 | This article is missing information about the circumstances of de Eguiluz's death.(October 2023) |
Paula de Eguiluz (fl. 1636) was a healer of African descent in present-day Santo Domingo.[ clarification needed ] [1] [2] Well known as a health-care practitioner in one of the largest slave cities in the New World, she was tried for witchcraft three times. [3] She had an important impact on the community of African healers.
De Eguiluz was born in present-day Santo Domingo.[ clarification needed ] Her mother, Guiomar, was an enslaved woman for a man named Diego de Leguizamón. De Eguiluz lived with her mother until her teenage years, when she was bought by Íñigo de Otaza. He enslaved her for many years and later sold her to a man named Juan de Eguiluz, in Havana. [4]
Living in Cartagena, Colombia,[ further explanation needed ] de Eguiluz was surrounded by a significant population of enslaved African women and African inhabitants. Owing to the flow of people coming and going, there was a substantial number of healers and ritual specialists in the city, as there was also much disease. The Spaniards and Creoles saw these women as the cause of disease.
De Eguiluz learned about remedies and rituals to help heal others. [5] She was accused and tried for witchcraft three separate times, between the years 1623 and 1636.
The first time de Eguiluz was accused of witchcraft was around 1624. Reported to the Spanish Inquisition by her Cuban neighbors, the charges against her included killing a newborn by sucking on its navel, jumping out of a window to avoid a blow from her master but suffering no injuries, practicing erotic magic, and having a pact with the devil as a member of a witches' gathering. De Eguiluz brushed off the accusations as resulting from the jealousy of "people who hate her because her master loves her and they see her well-dressed". She flaunted her wardrobe, which the Cuban Holy Office functionaries inventoried as including nine skirts, seven bodices, six shirts, and four headscarves. All of her clothing was new and expensive, far beyond expectations for an enslaved woman. She owned (and presumably wore, despite the tropical climate) heavy wool skirts lavishly dyed in blue, scarlet, dark green, and dark gold. She also had damask skirts, dyed blue or yellow, and decorated in silver. Her bodices were equally luxurious, in bright combinations including blue with gold braid, green and scarlet with silver buttons, and white and yellow with silver braid. [6]
After three months and thirteen hearings, De Eguiluz understood what the Inquisitors wanted to hear as her testimony: the story of the Witches' Sabbath. They would not settle for any explanation unless it included a confession of witchcraft. De Eguiluz complied, and spoke of her pact with the devil, though none of it was true. She was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to 200 public lashes of the whip and two years in a hospital, wearing a sambenito. [7]
The second time de Eguiluz was arrested was in 1632. There was suspicion that she had returned to witchcraft and made another pact with the devil. In the eight years between her first and second periods of imprisonment, even as she served her penance, she took advantage of her taste of freedom, earning an income as a healer and washerwoman, as well as taking part in love affairs and socializing with other Afro-Caribbean women who dealt in erotic magic, powders, remedies, and possibly even witchcraft and occult-influenced sexuality. As was traditional in Cartagena[ further explanation needed ] and other cities in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, due to a popular interest in manipulating emotions and sexuality via potions and spells, women of various social classes and nationalities gathered to confer, support each other's efforts in relationships with men, and buy and sell nostrums to help attract and keep men's interest and patronage. De Eguiluz and her peers and clients regularly spoke of their magical practices as attempts at achieving "good love", although the Inquisitors described the relationships the women craved as "dishonest friendships". Most of the experts in erotic magic in Cartagena were African-descended freedwomen and slaves, working in domestic servitude or in menial jobs. These women practiced divination in an effort to learn about potential lovers who could give them gifts or alleviate their financial worries, however temporarily. Motivated by emotional cravings and sexual desires as well as financial expediency, they cast binding spells and tied knots to keep these men with them. Invocations calling on souls in purgatory and hell demanded that the men feel pain in their most sensitive and vital organs if they left the women. They also discussed "stupefying" men to make them more compliant. De Eguiluz taught her comrades incantations that could reignite the "flames of love" in a disaffected lover. She also knew how to make potions that would "get rid of a man's love" when he was no longer wanted. [8]
During her second trial, she had 21 hearings, in which she developed a script of what the Inquisitors wanted to hear. By this time, however, she has made friends and connections within her local area, and she used them to try and help reduce her sentence. She also provided the Inquisitors with a list of names of people suspected of witchcraft, which led to the arrest of 21 women. In her testimony, de Eguiluz mentioned her experience with herbs, recipes, and healing, stressing the fact that her intention was to heal, not harm. [9]
In 1634, a prosecutor decided to review de Eguiluz's previous trial. Some of the women whom she had named were angry and wanted to testify against her. Five of them claimed they had confessed to witchcraft because de Eguiluz had convinced them to. De Eguiluz did not talk as much during this trial, fearing that, due to its seriousness, it could lead to her execution. She emphasized her work as a healer, calling herself a "curandera". [10]
The Inquisition was a Catholic judicial procedure where the ecclesiastical judges could initiate, investigate and try cases in their jurisdiction. Popularly it became the name for various medieval and reformation-era State-organized tribunals whose aim was to combat heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and other dangers, using this procedure. Studies of the records have found that the overwhelming majority of sentences consisted of penances, but convictions of unrepentant heresy were handed over to the secular courts for the application of local law, which generally resulted in execution or life imprisonment. If the accused was known to be lying from other credible evidence, a single short application of non-maiming, unbloody torture was allowed, to corroborate that evidence.
The Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, is the best known treatise about witchcraft. It was written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1486. Some describe it as the compendium of literature in demonology of the 15th century. Kramer presented his own views as the Roman Catholic Church's position.
