sabine maccormack - gods, demons, and idols in the andes

Gods, Demons, and Idols in the Andes

Sabine MacCormack

Idolatry has meant different things in different times and places. During the era in which the Spanish first encountered public religious practices that

they perceived to be idolatrous in the Americas, the study of Hermetic and Platonic texts in Europe, in particular in Marsilio Ficino's Florence, was

reactivating interest in the power of images and idols, and in the agency of

spirit beings or demons. Seekers after occult knowledge, among them Ficino

himself, speculated as to whether and how demons who possessed powers of healing and divination might come to reside in statues or talismans and to bring their powers to bear on human lives. Among the texts that figured in these speculations were not only the late Roman Hermetic treatise As-

clepius-quoted by Augustine in the City of God'-but also the Latin version of an Arabic manual that had been translated into Spanish at the court of Alfonso X of Castile and provided much information as to how to en-

'I supply details of editions and translations only for post-classical sources. Greek and Roman authors and some others are cited without further details, since these texts are available in many editions. See here, Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation. Introduction and Notes Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989); see especially the introduction, pp. 45-70, and Ficino's Book III, chapters 13, 20, and 26 with Brian Co- penhaver, "Iamblichus, Synesius and the Chaldaean Oracles in Marsilio Ficino's De Vita Libri Tres: Hermetic Magic or Neoplatonic Magic?" in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oscar Kristeller, ed. James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell, Jr. (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghamton, New York 1987), 441-55. See further below at notes 19-20. The survey by D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic From Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958) remains worth consulting.

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close spiritual beings in material objects. In early modernity, the influence of this treatise, known as Picatrix, extended across most of Europe.2 But while in Europe, demons, statues, images, and talismans figured, for the most part, in the preoccupations of the learned, in the Americas, Spanish newcomers encountered idolatry, the cult of deities present to their wor-

shippers in material objects of various kinds, as part and parcel of daily religious practice. Among the first things that some of the invaders of the Inca empire noticed was the ubiquitous and "detestable" cult of "dirty" idols.3 The resulting battle over idols and the beliefs and cultic practices surrounding them is in one sense only an outcrop of debates and conflicts over idols, images, and demons in the ancient Mediterranean and in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even so, the intricacies of European learned traditions ended up shaping the history and culture of Peru and the other Andean republics until the present. Yet while ancient arguments and beliefs about idols were reiterated in Peru, their effect was not quite what it had been in Europe. Besides, the arguments shifted and changed in the new context. There is also the question, did these arguments ever achieve anything beyond imposing European ideas and cognitive models on the Andean world? Or did they succeed in touching upon some aspects at least of An- dean religious practice and belief?

The central component of the argument about idols that took place in the former empire of the Incas was biblical and differentiated true and false

religion. As the Psalmist said, "[t]heir idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not, eyes have they, but

they see not . . . neither speak they through their throat. They that make them are like unto them; so is everyone that trusteth in them. O Israel, trust thou in the Lord."4 Similarly, "[a]ll the gods of the nations are demons, but

2 Picatrix. The Latin Version of the Ghayat Al-Hakim. Text, Introduction, Appendices, Indices, ed. David Pingree (London: Warburg Institute, 1986). Sadly, the promised second

volume, about the book's influence, was not published, but see Frances A. Yates, Gior- dano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. ch. 3. On the fortunes of the only known manuscript of the Spanish version of Picatrix see Alejandro Garcia Aviles, "Two Astronomical Manuscripts of Alfonso X," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 14-23.

3 [Bartolome de Segovia], Relaci6n de muchas cosas acaesidas en el Perti, in Cr6nicas Peruanas de interes indigena (Biblioteca de autores espatioles, hereafter BAE), ed. Esteve Barba (Madrid, 1968), 209: 82a; Miguel de Estete, "Relaci6n del viaje ... a Parcama," in Francisco de Xerez, Verdadera relaci6n de la conquista del Peru (ed. Concepci6n Bravo, Madrid: Historia 16, 1985), 137; Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad. La incorporaci6n de los indios del Peru al catolicismo 1532-1750 (Lima: Instituto Frances de Estudios Andinos, 2003), 103-10; 120-26, etc. 4 Psalms 113 B: 4-9 passim (Vulgate), same as Psalms 115: 4-9 passim (King James Bible). Translation from the King James Version.

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the Lord made the heavens."' In Christian hands, declarations of this kind,

originally designed to differentiate Israel's worship from that of other na-

tions, turned into exhortations for general religious change and transforma- tion. The Christian arguments against idols that most resonated in Peru were those that unfolded in the Roman Empire, and this for several reasons. In their search for comparanda which would explain the empire of the

Incas, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historians looked to the Roman

Empire as their primary model. Inca administration, roads, and religious practices all brought to mind Roman antecedents. Also, early modern Span- ish lawyers and jurists working in Peru were deeply aware of the Roman

origins of the laws they were administering, so much so that the Theodosian Code was cited as authority for measures taken against Andean idolatry, and the Justinianic corpus provided guidelines both general and specific for the laws of the Indies.6 Finally, missionaries in Peru, in their efforts to con- vert these new gentiles, saw themselves as the successors of the early Chris- tian apologists and church fathers.

I. IMAGES, GODS AND DEMONS

I begin my story with a complicated moment of devastation and confusion. In 1533, the Spanish invaders of the empire of the Incas, the land that became known as Peru, desecrated one of this land's greatest sanctuaries, the temple pyramid of Pachacamac, the "Maker of the World," on the Pa- cific coast near Lima. Pilgrims, bringing offerings, had come to visit the god for generations, if not for centuries. Some thirty years after the Spanish had ransacked the sanctuary, Andean witnesses in a lawsuit still remembered much of what had been taken. Architectural fittings of gold and silver, sacred vessels, and numerous other paraphernalia of religious worship, not to mention the many textiles for the use of the deity and his servants that the

Spanish were unable to appreciate, represented the highest, most highly prized manifestations of Andean visual expression.7 The textiles disap-

- Psalms 95:5 (Vulgate). I translate from the Vulgate because it was used by the Catholic Church in Peru. It here differs from the King James Version, which says (Psalms 96:5) "All the gods of the nations are idols. .. " 6 Sabine MacCormack, "El gobierno de la repfiblica cristiana," in El Barroco Peruano, ed. Ramon Mujica-Pinilla (Lima: Colecci6n Arte y Tesoros del Peruf, Banco de Credito, 2003), 217-49; Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 7 Elena Phipps and Joanna Hecht, eds., The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004).

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peared, but the gold and silver were transported by Andean lords and their

people to Cajamarca, where Francisco Pizarro and his followers were hold-

ing Atahuallpa, the ruler of the Inca Empire, for ransom. But when those Andean lords reached Cajamarca, with the ransom payment complete or

nearly complete, they found that Atahuallpa had been killed. The Spanish remembered this episode rather differently. Though

hardly mentioning the enormous treasure that they removed from Pachaca- mac's pyramid, they declared that the main issue had been a theological one. According to a member of the expeditionary force that made the jour- ney to Pachacamac, the priests would at first not allow them access. But

finally, "most unwillingly, they accompanied us, and passing many doors we reached the top" of the pyramid, where "there was a small patio in front of the idol's chamber made of branches with some posts decorated with leaves of gold and silver, and on top some weavings like mats to keep off the sun .... Across the patio was a closed door with guards .... The door was adorned with corals and turquoises, crystals and other things" and gave access to a small dark room. Here, by the light of a candle, the

Spaniards found "a pole fixed in the ground with the figure of a man at its

top, poorly carved and poorly shaped," with some small gold and silver

offerings.

