Inquisition

  Why did people sincerely believe in the divinity of these beatas? The answer must be that they dealt with some deep needs, with some of the distortions of reality that repression had forced people to accommodate. On a physical level they clearly provided an outlet for the increasingly repressed sexuality of Iberia under the sway of the Inquisition. On the psychological level, however, these cases were symptomatic of the effects of the cult of the Virgin.

  It is worth bearing in mind that one of the most common blasphemies prosecuted by the Inquisition related to doubting the truth of the virgin birth. While some refused to believe that a virgin could give birth, others could use the sexual activities of beatas to show that supposedly pure women were like everyone else. The sexual impurity of some beatas fulfilled a psychological need for a supposedly pure woman who was in fact not pure and not a virgin; on an unconscious level, beatas represented society’s deep resentment of the uses made of the story of the Virgin, and its collective belief in its impossibility.

  MANY PEOPLE LIKE a miracle. In Mexico the most important religious shrine today is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, now on the northern fringes of Mexico City. The shrine commemorates miraculous visions of the Virgin said to have been had by an indigenous labourer, Juan Diego, in 1531 just ten years after the conquest of Mexico. In July 2002 Pope John Paul II came to Mexico City to canonize Juan Diego. Millions of people thronged the Reforma boulevard in the city to witness the passage of the pope as he made his way to the shrine of Guadalupe to canonize an individual who some historians now doubt ever existed. Many of the people who came were from Mexico’s indigenous communities and one of them said on TV, This canonization is for all of us’.

  Perhaps similar feelings were prominent in the minds of those who adored beatas. How much better, after all, to adore holiness in the flesh than to think back to increasingly distant stories of the doings of Jesus and Mary in a far country that no one had ever visited. Yet when this credulity was stretched to allow all sorts of forbidden fruits, the real motivations behind such innocent desires were revealed.

  Here it is worth recalling the religious atmosphere of the 1520s and the first persecutions of Old Christians by the Inquisition in Spain. One of the groups that came under close scrutiny was the alumbrados or illuminists, and one of the more unusual doctrines of a member of this group, Antonio Medrano, was that ‘devotees could embrace one another naked as well as clothed’*2 – not something found in many religious works, either then or now, but an idea testament to the sort of feelings being worked through as the Inquisition advanced through society.

  As the 16th century unwound, beatas and alumbrados became increasingly associated in the minds of inquisitors, and each carried connotations of illicit sex. In early cases of persecution of alumbrados in the region of Toledo sexual activity had been a minor part of the accusations, but it was to become a much stronger element as time wore on. The next group of alumbrados was uncovered in the dusty region of Extremadura in the 1570s. They were revealed by an itinerant monk from the region, Alonso de la Fuente, who realized that curious modes of religiosity were at work when he came across a niece of his near Badajoz who ‘showed great signs of holiness . . . being yellow, dirty, thin, going about groaning, sweating and downcast’.20

  The woman was a beata, and confessed to de la Fuente that her master had told her to confess in such a way that ‘she felt a huge weight of bad thoughts, revolting considerations, carnal feelings, faithless ideas, heresies, blasphemies against God and the saints and against the purity of the mother of God . . . that she felt dead, consumed, mad and without reason or the body of a woman; and that she bore it all with patience, since her spiritual advisor told her that all this was a sign of perfection and of being on the right path’.21 If being a tortured, wretched misery was indeed seen as perfection, one wonders what hell would have looked like to these spiritual guides.

  De la Fuente, for one, knew at once that ‘all the teachers of this wickedness were ministers of the AntiChrist’.22 In the town where his niece lived the leader of the local alumbradas was one Marí Sánchez, who, said de la Fuente, ‘was celebrated as a very holy and wise women . . . and she had reached such a state of perfection that she was given communion every day as a spiritual necessity, because she was so hungry for the Sacrament that if she was not given it on any day she fell ill in bed and gave out a thousand groans and suffered cruel torments and behaved like a woman who had been bitten with rabies’.23 In today’s language one might say that if she didn’t receive communion this beata had a neurotic fit.

