.
80
See Michael David Bailey, “Heresy, Witchcraft and Reform: Johannes Nider and the Re-
ligious World of the Late Middle Ages” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1998), pp. 85–
87. This thesis has just been released as a book: Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and
Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

of the latter were themselves paradoxical images that expressed the be-
ginning of the end of history.81 The fact that the Indian myths themselves
expressed with conviction the belief in the imminent destruction of their
world was seen as another confirmation of European messianic ideas and as
a justification for the extermination of an old dream by a frantic modern
one.82 However, by the beginning of the 1550s, when Olmos wrote his
Tratado de hechicerías, the seraphic utopia in New Spain seemed to be
threatened in 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 attachment to their ancient idolatry.
At the beginning of the 1550s, this former concern was becoming
apparent in the insistence of the metropolitan authorities that the Indians
be taught Spanish, a mandate that attacked the seraphic utopia at its
heart. In fact, the crown sent a real cédula to all the provinciales of the
three mendicant orders with this new disposition.83 Olmos 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 mendicant orders. The por-
tentous landmarks would soon start appearing one after another: the first
Mexican Council in 1555, the death of the viceroy Velasco in 1564, the
coming of the Jesuits, the formal settlement of the Inquisition, and the sup-
pression of the apostolic privileges of the mendicant orders—all of these
occurred in 1572.84
The second threat that disturbed the Franciscan utopia was the appear-
ance of worrying signs regarding the sincerity of the Indian conversos,
the matrix of the new Christendom that would accelerate the end of times.
The first instance of this awareness was in November 1539, when Olmos
prosecuted and punished the lord of Matlatlán, 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 Zumárraga condemned to death a former
pupil of the Colegio de Tlatelolco, the lord of Texcoco.86 It was in this
81
See Mircea Eliade, “Mefistófeles y el andrógino o el misterio de la totalidad,” in Me-
fistófeles y el Andrógino (Barcelona: Kairós, 2001), p. 119.
82
J. M. Le Clézio, Le rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1988),
p. 208.
83
Baudot, Utopía e historia (n. 1 above), pp. 104–5.
84
Duverger (n. 36 above), p. 255.
85
Quoted by Ricard (n. 27 above), p. 468: “veinte años ha que se les explica el Evangelio,
y sin embargo persisten tan obstinados como antes en su idolatría.”
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 “amount of idols and ritual objects in the south of Chiapas, dur-
ing the visitas he carried out between 1551 and 1554.88 This prompted
the prelate to commission the Dominican Dimingo de Vico to write his
Tratado de idolos, practically at the same time that Olmos was working on
his own Tratado de hechicerías in Hueytlalpan. One of the greatest dis-
appointments would occur in 1562, when the Franciscans from Yucatán
discovered idolatrous practices at the heart of their missionary enterprise.
The violence of the following repression revealed the magnitude of their
disillusionment.89 The 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-hysterical reactions, typical of situations of real or imagined forms
of pressure that seem to question the security of their own identity and
that of others.92 The Franciscan utopia seemed to become, in the stressful
situation beginning in the 1550s, an appropriate means to reinforce the
positive self-definitions and the differences that separated the new Amer-
ican Christendom from other groups. The Tratado de hechicerías by
Andrés 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 Castañega’s original: from a
treatise for the formation of the diocesan clergy to an edifying sermon
for the Amerindians. This transformation can be clearly perceived in the
numerous markers of orality present throughout the 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: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 76–77.
90
Jacques Lafaye, “La utopía mexicana: Ensayo de intrahistoria,” in Mesías, cruzadas,
utopías: El judeo-cristianismo en las sociedades ibéricas (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1984), p. 85.
91
Joshua Levinson, “Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late Antiq-
uity,” Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000): 344.
92
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, “The Black Hole of Culture: Japan, Radical Otherness, and the Dis-
appearance of Difference (or, In Japan Everything Normal),” in Budick and Iser, eds. (n. 21
above), p. 199.
93
For a full description of the characteristic of the sermon as a literary genre, see Pedro
M. Cátedra, Sermón, Sociedad y Literatura en la Edad Media: San Vicente Ferrer en Cas-
tilla (1411–1412) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 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 imaginary communi-
ties negatively connoted, designing in this way an otherness that consists
of a relationship rather than a reality in itself.94 These corrupted imagi-
nary communities were the old European Christendom and the Indian pa-
gan ancestors.
In the “Exortación al Indiano lector,” one of the fragments that is not
included in Castañega’s original, Olmos reaffirms the new identity de-
rived from baptism, an excluding identity without return or 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.” Ol-
mos reminds the Indians of their perpetual dependent status under the
tutelage of the friars, and of their specific role in the new American Chris-
tendom: “If there is something you do not understand correctly, immedi-
ately ask the [Franciscan] father.” And he adds: “that man 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.”95 The 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 attributes of their past or future status.96
The Indians were neither pagans nor old Christians; they would not even
be new Christians should they lack the permanent assistance of the friars.
To strengthen the providential qualities of the new Christendom, Ol-
mos compares its image to the corrupted description of the European Old
Church. The choice of Castañega’s Tratado—a threatening description of
was an inspiring figure for Andrés de Olmos. For the reflection on the other in medieval ex-
empla, see Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women and 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, cuando fuiste bautizado has odiado,
despreciado, abandonado al diablo . . . para que Dios te ayude si no tienes el corazón doble,
si no tienes la lengua doble. . . . Ahora si de verdad, de buen corazón, perteneces a Dios allá,
detrás de ti . . . relegarás . . . al injusto mundo diabólico” (my emphasis). “ ‘Si algo no en-
tiendes bien, interroga al instante al padre’. Y agrega: ‘aquel hombre que no pregunta al
padre, quizá desee hacer cosas buenas y también quizá abrigue pensamientos que lo pier-
dan. . . . Por eso mismo será muy bueno él, el hombre del pueblo, humilde, seguirá a aquel
que está por encima de él.’ ”
96
Compare Victor Turner, “Entre lo uno y lo otro: El período liminar en los rites de pas-
sage,” in his La selva de los símbolos: Aspectos del ritual ndembu (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1990),
p. 104.

