The Huaca-Devil Dynamic

Much of the evidence analysed so far has made it clear that a central aim of the Christian missionaries in the Andes was to instil the certainty amongst their neophytes that any communication from huacas and other Andean deities was the result of either pure fabrication or demonic delusion. Meanwhile, the deliberate process of demonization of Andean divinities was paralleled in the Andes by the paradoxical process discussed at the end of the previous chapter, whereby the spiritual forces of subversion were effectively given a role in the divine administration. Ironically, in the process the Christian missionaries effectively encouraged a process of co-option in which the huacas were transformed into negative entities with an important role to play in the new religious system.

There is, however, an important distinction between the two processes. Whilst the process of co-option brought Satan's cohorts in from the cold and placed them as functionaries within the established order, the process of demonization separated them from the Andean people and drove them out into the wilderness, thereby winning back Satan's Andean bastion for God. After this, to use Ignatius of Loyola's analogy, the devil could only besiege the newly reclaimed citadel from without; he was only able to attack at its weakest point.

Of course, what the missionaries intended was often very far from what they actually achieved. In his discussion of the phenomenon of the demonization of huacas, for example, Kenneth Mills argues that in many cases such attempts largely failed and that Andean ‘demons’ refused ‘to be essentially diabolic’ in a strictly European sense. Similarly, he shows how fragments of information gathered from colonial documents demonstrate that huacas did not lose their significance among large sections of the indigenous population. The picture that emerges is one of a devil in transition, difficult to pin down and categorize as entirely universal, and who takes on diverse cultural traits that depend on the worldview of the particular narrator and the stage at which the story is being narrated.