RELIGIOUS HYBRIDIZATION IN COLONIAL PERU

A central goal of the Spanish invasion of Peru was the complete conversion of the Indigenous people to Catholicism. To this end, the Spanish largely failed. Scholars such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Luis E. Valcárcel, and George Kubler have argued that the Spanish only succeeded in establishing a veneer of Catholicism, beneath which strong Indigenous practices and beliefs remained.¹ Given that Indigenous religious survival has been established by other historiography, this paper aims to investigate the methods by which Catholicism and Indigenous religion were able to coexist and hybridize in colonial Peru. These methods include Spanish concessions meant to make Catholicism more compatible with existing practices, Indigenous assimilation leading to hybrid forms of worship, and outright resistance to conversion.

SPANISH ADOPTION OF INDIGENOUS BELIEFS

To ease the process of converting Andeans, Spanish missionaries adopted Indigenous religious practices and ideas into their Catholic teachings. Early histories of Indigenous practices compiled by Spanish missionaries showed attempts to find common ground between the two religions. In Inca Religions and Customs, published in 1653, Father Bernabe Cobo identified great overlap between Indigenous and Christian beliefs. Regarding native conceptions of the afterlife, Cobo described, “The Incas state that the souls of those who have been good go to heaven and enjoy perpetual bliss… They were also convinced that the inferno exists for bad people and that demons tormented them there.” This description of the afterlife is effectively the same as the Christian concepts of heaven and hell. Because of this, Cobo viewed the Indigenous religion as sharing Christian fundamentals, but also as being incomplete and deeply clouded by false practices. For example, he explained the lack of purgatory in the Indigenous understanding of the afterlife as a fact that was yet to be realized by the Andeans.² Another significant overlap was identified by Cobo as well as a different Spanish missionary, José de Acosta: that Dios existed among the many gods of the Andean pantheon, under the name of Viracocha.³ Cobo described Viracocha as the most important God and creator of all things, and his existence as proof of reason amid the Indian’s ignorance.⁴ These descriptions painted the Andeans as having always worshipped the Christian God, just among many other false gods. Such efforts to identify overlap show missionaries like Bernabe Cobo and Jose de Acosta believed their teachings were fundamentally compatible with the native religion. There was an existing foundation that Christianity could build upon. Thus, from the perspective of the missionaries, if the Indian religion shared several important concepts with Christianity, what would be the harm in temporarily borrowing other, less Christian concepts to ease the process of conversion? Spanish missionaries often did this — to extents ranging from slight adaptation to outright sacrilege.

Many Catholic concessions took the form of language, where missionaries often conveyed more Indigenous understandings of religious concepts in Quechua translations. The Spanish introduced new words into Quechua to make distinct separations between Catholic and Indigenous religious actions. One example is confessacuni, meaning the action of confessing to a Catholic priest, versus ychucuni, meaning to confess to a hechizero (Indigenous priest). Another verb, mochacuni, distinctly meant the action of worshipping Huacas. However, missionaries did not always use the new, Catholic versions of these verbs. In Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru, Dr. Regina Harrison identified a case of a Catholic missionary using one such pagan verb in translation: “‘Domingocunapi fiestacunapipas çamacu[n]qui Diosta muchancapac’ (Rest on the holy days of Sunday and on feast days in order to worship God; my emphasis).”⁵ This translation made conversion conceptually easier, as Andeans who heard these words would associate worship of the Christian God with worship of the Huacas, but it failed to make the distinction that complete conversion necessitated, and that the church had intended when it introduced new, Christian verbs. 

A step further in the concessions made by missionaries was applying Andean symbolism to Christian concepts. In Pastoral Quechua, Alan Durston identifies many words used in Quechua translations of Christian texts that had strong Indigenous connotations. The words capac and apu, meaning lord or king, were frequently applied to Jesus and God, or even to ideas such as the blood of Christ, to convey omnipotence. However, these words were strongly associated with the Sapa Inca, who also held divine status. The word usapu, meaning ‘he who can achieve anything’, was also used to translate the concept of omnipotence. This term was associated with Viracocha, the Incan god Cobo and de Acosta identified as Dios, although interestingly the missionary who made this translation believed another Indigenous god, Pachacamac, was the creator God. Finally, the stranger translations for omnipotence were words such as chacllipu, tocapu, and acnupu, which referred to the patterns embroidered on the clothes of the Sapa Inca. This conveyed the omnipotence of God through depicting him as dressed in the traditional clothes of powerful Incas.⁶ These translations show a transition from using words more familiar to the Incans to convey Christian concepts, to applying Andean symbolism to the concepts of Catholicism.

