The Medieval Bestiary in Early Modern Peru

Unlike a medieval chronicle, each chapter in Guamán Poma’s work is framed by a detailed illustration, after which the illustration is described and the story or significance of its information is unpacked. Many of the illustrations contain exchanges and dialogues between the people, animals, and fantastic beings featured in them. The medieval chronicle’s structure influenced that of its printed successor in the sixteenth century, but with some notable differences (Beck 2019). By the dawn of the early modern period, chronicles for the most part no longer included a history of the origin of man, for instance, the Christian creation story or the history of European civilization based on the ancient mythology of gods such as Hercules and his role in separating Africa from Europe. This tendency to provide one or more origin stories within the medieval chronicle distinguishes Guamán Poma’s work from that of his contemporaries in ways that provided him with the opportunity to narrativize Peruvian mythologies alongside European ones.

Similarly, the medieval bestiary is a descriptive, anecdotal treatise on various real and mythical species of animals that usually asserts a moralizing tone alongside some instruction in Christian values (Lugones 2006). For our purposes, the bestiary takes many forms, all of which somehow collect together animals and fantastical beings to demonstrate or express an important lesson to the reader, whether through means of an illustration, across the pages of a book, or within a brief narrative. In Guamán Poma’s case, however, the lessons and values he desires to share with the Spanish king are not limited to those of the Christian world; we must also read them for their significance to Andean audiences. Of particular note is the author, from a noble Andean class, in his role as chronicler and storyteller because spiritual stories and interpretation in a pre-invasion context were shared by nobles who kept Andean idols, often taking on animalian form, and disseminated them through avenues such as storytelling, music, and song (Barraza Lescano 2009: 93–121; Carrión 2019: 333).

Both the bestiary and the medieval chronicle grew to have a similar structure. They commonly take the form of books, sometimes illustrated, composed of chapters narrativizing the lessons gleaned from particular animals, in the case of bestiaries, or historical moments and figures, in the case of chronicles. Guamán Poma’s work uses this general organization to fashion a text that is both historical and moralizing, exhibiting qualities of both genres of medieval documentation.

Biblical stories fuse together the chronicle and bestiary genres through their regular involvement of animals and nonhuman beings. Until recent centuries, the Bible was interpreted as a source of historical knowledge in which animals exercise important roles in shaping Christian values. The book of Genesis exemplifies this form of bestiary, whereby the lessons about following the Christian god’s instructions and keeping one’s word are imparted through Eve’s interaction with the serpent and her and Adam’s subsequent consumption of the forbidden fruit. In this well-known series of exchanges, Eve takes the fruit after the snake entices her to do so, even though God had specifically instructed her and Adam not to eat the fruit. As a result of this so-called original sin, the pair are ejected from the Garden of Eden and for this reason we all live more difficult lives today. This episode demonstrates how animals take on human qualities – in this case the ability of the serpent to speak – to model behavior and its consequences. Bestiaries commonly include Biblical stories relating to animals, for instance, about original sin, but also relating to Adam’s task of naming animals (see, for example, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 88, fol. 14r).

And unlike a typical European chronicler, Guamán Poma speaks about notable women throughout his chronicle. Notably, in the seventh chapter of his book, the author addresses his female Andean readers, which demonstrates he had audiences in mind for this work beyond the king of Spain. Guamán Poma describes original sin and the church’s association of wickedness as intrinsic to women, but he directly challenges the logic of snakes talking and the likelihood of all women having such a character due to his own experience knowing and interacting with women: “All of that is ridiculous and a lie” (144). His commentary also extended to the fact that snakes cannot speak, being a rejection of European animalian interpretation. He nonetheless includes stories relating to other Biblical beasts. Guamán Poma allegorizes the Christian concept of hell using a monster within whose mouth or maw reside the seven sins, here personified by a collection of humans and devils (Figure 1.1). Because Guamán Poma’s purpose overall is to critique Spanish behavior and to underline the quality of the pre-invasion Incan world, he regularly describes Spanish behavior as sinful and unchristian, as violating the will of God. He also states blatantly that Spaniards will go to hell for the violence and crimes committed against his people in the textual description relating to this illustration. It is no coincidence that the person featured in greatest detail inside the mouth of hell is a European, recognizable by his beard.

