Gods, demonds and deceivers: jesuits facing Chaco skies

ALEJANDRO MARTÍN LÓPEZ

Évora

Congreso; 19º Congreso de la Société Européene Pour L?astronomie Dans La Culture (SEAC) del año 2011 ?Stars and Stones: Voyages in Archaeoastronomy and Cultural Astronomy - A meeting of different worlds?; 2011

Société Européene pour L?Astronomie dans la Culture (SEAC), Portuguese Association for Archaeological Research

During the 18th century, the Jesuits established a series of missions in what nowadays is the Argentine Chaco (such as San Javier in 1743, San Jerónimo del Rey in 1748, San Ignacio de Ledesma 1756, San Pedro in 1764, Jesus of Nazareth Inspín in 1766). This missions are lees known that the ones among the Guarani and also had a shorter duration. However, they were extremely important because they were located at a border area, which was thought by the Europeans and creoles of that time as a wild and unknown region. In this territory lived hunter-gatherers aboriginal groups which were organized in small bands; these groups had adopted European cattle and the use of horses. Also, they had complex relationships with colonial society: on the one hand, they frequently made armed raids against Creole border towns and on the other hand, they traded -especially cattle and horses- with colonial settlements.In this context, several Jesuits who settled in this region produced texts that describe their experiences. In them, they discussed sky conceptions of the aboriginal groups that lived in Chaco region. These reports were made in the context of the evangelization task. One of the concerns that these texts expressed was the search for local deities or vocabulary referring to divinity. Many of these authors referred that they did not found any of them. This strange fact certainly had an impact in the Jesuits descriptions about aboriginal skies.  Jesuits? opinions about the aboriginal celestial space were not only mediated by Christian ideas about heaven but also, by the baroque view of the Greco-Roman conceptions of the sky, especially the ones suggested by Ovid. Moreover, these texts were written mostly after the Jesuits? expulsion and thus they had an apologetic intent. Certainly, they sought to honor the work of the Jesuits missionaries, which sometimes leaded them to exaggerate the difficulties of the missionary task. However, they also tried to show the aboriginal people as beings that, with the right guidance, could be good Christians and loyal subjects. This intent also influenced the ways they used to present the aboriginal conceptions about the sky.Framed by these tensions, the Jesuits descriptions of Chaco skies range from the evemeristic opinion that the aboriginal skies were populated by old and heroic ancestors, to the idea that it was the devil who these groups worshiped in the stars. Halfway between these positions, we can locate the argument of ?the warlocks as deceivers?, which is widely used in the context of the struggle against shamanism.