A final, radical level of concessions made by the missionaries was the acceptance of Indigenous religious understandings and practices when they were unable to dispel them. An important concept the missionaries had long struggled to convey was the difference between representation and embodiment. To the Andeans, Huacas embodied Gods and took the form of physical places such as mountains and rock formations and objects such as stone idols. Thus, when the Spanish introduced images of Saints and crosses, they were unable to explain that the concepts these objects represented should be worshipped, not the objects themselves.⁷ Unable to dispel this misconception, the missionaries eventually leaned into it, and began to distribute Christian objects such as crosses, rosaries, statues, and amulets.⁸ To speed up the process of conversion, the missionaries decided to supplant Indigenous religious objects with Christian ones. Effectively, they allowed the continued worship of Huacas—so long as those Huacas were Christian. This hybridization of Christian and Indigenous religious practices was not only facilitated by the missionaries, but rather was driven by the Andean converts, who adopted Christian beliefs along with their old ones and built a dual understanding of the world.

INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ANDEO-CATHOLICISM

Indigenous Andeans assimilated Catholicism into their existing beliefs, leading to strongly hybrid religious practices. The compatibility of Indigenous and Christian religious beliefs was recognized not just by the Spanish, but by Indigenous religious leaders as well. “Religious specialists—the former camascas, amautas, and other wise men and women of Andean and Inca society—argued on substantial grounds that Catholicism was not so different from the Andean religion.”⁹ This direction from the top of Andean religious society suggested that the “new” religion made sense in the context of the existing one. Christianity could be adopted into existing beliefs instead of outright replacing them. This perceived compatibility was in part due to familiarity with Christian concepts and practices. As discussed previously, the idea of venerating images of saints and other objects seemed the same as worshipping a Huaca. Further, in some cases, there was overlap between Christian and Andean iconography. One factor contributing to the popularity of Santiago Matamoros among the Andeans, beyond being the patron saint of expelling colonizers, was the apostle’s symbol of the seashell. Seashells, specifically the Pacific thorny oyster, were commonly sacrificed to Huacas.¹⁰ This existing religious significance sped up the Indigenous adoption of St. James. Further, the preexisting significance of seashells manifested in unique, new world depictions of St. James. One such church painting depicts St. James baptizing Christ with a seashell, as seashells represented water to the Andeans.¹¹ This trend of Indigenous cultural and religious motifs being applied to Christian depictions, particularly artwork, occurred multiple times. A 1753 rendition of the Last Supper by Marcos Zapata, an Andean Catholic, shows Jesus and the apostles¹² feasting on a dinner of cuy and chicha.¹³ A meal of guinea pig and corn beer would have more significance to a colonial Andean than lamb and wine—the traditional foods of the Last Supper that represent sacrifice. This is because Andeans commonly sacrificed cuy and chicha to Huacas, by burning the guinea pigs and pouring the chicha on the ground.¹⁴ This conflation between the more symbolic sacrifice of Jesus and the literal sacrifices to Huacas was encouraged in part by the missionaries. One missionary’s Quechua account of the crucifixion used language that implicitly compared Christ’s sacrifice to the blood sacrifices made to Huacas.¹⁵ However, religious hybridization in the Andes went far beyond shared symbolism. 

