Dream-visions and divine truth in early modern hispanic America

Redden, A ORCID: 0000-0002-2120-9319 (2013) Dream-visions and divine truth in early modern hispanic America. In: Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press,Philadelphia, pp. 147-165.

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Abstract

The early modern Hispanic world was one in which the boundaries between reality, imagination, and delusion frequently blurred, sometimes imperceptibly. 1 The apparently active presence of spiritual entities made it harder to discern these boundaries and so, while many in Hispano-American society sought to give meaning to their dreams in order to better understand and negotiate the trials of everyday life, religious authorities legislated against dream interpretation for fear that this could cause and spread religious error. The consequences of such errors were not considered to be merely academic, rather they represented real danger to those who might be influenced by them. For example, Pedro Ciruelo-in his influential sixteenth-century treatise against superstition and sorcery-summarized this concern by writing that the vanity of dream divination lay in the fact there was never any certainty to the predictions the devil imparted to the "necromancer" and, most important, "the man becomes blinded and deceived by the devil: because he [the devil] treats him [the man] as if he were his slave. And God permits this because the man, due to his sins, deserves it."2 In this case, of course, Ciruelo was not condemning those who dream, rather those who actively interpret dreams in order to predict the future. Together with a broader belief that dreams might contain fundamental and revelatory truths unregulated by church authority and tradition, dream divining was considered particularly dangerous because it was that activity which implied some sort of pact between the diviner and the devil. Simply put, a dream could not be considered to reveal what was unknown unless a preternatural or supernatural power was involved; the chances of that power being of divine origin were considered relatively slim by church authorities. Thus authoritative pronouncements against dream interpretation, such as that found in "Sermon XIX" of the Tercero Catechismo in the epigraph, were perceived to be addressing a potentially serious problem. If we turn now to Hispanic America, Catholic religious authorities might have dismissed dreams that closely fitted autochthonous cultural paradigms as "vanities" or diabolical delusion, yet such rejection was never so simple with regard to those dreams that bridged cultures or that closely conformed to accepted Catholic tropes. As Francisco Núñez informed his Mapuche friend (quoted in the epigraph) in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, scripture held that God had granted revelations by way of dreams; there was then, an approved tradition of revealed truth within dream interpretation-the question was how to understand it. This chapter examines a selection of case studies involving dreams, dream-visions, and dream interpretation from late sixteenth- to eighteenthcentury Hispanic America. For the purposes of this essay, the significance of these cases lies in their utility as historical sources, for the imagery in indigenous dreams and the way they were interpreted (and, significantly, the way they were reported as having been interpreted) can give us an insight into the understandings of the time and place. This is true especially for those moments when cultural meanings might be expected to have shifted as indigenous dreamscapes were affected by the intervention of priests and confessors-in particular, the Jesuits-engaged in the process of conversion of indigenous Americans to Christianity. Indeed, the process of conversion provides the frame in which the dream-visions to be discussed below were and could be analyzed. While dreams and their meaning are arguably entirely personal and therefore subjective (making it more difficult for historians to gauge their historical utility), it is worth considering that dream imagery and the interpretation of this imagery are always dependent on overarching cultural constructs that enable the dreamers and their immediate community to give meaning to the signs and symbols visualized. 4 As Michael Brown points out in his essay "Ropes of Sand," the very act of remembering and retelling a dream is a cultural process.5 When those cultural processes are themselves affected by others (such as conversion to Christianity), then one can note a range of conflicting responses. In his study of early modern Jesuit-Chinese dream-visions, for example, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia notes that while dreams may be a universal phenomenon, they are not remembered or retold in the same way. In other words, he says, "dreams may reflect a universal mental grammar and yet utter culturally specific discourses."6 Herein lies the value of dreams within history, as those that have been recorded in contemporary documents and chronicles can (with all the necessary interpretative caution) provide us with additional information about the cultural interaction taking place during the period and in the region under study: Their remembrance, retelling, and subsequent documentation layered the dreams with imagery and cultural meanings understood by the dreamer, listeners, and writers.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Dreams, Visions, Christianity, Colonial Peru, Colonial Chile, Indigenous Religious beliefs and practices, Early Modern Catholicism
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	19 May 2016 15:17
Last Modified:	05 Nov 2024 11:43
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3000811