the advance of the diabolical conspiracy in the Old World—was also im-
portant for this strategy. The Christian virtues that the Franciscans were
anxious to recover for themselves suddenly appeared before their eyes,
incarnated in 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 through a trustworthy description of the other.97 As opposed to friars
and Indians, European Christendom seemed 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 Christianity burns, it is no wonder to see the new one on fire as
well, since the enemy has no less envy, rage, and rancor that 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 corrupt the new Christendom, and his
triumph would do nothing but hasten the end of history and his own final
defeat. Only a godly life and a strong faith could halt the increasing attacks
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 surrounds his 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 European corruption:
“because this New Spain is already entangled with various nations, and
wherever there is a crowd, there is confusion. Through this 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 transmitted to one another.” And then Olmos finished
with a suggestive admonition that seems to reserve paradise only for friars
and Indians, the pillars of a new apocalyptic Christianity: “and I beseech
that the care and diligence of shepherds and the heads of the church should
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
Compare Stuart Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Schwartz, ed. (n. 37 above), pp. 3– 4.
98
Olmos, p. 4: “si la vieja christiandad se quema, no es de marauillar que arda la nueva,
pues el enemigo no menos embidia tiene, enojo y rencor tiene destos que poco hase se le es-
caparon de las uñas.” “Y cada día [el demonio] cerca y rodea la presa por la tornar a correr
al qual sola la fe formada le es impedimento, porque la fe tibia o muerta, poco o nada se es-
panta” (p. 4).
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forever rule there.”99 As in some particular moiety systems described by

