Description:

Supay and its Narrators: Ambiguous Sacrednessand Elusive Evil in Early Colonial Peru

In this presentation, I address examples of early modernEuropean perception of the sacred in the Americas toconfront them with Indigenous responses to the distortionof native religious entities and their representations asagents of evil. Understood as a divine entity or a privilegedmediator with divinity, the idea of Andean sacredness maybe found in Quechua terms such as camac, huaca, samay,and supay. These terms, and the concepts they may haveoriginally referred to, were colonized by the ChristianChurch and distorted into manifestations of the devil. Formy study, I focus my attention on the Quechua term supay,used to refer to the Andean lord of the underworld whowas also described as a ghostly entity. Similar to PeterMartyr’s reconceptualization of cemíes as demons, supayprovided a convenient early colonial translation to refer tothe devil in the Andes. By analyzing the intricacies of thepossible original meanings of supay before the arrival ofthe Spaniards, its distortion in Spanish dictionaries, itsmanifestation in colonial Andean stories collected in theManuscrito de Huarochirí (1598-1608), and its elusivetreatment in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica ybuen gobierno (1615), I seek to understand how the Andeansacred was transformed into the Christian idea of the devilbut remained an ambiguous sacred entity for the Indians.

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