The Introduction presents the central ideas of the book. The major theme is acculturation. Dominant forms of ethnohistory discuss Native peoples of the Americas and the ways they responded to Spanish political domination. This book reverses the approach by analyzing how non-Native women adapted to their predominantly Native Mesoamerican cultural environment. Witchcraft and sorcery and their suppression by inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts represent the particular entry point for understanding these processes of acculturation. Non-Native women in this book were Spanish, Canarian, North African, Basque, and Senegambian. They adopted Mesoamerican rituals, such as corn hurling (tlapohualiztli), Nahua healing and midwifery, and peyote consumption, and spoke Nahuatl in everyday lives. Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish, such as metate, tianguis, and patle, symbolize the processes of acculturation. This book studies the earliest forms of non-Native women adapting Mesoamerican sorcery, magic, and healing, limited to the period 1521–71.

This chapter tells the stories of women from liminal-frontier regions – Andalucía and the Canaries. Some of these women were ethnic Spaniards. Others were described as Moriscas, an ambiguous term. In the stories told here, Morisca women could have been Arab–Spanish converts from Islam to Christianity; Maghrebi women; Spanish Canarians; or vaguely exotic or darker-skinned Andalucian women. Andalucía had a long tradition of female courtesan slaves, called ŷāriya. The women accused of sorcery in this chapter were often shamed for their sexual behavior. Two in particular, Esperanza de Valencia and María de Armenta, were described as being mujer enamorada, a euphemism for courtesan. Armenta in particular had affairs with two wealthy and politically powerful men of Mexico City in the 1530s. These women were accused, almost predictably, of love magic and of being too sexually free. In the context of Mexico, these Morisca and Andalucian women flouted Catholic ideas about female chastity and decorum. They were targeted by inquisitional courts not only for sorcery but also for being courtesans. At least one such Morisca was a slave of a wealthy man in Oaxaca and may have had some kind of amorous relationship with him.

This chapter offers an analysis of magic in Mesoamerica. An overview is given of specific Nahua cultural phenomena and of Spanish ecclesiastics’ attempts to place these Nahua concepts within a Spanish and Catholic framework. Nahua concepts explored here include: nahualli, shape-shifting sorcerer; tiçitl, healing specialist, midwife; tlapohualiztli, corn hurling as a form of divination; xochihua, flower-bearer, a gender-fluid man or transwoman associated with sorcery; and teixcuepani, or trickery. Particular attention is given here to Bernardino Sahagún and his Florentine Codex, Andrés de Olmos and his Nahuatl translation of Castañega’s anti-sorcery treatise, Alonso de Molina’s Nahuatl–Spanish Vocabulario, and Juan de Zumárraga’s Doctrina. An analysis is made of the difficulty of applying Nahuatl terms for Spanish ideas, often resulting in neologisms such as texoxaliztli for evil eye. Similarly, the Spanish idea that alcahuetas (procuresses) were linked to sorcery finds translation in the term “tetlanochili,” meaning “sorceress” generally. The Nahua idea of the owl-man tlacatecolotl, simplified by Spanish clergy as Satan, is also discussed.

This chapter examines the aftermath of early Anglican missionisation to Makushi groups. It begins with a story that was told to the author of a past Makushi leader described by a villager in Surama as a false prophet. The chapter then discusses various prophetic movements that arose among the Makushi and neighbouring Indigenous groups during the 1840s and afterwards which culminated in the alleluia religion. These movements used material and immaterial objects acquired and appropriated from the missionaries for new purposes. Many of these movements emphasised a central theme of transformation, which was often described in colonial sources in terms of Indigenous people becoming ‘white’ in one form or another. The movements combined resistance to colonialism with Christianity, shamanism, and sometimes also sorcery. In this context, shamanism became a means for contacting the Christian God. The chapter foregrounds a shamanic relational mode that structures interactions with outsiders among the Makushi.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

Chapter 5 is structured according to the uses for which noble clients commissioned magic. The range of uses is broader than the five identified for other social classes and they have therefore been grouped under three wider ambitions: political or social advancement; money; and practicalities. By structuring the discussion in this way we are able to interrogate the motivations behind the upper classes’ use of magic, and investigate the role it played in elite culture. The conclusion of this discussion is that the few aristocratic magic cases that survive are indicative of a wider culture of use

This chapter focuses on how and when elite persons employed magicians; what sort of relationship was enjoyed between employer and employee; and how such relationships were allowed to continue in a courtly context. Through the course of this discussion we see that the culture of magic use among the elite was substantially different to that of society more broadly. For example, whereas generally the lower classes had a ‘pay per use’ arrangement with service magicians, upper classes were more in the habit of keeping magicians as part of their household, normally requesting the services from a cleric on retainer. The implications of this, and other habits peculiar to the elite, are explored in some detail.

Over its long reign, the Qing imperial state aggressively pursued unauthorized religion, both to uphold its own spiritual hegemony, and to avert religious militarization. With growing social dislocation over the nineteenth century, the dynasty faced a massive explosion of religious violence – a seemingly irrepressible series of millenarian “White Lotus” movements in central China, Muslim uprisings in the north and southwest, and the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion that divided the country for more than a decade. Together, these rebellions and their suppression claimed the lives of tens of millions. The anti-Christian Boxer Uprising was brutally extirpated by a coalition of foreign forces, but at least as deadly were the waves of recriminations between Chinese villages. After coming to power in 1949, the Communist regime moved quickly to contain religion, expelling Catholic missionaries and initiating a suppression of native groups like Yiguandao. Policy towards religion appeared to soften in the 1990s, and yet remained highly vigilant towards any hint of millenarianism or religious sedition. Even knowing this, few observers were prepared for the sheer brutality of the 1999 campaign against Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice).

In the highly competitive and conflictual world of early modern China, aggression and violence were a regular part of life. People not only came to blows with other people, but also with ghosts and demons that infested their world with evils and afflictions. The rock fights, cockfights, self-mortifying shamans, sword-wielding exorcists, public floggings and bloody beheadings discussed in this chapter were common spectacles of public violence. China’s educated elites, who associated such acts with vulgar lower-class culture, disparaged popular forms of violence because they were wild, senseless and uncontrollable. For the lower orders, however, violence was purposeful. It gave power to the powerless and prestige to the disreputable. Regular displays were necessary to gain respect and could even ensure social mobility. Violence was essential to masculinity and gave meaning to men’s lives, providing them with ambition and dignity. The shedding of blood also gave meaning to violence. Blood was the vital force of life important in warding off evil spirits, curing illnesses, ensuring fertility and bringing good luck. These acts were part of a well-established, but heterodox, folk tradition whereby violence and bloody rituals were deeply rooted in the everyday life and popular culture of early modern China.