Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 12, No.

1, 2003

En su tierra lo aprendio: An African

Curanderos Defense before the Cartagena
Inquisition
Kathryn Joy McKnight
University of New Mexico

A relacion or summary report sent to Spain in 1652 from the Inquisition

Tribunal in Cartagena de Indias records that a man named Mateo, a black slave
of the Arara caste, was brought before the Holy Office under suspicion of
sorcery and pact with the devil (Cartagena de Indias, Libro 1021, fol. 304v).
Sixteen witnesses have testified to Mateo Araras1 use of a small grass object for
purposes of divination. The object is said to yield information to him by opening
or closing in response to his questions. One witness reports that Mateo placed
on the ground a cuernezuelo, an instrument made of the tip of an animal horn,
and spoke to it in another apparent invocation of supernatural powers, at which
point the object stood itself on end. The word used in the report to name Mateo
as a suspect of working evil is mohan, defined in the same text as hechicero y
maestro de ellos, porque mediante palabras y yerbas por pacto con el demonio
obran [sorcerer and teacher of sorcery, because they work through a pact with
the devil using words and herbs].
Neither the suspects identity as a black slave nor his alleged crime is unusual
among the records of trials that the Holy Office held in seventeenth-century
Cartagena. In a recent publication of transcribed documents, Colombian histori-
ans have identified over 400 individuals who were denounced, accused, impris-
oned or punished by the Cartagena Inquisition in the fifty years between 1610
and 1660 (Splendiani et al. 1997). Of these individuals, 16 percent are catego-
rized in the documents as negro and 11 percent as slaves (vol. 4, app. figs. 3,
4 and 6). About 30 percent of all the accused, regardless of race, were tried for
witchcraft or sorcerybrujera or hechicera. What is unusual in the account of
Mateo Araras trial are the particular narrative strategies by which this African
slave tells his story in response to the interrogation, and the specificity of the
symbols and transculturation with which he represents himself. After trying
unsuccessfully to paint a self-portrait beyond reproach for the dogmatic eyes of
the inquisitors, Mateo appears to redefine Christian subjectivity in a transcultur-
ation that affirms those very African cultural religious beliefs and practices that
the Church labeled as diabolical.
The present paper is part of a larger project to restore pre-nineteenth-century
Afro-Hispanic voices to the broad discursive fields that focus our attention in
contemporary colonial literary or discourse studies.2 Afro-Americans played
vital roles in the New World, from the discovery and conquest to the construc-
tion of infrastructure, the extraction, production and transportation of wealth for
1060-9164 print/14661802 online/03/010063-22 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of CLAR
DOI: 10.1080/1060916032000084767
 KATHRYN JOY MCKNIGHT

Spanish colonizers and the defense of Spaniards and Creoles against piracy. If
Afro-Americans did not attain a significant place among the ranks of colonial
intellectuals and writers, they did occupy the colonial imagination. Images that
colonizers created of blacks preyed constantly on the fears of the ruling class, as
the numbers of Afro-Americans exceeded those of Spanish descent and as slaves
ran away, launched armed attacks on travelers and estates and engaged in
numerous rebellions.3 These fears and realized threats motivated a great quantity
of discourse, but more often on the pages of legal statutes and official reports to
Spain than in chronicles, histories, poetry and theater. Still, representations of
Afro-Americans appear, if briefly, in the texts of such important writers as
Bartolome de las Casas ([1559] 1986), Guaman Poma de Ayala ([1615/16]
1980), Rodrguez Freyle ([1638] 1979), Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz ([1676] 1994)
and Siguenza y Gongora ([1692] 1984), while the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval
dedicated his extensive De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute ([1627] 1956) to what
he saw as the means to salvation for African slaves.4
How did the descendents of Africans in the Spanish colonies represent
themselves in discourse to these members of lettered societyto the colonizers?
To what extent did the oral and written interventions of Afro-Americans into the
lettered city penetrate the minds and influence the pens of its intellectuals? How
can we enrich the field of colonial studies by including their voices? While these
are the broader questions that motivate my research, I see the path toward the
answers in more modest studies of individual voices, in the examination of how
the descendants of Africans in colonial Latin America represented themselves
and colonial society through verbal discourse, particularly by telling stories
about themselves.

The Inquisition as a Platform for High-Stakes Storytelling

In his requisite three hearings before the inquisitors, Mateo Arara crafted varying
self-portraits in a series of testimonial narratives. Mateos inquisitors would
eventually use his testimony and that of witnesses to categorize and punish him
according to the type of aberration he manifested and whether his attitude
towards the Church exhibited a submissive desire for reconciliation. The sen-
tences generally handed down by the Cartagena Inquisition for witchcraft could
be as light as a reprimand and public humiliation or as severe as life imprison-
ment, including time as a galley oarsman. Those who were convicted lost their
personal possesions and often suffered 100200 lashes of the whip and tempo-
rary or permanent exile from the diocese or from the entire Nuevo Reino de
Granada.5 Caught in the secrecy of the Inquisitions process, not knowing the
exact charges he faced, Mateo de Arara must have tried to imagine the particular
content of the denunciations to determine what was at stake. How could he best
talk about himself to simultaneously satisfy the inquisitors desire for a full
confession and at the same time strive for self-preservation?
The Inquisition in the Spanish colonies constituted an arena in which opposing
groups struggled to determine individual destinies and to define how society saw
itself and its norms of acceptable behavior and belief. The Tribunal of the Holy
Office served an important role in mediating relationships between the coloniz-
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ing powers, political enemies and members of culturally subordinated groups,

developing techniques to exercise pyscho-social control over those who proved
a constant threat to colonial domination because they struggled for self-
preservation and cultural self-definition.6 These subordinated groups included
blacks and members of the mixed-race casta societymulatos, mestizos and
zambos7but not Amerindians, who had been exempted from the Inquisitions
jurisdiction since before the Cartagena tribunals 1610 inception.8 This insti-
tution dedicated to protecting a collective interestostensibly the purity of the
faith, but in real terms also the domination of the colonizers over the colo-
nizedsought to create self-disciplined subjects by defining the terms of the
conflict. If African and Amerindian beliefs and practices posed threats to
Catholic hegemony, the Tribunal took these threats and turned them back against
the provocateurs, transforming them discursively into warnings of supernatural
punishment for the aberrant individual. To defy the dominant culture by
believing in gods other than the one true Christian God meant to risk ones own
eternal damnation.
People of African descentnegros, mulatos and zambosmade up about 30
percent of those prosecuted by the Cartagena Inquisition. Their crimes against
the faith included explicit confrontational rejection of the dominant religious
culture as well as the implicit rejection of Catholic absolutism comprehended in
maintaining traditional and transculturated popular religious practices. With few
exceptions, Afro-Americans who were prosecuted by the Inquisition had blas-
phemed or renounced God or had engaged in practices the Church categorized
as hechicera (sorcery) or brujera (witchcraft). Many of the cases involving
blasphemy or reniegos (renunciation) came about when slaves cried out against
a cruel beating, either renouncing the masters belief system or attempting to win
the intervention of the Inquisition and thus gain a hearing for their complaints
against their masters (Alberro 1977, 15051).
Hechicera and brujera involve more complex relationships with Catholic
culture and directly concern the charges against Mateo de Arara. Space limita-
tions preclude a full discussion of the two terms and the phenomena they name,
but a brief distinction will help to set the stage for the discussion of Mateos
narrative defense against the charges he faces: suspicion of being a sorcerer
mohan or hechiceroand of having worked through a pact with the devil.9
Diana Luz Ceballos Gomez explains the distinction between the application of
the terms hechicera and brujera in the context of the Nuevo Reino de Granada
(1994, 8690). Hechicera is an accusation leveled at an individual; it pertains
to the use of spells and remedies for both negative and positive purposes and
often involves the use of natural materials. Under this category would fall the
widespread practices of amatory magic, to which all three matrix cultures
contributedSpanish, Amerindian and African. Brujera, on the other hand, is
a charge that identifies and stigmatizes a socially defined group. It points to sects
of witches whoat least at the level of the inquistors imaginationgather to
practice diabolical idolatry. In the New World as in the Old, this charge draws
heavily on the archetypal European witches sabbath to which witches fly after
applying hallucinogenic substances to their skin and where they engage in ritual
orgy and infanticide in the presence of a goat-devil. In the Nuevo Reino de
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Granada, the charge of brujera was specifically leveled against people of

African descent; of the 33 cases of brujera tried by the Cartagena Inquisition
between 1610 and 1650 and documented in the accounts preserved in the
Archivo Historico Nacional (Madrid), 19 involve negros, 11 mulatos, two
mestizos and one a zamba; there are no white Europeans prosecuted under this
charge (Splendiani et al. 1997, 4: Indice de reos).
Ceballos Gomez (1994) has found no cases of brujera in the Cartagena
Inquisition after 1650, and she explains this as a product of the diminished belief
in brujera on the part of Spanish and thus, too, the Spanish American
inquisitors, but also as an effect of colonizers having learned much more about
the religious and magical practices of Indians and Afro-Americans and thus
distinguishing them from European brujera. Mateo de Araras trial in 1652
postdates the last charges of brujera in Cartagena and offers a unique glimpse
into that moment of transition in the inquisitors imagining of their African
Others. In sharp contrast to the trials of the 1620s and 1630s of witches from
Cartagena, Tolu and Zaragoza, Mateo de Arara is not forced into archetypal
confessions of witchcraft and, instead, provides a fascinating glimpse into
transculturated practices that draw heavily from Africanor, specifically, West
African Araratraining. At the same time, his testimony demonstrates that he
still must respond to the inquisitors residual fears of diabolical idolatry linked
to ritual magic.
Mateos testimony speaks of African healing and ritual practices that are
generally difficult to discern in Spanish colonial records. Only three other negros
whose trials are recorded in the 16101660 accounts testify to similar practices.
Francisco Mandinga, an African-born yerbatero and herbolario,10 who needs an
interpreter in his trial because he is muy bozal (not acculturated), cures with
spells and venoms (Cartagena de Indias, Libro 1021, fols. 176r77r, 233v,
246rv). Domingo Lopez, a free black man, like Mateo, uses a cuernezuelo or
small animal horn in divination (Cartagena de Indias, Libro 1021, fols. 303r4v,
319v20r, 337r39v, 385r86r). Isabel, a black slave from Angola, uses herbs
and stones to cure and to divine, and communicates with the devil in the form
of a snake (Cartagena de Indias, Libro 1021, fols. 408r10r). Of the four cases,
all tried between 1648 and 1654, Mateos testimony gives the most detailed
picture of healing practices; he is the only one of the four to describe the
initiation ritual in which he became a healer, and his narrative strategies of
self-defense are the most complex.
There is another non-African defendant in Cartagena whose case also may
throw light on one of the charges leveled against Mateo, that of mohan, though
the case raises more questions than it answers. The famous mestizo mohan Luis
Andrea was tried in Cartega in 1614. He testified that he received his powers
from an uncle and grandfather and he used them in ritual gatherings of Indians
on the Cerro de la Popa in Cartagena, where he invoked the demon Buciraco
and healed illnesses using herbs. Virginia Gutierrez de Pineda and Patricia Vila
de Pineda identify the function of the mohan in the Nuevo Reino de Granada
with those of a shaman; the mohan was an intermediary between human beings
and the supernatural; he divined and healed; he was a leader who directed rituals,
mediated social relationships and exercised political and military power (1985,
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1326). The sacred hill called Cerro de la Popa, where Luis Andrea carried out
his activities as a mohan, is curiously associated with both runaway slaves and
Indian cults in Colombian oral traditions as announced today in Cartagena tourist
information.11 The accusation against Andrea states that he had an express pact
with the devil, worshipped him and thus was guilty of apostasy, that is of
separating himself from the Catholic Church (Cartagena, Inquisicion 1020, 3r).
While Mateo Araras testimony portrays his work of divining and healing clearly
within the concept of the shamanic mohan, there is no information to suggest
that he played a broader role of cultural leader. Yet this dual association of a
Cartagena sacred place with both Indian and African worship and with a mohan
suggests that there is more to the charge of mohan leveled against Mateo Arara
than is explicit in the relacion. Perhaps the inquisitors feared that Mateo, like
Luis Andrea before him, was involved in a leadership that fed anti-Spanish
sentiment.12
When Mateo Arara appears before the inquisitors, he must either confess
fully and throw himself submissively on the mercy of the court or he must
successfully narrate a self-portrait that negates the charges of mohan and of pact
with the devil. The latter course implies also a denial of the more general
subjectivities of heretic and apostate within which these charges are under-
stooda heretic who denies or contradicts Catholic doctrine, and an apostate
who abandons the Christian faith for an idolatrous sect. I argue, below, that
although Mateo cannot know the charges or testimony against him, he under-
stands sufficiently the cultural and social situation he facesthe exclusion of
his African practices and beliefs from Catholic orthodoxy and the Inquisitions
techniques of controlthat he undertakes a calculated response in his choices
of self-representation. His testimony deploys narrative and symbolic strategies
whose meaning speaks to self-preservation by molding a subjectivity
within Catholic beliefs in God, the Virgin Mary and the fundamental Christian
opposition of good and evil. But when pressed to the wall and shown that his
beliefs have been identified as aberrant, Mateos testimony changes, and he
affirms an identity and role founded on Arara knowledge of illness and practices
of healing.
Mateo Araras initial strategy is concealment. The information he gives during
the first hearing shows him as a good Christian and hides any African religious
Otherness. This dissimulation fails to address key elements of the denunciations
and thus does not satisfy the inquisitors. Mateos testimony at his second hearing
admits to certain aberrant practices, but frames them within Christian beliefs
and aims. His third hearing provides the most interesting symbolic narratives
of the trial, in which I propose that he redefines his oppositional practices and
beliefs to create a transculturated self, which affirms core elements of his
Arara identity, but maintains a claim for Christian acceptability. He mani-
pulates Christian signs of faithfulness, reframes African symbols and rites in
terms of a dualistic opposition between good and evil absent among African
deities and tells a richly polysemous tale of initiation as healer. The tale melds
Arara, Chibcha and Christian meanings into an ambiguous symbolism and
indirectly addresses the term mohan under which his prosecution has been
justified.
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Mediated Testimony

Inquisition trial documents provide only mediated voices of the defendants,

as their testimony is recorded by court notaries or scribes. These recorders
were instructed to use the third person in copying the testimony, but they were
also to allow the person testifying to speak freely without interruption, and
they were to write down everything he or she said, except those things that did
not relate to the trial (Valdes [1561] 1924, 412, 415; ch. 15, 32). The
faithfulness of the transcriptions, if more in content than in precise verbal
expression, is attested to by the great detail of the trial dossiers called
procesos and by the requisite ratification of each transcription by the witnesses
after hearing their testimony read. On rare occasions a colloquial expression
suggests that a scribe has recorded the exact words of a witness, especially
where the witness offers the words of another person as evidence, but
generally the relationship between the witnesss language and that of the
document is unclear.
In the case of Mateo Arara, two additional layers of mediation separate the
reader from the spoken words. Firstly, Mateos command of Spanish is
sufficiently limited that a ladino or acculturated African of his own caste acts
as interpreter. Secondly, the extant documents are relaciones or reports sent to
Spain, rather than the detailed transcriptions of the procesos. A significant part
of the archives of the Cartagena Inquisition has been lost, including many of
the procesos (Splendiani et al. 1997, 231). The absence of two important sets
of documentsthe testimonies of denunciation and the formal accusation
pose a significant obstacle to analysis of Mateos strategies. These documents
would have revealed the information the inquisitors were seeking in Mateos
confession and their working interpretation of his aberrant subjectivity.
Unfortunately, the proceso of Mateos trial has not survived either in Colom-
bia or in the Archivo Historico Nacional de Madrid, where several procesos of
Afro-Americans are preserved.13 Despite the multi-layered mediation, there
are elements of narrative structure and symbol whose internal coherence as
well as their relationships to the cultural contexts of West Africa and the
Nuevo Reino provide strong evidence and compelling detail of Mateos
strategic self-fashioning.
Mateo Arara was born in Africa. Although the denomination Arara as it
was used in the New World context does not precisely identify ethnicity or
origin, it strongly suggests that Mateo was born among the Ewe-Fon-speaking
peoples who lived in what is today Benin, possibly in the southern kingdom of
Allada.14 The inquisitors give the information that he is the slave of the
deceased Captain Juan de Heredia, resident of Cartagena (Cartagena, Inquisi-
tion, Libro 304v5r). The actions for which he is prosecuted, though, took
place in a mining area, probably near Mompox, a city on the Ro Magdalena,
about 100 miles southeast of Cartagena. This location is interesting for the
high degree of the racial and cultural zambaje of African slaves and indige-
nous women that was forged along the Ro Magdalena, a cultural mix that
might explain symbolic aspects of Mateos final testimony.15
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First Hearing: 26 September 1651

Mateo Arara was imprisoned by the Inquisition on 6 September 1651, in
Cartagena. The record of his first hearing, on 26 September, is brief. After
identifying the suspect, summarizing the testimonies against him and recording
the date of his imprisonment, the scribe reports briefly Mateos initial testimony:
Dijo que saba curar desde que estaba en su tierra y que no le enseno nadie,
ni del conocimiento de las yerbas, porque el de su cabeza lo deprendio y
nombro muchas yerbas y races de que usaba y para sanar mordeduras de
culebras venenosas. Y no dio razon de la esterilla y en este estado esta esta
causa. (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol. 305r, emphasis mine)
[He said that he had known how to heal since the time when he lived in his
own land and that no one had taught him, nor had they taught him a
knowledge of herbs, because he learned it from his own head and he named
many herbs and roots that he used to heal venemous snake bites. And he did
not give information about the little mat and this is the current state of his
cause.]

It is unclear in the summary which part of the testimony comprised Mateos

initial presentation of himselfwhen he answered the requisite question of
whether he knew why he had been brought before the Inquisitionand what
information he gave in response to specific follow-up questioning. Despite the
unknowns, three aspects of his self-representation appear strategic when com-
pared with later testimonies. Firstly, Mateo limits his characterization of the
practices under scrutiny to herbalism. Noem Quezada found in the archives of
the Inquisition of New Spain that curanderos or folk healers enjoyed a certain
degree of tolerance. Their healing practicesa syncretism of Spanish, Indian
and African folk medicineswere needed by a society whose few medical
doctors could only inadequately treat the elite population (1991, 37). Virginia
Gutierrez de Pineda and Patricia Vila de Pineda note a similar need for folk
healers in the Nuevo Reino de Granada (1985, 55). It was when the curanderos
practices manifested a belief in supernatural assistance that the Inquisition
became concerned (Quezada 1991, 52). Perhaps seeking the greater safety of the
label of curandero, Mateo fills his testimony with the names of herbs and roots
that he used for healing, and carefully avoids mention of the esterilla. It is his
use of this esterilla, as described in the denunciations, that would be seen as
invoking supernatural assistance, specifically that of the devil. Secondly, Mateo
clarifies that his knowledge of healing pre-dates his arrival in the Nuevo Reino
de Granada. He thus distances himself from the charge of mohan, a word that
names the specialized Indian religious function that the Inquisition equates with
idolatry or devil worship. Thirdly, Mateo implies that his knowledge of healing
is innateno le enseno nadie [no one taught him]an idea he makes explicit
in his second hearing, saying that he drew this virtue from his mothers womb:
esta virtud saco de la barriga de su madre (Cartagena, Libro 1021, 340r). It
would seem that Mateo extricates his identity as herbalist from either an
Amerindian or African (i.e. non-Christian) belief system and thus from associ-
ation with demonolatry. If Mateo Araras knowledge of Spanish is limited, the
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same cannot be said for his understanding of the Inquisitions techniques in the
discernment of aberration.16

