Vipers under the altar cloths: satanic and angelic forms in seventeenth-century New Granada

Redden, Andrew ORCID: 0000-0002-2120-9319 (2013) Vipers under the altar cloths: satanic and angelic forms in seventeenth-century New Granada. In: Angels, Demons and the New World. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, pp. 146-168.

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Abstract

One morning one of the Fathers was saying Mass at the high altar of a church … On reaching the end of the Gospel of St John, his companion placed his hands on the corner of the altar to say ‘Verbum caro factum est’. As he took his hands away, a viper that was under the cloth [struck at] him [but missed] and the Father fervently thanked the Lord for having liberated him from such manifest danger. One afternoon, as [the Jesuit missionaries] left a mountain range, the devil raised such a storm of water, wind, thunder and lightning in revenge for the tremendous torment that their preaching caused him that it seemed like the world would end … Once the storm had abated a little, they continued on their journey … unharmed: although one of the lightning bolts so startled the mule carrying the [Mass] ornaments [and] portable altar … that it fell down the mountainside. But they found it uninjured and its sacred baggage completely undamaged. For seventeenth-century commentators, New Granada was a land of great contrasts and extremes – at once violent and beautiful, where temperate and fertile valleys gave way to huge mountain ranges, immense plains or thick jungle; where fast-flowing mountain streams became vast languid rivers and where life and death were familiar partners. Such contrasts were often just as evident in people's spiritual lives, so it should come as little surprise to find angels as well as demons in the historical documentation. In a place where vipers could hide beneath altar cloths to strike out at unwary priests as they finished Mass, demons could strike unwary souls in the hope of poisoning them and causing their perdition. Meanwhile, angelic instruments of divine providence were often the soul's last defence against these demonic attacks from the darkness.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Angels, demons, syncretic religious practices, Jesuits, Colonial New Granada
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	18 May 2016 16:03
Last Modified:	17 Dec 2024 11:45
DOI:	10.1017/cbo9781139023870.009
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3000806