could still be alive and that the Spaniards could have issued from a place not unlike the Aztlan described in Duran’s Historia.
Fourth, one of the most compelling forms of epistemic violence resides precisely in undoing the belief in the power of enchanters, witches, and wizards. Thus, the Tlatelolca version of the conquest collected in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex emphasizes the fact that the wizards Motecuzoma sent to enchant the Spaniards failed. Note, however, that the informants continue to tell stories that implicate both the Nahuas and Spaniards in magical realms. If the inquiry requested that informants “tell the story of how they were conquered,” they respond with a story in which magic fails but continues to be integral to the narrative. As it were, it is a magical story of how magic failed. Wouldn’t the Spaniards be seen as extremely powerful teotl precisely because the power of native wizards, forms of teotl (which would include by definition anyone extremely good or bad, including Motecuzoma himself), did not affect them? In this process, wouldn’t St. James, the Virgin, and the rest of the Christian spirits, and for that matter “el diablo,” be variations of teotl? Wouldn’t the Nahua retain their epistemology and life forms to the extent that they continued to conceptualize the conquest in “magical” terms? Wouldn’t the ultimate conquest achieve its end when the Nahua would no longer tell stories of conquering teotl, but simply provide a narrative based on military superiority or the decimation of the population by epidemics? In answering these questions, shouldn’t we remain vigilant of the writing violence we may impose by insisting on the “rationality” of the Nahuas, who couldn’t have believed that the Spaniards were “gods”?
Writing that Converts
In itself the notion of converting someone to the Christian religion entails violence in that earlier beliefs must be discarded to give way to the new universal creed. It is not merely abandoning one creed for another, but reducing the other creed to falsity. There is a whole literature in indigenous languages that was devised to uproot and denigrate native spirituality. I choose spirituality to avoid the more specialized notion of religion. Spirituality does not necessarily entail a separate realm that one might define as secular. In the West, in the culture of the sixteenth-century missionaries, religion (and the discipline of theology) exists side by side with philosophy, art, literature, and science. For the missionaries of the sixteenth century, there is only one true religion: revealed Christianity in its Roman Catholic form. In addressing native spirituality, the first task was to define all native beliefs as superstitious, as induced by the trickeries of the devil, as idolatrous. It is only for scholars of post-Enlightenment religious studies that Mesoamerican life forms are understood as religion. In central Mexico, Franciscan missionaries wrote a most extensive ethnographic literature for conversion purposes. One could argue that the origins of religious studies should be traced back to conceptualization of another culture’s beliefs as an object study. And one should wonder if the supposedly value-free disciplines of religious studies has not carried a colonialist frame of reference in spite of their scientific intentions. It is not a symptom that one does theology when exploring one’s beliefs, but religious studies when studying religious phenomena that are not one’s own? Has not religious studies, much like anthropology, been linked to various form of imperialism and their civilizing missions? I can only raise these questions here.
The genres devised for converting Indians in the sixteenth century included treatises on demonology, exaltations to abandon their false gods, confessionals, catechisms, and spiritual exercises. In what follows I will limit myself to some generalities concerning Alonso de Molina’s Confesionario mayor en lengua mexicana y castellana (1569) and the group of texts by Bernardino de Sahagún commonly known as his “enciclo-pedia doctrina,” a doctrinal encyclopedia. I will argue, however, that the Exercicio quotidiano, which was found among the papers of the Chalcan historian Domingo Chimalpahin, suggests that it was written under the supervision of Dominican friars.
Molina’s Confesionario establishes the need that Indians become conscious of being sinners, it implants a new memory for the examination of one’s self. In one place it specifies that all humans sin at least seven times a day, but goes on to emphasize that these sin are, for the most part, venial rather than mortal. Indigenous subjects are under the obligation of learning to examine their conscience to discover sins. The confessional presents itself as a guide in which the Ten Commandments, the five senses, and the theological and cardinal virtues guide the penitent through an exhaustive account of his sins. It concludes with discussion of absolution and the required contrition for the restitution of grace.
We should note here that Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, or the Florentine Codex, conceives itself as a linguistic project in which the accumulation of examples of proper Nahuatl, which would also document idolatries, superstitions, auguries, and omens, among other things, would aid missionaries in writing sermons in Nahuatl and confessing Indians:
To preach against these matters, and even to know if they exist, it is needful to know how they practice them in the times of their idolatry, for, through [our] lack of knowledge of this, they perform many idolatrous things in our presence without our understanding it. And, making excuses for them, some say they are foolishness or childishness, not knowing the source whence they spring (which is pure idolatry). And the confessors neither ask about them, nor think that such a thing exists, nor understand the language to enquire about it, nor would even understand them, even though they told them of it. (Sahagún, 1950-82: 1, 45-6)
Beyond the Historia general and its pedagogical end of training preachers and confessors in the art of Nahuatl, Sahagún wrote a series of doctrinal texts that address Nahuas. The so-called enciclopedia doctrina would include the appendix to Book 1 of the Historia general, “Las veintiseis adiciones a la postilla” and “el apendice a la postillao las siete colaciones.” This last text is a fragment. In his Spanish and Nahuatl edition of these texts Arthur Anderson also includes the Exercicio quotidiano, a text that was found among Chimalpahin’s papers. The Exercicio quotidiano includes the following note at the end: “I found this exercise among the Indians. I do not know who produced it, nor who gave it to them. It had many errors and incongruities. But in truth it may be said that it was done anew rather than that it was corrected. In this year of 1574. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún” (Anderson and Schroeder, 1997: 2, 183). Note that the handwriting is Chimalpahin’s. We must remember that at least part of Chimalpahin’s intellectual formation was under the Dominican friars in Amaquemecan.
An echography of internal voices would attend to the different forms of devotion and conversion implicit in evangelical writings. As Edmundo O’Gorman has correctly pointed out in writing about Las Casas’s De unico vocationis modo, the Dominican and Franciscan orders differed in the emphasis they placed on the will and the understanding in their evangelical practices (O’Gorman, 1942: 31 – 60). Neither is the will an exclusive domain of the first nor is the understanding of the latter. Both reason in addressing Indians and both presuppose on the part of Indians a desire to accept the articles of the faith. However, the habitus they pursue differs (Rabasa, 1998). Observe that the Exercicio quotidiano emphasizes the formation of an intellectual habit, which to my mind seems indicative that it was written under Dominican supervision.
Sahagún’s doctrinal writings have two modalities. In the first, Sahagún exposes the falsehood and cruelty of the pagan gods. One can trace instances of these modalities in the appendix of Book 1 and the Apéndice de la postilla. In the appendix of Book 1 he limits himself to making declarative statements: your gods are false, hence you must abandon them. That’s how it is, period. In the second, Sahagún works on declarative sentences that establish the tenets of the faith that all Christians must accept and are under the obligation of believing. Again, there is no reasoning; rather he works on the transformation of desire and the will. Sahagún seeks an affective transformation of the subject. The source of knowledge is the truth of the Gospel, of those who know how to interpret the divine word. The objective is to infuse in the Indian subject “the desire of the desire that will take him to love by the love of