Second Hearing: 7 February 1652

At his second hearing, four and a half months later, Mateo addresses his use of
the divining tool described in the denunciations as an esterilla or small straw
mat. His interpreter now refers to the instrument primarily as an escobita or little
broom.17 Mateos testimony in this second hearing centers on his divining and
healing activities during a trip his master forced him to make four years before
to a gold mine southeast of Cartagena. The teniente of Mompox, a man named
Saavedra, had requested Mateos help. Perhaps the inquisitors asked Mateo to
address his use of the escobita on this trip or perhaps he realized that the public
knowledge of these activities would be the most likely cause of his interrogation.
If Mateo, now, feels compelled to address the sensitive question of the
divining tool in a practice that Inquisition suspects to be an invocation of the
devils powers, he also seeks to legitimate and authorize his activity in terms that
the inquisitors might accept. My analysis assumes that Mateo exercises greater
narrative control over this first portion of the testimony than in his later answers
to the inquisitors specific probing questions. Key elements in Mateos self-rep-
resentation include the coercive and approving role of colonial authorities over
his actions as a reluctant healer, the beneficial nature of his actions, his
antagonistic relationship to evil-doers and his affirmation of Christian beliefs.
Mateos narrative begins by reiterating the earlier deculturated version of his
healing activities: he created the broom by his own knowledge after arriving in
the Nuevo Reino de Granada, and did so in order to identify herbs that would
heal, that would work for good. He is so concerned with separating himself from
any cultural practice that he expresses his independent invention of the practices
in three ways:
Habiendo venido a estos reinos, el propio de su cabeza hizo una escobita de
hojas de palma y [] la ato por los cabos y [] por arriba quedo dividida en
dos partes como brazos y [] esta escobita hizo para conocer la[s] yerbas
buenas y malas para curar a los cristianos y [] nadie le enseno a hacer dicha
escobita, sino que el la hizo por su propio parecer. (Cartagena, Libro 1021,
fol. 340r, emphasis mine)
[Having come to these realms, he himself with his own head made a little
broom of palm leaves and [] he tied its ends and [] at the top it was
divided in two arm-like parts and [] he made this little broom in order to
know the good herbs from the bad in order to heal Christians and [] no one
taught him how to make the said broom, but rather he created it from his own
ideas.]
When Mateo was called on to heal the sick slaves belonging to Teniente
Saavedra, he proved reluctant, perhaps not so much to heal as to enter the
perilous terrain of using non-Spanish practices in the presence of Spaniards or
white Creole men. Mateo points out, however, that as a slave he had no choice.
A Mompox official named Saavedra wrote to his master requesting that Mateo
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be sent to cure the many ill negros that he had. So, his master forced him to go
and they took him to Moroc, a gold mine belonging to one Juan Abad. The
approving presence of several men who embody colonial authorityMateos
master Juan de Heredia, the Mompox deputy Saavedra, the mine owner Juan
Abad and several unnamed priestslegitimates his actions and displaces re-
sponsibility for them from Mateo onto these authorities (Cartagena, Libro 1021,
fol. 340r).
The venue of Mateos activities gave additional legitimacy to his actions.
Mining provided a primary economic base for the Nuevo Reino throughout
much of the colonial period, and it was African slaves who carried out most of
this work in the Cauca and Ro Magdalena valleys and in Antioquia (West 1975,
9899). Disease and mortality among slaves in the mines were significant
problems and a threat to the colonys economic success. Mine owners went to
some expense to combat illness, obtaining special foods and medicines, which
included medieval remedies (102). In the larger picture, Mateo had been brought
to Juan Abads mine to use his rare gifts and knowledge to uphold the economic
and political power of the colonial elite.
In explaining these gifts, however, Mateo must face the the significant
difficulty posed by the divining broom because of its unorthodox origins and the
inquisitors interpretation of its use as animated through a pact with the devil.
Mateo recounts that he was first taken to Juan Abads dwellings so that he could
find out whether there were any yerbateros among the blacks there. According
to his testimony, yerbatero or herbalist is the name given to those who use
herbs for malevolent ends. Before Mateo will concede to using his divining
powers, he insists on hearing mass. After mass, the negros are gathered and he
goes to work, but with no luck. So, everyone returns to the mine, where they
gather the black miners in a circle:
Este se puso sentado en medio e hizo traer una batea y echar en ella una botija
de vino y que fuesen todos los negros bebiendo un poco y que luego saco de
su mochila la escobita y teniendola en las manos con mucha confianza en la
Virgen Mara y Nuestro Senor Jesucristo, comenzo a jurar con dicha escobita
y un congolon esto es una calabacita pequena que tena atado a ella, si haba
negro yerbatero y [] la escobita se volvio de una parte a otra y cuando volvio
al lado derecho mostraba que un negro que estaba junto a el era yerbatero y
para certificarse lo hizo por tres veces y a la tercera dijo como aquel negro era
yerbatero y se llamaba Ventura Anchico. (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol. 340r)
[This man [Mateo] sat down in the middle of the circle and had a shallow dish
brought and he poured into it a pitcher of wine and had all the negros drink
a little and then he took his little broom out of his bag and holding it in his
hands, trusting very much in the Virgin Mary and Our Lord Jesus Christ, he
began with the said broom and a congolon, which is a small gourd that he had
tied to it, to ask whether there was a black yerbatero there and [] the broom
moved from one side to the other and when it moved to the right it showed
that a black man who was next to him was a yerbatero and to certify this
result, he did it three times and on the third time he said that that black man
named Ventura Anchico was a yerbatero.]
The ritual Mateo has just described is shamanistic, probably African in origin,
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but he tries to legitimate it with the invocation of Christian icons. He uses the
instrument to get to the root of a problemto identify the working of the enemy
of the Christian Godthe heretical yerbatero who has harmed his fellow
workers and has thus attacked the Christian mine owners property and threat-
ened his well-being. After identifying the cause of the illness, Mateo cures the
black men with infusions of bark, sugar water and other herbs and with the twig
of the orejon plant tied to a small cross. The ill are cured after vomiting up
bones, hairs and feathers. Again, Mateo seeks Christian legitimacy by mention-
ing that he has also healed two priests at Moroc.
To approach an understanding of Mateos own conception of the escobitas
operation, I have consulted sources on Dahomean and Yoruba religious prac-
tices, two related belief systems that dominated the general area of West Africa
identified with the Arara slaves (Herskovits and Herskovits 1933; Feraudy
Espino 1993 and Verger 1995).18 Heriberto Feraudy Espino describes the
practices of Yoruba babalawos, the priests or diviners of Ifa who seek to gather
information and to know the future (1993, 16263). While none of the instru-
ments this researcher describes works exactly as Mateos escobita, they seem to
share its operating principle, in which information is obtained through a
combination of the diviners spoken word and a reading of the movement or final
position of the manipulated object.19 Both Feraudy Espino, who discusses
divination, and Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1995), who studies the healing uses of
plants, explain the role of the Ifa in these religious activities. The Ifa is an oral
corpus of systematic religion and philosophy, divided into 256 odu. A divining
instrument leads the diviner or herbalist to the odu in which the desired
information or remedy can be identified (Feraudy Espino 1993, 140; Verger
1995, 19). The oral pronunciation of words in or related to the use of the odu
is seen in itself as powerful. Mateos oral addressing of the escobita may relate
to an oral tradition such as the Ifa and to the belief in the magical power of the
spoken word.
Herskovits and Herskovits describe a similar use of objects called gbo or
charms in Dahomey religious practices; these authors explain that each gbo
derives its potency from the supernatural power called upon to animate it
(Herskovits and Herskovits 1933, 64). Such animation by a spirit would seem to
be the hidden conception behind Mateos assertion that his escobita sought out
the yerbatero who had caused the miners illness. That Mateo believed the
slaves illness was caused by another human beingone who had invoked a
spirit to accomplish the evilalso finds resonance in Afro-American beliefs
(Ortiz 1973, 91).
The inquisitors interrogate Mateo further. They ask about the origin of his
knowledge of herbs. He explains that the escobita tells him which are good herbs
and which are bad by opening and closing in response to his questions. He
identifies the powders in a gourd attached to the escobita as coming from the
ariajua tree that grows in Cartagena, and says that this herb cures stomach aches
and phlegm and should be taken with wine. Once again, he insists that no one
has given him any of this information. When the inquisitors press him on the
delicate question of who exactly moves the escobita, he gives them more suspect
information: it is the escobita that moves itself. He does not mention animation
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by a deity or spirit. He does, however, tell of a ceremony that enables the

escobita to work, a ceremony that would remit the inquisitors to African cultural
practices: before using the escobita, he took a chicken, slit its throat and
sprinkled its blood on the instrument, after which he covered it with contrayer-
bas so that it could move by itself. Quickly, he adds that he did all of this with
a clean heart. He also clarifies, when asked, that the small cross he tied to the
orejon stick he placed there in the name of God (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol.
340v). These attempts by Mateo to link his use of the divining instrument to his
Christian faith and good works, however, would not have convinced his
inquisitors or the experts they later consulted of his orthodoxy. The sixteenth-
century Spanish demonologist Pedro Ciruelo (1530) insists that no matter how
deep their conviction, those who claimed the power to mediate with God or
other members of the Heavenly Host [] would only succeed in contacting the
Devil (Thornton 1988, 276). Clergy of the time insisted that only ordained
priests could mediate between human needs and God or the saints.

