The cross and the serpent

Astride the ruins of the former Inca Empire, victorious Spaniards in the seventeenth century initiated a relentless and uncompromising assault on the Andean religious world. Native spiritual leaders did not submit without a struggle; they resisted persecution, adapting beliefs and rites to contest the dominance of Christianity in Peru's postconquest world.

In this book, Nicholas Griffiths examines how Spaniards conceived religious repression and how Andeans responded to it throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century.

Griffiths explores in detail the conceptual framework and methods used by the Spaniards to interpret native religion. The defenders of traditional Andean religion, its native priests, were identified with a powerful figure in Spanish demonology, the sorcerer, who was understood to be a charlatan and a trickster rather than a fearful ally of Satan. The Spaniards failed to perceive, and hence to challenge, the very real powers that these religious leaders exercised as the shamans for their communities.

Native Andeans resisted persecution through a variety of strategies. Indigenous communities were able to undermine the effectiveness of judicial trials and even exploit them as a means to settle their own internal disputes. Persecution drove native religion underground, but its underlying principles were not destroyed. Instead, the Andean spiritual realm offered a vigorous response to repression and underwent fundamental adaptations and transformations in a dynamic process of self-renewal.