The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

42 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
the conquest, "that the conquerors became the conquered" (1951:
128). That restless dialectic of magical counterattributions 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 (bru/'os) 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