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Caciques and Conversion: Juan Atonal and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Post-Conquest Chiapas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
In September, 1584, during an episcopal visita to Chiapa de Indios, a group of townspeople came to the bishop, Fray Pedro de Feria, to accuse the patriarch of one of the principal lineages in the town of leading a clandestine cult. They said that, in nearby Suchiapa, a “gran junta” composed of twelve Indians who called themselves the Twelve Apostles gathered at night to walk among the hills and caves, and to perform “demonic rites against our Christian religion.” With them, Feria was told, went two women. One they called Santa María; the other, Magdalena. Together the cultists carried out ceremonies in which they transformed themselves into gods and goddesses. In their divine form, the women were said to have the power to conjure storms, and to give many riches to whomever they pleased. Feria would report that they had “many other superstitutions and vanities” which he compared to the Alumbrados or Illuminist sect that had been widely popular in Spain during the 1520s and been condemned by the Inquisition.
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References
1 The account of the Atonal conspiracy is drawn entirely from “Relación que hace el obispo de Chiapas, Fray Pedro de Feria, sobre la reincidencia en sus idolatrias de los indios de aquel país despues de treinta años de cristianos,” in Orozco, Francisco y Jiménez, , ed., Colección de documentos inéditos relativos a la iglesia de Chiapas, Tomo II (San Cristóbal de las Casas, 1909–1911),Google Scholar No pagination. For other secondary treatments, see Wasserstrom, Robert Class and Society in Central Chiapas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 24–26;Google Scholar de León, Antonio García Resistencia y utopía (México: Ediciones Era, 1985), 1, 76–77;Google Scholar and especially, Megged, Amos “Accomodation and Resistance of Elites in Transition: The Case of Chiapa in Early Colonial Mesoamerica,” HAHR, 71 (August 1991), 477–500.Google Scholar
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