Guardians of Idolatry: God, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón's Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions by Viviana Díaz Balsera (review)

One of the most fascinating known works from colonial Mexico was penned by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a devout priest deeply committed to extirpating idolatry among his parishioners in the town of Atenango del Río, in a remote mountainous region of Chilapa in the present state of Guerrero. His Tratado de supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que oy viuen entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (1629) has become a popular object of much scholarly scrutiny over the last several decades. Written in Spanish but containing ritual incantations in Nahuatl, it is a vivid testimony of the strength of preconquest beliefs, which survived despite more than one hundred years of Christianization efforts. The Nahuatl incantations recorded by Alarcón designate different beings and entities with names expressed in a very complex ritual language, often referring to deities and other sacred beings who were called forth in order to bring about the effects desired by the petitioners involved in the ritual. While there are numerous testimonies contradicting the Spanish propaganda—and an enduring academic myth!—regarding the success and efficiency of Christian instruction in colonial New Spain, Alarcón’s account of idolatrous practices and incantations, in fact salvaged by him from total erasure, attests to the integrity of indigenous ritual and worldview. This integrity, based on local ontology and epistemology, as argued by Díaz Balsera, is indeed retrievable despite having been forced into the repressive paradigm and ideological framework of a Spaniard who claimed religious and cultural superiority and saw the indigenous people as “recalcitrant backsliders” and “ hypocritical, cunning idolaters” (5). In what is undoubtedly a novelty in existing scholarship, the study by Díaz Balsera shows how Spaniards perceived, understood, and classified Mesoamerican practices according to their own ontological perspective and a discriminating colonial mindset. She examines the “demonological mindset of Spanish colonizers and ecclesiastics” as well as its roots in early modern Christian epistemology, permeated with beliefs in the “animated realm of the occult” (4). By probing this part of the European culture of the epoch, Díaz Balsera explains how these paradigms provided an essential lens for viewing and translating indigenous