Getting Ratted Out to the Inquisition

One of the articles for this week, “Women, Religion, and Power” by Martha Few, utilized two cases of accusations of witchcraft and “superstition” from Inquisition records from colonial Guatemala to discuss the ways in which women used religion to exercise power over their own lives.  These two women, Lorensa de Galves and Sebastiana de la Cruz, were reported to the Inquisition after witnesses to their rituals, one a mulatta slave and the other a Catholic priest, felt that their actions were heretical in nature.  Lorensa used a ritual that involved spinning scissors in the air while invoking the twelve apostles to find out who stole several items of clothing.  The mistress of the mulatta slave discovered this ritual and disrupted it.  Sebastiana was accused of believing that her son was a son of god and had divine powers.  Specifically she and several other people had knelt in front of him while he was on a cross wearing a crown of thorns.  She also attributed to her son divine birth, saying that he had come from the sky.

Martha Few attributes to these actions great significance given their race, gender, and class status.  She argues that their actions were about power and the ways in which women could appropriate religious imagery and language for their own uses.  Sebastiana was a mulatta and a widow.  She used Catholic imagery in the rituals she practiced with her son and others, but in a way not sanctioned by the Church and in fact fairly heretical.  Lorensa was white and also a widow.  Her “witchcraft” also used Catholic imagery(the twelve apostles) but for her own uses (to find the stolen articles of clothing; which apparently she was able to do!)  Few links these actions to women’s acts of resistance to the social climate of the day.  This is a novel interpretation in that both these things could just be interpreted as overly superstitious/slightly crazy women doing weird things (which is how witchcraft comes off to me!)  Few is able to re-contextualize these, to show how they make sense in a world in which women (and especially widowed women) have to justify their non-traditional actions because they lack power and privilege.