Guardians of Idolatry

Guardians of Idolatry
Author :
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages : 300
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780806162164
ISBN-13 : 0806162163
Rating : 4/5 (64 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Guardians of Idolatry by : Viviana Díaz Balsera

Download or read book Guardians of Idolatry written by Viviana Díaz Balsera and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish Treatise collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is recognized as one of the most significant firsthand records of indigenous religious practices in postconquest Mexico. Yet, as Viviana Díaz Balsera argues in Guardians of Idolatry, the selection process for the incantations recorded in the Treatise reflects two sites of agency: Ruiz de Alarcón’s desire to present the most flagrant examples of Nahua “demonic” practices, and Nahua efforts to share benign nahualtocaitl in order to preserve their preconquest traditions while negotiating with colonial Christian hegemony. Guardians of Idolatry offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. Through close reading of four incantations—for safe travel, maguey sap harvesting, bow-and-arrow deer hunting, and divination through maize kernels—Díaz Balsera shows the nuances of a Nahua spiritual world populated by intelligent superhuman and nonhuman entities that directly responded to human appeals for intercession. She also addresses Jacinto de la Serna’s Manual for Ministers of These Indians (1656), an elaborate commentary on the Treatise. Guardians of Idolatry tells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico. Together, Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise and de la Serna’s Manual reveal the highly sophisticated language of the nahualtocaitl, and the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican epistemology.


Guardians of Idolatry Related Books

Guardians of Idolatry
Language: en
Pages: 300
Authors: Viviana Díaz Balsera
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-11-01 - Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain
Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire
Language: en
Pages: 269
Authors: Mina García Soormally
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-01-21 - Publisher: University Press of Colorado

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An ethnohistory on the spiritual and governmental conquest of the indigenous people in colonial Mexico, Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire exam
The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam
Language: en
Pages: 190
Authors: G. R. Hawting
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1999-12-09 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? Traditional scholarship ma
Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that Today Live Among the Indians Native to this New Spain, 1629
Language: en
Pages: 438
Authors: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1984 - Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Treatise of Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón is one of the most important surviving documents of early colonial Mexico. It was written in 1629 as an aid to Roman C
A Little History of Religion
Language: en
Pages: 253
Authors: Richard Holloway
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-08-23 - Publisher: Yale University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity’s earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening r