chapter 9

‘Psychomachia Indiana’: angels, devils

and holy images in New Spain
David Brading

In a pastoral letter issued to celebrate the consecration of the cathedral

church of Puebla de los Ángeles on 18 April 1649, Bishop Juan de Palafox y
Mendoza (1600–59) proudly recorded that although the work on the
building had begun in 1575, it was left to him to complete it over a period
of nine years and at a cost of 350,000 pesos. He reminded his readers that
the image and prototype of all churches on earth was Bethel, where Jacob
had seen, as in a vision, a ladder from heaven, with angels ascending and
descending, acting as the messengers and agents of the Almighty. God was
everywhere, of course, but Palafox averred that He dwelt with special
majesty in heaven and in churches. ‘In the empyrean heaven He works the
things of glory and in the temple He works the things of grace’. ‘How
terrible is this place!’ Jacob had exclaimed. ‘It is the house of the Lord and
the gate of heaven’. In every Catholic church God was perpetually present:
‘here is His body, His blood, His divinity’, a presence that should evoke a
reverent dread, for these temples were inhabited by armies of angels who
protected and worshipped their Divine Lord like the Seraphim who had
once guarded the Ark of the Covenant. In their offering of the sacrifice of
the Mass, Catholic priests, too, acted as ‘soldiers of God’, engaged in daily
battle to rescue souls from the devil and his host of demons.1
Catholic cathedrals, just like their Byzantine counterparts, were the
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Christian heirs of the Hebrew Temple at Jerusalem – their high altar and
tabernacle the equivalent of the inner sanctuary and Ark of the Covenant.
Bishops were as much the heirs of the apostles as of the Jewish high priest,
albeit a priest of the line of the order of Melchizedek rather than that of
Aaron, as the Letter to the Hebrews explained.2 Insofar as it was inhabited
by angels, however, a cathedral was an earthly reflection of heaven and was
thus inhabited by the nine choirs of angels described by Pseudo-Dionysius

1
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Obras, 13 vols. (Madrid, 1762), vol. iii (part 1), 265–300.
2
Hebrews 6:20.

249

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 250 The world of the Baroque
in his Celestial Hierarchy. In descending order, these were: Seraphim,
Cherubim and Thrones; Dominions, Virtues and Powers; and Principal-
ities, Archangels and Angels.3 The chief purpose of a cathedral was the
worship of God, which found expression in the celebration of the divine
office by the chapter of canons and their acolytes, not only at Mass but
also across the day. Cathedrals in Spanish America were built and main-
tained by the tithe levied on agricultural production throughout vast
diocesan territories, generating sufficient revenues to maintain bishops
in splendour, canons in high comfort and to educate the future parochial
clergy. Their construction in the principal urban centres was a clear sign
that the Spanish American viceroyalties were integral kingdoms within the
majestic ambit of the Catholic Monarchy.
The manner in which Palafox expatiated, in triumphant strain, about
the spiritual significance of his cathedral, sits somewhat uncomfortably
with his well-known determination to oust the Mendicant friars from the
vast doctrinas they had administered since the early sixteenth century,
when they had been entrusted with the evangelisation of the indigenous
population. Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians were ejected and
replaced by no fewer than 150 secular clergy acting as curas and vicars. It
would be misleading, however, to see this initiative as a precursor of the
secularisation that took place in the eighteenth century. The memory of
the ‘spiritual conquest’ undertaken by the Mendicant friars was still fresh
in Palafox’s time, and so the friars were allowed to retain their convents
and even to construct a series of new parish churches.4 Only a few decades
earlier, the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada had provided a grand synthe-
sis of what was known about the history, religion and civilisation of pre-
Hispanic Mexico; but additionally, his monumental Monarquı́a indiana
(1615) had celebrated the Franciscan role in the conversion of the native
population, incorporating entire chapters from earlier chroniclers to
transmit the exhilaration of that moment. In particular, Torquemada
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

relived the Franciscan emphasis on ‘Lady Poverty’ and the hope of

reviving the simplicity of the primitive Church. For, in the Indians, the
friars encountered a race blessed with remarkably few material possessions
and an apparent lack of the acquisitive spirit that was so prevalent in
Europe. On the other hand, however, the Franciscans from the start
pointed to the cruelties of the native religions and interpreted the practice

3
Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchies (Godalming, 1965), 33–49.
4
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Tratados mejicanos, ed. Francisco Sánchez-Castañer, Biblioteca de
Autores Españoles, 117–18, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1968), vol. i, 22–5.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 251
of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism as clear evidence that the New
World had formed a veritable kingdom of darkness before the arrival of
the Spanish. In the Mesoamerican pantheon of deities and horrific cycle
of feasts there could be discerned the unmistakable dominion of the devil.
Indeed, Torquemada identified Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica tribal deity,
as Satan himself, who first guided his chosen people across the northern
wastelands by means of oracles and then induced them to pitch their
settlement in the mud-swamps of Tenochtitlan where they founded
the capital of their demonic empire. In effect, Torquemada followed
St Augustine’s City of God and depicted Mexico-Tenochtitlan as another
Babylon, a great, glittering city, but governed by princes and priests who
were the chosen instruments of the devil. By contrast, New Spain formed
a new Jerusalem and its founder, Hernán Cortés, acted as another Moses
when he led the Mexica out of the Egypt of idolatry into the holy land of
the Christian Church.5 Writing at the start of the seventeenth century,
Torquemada thus transmitted to future generations a complex historical
vision that was late medieval in many of its emphases.
By this time, it had been obvious to most members of the parochial
clergy that the native peoples continued to practise secret rites derived
from ancient beliefs and idolatry. In effect, the devils were still abroad,
actively seeking to combat the Kingdom of God and to corrupt Indian
minds and hearts. In an influential manual for confessors of ‘idolatrous
Indians’ written in the late seventeenth century, Diego Jaymes Ricardo
Villavicencio, the creole parish priest of Santa Cruz Tlatlaccotepetl,
warned his community that there were ‘master ministers of the devil,
like the rabbis of the Jews’ who practised their rites in secret places. The
treatise was dedicated to the Bishop of Oaxaca, Isidro de Sariñana y
Cuenca who, in a prefatory letter to the author, lamented that after a
century and a half of Christian teaching ‘these miserables’ were still sunk in
idolatry and, under the mask of Catholic ritual, continued to worship old
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

and new gods of their own making. To eradicate this evil it was necessary
to reach the hearts of the Indians through appropriate preaching. But in
order to eliminate ‘the pernicious relics of Baal, I have built in this city a
perpetual prison for the confinement of the dogmatists and masters,
judging that by taking and withdrawing them from their villages, one
can tear out the roots of idolatry’. For his part, the bishop of Puebla
likewise pointed out that the Indians were inclined to hide their idolatry

