diately after landing in the New World, scholars, priests,
scribes, and soldiers began describing and assimilating the
Indians’ peculiar and, to them, outlandish practices for their
Old World sponsors and public. The confrontation between
these early explorer-chroniclers and their indigenous subjects
established the basis of a religious opposition between Chris-
tian reformer and “pagan” Indian; and it is no exaggeration
to say that these early accounts set the stage for all later schol-
arly and scientific studies of the continent’s diverse religious
traditions.
All early accounts of religion were driven by the practi-
cal needs of empire. For the Spaniards, the political impor-
tance of understanding and analyzing native religious belief
first arose through their encounters with the powerful Inca
state of highland Peru. Chroniclers such as Juan de Betanzos
(1551), Pedro Cieza de León (1553), and Cristóbal de Moli-
na (1572) among others provided vivid accounts of imperial
religion and Inca state mythologies. Two concerns tempered
their descriptions and choice of subject matter: the spectacle
of Inca rituals and the parallels they imagined to exist be-
tween their Christian millenarian and apostolic traditions
and the natives’ own beliefs in a “creator god” whose prophe-
sized return coincided with—and thus facilitated—the ini-
tial Spanish conquests in Peru. Similar messianic beliefs
among the Tupi-Guaraní of eastern Brazil attracted the at-
tention of the explorers Hans von Staden (1557) and Anto-
nie Knivet (1591). Their writings provide fascinating ac-
counts of Tupi religion as part of an argument intended to
prove the presence of the Christian apostle Thomas in South
America long before its sixteenth-century “discovery.” Such
early accounts inevitably strike the modern-day reader as eth-
nocentric. The tone of these writings is understandable,
however, since their purpose was to make sense of the new
cultures and peoples they met within the historical and con-
ceptual framework provided by the Bible. Within this frame-
work, there was only one “religion” and one true God. All
other belief systems, including those encountered in the
Americas, were judged as pagan. For some early theologians,
the pagan practices of the South Americans placed them well
outside the domain of the human. Others, however, believed
the Americans were humans who had once known the true
God and then somehow fallen from grace or were innocents
with an intuitive knowledge of God. Early accounts of reli-
gious practices were driven by this desire to uncover evidence
of the Indians’ prior evangelization or intuitive knowledge
of God. Catholic writers thus often interpreted the indige-
nous practices they observed by comparing them to such fa-
miliar Catholic practices as confession. In what is perhaps the
most sympathetic account of a native religion, the Calvinist
Jean de Léry made sense of the religious practices of the Bra-
zilian Tupinambá Indians by comparing their ritual canni-
balism to the Catholic Communion, in which Christians
partook of the body and blood of Christ. De Léry’s account
suggests the extent to which all early inquiries into South
American religions were inevitably colored by the religious
and political lines drawn within Europe itself by the Refor-
mation.
For Iberians, however, it was the Reconquista or Libera-
tion of Catholic Spain from Moorish rule that lent the study
of religion an urgent, practical tone. If Indian souls were to
be recruited to the ends of the “one true religion,” it was nec-
essary to isolate and eradicate those aspects of the indigenous
religions that stood in the way of conversion. Priests had to
be instructed, catechisms written, and punishments devised
for specific religious offenses. The ensuing campaigns to ex-
tirpate idolatries produced the first true studies of religion
in the Andean highlands. Combining knowledge of Chris-
tian doctrine and missionary zeal with an increasing practical
familiarity with indigenous life, theologians and priests such
as José de Acosta (1590), José de Arriaga (1621), Cristóbal
de Albornóz (c. 1600), and Francisco de Ávila (1608) set out
to define in a rigorous and scholarly way the parameters of
indigenous religion.
A few indigenous and mestizo writers sought to vindi-
cate their culture and religion from the attacks of these Cath-
olic campaigners, in the process contributing greatly to the
historical study of Andean religion. Among the most inter-
esting of the indigenous chronicles is an eleven-hundred-
page letter to the king of Spain written between 1584 and
1614 by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, a native of Ayacu-
cho, Peru, who had worked with the extirpation campaigns.
Other native accounts include the chronicle of Juan de San-
tacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua (c. 1613) and the
monumental History of the Incas (1609), written by the half-
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. These native writers defended the
goals but not the cruel methods, of Christian conversion and
defended many native beliefs and practices as more just and
rational than the abuses of the Spanish colonizers.
Other chronicles record European reactions to religions
of the Amazonian lowlands; these include among others the
travel accounts of Claude d’Abbeville (1614) and Gaspar de
Carvajal, a priest who accompanied the first exploratory voy-
age up the Amazon River system in 1542. But if what the
Europeans understood by “religion”—that is, hierarchies,
priests, images, and processions—fit in well with what they
found in the Andean state systems, it differed markedly from
the less-institutionalized religions of the tropical forest re-
gion. Accounts of lowland religions were accordingly
couched in an exaggerated language stressing atrocity, pagan-
ism, and cannibalism. Such emphases had more to do with
prevailing European mythologies than with the actual reli-
gious beliefs of tropical forest peoples.
This early literature on Andean religion provided irre-
placeable data about ritual, dances, offerings, sacrifices, be-
liefs, and gods now no longer in force—including, in the case
of Guamán Poma’s letter, a sequence of drawings depicting
indigenous costume and ritual and, in the chronicle of Fran-
cisco de Ávila, a complete mythology transcribed in Que-
chua, the native language. But these colonial writings also
provided a powerful precedent for religious study thereafter.SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY 8593