Guamán Poma also updates the Christian origin story to account for an Andean presence in the world. He does this through the mappamundi, studied in due course, and also in his depiction of Noah’s ark (Figure 1.2). In his representation of this Biblical episode – which may comprise one of the earliest forms of bestiary to become broadly illustrated in medieval Europe, although the animals themselves do not individually offer lessons, stories, or morals – he features Noah on his boat filled with animals, and one of them – the lion or tiger – we will encounter elsewhere in his chronicle. As the Biblical story establishes, a pair of each animal was saved to renew the world after the flood waters receded. Guamán Poma depicts various species, among them a llama, being an Andean species unknown to Europeans before the Spanish invasion. By reserving a spot for the llama in the Christian origin story, Guamán Poma indigenizes the bestiary describing Noah and his ark. In this sense, he boldly extends the story of Noah’s ark and stakes out a space for Andean fauna upon the boat, challenging the Christian narrative in other ways reminiscent of his rejection of talking snakes. Through this corollary, if Noah was able to collect llama for the ark, how did the dispersio apostolorum later initiated by Christ not make it to South America? How can Noah’s ark, but not God’s word, not have had global reaches until the Spanish and associated violence of colonization arrived in the Andean world?

Like the chronicle genre, the bestiary developed over the course of centuries and had pre-medieval roots in Latin and Greek texts, such as the Physiologus of late antiquity. Bestiaries were not always the stand-alone books that they became in the medieval period; many were integrated into popular medieval texts, such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (Book 12, “Concerning Animals”), modeled on the Physiologus (Ward 2010: 1637). After the European printing press helped broaden audiences for the Etymologies, as well as Aesop’s Fables, throughout sixteenth-century Spain bestiaries began to emerge in hybrid form. Spanish chroniclers of the Indies such as Bernardino de Sahagún included sections within their chronicles about the aspects of the animalian world that were previously unknown to Europeans, occasionally sharing their cultural and spiritual significance (see the Florentine Codex and Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España [1576]). Similarly, Sebastián Covarrubias’s 1611 dictionary of the Spanish language contains entries, some of them several thousand words long, that describe seventy-nine mammals, sixty-three birds, and so on, in addition to fifteen fantastic animals, as well as their symbolic significance, for which stories resembling those contained in bestiaries emerge (Morgado García 2011: 77).

While there is no reason to believe that Covarrubias influenced Guamán Poma, or vice versa, this contemporaneous interest in understanding animals evidently swelled in the early seventeenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, both authors include references to chimera and unicorns in their respective texts, alongside American species, such as the caiman and papagayo (Morgado García 2011: 78), despite the stark differences in their form and purpose – one a dictionary and the other a chronicle. Seventeenth-century interest in animals grew due to factors such as colonialism, mass reproduction, and science. As Europeans cast their sights on other continents, they discovered unknown-to-them species. The printing press and broadening audiences for learning about far-away places enabled these species to be described in detail and even visualized for vast audiences. But also, developments in the natural sciences generated demand for categorizing and accessing this knowledge, which was maturing into what becomes the field of zoology. Medical cures and uses for new-world plants and animals similarly attracted European scientists, which also points to the ways Europeans either ignored or appropriated traditional ecological knowledge.

From an Andean perspective, however, these factors do not explain why Guamán Poma found animals a useful means to relate the conditions of colonial life. Like other Indigenous people, what comprised the living, sentient world was not limited to humans, and life could transform from one thing into another being. Humans could dress as animals, animals could become humans, and seemingly inanimate objects such as rocks could become spirits (Arnold 2018: 144). These forms of anthropomorphism that are familiar to the European reader of bestiaries form the foundation of Andean ontology. Andean people attributed personhood and animacy to animals, plants, objects, and landscapes; they speak, or speak through a human interpreter, and have agency, much as many beings traditionally featured in European bestiaries (Botta 2022: 60). Furthermore, during Guamán Poma’s lifetime, and in the communities where he lived, the cult of Taki Onqoy was revitalized. This movement sought to reconnect precolonial spiritual practices with Andean ontology and to resist the Spanish-colonial ways of life imposed upon them (Norman 2021: 490–508). Taki Onqoy sought to foster a lifeline between the colonial present and the ancient and ancestral gods of Andean peoples.

The flexibility and adaptability of animalian stories for teaching values and morals enabled them to easily cross genres. This function – to educate and instill values in other humans – is a key and seemingly universal means through which animals gain meaning for humans. As Debra Higgs Strickland establishes in her thorough study of the bestiary, both the textual and visual content of the medieval bestiary “presented evidence to their readers of Christ and the devil in the world around them and offered behavioural advice for people who sought to live their lives more perfectly in the eyes of God” (1995: xv). This purpose of the bestiary made it a perfect instrument with which to inform the king about life in colonial Peru.

