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Two women were hybrid tiçitl-curanderas in 1560s. Isabel de Vera was a mixed-race woman living in Michoacán in 1562. There were rumors that she had been publicly shamed as a sorceress and alcahueta in Mexico City. She performed various spells, including making a potion from dead sheep heads for a girl who had a broken toe or foot. She was exiled from Michoacán and disappeared, maybe. More than a decade later, a woman with the same name was accused of bigamy in the mining town of Guanajuato. These were probably the same woman – daughter of a conquistador and a low-status Nahua woman in Mexico City. She was fleeing an abusive husband (a mulato shoemaker) and remarried a Nahua man from Texcoco, believing her first husband had died. The two case files show the fluidity of ethnic identity in early colonial Mexico. The other case concerned a Spanish or mestiza woman, Agustina Núñez, who was a spellcasting curandera in Oaxaca. She used mulberry, which was probably the Native Mexican plant, xanatl, though the mulberry introduced by Spaniards for silkworm food may also have been the plant used in her healing of a broken bone – accompanied by spells. Both women had adapted to their Native environments as curanderas.
This chapter examines the earliest cases of sorcery trials in Mexico in 1520s and 1530s. A discussion is presented of the ways that Spanish women learned magic from Nahua women in Mexico City. Spanish women adopted multiple Nahua cultural behaviors. These included understanding the role of the tiçitl; metaphysics of Nahua forms of healing; the god Tezcatlipoca; and invocations in Nahuatl language. Spanish women learned about the Nahua cultural significance of sweeping and brooms, associated with cosmic order and cleanliness. Spanish women also quickly learned Nahuatl, communicating with domestic servants and in the street, where the Nahuatl word for market, tianguis, became the first Nahuatl loanword in Mexican Spanish, as early as 1524. Other cases against Spanish women show that these women quickly adopted Mesoamerican plant material for spells and that these women understood the rite of corn hurling (tlapohualiztli).
This chapter offers an analysis of magic in Mesoamerica. An overview is given of specific Nahua cultural phenomena and of Spanish ecclesiastics’ attempts to place these Nahua concepts within a Spanish and Catholic framework. Nahua concepts explored here include: nahualli, shape-shifting sorcerer; tiçitl, healing specialist, midwife; tlapohualiztli, corn hurling as a form of divination; xochihua, flower-bearer, a gender-fluid man or transwoman associated with sorcery; and teixcuepani, or trickery. Particular attention is given here to Bernardino Sahagún and his Florentine Codex, Andrés de Olmos and his Nahuatl translation of Castañega’s anti-sorcery treatise, Alonso de Molina’s Nahuatl–Spanish Vocabulario, and Juan de Zumárraga’s Doctrina. An analysis is made of the difficulty of applying Nahuatl terms for Spanish ideas, often resulting in neologisms such as texoxaliztli for evil eye. Similarly, the Spanish idea that alcahuetas (procuresses) were linked to sorcery finds translation in the term “tetlanochili,” meaning “sorceress” generally. The Nahua idea of the owl-man tlacatecolotl, simplified by Spanish clergy as Satan, is also discussed.
This book tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others – routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Martin Austin Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers.
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