5
Juan de Torquemada, Los veinte y un libros rituales y monarquı́a indiana, ed. Miguel León-Portilla
et al., 7 vols. (Mexico City, 1975–83), vol. i, 114, 132–5, 397; vol. ii, 9–10, 39, 326–30.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 252 The world of the Baroque
by devotion to holy images, and insisted that the agents of this cult should
be punished and imprisoned. He nevertheless urged clemency for the
common Indian, since ‘whipping, prison and chains harm and even kill,
but do not convert or heal’. In a word, he advocated persuasion before
punishment: ‘the heart of the minister more readily subdues when love is
shown to the Indians than when zeal wields its rigour’.6
With the experience of thirty years as parish priest of the district of
Santa Cruz Tlatlaccotepetl, Villavicencio reminded his fellow curas that
the Church was an earthly paradise, a garden adorned by the tree of life
and whose limits were marked by the parish clergy, acting as the Cher-
ubim who protected the ‘paradise of New Spain’ from the great serpent,
the devil. So idolatry constituted the greatest offence against God – the
denial of divine authority by the worship of the devil in the form of idols,
much in the same way as Israel had offered sacrifice to Moloch or Baal.
Alluding to the illustrious historian of the Spanish Conquest, Bernal Dı́az
del Castillo, Villavicencio added that the New World before the conquest
had been utterly subjected to ‘the tyrannical dominion of the Prince of
Darkness and the Father of Lies’, being replete with temples, altars,
human sacrifices and ‘accursed peoples’ who practised abominable
customs, with many wives, unnatural vice and cannibalism. In the great
temple of Mexico-Tenochtitlan there had been two temples dedicated
respectively to Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca (the ‘god of hell’) to
whom over 2,500 victims were offered each year. It was to remedy this
state of affairs that ‘the Lord Malinche’ – as the Indians, perhaps not
without a touch of irony, referred to the conqueror of Mexico – had been
sent by God to overthrow Moctezuma, much in the same way as he had
sent David to combat Goliath. ‘In the time predestined from eternity’,
wrote Villavicencio,
against the powerful monarch and great emperor Moctezuma, God sent the
valiant hero, unparalleled in valour, Don Fernando Cortés. Just as in the land of
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Egypt against Pharaoh he had sent Moses, his captain and leader, to free the
chosen people of Israel from the power of that tyrant and to lead them with
prodigious acts to the land of promise, so also in this kingdom, with prodigious
acts of courage and singular feats, Cortés led the Indians not so much from
the subjection and dominion of that obstinate idolater Moctezuma, as from the
oppression and vassalage of the rebel and most cruel tyrant, far greater than
Pharaoh, the Prince of Darkness, the Father of Lies, proud Lucifer.7

6
Diego Jaymes Ricardo Villavicencio, Luz y método de confesar idólatras y destrierro de idolatrı́as
(Puebla, 1692), 7–18, 28, 41–7.
7
Ibid., 46–7, 87.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 253
After the great siege of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, when thousands of Indians
died from the effects of war, hunger and the plague, God had aptly
entrusted the new kingdom to Spain, the Catholic Monarchy and the
Church. And yet, despite this great victory, Villavicencio averred that the
devil remained at large in New Spain, still active in secret, hidden places.
Only fifteen days before, an entire group of Indians had been found
engaged in idolatrous worship and had been sold as slaves to the textile
workshops and sugar mills in nearby Atrisco. He himself had imprisoned
‘a rabbi’ of this sect, who confessed that some thirty Indians had met in a
secret cave and had offered a fowl and their own blood, promising to fast
for four days and nights. In confession, an Indian woman had told him
that she had seen ‘criaturas’ (young children) sacrificed and cut in two. In
effect, in most villages there were ‘idolatrous rabbis’ who assumed the
offices of ‘popes and priests’. Villavicencio expressed the hope that the
bishop of Puebla would follow Sariñana’s example and build ‘a secure and
perpetual prison’. Had not Moses slain all those who had worshipped the
Golden Calf and had not Elias slaughtered four hundred prophets of
Baal? Proof of the influence of idolatry could be found ‘in the tumult they
raised in this year of 1692’, burning the palace in Mexico City. Was it not
a sign of God’s anger that, with prices of maize and wheat so high, many
natives were now dying, especially their children?8
Villavicencio concluded by calling upon his fellow curas to combat with
all their strength ‘the infernal and diabolical plague of idolatry’. He
admitted that some priests chose not to meddle in such matters, fearful
that the villagers would riot or bring false accusations against them in the
courts; but such was the behaviour of cowards or mercenaries rather than
of pastors or curas. Others neglected their duties, merely saying Mass and
hearing confessions speedily and without due enquiry. As an example he
recalled the case of an Indian of his parish, a good Christian, who visited a
neighbouring district; when he talked to the natives there about the
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

mysteries of the faith and the Ten Commandments he was alarmed to

be informed by them that they had never heard of such matters as heaven
and hell, the Last Judgment and the final resurrection. This prompted
Villavicencio to issue a sharp warning to priests who failed in their duties,
reminding them of the horrific vision that the Dominican St Vincent
Ferrer had had of the death of St Bernard: 30,000 other Christians had
also died at that moment and only the soul of St Bernard and of three

8
Ibid., 48–60, 94, 98. On the tumult of 1692 see Rosa Feijoo, ‘El tumulto de 1692’, Historia Mexicana
14.4 (1965): 656–79.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 254 The world of the Baroque
others that went to purgatory had been spared the torments of hell fire. In
comforting vein, Villavicencio recalled the example of another illustrious
Dominican, Jordan of Saxony, who had been spared the torments of
purgatory because of the large number of souls he had helped to salvation
by his hearing so many ‘confessions of the poor’.9 He also cited the
example of the most illustrious of the bishops of Puebla, Juan de Palafox,
whom he praised as ‘the model and example of curas and priests in the zeal
for the honour and glory of God and his Church’. He did not hesitate to
compare his talent and virtue to those of a range of prophets and saints,
and concluded that ‘he [Palafox] taught and preached with his life, words,
works and pen’, expressing the hope that when ‘the Church takes note of
his merits, his virtues and sanctity, she will honour him by placing him in
the Catalogue of her Saints’.10
Villavicencio was not a lonely voice. The Itinerario para párrocos de
indios (‘Manual of parish priests in charge of Indians’), for example, was
published in Madrid in 1668 and as six successive re-editions up to 1771,
and was widely consulted throughout Spanish America. Its author, Alonso
de la Peña Montenegro (1596–1687), consecrated bishop of Quito in 1654,
affirmed that the great problem of the parochial clergy in their dealings
with Indians was the survival of their ancient idolatry. In line with
Villavicencio and others, he argued that the Indians before the Spanish
conquest had belonged to the ‘tyrannical empire’ of Satan and that their
old beliefs still persisted no matter what the preaching against them: ‘the
vice that comes with the blood and is suckled with the breast milk carries
with it a hidden empire’, he wrote, laying emphasis upon genetic inherit-
ance similar to the suspicions levelled at converted Jews in sixteenth-
century Spain. On discussing the matter in greater detail, Montenegro
admitted that different levels of ‘idolatry’ existed, since some Indians were
inclined to worship both the Christian God and their own deities at
different places and times. For all that, there were any number of hechi-
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

ceros – sorcerers and folk-healers – who invoked the legion of demons that
still haunted the land, offering cures and love potions, interpreting dreams
and playing upon the fears and superstitions of their clients. All such
practitioners should be imprisoned, and any native lord who assisted them
should be deprived of his office. The punishments he recommended were
severe: ‘Lashes of the whip, banishment and prison’.11

9 10
Villavicencio, Luz y método, 24–5, 53–5, 98, 110. Ibid., 118.
11
Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para párrocos de indios (Madrid, 1668), 176–96. The
subsequent editions appeared in Lyons, 1678; Antwerp, 1698, 1726, 1737 and 1754; and Madrid,

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 255
In order to deter Indians from backsliding, Montenegro advised priests
to emphasise the power of Almighty God and the dire punishments he
had prepared for all those who ignored his commandments. At this
juncture Montenegro inserted a long, horrific description of hell as a vast
cavern at the centre of the earth where a multitude of devils tormented the
damned with various beating and tortures. All the emphasis was on the
sufferings of the senses, eternal hunger and thirst, with endless fire and
countless vermin and snakes that consumed the flesh of the miserable
sinners. At the same time, Montenegro described the demonic guardians
of this gigantic gaol as ‘ministers of divine justice’ and recommended that
parish priests should describe this terrible scene with ‘liveliness and spirit’
so as to move the Indians to repentance of their sins.12 It is perhaps no
surprise that the First Church Council held in Peru, in 1551, should have
not merely encouraged ministers to warn the natives about the danger of
hell fire, but also ‘tell them how all their ancestors and lords, because they
had not known God nor adored Him, but the sun, stones and other
creatures, are now in that place of great pain’.13 The definition of pre-
Hispanic polities as the instruments of Satan’s dominion, in other words,
logically entailed the retrospective damnation of all Indians before the
advent of Christian instruction.