Seeing how vile and despicable the idol was, we went outside to ask why they cared about so mean and ungainly a thing. But they, astounded at our daring, defended the honor of their god and said that he was Pachacamac the Maker of the World who healed their infirmities. According to what we were able to learn, the devil ap- peared to those priests in that hovel and spoke with them, and they entered there with the petitions and offerings of the people who came in pilgrimage, because they came from the entire kingdom of

Atahuallpa, just as Moors and Turks go to the house in Mecca.

Seeing the vileness of what was there and the blindness of all those

people, we gathered together their leaders and enlightened them. And in the presence of all, the hovel was opened and torn down ... and with much solemnity a tall cross was raised over the seat which for so long the devil had claimed as his own.8

Another of the Spaniards who had forced their way into the shrine wrote that "the Christians explained to the Indians the great error in which they

8 [Miguel de Estete], Noticia del Perzi (Colecci6n de libros y documentos referentes a la historia del Perfi, 2nd ser, vol. 8) (Lima: Imprenta y Liberia Sanmarti, 1924), 39-40.

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had been enveloped, and that he who was talking in that idol was the devil, who was deceiving them. They also explained that from thenceforth they were not to believe in him do what he advised; and other things about their idolatries." Finally, the Spanish captain Hernando Pizarro "broke the idol in the sight of everyone, told them many things about our holy catholic faith and gave them as armor to defend themselves against the devil the

sign of the cross."' Pizarro, who wrote his own account of these events, had a different view of the cult and identity of Pachacamac: "I do not think that they talk with the devil, but that those ministers (of the idol) deceive the lords in order to exploit them."'0

Perhaps Pizarro was simply following the brash logic of a soldier in

thinking that words attributed to Pachacamac were the fabrication of his

priests. He was, however, not the first to express such an idea, which evoked the critique and destruction of pagan cult statues by Christians in the Roman Empire where perceived priestly fabrication had played a similar role. An example was the famous statue of Sarapis in Alexandria, which in 391 A.D. Theophilus, the city's patriarch, ordered to be torn down in the

presence of his worshippers: they were all convinced that if anyone came too close to the holy image, pestilence would come and the earth would shake. But nothing happened when the image fell under the blows of an ax and "felt no pain, being made of wood, nor did it utter a word, since it

possessed no life." Instead, when the head was hacked off, "herds of mice scrambled out of it."" The fall of the statue as told by Christian historians resonated with the psalmist's repudiation of the idols of the nations and

9 Estete in Xerez, Verdadera relaci6n de la conquista del Perf (above n. 3), 137-38. 10 See Gonzalo Fernfandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Historia general y natural de las Indias (BAE, vols. 117-21), ed. Juan Perez de Tudela Bueso (Madrid: Atlas, 1959), book 46, ch.15, 89a. 11 Cassiodorus-Epiphanius, Historia Tripartita (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Lat- inorum, hereafter CSEL, vol. 71), eds. W. Jacob and R. Hanslik (Vienna: 1952), bk. 9, section 28; this is a slightly abridged translation from Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica 5: 22. Before describing the destruction of the statue, Theodoret mentioned the speaking statues of Egypt: they were hollow inside so that it was possible for a person to speak "through their mouths." In the Latin version, it is possible for the reader to include here the statue of Serapis as another of the speaking statues. Less picturesque accounts of the event are in Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica 5: 16-17; Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica 7: 15. The Historia Tripartita, available to Western readers in hundreds of MSS and several

early editions is the text most relevant in this present context, although the most detailed and contemporary account is by Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica 11: 22-30 passim, in

Eusebius, Werke. Zweiter Band. Zweiter Teil (Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller N.F. Band 6,2), ed. E. Schwartz and T. Mommsen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999). Anto- nio Baldini, "Problemi della tradizione sulla 'distruzione' del Serapeo di Alessandria," Rivista Storica dell' Antichitij 15 (1985): 97-152.

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also with the Hellenistic invective, attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, against the gods of Babylon who were so powerful a reality for Jews living in the diaspora: "their tongue is forged by a workman," the author of the letter wrote, "it is of gold and silver, is false and cannot speak." "Bats, swallows and other birds fly around the bodies [of the idols] and over their

heads, and cats [prowl around them], so you know that they are not gods." Christian apologists were fond of elaborating on these thoughts in ever more satirical detail: "mice, swallows and kites," Minucius Felix wrote, "because they understand perfectly that [the statues] feel nothing [when they] take up residence, and if you don't chase the creatures away, they make their nests in your god's very mouth."12

Similar declarations, accompanied by vigorous action, were reiterated in Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: shrines and holy places were desecrated and representations of Andean deities destroyed in the expectation that the deities would be supplanted by the Christian god and forgotten. But things did not work out this way. Pachacamac's vast

possessions-temple treasures, lands, and herds of animals-were indeed looted and dispersed, and his priests and attendants scattered or perished during the years of conquest and civil war that followed the death of the Inca. But Pachacamac himself was not forgotten. As the historian Pedro Cieza de Le6n learned when he visited the ruined pyramid in 1549:

Some Indians say that in secret places this wicked demon Pachaca- mac talks with the old people: for seeing that he has lost his credi-

bility and authority, and that many of those who used to obey him now acknowledge their error and hold a contrary opinion, he says to them that what the Christians and he himself preach is one and the same thing, and other words of the sort, uttered by such an

adversary. And with deceit and false appearances he is able to pre- vent them from receiving the water of baptism."1

12 Minucius Felix, Octavius (Corpus scriptorum Latinorum Paravianum), ed. Michael

Pellegrino (Turin: In aedibus Io. Bapt. Paraviae et Sociorum, 1963), 9; Tertullian, Apolo- geticus (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol.1, hereafter CCSL) lists kites, mice and

spiders. 13 Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Cr6nica del Peru. Primera Parte, ed. F. Pease (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica, 1986), ch. 72, fol.97v-98. See also, Bartolomd de las Casas, Apolo- getica Historia Sumaria, ed. Edmundo O'Gorman (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaci- ones HistOricas, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, 1967), ch. 131, 687

(hereafter A.H.), recording the words of Pachacamac. This passage was adapted by Jer6- nimo Roman, Republica de Indias. Idolatrias y gobierno en Mexico y Peru antes de la

conquista (Madrid: Victoriano Sudrez, 1897), 1: 5.