anthropology, both extremes—the old and the new Christianity—are not
conceived here as a pair of complementary opposites that together make
up a harmonious whole, halves that exchange between them their neces-
sary opposing qualities. Instead, the opposites are here two different ways
of conceiving the hierarchy that orders the relationship between 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 reproduce its own hierarchy.100 Thus, whereas
the old Christianity provided the Indians with a subordinate status—the
blemish of the converso—the new Christendom transformed the corrupted
faith of the old Christian into the reality that Amerindian neophytes were
forced to overcome.
The radical condemnation of European Christianity seems to turn Ol-
mos’s discourse into a fractured enunciation that challenges the hegemonic
discourse from a subordinate perspective. However, his Tratado is 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 aspires to recreate on another continent. Hence Olmos’s discourse does
not surpass the limits of a universalizing narration, the supreme truths of
a revealed religion that prevent the complete recovery of the differences
of the local culture.101 To see non-Western peoples as having themselves
become the standard-bearers of Western culture is in some ways a more
profound form of colonization, the search for its own idealized image in
the imperfect copies fabricated by other cultures, ethnocentrism thinking
itself as antiethnocentrism.102
But the vieja christiandad was not the only inverted image that Olmos
used to strengthen the new providential identity of Amerindian neophytes.
99
Ibid., p. 5: “porque ya esta Nueva España se va mezclando de diuersas naciones, y
donde ay muchedumbre ay [sic] está la confusión. Deseo con esto avisar a los unos y a los
otros simples en tal manera que así como a algunos se les pega la lengua o costumbre cor-
rupta la tal ponçoña y pestelencia o semejante no se pegue o traspase de unos en otros” (my
emphasis). “Y ruego se abiue y despierte el cuidado y diligencia de los pastores y rectores de
[la] yglesia, y que tal solicitud pongan en las ánimas que a cargo tienen, que al fin con ellas
en el cielo para siempre reynen.”
100
See Valerio Valeri, “Reciprocal Centers: The Siwa-Lima System in the Central Moluc-
cas,” in The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode, ed. David
Maybury-Lewis and Uri Almagor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp.
135–36.
101
See 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 according to biological descent, whereas
in the second, identity was built on the acceptance of a certain institu-
tionalized system of beliefs.103 Baptism should then replace ancestral re-
lationships as the articulating axis of this new imaginary community.104
To achieve this, a vast pedagogical industry had to compel the neophytes
to a permanent exercise 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 estrangement comes a new identity, which,
because it cannot be “remembered,” must be narrated.105 As Olmos re-
minds the Indians, “you should know that a long time ago, at the time of
your grandfathers, the Devil penetrated a 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.107 For the time being, the friars banished to hell the venerated an-
cestors in toto: “our grandfathers did not take shelter in a good deity, and
in this way they would not know any charity.”108 Thus, every object that
represented in any way some form of solidarity within the lineage, such
as the small reliquaries in New Spain or the mummies in Central Andes,
deeply angered the preachers.109 Fray Andrés 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:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6: “the mem-
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.”
105
Ibid., pp. 200–204.
106
Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 17: “sabréis que hace ya mucho tiempo, de cuando los abue-
los, el Diablo penetraba en una piedra, en un palo, en una persona que servía de intermedi-
ario, para hablar, para engañar mucho” (my emphasis).
107
See Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De la idolatría: Una arqueología de las
ciencias religiosas (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), pp. 101, 154.
108
Olmos, p. 23: “nuestros abuelos ne se refugiaban en una buena divinidad, y así no
conocerán ninguna caridad ” (my emphasis).
109
See Serge Gruzinski, La colonización de lo imaginario: Sociedades indígenas y occi-
dentalización en el México español. Siglos XVI–XVIII (México: Fondo de Cultura Econó-
mica, 1988), p. 136; cf. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and 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 grandmother to
show that they leave to him the task to become friends with 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.”110
This disturbance of memory compelled the Indians to construct a false
being, a Christian autobiography of 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 another that re-
orders and reads those marks, a temporal division between a self that reads
and one that is read.111 As Olmos argues, “neither would you believe in
dreams, in deceiving words, in the bad things whose memory your 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
Amerindian church: “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.”113 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.114 That is why Olmos recounted the responsi-
bilities of those who, because of not avoiding contact with wicked men,
would fall again under the power of the devil: “the nahual would leave us
his tyranny as a memory, his hypocrisy, his wickedness. . . . It is said that
110
Olmos, p. 73: “si un hombre recibe algún signo de su padre, de su madre o de una
abuela para mostrar que le dejan el trabajo de hacer amistad con el Diablo, aunque el hijo no
crea en esto, si quizá aún un hombre agarra las cosas dadas por el adepto del Diablo sin de-
spreciarlas, parece como si asi permitiera al Diablo hacer aquello que hizo en su nombre su
madre o aquel que le dejó estas cosas diabólicas.”
111
Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion
in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996),
p. 100.
112
Olmos, p. 21: “tampoco irás a creer en los sueños, en la palabra engañosa, en las cosas
malas cuyo recuerdo han dejado tus padres, tus abuelos, ciegos que no creían en el verda-
dero Dios, que no lo conocían. Y ahora descubre la falta, tú que la conoces” (my emphasis).
113
Ibid., p. 28: “en medio de la gente, entre la gente viven los malvados . . . y arrastran a
la gente a la ruina, a la enfermedad, los hacen desgraciados, los castigan muy duro con
pulque, con hongos, para que vengan a ser malvados” (my emphasis).
114
See David Warren Sabean, “The Sacred Bond of Unity: Community through the Eyes
of a Thirteen-Year-Old Witch (1683),” in Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village
Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.
109–10.

