August 27, 2025 • 52 mins
Guest: Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig
Book: The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century Mexico
Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig takes us into colonial Mexico's magical underground, where cultural exchange happened in kitchens between women of different backgrounds. This isn't your typical witch hunt story—Mexico never had mass executions or crazes. The Spanish Inquisition there was more interested in heretics than magical practitioners.
But women still took risks. From enslaved women casting freedom spells to Spanish settlers experimenting with peyote (the first documented non-indigenous use), these stories reveal how people navigated colonial power and sought agency in their lives.
You'll hear about love magic with personal ingredients and indigenous divination techniques. Plus the demographics of colonial Mexico City, where Spanish women were less than 20% of the population.
This episode flips the expected colonial narrative—showing how native practices influenced the colonizers themselves. A story of adaptation, survival, and unexpected cultural blending.
Hosts: Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson Also check out: The Thing About Salem (weekend podcast)
Buy the Book: The Women Who Threw Corn by Martin Austin Nesvig
The Thing About Salem Patreon
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
Today's guest is historian of Mexico Doctor Martin Austin
Nesbig. Doctor Nesbig has a new book
releasing in early September called The Women Who Threw Corn,
Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century Mexico.
(00:22):
And Mexico is a new region for the show, so I'm excited to
visit there in this episode. Me too, and we're looking at an
earlier era than we typically reach, the 16th century.
So join us to see what aspects of witchcraft and witchcraft
accusations are similar to otherstories we hear about around the
(00:43):
world throughout time. And which aspects are
surprisingly unique? You'll enjoy this discussion as
it takes some surprising turns. Welcome to the Thing about Witch
Hunts podcast. Doctor Martin Austin Nesbig.
We're so happy you're here todayto talk to us about 16th century
(01:04):
Mexico's conversation. Could you please tell us about
your work and expertise? Sure.
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
And my name is Martin Nesbig andI'm a historian of Mexico and
this is my third monograph. So I studied Mexico and most
(01:25):
people when you tell them they study Mexico, they usually say
things like oh, tacos or tequilaor conquerors or things like
that. So I don't really study any of
those things. I study the ways that people in
Mexico reacted to Spanish religion, and this is kind of
(01:46):
one of my main areas. But this particular book is
actually the first book in a planned trilogy of books about
acculturation. So most of the work that's out
there on acculturation in Mexicotalks about, OK, so like,
everybody knows, like, conquistador Fernando Cortez
(02:06):
comes to Mexico, He conquers theAztecs, and the Spaniards take
over. I mean, that's kind of standard
narrative. And that narrative has become
much more complicated in recent years.
In any case, there's a lot of people studied native people in
Mexico and they studied their native language, which is Nawat.
There's a lot of other native languages.
The one that that is that was the predominant language of the
(02:29):
Aztecs and in central Mexico is Nawat.
And the kind of predominant approach has been to study the
ways that native peoples responded to the Spanish
invasion or responded to Spanishcolonialism or Spanish imperial
rule or Spanish language. And So what I did is pretty much
(02:53):
the opposite. I had studied the way that
native culture influenced non-native people.
And that's the basic outline of the main subject of the book.
And I focused in particular on witchcraft.
So today we're talking about your new book, The Women Who
(03:14):
Threw Corn, Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century
Mexico. My first question is, what does
the name mean? The Women Who Threw Corn, What
is that? So it's a really good question.
And the women who threw corn refers to a traditional form of
(03:37):
we might call it magic, but magic isn't really the right
word. It was a form of divination.
So it's called slapuwalis in theNawa language.
Slapuwalisli refers to the process of growing corn or
hurdling corn as a way of divining events.
So in amongst the Nawas and other native groups in
(04:02):
Mesoamerica, they didn't really distinguish between magic and
medicine. It didn't really have a specific
difference to them. And so this throwing of corn or
hurling of corn was a very important part of their sort of
magic medical practice in pre Hispanic Mexico.
(04:23):
So the reason I titled the book that is that this is one of the,
it's, it serves as a metaphor because Spanish women and also
other women who came from Spain but may have been ethnically
North African or mixed or baskedliving in Mexico, they started
using this corn hurling themselves.
(04:45):
And at first what they start to do is they pay native women to
do the corn hurling. But then by the 1570's, the
Spanish women are hurling the corn themselves.
So the title comes from that andextends in as a metaphor for
this process whereby Spanish women and North African women
(05:07):
and other women adopted these native practices.
And you tell us a little bit about that process that you
mentioned, and now I'm forgetting the word.
That's OK, don't worry about it.Just call it corn hurdling.
That's what the Spanish did too,because they couldn't figure
that word out ether and so they they just stuck with HR
(05:29):
sweatface or HR meise which justmeans to throw corn.
And you were sharing with us about the adoption of practices
and cultures to different ethnicgroups.
Can you explain that a little bit more to us and just why it's
really important for us to understand how women learn from
(05:52):
each other and how they're absorbing the culture?
