Witchcraft, Sorcery And The Inquisition: Sexuality, Power And Repression In Colonial Latin America Written By Maria Jaramillo

Witchcraft, Sorcery and the Inquisition: Sexuality, Power and Repression in Colonial Latin America written by Maria Jaramillo

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal. — Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
Witchcraft, Sorcery and the Inquisition: Sexuality, Powerand Repression in Colonial Latin America
Colonial Latin America is a land that symbolizes the realization of European imagination. As Laura de Mello e Souza writes in her introduction to The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross, the discovery of America signifies a transition from “imaginary voyages to real voyages”: “three hundred years had gone by, time enough for the mental projections ofsixteenth-century Europeans to stretch into the newly discovered continent, encountering the imaginary universe of people from other cultures and ultimately merging with them” (4). The realization of this long, dreamt- about land is met by Europeans with both captivation and fear; the exuberance of the New World’s nature and its quickly shaping racial and ethnic makeup appeals to the conquerors comingfrom a limited and deprived land. This fascination with difference is, of course, extended to the realm of foreign sexualities: “cannibalism, nudism, sexual freedom, eroticism, polygamy, incest” (Souza, 6).
It is after gaining an understanding these preliminary emotions towards early Colonial America that I might introduce the relationship between the Colonial establishment of power over thediscourses of witchcraft, gender and sexuality. As French and Bliss say, discourses “produce certain kinds of knowledge about subjects because they portray or represent these subjects in a specific manner” (12). Allusions and tentative assumptions made about the witchcraft and sorcery yields to us insights about how the Colonial authority sought to assert control by spreading “knowledge” about thesesubjects. The religious idea of the existence of a struggle on earth between good and evil, the saint and the sinner, translates into the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and in a more personal and sometimes private sphere, to the establishment of a hierarchy between man and woman. In the colonial and Inquisitorial context, woman’s character was easily dichotomized into asaintly figure mirroring very much that of the Virgin Mary’s, or a “bruja,” a highly sexual figure closely linked to the Devil. Keeping in mind the similarity of the European colonizers’ attempt to gain control over an unknown and what Friar Vicente do Salvador dubbed an “immature portion of Earth” (Souza, 7), I will explore how the working concept of witchcraft and religious superstition helped definethe discourses of gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America. Attention will be paid to how the instilment of fear and the Inquisition acted as tools of repression; alternatively, women appropriated witchcraft as a means of obtaining power. I will also briefly describe how the relationship between magic, gender and sexuality influenced and was influenced by the forming racial identities anddiscourses. Though my thesis mostly concentrates on the relationship between witchcraft and femininity, it is important to take note of the interactions existing between men and women through the use of witchcraft; a most interesting example of this is the popular use of “love magic”, which both men and women used to obtain love and control it.
Old World Influences: Religiosity, Witches and theRise of the Inquisition
It is clear and necessary to understand Colonial America’s rich heritage of witch beliefs and practice hailing from Europe as well as Africa. Gustav Henningsen’s The Witches Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition is an efficient discussion of theories of witchcraft, scholarly works that have both tried to confirm or dispel the existence of the witch cult...