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Thus Pachacamac was not simply the anthropomorphic wooden pole that Hernando Pizarro had destroyed, but a living presence that would not

go away: in short, he was a demon after all, just as most of the first looters had thought. This different view of what an idol consisted of also reflected

early Christian antecedents, which in turn were echoed by Ficino.14 Tertul-

lian, Arnobius, Lactantius, and most of all Augustine understood the power of images, as when Augustine as a young teacher in Carthage watched the festival of the Great Mother. Her statue was displayed in front of her temple surrounded by a vast crowd and was celebrated by processions of dancers and worshippers.1' Although Jeremiah had said that idols "are carried about because they are unable to walk ... and can do neither good nor

ill,"'1 the goddess standing high on a podium amidst music, pomp, and

ceremony seemed to be manifest in her very own person.17 Augustine, when

approaching old age, still remembered this event in vivid detail. What was it that triggered such profound devotion in the presence of idols? "Who would doubt," he wrote:

that the idols are devoid of all sense perception? But nonetheless, when they are raised up in an honorable and exalted place, and are attended by [worshippers] with prayer and sacrifice, they influence weak souls by means of their similitude to [the body's] living mem- bers and senses, even though they possess neither senses nor soul. Thus they seem to live and breathe because of the veneration of the multitude, from whom such deep reverence is offered up to

them.18

And yet, the attention of worshippers did not seem to be quite sufficient to explain the malignant power, as Augustine and other Christians viewed

it, of the pagan gods, or the way that their adherents clung to them in

apparent defiance of all logic, reason, and good sense. Rather, the statues seemed to be inhabited by a demonic presence that became increasingly real

14 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life (above n. 1), 3: 26 lines 110-14.

l" Augustine, De civitate dei, ed. Bernardus Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (CCSL vols. 17-18), 2: 26. 16 Jeremiah 10:5. I translate the Vulgate text.

17 Note Augustine's wording in De civitate dei 2: 26: "ludos qui agebantur intentissime spectabamus, intuentes alternante conspectu hinc meretriciam pompam, illinc virginem deam."

1" Augustine, Epistulae (CSEL, vol. 34), ed. A. Goldbacher (Vienna: F. Tempsky 1895), 102, 18; cf. Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of August- ine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 152-53.

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in the course of Christian contestation. Indeed, some pagans would have agreed but would have viewed the presence in positive terms. According to the hermetic treatise Asclepius, cited by Augustine and after Augustine by Thomas Aquinas, Ficino and the great apologist of indigenous American peoples Bartolome de las Casas,19 "animated statues" did exist. The treatise, which derived from Plato's Timaeus the doctrine that the highest god had created the eternal gods, adumbrated that humans in their turn "should form their gods out of the similitude of their own countenance." The result would be "animated statues filled with sense perception and spirit, that accomplish great and marvelous things, statues foreknowing the future."20 For Christians, however, the life that inhabited these statues could only be demonic.

A parallel understanding unfolded with respect to oracles. In the early second century, Plutarch who was deeply familiar with the procedures of the Delphic Oracle stated that the Pythia's voice and her choice of words were entirely her own: Apollo "makes present to her only the imaginations and the light in the soul regarding future events. This is what inspiration is."21 But some Christians, taking their cue from extravagant poetic descrip- tions of ecstasy and possession, thought that the Pythia spoke in a frenzied state of demonic possession. This interpretation of Delphic prophecy became standard in Christian writings.2 For if the gods of the nations were

19 Asclepius in Corpus Hermeticum vol. 2 , eds. A.D. Nock and A.-J. Festugiere, (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1973), sections 23-24; see also Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek

Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Augustine, De civitate dei 8: 23; Aquinas, Summa

Theologica. Secunda secundae q. 94, a.1 resp.; Summa contra gentiles 3: 104; Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3: 26 with Introduction p. 47; Las Casas, A.H., ch. 29, 148. 2(1 Asclepius, 23-24. 21 Plutarch, The Oracles at Delphi no longer given in verse, ed. and tr. F. Cole Babbit, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969) = Plutarch, Moralia vol. 5: 397C.

Imaginations: phantasiai; inspiration: enthousiasmos. Joseph Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 196-239. 22 Among the earliest, Origen, Contra Celsum, tr. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1965), 7: 3 with Chadwick's notes; 8: 45-46. Eusebius, Praepara- tio Evangelica (Sources Chrktiennes no. 262), ed. and tr. O. Zink (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1979), 4.2.13: the oracles are spoken by imposters; 4.10.3 Apollo is a demon. For the

Pythia in a state of frenzy, see Lucan, Bellum civile 5: 114-95. Vergil, Aeneid 6: 7982 also described the Sybil when she delivered her prophecy to Aeneas in a state of frenzy. Servius commenting on the passage sharpened it by saying that Apollo overpowered the

Sybil as a rider overpowers an untamed horse while yet remaining the majestic deity who was loved and adored by his worshippers; see Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, eds. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), Ad Aen. 6: 79.

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indeed demons-opponents of the true God-then the inspiration that led to prophetic utterance acquired a demonic, malevolent complexion.23

Participating in the cult of the gods amounted to laying oneself open not just to what Christian apologists viewed as the error of polytheism caused by deficient information and faulty reason, but to the moral error of listening to demons who inhabited religious images, just as the demon

Apollo inhabited the Pythia. So far from being mere empty forms-artifacts of metal, wood or stone that could not move or talk-images of the gods were dwelling places for demons.24 This view of idols, recorded in secular and church histories, saints' lives, and acts of martyrs,2s most of all those of the legendary variety, seemed to fit the realities of Inca and Andean religion much better than the rationalistic interpretation of Hernando Pizarro and other conquistadors who saw in Andean oracular and other cults

priestly manipulation or simple human error. The Andean demons were everywhere, not only in the great pilgrim

sanctuaries like that of Pachacamac, but also in countless local shrines

where, according to information collected by missionaries and officials, small deities, described generically as huacas, prognosticated droughts, floods, and other matters of personal and communal interest. However, the

rough and ready dismissal of Andean religion that satisfied the first invaders became unconvincing during subsequent years. The first invaders cited the

religious errors of the Incas as grounds for overthrowing their empire: the

idolatry of the Incas, so the reasoning went, infected Inca governance and subjected Andean people to the twofold duress of serving false gods and unlawful rulers.26 Historians who studied and learned to admire Incan administration, by contrast, found idolatrous religion to be perfectly compati- ble with good government. One only had to think of the Romans, idolaters one and all, whose virtue and wisdom had won them a world empire.27

23 Origen, Contra Celsum 7: 4; 8: 46 reaches this result regarding the Pythia, albeit cir- cumspectly. 24 Cf. Tertullian, De idolatria (CCSL vol. 2, 1954) 3: 1-2, idolatry predates images, but became more powerful with the invention of statuae, imagines, and simulacra. 25 In the Martyrdom of Saints Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike section 1, the link between idols and demons is clearly stated in the conversation between Carpus and the proconsul, see H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 22; Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Cronica del Peru. Segunda Parte, ed. Francesca Cantu (Lima: Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Perul, 1986), ch. 28 gives a list of oracles where "el maldito Demonio hablava." 26 Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Historia Indica (BAE, vol. 135), ed. Carmelo Saenz de Santa Maria, (Madrid: 1965), ch. 6. 27 See Garcilaso de la Vega Inca, Primera parte de los Comentarios Reales de los Incas (BAE, vol. 133), ed. Carmelo Saenz de Santa Maria (Madrid: Atlas, 1960, hereafter C.R.

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II. RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT: IDOLATRY AS POSITIVE ASPIRATION

Once the Incas emerged in historical writing as the Romans of their world, as the Aztecs were of their world,28 the nexus between religion and government in the Americas acquired an entirely new face, leading to a fundamental redefinition of what Amerindian idolatry amounted to. The pioneer of this line of argumentation was Bartolome de las Casas, Dominican friar, missionary, and above all, defender of Indian rights. In his polemics Las Casas read and used much of the new Italian scholarship about the Ro- mans: Flavio Biondo and Lilius Gregorius Giraldus in particular were cited

regularly, along with humanist editions of Greek and Roman authors, and of the early Christian apologists and church fathers. On the basis of these

writings, Las Casas interpreted Aristotle's Politics and Ethics as arguing that religious and political expression, both equally manifest in the development of culture and in occupational specialization formed one single continuum. This continuum was discernible in classical antiquity, in Christian

Europe and in the Americas. This premise entailed a new vantage point on idolatry. For in that the

development of culture expressed positive human inclinations and activi-

ties, so did the development of religion, even when it was idolatrous. The issue had already been broached by Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent

theologian of the Dominican order, whom Las Casas studied as a novice.

Commenting on Aristotle's words in the Poetics, that "humans naturally delight in imitation," Aquinas explained: "therefore from the beginning simple humans looking upon images of humans that had been crafted by the skill of artists bestowed on these images the cult of divinity." Another cause of idolatry was inordinate love, and a further one was plain ignorance, both the consequence of the blurring of human understanding and

perception that resulted from original sin.29 Las Casas agreed. He found original sin uninteresting, if not outright

boring, as a topic for theological reflection. Everyone suffered from it, and there was nothing new to be added. As for idolatry, it seemed indeed to

respond to human inclinations and needs that were in themselves praise- worthy. The primary of these needs was to offer reverence and respect to

I), ii, 27, p.81, citing Cieza, Cr6nica del Peru. Primera Parte ch. 38, and Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias VI,1. 28 David Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 29 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Secunda secundae q. 94, a. 4 resp.

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whatever was good and excellent. Given the "fog of ignorance and corrup- tion of human nature with which we are all born," the invisible and universal ordering principle of the cosmos that was God had been obscured to natural reason, leaving accessible for veneration "the created truths" that were discernible to the eyes. Hence, humans offered worship:

to those things in which some sign or appearance of goodness or excellence was to be known, [and these things] we call idols; or to the things that represent idols, because whatever goodness, worth and nobility is contained or revealed in creatures, is nothing other than traces and reflections of God's sublimity, excellence and maj- esty.30

Augustine had asked, "who has ever thought of offering sacrifice to any being other than the one whom he knew, believed or imagined to be God?"31 This question led Las Casas to his radical and new conclusion about the nature of idolatrous worship: "No difference exists between of-

fering sacrifice to the true God or a false one if he is held and understood to be the true God. The reason is that conscience that is in error binds as much while it remains uninformed as does the conscience that is not in error."32 The long practice of idolatry had converted it into deeply rooted

custom, and custom, as Aristotle had seen, "is similar to nature."33 One cannot help one's nature. Among the numerous illustrations that Las Casas cited for this fundamental fact were children's games: the dolls that children

played with were, he thought, tiny idols, idolillos.34 In short, idolatry was wrong, but its practitioners in the Americas

could not be described as any more culpable than the Greeks and Romans. This perception led Las Casas to a vision of the role of idolatry in the his-

tory and politics of indigenous America, and also in the world at large, that was already implicit in the work of Pedro Cieza de Le6n, who repeatedly compared Inca religion and governance to those of Rome. But Las Casas drove home the conclusions. According to the universal and laudably pious opinion of Gentiles, the cult of the gods furthered the commonweal, and

30 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 73, p. 378. 31 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 73, pp. 378-79, citing Augustine De civitate dei 10: 4 "quis vero sacrificandum censuit nisi ei quem Deum aut scivit aut putavit aut finxit?" 32 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 183, p. 242.

33 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 74, p.386, "consuetudo similis est naturae, ideo difficile est ipsam mutare," citing Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 10: 9; Metaphysics 2: 14. 34 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 74, p. 386.

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neglect of the gods brought misfortune. To illustrate this point, Las Casas

cited, inter alia, the speech of Camillus persuading the Romans not to leave Rome after it had been devastated by the Gauls, so as to settle elsewhere. "Our city was founded in accord with auspices and augury," Camillus had said.

Every place in it is imbued with sacred rites and the presence of the gods. Not just the days are fixed for our solemn sacrifices, but also the places where they are to be offered. Romans: will you desert the gods of your families and your city?"

The Romans decided to stay. Their piety on this and countless other occa- sions lay at the root of their imperial success. As Cicero had said, "[t]he gods govern and give order to all things."-6 In the Inca Empire too, as Las Casas had learned from Cieza and from missionaries in Peru, the gods, particularly the Incan ancestral Sun, ordered everything and were wor-

shipped with unfailing devotion. This devotion, and the temples, rituals, and sacrifices which made it palpable, were the quintessential expression of Inca statecraft for which Las Casas expressed nothing but admiration.

Then why should anyone become a Christian? Las Casas's reason was

transparent: the gods of the nations were indeed demons, who rewarded and punished their worshippers "so that the cult of idols should become ever more firmly rooted in the world."37 The demons were deceivers because they claimed for themselves the very acts of devotion that were owed to the true God alone. The resulting hall of mirrors, the web of good wor-

ship offered to evil recipients was so bewildering that human beings, rooted in custom that had become nature, and urged on by their yearning for a

higher good, were unable to perceive the way out. And why did God allow all this? To that question Las Casas ultimately provided no answer. The answer that he rejected, which was espoused by some contemporaries and

by others subsequently, suggested that the Indians had brought their errors, and the suffering and destruction of invasion and conquest, on themselves because sin held a tighter grip on them than it did on others. But according to Las Casas, the Spanish were the worse idolaters: their idol was the riches of the Indies.

35 Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.52.2-3, referred to by Las Casas, A.H., ch. 184, p. 247.

31 Cicero, de legibus II, vii,15 "dominos esse omnium ac moderatores deos," quoted by Las Casas, A.H., ch. 184, p. 247. 37 Las Casas, A.H., ch. 184, pp. 248-50.

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Las Casas regarded idolatrous worship as part and parcel of the proc- ess of change over time. This view, formulated in historical, rather than

theological terms, had already been elaborated by Cieza on the basis of his researches about the origin and nature of the Incan Empire. The earliest Andean cults, Cieza thought, focused on the dead and on satisfying daily needs, on talismans and fetishes related to harvests, fisheries, and animal

husbandry. Cieza noted that such cults were still being observed throughout the Andes. But in Cuzco, and wherever the Incas ruled, these cults had been

complemented, and to a certain extent displaced, by the worship of the Inca Sun and of the Creator Viracocha. Las Casas deployed his enormous learn-

ing to weave this thesis into an interpretation of Aristotle which led to an overall conclusion that cultural and political development went hand in hand with the development of religion. Thus he juxtaposed the imperial cults of the Aztecs and Incas with what he perceived to be the simple worship of chiefdoms and other non-centralized societies, and saw in all Amerindian religions, idolatrous though they were, important traces of humankind's original monotheism.

The notion that idolatry changed over time also made sense to Peru's most influential historian, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of Inca royalty and a Spanish conquistador. According to Garcilaso, in primitive times, before the Incas, the countless small gods being worshipped matched the backwardness of living conditions:

for each province, nation, village and settlement, each lineage and house had different gods. For it seemed to those people that someone else's god, occupied with someone else, would not help them, but would help only his own devotee. And so they ended up having such a variety of gods, and so many, that they were almost without number. And because unlike the Roman Gentiles they did not know how to make imagined gods, like Hope, Victory, Peace and the like, because they did not lift their thoughts to invisible things, they adored what they saw before their eyes.

In listing these multifarious idols, Garcilaso developed an incipient theory of the primitive mind that correlated progress in modes of survival with the choice of objects of worship. During an initial primitive age, pumas commanded respect for their fierceness, foxes for their cunning, and con- dors for their magnificence. As to what was useful to those simple human

beings, on the Peruvian coast it was fish that attracted idolatrous attention,

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while elsewhere, cultic objects related to maize and other crops that were necessary for survival.38

All this changed during the "second age" of Andean idolatry, with the coming of the Incas who created an idolatrous religion in which Garcilaso perceived an authentic theological rationale whereby Incan idolaters joined earlier seekers after true religion. This rationale was a tacit review of what had been said about Inca idolatry by earlier historians, into which Garcilaso incorporated a set of theological points of his own. As Garcilaso saw matters, the Incas had commanded their subjects to "worship and adore the Sun as their principal deity." The reason they gave was the "Sun's beauty and splendor." The Inca solar cult therefore gave expression to that human yearning for exalted objects of worship that Las Casas had described as a motivating force in idolatrous worship. Besides the Sun, the Incas revered the Sun's consort the Moon, along with Lightning, Thunder and the Rain- bow as his attendants, and also the first Inca ruler, his consort and their descendants, who were the Sun's children. The Indians:

regarded their kings as children of the Sun because in their great simplicity they believed that this man and this woman, who had done so much for them, were his sons who had come down from the sky. Hence, in those days, people adored the Incas as divine, and later they adored all their descendants, with much greater inte- rior and outward veneration than the ancient Gentiles adored Ju- piter, Venus, and Mars.39

Finally, the Indians worshipped the "Maker of the World" Pachacamac, he "who gives soul to the entire world. In its complete and proper meaning the name means to give expression to 'him who works in the universe what the soul works in the body.' "40 This Pachacamac of the Incas was a very different deity from the one whom Hernando Pizarro and his men thought they encountered:

With the natural reason that God gave them, the Inca Kings of Peru understood that there was one Maker of all things, whom

they called Pachacamac, which means to say "the Maker who sus-

3 Garcilaso, C.R., i, 9-10; similarly Las Casas A.H., chs. 126; 182.

" Garcilaso, C.R., I,ii,1, p. 42a. For the rainbow supported by serpents in Garcilaso's coat of arms, see Christian Fernandez, Inca Garcilaso: imaginaci6n, memoria e identidad

(Lima: Universidad San Marcos, 2004), 99-111.

40 Garcilaso, C.R., I.ii.2, p. 43a.

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tains the universe." This doctrine first went forth from the Incas and spread throughout all their realms both before and after the Incas conquered them. The Incas said that Pachacamac was invisible and did not allow himself to be seen, and that for this reason

they raised no temples and offered no sacrifice to him as they did for the Sun, beyond adoring him in their hearts ... in accord with the external gestures [of worship] that they made with their head, arms and entire body when uttering his name.41

According to Garcilaso, another reason why the Maker received no sacrifices from the Incas was that having made everything, he needed nothing.42 Did Garcilaso know that the pagan philosopher and holy man Apollonius of Tyana had said that no sacrifices should be offered to the supreme deity, since he had no need of anything?43

At any rate, as Las Casas had insisted, the gentiles of America did at- tain a certain understanding of God, even though-according to Cieza-the devil had fraudulently claimed that Pachacamac and the God preached by the Spanish were one and the same thing. But Garcilaso, having thought about the intentions that Las Casas attributed to Amerindian gentiles, read the devil's words differently: "The intention of those Indians was to attri- bute this name to the highest God who gives being and life to the universe." In Garcilaso's eyes, the Indians were right: Pachacamac, the Maker of the

World, was indeed the true God. However, when the devil said that he himself was Pachacamac this was a lie, as would be apparent to anyone who took the trouble to find out that the Indians used quite different termi-

nology to refer to God's adversary.44 In short, the devil was misrepresenting Andean worshippers of the one God to their Spanish conquerors and teachers to the detriment of everyone. For when questioned by the Spanish:

the Indians do not dare to give an account of these things with the

proper meaning and intention of the words, seeing that [Spanish]

41 Garcilaso, C.R., I.vi.30, p. 232b; cf. Garcilaso, C.R., I.vi, p. 234a, "por no le haber visto ni conocerle, ni saber que cosa fuese." Also, ibid. on adoration of Sol and Pachaca- mac, nothing being offered to the latter. 42 Garcilaso, C.R., I.v.18, p.174a, where Pachacamac is assimilated with Viracocha. Else- where (C.R., 1.11, p.43b; vi, 31 p.234a), Garcilaso assimilates Pachacamac to the Un- known God of Acts 17:23, explaining that the Incas offered no sacrifice to Pachacamac since they had not seen him and thus did not know him. 43 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 4.13.1. 44 Garcilaso, C.R., I.ii.2, pp. 43b-44a.

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Christians abominate everything of theirs as pertaining to the devil. Also, the Spanish neglect to enquire after these matters

plainly, but rather insist that it all pertains to the devil, as they imagine it. The reason is that the Spanish do not have any real

understanding of the general language of the Inca so as to compre- hend the derivation, composition and proper meaning of such ex-

pressions.45

The name of Pachacamac was a salient example because it demonstrated that the Incas did form a concept of a supreme deity. Echoing the address of the Apostle Paul to the Athenians in the Book of Acts about their altar to the Unknown God, Garcilaso wrote that the Incas addressed to "Pacha-

camac, the unknown god" the adoration of their souls.46 For the ancestral Sun of the Inca rulers, by contrast, they built temples, and to him they offered sacrifice in the manner of the ancient gentiles of Europe, because he was known and visible. This theological reasoning that Garcilaso attributed to the Incas, incomplete though he acknowledged it to be in the light of

revelation, was precisely what the Spanish refused to recognize.47 In Garcilaso's eyes, Andean and Inca idolatry was thus a product not

just of human frailty in its Amerindian historical context, but also of the

ignorance and arrogance of the bearers of the true faith. In 1554, Sairi

Tupac, a son of the great Inca Guayna Capac, decided to leave his retreat in the selva not far from Cuzco and became a Christian. As a child, Garcilaso watched Sairi Tupac praying in Coricancha, the "golden corral" that had

formerly been the imperial sanctuary of the Inca Sun but had meanwhile been converted into the church of the Dominican friars:

4' Garcilaso, C.R., I.ii.2, p.44a 46 Garcilaso, C.R., I.ii.4, p. 48a, "Pachacamac dios no conocido que ellos adoran mental- mente"; C.R., I.v.18, p.174b "Pachacamac no visto ni conocido, y el sol visible y noto- rio." See also C.R., I.iv.19, p.140b, quoting Bias Valera about Inca Roca saying that Pachacamac could be known to be God from the beauty of his heavenly dwelling. The statement has a parallel in Las Casas, see Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 209-10. Garcilaso's point was spelled out by Gerardus loannes Vossius, De theo- logia gentili, et physiologia christiana sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae ad veterum

gsta, ac rerum naturam reductae; deque naturae mirandis, quibus homo adducitur ad Deum Liber I et II (Amsterdam: Johannes and Cornelius Blaeu, 1642), 1: 14, citing Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2: 28 on festivals of the Romans, and linking Varro's SI DEO SI DEAE to the Ara ignoti Dei (cf. above n. 41). 47 Note Garcilaso, C.R., I.vi.30, p.233a about Rimac, "el que habla," compared to

"Apolo Delfico y otros muchos que hubo en la gentilidad antigua." C.R., I.vi.31, p. 233b, the Spanish confuse Rimac and Pachacamac because they do not understand Quechua properly.

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With much devotion he adored the most holy sacrament, calling it

Pachacamac, Pachacamac. And the image of Our Lady he called Mother of God. But there was no lack of malicious persons who said when they saw him kneeling before the most holy sacrament in the church of Saint Dominic that he did it to adore his father the Sun and his ancestors whose bodies had been housed in that

place.48

III. CONFRONTATION

These malicious persons were far from alone. Las Casas, like some of his fellow Dominicans in Peru, in particular the linguist Domingo de Santo

Toma's, was confident that Amerindian idolatry would naturally and over time yield to true religion. This expectation was not born out by experience, or not fast enough, which reopened the question as to why the Indians were idolaters in the first place. The issue brought to the foreground another old established idea about idolatry. Writers of sacred and gentile history were

agreed that idolatry reached back almost to the origins of humankind, perhaps to the time of Enoch in the sixth generation after Adam49: for Enoch had "walked with God," implying that his contemporaries did not. Others, including Aquinas, located the origin of idolatry at the beginning of the Second Age,0o when, after Noah's Flood, human beings began to multiply and-with the confusion of languages that followed the building of the Tower of Babel-scattered over the world. Historians who speculated about the migrations that might have brought the forebears of Amerindians to the new continent therefore looked for a date subsequent to Babel. A central theme in their account was that these forebears forgot their maker and worshipped idols. The story was helped along by the absence of writing in the Americas, at least in a form recognizable to Europeans. Some authors even suggested that Quechua, the language of the Incas, while abounding with the names of all sorts of idols lacked a term for "god." "Whence it is

clear," concluded the Jesuit missionary Jose de Acosta, "how deficient and weak a concept they had of God, since they cannot so much as name him

48 Garcilaso, C.R., II.viii.11, p.146b. See also C.R., I.v.2, p.151b, the celebration of Cor-

pus Christi in Cuzco in 1551: the Indians were glad to celebrate "la fiesta del Sefior Dios

Nuestro, al cual ellos llaman Pachacamac." 49 See The Latin Josephus: Introduction and Text. The Antiquities: Books I-V, ed. Franz Blatt (Copenhagen: Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus, 1958), 1: 72 with Genesis 6:5. 50 Aquinas, Summa theologica. Secunda secundae q. 94 a. 4, 2.

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except by our Spanish term."" But this did not mean-Acosta conceded- that they had no concept of God at all.

Acosta was deeply torn about his work as a missionary in Peru. He

deplored the impact that Spanish governance in Peru was having on indigenous people. But he also thought that Europe was "the better more noble

part of the world,"'52 and its culture superior to that of Amerindians, a point confirmed for him by the countless idols and idolatrous forms of worship that missionaries were contending with on a daily basis. By way of imposing some order on this mass of error, Acosta classified indigenous idolatries into four varieties. The Indians worshipped "natural things"-both those that were discernible to all human beings-"the sun, the moon, fire, earth, the elements," and those that pertained to different localities, such as rivers, springs, trees, and mountains, described in Peru as huaca. They also adored what arose from "human invention or fiction": "idols or statues of wood, stone or gold," like those of Mercury or Minerva, all of them things that are "nothing and never were anything." Finally, there were cults of the

dead, of "what really was and is something.""3 This classification-unlike those of Aquinas, Cieza, and Las Casas-posited no historical evolution of

religious thought and action in the Andes, and intersected only incidentally with earlier classifications of Greek and Roman idols. But it proved to have certain practical uses, for when, in the early seventeenth century, Peruvian ecclesiastics turned to systematic destruction of indigenous objects of wor-

ship, it was Acosta's classification that was cited by way of distinguishing idols that could and others that could not be confiscated and destroyed: huacas, ritual objects and bodies of deceased ancestors, as distinct from

sun, moon, and mountains.5s4 From the beginning, some missionaries had been hesitant to employ

Quechua vocabulary for key Christian concepts such as God, Holy Spirit, Sacrament, and several more. The Quechua language, it seemed, was too

deeply steeped in idolatrous thinking to serve as a vehicle for Christian

51 Jose de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (hereafter H.N.M.), ed. Ed- mundo O'Gorman (Seville: 1590; Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1962), 5:4, p.220, noting the existence of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic terms for God. 52 Acosta, H.N.M., 5.1, p. 218. - Acosta, H.N.M., 5.2, p. 219. Earlier, Acosta had described the different kinds of idola-

try somewhat differently, see Jos& de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute, ed. L. Per- efia et al. (Salamanca, 1589; Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1984), book V, chap. 10, citing John of Damascus and the Letter of Jeremiah (reproduced in the Vulgate as an appendix to the

prophet Baruch). 14 Pablo Jose de Arriaga, Extirpaci6n de la idolatrfa del Peri. In Cr6nicas peruanas de interes indigena (BAE, vol. 209), ed. E. Barba. (Madrid, 1968), ch.2.

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teaching without careful review. This initial hesitation turned into firm pol- icy when in 1584, the Third Council of Lima issued a catechism and a set of sermons in Quechua for the use of missionary clergy. Here, as in such literature in subsequent generations, most theological terms were intro- duced into Quechua as loan words from Spanish.