Much to the dismay of Spanish missionaries, many Andeans continued to worship God and the Huacas. In one such case, the kuraka and Catholic convert Don Diego Pacha decided to consult a hechizero when his son became gravely ill. This hechizero claimed that the boy’s illness was due to the ayllu’s neglect of a local Huaca. To try and correct this, the kuraka made an offering of chicha to the Huaca, to no immediate avail. When the hechizero claimed this offering was insufficient, and that more offerings must be made to other Huacas to heal the boy, Don Diego became upset and denounced the hechizero to the local Catholic priest. He then donated 20 reales to the church, asking that a mass be held for the recovery of his son.¹⁶ This shows the Indigenous and Catholic religions as two distinct yet coexisting options that were practiced and utilized as Indigenous people saw fit. However, these practices did not only exist in separate worlds. Andeans often worshipped Huacas and God simultaneously. In one example, the Augustinian Juan Ramiro had been hearing about the ongoing worship of a Huaca, Guamansiri, for months among his converts. Unable to find this Huaca, he was finally able to get an Andean man to reveal its whereabouts. He was horrified to discover that Guamansiri took the form of a small weaving that had been hidden behind the church’s altar. The Andeans had been worshipping the Huaca during mass.¹⁷ To many Andeans, churches were not just for Christian worship. Previous forms of worship continued in these spaces as well. This broke down the distinction between Catholicism and Indigenous practices, and led to the formation of a single, hybrid religion. Many missionaries claimed that they had fully uprooted paganism, but in reality the practice continued, often because the Indigenous people had hidden their Huaca worship quite adeptly, or because the two religions had blended inseparably. Ultimately, this was something that the Spanish failed to control, and the hybridization of the two belief systems became entrenched. However, not all Andeans accepted Christianity as something that could be harmlessly adopted. Many rightfully saw Christianity as the scourge of their communities and rejected it in favor of practicing a purer form of their old beliefs. 

RESISTANCE TO CONVERSION

Many Andeans resisted conversion to Catholicism or even rebelled against it by attempting to revive Indigenous religion. Certain actions taken by Indigenous people showed a clear preference for the existing religion over the intruding one. As discussed earlier, some missionaries distributed Catholic objects to uproot the worship of Indigenous Huacas. These Catholic objects were not always received as equals to existing Huacas. Missionary accounts show many instances of people sacrificing items like rosaries and images of saints to their Huacas.¹⁸ This drew a clear distinction between Catholic religious objects and Indigenous ones. People who made these sacrifices considered the Catholic objects powerful enough to be worth sacrificing, but less powerful than the existing Huacas. These individual actions against Catholicism showed some preference for the old religion. A more substantive example is mass, organized rebellion. 

In the 1560s, early in the colonial order, a religious revival movement formed in the Andes. It was called the Taki Onqoy, or “dancing sickness,” because it was believed that neglected Huacas possessed preachers and made them dance as they delivered divine will. These dancers preached the return of the Huacas, the downfall of the Christian God, and the extirpation of the recently arrived Spanish. The rebellion spread widely throughout the provinces.¹⁹ This movement was both a religious and political revolt. It identified both the Christian God and the Spanish as the cause of Andean suffering and proposed a solution of returning to the pre-Spanish status-quo of Huaca worship and Incan kings. Obviously, this was quite alarming to the Spanish. The viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, sent a visitador general to crush the uprising.  The leaders of the rebellion were identified and punished, which effectively ended the movement within a few years. No similar movement would arise afterwards.²⁰ To make matters worse, the Spanish killed the last Incan king, Túpac Amaru, shortly afterwards, crushing the hopes of a return to Incan dominance. The fact that no similar revival movements followed does not mean that Andeans submitted to Catholicism. As discussed earlier, this period was filled with cases of individual acts of resistance, coexistence of Indigenous and Catholic religious practices, and the formation of a hybrid Andeo-Catholicism built on the concepts and symbols of both religions. Instead, it is likely that the Taki Onqoy rebellion taught the Andeans to never neglect the Huacas, and that this lesson drove the long-lasting practice of Huaca-worship, which survived even as Catholicism continued to spread in the Andes.

CONCLUSION

Both the Spanish missionaries and Andeans drove religious hybridization in colonial Peru. The Spanish contributed to this process by adopting Indigenous religious concepts and practices into their teachings. This made Catholicism more compatible with Indigenous religion and sped up the process of converting the Andeans, although to a less “pure” version of Catholicism. Andeans contributed to this process by assimilating Christianity into their existing beliefs, which came in the form of applying Indigenous meaning and symbolism to Christianity, as well as continuing the practices of both religions, either distinctly or simultaneously. Finally, many Andeans kept Indigenous religion alive by resisting conversion, using methods ranging from individual acts of rejection to widespread rebellion. Although outright rebellion was not frequent throughout the colonial era, it was enough to establish the importance of the continued worship of Huacas. Overall, these actions resulted in the practice of a deeply hybrid Andeo-Catholicism in colonial Peru. 

FOOTNOTES