Well, they, yeah, they adopted alot of different practices from
native women. And part of what I tried to do
in this book is try to recreate the world that these women lived
in, which is not easy to do because the sources are
(06:13):
fragmentary. But obviously the domestic space
is a place where women learned from each other a lot, partly
because in traditional Spanish society, women were supposed to
be domestic creatures, and the domestic space is a space where
they learn things. So in the kitchen, in the living
(06:34):
spaces where they learn some of these things.
And so it's not surprising that some of the early forms of
cultural transfer come in the form of food or everyday life,
that sort of thing. And the corn hurling just
happens to be one of these particular practices.
Thank you. Are there specific regions
(06:55):
within Mexico that you're focused on in your work?
In this particular book, I it wasn't specifically regionally
focused. I wrote a book some time ago
that was specific to Michoacan, which is in western Mexico.
But this book was driven more bythe cultural practices as
(07:16):
opposed to specific regions, andit was also driven by the
availability of sources. Probably most of the material in
the book comes from Mexico City,which is unsurprising because
that's the major city. Even in the 16th century, it was
the major cities. So a lot of the material and a
lot of the stories that I tell in the book come from Mexico
City, which was a very large city.
(07:37):
I mean, prior to Spanish contact, it was one of the
largest cities in the world, probably bigger than most of the
cities in Europe. They don't really know how many
people exactly lived there, but the IT was an island and a lake.
And then there was the kind of cities around the edge of the
lake. So the island city itself
(07:57):
probably had about 50,000 people.
And then if you include the kindof the cities along the lake,
Sochimed Cocoyo, probably 200,000 people in the Basin of
Mexico. So a lot of the material comes
from Mexico City. And then I also have some
stories that involved Michoacan,which is to the West of Mexico
City. There's some stories from
(08:20):
Guanajuato, which was at the time of major mining producing
area, and also from Sakatekas, which was the major mining city
in the colonial period. There's a case of a mulatto
woman from Sakatekas and then I also have a couple cases from
Oaxaca in the South. It's kind of a combination of
(08:43):
different regions. And in this domestic space, the
divination practices are really important.
You mentioned that there's not defined separation between
medicine magic practices. Can you tell us how divination
was important to them? It was important to native
(09:06):
people for a variety of different reasons.
It was used to figure out the origins of diseases.
So in their sense of medicine, disease could be caused by a
sort of metaphysical things. And so the way that sometimes
you would figure out the origin of diseases was through various
(09:29):
forms of divination. The divination with the corn was
often used to predict events andit became basically a form of
love magic in the colonial period.
The Spanish women already had a practice of using fava beans in
sexual or love magic in prior togoing to the Americas.
(09:49):
So this was a kind of a well established form of love magic
was fava beans. Sometimes they would put fava
beans in their mouth and they would pronounce some kind of
incantation. The corn kernels were a
recognizable something that was akin to a fava beans.
They're similar in size. It's kind of similar concepts.
(10:11):
They readily adapted to the cornthrowing.
But the difference was that the Spanish women used it primarily
for love magic as opposed to sort of medicine Med.
It's a kind of they're doing it wrong.
So why do you think that the non-native women, the Spanish
and the other women who came from outside adopted the local
(10:33):
practices in Mexico instead of sticking with the practices that
they brought over? We would have to ask them, and
even if we could ask them, they might lie, so it's hard to know
exactly that. There's probably a combination
of factors. 1 is just availability of material that
can't use all the products from Spain because you're not in
(10:54):
Spain, you're in Mexico. So they didn't have fava beans
in Mexico. They had corn, they had what we
call beans. Fava beans, I guess are not, I
don't know the exact story here,but the fava beans and beans
that we think of like beans, like black beans, those are from
Mexico, that they're talking us to Mexico.
Fava beans were European, but I think they're like in a
(11:16):
different family or something, but they didn't have fava beans.
So like we don't have any fava beans here.
I guess we'll use this corn stuff.
And so they, it was what was available.
So a lot of it is just availability, but they still use
Spanish materials. They Fern seeds was like a
(11:37):
thing, if you could believe it, like ferns on the, I don't know
if you've ever seen ferns on theback of the Fern.
They've got these little things.They're like little seed pod
things. They're very small and they're
brown and those were used in magic in Spain and they got used
in Mexico, at least I saw them used at least in one case.
(11:58):
So they did, they imported Spanish stuff and then in sport.
And obviously their ideas are Spanish.
They're from Spain because in the very the early period, I'm
talking about people that were from Spain that were born in
Spain. I mean by the, once you get into
a later period, obviously have people who are ethnic Spaniards
born in Mexico, but I most of the people I was looking out for
(12:21):
women who were actually born in Spain.
So part of it is just availability of material.
The other thing is that Spaniards were very small ethnic
minority in Mexico in the 16th century up until the 1560s,
fifteen, 70s. They're very, very small ethnic
minority in Mexico City and outside of Mexico City even a
(12:43):
much smaller ethnic minority, certainly less than 20% of
Mexico City. And in a lot of places outside
of Mexico City they were certainly even a smaller
minority. So that's they're living in a
primarily native world and they're most of the people
around them are speaking native languages.
(13:05):
There are people speaking Spanish and Spanish is about the
official language of the colonial government.
But in their everyday lives, thepeople around them are not
necessarily Spanish. Most of them are not Spanish.