The bestiary genre also focused on fantastic, magical, marvelous, and mythical qualities of beasts and their associated activities. This particular tendency within the bestiary must be contextualized against the European imaginary and associated gaze toward the Americas, which viewed South American peoples, flora and fauna, and contents in the same way. New-world utopias were created by the vision that Europeans could become little monarchs over their own kingdoms of exotically colored birds and gold mines (Soule 2014). From a structural perspective, Guamán Poma’s chronicle does not comprise a stand-alone book of beast-related fables; rather, he inserts what Debra Hawhee has termed mini-bestiaries throughout both parts of his chronicle (2017: 286). As Hawhee notes, in addition to their Christian and moral function, bestiaries of this nature have significant capacity for world-mixing through their ability to blend Christian and, in Guamán Poma’s case, Andean spiritual values and epistemologies. The same extends to the use of medieval beasts and mythological figures in Andean visual culture of the colonial period, with many examples of European sirens, basilisks, and centaurs standing in for Andean huacas, being spirits or spiritual spaces (Lizárraga Ibáñnez 2016: 347; Mills 2018: 40–74).

An excellent example of the mini-bestiary can be found in Guamán Poma’s allegory expressing colonial hierarchies of power using the six animals most feared in the Andean world (Figure 1.3). Structured as a composite illustration that contains several animals surrounding a kneeling and distressed Andean, the text that follows narrates the illustration. The monstrousness of Spaniards is detectable in illustrations such as this one using methods easily understood by European audiences, even if the reader is unfamiliar with Andean experiences of the animals described by Guamán Poma. The allegory represents the Andean concept of perpetual incarceration, sankay, by surrounding a pleading Incan with the corregidor (Spanish colonial administrator), as the serpent – and we can note that the illustration contains a winged serpent or dragon typically found in medieval illustrations and not the type of serpent represented in his illustration of the Garden of Eden. Then comes the comendero (Spanish plantation or labor manager), as the lion; the cacique principal (appointed Indigenous authority who imposed Spanish rule over an Indigenous community) as the rat; the Spanish traveler or inhabitant as the tiger; the missionary as the fox; and the scribe as the cat or puma. He explains that the scribe is feared because “the cat is a hunter that stalks and pushes and catches his prey and he doesn’t let the rat get away. That’s how he stalks the lands of the poor Indians until he catches them, too.”

Animals tasked with punishing humans serve a broader purpose in signaling and calling out evil. They are balanced against animals tasked with supporting and nurturing humans, thus bringing the world into a balance of opposites and reflecting other important binaries in the Andean world, such as the sun and moon, and man and woman, all of which inform this worldview. Llamas – being the species that Guamán Poma chose to include in his version of Noah’s ark – are highly regarded and characterized as curious, independent, and delicate. In Andean mythology they play a role that models positive forms of human behavior. Llamas giving birth parallels women giving birth, both of which connect to kinship and renewal. When sacrificed, the hearts of llamas were thrown into waterways to nourish crops; their fat honored huacas, and evil spirits killed people and llamas by robbing them of their fat (Strong 2003: 125).

In his allegory, Guamán Poma views these Spanish colonial interlocutors as criminals who are “mortal enemies of this kingdom,” with some of them – such as the winged serpent – being exogenous forms of beasts introduced into the Andes through colonialism. He converts these most feared animals into the categories of Europeans and their designates responsible for so negatively impacting on Incan lives. In so doing, he removes the humanity of these colonial authorities and instead portrays them as bestial. The Spanish reader brings his knowledge of the bestiary to interpret the allegory. Snakes, lions, and rats each serve punitive roles in European mythology, as they can in Andean spiritualism as well. Andean symbolism for foxes, for instance, associated through this allegory with missionaries, characterizes outsiders as foxes who may be prone to lying and trickery, making the fox-missionary archetype akin to the trickster figure in other parts of the Americas who is able to shapeshift (Jodłowska and Mąka 2015: 196; Marín-Dale 2016). Analysis of Andean legends demonstrates that the fox tends to be a mortal enemy of mankind, together with other animals such as the puma, characterized as “animals of the devil” as opposed to “animals of god,” which include the llama (Quispe-Agnoli 2014: 54). In the medieval European bestiary, the fox pretends to sleep, play dead, or enrobe himself in red earth to appear blood stained in order to capture birds who mistake him as unthreatening (Diekstra 1985: 147). Elsewhere in his chronicle, Guamán Poma describes these animals as forming a state of perpetual incarceration, sankay, which is an Andean concept that describes a space akin to hell, and thus the allegory might appear at first to be European, but it has pre-invasion origins.

The allegory also problematizes the written record as responsible for the violence experienced by his people. Textual authority is one of the cross-cutting themes of Guamán Poma’s book. He makes pains to assert the authority of oral knowledge and of oral experiences or exchanges, which together comprise common knowledge in the Andean world, whereas textually related knowledge could be possessed by a much smaller and privileged cohort of people. Furthermore, his inclusion of the scribe reminds us how the pen of the scribe transubstantiated possibility into reality in ways that dispossessed Guamán Poma of his lands and titles.