The perspective of missionaries on idolatry in the Andes came to differ

substantially from that of historians and lay people in general. Historians viewed Andean idolatry in global terms, in light of precedents derived from

Scripture, from the historians of Greece and Rome and from theological classics, in particular the Summa of Aquinas. In these contexts, idolatry was an inherently intelligible phenomenon with a long history. Missionaries also began with these orientations, but their task of transforming a pagan, idolatrous society into a Christian one turned out to take much longer than first anticipated. This task was rooted not just in the perceived fact of An- dean idolatry and its projected elimination, but in countless small details of

daily life that were in one way or another connected with idolatrous practices. If the Quechua language seemed to be inherently idolatrous, so did other forms of human expression: music, forms of dress and hair styles, names that evoked aspects of Andean living, and most of all customs of

sociability and conviviality. Tertullian's warnings about tentacles of idolatry that reached into so

many aspects of work and leisure acquired a new reality in the Andes. Christian contemporaries of Tertullian knew that worshipping idols was

wrong. Making statues that became idols even without rendering cult to them was wrong too, Tertullian pointed out: a craftsman should instead make chests and other useful things. Teachers were at fault when instructing the young about the names, birthdays, genealogies, and festivals of "the

gods of the nations.""5 It was wrong to give gifts on the pagan feast days and to put celebratory wreaths and lights on doors, because that amounted to honoring some

idol.-6 Such details of daily life also occupied missionaries

in the Andes and revealed that the categories of what was and was not idolatrous or demonic were not as clear as might be expected, or rather, that not much consensus emerged between missionaries and their Andean

public. In this context, Peruvian missionaries consulted Tertullian's treatise as highly relevant to their concerns.57

-" Tertullian, De idololatria 10: 1-5. 56 Tertullian, De idololatria 13: 1; 15: 1.

57 Francisco de Avila, Tratado de los evangelios, que nuestra madre la iglesia propone en todo el azo ... Tomo primero (Lima: Pedro de Cabrera, 1648); see the "Aprobaci6n" by Fray Miguel de Aguirre.

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In 1608, the villagers of San Damian de Huarochiri became tired of hearing their priest, the missionary Francisco de Avila, preach against idolatry on every possible occasion and asked him to stop. The sermons were giving the village a bad name, and in any case, everyone was a faithful Christian. Avila did moderate his tone, and then discovered that the villagers were observing, alongside Christian holy days, the festivals of Andean deities, in particular that of the local snowcapped mountain Pariacaca and his sister Chaupifiamoc. The discovery resulted in a vicious campaign of extirpation in which hundreds of huacas, mummified bodies of ancestors, and ritual objects were sought out and destroyed. Avila also imprisoned one Hernando Paucar, regional lord or curaca of the village of San Pedro de Mama, and much revered wandering shaman, who had described his work and life for him. Wherever he went, people welcomed Hernando Paucar with dancing, music, and offerings and erected what Avila described as a ramada, a "shelter made of branches" for him to stay in. According to the shaman's testimony as translated by Avila:

they decked and enclosed the shelter with fabric and the ground was covered with fresh straw, and . . . there they came to consult me and I responded, sacrificed guinea pigs, made libations of chi- cha and performed other ceremonies while the visitor was watch- ing. Some said they wanted to hear the words of Chaupifiamoc, and I made her speak setting down a small figure representing her, and sometimes she spoke very softly and others loudly. This is what you-declared Hernando Paucar addressing Francisco de Avila-say was the devil.-8

The shelter of Hernando Paucar with its covering of woven fabric evokes the covered patio in front of Pachacamac's chamber atop his pyramid that the Spanish destroyed in 1533. This resemblance is not accidental, for divinatory and other sacred encounters customarily took place in precisely this kind of structure.59 As for Chaupifiamoc's representation, Her- nando Paucar probably referred to it as a huaca. Avila translated this as idolillo, a small idol, and in the footsteps of his early Christian predeces- sors, he did think that the shaman was speaking with the devil in the idol.

18 Avila, Tratado; see Avila's "prefacion al libro de los sermones."

"9 See Frank Salomon and G. Urioste, eds., The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), ch. 7, section 92 with n. 165, about the enclosure of quishuar wood built for a woman of the

ayllu (kingroup) Cupara as the human representation of the huaca Chuqui Suso.

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Other missionaries of Avila's day held an alternative theory, that prophetic speech by huacas was best explained as priestly fraud. Neither quite makes sense of Hernando Paucar's words, even as translated by Avila. Instead, the shaman appears to have said that he himself openly spoke in place of the

huaca Chaupifiamoc, whose representation was present.60 Elsewhere in the Andes also, religious specialists spoke on behalf of

huacas and deities. Consulting huacas was an orderly and dignified affair, and had been part and parcel of running the Inca empire. Bearing offerings, the Inca in person or through a delegate had enquired periodically and in times of especial need at the empire's great sanctuaries about actions to be undertaken or omitted. In addition, deities from all parts came to Cuzco

annually with their priests in order to prognosticate the future, and were rewarded or penalized in accord with the accuracy of their predictions.61 Although the imperial splendor and circumstance that accompanied such official consultations did not outlast the Spanish invasion, regional oracles and shamans like Hernando Paucar continued serving their communities for generations. Here, reality differed substantially from the expectation of missionaries. For although Hernando Paucar, like spokespersons for deities in Inca times, interacted with the huaca Chaupifiamoc and spoke in com-

plete possession of his senses, Avila was fully convinced that in some way, a demon or devil was talking. The ground for this profound reinterpreta- tion of reality had been prepared by the early Christian apologists and church fathers whose works Avila studied in order to orient himself among the gentiles of the Andes.62

By Avila's time, the consensus that the huacas were demons, and that it was demons who through some human or material vehicle delivered divi-

natory statements, was almost universal among missionaries in Peru. Avi- la's contemporary, the Andean historian Guaman Poma de Ayala was in

general agreement regarding the demons, but had nothing but criticism for Avila's methods. Not long after Avila had imprisoned and questioned Her- nando Paucar, and had undertaken a rigorous campaign of confiscating and

destroying all manner of objects that he associated with idolatrous worship,

60 See Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 7, 91-94 about a woman being celebrated as the huaca Chuqui Suso. 61 Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Cronica del Peru'. Segunda Parte (above n. 25), ch. 29. 62 Earlier, the Augustinian friars in Huamachuco had interpreted oracular utterances by an Andean deity as either priestly fraud or demonic speech, see Fray Juan de San Pedro, La persecuci6n del demonio. Cr6nica de los primeros Agustinos en el norte del Perur (1560), ed. L. Millones, J. R. Topic, and J. L. Gonza'lez (Malaga: Algazara, 1992), 170-71.

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Guaman Poma met three old women who had taken flight. Avila, the three women reported, had threatened to prosecute all and sundry as "sorcerers and sorceresses," and for "worshipping huacas. Without their having done

it, he takes pleasure in saying that they adore stones." The women fled because a rope would have been tied round their necks, and holding a candle they would have been forced to walk in a procession: "and with that, the said inspector of idolatries is finished and declares himself satisfied." There was no way, the women said, to defend oneself:

If the person is Christian and answers and says that he knows

nothing of huaca idols and that he adores one God alone, and the

Holy Trinity and the Virgin Holy Mary, and all the male and fe- male saints, and angels in heaven, Doctor Avila orders such an Indian to mount a white llama and there he says the Indian must be whipped hard until the blood runs onto the side of the white llama so the blood of the poor Indian is seen. And with the torture and pain the Indian says that he adores the idol and old huaca.63

Hearing all this, Guaman Poma went to see for himself. In San Pedro de

Mama, where the huaca Chaupifiamoc in one of her manifestations had been at home, he heard that:

an inspector of the holy church called Doctor Avila and the gover- nor, under cover of saying that the people were idolaters have robbed them of much gold and silver and clothes and feather garments and other fine things, clothes of cumbi cloth and ordinary cloth, pins, shirts, vessels, and drinking cups all of gold and silver. These things they owned to dance and celebrate during festivals and holy days, Corpus Christi, and the inspector has taken everything from the poor Indians. On top of that, he has left behind two

young inspectors. On top of that, he charges them the cost of his food and demands forced labor for himself and his servants.64

Setting aside the coercive methods of achieving Christian conviction, Guman Poma reveals that the discourse of idolatry had come to rest in

significant part on cultural issues. This was also the opinion of Guaman

63 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cr6nica y buen gobierno, ed. J. V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and J. Urioste (1615; Madrid: Historia 16, 1987), 1111. 64 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cr6nica, 1121.