Third Hearing: 16 March 1652

At his third hearing, Mateo Arara makes a significant break from his earlier
statements, but only after he has heard the complete accusation that has been
leveled against him. It is this written accusation, which has been lost, that would
have held important clues why Mateo makes such a radical turn in his narrative
strategy. In this third hearing, he pours out a story of a clearly transculturated
African and Catholic religious practice and completes his testimony with a
fascinating tale of initiation as a healer, which begs reading as a story of a
deeply transculturated and ambiguous symbolism.
The first of Mateos two stories in this final hearing recounts a new instance
of healing. He tells that while he was still at the Moroc mine he healed a young
black boy by making a cross out of twigs and placing it over the door of the hut
where the boy and his mother lived. Then he had a chicken brought and he
explained that if the chicken died the boy would live, but if the chicken lived the
boy would die. He performed a ritual cleansing on the boy with the chicken:
Mateo had the mother hold the chicken over the boys head while Mateo
commended the boy to God, invoking the Holy Trinity and pleading with God
and the Virgin Mary to enable him to cure the boy. As the mother held the
chicken, Mateo pronounced the words Yo quiero muchacho llevabas pollo [I
want the boy, you took away the chicken]. These words he addressed to the
devil, worshiping God all the while. The chicken died and Mateo sent someone
to throw it into a ravine. This done, the boy recovered (Cartagena, Libro 1021,
fol. 340v41r).
To the inquisitors, this ceremony would have seemed at best a misuse of the
names of God and the Virgin, a practice associated with witchcraft and
prosecuted in Spain and the New World alike.20 At worst, it would appear a
diabolical fetishism, indicative of idolatry. Feraudy Espino (1993, 147), Her-
skovits and Herskovits (1933, 4042) and Ortiz (1973, 77) all discuss the
importance of chickens and roosters in ceremonies and sacrifices to West
African gods. One particular deity who especially favors chickens in sacrifice is
73
 KATHRYN JOY MCKNIGHT

Legbaalso known by the names Eshu, Esu and Elegbara, among others. He is
the trickster god who can rob fate of its victims, as perhaps is implicit in Mateos
ceremony to cure the young boy. Alternative African interpretations of healing
ceremonies may include the use of the chicken as a gbo to divine whether the
sick boy will live or die (Herskovits and Herskovits 1933, 62) or the use of the
animal as an embo into which Mateo seeks the transfer of the demon of the
illness (Ortiz 1973, 91).
Why does Mateo take the risk at this point to give such self-damning
testimony? It is important to note, here, that the accusations leveled during
Inquisition trials closely resemble a pastiche of the witnesses testimony, with
identifying names expunged. When Mateo recounts this story, he knows at the
very least that he is being accused of the acts named in the initial relacionthat
he is a mohan or sorcerer and teacher of sorcery, who works through a pact with
the devil, using words, herbs, an esterita or escobita and a cuernezuelo. Did one
of the denunciations mention this or a related healing using a chicken and thus
lead him to confess the incident? Did the apparent omniscience and omnipotence
of the inquisitorssuggested in the detailed accusationsoverwhelm Mateo and
compel him to tell all? Or did he see that if all was now known by the
inquisitors, he must at least reinterpret his actions, showing them to be consistent
with Christian beliefs? Though West African religions do not turn on the same
dualist axis as Christianity, Mateo insists that he belongs to the hosts of good in
the fundamental Christian struggle between good and evil. His evidence includes
the success of the healing ceremony and his use of the cross and prayers to a
Christian God. He did, after all, side with God in speaking to the devil in terms
of rejection and triumph, somewhat as a priest might do in an exorcism: Yo
quiero muchacho llevabas pollo, perhaps meaning, I want the boy healed; you
take and kill the chicken.
Asked once again who taught him to heal in this manner, Mateo now tells a
story that will belie all previous efforts at characterizing his knowledge as innate.
In a story unlike any he has told so far, he layers a complex and ambiguous
symbolism, which allows readings of African, Amerindian and Christian mean-
ings, while affirming the fundamental goodness of his being. While Mateo
explicitly places the ritual in Africa, the ceremony itself resonates most strongly
with the practices and myths of the Chibcha or Muisca cultures of northern
South America. Mateos framing of the ritual also reiterates the Christian
transculturation he has maintained throughout his confessions, both negatively in
the naming of the devil rather than a non-Christian deity and positively in the
clear choice of good over evil. The most puzzling and most exciting symbolic
elements of the narrative are a river spirit, which he describes as a mula (mule),
and a process of selection during which the initiates confront possible death in
the depths of the still river. Mateos layering of Christian meaning onto the
Chibcha symbolism of the water remits also to Christian baptism, creating a
transculturated and highly ambivalent text. A study of West African initiation
rites, the Colombian mohan, Chibcha mythology and Christian baptismal sym-
bolism poses provocative possibilities.
Mateo locates his initiation rite in Africa: en su tierra lo aprendio [he
learned it in his land]. His explanation that his maternal uncle was the healer in
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a kings house suggests both a concept of inheritance of the role and an assertion
of significant social position, one that Mateo has at least partially lost in
slavery:21 Y siendo preguntado que quien le enseno este modo de curar, dijo
que en su tierra lo aprendio, que se lo enseno un to suyo, hermano de su madre,
que se llamaba Soo y curaba en casa del rey [And having been asked who
taught him this method of healing, he said that he learned it in his land, that his
uncle taught him, his mothers brother, whose name was Soo and who healed in
the kings house] (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol. 341r). Mateos story suggests
pride, as he carefully explains his successful passage through the initiation, built
on his truthfulness and his intention to assume the responsibilities of a positive
social role to do good through healing: los que as curan en su tierra van a un
ro que llaman de la Madalena, que no corre y all hacen juramento que si no
curaren para hacer bien queden muertos en aquel ro y si curaren bien salgan
libres; y [] se ahogan algunos y va un buso y los saca y [] alla no conocen
a Dios y as aquel juramento lo hacen al diablo [those in his land who heal in
this way go to a still river called the Madalena, and there they take an oath that
if they are not to use their healing powers for good they will die in that river and
if they are to use their powers for good, they will come out of the river free; and
[] some drown and a diver goes in and pulls them out. They do not know God
there, so they make their oath to the devil] (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol. 341r).
The ceremony itself resembles none I have yet encountered in my initial
research into Dahomean/Yoruba or Muisca rituals, though it shares with them
elements of symbolic meaning.22 Mateo tells that before beginning his work as
a healer he went to this great river and declared his oath that with his powers
he would not harm anyone or induce natural calamities, that he would neither
prevent the rain from falling nor make worms eat the fruit crops. After his
declaration, a thing like a mule came out of the river depths. The mule swept
him far into the river and then returned him to the shore, in proof that he swore
truthfully. After this initiation, Mateo followed his uncle and carried the objects
he used for healing and he learned to heal and to divine with the esterilla
(Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol. 341r).
Both Herskovits and Herskovits (1933, 40) and Zuesse (1979, 144) discuss
ritual ordeals in which an initiate passes through a symbolic death. Zuesse delves
more deeply into examples of this experience in which the ritual death includes
physical and psychological stresses, endowed with meaning through the sym-
bolic structure of the ritual and the explicit messages of dramatic enactment and
song. The process of initiation destroys this self-centered world of childhood
and incorporates the new self into an outwardly focused communal role, which
belongs to a transcendent order (Zuesse 1979, 145). Since priestly training in
West Africa can begin as early as the age of seven, it is quite possible that the
younger self Mateo describes was a child, who still saw the world in a
self-centered concern for its impact on his own being.23 His symbolic death of
near-drowning in the ritual brings him into a significant, outwardly focused role
of healing that gives his new identity a place in a transcendent order; his new
practices will involve relationships with the ancestral spirits or deities.
But what of this unmoving river called the Magdalena? Neither Dahomean nor
Yoruba traditions provide satisfactory explanations for the location of Mateos
75
 KATHRYN JOY MCKNIGHT

