As intermediaries for Satan, such leaders supposedly initiated their converts in a ritual that mocked Christian baptism and denied God, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in order to achieve salvation in the afterlife and wealth and power in the here and now. Male sorcerers (brujos) became important leaders in the runaway slave camps (palenques} which caused the authorities endless concern (Borrego Pla, 1973 :27, 83 Tejado Fernandez, 1954:117-32). Female slaves served as healers to such exalted personages as the bishop of Cartagena and the inquisitors themselves, while others were lashed when their occult powers were defined as evil, especially when epidemics of witchcraft were raging. The Inquisition was founded in Cartagena in the early seventeenth century for reasons that included the Church Fathers' judgment of the colony as the "most vicious and sinful in the Spanish Dominions, the faith on the point of destruction" (Lea, 1908 :456). Thus, the popular religion of Spanish America was stamped with ethnic and class dualisms of this momentous order -ever susceptible to mercurial inversions in accordance with the shifting currents of caste and class power. The quasi-Manichaean dualistic cosmology of the conquerors coexisted with the polytheistic or animistic monism of the African slaves and Indians, so that the conquerors stood to the conquered as God did to the devil. That restless dialectic of magical counter attributions persists in popular culture to the present day.Ĭolonization and enslavement inadvertently delivered a special mystical power to the underdog of colonial society-the power of mystic evil as embodied in the Christians' fear of the devil. "It is in this trance," writes Gustavo Otero, referring to the first days of the conquest, "that the conquerors became the conquered" (1951: 128). In fact, the Europeans defined African and Indian religion not merely as magic but as evil magic. Conversely, the Europeans availed themselves of their subjects' magic, which was not distinguished from religion. The indoctrination of African slaves by Catholic priests focused on curing, which exploited the miracle-yielding power of the Christian pantheon to the utmost (Sandoval, 1956). The Europeans had few efficacious medical resources, and their curing depended heavily on religious and magical faith: masses, prayers to the saints, rosary beads, holy water, and miracles wrought by priests and folk curers. This process was most obvious in beliefs concerning illness and healing. The magical lore of the European was joined to that of the despised African and Indian to form a symbiosis, transformation, and adaptation of forms unknown to each group. The African slaves brought their mysteries and sorcery, the Indians their occult powers to cure or kill, and the colonists their own belief in magic (Lea, 1908:462). The Inquisition, for instance, regarded the occult arts that were drawn from the three continents not as idle fantasies but as the exercise of supernatural powers, including an explicit or implicit pact with the devil. Second, religion was inseparable from magic, and both permeated everyday life-agriculture, mining, economy, healing, marital affairs, and social relations in general. First, the whites were apprehensive of the supernatural powers of their subjects, and vice versa. Two generalizations are necessary to any discussion of black slave religion in Latin America. Part II: The Plantations of the Cauca Valley in ColombiaĬHAPTER 3: Slave Religion and the Rise of the Free Peasantry () The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
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