Cartagena, known since the colonial era as Cartagena de Indias, is a city and one of the major ports on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Coast Region, along the Caribbean sea. Cartagena's past role as a link in the route to the West Indies provides it with important historical value for world exploration and preservation of heritage from the great commercial maritime routes. As a former Spanish colony, it was a key port for the export of Bolivian silver to Spain and for the import of enslaved Africans under the asiento system. It was defensible against pirate attacks in the Caribbean. The city's strategic location between the Magdalena and Sinú rivers also gave it easy access to the interior of New Granada and made it a main port for trade between Spain and its overseas empire, establishing its importance by the early 1540s.
A potion is a liquid "that contains medicine, poison, or something that is supposed to have magic powers." It derives from the Latin word potio which refers to a drink or the act of drinking. The term philtre is also used, often specifically for a love potion, a potion that is supposed to create feelings of love or attraction in the one who drinks it. Throughout history there have been several types of potions for a range of purposes. Reasons for taking potions ranged from curing an illness, to securing immortality to trying to induce love. These potions, while often ineffective or poisonous, occasionally had some degree of medicinal success depending on what they sought to fix and the type and amount of ingredients used. Some popular ingredients used in potions across history include Spanish fly, nightshade plants, cannabis, and opium.
Tituba was an enslaved Native American woman who was one of the first to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693.
The Mexican Inquisition was an extension of the Spanish Inquisition into New Spain. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was not only a political event for the Spanish, but a religious event as well. In the early 16th century, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition were in full force in most of Europe. The Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon had just conquered the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Granada, giving them special status within the Catholic realm, including great liberties in the conversion of the native peoples of Mesoamerica. When the Inquisition was brought to the New World, it was employed for many of the same reasons and against the same social groups as suffered in Europe itself, minus the Indigenous to a large extent. Almost all of the events associated with the official establishment of the Palace of the Inquisition occurred in Mexico City, where the Holy Office had its own major building. The official period of the Inquisition lasted from 1571 to 1820, with an unknown number of individuals prosecuted.
The benandanti were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
Witchcraft in Latin America, known in Spanish as brujería and in Portuguese as bruxaria, is blend of Indigenous, African, and European beliefs. Indigenous cultures had spiritual practices centered around nature and healing, while the arrival of Africans brought syncretic religions like Santería and Candomblé. European witchcraft beliefs merged with local traditions during colonization. Practices vary across countries, with accusations historically intertwined with social dynamics. A male practitioner is called a brujo, a female practitioner is a bruja.
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. It began toward the end of the Reconquista and aimed to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under papal control. Along with the Roman Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition, it became the most substantive of the three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition.
The Basque witch trials of the seventeenth century represent the last attempt at rooting out supposed witchcraft from Navarre by the Spanish Inquisition, after a series of episodes erupted during the sixteenth century following the end of military operations in the conquest of Iberian Navarre, until 1524.
In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America. Between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, almost all in Europe. The witch-hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630, during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors, and women made formal accusations as much as men did. Magical healers or 'cunning folk' were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused. Roughly 80% of those convicted were women, most of them over the age of 40. In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake, the traditional punishment for religious heresy.
Alonso de Salazar Frías has been given the epithet "The Witches’ Advocate" by historians, for his role in establishing the conviction, within the Spanish Inquisition, that accusations against supposed witches were more often rooted in dreams and fantasy than in reality, and the inquisitorial policy that witch accusations and confessions should only be given credence where there was firm, independent, corroborating evidence. He was probably the most influential figure in ensuring that those accused of witchcraft were generally not put to death in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the first institutions in Europe to rule against the death penalty for supposed witches. Its Instructions of 1614, which embodied Salazar's ideas, were influential throughout Catholic Europe.
Juan Roque was an African resident of colonial Mexico City. He died in 1623, leaving behind one of very few wills and testaments of African residents of colonial Latin America. His daughter Ana María, and the confraternity to which he belonged in the hospital of the Limpia Concepción, also left behind documents describing a court battle which detail the final requests made by Juan Roque concerning a house "in the neighborhood of San Hipólito in the lane next to the College of San Juan where it meets the open air market of San Hipólito, bordering the houses of the marshals and those of Don Ángel de Villasaña".
Francisco de Murga y Ortiz de Orué was a Spanish soldier and engineer who became Governor and Captain-General of Cartagena. He was governor of Marmora in Africa when he was appointed to fortify the plaza of Cartagena. He was a knight of Order of Santiago. He died in 1636.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Helena Scheuberin was an Austrian woman who stood trial accused of witchcraft in 1485. Her trial and acquittal led Heinrich Kramer to write Malleus Maleficarum, which was published two years later.
Always a Witch is a Colombian television series starring Angely Gaviria, Sofia Bernal Araujo, Dylan Fuentes, Valeria Henríquez, Carlos Quintero with Lenard Vanderaa. The plot revolves around Carmen Eguiluz, a witch and slave from 1646, and is set both in the 17th-century and present-day Cartagena, Colombia. It was ordered direct-to-series, and the first full season premiered on Netflix streaming on January 1, 2019. It was renewed by Netflix for a second season, which aired worldwide on February 28, 2020. The show is dubbed in English for English speakers.
María de Echachute was one of the victims of the Basque witch trials, and one of six people executed by over hundreds of accused.
Rosa Egipcíaca, also known as Rosa Maria Egipcíaca of Vera Cruz and Rosa Courana, was a formerly enslaved writer and religious mystic, who was the author of A Sagrada Teologia do Amor de Deus Luz Brilhante das Almas Peregrinas – the oldest book written by a black woman in the history of Brazil.
The views of witchcraft in North America have evolved through an interlinking history of cultural beliefs and interactions. These forces contribute to complex and evolving views of witchcraft. Today, North America hosts a diverse array of beliefs about witchcraft.