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Angels, Demons, and the New World

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2641352

1527-1900

Stuart B. Schwartz,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

As the editors point out in their helpful introduction, angels' immateriality and benign nature make them elusive and incomprehensible to the modern mind, so that the devil not only “has the best lines” (p. 1), but he and his minions have also garnered a lion's share of popular fascination and academic attention. This volume, based on papers presented at a symposium at Bristol University, seeks to examine the role of both angels and devils, not only in the theology and orthodox piety of colonial Spanish America but also in local religiosity, where belief in their powers threatened to slip into “magic” or “superstition,” a hazard thought by church authorities to be especially great among the recently converted indigenous populations. The editors emphasize that despite a certain downplaying of these supernatural forces in Reformation and Catholic Reformation Europe, celestial spirits, be they benign or maleficent, were a widespread and vibrant part of Baroque culture in Spanish America.The volume is organized into three sections, each with three essays. The first section examines the Old World cosmological position of the devil and of angels. Andrew Keitt turns to the classic medical and philosophical texts of sixteenth-century Spain, in which the thinkers of that period sought to define and distinguish corporal and philosophical explanations of these celestial beings from preternatural ones. We see in the humanist medical treatises a gnawing skepticism about folk healing and demonic influences. Keitt shows how this skepticism toward the preternatural and a naturalization of extraordinary phenomena were carried to the New World, but he stops short of discussing how such attitudes may have influenced the relative absence of the witch craze in Spain. Kenneth Mills uses a group of Hieronymite narratives about Our Lady of Guadalupe of Extremadura to show how concepts of demonic possession were easily transferred to the Indies and how they became a principal explanation for the delusion and blindness of the indigenous peoples. Fernando Cervantes then shifts the focus to angels by demonstrating the particular attachment to their role by the early (pre-Reformation) missionaries, who remained convinced of the unity of the natural and supernatural worlds and who often sought to find parallel elements in preconquest religions to facilitate conversions.The three chapters on indigenous responses seek to show how native American peoples sought ways to incorporate demons and angels into a new cosmology alongside other Christian concepts. It is perhaps inevitable that the papers presented here concentrate on the heartlands of the viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru. Only Andrew Redden's chapter takes on New Granada, and thus the frontiers north of the Río Bravo, south of the Bío Bío, or even of the well-studied mission fields of Paraguay or California are not included. Central Mexico offers excellent opportunities and sources for study. Louise Burkhart's review of the appearance of angels or devils in 27 pieces of Nahuatl theater reveals that these supernatural forces were naturalized as part of everyday existence, but given the missionaries' influence on these scripts, it is difficult to separate indigenous from Spanish voices and cosmologies in the plays. Caterina Pizzigoni's use of a different type of source, Nahua wills and testaments from the Toluca Valley, shows that angels were invoked rarely and over time seem to have played a far less important role in indigenous religiosity than the saints.The final section on “The World of the Baroque” deals with the role of the celestial angels and the devil in the Baroque culture of the mature colonial era. Ramón Mujica Pinilla draws on his excellent previous study Ángeles apócrifos en la América virreinal (1992) to examine the role of angels in the political theology that accompanied and described the Spanish conquest of Peru. Despite post-Trent attempts to discourage the proliferation and individualization of angels, their naming and representation in military garb spread throughout the Peruvian viceroyalty and became a genre of colonial religious art. Mujica Pinilla demonstrates how authors from Bartolomé de Las Casas to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala incorporated supernatural beings into an “eschatological imaginaire” (p. 182), but, surprisingly, he does not discuss their relationship to the other miracles of the conquest like Pedro de Candia's miracle at Tumbes or the purported intervention of the saints in crucial battles. Jaime Cuadriello's sweeping essay compares missionary influence and indigenous response to divine interventions and messengers in Peru and Mexico, arguing that the república de indios had accommodated to a Baroque cosmography by the eighteenth century.David Brading's concluding essay argues that the New Jerusalem that the missionaries sought to make out of New Spain was retarded or perverted by the stubborn idolatry of the native peoples. By the seventeenth century, Marian and angelic devotions were promoted to remedy that continuing problem. Brading provides a number of exemplary texts with that goal, including Alonso Ramos's hagiography of the onetime slave Caterina de San Juan, the famous china poblana whose spiritual struggles, with the help of the Virgin and various angels, against demons provided a model for the “cycle of Catholic devotion that reached its apogee” in the mid-eighteenth century (p. 272). Even though Brading uncharacteristically misidentifies Caterina, who was born in India, as coming from the Philippines (an error that the editors also make), he convincingly insists we cannot understand her world, or her importance to her contemporaries, without considering her angelic aides and demonic opponents.