he could transmit this 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 alteration of the subject in Olmos’s Tratado is useful to ex-
plain the formal alterations that Fray Andrés introduced in Castañega’s
original. First, there is the change of title: from Tratado de las supersti-
tiones (Treaty regarding superstitions) to Tratado de hechicerías (Treaty
regarding sorcery). Second, there is the excision of the thirteen chapters
that make up the second part of Castañega’s work. The objective of Fray
Martín was to remind the old Christians that those apparently harmless
superstitiones were ways of contracting a tacit pact with the devil, scarcely
separated by a difference in degree with respect to the Sabbath atrocities.
That is why the chapters of the second part were really the core of Cas-
tañega’s Tratado. The first eleven chapters that describe in detail the dia-
bolical counter-church were nothing but dependent on the other thirteen.
That theological fiction of the first part justified the intrinsic diabolical
character of 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 Andrés’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
compared with 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
Tratado de las supersticiones becomes the Tratado de hechicerías, and
both original parts transform themselves into one text, in which only the
counter-church that includes idolaters and apostasies is described. The
new Amerindian church—the axis of the providential mission to which the
Franciscans believed themselves predestined—had to be preserved from
this diabolical counter-church.
115
Olmos, p. 71: “el nahual dejará en el recuerdo su tiranía, su hipocresía, su maldad.
. . . Se dice que esto lo podrá transmitir a alguien, dárselo, cubrirle con ello; en cuanto se
acerquen a él, entonces se lo comunicará, lo cegará. Pero . . . no se podrá tomar este tributo
de trabajo si no es por voluntad propia. . . . Porque efectivamente, si él, el nahual le toma a
una madre su joven doncella para que trabe amistad con el Diablo, sólo será por voluntad de
la joven doncella.”
One Line Short

vi. old devil, new world: satan as a trickster

The alteration of the subject of discourse was not the only substantial in-
novation introduced by Olmos in his resignification of Castañega’s Tra-
tado de las supersticiones. Forced by necessity to adapt that text to the
American reality, Fray Andrés had to display an interpretation of the di-
abolical power significantly different from the radical demonology that
was triumphing at 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.116 After the
resurrection of 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, transforming itself into one of the more dynamic disciplines
within theology, a true natural science of demons.118 No other period of
the history of Christendom was more obsessed with the figure of the devil
than the period that covers the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In fact,
our interaction and dialogue with the supreme adversary of the Christian
god is established at 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.120 The symptoms of this early modern obsession with the demon are
widely known, in particular witch-hunting, a unique and paradigmatically
modern phenomenon.121 This pessimism and tragic vision is reproduced
116
Robert Muchembled, Une histoire du diable, XIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2000),
p. 24; cf. Hans Peter Broedel, “The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witch-
craft: Encounters with the Supernatural between Theology and Popular Belief ” (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, Il diavolo tra fede e ragione (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2000),
pp. 85–118.
118
See Stuart Clark, “The Rational Witchfinder: Conscience, Demonological Naturalism
and Popular Superstitions,” in Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe,
ed. Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
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. Iconography represented Satan with

