Deities, Devils, and Witches in Animal Forms

Yet New Spanish churchmen evidently suspected that Mesoamerican auguries stemmed from more problematic beliefs. Owls’ status as ill omens and malevolent supernatural (but not divine) figures in Mesoamerica, likely compounded by their pre-existing associations in Europe, led early evangelizers to choose tlacatecolotl as the most suitable Nahuatl title for the devil (Burkhart 1989: 40–1). Uses of tlacatecolotl for the devil are ubiquitous in the Nahuatl pedagogies, but similar terms even appear in Oaxacan sources. Ethnohistorian Kevin Terraciano has found a reference to the devil as “tiñomi ñaha” (owl-person) in a Mixtec oath for witnesses of a marriage, along with “tiñumi ñaha” as the translation for “demonio” in Alvarado’s Vocabulario and in fray Benito Hernández’s 1567 Doctrina en lengua misteca (Terraciano 2001: 303–4). Again, it is difficult to gauge whether this owl-person was a Nahua transplant, but its ready usage by friars in Oaxaca, as well as references to ominous birds in linguistic sources, suggests pre-existing parallels.

Representing either sacred or infernal supernatural beings in animal forms also had precedents in both pre-invasion Mesoamerica and Iberia. Indigenous cultures depicted a vast array of divinities as fully animal or with animal traits, including principal Nahua deities such as Quetzalcoatl (meaning “quetzal-plumed serpent”), sometimes portrayed in this feathered-snake figure. Meanwhile, throughout medieval and early modern Europe some animals not only symbolized sin but could be manifestations of the devil himself. One of the most deep-rooted and pervasive images of Satan was the satyr-like creature, which formed through a combination of Classical, ancient Jewish, and early Christian referents by the Middle Ages. The other most archetypal form of the devil, as the figure he adopted to tempt Eve in Genesis, was the serpent. Encountering zoomorphic divinities in Mesoamerica confirmed to missionary friars that they were dealing with demons, as Sahagún must have conveyed to the Nahua artists that illustrated Tlaloc with a bearded goat-like face in the Florentine Codex (Cervantes 1994: 26).

Colonial clergy introduced both corpuses of imagery to New Spain, with Sahagún using the mazacoatl (deer-serpent) as a combined Nahua approximation (Burkhart 1989: 43). The serpentine devil makes a noteworthy appearance in one of the more unique Nahuatl pedagogies. Fray Juan Bautista’s 1599 Confessionario relays longer Christian morality tales in the elevated huehuetlatolli style, including the story of Valentín de la Roca. Here, a snake tempts the Spanish nobleman to ignore mass and the doctrine, and not confess his sins, then reveals itself to be the devil, named “tlacatecolotl,” and drags him to hell (1599: fol. 21). Nahua audiences could easily have identified this devil, cast as a human-owl possessing the power to transform themselves into a snake, with the animal transformation specialists of their ancestral traditions.

As Fernando Cervantes has observed, the clergy’s foremost concern with Indigenous devotions, which they classified as idolatry and devil worship in New Spain, bestowed the devil with even greater power than in pre-imperial Iberia (Cervantes 1994: 20). By interlinking animal transformation specialists with the devil through their names and characteristics, especially in didactic materials directed to Indigenous audiences, colonial evangelizers may have been counterproductively elevating the power of these ritual practitioners, even if painted as wholly malevolent. The connections that Christian pedagogues drew between Indigenous peoples’ spiritual relations with animals and idolatry, diabolism, and witchcraft, continue to emerge from their confessionary questions. To understand these conceptual associations, the European theological framework of witchcraft requires further explanation. Early Modern Spanish theologians viewed the (super)natural world through dualistic models in which the devil and his followers (witches) inverted the social, moral, and natural order established by God, including through transfigurations from the higher human to lower animal forms (Alves 2011: 127). Although, according to some demonologists such as Martín de Castañega, the devil did not have the power to effect true corporeal changes, so instead only created illusions of witches’ metamorphoses (Castañega 1997: 54).

With Indigenous peoples’ reported human-animal transformations, colonial elites faced the combined dangers of colonial subordinates rebelling against imperial, natural, and divine hierarchies. Alves demonstrates how missionaries and ministers applied this model to Indigenous beliefs in Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón’s 1629 treatise on Indigenous “Heathen Superstitions,” which framed the nahualli as someone with an animal spirit companion bestowed by a pact with the Devil (Alves 2011: 129). Roberto Martínez González’s monograph Nahualismo also finds Spanish clergy applying Scholastic frameworks of demonic witchcraft to the nahualli, whom they labeled as a “witch,” “sorcerer,” or “necromancer” (464). It was through their legal persecution of Indigenous specialists as witches, he argues, along with attempts to persuade Indigenous peoples that their spiritual beliefs were in fact demonic, that the colonial church ended up “equipping the ancient notions of the nahualli and tlacatecolotl with the European conceptions of the witch and devil” (Martínez González 2011: 468–9; 472). Spanish identification of the nahualli with European witchcraft was arguably so influential that it led to the widespread stigmatization of figures who previously held important though ambiguous roles within their communities, able to use their animal guises to both attack and defend their neighbors.