  The leaders of this group were Hernando Alvarez and Cristóbal Chamizo, who were both punished in an auto in Llerena in 1579.24 These father-confessors had exceptionally efficacious methods of inducing neurotic symptoms in their ‘daughters of confession’. They would declare that only they were to confess the women. They would instruct their charges to fast and discipline themselves with lashes at least once every five days. They would tell them to pray rigorously and contemplate the meaning of the passion of Christ. After some time undergoing this austere, self-mutilating programme, the priests would ask the women if they felt anything.25

  An anonymous report for the Inquisition described what happened next:

  Those who perform this prayer with feeling experience hot flushes, ardour, and pain in specific parts of the body, in the heart, in the chest, in the back, in the left arm and in ulcerous places; they faint, suffer from seizures, palpitations, tiredness, rabidness, anxieties, and other strange things. Then their confessors tell them that these come from God and the Holy Spirit. Some of these beatas, when they perform these prayers, see visions, hear noises and voices, suffer great fears and frights, and they cannot look at images or go to church . . . and it seems to them that the Christ who they are contemplating appears as a man and they suddenly feel great carnal temptations, and it really seems to them that they touch him sexually until he is polluted [ejaculates]. This is then the excuse for their guides to teach them to look on them as men as well, and they fall in with them putting mouth against mouth and limbs against limbs and the guides say pretty and loving words to them, such as ‘Flesh of my flesh, bones of my bones’ . . .26

  Chamizo was found guilty of deflowering numerous beatas. The symptoms provoked by his mode of confessing went beyond the purview of inquisitorial explanation:

  As soon as these women confess with their guides, they feel a strange affection for them, and they become lost in great temptations of the flesh. Soon they feel fits of madness and they go to look for them and their spiritual guides kiss them and embrace them and put their hands on their breasts and over their hearts, telling them that these contacts are not sinful, that they do them to make them happy, to console them and to help them to get rid of these feelings . . . and some of them go further with these contacts, putting their tongues in their mouths and touching them in their private parts and throwing themselves naked onto the bed with them.27

  Such strong currents of repressed energy were unleashed by these methods of prayer and contemplation that some women were able to melt wax with their bare hands when they were in the midst of this inflamed passion, known to them as ‘devotion’.28 In the 1620s an even more widespread outbreak of alumbradismo would be experienced in Seville, led by a beata called Catalina de Jesús and her sidekick, the priest Juan de Villalpando. Once again a confessor would take advantage of his position to touch up his ‘daughters of confession’, and there were so many people in this group that over 500 people gave evidence against Villalpando.29

  Both Extremadura and Seville, where these alumhrados were found, were places from which large numbers of men had left to go to the New World,30 places of longing, desires and sadness. But most of all they were places where these phenomena had to co-exist with sexual repression, watched over by the same ideology as accompanied the rise of the Inquisition. These conditions fostered the development of neurotic symptoms in those for whom repression was most severe. This usually meant women unabl
e to marry for lack of men. The social forces unleashed with the expansion to America had thus also triggered the mass exploitation of women by men, an exploitation that took place on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

  THE ROLE OF the Inquisition in propagating repression was a complex one. By the time of the discovery of the disturbed behaviour of the alumhrados of Extremadura in the 1570s the Council of Trent had placed the sexual behaviour of Catholics within the scope of inquisitorial inquiry. It was the Council of Trent which made monogamous marriage the sole legally and morally acceptable form of social behaviour, and it was the Inquisition which was charged with overseeing the daily repression of ‘sexual deviance’ – sex outside marriage.31 Bulls of 1559 and 1561 required the Church to examine the behaviour of priests in the confessional, and soon increasing attention was being given to sodomy and bigamy. What the French philosopher Michel Foucault called the ‘cycle of the forbidden’ had begun.32

