Conclusion

Missionaries and ministers in New Spain translated religious pedagogies into Native languages as tools of ideological colonization, seeking to impose Christian visions of a divine-natural order that positioned human beings as dominant and distinct from nonhuman animals. However, the ways in which clergy articulated questions about doctrine, sermons, and confession reveal the often-unintentional entanglements with Indigenous cosmovisions their texts produced, which facilitated integration between aspects of Iberian Catholicism and Indigenous Mesoamerican religions. Although evangelizers attempted to define human rationality and virtue in opposition to animal unreason and vice, some clerical authors’ visual and textual metaphors became intermixed with Indigenous symbolism that defied those categorizations. Meanwhile, the inquiries into illicit beliefs in animal auguries appear to confirm those creatures’ power, as do the concerns over the machinations of the devil or witches who might inhabit animal forms. Conflict between New Spanish churchmen’s intentions for their doctrinal materials and the texts’ multiple possible meanings for Indigenous audiences, expresses the contradiction at the heart of the colonial Christianization project. The campaign to destroy Indigenous cosmovisions that interconnected human beings with nonhuman animals in a unified sacred-natural world, and frame those perspectives as irrational, false, and evil, appealed to the human rationality of Indigenous souls in order to uphold their distinction from animals. Yet these religious pedagogies necessarily did so within Indigenous linguistic and cultural frameworks, complicating the Christian messaging.