In his Monarquı́a indiana, Juan de Torquemada lamented that the earthly

remains of Fray Martı́n de Valencia, the ascetic leader of the first Francis-
can mission to Mexico, had been lost, and that few public miracles were
associated with his name. He concluded that if the ‘spiritual conquest’ of
New Spain had not been greatly favoured by miracles, the reason for this
was that the Indians, moved inwardly by the Holy Spirit, had readily
accepted the Christian faith.14 A different explanation was advanced by
the Augustinian chronicler Juan de Grijalva, who argued that the primi-
tive Church had required miracles because the apostles were poor, ignor-
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

ant men confronted with all the pride and learning of the Romans and the
Jews; in America, by contrast, ‘the preacher was in all things superior to
the Indians’ and hence stood in no need of such assistance.15 In his City of

1771. For its importance see William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 1996), 152–60, 601–4.
12
Montenegro, Itinerario, 314–15.
13
Concilios Limenses (1551–1772), ed. Rubén Vargas Ugarte, 2 vols. (Lima, 1951–4), vol. i, 29.
14
Torquemada, Monarquı́a indiana, vol. vi, book 20, chs. 14–15.
15
Juan de Grijalva, Crónica de la orden de N.P.S. Agustı́n en las provincias de la Nueva España (Mexico
City, 1624), 42.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 256 The world of the Baroque
God, on the other hand, St Augustine had proclaimed the cures wrought
at the tombs of the martyrs in North Africa as a sure sign that the Holy
Spirit dwelt among the Christian people and that the miracles described
in the New Testament still continued.16
Closer in time, less than two centuries before the conquest of New
Spain, St Francis had been acclaimed as a second Christ precisely
because, in a much celebrated vision, an angel had graced his body with
the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ. In the great basilica constructed
at Assisi, pilgrims found a series of paintings which commemorated the
miracles of the saint and found consolation in prayer before his tomb. In
the official life of St Francis, the great thirteenth-century Franciscan
theologian St Bonaventure identified the founder of his order as the
sixth angel of the Apocalypse and related the divinely-inspired founda-
tion of the Franciscans in sober fashion. In advancing that claim,
St Bonaventure implicitly accepted the scriptural theology of the
twelfth-century Cistercian abbot from Calabria, Joachim of Fiore, who
had argued that the history of Israel offered a pre-figuration of Christian
history, with each sequence divided into seven ages. The sixth and
penultimate age was about to begin and was to be an epoch of unparal-
leled conflict and expansion of the Christian faith, marked in equal
measure by the appearance of Antichrist and by the preaching of two
new religious orders.17 It was owing to the influence of this typological
theology that the early Franciscans in Mexico had interpreted the rapid
conversion of the native peoples as the creation of an apostolic Church
that would compensate the Catholic Church for the loss of Germany
and England to Protestantism. For all that, as the years passed, both
creoles and Indians came to pray for, and to expect miracles – or, more
precisely, miraculous cures.
It was from the power of holy images, however, rather than from the
relics of holy men and women, that Spaniards from the Hapsburg era
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

most expected miracles to flow. And, in a way that might shed some light
on the findings of Caterina Pizzigoni among the indigenous communities
of the valley of Toluca;18 these images generally represented the Virgin
Mary, Christ crucified, and only rarely particular saints or angels. To

16
St Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson
(Harmondsworth, 1972), 1033–47 (Book 22, chs. viii-ix).
17
See Rosalind B. Brooke, The Image of St Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century
(Cambridge, 2006), 218–42, 378–414. On Joachim the classic study is by Marjorie Reeves, The
Influence of Prophecy in the Late Middle Ages: A Study of Joachimism (Oxford, 1969).
18
See Chapter 5.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 257
house ‘miraculous’ images, special sanctuaries were constructed, and, as
Kenneth Mills has so vividly described,19 accounts of their origin and their
cures were later published. The most spectacular of the Marian devotions
was the Holy House at Loreto, a small chapel no more than thirty-one feet
long and thirteen wide, built of rough stone and brick, which was declared
to be the self-same house in Nazareth where Mary was born and where the
conception of Jesus occurred. It was in 1291, so the story went, that a host
of angels had transported the house first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto,
situated close to the Adriatic Sea near Ancona. Although there is evidence
of devotion to a smoke-blackened wooden image in this chapel since the
twelfth century, it was only in 1472 that the narrative of its miraculous
transportation was published and its Marian image ascribed to the carving
of St Luke. It was left to Pope Julius II to place the sanctuary under direct
papal jurisdiction and to enclose the chapel within a handsome basilica,
its humble walls sheathed in marble. For centuries to come, the Santa
Casa attracted innumerable pilgrims, which in the sixteenth century
included Miguel de Cervantes,20 and was recognised as the premier
Marian shrine in Italy.21 By then, the Virgin Mary was endowed with
the title of ‘Queen of Angels’ and was often depicted as surrounded or
carried aloft by the heavenly hosts.
In early medieval Spain, the most potent cult of a saint emerged in the
ninth century when the tomb and bones of St James, the son of Zebedee,
were discovered at Compostela. Since it was later affirmed that the saint
had intervened in battle against the Moors, St James – or Santiago, as he
became known in Spain – was dubbed the ‘Moorslayer’ and as such
portrayed on horseback with sword in hand.22 To account for the pres-
ence of his bones, it was alleged that he had come to Spain to preach the

19
See Chapter 2.
20
See his novela ejemplar, ‘El Licenciado Vidriera’ – ‘The Glass Graduate’ – which includes a
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

memorable account of a visit to Loreto: ‘ . . . at whose shrine he [Tomás Rodaja, the eponymous
hero] could see nothing of the inner or outer walls because they were covered with crutches,
shrouds, chains, shackles, manacles, hair-pieces, wax busts, paintings, and altar-pieces, which
testified to the infinite mercies which many had received from the hand of God as a result of
the intercession of his divine Mother. For God wanted to enhance and give authority to that holy
image through many miracles, as a reward for the devotion it inspired in those who adorned the
walls of her house with these and other tokens. Tomás saw the very room and chamber where
the most exalted and significant message was delivered, witnessed but not comprehended by all the
heavens, all the angels, and all those who dwelt in the eternal realms.’ Miguel de Cervantes,
Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lipson (Oxford, 1998), 111.
21
See Herbert Thurson, ‘Santa Casa di Loreto’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Heberman
et al., 16 vols. (New York, 1907), vol. xiii, 454–6. More generally see Kathleen Weil-Garris, The
Santa Casa di Loreto: Problems in Cinquecento Sculpture (New York, 1977).
22
The name clearly derives from the early Christian usage, Sant Iacob.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 258 The world of the Baroque
gospel and, although he returned to Palestine where he was martyred, his
remains were brought to Compostela where they were interred in the
cathedral. At some point, not at all clear, it was further alleged that Santiago
had preached in the city of Zaragoza and that, when he was beset by
enemies, the Virgin Mary, carried aloft by a thousand angels, had come
to Spain and appeared to him. There, she commanded him to build a
church in her honour and presented him with a small wooden image of
herself, crowned and with the child Jesus in her arms, standing on a
jasper column. She then promised him that ‘until the end of the world’
she would ‘preserve this pillar in the place where it is’. When, in 1616, the
Franciscan chronicler Diego Murillo published twin treatises on the excel-
lences of the city of Zaragoza and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Pilar, he
fused local patriotism with religion and vigorously defended the tradition
of St James’s preaching in Spain, which had been questioned by some
foreign critics. Moreover, he insisted that it had been at Zaragoza that ‘there
thus began the holy use of images so agreeable to God’, expressly com-
mended by the Virgin Mary herself. And indeed, he insisted: ‘God is
accustomed to work through images, which are also books and preach
silently to us and at times with greater effect than writings.’23
The Franciscan contribution to Marian and angelic devotion was
further deepened and directed towards heterodox conclusions by the
Blessed Amadeus of Portugal, Joannes Menesius da Silva (1431–82), the
founder of a reformed congregation of his Order in Italy, whose Apoc-
alipsis nova circulated in manuscript before being condemned by the
Roman Inquisition. The book consisted of a series of revelations commu-
nicated to Amadeus by the Archangel Gabriel, chief among which was the
confirmation of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, thereby providing heav-
enly approbation of a dogma defended by the great thirteenth-century
Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus. There was also the prophecy of the
imminent advent of an angelic pope who would reunite the Greek and
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Latin Churches. In his fifth ‘rapture’, Amadeus was informed that there
were seven archangels named Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Sealtiel,
Jerudiel and Barachiel, who should be venerated as ‘princes of the palace
of heaven’ and as the ‘immediate ministers of God’.24 Finally, in his
eighth and last ‘rapture’, Amadeus heard Mary informing the apostles

23
Diego Murillo, Fundación milagrosa de la capilla angélica y apostólica de la Madre de Dios del Pilar
(Barcelona, 1616), 65–9, 95, 258, 272–3.
24
On Amadeus see Marjorie Reeves, ed., Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period: Essays
(Oxford, 1992), 129–83; also, Andrés Serrano, Los siete prı́ncipes de los ángeles, validos del rey del
cielo, misioneros y protectores de la tierra, con práctica de su devoción, 2nd edn (Brussels, 1707), 10–15.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 259
that she would be ‘bodily present’ in her holy images until the end of the
world, and that her presence would be manifested by the miracles
performed through them. Although Amadeus’s writings were condemned
in Rome, in Spain, Antonio Ortiz, a Franciscan of the Province of San
Gabriel, from where many of the first Franciscans sent to evangelise Mexico
in 1524 would be recruited, wrote a commentary on the Apocalipsis nova
which included a great part of the original manuscript. In 1543, St Peter of
Alcántara testified that the text of this translation had been considered by
the Cardinal Archbishop of Seville, Alonso Manrique, the Chief Inquisitor
of Spain between 1523 and his death in 1538, and that his theologians had
found nothing in it to cause scandal.25 In effect, the reformed branch of the
Franciscans in Spain accepted and endorsed the doctrine that Mary was
present in those of her images to which miraculous cures were attributed,
and they equally embraced the cult of the seven archangels.
There is no better demonstration of the manner in which Marian devo-
tions inevitably encompassed angelic assistance than the writings of Miguel
Sánchez, the Mexican priest who first recounted how the Virgin Mary had
appeared to the humble Indian Juan Diego in 1531, leaving an image of
herself as Our Lady of Guadalupe imprinted on his cape. In a treatise written
in the 1640s and published in 1665, Sánchez cited St Augustine and
St Vincent Ferrer, ‘angel of the Apocalypse’, as his masters, and constructed
a set of nine-day meditations for the two rival sanctuaries of Mexico City:
Los Remedios and Guadalupe. Each day was devoted to one of the nine
hierarchies of angels identified by Pseudo-Dionysius, but this time in
ascending order – Angels, Archangels and Virtues; Powers, Principalities
and Dominations; and Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. He identified
St Michael as the angel who intervened to prevent Abraham from sacrificing
Isaac and through whom God spoke to Moses at Horeb, and he drew on the
celebrated figures invoked respectively by the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah in
his discussions on the Cherubim and the Seraphim. His central concern,
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

however, was to present the contrasts between the two most important
images of Our Lady in New Spain. Our Lady of Los Remedios, which had
been brought to Mexico by the conqueror Juan de Villafuerte, was saluted by
Sánchez as the ‘companion and captain of the Christian armies, the con-
querors of the New World’. Our Lady of Guadalupe, by contrast, was
described as ‘an Eve born and formed from a sleeping Adam, appearing

25
Arcángel Barrado Manzano, San Pedro de Alcántara: Estudio documentado y crı́tico de su vida
(Cáceres, 1995), 36–8, 183–4; see also, Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Ángeles apócrifos en la América
virreinal, 2nd edn (Lima, 1996), 55–79.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 260 The world of the Baroque
for the first time among flowers’. Whereas Los Remedios was a pillar of fire, a
moon, guiding the Israelites by night, and in command of the rains,
Guadalupe was a ‘spiritual mother’, a pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites
by day, ensconced on her throne, the sun, with powers to abate the flood-
waters. Recalling the four Cherubim seen by the prophet Ezekiel in the forms
of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle,26 Sánchez applied comparable contrasts
to ‘the two angels’, as he chose to refer to the two Indians to whom the Virgin
had appeared. Don Juan del Águila, the Indian nobleman who discovered
the image of Los Remedios, was symbolised in St John the Evangelist, while
Juan Diego, the humble peasant, was symbolised in St John the Baptist and
the ox – for ‘there is no hieroglyph more vivid of an Indian than an ox, by
reason of his humility, usefulness, toil and persecution’.27
In his Imagen de la Virgen Marı́a, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648),
Sánchez drew upon chapter twelve of the Apocalypse, a book ‘to which my
genius is inclined’, to interpret the significance of the Mexican Virgin. To
help him in his labours, he invoked the assistance of his namesake,
St Michael the Archangel. By way of prelude, he described the conquest of
Mexico as a terrestrial re-enactment of the apocalyptic battle between Satan
and St Michael. Moctezuma’s empire here figured as ‘an imperial monarchy
with seven crowns’, a diabolic state based on ancient Indian kingdoms, but
animated by Satan, as Torquemada had argued. In sharp contrast, Hernán
Cortés and his band of conquerors ‘enjoy the title of an army of angels, who
destroyed the dragon and his followers, for the conversion of this New
World and the foundation of its Church’. In the same way as the apostolic
Church had been achieved by martyrdom and suffering, so too the conquest,
which was also a birth, had been accompanied by harsh pangs of sorrow.
When Sánchez came to consider more closely the image of the Guadalupe,
he declared that the hundred rays of the sun that surrounded the Virgin
signified that Mexico was a land governed by ‘the Catholic Monarchy of
Spain’, whose great monarchs he compared to the sun, so powerful and
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

extensive was their authority. As for the stars on the Virgin’s mantle, they
referred to the conquerors – that unlikely band of angels who had conquered
Lucifer in the form of Huitzilopochtli, the Mexican god of war.28

26
Ezekiel 1:10. Ezekiel’s vision is evoked in the Book of the Apocalypse, 4:7.
27
Miguel Sánchez, Novenas de la Virgen Marı́a, Madre de Dios, para sus dos devotı́simos santuarios, de los
Remedios y Guadalupe (Mexico City, 1665), reprinted in Colección de obras y opúsculos pertenecientes a
la milagrosa aparición de la bellı́sima imagen de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, que se venera en su
santuario extramuros de Méjico, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1785), vol. i, 79, 101–3, 259–64, 282–6.
28
Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen Marı́a, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe. Milagrosamente
aparecida en la Ciudad de México. Celebrada en su historia, con la profecı́a del capı́tulo doce del

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 261
Was not Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sánchez asked, cast in a perfect
likeness of the Woman of chapter twelve of the Apocalypse, seen by
St John in a vision on the island of Patmos, ‘an image of heaven by prophecy
and, in the image of earth, the copy by miracle’? The moon at her feet was a
symbol of Mexico, an island city, situated within an inland sea. The angel
whose outstretched wings supported the Virgin was evidently St Michael, his
wings reminiscent of the Aztec eagle that was used as a symbol of the imperial
city of Mexico. His role here clearly indicated that he was the guardian angel
of New Spain. And although Mary fought the Satanic hosts through all her
images, Sánchez concluded that she acted most powerfully in those miracu-
lous images that possessed their own sanctuaries, since these edifices acted as
spiritual fortresses where the faithful could obtain protection from demonic
attack. In visiting Tepeyac, moreover, they encountered ‘a new paradise, a
new Adam, Juan Diego, and a new Eve, Mary’, albeit always with St Michael
and his angelic cohorts in attendance.29

On 5 January 1688, in the imperial city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Caterina de San
Juan, a beata renowned for her sanctity, died at the estimated age of eighty-two.
Such was her local fame that her funeral was attended by a great crowd and her
coffin was carried in turns by leading members of the city council, the cathedral
chapter and the religious orders. After a solemn vigil and prayers, she was buried
in the chapel of the Holy Innocents, to the right of the high altar of the Jesuit
church of Espı́ritu Santo. Soldiers had to be brought in to protect her remains,
since twice her shroud was torn off by members of the crowded congregation
who sought to ‘cut off her fingers and the flesh of her body’ so as to gain
possession of coveted relics imbued with her charisma.30 After this ceremony,
the dignitaries retired to the cathedral where they attended a memorial Mass
and heard a sermon preached by the Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera who not only
praised Caterina’s ascetic life but also affirmed that she had rescued souls from
purgatory. ‘How much does Christendom owe her’, Aguilera exclaimed,
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

. . . in the victories it has had over the Turks in these years, where she was to be
found animating the Catholic armies with interior and efficacious help, and, at the
same time, here describing the state of the battles and the course of the victories!31

Apocalipsis (Mexico City, 1648). References are to Testimonios Históricos Guadalupanos, ed. Ernesto
de la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro de Anda (Mexico City, 1982), 211–33.
29
Testimonios, 162–4, 211–33.
30
Alonso Ramos, Prodigios de la omnipotencia y milagros de la gracia en la vida de la venerable sierva de
Dios, Catherina de San Joan, natural de Gran Mogor, difunta en esta imperial ciudad de la Puebla de
los Ángeles en la Nueva España, 3 vols. (Puebla, 1689; Mexico City, 1690, 1692), vol. iii, 86–9, 111.
31
Ibid., vol. iii, 109.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 262 The world of the Baroque
And yet, the woman to whom such extraordinary spiritual powers were
ascribed had arrived in Puebla as a slave at the age of ten or twelve,
imported from the Philippines and hence called china, a generic term for
all those sent from those islands. She had been the property of a well-
known citizen, Miguel de Sosa, for whom she worked in household tasks.
After his death, Caterina passed into the possession of Pedro Suárez, a
priest who, in 1626, made her marry another slave called Domingo, also
described as a chino, in the hope that, with his help, Caterina would
manage a school for girls. Determined to remain a virgin, however,
Caterina repulsed all the advances of ‘the coarse and dirty Domingo’
and was later liberated from slavery by a benefactor for the sum of eighty
pesos.32
The contrast between Caterina’s humble beginnings and the public
splendour of her funeral is of such magnitude that it can only be explained
by a wide-ranging study of the fervid religiosity of the city of Puebla in the
seventeenth century. Here we can only offer a report of what was written
by Alonso Ramos, a Jesuit from Old Castile who had acted as Caterina’s
sole confessor since 1673. If he was able to publish three volumes of her
biography, it was because the enterprise was supported and in part funded
by the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, by the city
council and by leading Jesuits. Indeed, the first volume was handsomely
endorsed by a justificatory letter from Antonio Núñez de Miranda, who
had also for a time acted as Caterina’s confessor and who was described as
‘the primary doctor and universal master of these kingdoms’. In exultant
strain, Núñez de Miranda marvelled that ‘this happy century’ should have
been so ‘truly blessed with extraordinary favours and the wonderful
sanctity of so many and such singular women who have flourished in all
virtue’. There had been comparable women in the past, but to see ‘so
many and of such virtue all together’ and whose ‘spirits are all occupied in
ecstatic and joyful admiration of the divine prodigies’ was a marvel for
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

which he could find no precedent. To find comparable cases, he cited the

lives of any number of holy nuns and beatas, starting with the Dominican
St Catherine of Siena and the Carmelite St Teresa of Avila, but he went
on to observe that ‘in this happy century’, some heads might feel drowned
‘in the midst of an ocean of prodigies, in a high sea of visions, revelations,
prophecies and extraordinary divine favours’. To explain how all this had
been made possible, Núñez de Miranda invoked the theological ‘suppos-
ition’ that Caterina had been predestined by God for a life of heroic
32
Ibid., vol. i, 11, 25–9, 123–9.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 263
sanctity. His answer to why God had chosen a pagan china was simple and
categorical: God had wanted to; as ‘absolute and independent Lord’ of all
creation he could impose His will. Hence, every one of her confessors,
himself included, had attested to Caterina’s holiness, simplicity, prudence
and obedience.33
After consulting with Núñez de Miranda, whom he called ‘my father
and master’, and warning his readers not to offer cult or prayers to
Caterina until Rome had deigned to raise her to the altars, Ramos set
off to tell the story of her extraordinary life. He had relatively little to say
about her early years, having only acted as her confessor since 1673, and
largely restricted himself to what she had told him. She claimed she was of
royal descent in India in the empire of the Great Moghul (gran Mogor),
but had been seized by pirates and sold as a slave in Cochin (Kochi),
where she was first instructed in Christianity. In her early years she was ‘of
rare beauty; her colour more white than dark, her hair more silvery than
blond, the forehead wide, the eyes lively’. As she grew older, however, she
came to resemble more ‘a nut-brown Indian of those burnt by the sun in
the West, than the white and beautiful Orientals of the confines of
Arabia’. It is perhaps not surprising that what most attracted Ramos’s
attention was the period after Caterina was liberated from slavery, when
she was taken in by Hipólito del Castillo de Altra, a leading citizen of
Puebla who, at her own request, gave her a room next to the stables, from
which she could easily walk to the nearby church of Espı́ritu Santo.34 By
the 1640s she seemed already to have acquired a widespread reputation for
sanctity, having been befriended by the Venerable Mother Marı́a de Jesús,
a holy nun from the Conceptionist convent, who warned her of the
sufferings that awaited her, as well as earning the admiration of none
other than Bishop Palafox himself. Allegedly, he would each day send her
‘a small plate of food from his table that this poor slave might eat’ and, on
learning that she wanted to make an arduous pilgrimage to the sanctuary
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

of Our Lady of Cosamaloapan,35 paid in full for the cost of the journey.36
What attracted her Jesuit confessors in the first place was her
asceticism – she ate very little, wore three cilices around her limbs and

33
Ibid., vol. i, letter of Antonio Núñez de Miranda (unpaginated).
34
Ibid., vol. i, 4–12, 111, 123; vol. ii, 1–2.
35
The decision to undertake this long journey – Cosamaloapan is located on the plains of Sotavento
in the central zone of the modern state of Veracruz, about 240 km from Jalapa – was presumably
taken in consultation with Sor Marı́a de Jesús, since the place is famous for its yearly celebration in
honour of Our Lady of Concepción.
36
Ramos, Prodigios, vol. i, 78; vol. ii, 64.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 264 The world of the Baroque
body and daily administered a ‘discipline of thirty-nine blows’ – and her
capacity for prayer – each day she recited all fifteen mysteries of the rosary
three times over. Having been largely restricted by her household chores
while she was a slave, it was only after her liberation that she began to
attend Mass daily. Her early confessors were divided about how often she
should receive the Eucharist, one ordering her to take the host only every
eighth day. It was not until Ramos became her spiritual director that she
was encouraged to go to communion every day, for which she was hugely
grateful, declaring that one communion was worth a hundred masses or a
hundred sermons. She was devoted to Christ the Nazarene – that is,
Christ in his Passion – and she hung a small plaque of this image from
her neck so that it was close to her heart. Additionally, she prayed to the
images of the Virgin Mary found in the church of Espı́ritu Santo,
especially those of Our Lady of Populo, Our Lady of Loreto and Our
Lady of the Rosary, and to an image that had been sent from Rome by
St Francis Borgia. On her visits to the cathedral, which became more
frequent in later years, she would pray to the images of Our Lady of
Solitude and Our Lady la Antigua. ‘The Queen of Heaven so esteemed
these visits,’ wrote her biographer, ‘that she manifested herself in the two
images as if they were alive and had familiar dealings and heavenly
conversation with this holy child’. Her humility was displayed when she
referred to herself as ‘a little dog in the house of St Ignatius’ and, more
strongly, ‘an old shoe buried for a long time in a dung heap’. She never
smiled and chose not to frequent the company of other pious women.37
Where Caterina distinguished herself, at least in the eyes of her confes-
sors, was in the ‘terrible abandonment’ that she experienced. When asked
how she was, she replied: ‘How am I to carry on with this constant
dryness, the abandonment and this continuous anguish of death?’ To be
sure, at times she experienced great relief when Christ appeared to her, so
that ‘she threw herself down to kiss his feet and his sacred wounds and
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

