History of Catholicism in Black and white in the Land of Magical Realism

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The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Michael T. Taussig

https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/taussig_devil_commodity.pdf

Part II: The Plantations of the Cauca Valley in Colombia

CHAPTER 3: Slave Religion and the Rise of the Free Peasantry

Two generalizations are necessary to any discussion of black slave religion in Latin America. First, the whites were apprehensive of the supernatural powers of their subjects, and vice versa. Second, religion was inseparable from magic, and both permeated everyday life—agriculture, mining, economy, healing, marital affairs, and social relations in general. 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. 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 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. This process was most obvious in beliefs concerning illness and healing. 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. 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). Conversely, the Europeans availed themselves of their subjects' magic, which was not distinguished from religion. In fact, the Europeans defined African and Indian religion not merely as magic but as evil magic. "It is in this trance," writes Gustavo Otero, referring to the first days of the conquest, "that the conquerors became the conquered" (1951: 128). That restless dialectic of magical counter attributions persists in popular culture to the present day.

Colonization 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. 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. 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 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, [with] the faith on the point of destruction" (Lea, 1908 :456). 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. 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). 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. This system of belief expresses the specter of social inversion. Teleologically ordered by the Supreme God, the hierarchy of social forms defined by class, color, and sex engendered its mirror image in the fears or hopes of an underworld allied with Satan.

Blacks were notorious for their militantly anti-Christian outbursts, which were macabrely ritualized in the sine qua non of slavery, flogging; at such times it was not unusual for the victim to cry, "I denounce God!" (Medina, 1889:106; cf., Palmer, 1975). They also destroyed symbols of the church—hardly surprising in a society in which, for example, a woman slave owner might measure the duration of a flogging by the time it took her to recite her rosary (Meiklejohn, 1968:216).

Writing in 1662, the chief inquisitor attributed much of the sorcery and idolatry in the mining districts to the heedless materialism of the mineowners, who "live only for profit. . . and keep watch only that the slaves accomplish their daily labor and care for nothing else" (Medina, 1889:12,0). Ostensibly, this sorcery could not only kill and maim people but also destroy the fruits of the earth—a claim still heard in connection with alleged devil pacts made by plantation laborers in the southern Cauca Valley. The pact will increase their productivity and their wage, but renders the canefield barren. Yet, the same laborers, working as peasants on their own or their neighbors' plots around the plantations or as independent subsistence dwellers in the jungles of the Pacific coast, reputedly spurn such pacts. Zaragoza, the mining area referred to, was the scene of one of Colombia's greatest slave revolts, which, according to observers, attempted to exterminate the whites and destroy the mines, as well (Vazquez de Espinosa, 1948 :34i).

The spasmodic moment that bridged the lash and the cry of renunciation of the master's God epitomizes the slaves' devil. He can become a figure of solace and power in that war of attrition against the African's culture and humanity itself. In their devil worship, the slaves appropriated their enemy's enemy. Ironically, through its very attempts at suppression, the Church indirectly validated devil worship and invested it with power. By acknowledging fear of the slaves' spiritual powers, the credulous Spanish inadvertently delivered a powerful instrument to their bondsmen. The Spaniards believed that the devil had spawned the heathen African and that the slaves were part of his ministry. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, after all, the most intense years of the witch cult in Western Europe, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition—an epoch in which the whole of Christendom trembled before the threat of the diabolic and the magician's manipulation of nature.

Ambiguously but persistently, Europeans equated slave folklore and religion, African identity, with the devil (cf., Genovese, 1974: 159-284). But for the African slave the devil was not necessarily the vengeful spirit of evil. He was also a figure of mirth and a powerful trickster. As Melville J. Herskovits pointed out, West Africans understood the European devil as their divine trickster, and their moral philosophy resisted the sharp dichotomy of good and evil espoused by the missionaries (195 8:2 5 3). Today, along the virtually isolated rivers of the Colombian Pacific coast, where blacks were largely left to fend for themselves after emancipation, they have, not one, but several devils, who tempt rather than threaten. The idea of hell among the blacks of the Raposo River only vaguely corresponds to the Christian idea; some people place it in the sky (Pavy, 1967:2,34). Finding their spirits defined as devils or one in particular defined as the devil, the blacks did not readily attribute evil to the "devil," at least not at first. And even if they did, the attribution could have signified hostility to the new order.

Describing the Apo ceremony among the Ashanti, William Bosman wrote during the late seventeenth century:

Conjurors and Miracle-Mongers are no strange things amongst the Negroes: they firmly believe in them, but in a different manner from our European Ridiculous Opinionists; who are persuaded no Conjuror can do any feats without the help of the Devil. For on the contrary, the Negroes do not doubt but that 'tis a gift of God, and though in reality it is a downright cheat, yet they, ignorant of the Fraud, swallow it as a Miracle, and above Humane power; but that the Devil may not in the least participate of the Honour, they ascribe it all to God. [1967:157-58]

Whereas the Spanish ascribed it to the devil! Perturbed by the purely formal character of baptism and conversion, which impeded rather than sustained indoctrination, the outstanding Jesuit Father Alonso de Sandoval wrote during the early seventeenth century from his post in Cartagena: "They worship the devil. . . and when sick they invoke the names of Jesus and Maria" (1956 1, 82). As for "Guinea," he writes, there the devil held such sway and had so many aides that those few people inclined to the Christian faith died without remedy from sorcery or poison. Yet, by his own testimony, it was impossible to proselytize without reinforcing the pagan premises of the potential neophytes.

