Los hombres-búho de Satanásevolución teológica de la idolatría y la brujería en la Edad Media europea y en la Nueva España

Résumé

This paper explores how witchcraft, idolatry, and indigenous devotions were perceived by the sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries who evangelized colonial Mexico (New Spain). I examine how the friars compared indigenous idolatries with their own experiences in dealing with witchcraft in the Old World. I argue that Spanish priests used the same conceptual framework that inquisitors in Europe developed to persecute and classify witches, heretics, and idolaters. In this sense, the missionaries applied new intellectual concepts such as the role of the Devil in idolatry and sorcery to extirpate and demonize the indigenous religion they encountered. Furthermore, I argue that the friars framed the figure of the nahual, or indigenous sorcerer, as the American equivalent of the European witch. Therefore, they reproduced the imagery associated with witches, such as being evil, nocturnal, female, and subservient to the Devil, to describe some of the main characteristics of the nahual.