Jacinto de la Serna, Manual de ministros de indios
A handbook by the parish priest of the Sagrario of Mexico City, written to help other priests recognise and stamp out Nahua ritual practice. To make it usable he printed the thing he meant to destroy: healers' testimony in their own account of it, the herbs they used, the incantations word for word. The same pages record the death sentences, the forced searches and the imprisonments that produced the testimony.
Why this wins its question: Extirpation manuals are normally cited as evidence of repression and left there, or quoted through modern anthologies that print the incantations without the pages around them. Both halves are on the same sheets and are set down here together from a reading of the edition: the declared purpose — print the words so ministers can recognise them, preach against them, prevent their use and punish those who use them — and then the words themselves, the maguey conjuros, the xicara divination, the peyote and ololiuhqui and estafiate, a healer crediting the Virgin of los Remedios with showing her the herbs; and, on the facing columns, a death sentence at Coiucan, a house entered by force at Atenango, a section headed "Prisiones de medicos y hechiceros", and a man dead after an ololiuhqui cure. The object also does what popular accounts of this text almost never do: it records that the edition available here is a 1953 reprint catalogued as 1892, that its editors admit cutting passages, and that its Nahuatl was silently normalised by its editor, so nothing quoted can be attributed to the seventeenth-century manuscript.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The work is a priest's manual against indigenous religion, and its title says so. The facsimile of the Museo Nacional title page reproduced in this edition reads "MANUAL DE MINISTROS DE INDIOS PARA EL CONOCIMIENTO DE SUS IDOLATRIAS, Y EXTIRPACION DE ELLAS", composed "POR EL DR. JACINTO DE LA SERNA", described there as a native of Mexico, three times rector of the Colegio Viejo de Todos Santos, doctor of theology of the imperial university and three times its rector, curate of the Sagrario of the cathedral and visitador general.
The text states its own reason for printing what it condemns. Introducing the section "Conjuros usados para sangrar y aplicar ventosas", Serna writes that he will set down the words used "assi en las ventosas como en las sangrias", and gives the purpose plainly: "Lo que baste para que los Ministros entiendan la materia, y la reconoscan, assi para predicarla, como para estorbar que no se usse, y castigar á los que la ussaren" — enough that ministers may understand the matter and recognise it, so as to preach against it, to prevent its use, and to punish those who use it.
He also states the limits of his own transcription. Because these things "son tan antiguas y que de ordinario suelen estar mal escritas", he says, "no se puede todo ajustar á las palabras, que ussarian antiguamente, ni tampoco formalmente explicar la fuerça de las methaphoras, de que ussan, y darles en el todo la significacion, que tuvieron antiguamente: mas lo mas essencial porné". The compiler of the fullest surviving record of this language says on the page that he cannot fix its wording and cannot explain the force of its metaphors.
The metaphorical language is named and defined. Maize, "la principal semilla desta nacion", carries conjuros "tan obscuros, y methaphoricos" that to understand them one must go to the calendars, the signs of the months and the gods they are applied to; "ellos de ordinario llaman á este lenguaje, y nombres de estas methaphoras Nahualtocaitl, que quiere decir nombres disfraçados" — disguised names.
The conjuros are printed in full rather than summarised, and they are addressed to the plant and the tool. Before uprooting a maguey for transplanting, the digging stick is conjured — "Ea, que ya es tiempo, espiritado cuya dicha está en las aguas: vamos, que emos de arrancar, y leuantar la estimable muger, la de ocho en orden, que è de ir á plantarla" — and once planted the maguey is welcomed: "Seas ya bien llegada, noble muger de ocho en hilera, que aqui es muy aproposito, y muy buen lugar: aqui labré y cultivé para que estes muy á gusto." The copper spoon used to scrape the plant for aguamiel is addressed as "chichimeco bermejo", and the earth as "mi madre, y señora tierra".
Serna explains the metaphors he has just printed, and the explanation is itself ethnography: the maguey is called "la de ocho en hilera" because the plants are set out eight to a row in a square; the scraping spoon is called bermejo Chichimeco for its coppery colour and for the effect of eating the bark it scrapes, "porque entre esta nacion está receuido llamarse chichimecos porque comen y chupan sangre, y carne humana"; and the demand that the plant weep and sweat is "methaphora, en que se pide mucho fructo del aguamiel".
The healers' own account of their vocation is recorded at length. A woman called Francisca, named to Serna by "vn indio ladino de la Iglesia" as "muy gran medica", told him that the grace of curing was inherited from her parents, who were curanderos, and that as a girl she had died and lain three days dead under the water beside a great sabino, where she saw all her kindred, who gave her the grace to cure and the instruments to do it with: a needle to prick the affected part, and a xicara, a vessel of half a calabash, for divining what the sick had and how it would end.
The divination protocol is set down as a procedure. Called to a patient, Francisca put the xicara of water at the sick person's head and poured water in: if it turned yellow the illness was one God had given; if the water moved in a circle until it was consumed, the patient would die and there was no remedy; if it took the colour of blood it was a sign of witchcraft.
The pharmacopoeia is named, and so is the authority claimed for it. Francisca named some twenty practitioners who had received the grace and the instruments of their cures — to some the cupping glasses, to others the lancet, to others "las yerbas, y medicinas, que auian de aplicar el Peyote, el ololiuhqui, el Estaphiate, y otras yerbas" — and Serna records that one of them declared "que la Virgen Sanctissima de los Remedios personalmente le auia mostrado las yerbas de sus curas", so that she might have her living from what the sick paid her. Another healer's vision is given with the herbs named: the Virgin appeared as a pilgrim woman dressed in green with the child Jesus in her arms, a golden arch above her from which hung "Quanenepilli, Tlatlanquaio, Xoxotlatzin, Quapopoltzin".