imperial attributes, sitting on the throne like the perfect inverse of God
the Father, the Pope, or the absolute monarchs.122 The period that stretches
from the Reformation to the Enlightenment was 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 affirm that
this theological discipline was not inscribed in the medieval religious dis-
course, that it had emerged abruptly in a very disconcerting discontinu-
ity.124 Several explanations for this radical transformation of the religious
discourses have developed, all of them centered on changes initiated from
the twelfth century on. One such change was the concern with the menace
of Cathar dualism.125 A second was the dissemination from the cloisters
of an image of the devil that seemed, by dramatic exigency of the monas-
tic exempla, a figure with a high degree of autonomy, the indefatigable
enemy of virtuous men rather than the deserved scourge of sinners.126 A
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Nicole Jacques-
Chaquin et Maxime Préaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Grenoble: Mil-
lon, 1994); Robert Muchembled, ed., Magie et sorcellerie en Europe du Moyen Age à nos
jours (Paris: Colin, 1994); James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England
1550–1750 (London: Penguin, 1996); Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in
Scotland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); John Putnam Demos, Enter-
taining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1983); Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic,
Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Per Sörlin, “Wicked Arts”: Witchcraft and Magic Trials in South-
ern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead:
A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 1999); Gustav Henningsen, El abogado de las brujas: Brujería vasca e
Inquisición Española (Madrid: Alianza, 1983). It is fascinating to compare this with an extra
European case study: cf. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
122
See Jérôme Baschet, “Satan ou la majesté maléfique dans les miniatures de la fin du
Moyen Age,” in Le mal et le diable: Leurs figures a la fin du Moyen Age, ed. Nathalie Nabert
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp. 187–210. See also Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et
Culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle) (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 Teufelsbücher
(Bern: Herbert Lang, 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 Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 101–32; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An In-
quiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic, 1975); I quote the Spanish edi-
tion: Los demonios familiares de Europa (Madrid: Alianza, 1980), pp. 85–89.
126
See Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 92–93.

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

Deadly Sins by another centered in the Old Testament Decalogue.127 The
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-à-vis the potentia Dei absoluta.128 Nevertheless, his
detailed and systematic description of the fantastic virtues of seraphic
natures later facilitated the comprehension, in theological terms, of the
deeds attributed to demons and witches since the middle of the fifteenth
century.129 A second contribution of Saint Thomas was his reformulations
of the problem of evil: by clearly differentiating divine will from divine
permission, Aquinas allowed a considerable expansion for the devil with-
out affecting the omnipotence and goodness of the Creator.130
The Tratado de las supersticiones by the Franciscan Castañega is a clear
expression of this modern radical demonology. A historian has recently
made it clear that, even though Fray Martín never quotes the Malleus
Maleficarum, it is evident that he displays the same topics in the same
order.131 Castañega represents a moderate version of modern demonol-
ogy, typical of Spanish Renaissance theology. Even when he accepts the
reality of the Sabbath and the witches’ flights, Castañega also holds that
the same phenomena frequently occur only in the imagination of the
bruxas. This modern interpretation was remote from the more radicalized
versions of modern 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 extraordinary preternatural powers of the devil, de-
rived from his angelic nature, which made possible and plausible the di-
verse components of the Sabbath stereotype.132 “We read,”—Castañega
states, “that the angel took Habakku from Judea to 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. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 215–30.
128
On 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 Éditions Latines, 1986).
129
See Charles Edward Hopkin, The Share of Thomas Aquinas in the Growth of the Witch-
craft Delusion (1940; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. 174–84.
130
Broedel (n. 11 above), pp. 228–30.
131
Homza (n. 18 above), p. 204. At present, critics tend to consider Heinrich Institoris as
the real author of the Malleus Maleficarum, reducing Jacob Sprenger’s participation to a
minimal collaboration. See Broedel, pp. 90–92.
132
On the notion of the supernatural order, see Campagne, Homo Catholicus (n. 50 above),
pp. 566–600; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of 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
Modern demonology, which Castañega’s Tratado expressed, presented
serious problems for Olmos, as well as for American preachers in 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
preternatural causality derived from the devil’s natural powers.134 Saint
Thomas did not doubt the capacity of separate intelligences to act on the
material world, from their dominance of local movement: for Aquinas,
diabolic magic could be effective.135 Such a degree of power attributed to
the enemy of the Christian God complicated the evangelization of those
peoples that had recently abandoned paganism. 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.136 There were also theological reasons that could even apply to
the superstitions of European Christians: while the illocutionary acts di-
rected to God by the pious believer not always produced the desired
effects—Castañega 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.137 How 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 Christian god hears his followers’ prayers?
That is why, at the time of the conversion of Europe, preachers were
tempted to spread the image of an impotent demon, 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, appended to 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 Tonitruis by Agobard
of Lyon (d. 840); the famous Canon Episcopi, reproduced for the first
time by Regino of Prüm in his De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis et Religione
133
Castañega (n. 10 above), p. 67: “leemos que el angel llevó a Abacuc de Judea a Babi-
lonia con la comida que llevaba para . . . Daniel . . . ; y dice que lo llevó de un cabello de la
cabeza, sólo para denotar la virtud y poder del ángel para llevar a un hombre.”
134
135
See Hopkin, p. 115.
136
Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (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 Burchard of Worms (c. 1008–12)—particularly the latter, tradi-
tionally known as Corrector.138
Some American texts reproduced the image of a demon radically im-
potent.139 Nevertheless, the evolution of scholastic angelology and the
spread of 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 Castañega’s Tratado as a source of inspiration,
since it was an example of radical modern demonology.
Fray Andrés had to resignify the image of the demon in accordance
with various simultaneous strategies. To begin with, he had to reinforce
the creatureness of the demon with an even greater emphasis 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 Bernardino de Sahagún—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.”140 The 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.141 In any case, this choice placed the demon in a
138
For the Council of Braga, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval
Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 111; for the Indiculus Super-
stitionum, see John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A
Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales” (1938; reprint, New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1990), pp. 419–21; for Pirmin of Reichenau, see Claude Lecouteux, Au-delà du
merveilleux: Des croyanes au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne,
1995), pp. 57–59; for Penitencial de Silos, see McNeill and Gamer, p. 285; for Agobard of
Lyon, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Historia de la superstición (Barcelona: Crítica, 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,
Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (n. 125 above), pp. 291–93; and for Decretum, see Giordano,
pp. 263–69.
139
We read in the Doctrina Christiana Mexicana by Juan de la Plaza (México, 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 Christiani ex-
ercent et operantur sunt fraudes Demonis? R. Ita est, et qui illis credunt, et operantur queae
dicunt, peccant contra fidem et obligantur Inferno” (Resins Llorente [n. 25 above], p. 658).
140
Burkhart (n. 34 above), p. 44; Cervantes (n. 2 above), p. 47. Quotation is from Olmos
(n. 17 above), p. 13: “vosotros habéis de saber que este hombre-búho se nombra, se llama
verdaderamente por una multitud de nombres: mal ángel Diablo, Demonio, Sathán.”
141
See Hugo Nutini and John M. Roberts, Bloodsucking Witchcraft: An Epistemological
Study of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in 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 European Lucifer.
Regarding the description of the real powers of the demon, Olmos
adopts a compromising strategy: according to his source—Castañega’s
Tratado—Fray Andrés 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 Tratado de
hechicerías, 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
natural powers 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 nature cannot be denied, especially if
the deity gives him permission to exercise his powers openly: “he is able
to throw fire up there, through the 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.”144 Another 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, Andrés de Olmos introduces the principal
change made to Castañega’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 human minds, to dis-
play a veil that distorts human ability to perceive the world as it really is,
and to apprehend the hierarchies that order the chain of being and show
the correct place that demons should occupy in the cosmos.146 In Sri Lanka
142
For the tension between both ways of demonization of the Indian religions, see Ken-
neth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 223–24.
143
Olmos, p. 51: “está excrito que un ángel se llevó a Abachuc cuando vivía allá, en un
lugar llamado Judea; tan sólo lo agarró por un cabello . . . , así probando la virtud y la fuerza
del ángel para llevarse a alguien.”
144
Ibid., p. 63: “bien podrá lanzar el fuego allá arriba, por los aires, y podrá hacer que éste
se mude de sitio; así acompañará al viento, de tal suerte que un torbellino de viento se levan-
tará o acaso no se levantará si 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 Institution Press,
1991), pp. 1–6, 155–56.