then, on embracing his sacred body, she felt an abyss of joy and an
inexplicable feeling of consolation’. On another occasion, the Virgin
Mary appeared and fed her with milk from her breasts. But for some
ten or twelve years she felt utterly deserted, imagining that all such
consolations were illusory and mere fantasies, so that she lived ‘in a dark
night’ and ‘in this solitude of her beloved’. During these long years ‘the
day was a dark night and the night was a hell of multiple afflictions,
finding herself without God’. Nor were there wanting confessors who
37
Ibid., vol. i, 38–44, 66–70, 122; vol. ii, 4, 36–7, 86–9.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 265
condemned ‘her visions and revelations as illusions’, if not the work of the
devil. Like Christ at Gethsemane, she drank the chalice of bitterness.38
Once this long period of dryness had passed, she again found herself
floating on ‘an ocean of delights’, dwelling in communion with God,
explaining what this meant in these terms:
From that continuous presence of the Lord, as I have explained on other
occasions, a sovereign light comes to me and takes possession of me, so that
my soul is bathed and penetrated by this extraordinary gift that I see represented
without form, image or figure, the Divinity with its attributes, perfections,
mysteries, truths of Our Holy Faith and other divine things, revealed to my soul
in such a real and extraordinary way that all my nature is perturbed and changed
in ease and joy by all the superior powers of the spirit.39
For her confessor and biographer, in these utterances and reported experi-
ences, Caterina clearly demonstrated that she had reached the very height
of Christian contemplation and achieved union with the Godhead with-
out the distortion caused by the imagination and its pictures. Citing
St John Cassian, the great fourth-century master of the contemplative
life, he concluded that ‘divine contemplation and quiet prayer that unites
us to God is the sole purpose of religious exercises’.40
To concentrate unduly on these contemplative transformations, worthy
of St John of the Cross, would run the risk of misrepresenting the tone
and bias of Ramos’s hagiography, where Caterina’s persecutions by innu-
merable kinds of devil since her childhood are recounted in exquisite
detail. Her demons took the shape of ‘asps, basilisks, vipers and snakes,
lizards and filthy toads’, not to mention rats, fleas and other vermin. On
one occasion, Caterina was threatened by a dragon with seven heads; on
another, she was tempted sorely by the spectacle of two handsome men
engaged in lascivious acts. By and large, she was safe from demonic attack
when in church, but suffered almost immediate assault on entering her
room. During the night hours, ‘this virile amazon of Jesus’ fought
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

spiritual battles against demons by means of holy water, a cross, relics

and by calling upon holy images and angels for help. Once, when she
begged help from the Queen of Heaven, naming the images of her
different advocations, these self-same images of the Virgin came to her
room, ‘entering like a procession of shining stars’. On another night, an
army of angels arrived led by ‘their brave captain leader, St Michael’, and
routed her enemies with their bright swords. Then, in a vision that took

38 39 40
Ibid., vol. ii, 21–7, 66–70. Ibid., vol. iii, 14, 71–2. Ibid.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 266 The world of the Baroque
place in May 1679, with the aid of a ‘sovereign light’ she learnt that a great
council of devils had met to plot against her and ‘against all the creatures
redeemed by the blood of Christ’, but thanks to heavenly assistance she
won a great victory over ‘the forces of the powers of the shadowy abyss’.41
Theologically speaking, the most singular feature of Ramos’s narrative
was the assertion that Christ had given Caterina the power to rescue souls
from the fires of purgatory. In spirit she had even visited hell, but was unable
to halt the inexorable infliction of divine justice there. In a vision of 1677,
however, she successfully pleaded with her ‘divine husband’ who said to her:
‘Take the blood of my wounds and spread it over the world, since I have
made you the dispenser of my blood’. As a result, Caterina became ‘a fisher
of souls’ and, on entering Purgatory, saved ‘innumerable souls’, among them
Chinese, Japanese and Indians. When Christ asked her, ‘How many souls do
you want to take from Purgatory?’ she replied: ‘Millions’. Sure enough, in
December 1680 she had a vision in which for seven hours she saw souls
leaving that place of punishment. In this context, it is perhaps only to be
expected that she should have seen her Jesuit father confessors all safely
ensconced in heaven, albeit at times after a short stay in Purgatory. Indeed,
she was convinced that all Jesuits would find their way to Paradise.42
Even on a mundane plane, Ramos attributed extraordinary powers of
foresight and intervention to Caterina, insisting that, like the Patriarch
Jacob wrestling at the Jabbok,43 she could fight with angels. He com-
mented that readers who were not expert ‘in the ways and hidden paths of
the spirit’ might not fully understand that Caterina’s soul
took itself out of her body, in order to do battle with the wild beasts; nor did she
rely on her bodily and material arms to exert and prove the strength of her
courage with huge and evil angels: because contemplative souls contrive and
sustain these and similar combats in idea, relying (even when their bodies are
immobile and obstructed) on their own faculties as if their material and bodily
members really and truly helped them.
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Here then was a doctrine of spiritual levitation in which the soul flew free
from the terrestrial bonds of the flesh and, like a ‘royal eagle’, could soar
above the clouds and across the world. Moreover, Ramos insisted that,
even when dreaming, the soul does not cease to work:
the soul meditates, reasons, talks, acts, struggles and conquers. Without leaving
the body, it goes flying by land and by sea in order to search for a friend with

41 42
Ibid., vol. i, 75–8, 81, 117; vol. ii, 98–108. Ibid., vol. iii, 36–9, 60–3, 108.
43
See Genesis 32:22–32.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 267
whom to find consolation, or for an enemy in order to fence and force his arms.
She rejoices, she speeds forth, she undertakes arduous enterprises and affairs and,
although not able to use the members of the body, relies upon her own powers to
achieve her desires, so that in the field of her idea she does everything as if it really
should happen or as if the body itself should help her.44
In the light of such powers, it comes as no surprise that Ramos should have
claimed that Caterina joined with the Virgin Mary to help save a Spanish
fleet from a hurricane, or that in the Caribbean, which was then under siege
from the attacks of French and English pirates, she should have acted as a
‘universal angel’, helping Spanish commanders to defeat their foes. She
prayed for ‘the Catholic Monarchy’ in its battles in Flanders in 1672, and in
vision saw Philip IV as a great eagle attacked by hawks. She was much
concerned with the rebellion in New Mexico in 1680 and sought to help
the Jesuit missions in the North. More extraordinarily, on one occasion she
travelled to Asia, saw the face of the emperor of China and discerned that
the emperor of Japan was about to convert to Catholicism and become the
ally of the Catholic king.45 All these and other marvels, no doubt confided
by Caterina, were recorded by her faithful chronicler.
Although Caterina spoke with God ‘asleep or awake’, in her raptures
and ecstasy she was so caught up in the love of God that she experienced
‘sovereign abstractions, through participation in the attributes of that
divine Lord’. For all that, when asked to describe the Almighty, she
turned to pictorial art for inspiration: ‘I have also seen’, she claimed,
all three Persons together and joined in a union of identity with the being of God,
Triune and One, and I do not know how to explain it to you save by referring to
the common painting of a body with three faces all the same. Apart from this,
I have seen a great eye, more resplendent than the sun that gives us light, that
accompanied me continuously for a long time, that always watched me, and
I understood that it was the very divinity and incomprehensible being of God.46
Here, as in the case of the Virgin Mary or of Christ, Caterina left a vivid
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

testimony of the prodigiously fertile visual imagery that the churches and
sacred spaces of the Hispanic Baroque could generate in the minds of
their devotees.
As we have seen, Caterina was buried in magnificent splendour and her
biography was funded by the Bishop of Puebla and the City Council, its
three volumes commended by such eminent Jesuits as Antonio Núñez de