Guamán Poma also reasons that these same animals are worshiped and idolized in the Andes as a means of appeasing them so that they no longer kill humans (270). Their connection with the carceral reality of colonial life relates to the concept of the samka, being an enclosure or cave within which animals such as these ones were placed in precolonial times (Figure 1.4).1 He describes these Andean jails as being for “traydores y de grandes delitos como de la ynquicición” (303). Essentially, the jail was “deuajo de la tierra hecho bóbeda muy escura, dentro criado serpientes, colebras ponsoñosas, animales de leones y ticre, oso, sorra, perros, gatos de monte, buytre, águila, lichusas, zapo, [y] lagartos. Destos animales tenía muy mucho para castigar a los uellacos y malhechores dilenqüentes [desde ladrones hasta brujos]. A estos dichos le metían hatun huchayoc [grandes delincuentes] para que la comiesen bibo y algunos no las comía por milagro de Dios y lo tenía dos días enserrado. Dizen que se sustentaua con tierra y se saluaua destos animales. Luego mandaua sacar el Ynga y le daua por libre cin culpa y ací lo perdonaua y lo bolbía la honrra” (ibid). Also see Husson 1993: 70. Likening it to the illustration of humanity condemned to perpetual hell from a Christian perspective, and explicitly referring to Inquisition jails as having a similar function, Guamán Poma explains that the samka was an important tool for addressing criminality, as criminals were placed in a samka to meet a violent and terrifying death. The reader of his chronicle will also recognize the overlap in animals between the allegory of colonial life and this conceptualization of perpetual hell, to see how Europeans are personified through this interpretation of sankay.

Unlike colonialism, Guamán Poma explains that this form of punishment also has a hopeful trajectory. When people went to jail, if they were able to survive these dangerous animals and beasts for two days, they would be freed, pardoned, and their honor would be restored – much as one was after being declared innocent and released from jail by the Inquisition. He explains that not all crimes would result in being sent to samka, with specific ones such as murder and adultery receiving other sentences, even capital punishment, from which escape was impossible (305). This tension between jail, death by wild animals, and atonement suggests that certain sins could be remedied by physical duress, on the one hand, and that the wild animals – when read as Spaniards – could be left behind, that Andeans could find a way to escape from them, and that postcolonial life afterward could hold greater promise.

In this way, Guamán Poma’s chronicle of Andean and post-invasion Spanish Peru weaves together a characterization of Spanish activities using pre-invasion knowledge about the animal and spiritual worlds. In this case, one of the Inca’s Spanish tormentors in the aforementioned allegory is a huaca who threatened the Incas with torment if they did not worship him (Figure 1.5). The alignment between lions, Spaniards, and a bedeviled spirit is well-articulated throughout the book but never made explicit except by reading across the text and by comparing the contents of both the text and its images.

Another medieval genre, the mappamundi (map of the world), with one exception was never included in a bestiary (Van Duzer and Dines 2006: 7–22). Yet, the design of this medieval cartographic object lent itself well to the bestiary genre because it was not uncommon to depict and describe a group of fantastic and real beasts along the extremities of the world known to medieval Europeans and that reflected a Christian worldview. On premodern maps, this presence can be detected in the form of Gog and Magog, which relate to the Bible’s accounting of the apocalypse and the impending invasion of evil that sets off the transition of the worldly Jerusalem into the City of God, and beasts such as unicorns that were extensively covered in bestiaries. Rather, mappamundis more easily appeared in books that recounted history, which makes Guamán Poma’s choice to include this form of map a unique triangulation of the three medieval genres (Figure 1.6).

Oriented with the east at the top, rather than show the Christian world as Europeans knew it before 1492, the mappamundi shows the Incan world in a diachronic fashion that knits together the extent of the Incan empire before the Spanish invasion as well as its situation post-invasion (for analysis of this and other map-related works by Guamán Poma, see López Salas 2022: 3–19). Guamán Poma created, to the east, a terra incognita that included Spain as well as fantastic beasts, separating them from the Incan world using the Marañon River (Figure 1.7).

Among these beasts and fantastical beings is one who resembles a siren to European readers, or for Andean readers a water spirit that warns Andeans about the dangers lurking beyond or below the water. Its positioning in the Atlantic Ocean with Europe placed off the map is interesting for its spatial alignment with terra incognita and potential for danger symbolized by the huaca (Turino 1983: 81–119). Sirens are European forms of tricksters, for they lure sailors to their death, whereas Andean water spirits warn of danger. Beyond the river is a flying serpent that resembles the personified Spanish corregidor from the allegory of the most feared animals. Joining these beings is a unicorn, as well as tigers and other dangerous and fantastic beings, that belong to the medieval bestiary of terra incognita.