as in baroque Europe, 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.”148 With this last ex-
pression, Olmos abandoned one of the essential characteristics of the
demonological discourse: its intrinsic ambiguity.149 If in the Augustinian
model of superstition the demon can often produce those effects that the
homo superstitiosus does not obtain, through the natural and supernatural
ways, in Fray Andrés’s discourse the devil infallibly breaks his 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.”150
The impotence of the devil, then, is not due to his natural incapacity to
produce real effects in the material world, but to his incurable tendency
to lie: “nobody will be consecrated to the Devil no matter how poor he is,
since he only gives faked things, and afterward something horrible and
scary would happen to them.”151 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 transubstantiation the divinity
makes use of the disjuncture between substance and accidents, the demon
uses the distance that separates reality from appearance to create in the
imagination independent images of the objects perceived through the
senses, eidola rather than phantasmae.153 Fray Andrés states: “the Devil
is capable of blurring somebody’s knowledge, what is called senses, so
in this way [the person] disappears in a deep dream; so he . . . thinks that
147
Maggi (n. 49 above), pp. 106, 111; Kapferer, p. 104.
148
Olmos, p. 37: “El diablo no ofrece siempre aquello que desea un corazón malvado, el
Diablo no le procura satisfacción, porque aquel que no aspira a Dios siempre será engañado
por el diablo” (my emphasis).
149
See Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “El rosario del soldado o el combate por el sentido:
La polémica en el seno del discurso antisupersticioso (España. Siglos XV–XVIII),” Fun-
dación 5 (2001–2): 353–72.
150
Olmos (n. 17 above), p. 49: “el Diablo que es muy lisonjero, muy artero, prometió, ofre-
ció dar muchas riquezas, y luego se burla, se ríe de la gente.”
151
Ibid., p. 45: “nadie se consagrará al Diablo por pobre que sea, ya que sólo da cosa fin-
gida, algo para que luego, luego, le ocurra a uno algo horrendo, espantoso” (my emphasis).
152
Ibid., p. 21: “y si a veces, raras veces, dice palabras verdaderas el Diablo, es muy a
menudo porque quiere hacer desaparecer las sospechas, porque quiere embaucar; sólo es
para disimular sus mentiras, su baba” (my emphasis).
153
Compare MacCormack (n. 109 above), pp. 25, 28, 30.