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Poma's contemporary, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In response, Garcilaso devised a panorama of Andean and Inca religion designed to demonstrate that arguments accompanied by cultural contempt or duress were mis-

placed, because without reciprocal understanding of what could be meant

by idols, idolatry, and true religion, communication was impossible. But there were further issues that Garcilaso did not want to consider.

The feather garments and clothes of cumbi cloth, the silver and gold pins, vessels and drinking cups that Avila had confiscated were indeed used-whether formerly or still in the present-in the cults and festivals

honoring huacas. Besides, in many Andean settlements, the indigenous cal- endar was revised so as to have the traditional festivals honoring huacas and idols overlap with Christian ones. Avila knew that the festival of Chap- ifiamoc, and also that of her brother the glacier Pariacaca were still being celebrated and overlapped with Corpus Christi.6s Arguments about orna- ments used in Corpus Christi celebrations therefore did not convince him. Likewise he and men of his persuasion would not have lent credence to Garcilaso's interpretation of Pachacamac. Hernando de Avendafio, who, like Avila, studied idolatry, even went so far as to suggest that Andean surnames ought to be replaced by Spanish ones, so as to drive out the idolatrous reminiscences that he felt Andean names inevitably carried with them.

Many people dropped their Andean surnames, but others did not and such names remain current to this day. The cult of huacas, albeit at times in Christian guise likewise is alive and well, but they are no longer called idols.66

This is because in the course of the eighteenth century, the Church lost interest in Andean idols, and in idols altogether.67 There is a further, perhaps more weighty reason why the huacas have not all disappeared, or rather

why new ones, both large and small, keep emerging. For the discourse of

6- Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 9, section 126; ch.13 section 173; 175 about Chaupi N&am- ca's festival around the time of Corpus. For Paria Caca's festival in Christian times, see Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 9, sections 133-34; 140. 66 Inge Bolin, Rituals of Respect: The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Peter Gose, Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains:

Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1994); Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian

Village (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 238-49 has unique material and insight into the internal workings of Andean continuities. 67 Karen Spalding, Huarochiri. An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1984), ch. 8; in Europe, an indicator of the new mood

Spalding identifies (p. 268) is the treatise about oracles by Bernard Le Bovier de Fonten- elle, Histoire des Oracles, ed. Louis Maigron (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1971).

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idols as formulated in Peru, resting as it did on ancient European roots, did not ultimately intersect with what huacas were and are,68 however vigor- ously this discourse was at times conducted. Take the huaca Chaupifiamoc. In the village San Pedro de Mama, where Hernando Paucar was curaca, Chaupifiamoc was known as the daughter of Tamta NJamka, a lord of an earlier age. The village of San Pedro de Mama was located in lands that had

formerly belonged to the Yunga people, who were displaced by the Yauyos from the Andean highlands. Before becoming a rock with five wings or arms that was guarded in San Pedro de Mama,69 Chaupifiamoc married, against the objections of her kin, a male who like the Yauyos people came from the

highlands. The marriage thus represented, at a divine level, the at times conflictive union of Yungas and Yauyos that was also expressed in the com-

petitive dances Yungas and Yauyos performed for the glacier Paria Caca.

Paria Caca was the ancestral deity of the Yauyos people.70 The Yauyos revered Chaupifiamoc as well, but for them, she was the sister of their own

Paria Caca, and the two were children of the Sun and Hanan Maclla, another divine figure of the highlands.71 In this version of her identity, Chaupi- fiamoc was one of five sisters, whom the Yauyos worshipped as a group.72 The glacier Paria Caca also had various aliases, one of which was that he

originated from five eggs. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to observe here that an Inca queen was called Mama Runtu, Mother Egg.73 Finally, Chaupifiamoc was in some respect present through the huaca who spoke in Hernando Paucar's prognostications, and probably elsewhere as well.

When missionaries felt that the huacas kept eluding them both in terms of discourse and in terms of their physical existence, they were right. In terms of discourse, the biblical and patristic concept of what an idol was, with or without its demon, did not intersect with the notion of huaca that we see at work in, for example, the figure of Chaupifiamoc. In terms of

physical existence, even huacas that according to Jose de Acosta's classification were destroyable because they could be confiscated, were in fact not

68 Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Estructuras andinas del poder. Ideologia religi- osa y politica (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1983). 69 Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 10, section 144.

7 See Salomon, in Huarochiri Manuscript, n. 286. For the kinship of Yungas and Yauyos at Paria Caca's festival, see Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 9 section 116 with Salomon's note. 71 Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 13, section 172; see also ch. 10, section 143. 72 Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 13, sections 184-85.

7. Garcilaso, C.R., I.v.28, consort of Inca Viracocha; see also Garcilaso, C.R., viii, ch. 8,

a consort of Guayna Capac.

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destroyable because they were capable of regeneration perennially repeated. All that was needed was the interest of a devotee.74

Seen in Andean terms, therefore, the hermetic treatise Asclepius, ac-

cording to which human beings could be the makers and inventors, fictores, of gods, stated the position correctly. Even so, this only relates to the An- dean situation to a limited extent. The treatise envisioned statues, material creations that could also be works of art, creations that were at any rate the work of human hands. Many, but by no means all, huacas were works of human hands. Furthermore, the existence of a huaca made by human hands was not confined to this particular rendering: it could revive, and

many huacas did revive, simply as a stone. The biblical and Christian conception of idols comprises the notion

that the idol is in some respect anthropomorphic. The idols have eyes that see not, and so on. In the words of the treatise Asclepius, humans made

gods ex sui vultus similitudine. This conception was of some relevance in the Andes, because human beings did, as it were, make gods. But this relevance also was limited, because so many huacas bore no resemblance of any kind, whether human, animal or plant. Yet a human being was nonetheless instrumental in perceiving the huaca's existence and power, even if it was

not, as Thomas Aquinas posited, in terms of the human love of imitation. In the Andes, as everywhere else, human agency shapes and interprets the

environment, the inner and the outer life. But the shaping extends beyond the "similitude of the human countenance." In this sense, Garcilaso's panorama of Inca religion, of the conjoined worship of the visible Sun and the invisible and unkown Pachacamac, much though it has been criticized for

being the product of his own imagination, has a great deal to teach us. This

panorama may also help to explain why, in Christianity as practiced in the Andean highlands, the organizing principles so often remain elusive to outsiders.

University of Notre Dame.

74 Fray Juan de San Pedro (above no. 62), p.179; Huarochiri Manuscript, ch. 20, sections 236-39 has a similar story about the emergence of a huaca.

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