Bernardino de Sahagún, Jose de Acosta and the Sixteenth-Century Theology of Sacrifice in New Spain

Abstract

Bernardino de Sahagún, Jose de Acosta and the Sixteenth-Century Theology of Sacrifice in New Spain Laura Ammon The long sixteenth century was the beginning of an era that was fraught with both inter- and intra- religious tensions. Early reports of the New World, teeming with life, people and wealth, were laden with discussions of practices that were foreign to European religious ideas. Coupled with the intra-religious tensions that yielded the era of reformations, sixteenth-century Christianity was experiencing tremendous challenges. Among the first to chronicle these religious differences and to propose methods for dealing with the diversity of practice and belief found in the New World were Bernardino de Sahagún and Jose de Acosta. These missionaries produced seminal texts that are the roots of a pattern of comparison that persists in the study of religion today, firmly grounded in categorizing, establishing, maintaining difference, and identifying similarity while striving to contribute to the spread of the Christian empire. The emergence of the comparative study of religion is connected to the expansion of Europeans and specifically European Christians into a world without Christianity. Walter Mignolo has argued that the foundations of the world today can be located in the late fifteenth-century with the discovery of the New World: "the emergence of modernity/coloniality [is] the emergence of a world order under whose principles we are still living." 2 Frequently, scholars locate the historical roots of the comparative study of religion in nineteenth-century authors such as Edward Burnett Tylor or Max Müller. 3 However, in this article I want to locate them in Mignolo's understanding of the geopolitics of knowledge. As he states, the modern world "can be described in conjunction with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit and ... such a conceptualization is linked to the making of colonial difference(s)." 4 While the comparative study of religion is thought to be a product of the Enlightenment, I will argue that its roots can be found in the early-modern period of missionary contact between the New World and the Old World, specifically the Iberian empire, and the texts produced during the Spanish conquest of the Americas. These missionary texts have made a significant contribution to the development of the study of religion though that contribution has been neglected and misrecognized. 5 The comparative study of religion begins with the emergence of the Iberian period of expansion and colonialism rather than with the Enlightenment with its focus on Northern European colonial practices. Iberian colonialism, only recently receiving the attention of postcolonial theorists and historians has been neglected in the study of the hows and whys of the exercise of colonial power. 6 Outside the Enlightenment time frame for the "beginning" of modernity and located out of the southern reaches of Europe, Iberian colonialism has been effectively erased from many discussions of colonialism and postcolonialism in much the same way that philosophy from the world of Latin America has been disregarded or ignored. 7 Due particularly to the reports of excessive Spanish brutality known the Black Legend, Protestant northern Europeans largely discounted Spanish missionary accounts of Amerindian contact, or used them as further evidence of the cruelty (and by implication, illegitimacy) of the Spanish colonial endeavor. Moreover, the texts of sixteenth-century missionaries and chroniclers have been used in the development of the comparative study of religion with little regard for the social, political and economic context that influenced their creation. 8 Two of the best known sixteenth-century missionaries, Bernardino de Sahagún and Jose de Acosta, created works central to our understanding of colonial missionaries and indigenous religious practices at the time of the Spanish conquest in what is now Mexico. Their works have influenced generations of scholarship and each has been honored for his contribution to the anthropological understanding of Indoamerica. Each missionary wrote extensively for other missionaries; Acosta wrote also for a broader European audience. Their representations of indigenous religion and religious practices have informed the study of indigenous religion in Central and South America since those works were first published. This paper will explore Sahagún's and Acosta's texts in a more specific way. I will examine how...

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