  Sodomy – homosexual sex – was tried by both the Inquisitions of the Crowns of Aragon and Portugal, though not by the Inquisition of the Crown of Castile. The first trials for sodomy in Aragon had been as early as 1531, in Barcelona,33 while in Portugal sodomy came under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction in 1555,34 and was the second most common crime tried by the Inquisition there after crypto-Judaism.35 The right of Portuguese inquisitors to inquire into sodomy spread to Goa in 1567.36 Women and men were covered by the inquisitorial definition of sodomy, as lesbianism was included, though the number of trials for this was very small; there were several cases of women denounced for lesbianism in Brazil in the 1590s37 but it was decided in 1646 that women should only be prosecuted for their part in anal sex.38

  Many cases of sodomy which came before inquisitors were testament to the harsh, isolated nature of existence in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Migration to and from ports and between areas of seasonal work meant that Iberia was a place full of inns where strangers would bed down in the same room as one another before continuing on their journeys.39 These people may have been shepherds tending flocks, servants of powerful figures or muleteers and carters transporting goods from one end of the country to the other. They had to supply their own food and entertainment. Inns would have been filled with pulsing energies, tiredness and physical frustrations exacerbated by temptation. Beds were often shared with strangers as the key was thought to be to maintain bodily warmth with four in a bed not uncommon. This meant that those so inclined deliberately frequented inns looking for willing partners.40

  Besides the chance homosexual encounters of the road, there were ugly stories of abuse. Francisco da Cruz worked in the convent of St Catherine in Évora and was accused by several young men of touching their private parts when sharing the same bed,41 while a friar from the Dominican monastery of the same city was notorious in the early 17th century for trying to rape young men in the district. One of his targets, Manoel Pires, was only able to escape by punching the fat, tall man and knocking him to the ground.42

  While today we may draw a distinction between such predatory and abusive attempts at a homosexual encounter and consensual sex, the Inquisition did not. Since the Middle Ages sodomy had been associated with heresy.43 The act of sodomy was seen as a violation of the natural order and something increasingly significant when the state’s presence was encroaching on many aspects of life, and when it desired to impose the notion of a natural order and hierarchy.44 Thus all acts of sodomy, whether violent or not, needed to be prosecuted.

  In pursuing homosexuals, the Inquisition was far from alone in Europe. More people were executed for sodomy in Calvinist Holland between 1730 and 1732 than in the entire history of the Portuguese Inquisition.45 Thus the repression of homosexuality by the Inquisition was not in any way unique; nevertheless, it was testament to the atmosphere of sexual repression which was also expressed through the pursuit of bigamists.

  Bigamy is not seen as a major problem today, but in the 16th and 17th centuries it was rife. This was for two main reasons: first, that legitimate sexual relationships could only take place within marriage, and second, that this was a world where people were criss-crossing the oceans in an attempt to make their fortunes, and slaves could be uprooted from one place and deposited in another.

  Thus many bigamists punished by the Inquisition in the Americas were slaves who had been taken away from their wives or husbands and had decided to marry again.46 Sometimes people had more prosaic reasons for committing bigamy; this was the case with a man accused in Lisbon in 1666 of having married a rich widow so that he could get hold of enough money to keep his first wife and their children.47

  What the Inquisition’s dealings with bigamy reveal most of all is a form of institutional blindness reminiscent of the official searching a ship for banned books and ignoring the slaves stacked up like matchsticks in the hold. For when one reads some of the cases prosecuted by the Inquisition in this area it is clear both that they were expressive of lives of sadness, fear and danger, and also that the Inquisition had little empathy for the people caught up in the midst of these emotions.