ritual in a body of water, particularly when one notes that he calls it by a

Christian name.24 In contrast, the fateful trip that led to Mateos imprisonment
by the Inquisition offers a persuasive explanation of the name, since this trip
took him to a mining area near Mompox, most likely by way of the Ro
Magdalena.25 There are compelling reasons why Mateos lived experience in the
Nuevo Reino de Granadaparticularly in and around the Ro Magdalenamay
have led him to incorporate into the initiation experience a body of water in
which he faces death. The colonial reality of encounters with natural waters in
the Nuevo Reino de Granada made them a place befitting of such dangerous
significance as that of the near-death ritual. Two types of labor in which slaves
were employed brought them into dangerous waters. Gold mining in colonial
times was placer mining, which involved sluicing, panning and diving into
auriferous waters, while la boga was the exhausting work of conveying boats up
and down the riversparticularly along the colonial umbilical cord of the
Magdalenaby means of long poles. This work was first carried out by Indians
to satisfy colonial tributes, but later by black slaves and then by the free zambo
offspring of slave men and indigenous women. While the trial reports do not
specify Mateos own occupation, it is clear that he had come into contact with
men who worked in both occupations. If waters endangered mens lives, a healer
might seek protection from such dangers in a tutelary water spirit.
More important is the sacred significance of the waters of the Chibcha
territories in their creation myths. These sacred waters are related to the word
used to name Mateos suspect rolemohan. Juan Rodrguez Freyle describes the
indigenous mohanes as guardians of the sanctuaries and altars of the devil,
suggesting a priestly function (1979, 38). He also points out that the devil was
worshipped principally in five places, all natural bodies of water, highland lakes:
Guatavita, Guasca, Siecha, Teusaca and Ubaque. In Chibcha mythology, the
high Andean lakes are sacred places of offering. They are, together, the uterus
of Mother Earth and the place from which Bachue, the mother of humanity,
emerged to populate the earth, also the doorways of communication with the
feminine underworld of the earth.26
Jose Rozo Guata interprets Chibcha myth and ritual to hold all natural waters
as objects of religious cultlakes, pools, and rivers, especialmente en los lugares
donde estos se encajonaban formando grandes pozos o se despenaban [especially
in the places where these were boxed in and formed great holes or they hurtled
over the edge of a cliff] (1997, 54). The grandes pozos or great holes sound
much like Mateos still river. Miguel Triana ([1921] 1970) relates much more
detailed information, depending primarily on the chronicles of Fray Pedro Simon
(1627) and Juan Rodrguez Freyle ([1638] 1979). Simons chronicle, particularly,
shows a religious symbolism of water that infuses Chibcha ceremonies, marking
several major life transitions, including birth, puberty and the consecration of
Chibcha priests through sacred baths of purification in the lakes (Triana [1921]
1970, 6063). The legend of El Dorado unites these religious ablutions with
sacrificial offerings. In the legend, the sovereign of Guatavita was taken out
onto the lake on a raft, together with an offering of religious objects forged from
gold. After the offering was thrown into the icy waters, the sovereign himself
dove into the icy waters to purify his body. The Bahue creation myth augments
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the awe-inspiring meanings of the lakes. When this goddess of creation and her
husband grew old, they returned to their lake of origin transformed into large
snakes. This symbol of the snake as patron of the lakes has persisted in the
popular imagination for centuries (Triana [1921] 1970, 67).
The ritual Mateo describes resonates with these Chibcha practices and myths.
His mula who lives in the depths of the river is, like Bachue in serpentine form,
an awesome deity, but one who affirms humanity. Locating the shamanistic
initiation in the still waters of the formidable Magdalena or its swampy
surroundings evokes the fear appropriate in an encounter with death capable of
winnowing good from evil. In the mulas power to select those initiates who are
good and truthful and send them out to heal in the world, this being echoes the
positive or fruitful qualities attributed to Bachue in her parting exhortation to
humankind to live in peace with one another and to keep the laws that she has
brought them (Triana [1921] 1970, 67). If it is local practice or belief that
informs Mateos initiation ritual, then perhaps before he can go out into the
world as a healer he must return to a transcendent womb, face death and be
reborn. Still, this selecting out of good from evil seems a Christian modification;
both Colombian and West African shamans are capable of working evil as well
as good in spells against individuals or in controlling the natural forces.27
Why, though, does the novitiate Mateo swear his pledge to the devilque
alla no conocen a Dios y as aquel juramento lo hacen al diablo [that there they
do not know God and so they swear to the devil] (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol.
341r, emphasis mine)? The word que [that] identifies the statement as Mateos
through the initial dijo que [he said that] of the testimony. What actual
wordin Spanish or his own languagedid Mateo use, here, to name the devil
and what did he mean? Did he name a Chibcha deity? Did he speak of an oath
to Legba or Esu, the West African messenger of the deities, who tricks fate and
is associated with Ifa, healing, protection and divination (Herskovits and Her-
skovits 1933, 60; Feraudy Espino 1993, 176)? Did he use the Spanish word
diablo or demonio or did the translator turn an African or Amerindian name into
that of the devil for the inquisitors comprehension?
Whatever the word, it is clear that for Mateo this devil is not the Christian
embodiment of absolute evil, the enemy of God. The Catholic colonizers, who
could not accept any system of religious beliefs other than their own, trans-
formed any and all other deities into the devil. Jaime Humberto Borja Gomez
asserts that the devil was a constitutive element of colonial culture by which
relationships between the colonizer and the Other were codified (1998, 20, my
translation). Mateo resists such a characterization of his belief system when he
tells that as a novitiate he pledged to this deity that he would do no harm to
anyone, nor would he call off the rain or call on plagues to destroy crops. He
gave his word to use his powers for good in a proclamation tested by ordeal and
proven true. To emphasize this point, he closes his story reminding the
inquisitors of the good he has accomplished with the esterilla, both in healing
and by uncovering the misdeeds of others.
Curiously, the symbolic watery death ordeal of his initiation shares a deep
symbolic meaning with Christian baptism. In his letter to the Romans, Paul
writes, Have you forgotten that when we were baptized into union with Christ
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Jesus we were baptized into his death? By baptism we were buried with him, and
lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of
the Father, so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life (Romans
634, The New English Bible). Early Church fathers came to interpret the water
of baptism as representing this grave and the three baptismal submersions as
symbolic of a three-day burial with Christ.28 In the Christian ritual of baptism,
the bodys submersion into and emergence from the water serves as a sign of
salvation that separates out those who worship good/God from those who reject
God and worship evil or the devil. In Mateos initiation as a healer, he faces
death in a watery submersion. His submerged body is marked as good and
separated out from the evil as in a Christian baptism. It may or may not be a
stretch to think that Mateos own Christian baptism somehow influenced his
choice of symbolism in the initiation ritual he relates. Even so, it proved an
indecipherable or unacceptable sign for the inquisitors.
The inquisitors represented the dominant group that lived a constant tension
between its desperate need for slaves on the one handto build infrastructure,
extract riches, grow food, subdue Indians, chase away pirates and care for their
houses and childrenand, on the other, its deep-rooted fear of slave rebellion.
Cartagena was particularly vulnerable to slave violence, so close was it to the
preferred areas where runaways built free societies from which they attacked
Spaniards (Arrazola 1970; Borrego Pla 1973). That the Inquisition might seek
the political, rather than spiritual, end of suppressing slaves under the guise of
protecting the faith was not new. The Holy Office in its New World inception
had arbitrated political feuds between rival conquistador groups and religious
factions in New Spain (Greenleaf 1969, ch. 1 and 2). As Borja Gomez tell us,
the devil became a mechanism of control over those groups who distanced
themselves from Christian norms (Borja Gomez 1998, 20). The Inquisition
played a prime role in developing this mechanism of control when it punished
slaves for a pact with the devil in order to create a public spectacle of
punishment and strike fear into the hearts of those whom they themselves feared.

Conclusions
The story that Mateo wove failed to save him from being convicted and
sentenced. On 6 July 1652, four clergy members were brought in to examine the
case. The four agreed unanimously that the accused had made an explicit pact
with the devil, while two members of the group added that he was also suspect
for his use of holy words and the sign of the cross (Cartagena, Libro 1021, fol.
341v). On 22 July 1654, almost three years after his arrest, Mateos sentence was
proclaimed in a public auto de fe in which he was made to pronounce the
abjuracion de levi and he received 200 lashes of the whip. He was then to serve
the convent of Santo Domingo for ten years in order that to be correctly
instructed in the faith (fol. 320r). The sentence was neither as harsh nor as
lenient as it could have been. Already a slave, the ten-year service in Santo
Domingo may have made little difference to Mateos freedom for self-determi-
nation. The directive that he was to be taught in the faith by members of the
Order of Preachers and upholders of orthodoxy indicates that the inquisitors saw
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in Mateo not an intractably evil enemy, follower of a diabolical sect, but a

malleable Other.
Mateo Arara may have tried to work out in his story such a flexible religious
subjectivity as he hoped the inquisitors would accept after his initial tactic of
feigning orthodoxy failed. He was born into a culture whose religion embraced
an attitude of flexibility towards the religious beliefs of other groups. Perhaps he
had also encountered African slaves evangelized before their transport to the
New World, whose beliefs were already an AfricanCatholic syncretism.29
Nevertheless, the narrative subjectivity he forged overran the boundaries of
Catholic flexibility, perhaps primarily because of the power he asserted for
himself in invoking the supernatural. If Mateo Arara failed to protect his
individual subjectivity from punishment, on a collective level, it was the
Inquisitiontogether with the missionary endeavors of baptism and con-
fessionthat ultimately failed to suppress African, Amerindian and syncretic
religious practices.30 Perhaps in providing this arena in which the accused
learned to negotiate colonial disciplinary power, the Inquisition itself facilitated
a transculturation process that took place in the Others weaving of a story of
self out of the beliefs, cultural practices and experiences of Catholicism, casta
society and African origins.

Notes
1
As evidenced in the reports transcribed by Splendiani and colleagues (1997), Spanish colonial
slave authorities often gave first-generation African slaves the name of their ethnicity or port
of departure as a last name. Oscar Grando Moraguez (2000) discusses the parallel situation in
Cuba. Footnote 14, below, discusses Mateos probable geographic origin in what is today
Benin.
2
See also McKnight (1999). The number of scholars working in this area is still small, but
growing. Examples of such focus on Afro-colonial discourse includes work by Margaret M.
Olsen (1998a; 1998b), Renee Soulodre-La France (2001) and presentations by Jose Ramon
Jouve Martn and Mara Eugenia Chaves on Afro-Hispanic representation at the meeting of the
Latin American Studies Association in 2001.
3
There are numerous studies of African slave resistance in the New World. For a discussion of
the history of slave resistance in the Nuevo Reino de Granada, see, for example, Borrego Pla
(1973) and Arrazola (1970).
4
Sandovals work includes a description of the variety of African cultures present among the
slaves, their miserable plight in slavery and a guidebook for priests who carried out evangeliza-
tion among slaves. See Olsen (1998b) for a discussion of Sandovals representation of
blackness, Afro-Americans and the Jesuit mission.
5
See, for example, the cases of Luis Andrea, a mestizo (Cartagena, Libro 1020, fols. 3, 19),
Angelina de Nava, a free black woman from Guinea (fols. 327r29r), Ana Mara, a Caraval
slave (fols. 329r31r) and Barbara Gomez, a black woman from Lisbon (fols. 331r36).
6
See Greenleaf (1969, ch. 1 and 2). Klor de Alva states that although its ostensible function was
to safeguard the orthodoxy of the faith, the Holy Office was recognized to be and constantly
was used as an important tool for social and political control since its founding in the thirteenth
century (1991, 8).
7
Although the representation of race is very complex, the terms mulato, mestizo and zambo
applied generally to the offspring of Spanish and African parents, Spanish and Indian parents
and Indian and African parents, respectively. In 1571, Felipe II decreed that Indians no longer
were to be tried by the Inquisition. J. Jorge Klor de Alva (1991) argues that the function of
disciplining the great masses of indigenous Mexicans was taken up more effectively and
efficiently by the missionary activities of baptism, sermonizing and, especially, confession.

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8
Splendiani et al. show 58 percent of those prosecuted to be white, 4 percent mestizo and 9
percent not identified by race.
9
Diana Luz Ceballos Gomez (1994) provides an excellent discussion of hechicera and brujera
in the Nuevo Reino de Granada and, particularly, of how the image of the European witches
sabbath became superimposed onto popular African rituals in the inquisitors minds; Virginia
Gutierrez de Pineda and Patricia Vila de Pineda (1985) study in detail the Spanish, Amerindian
and African popular religious healing practices that were often attacked by the Inquisition;
Carlo Ginzburg (1991) develops a theory of how the image of the witches sabbath developed
in an interaction between pagan rituals and theological and inquisitorial activity in late medieval
and early modern Europe; his discussion is very relevant to understanding the related dynamic
in the Nuevo Reino de Granada.
10
Both terms refer to someone who makes and applies herbs and herbal infusions. Often, the
person is a healer or uses herbal potions together with spells in a shamanistic activity. In the
Arara case, the term yerbatero appears to signify a malicious use of herbal magic.
11
The online version of the Cartagena journal El Universal tells that an Augustinian convent was
founded on the Cerro de la Popa in 1607 in order to expel Buziraco, the image of the macho
cabro worshipped there by Indians. The webpage of the Cartagena de Indias Convention &
Visitors Bureau titled Sitios de Interes Historico tells that according to legend the first prior
of the Augustinian convent threw the devil, in the form of a male goat or macho cabro, off
the hill and that this devil, Buciraco, was worshipped by blacks.
12
In addition to leading non-Catholic religious rituals on the Cerro de la Popa, Luis Andrea
testified that Buciraco told him not to cure Spaniards and that an older Indian, instrumental in
his initiation rites, also instructed him not to confess his activities to Spanish priests (Cartagena
Inquisition, Libro 1020, fols. 19r24r). In the notorious trials of supposed brujas and brujos in
the 1630s, the Cartagena Inquisition prosecuted a number of well-known yerbateros from the
Getsemana area near Cartagena (Ceballos Gomez 1994, 140). One of these women, Paula de
Eguiluz, was so well known as a medica that even after her incarceration, she was ocassionally
allowed out of the jail to heal patients, who included the inquisitors themselves and the bishop
Fray Cristobal de Lazarraga (Medina 1978, 115, n. 1). So far, records do not indicate any
similar popularity on Mateos part, but perhaps the inquisitors feared such acclaim for this
herbalist.
13
There are six procesos of Afro-Americans living in the Nuevo Reino de Granada that were sent
from Cartagena to Spain and that are now preserved in the Archivo Historico Nacional. They
pertain to the trials of Pedro de Angola, for beating another slave (1627, Inquisicion, Legajo
1616); the three trials of a free black woman named Paula Eguiluz (1632, 1635, 1636) and that
of Diego Lopez Melgar, a mulato cirujano (surgeon) (1634), both accused of being witches,
both of whom eventually produce confessions that respond to the European image of the
witches sabbath (Inquisicion, Legajo 1020); a proceso for Sebastian Bran for Judaism and for
taking food to his master who was imprisoned for the same crime (1650) (Inquisicion, Legajo
1620) and a proceso for Felix Fernando Martnez, a fugitive slave, accused of the sacrilege of
robbing a monstrance and its consecrated host (1777) (Inquisicion, Legajo 1623). Diana Luz
Ceballos Gomez has found rich documentation on hechicera and brujera in civil court records
in the Archivo Nacional de Colombia and the Archivo Historico de Antioqua, pointing out
other important sources for such narrative self-definition by Afro-Colombians during the
colonial period. She asserts that the civil courts often occuppied themselves with brujera and
hechicera for the purpose of social control (1994, 95).
14
Grando Moraguez (2000) discusses the complex problems of origin and ethnicity among those
called Arara in Cuba. Firstly, an ethnic name was often given to a slave according to port of
departure, rather than his or her birthplace. Secondly, modern researchers disagree on the exact
identification of the geographic origin of those called Arara in the New World, an identification
confused by orthographic inconsistencies in the period. Many scholars associate the word
Arara with Allada, the name of a city and kingdom, while others disagree. Finally, in Cuba
cabildos or African cultural organizations brought together various Fon-speaking ethnicities
under the same denomination; thus some of those called Arara have received the name through
cabildo association rather than origin. Identifying the origin of slaves called Arara in the
Nuevo Reino de Granada may present similar problems.

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15
Zambaje on the Ro Magdalena was the result of unions between escaped slaves and indigenous
women, in an area where the labor demanded in the tribute system decimated the male
Amerindian population. See Penas Galindo (1988) for a discussion of zambaje in this region,
specifically related to the occupation of the boga, the moving of boats up and down the Ro
Magdalena by the exhausting work of a crew equipped with long poles.
16
That a slave in the Nuevo Reino de Granada might have learned the basic Catholic doctrines
without having learned Spanish is not surprising. John Thornton discusses the catechistic
sessions led by Pedro Claver among African slaves in Cartagena, which the Jesuit carried out
almost immediately after the slaves disembarked. The slaves were divided by languages into
groups of ten, to each of which was assigned a catechist-interpreter of their own nationality,
someone who had likely been trained by Claver. The instruction involved both explanations by
the African catechists and their translation of messages given by Claver (1988, 27172).
17
The documents refer to this tool variously as an esterilla and esterita, words that indicate a
mat-like object of woven grasses, and escobita and escobilla, or broom, which seem more
likely names given Mateos description of the way the two arms of palm fronds moved away
from and towards each other.
18
The rituals Mateo Arara describes do not match any of those detailed by Virigina Gutierrez de
Pineda and Patricia Vila de Pineda (1985) in their study of Colombian Indian practices during
the colonial period, though their general shamanic principles are similar.
19
Feraudy Espino lists as instruments of divination the ikin, a set of 16 sacred palm nuts, the opele
or chain on which opele seeds are strung, the ibo, consisting of cowrie shells and sacred bones,
and the orob or irafa, a wooden or ivory stick. Each of these instruments is tossed or dropped
on a flat surface or marked board and its position is interpreted by the diviner (Feraudy Espino
1993, 17072).
20
See Mara Helena Sanchez Ortegas discussion of the prosecution of Spanish men and women
for misusing Catholic liturgy and the names of God and the saints in practices of love magic
(1991, 59).
21
Ortiz refers to an African tradition of priestly oligarchies in which the vocation and position are
inherited from father to son (1973, 121). Recall that the mestizo Luis Andrea also inherited his
powers as mohan from his uncle. According to Fernando Ortiz, Cuban brujos in the mid
twentieth century still enjoyed the community respect that results from a perception of their
almost omnipotent character and their superior knowledge (Ortiz 1973, 126).
22
See Ortiz (1973), Herskovits and Herskovits (1933), Verger (1995), Feraudy Espino (1993) and
Zuesse (1979, 13565).
23
Feraudy Espino states that the training of Yoruba babalawos commonly begins when the
candidate is between the ages of seven and twelve (Feraudy Espino 1993, 139).
24
The initiation ritual for Dahomean vodonsi or priests incorporates a ceremony in which the
novitiates draw water from a symbolic river of earthenware pots (Herskovits and Herskovits
1933, 42). In the Yoruba religion the river deity Osun represents both fertility and the wisdom
of the forests which can heal with fresh waters where medicine fails (Feraudy Espino 1993,
190). Both examples appear removed from the ritual Mateo described. The name he gives the
river separates it further from his homeland. At the time of his trial, Christianity was just
arriving in the state of Allada, the probable location of his initiation story (Thornton 1988,
27475), thus it is unlikely that a Christian saints name would already grace a body of water
there.
25
The editors of the document identify Moroc as being in the vicinity of Mompox (Splendiani
et al. 1997, 461, v.s. ndice onomatico Juan Abad), though I have not found such a name
on detailed modern maps of the area (scale 1100,000).
26
See Museo de Oro (2001).
27
Gutierrez de Pineda and Vila de Pineda cite Pedro Simons discussion of how the Colombian
shamans were thought to control natural elements (1985, 16).
28
See for example St. Cyril of Jerusalems second lecture on the mysteries, paragraph 4 (1970,
163).
29
When Portuguese missionaries brought Christianity to Central Africa at the end of the fifteenth
century they were quite tolerant of syncretism (Thornton 1988, 266). Later, in Africa, the
Spanish would also show such tolerance. The Spanish Capuchin missionaries to Allada in the

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 KATHRYN JOY MCKNIGHT

second half of the seventeenth century brought a catechism prepared in Fon in Spain, which
allows the generic Fon word for god, Vodu [] to be identified with the Christian God, and
more importantly, allows the term Lisa to be used to refer to Jesus Christ (Thornton 1988,
267). This linguistic practice allowed the Allada concepts to remain functional behind the
references to their Christian counterparts. In the catechism, for the lines of the Ave Mara
which in Spanish are Santa Mara, Madre de Dios the Arda catechism reads Santa Mara,
nague e Vodu (emphasis mine). The credo reads, Midiq, Vodu, mitome nu popo, Tol, agai,
afene, Lifa, vito, depo for Creo en Dios Padre todo poderofo, Criador del Cielo, y de la
tierra, y en IefuChrifto su vnico Hijo (emphasis mine); see Doctrina Christiana (1658).
30
Perhaps the space of the Inquisition trial also offered Mateo Arara and other Afro-Hispanic
slaves the opportunity to learn more clearly the rigidity of the colonizers religious beliefs and
to better hone their strategies of dissimulation in order to preserve and protect their religious
beliefs and practices. If his sentence was sufficiently harsh, it could not cut Mateo Arara off
from those communities in which he might have continued to use and teach his special gifts,
with much greater caution now, sharing a new and painfully learned knowledge of how to
survive under colonial domination.

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