The 1553 Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios by fray Andrés de Olmos is the most patent example of missionaries imposing Scholastic models of diabolical witchcraft onto Indigenous animal transformation specialists through Native language texts. Although largely a translation of fray Martín de Castañega’s 1529 Tratado de supersticiones y hechicerías into Nahuatl, Olmos did adapt the work to a Nahua audience, transforming the text into a direct interlocution with Indigenous “idolaters” who were falling back into their recent pagan past (Campagne 2004: 9–21). Both Franciscans were involved with Inquisitorial witch trials in the Basque country; Castañega completing the first version of his treatise in 1527 while Predicator of the Holy Office in Burgos, while Olmos accompanied future bishop of Mexico Zumárraga to carry out the processes against witches in Biscay and Navarre (Olmos 1979: 352). In 1528, Olmos left for New Spain with Zumárraga and the year after, Castañega published his revised treatise in Logroño. Yet Olmos turned to the Spanish demonologist’s work to make sense of what he witnessed over two decades of evangelizing Nahua populations in central Mexico. Crucially, Olmos named the satanic ministers who were “deceived” by the devil into thinking that they transformed themselves into animals, as “nanaualtin.” He then exhorted to the Nahua listener that “if the Devil gives someone the appearance of a bird or cougar, or coyote, or jaguar” notably, referring to native species rather than the cat and fox in Castañega’s original, this was not to be believed since “the nahualli cannot come or go if the body does not go with them” (Olmos 1979: 109). For, much as Castañega had explained, the devil lacked the power to enact material transmutations. Upon encountering Nahua personages attributed with the power to take animal forms, Olmos aimed to uphold the Christian natural order articulated by the Spanish demonologist, which prohibited such illicit transformations from man to beast.

Fray Olmos’s Tratado was a unique translation of demonology into an Indigenous Mesoamerican language, but the far more common Native-language doctrinal materials also touched on ritual specialists with shapeshifting capabilities, in ways that may have blurred the boundaries between man, beast, and diabolical power. Not only do most Nahuatl texts use tlacatecolotl for the devil, but many of them also employ the term to describe practices of witchcraft. Among don Alva’s queries, he asks (in the Castilian) “have you gone some night to rob [people], breaking into the house and making the owners sleepy with diabolical words, of spells or enchantments, with which you could easily bring everything you found with you?” (1634: fol. 25v). The Nahuatl phrase for this sleep-inducing spell is “otitecochtlaz inmotlacatecolo tlatolyca,” which translates to “do you make them sleep with the devil’s words” when tlacatecolotl is only taken to mean “devil.” However, if the term tlacatecolotl maintained some of its original Nahuatl meanings, as the title for malevolent animal transformation specialists, then the phrase is closer to “making them sleep with the words of the human-owl.” That someone would typically use these incantations for theft, links to the “bad” varieties or activities of nanahualtin in the Florentine Codex. Among those born under the day sign One Wind were the temacpaltitoque (“ones who danced with the dead woman’s forearm”) a subset of tlacatecolotl, who Sahagún’s informants describe as performing a ritual that left people “in a deep sleep” while they carried away “the treasures, the guarded things” from their victims’ home (Sahagún 1979: 102–3).

Another revealing detail is that Alva includes these questions in the section regarding the Seventh Commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery), where all other queries refer directly to sexual transgressions. Alva’s confessionary therefore implies that acts of sexual predation took place in these nocturnal robberies, which is another behavior attributed to the temacpaltitoque in the Florentine Codex, who “take their pleasure with them [women], taking advantage of their sleep” (Sahagún 1979: 103). Fray Molina also connects diabolism and witchcraft to animal transformation specialists, by asking whether the devil (“tlacatecolotl”) deceived the confessant or whether they “deceived yourself, learning the words of the devil” (otmimotlapololti ynic niman oticmomachti tlacatecolo tlatolli), “to bewitch others or to provoke women to lust” (yntetlahchiuiliztli intexoxaliztli, ynciuatlatolli ynnaualotl), “or to enchant or conjure hail” (yuan inteciuhtlaçaliztli) (Molina 1578: fol. 115v). Here, Molina even uses the verb forms of Nahua specialists, including the nahualli, texoxoani (who casts spells with their eyes), and teciuhtlazqui (rainmaker, one of the nahualli’s beneficial roles). As such, we find clergy such as Alva and Molina confirming Indigenous conceptions that certain people had the capacity to manipulate the (super)natural world through the supernatural. Potentially, including the ability to adopt animal figures and become the tecolotl (owl) in tlacatecolotl, who they now “equipped” (as Martínez González 2011 proposes) with the powers of witchcraft and the devil.