  Recife (Brazil) 1663

  ANTONIO MARQUES DA SYLVA came before the inquisitorial representatives to accuse his wife, Maria Figeuira de Abreu, of bigamy. Sylva was a desperate man with a desperate story; the Inquisition was his last hope. He had married his wife sixteen years before in the city of Bahia, and after living with her for three years and having children, he had sailed for Portugal on business. It was a decision which was to have disastrous repercussions for the rest of his life.48

  En route to Portugal, Sylva’s ship had been seized by English pirates and he had been taken to Harwich in England. He was imprisoned for eleven months before being allowed to go to Portugal. After a few years there saving money, he had left as a passenger on a ship travelling to the island of Madeira to pick up wine. From Madeira Sylva had planned to go on to Brazil, but his ship had again been captured by pirates and this time he had been abandoned in the Azores.

  Sylva was clearly out of favour with the heavens. He had been forced to return again to Portugal, where for some time he was unable to get the money together to return to his wife. At last, in August 1661, eleven years after he had left Brazil, he set sail in an English ship for Rio de Janeiro. He arrived safely, but Rio was almost 1,000 miles from his familial home. Setting sail from Rio for Bahia, the ship he was travelling in sank off the coast of Espirito Santo and Sylva swam ashore without anything in the world except the clothes on his back.

  After such an extraordinary series of adventures the prospect of home must have seemed a sweet dream indeed. Yet perhaps Sylva had also learnt to adopt a little fatalism; in Espirito Santo he learnt that his wife had married again and that if he appeared she and her husband would kill him. However, Sylva felt that he probably had little choice but to continue. He had no money, no possessions and no contacts anywhere but in his old home. Arriving in Bahia, he fell ill and spent three months in hospital. He did not try to find his wife; he kept his head down even after leaving hospital and going on to Recife, until one night his wife, having heard that he had reappeared, sent for him and took him to her house.

  For two months Sylva and his wife lived together. He pretended that he was her brother-in-law, as anything else would have aroused suspicion. Maria told him not to worry and that she would give him the money to return to Portugal, but one night she and her second husband Francisco Alvares Roxo tried to move him out of the city to the house of Roxo’s aunt. Realizing that this was the prelude to killing him, Sylva escaped and told inquisitors his story; the inquisitors arrested Sylva’s wife, and the case began to unravel.

  Stories like Sylva’s reveal the root cause of much of the bigamy of the time: the unpredictability and danger of life in the age of the discoveries. Sylva’s wife Maria was clearly afraid of the consequences of the Inquisition’s discovery of her sin and by no means the only bigamist to contemplate the murder of an inconvenient extra husband or wife.49 At times, exiled men married again in the
ir place of exile, to the deep sadness of their first wives, who would come crying to the door to hear news of the people that they had loved, and lost.50

  The penalties for those found guilty of bigamy were harsh. As late as 1774, in Portugal they included whipping and between five and seven years in the galleys for men, and six and eight years in exile in Angola or Brazil for women.51 Meanwhile, in both Aragon and Portugal sodomy could lead to being ‘relaxed’ to the secular arm. Just as sex outside marriage was perceived as sinful, multiple marriages or, in the Inquisition’s enigmatic phrase, ‘pollution outside the natural vessel [non-vaginal sex]’ could not be tolerated in a society governed by moral values.

  Once again, we find ourselves in the gulf between the intentions and the effects of the Inquisition. With these notions of sexual conformity, the Inquisition claimed to desire a morally pure society and yet, as we have seen with the beatas and alumbrados, the society of which it was the moral guardian encouraged sexual neuroses which led to results which were anything but pure. There was an outward concern for morality, but no thought to what this might do to people’s inner emotions. A fastidious concern with the details of a case history blinded investigators to the emotional and moral significance of their subject.

  The level of repression aimed at ordinary sexual activity emerges casually from details. Take the Frenchman Charles Dellon in Goa in the late 17th century: with ships constantly coming into port bringing men looking for sex and a little release, Dellon was told by a Portuguese to cover up the crucifix above his bed if he brought home a woman to sleep with.52 Natural impulses had been made taboo and the enforcer of this code was the Inquisition. In such circumstances outbreaks of mass insanity such as those which periodically centred on beatas were almost inevitable. Such neurotic acts of sexual fulfilment were a vital defence mechanism, and one of the only ways of exorcising the demons festering within.