Witchcraft and Wizardry

According to Guaman Poma, it was male who officiated over the magical rituals. They were usually some sort of poison maker or the like. However, there were many different spiritual beliefs. Owls hooting at the wrong time or a wolf howling could be dark omens for the Incas. These rituals and spells might seem silly to “modern” people who believe in “reason” and “science” over superstition, but they were an active part of these people’s lives. The spells were usually utilized in such a way as to inflict punishment of some sort. This could be binding a toad and burying it in a specific location so the intended target would die in the same fashion. Or, if a thief stole a potato then the leaves of the plant would be hanged at the road to create shame within the criminal. There were also spells to allow women to punish men or allow them to punish each other through different incantations. “The demons take you,” “May you be reduced to living like a wild animal,” “May you have to be for your living or work as a servant,” “May you wander like a lost soul,” “May you starve, shrivel in the sun, go astray and die in misery as a penniless, miserable, cowardly, thieving, lousy son of a whoring mother.”  These may sound like regular insults, but the Incans believed that words had spiritual power and one could actually place a curse by saying them.

This is incredibly similar, and incredibly different, from the experience of witchcraft in Mexico and Spain under the Holy Mother Church. In continental Europe it was mostly women who were persecuted for their assumption of playing with the devil. These were usually single, older women who did not fit society’s standard of acceptable gender norms. Sometimes it would even be something as ridiculous as the woman having red hair. However, the incredible similarity is that both the magic in the Andes and witchcraft in Europe and Mexico were done to injure an adversarial party. This could be a cheating husband or any evil person. The spells could range from trying to make the husband impotent or killing him. One spell was to put a candle under the bed in a bucket of water, and when it went out then the husband would no longer want to have sex. The common theme throughout the literature is that magic was used to punish those that could not be punished in other ways. This is subversive because the normal social channels, the Church and civil courts, could not give the women the satisfaction they need in exacting revenge upon their mates. If anything, it is the fault of the Church for allowing this to happen because they would not kill cheating husbands. There seems to be very similar, yet definitively different, circumstance and actions between the magicians of the Andes and of Spain/Mexico.