44 45
Ramos, Prodigios, vol. ii, 109–10. Ibid., vol. ii, 1, 115–24, 157–60.
46
Ibid., vol. ii, 96–7.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 268 The world of the Baroque
Miranda and José Vidal de Figueroa. Nevertheless, on 24 December 1696
the Mexican Inquisition condemned the work of Antonio Ramos for
containing ‘useless and untrue revelations, visions and apparitions, full
of contradictions and improper comparisons’ and for advancing ‘daring
and dangerous doctrines, contrary to the sense of the doctors and the
practice of the Universal Church without more foundation than the
frivolous credulity of the author’. Nor was it easy to deny the appropri-
ateness of the inquisitorial condemnation after Ramos himself was
accused of alcoholism and, worse, when removed from his post as Rector
of the college of Espı́ritu Santo, he fell into a rage and sought to kill his
successor, wounding those who tried to restrain him. Thereafter, he was
kept in seclusion and died an unknown death.47

All Jesuits were committed to a life of spiritual combat by their initiation

rite, The Spiritual Exercises, in which St Ignatius of Loyola called upon them
to enlist in the service of Christ, the Lord of the universe, in much the same
spirit as a loyal subject might follow his king into battle against the infidel.
He then enjoined them to reflect on the long, obscure life of Christ at
Nazareth, before picturing in their mind’s eye ‘a vast plain embracing the
whole region of Jerusalem, where the supreme Captain-General of the good
is Christ our Lord, and another plain, in the region of Babylon, where the
chief of the enemy is Lucifer’. In this war between two standards, Satan
despatched innumerable armies of demons to deprave and subvert every
nation on earth, whereas Christ relied on His apostles and disciples to
preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. At stake here were the opposing
values of riches, honour and pride, on the one hand, and poverty, shame
and humility on the other. The opposition was clearly reminiscent of
St Augustine’s vision of the Two Cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, engaged
in cosmic conflict across the ages; but in St Ignatius’s mind, this now went
hand in hand with insistent exhortations in which he urged Jesuits to
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

sustain the devotional practices of medieval Catholicism, encouraging

veneration of saints’ relics, candles and holy images, the frequent hearing
of Mass, the reception of communion and the practice of pilgrimage.48
In 1554, which is to say, two years before his death, St Ignatius accepted
the invitation of Pope Julius III to establish a college at Loreto, where

47
See Manuel Ramos Medina, ‘Estudio introductorio’ of the facsimile edition of Ramos Los
prodigios, 3 vols. (Mexico City, 2004).
48
See his ‘Rules for Thinking with the Church’, The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, trans.
W. H. Longridge (London, 1919), 100–8, 198–9.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 269
eventually some forty Jesuits were assigned to officiate as a second choir in
the basilica that housed the Santa Casa and to assist at the confessionals.
Henceforth, the Society was to be active in promoting devotion to Our
Lady of Loreto and the Holy House in Europe and America.49 In his
treatise on the devotion, the Mexican Jesuit Francisco de Florencia
emphasised that this was the humble house where Mary was born and
brought up, where Christ was conceived and where he grew to be a man.
After his death and resurrection, it had been there that St Peter, together
with the other apostles, had celebrated the first Mass of the Church, and it
had been none other than St Luke who had sculpted the image of the
Virgin and child. Florencia himself had spent three days at Loreto in 1670,
and he recalled that, when he entered the holy chamber to say mass, he
felt as if he had been
struck dumb so that, being before this altar which St Peter had consecrated, on
starting the Introit, for a moment I could not utter a word nor contain my tears;
my throat felt knotted and both my body and soul were filled with a sweet
dread.50
By then, the basilica was thronged with pilgrims arriving from across
Catholic Europe in hope of consolation and cure of their ills. After this
visit, Florencia encouraged two Italian Jesuits to undertake mission work
in Mexico, becoming known there as Juan Marı́a Salvatierra and Juan
Bautista Zappa. It was thanks to their arrival and devotion that the Society
in New Spain built replica chapels of the Holy House in their college of
San Gregorio in Mexico City and in the Jesuit novitiate at Tepotzotlán,
besides proclaiming the Italian Virgin as patron of the missions in
California.51
Loreto was by no means the only focus of Florencia’s devotion to the
Mother of Christ. In a treatise published in 1688 he also provided the most
detailed, albeit the most confused, account of the cult of Our Lady of
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Guadalupe in Mexico, whose well-known image he defined as an

Immaculate Conception – a devotion widely acclaimed in the Hispanic
world. He then argued that, since it had been the Archangel Gabriel
who first visited Mary in Nazareth, at the Annunciation, it was pointedly
appropriate that he should also figure as the painter of Mary at

49
Francisco de Florencia, La casa peregrina, solar ilustre, en que nació la reina de los ángeles . . . la casa
de Nazareth, hoy de Loreto . . . (Mexico City, 1689), 55.
50
Ibid., 75.
51
Miguel Venegas, Vida y virtudes del V. P. Juan Bautista Zappa de la Compañı́a de Jesús (Barcelona,
1754), 30–1, 79–80.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 270 The world of the Baroque
Guadalupe, where the Virgin was in fact ‘reborn through her image in this
flowery Christendom, in her new Nazareth and as Patron of the Indies’.
Indeed, St Gabriel had inserted himself in the image as the supporting
angel, not only as a signature, but also to indicate that he was ‘the
Guardian Angel of Imperial Mexico . . . the agent of the Co-Redeemer
of the New World’.52
If Florencia was later saluted as ‘the celebrated historian of the chief
images of Our Lady that are venerated in this kingdom’, it was because he
also wrote about Our Lady of los Remedios and about two popular
Marian sanctuaries in New Galicia, a treatise published in 1694 tracing
the emergence of devotion to the images of Our Lady of Zapopan, just
outside the city of Guadalajara, and Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos in
Jalostitlán. Interestingly, in this work Florencia readily accepted the
revelation of the Blessed Amadeus of Portugal and asserted that the Virgin
Mary was truly present in her miraculous images. To support this asser-
tion, Florencia cited the contemporary Franciscan chronicle of Baltazar de
Medina, published in 1682, where the author noted that St Peter of
Alcántara had defended the orthodoxy of the Apocalipsis Nova. In Flor-
encia’s account of the images of New Galicia, he cited the eighth ‘rapture’
of the Blessed Amadeus amidst some intriguing Mexican interpolations:
Know you my children, said the Lady, that through the grace of my Lord Jesus
Christ I shall also be with you bodily until the end of the world; not in the
Sacrament of the Altar, as is my Son, since that is neither convenient nor decent,
but in my images of brush (as in that of Guadalupe of Mexico) or of sculpture
(as are those of San Juan, that of Zapopan, that of Los Remedios of Mexico, and
others) and then you shall know that I am in them when you see that some
miracles are made through them.53
In this revelation the Virgin is thus reported as announcing that she will
be present in certain images, much in the same way as Christ was present
in the Eucharist. Since her presence was demonstrated by the performance
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

of miracles, however, she was obviously not present in all her representa-
tions, but only in those that attracted pilgrimage and widespread devo-
tion. It was these miraculous ‘cult’ images that were destined to endure
until the end of the world.