A healing formula is printed word for word, and it invokes the Christian God. The healer was to stand at the door and say "Si es con orden de mi Padre Dios, aqui traigo la medicina, para que sudes, y te purgues; y si es voluntad de mi Dios, te aiudará, porque no es possible, que yo sobrepuje la palabra de Dios"; then to the illness, "Aora entra aqui junto á este enfermo, y tú la justicia de Dios te has de ir, y has de salir de aqui"; and then to the patient, promising to return the next day. Serna's own verdict is on the same page: "Parece, que no tienen estas palabras malicia alguna, y estan llenas de ponzoña" — they seem to have no malice in them, and they are full of poison — because, he argues, the fire is called Totatzin, our father, so the invocation is to the fire.
Ordinary observance is recorded alongside healing. Serna describes offerings of copal on hilltops and at cairns the Indians called Teolochollí, skeins of thread and badly spun cotton cloths called Piton, candles thrown into rivers on behalf of the sick, and the rite at the election of indigenous governors and alcaldes: when the men elected were young, the elders and principales carried them at dawn to the river and bathed them, and made offerings to the river so that it would favour the office they were beginning.
What the investigations cost is on the same sheets as what they preserved. In the case of the buried ashes at Coiucan in the province of Acapulco, after sickness followed and many died, the alcalde mayor, with the opinion of Doctor Juan Ciano, professor of laws in the university and afterwards oidor of Guadalajara, "condenó á muerte á los mas culpados" — condemned the most guilty to death. Of a woman of Atenango who kept inherited tecomates in a small chest under key, Serna writes that "fué necessaria mucha violencia, y maña deste Ministro para sacarselos", entering her house with the authority of the justice and as ecclesiastical judge, and that she fainted and lost the colour of her face when the chest was opened. A section heading a few pages later reads "Prisiones de medicos y hechiceros".
A death from ololiuhqui is recorded too, and belongs on the record beside the pharmacopoeia. A curandero named Juan de la Cruz pressed a sick man, Joseph Velázquez of Malinaltepec, to drink ololiuhqui; the man refused; Juan de la Cruz then lit candles in the oratory and persuaded the whole household to take it on his behalf, and all were "privados del Iuizio, que es el effecto de esta bebida". When they came to themselves the sick man began to die, raging against Juan de la Cruz and calling him "traidor hechizero, que me haz muerto".
The register of the prose is hostile throughout and should be read as such. Serna calls his subjects "estos miserables indios", states that "el author de todas estas maldades es el Demonio", and closes the ololiuhqui case by lamenting how easily "el Demonio se lleua á estos desventurados despues de auer receuido el agua del Sancto Baptismo". Nothing in the pages read credits the healers as holders of knowledge; they are witnesses under examination, and the book is the record of their examination.
The text has reached print through a damaged chain, which the edition itself sets out. Paso y Troncoso reports that the Museo Nacional's "original", dedicated to Archbishop Sagade Bugueiro, is written in a good hand that is not the author's, the author's signature appearing only at the foot of the dedication; that the manuscript had been in Boturini's hands; that two further copies then surfaced, one with Dr Nicolás León of Morelia and one at the Maisonneuve bookshop in Paris; and that the Paris copy, which he bought, proved "una copia, y pésima", so adulterated in words and concepts that "estaban las palabras mexicanas, especialmente, tan estropeadas todas, que juzgué bastante dificil su restablecimiento". It served all the same to repair lacunae in the Museo's copy, which lacked its title page and two leaves at the front and had two more cut out of the body — one of which had carried a painting of the Siglos, and one the drawing later identified as the Cuauhtli Ocelotl.
The edition read here is not the one its catalogue record names, and it declares two interventions of its own. A footnote on page 92 dates this printing "Pub. en Bteca. de Lib. NAVARRO.—México, D. F., 1953", although the volume is catalogued to 1892; the editors state that where a disquisition ran long "hemos hecho algunas supreciones, en los ultimos razonamientos, pero dejando casi siempre, la parte inicial de los mismos"; and Paso y Troncoso states that he left the Spanish text's errors standing but that the Nahuatl he had "procurado personalmente subsanarlas, examinandolas con escrupulosidad y haciendolas inteligibles, pues en gran parte dependian de mala separacion de los vocablos". Every Nahuatl form quoted above is therefore an editor's restoration, not a manuscript reading, and no claim is made here about the wording of the seventeenth- century original.
This manual is one of a set, and the set's other great witness is a relative of a famous man. In the same edition Paso y Troncoso lists the order of the treatises in the Museo Nacional's original volume — "Pedro Ponce, Sánchez Aguilar, Ruiz de Alarcón, Balsalobre, Jacinto de la Serna y Fray Pedro de Feria" — and judges that to take the incantations from Alarcón's treatise "es como si bebiésemos en la purísima fuente original, puesto que las recogió el hermano de nuestro dramaturgo de boca de los indios": Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, brother of the playwright, collected them from the mouths of the Indians. Serna's own pages describe that brother at work, as the beneficiado of Atenango del Río acting under commission from Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna.