{"product_id":"guardians-of-idolatry-gods-demons-and-priests-in-hernando-ruiz-de-alarcons-treatise-on-the-heathen-superstitions","title":"Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón's Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions","description":"In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarc n produced the \u003ci\u003eTreatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain \u003c\/i\u003eto aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish \u003ci\u003eTreatise\u003c\/i\u003e collected diverse incantations, or \u003ci\u003enahualtocaitl\u003c\/i\u003e, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is recognized as one of the most significant firsthand records of indigenous religious practices in postconquest Mexico. Yet, as Viviana D az Balsera argues in \u003ci\u003eGuardians of Idolatry\u003c\/i\u003e, the selection process for the incantations recorded in the \u003ci\u003eTreatise\u003c\/i\u003e reflects two sites of agency: Ruiz de Alarc n's desire to present the most flagrant examples of Nahua \"demonic\" practices, and Nahua efforts to share benign nahualtocaitl in order to preserve their preconquest traditions while negotiating with colonial Christian hegemony. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eGuardians of Idolatry\u003c\/i\u003e offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. Through close reading of four incantations--for safe travel, maguey sap harvesting, bow-and-arrow deer hunting, and divination through maize kernels--D az Balsera shows the nuances of a Nahua spiritual world populated by intelligent superhuman and nonhuman entities that directly responded to human appeals for intercession. She also addresses Jacinto de la Serna's \u003ci\u003eManual for Ministers of These Indians\u003c\/i\u003e (1656), an elaborate commentary on the \u003ci\u003eTreatise\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eGuardians of Idolatry \u003c\/i\u003etells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico. Together, Ruiz de Alarc n's \u003ci\u003eTreatise\u003c\/i\u003e and de la Serna's \u003ci\u003eManual\u003c\/i\u003e reveal the highly sophisticated language of the nahualtocaitl, and the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican epistemology. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDíaz Balsera, Viviana:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cb\u003eViviana Díaz Balsera \u003c\/b\u003eis Professor of Spanish at the University of Miami and the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Pyramid under the Cross: Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Oklahoma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50328531468562,"sku":"9780806160405","price":49.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_39c2ca5a-6d92-47c7-bd9e-c822f9cdc178.jpg?v=1727743585","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/guardians-of-idolatry-gods-demons-and-priests-in-hernando-ruiz-de-alarcons-treatise-on-the-heathen-superstitions","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}