The enforcement of Christianity entailed those almost insuperable contradictions that made social control difficult for colonialists everywhere. The authorities constrained or suppressed some of the most public expressions of popular religion—for example, the feast days and funerals organized by the black cofiadias (religious brotherhoods) and cabildos (councils)—which augmented the solidarity of slaves and free blacks, encouraged liberation, and maintained an African tradition in the New World (Acosta Saignes, 1967:202-5; Bastide, 1971 9). Yet, paradoxically, one of the reasons for allowing the formation of such cofiadias and cabildos in the first place had been to further control over the black population (Bastide, 1971; Ortiz, 1921).

The scanty accounts of Christianization suggest that conversion and consolidation of belief remained little more than a formality throughout the entire epoch of slavery. Indeed, Sandoval (1956:198) echoed the common observation that the slave owners regarded Christianized slaves as more rebellious and as poorer workers than those not indoctrinated and would pay less for them (Sandoval, 1956:198; cf., Bowser, 1974 9; King, 1939:16-17). Whites were not only disinclined to buy Christianized slaves but tried to prevent their conversion, at times telling them that baptism was bad. According to Jose Toribio Medina, slave owners, reluctant to pay the costs of lengthy inquiries and penalties, encouraged their slaves to disappear if they were on the Inquisition's wanted list (1889). As a result, an underground African or quasi-African religion seems to have flourished, at least during the early years, syncretized with ardent faith in the miracle powers of Christ and the saints—powerful spirits who could be appealed to for earthly succor.

In 1771 the Bishop of Popayan, capital of the Cauca region of south-west Colombia, complained bitterly that his attempts to catechize the slaves and prevent their being worked on Sundays and feast days encountered the firm opposition of the slave owners. He believed that clerical mine speculators were identifying too closely with the exploiters of their slave flocks (King, 1939:217). The right of the slaves to rest on feast days, of which there was at least one a week in addition to Sundays, was hotly disputed by the Cauca mine owners during the eighteenth century. Yet, in a study of the health of slaves in New Granada, David Lee Chandler concludes that for many slaves the Church's insistence on rest days "must have . . . prolonged their lives" (1972:238). On these days they could also earn the wherewithal to buy their freedom, but many Cauca slave owners responded by reducing the food and clothing ration of the slaves. In these circumstances the feast days may have inclined the slaves favorably toward the Church and added a religious rationale to their opposition to their masters.

Priests were in short supply, and few gave much attention to Christianizing slaves. "As a result," writes Norman Meiklejohn, "many of Colombia's Negroes were blithely ignorant of Christianity's true meaning and of its moral precepts" (1968:287,- cf., Pons, 1806, i: 160). Yet surely this "ignorance" cannot be explained only by the shortage of priests. Black popular religion could hardly endorse slavery and all it implied, nor could the slaves remain content with equality in God's eyes but not in their own. But only with the breakdown of the colonial hegemony and the power of the Church could a radical interpretation of Christianity surface fully, as it did in the chiliastic doctrine espoused by the radical liberals from the 1840s onward. In the opinion of Ramon Mercado, native of Cali and Liberal party governor of the Cauca region between 1850 and 1852, it was precisely Christianity in its true sense that was astir among the oppressed classes as a result of their condition and the authorities' abuse of doctrine. The slave owners and their priests taught a perversion of Christianity, which eventually facilitated their overthrow. His accusation was leveled not against Christianity, which he saw as innately liberating, but against the slave owners and the Church, whose preaching "was reduced to the idea of a terrifying God so as to exalt the large landowners, inculcate blind respect for the privileged classes, . . . combat with the threat of eternal punishment in hell the libertarianism threatening their hegemony, . . . and to erect as sins the slightest action of the poor and devalued classes" (1853 :xi-xii, Ixxix). As Mercado astutely observed, it became a moot point who was practicing idolatry, the rulers or the ruled. The tremendous power of the slave owners, nowhere greater than in Cauca, engendered a religious fanaticism prone to violence.

With the impulse set afoot by the unsettling conditions of the French Revolution and the Wars of Independence from Spain, the diabolical God of the slave owners spawned an antithetical vision of the holy cause among the subject classes—a radical Catholic Utopia, anarchist and egalitarian, founded in the sacred ways of nature. Confidently assuming the support of the masses, Mercado declared, "We have to drag into the light of Christianity the iniquities that they have committed against the people. The people know that their rights should not be at the mercy of rulers, but that they are immanent in nature, inalienable and sacred" (1853 : Ixxix).

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(pp. 41-46)

https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Commodity-Fetishism-South-America/dp/0807871338

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1. Magical Realism