52
Francisco de Florencia, La Estrella del Norte de México. Historia de la milagrosa imagen de Marı́a
Stma. de Guadalupe (Mexico City, 1688), 591–604.
53
Francisco de Florencia, Origen de los dos célebres santuarios de la Nueva Galicia, obispado de
Guadalajara en la América Septentrional, 3rd edn (Mexico City, 1766), 150. See also Baltazar de
Medina, Crónica de la santa provincia de San Diego de México de religiosos de N. S. P. Francisco de la
Nueva España (Mexico City, 1682), 123.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 271
With his reputation as a chronicler assured, it was appropriate that
Florencia should have been presented with a manuscript, written in 1643
by Pedro Salmerón for Bishop Palafox, about the apparition of St Michael
the Archangel to an Indian from the district of Santa Marı́a Nativitas, in the
modern state of Tlaxcala, called Diego Lázaro de San Francisco. In a work on
the topic published in 1692, Florencia related how St Michael had appeared
in 1632 to alert Lázaro about the existence of ‘a spring of miraculous water for
an illness’. When the Indian later fell ill, the archangel appeared to him in his
hut, took him to the spring and there cured him, saying: ‘Those who come
here with a living faith and sorrow for their sins will obtain a remedy for their
toil and their necessities with the water and earth of this spring.’ A devotion
to St Michael flourished quickly and was already a well-known place of
pilgrimage by the time Salmerón arrived to conduct an inspection. Quick to
promote local devotions, Bishop Palafox had commanded a church to be
built on the site and had installed a chaplain. The waters of the spring had
been channelled into a well situated in the courtyard of the church and the
figure of St Michael, depicted with a staff and plume rather than the more
familiar sword, had been placed in the central retablo of the chapel. By 1680,
some 12,000 pilgrims attended the annual feast day of the Archangel.54
Further evidence of the growing devotion to angels in New Spain was
demonstrated by the publication of a treatise on the Seven Angels by the
Spanish Jesuit missionary Andrés Serrano in 1699. The author frankly
admitted that only the names of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael were
‘certain and canonical, even if many Church Fathers also accepted Uriel,
since his name occurs in the fourth book of Esdras. In effect, the
remaining names of the archangels derived from the fifth ‘rapture’ of
the Blessed Amadeus, whom Serrano referred to as ‘a man illustrious in
sanctity, miracles and prophecies’. But evidently, the Jesuit had not read
the Apocalipsis Nova since he relied on his co-religionist, the Flemish
Jesuit Cornelissen van den Steen, better known as Cornelius a Lapide
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

(1567–1637) who, in his commentary on the Apocalypse, had declared that

he had seen the names of the seven archangels, revealed by Amadeus, in
the church of St Mary of the Angels in Rome.
The notion of the seven principal angels derives from the Apocalypse
and to some degree also from the Book of Tobit, where Raphael had
declared himself to be ‘one of the seven’ who assisted at the throne of the

54
Francisco de Florencia, Narración de la maravillosa aparición que hizo el Arcángel San Miguel a
Diego Lázaro de San Francisco, indio feligrés del pueblo de San Bernardo, de la jurisdicción de Santa
Marı́a de Nativitas (Seville, 1692), 7–9, 27–8, 127.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 272 The world of the Baroque
Almighty.55 Serrano resolved the discrepancy between the relatively lowly
rank of the archangels in the heavenly choirs of Pseudo-Dionysius by
asserting that these celestial princes were ‘seraphim in status, archangels in
name, angels as messengers and, in dignity, superior to all, like the stars of
the first magnitude’.56 For all that, he saluted St Michael as ‘captain-
general of the armies of God’ and ‘high priest of heaven and vicar of
Christ’. As for St Raphael, he acclaimed him as the special patron of the
Jesuits, whose mission was ‘to travel across the world and spread the glory
of God among the most barbarous nations’.57

From the 1640s onwards the creole society of New Spain was immersed in a
cycle of Catholic devotion that reached its apogee in what has been called
the Guadalupan Moment of the 1740s and 1750s, when Our Lady of
Guadalupe was acclaimed Principal and Universal Patron of all kingdoms
in New Spain. In Zodiaco mariano (1755) originally written by the Jesuit
Francisco Florencia, but greatly revised in the eighteenth century by his
learned fellow Jesuit Juan Antonio de Oviedo, over a hundred ‘miraculous’
images of Mary were described and characterised as constituting a galaxy of
stars circling the moon that was Guadalupe.58 Throughout this period, new
convents of nuns were opened, the Jesuits grew in numbers, wealth and
influence, and an entire new generation of Franciscan missionaries arrived.
It was an age that never failed to capture the imagination of even the least
likely visitors, as we can attest from the testimonies of the likes of Giovanni
Francesco Gemelli Careri and Francisco de Alforjı́n.59 Its extravagant claims
and excesses are too easy to dismiss, as already at the time even the Inqui-
sition was prone to do. But it is important not to lose sight of the extraor-
dinary fertility of the age and of its undoubted intellectual solidity in any
attempt to calibrate the cultural character of a world that creoles often
referred to as ‘an American paradise’. In the eloquent words of Edmundo
O’Gorman, this was an epoch
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

in which the rapture of a nun, the miraculous cure of a dying man, the
repentance of the condemned, or the divinations of a pious woman, are much
more news than the rise in the price of employment or the imposition of an

55 56
Tobit 12:15; cf. Apocalypse 8:2. Serrano, Los siete prı́ncipes, 10–15, 256–8.
57
Ibid., 278, 200–4.
58
Francisco de Florencia, Zodiaco mariano, ed. and augmented by Juan Antonio de Oviedo (Mexico
City, 1755); see the facsimile edn with introduction by Antonio Rubial Garcı́a (Mexico City, 1995).
59
See the descriptions of churches, convents, colleges and the profusion of Baroque images in
Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Viaje a la Nueva España, ed. Francisca Perajo (Mexico City,
1976), and Francisco de Alforjı́n, Diario del viaje que hizo en la América (Mexico City, 1964).

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.
 Psychomachia Indiana 273
excise duty; an epoch in which journeys to the depths of the soul are of more
importance than the expeditions to California or the Philippines; an epoch, in
sum, for which the transition from the regime of the encomienda to that of the
latifundia turns out to be a contingent worry compared to the ontological anxiety
of conquering its own being in history.60
In these words, perhaps, we encounter some explanation of why the
leading Jesuits of the late seventeenth century should have paid so much
attention to the visions of Caterina de San Juan. Even if the Inquisition
might question many of the miraculous details of her hagiography, there
was no doubt about her piety in the minds of most of her contemporaries.
Her trials at the hands of demons were a common feature of Baroque
spirituality, and the isolation of her biographer and his descent into
violent and destructive despair were symptomatic of precisely the spiritual
conflict that St Ignatius himself had so vividly encouraged his Jesuit
followers to engage in. Caterina de San Juan might have won her fight
against demons in their various forms, but Ramos’s own decline was a
none-too-gentle reminder of how vulnerable even those seemingly best
equipped actually were against the snares of the enemy. All the same, the
firm belief that the devil had been soundly defeated by the angelic militia
captained by St Michael was a constant source of reassurance. In every
respect, therefore, the world of Caterina de San Juan, like that of the
rest of her Spanish American contemporaries, is destined to remain
shrouded in mystery whenever it is severed from the myriad of angelic
and demonic forces that figured so prominently in the dominant theology
of their epoch.

60
Meditaciones sobre el criollismo (Mexico City, 1970), 27.
Copyright © 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Cervantes, F., & Redden, A. (Eds.). (2013). Angels, demons and the new world. Cambridge University Press.
Created from fredonia-ebooks on 2022-04-20 16:20:03.