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

dores de idolatrías, 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 Tratado de hechicerías by the Franciscan Andrés de Olmos is a crea-
tion that differs extensively from the Tratado de las supersticiones by
Martín de Castañega. In accord with the monopoly on the revealed truth
that Christianity claims, Olmos carries out an exercise that simulta-
neously denies and affirms the incommensurability between European and
American cultures, that denies everything pertaining to 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
Castañega’s treaty. Castañega’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 alterations reflect the different strategies that
the two authors had. If the model reader of the Spanish Tratado is the di-
ocesan clergy—the implicit subject of Castañega’s discourse—Andrés
de Olmos directly addresses the Indians of New Spain, raw material for
the providential utopia 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 about the success of the strategy of massive conver-
sion, carried out by the minor friars, were clearly noticeable. It is idola-
try, which for baptized Indians always meant apostasy, that worried Olmos:
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
Castañega’s original work. To strengthen the identity of the new Amerin-
dian Christianity, Olmos compares its purity—which he believes could
be preserved—with, on the one hand, European corruption, the dry tree,
the christiandad vieja that burns, and, on the other hand, with the idola-
try of his ancestors, which persisted inside the already Christian commu-
nities, and whose menace is compared to the counter-church of the witches,
an image that Castañega employs 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 Tratado by Olmos
was not to be read, but to be preached.
154
Olmos, p. 53: “el Diablo tiene la capacidad de turbar en alguien el conocimiento, lo
que se llaman sentidos, que así desaparecen en un profundo sueño: de tal suerte que . . .
piensa que se produjo ante él aquello que vio en su sueño.”
155
Mills (n. 142 above), pp. 211– 42; Bernand and Gruzinski (n. 107 above), p. 47.

The transformation of the original demonology displayed by Cas-

tañega 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 Franciscan had 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
thirteenth century. At the same time, he is a trickster who in all cases in-
variably deceives his acolytes, breaks his promises, and ignores every
pact. He is the master of illusion who penetrates dreams with 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 ancestral practices, but in his own
way, waiting for the end of the world, he also declared his rupture with
the christiandad vieja, with the corrupted faith 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)

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i. from logroño to hueytlalpan

mexicana (1520–1569) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1983), pp. 146–50.

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

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many years before by another franciscan friar: Martín de Castañega’s Tra-

ii. fray martín, fray andrés

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

Emecé, 1945), p. 389.

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

iii. separation, translation, and conversion

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But conditions changed radically in those places where a hegemonic

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priate tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established by the

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relationships, and these relationships are ontological rather than logical.30

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that the native structures managed to impose themselves on the compo-

iv. a new title, a new structure, and a new treatise

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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 superstition to idolatry: the subject of

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castañega’s subject of discourse: superstitious men and

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

olmos’s subject of discourse: indians and idolaters

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World. Nevertheless, his tireless work as an itinerant preacher as well as

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To reinforce the identiﬁcation of the Indians with the new millenarian

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One Line Short

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forever rule there.”99 As in some particular moiety systems described by

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

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One Line Short

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vi. old devil, new world: satan as a trickster

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in literature, in the arts, and in myths. Iconography represented Satan with

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

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