And then obviously the in the later period, which I don't
really talk about in this book, the later period, once you get
(13:25):
past about 15 fifties, 1560s, obviously it's a much more multi
ethnic world. A lot of people, mixed
ethnicities and a lot of those people cease to speak native
languages. But so they're just, they're
living in a native world, they're living in a
predominantly non Spanish world.They were able to continue their
(13:47):
traditional practices, it was just looking a little different
and being enriched by the new culture they were experiencing.
Yeah, most of these women were officially Catholic.
They probably a lot of them wentto Mass on a semi.
Well who knows? I mean a lot of people didn't go
(14:08):
to mass even then. They were nominally Catholic and
some of, but some of them were probably Muslim and women who
were of some kind of North African background, especially
in the earlier period in the 16th century, because the
southern part of Spain had been under Muslim rule until the 13th
(14:28):
century. And the very, very southern
part, Granada was under Muslim rule until 1492.
And there's women who came from Granada who that are in this
book and some of them are accused of being Muslims.
So, you know, who knows? But most of them are Catholic
and there's churches, they go tochurch, they go to mass, all
that. But even in Spain, ordinary
(14:52):
people who were all officially Catholic, even they didn't
really, they practice popular religion all the time too, so
they just adapted to their circumstances and started using
native forms of magic. Did Mexico see any large witch
hunts or witch crazes like happened in Europe?
(15:13):
There were no witch crazes in Mexico and there were no witch
hunts. There were in the whole history
of of Mexico and the Inquisitionand the witch hunts there.
They didn't burn any witches. The Inquisition, there were
people were executed for other kinds of crimes, but there were
no witch. There weren't really any actual
(15:34):
witch crazes. It depends on your definition of
a witch craze. The people that study witch
crazes or witch hunts in Europe usually say that in order for it
to be a craze, like there have to be large numbers of people
who were pulled into the courts and interrogated and large
numbers of people that were executed.
And that never happened in Mexico.
(15:54):
The ones in Spain that are famous like the Sugata Mundi
case from 16 O 9/16/10 is the one with the goat and Goya
painted a painting of it. That was witch craze.
But the the big numbers are in Germany.
That's where all the people, that was like the place where
the most people got killed for being accused of witchcraft was
(16:15):
in Germany. But in Mexico nobody gets
executed for being a witch. Women do get in trouble, they
get investigated, they get interrogated, but nobody gets
executed. So there's no witch crazes in
Mexico. It's just not.
It's just not a thing. When I was reading, I noticed
that you pointed out that some of the women who did find
(16:36):
themselves in the place of accusation were very exotic or
exceptional and perceived as exceptional.
Although there is the whole discussion on vulnerable and
people desperate in society finding themselves in
accusations. We also have seen lots of cases
(16:57):
in colonial US where the complaint was that the woman was
exceptional or beautiful, and I saw all that is a common thread
there. Sure, that definitely happens in
Mexico. That women who are considered
ethnically different or who are considered oversexed are often
accused of being witches. This is a pretty common, as you
(17:20):
mentioned, this is a this is pretty common throughout all the
different kinds of witch crazes and witch hunts or inquisitions.
There have been studies also that suggest that the widows
also are particularly vulnerableto accusations of witchcraft.
And at least in the context of the Hispanic world, part of the
reason is that they don't have any family to protect them.
(17:42):
So the women that tend to get accused are either single women,
widows, women who are perceived as being different, women who
are perceived as being oversexed.
But it's very common in this in the case in Mexico, and this is
similar to Spain, but in Mexico,a lot of the women who get
accused of being witches are women who were of mixed
(18:05):
ethnicity. So they're either from southern
Spain, which had a larger or longer term impact of Muslim and
North African culture because this the kind of the southern
part of Spain, especially Andalusia was under Muslim rule
until the middle of the 13th century.
So for 500 years it was under Muslim rule and then Granada was
(18:27):
under Muslim rule until 1492. A lot of these women are either
they're from Andalusia, southernSpain, which is where Seville
and Granada and Cordoba are located.
There are all kinds of stereotypes back in the day, in
the 16th century that women fromAndalusia were oversexed.
They also tend to be darker skinned.
(18:48):
And then you have this other group called Moriscas, which is
a kind of a term that sort of doesn't mean anything to the
extent that it can mean a lot ofdifferent things.
It can mean they can have a sortof a religious designation,
which means they could refer to somebody who had been a Muslim
and had converted to Catholicism.
(19:10):
It could just mean someone who was of some kind of vaguely dark
skinned vaguely North African look.
Could be that could be a Moriska.
It could also be just some a woman who was enslaved in a
Spanish expeditions and invasions of North Africa in the
16th century and from Tunis and other places women in Algiers
(19:35):
women were captured and sold into slavery and brought back to
Spain. And actually Moriska women were
highly valued as slaves for their perceived good looks.
So there's a lot of these women.And then of course there are.
There are enslaved sub-saharan Africans in Mexico, though in
the period that I'm looking at, there aren't.
(19:56):
The numbers are not gigantic, but the women that got accused
of witchcraft that we know aboutwho were sub-saharan African is
mid 1536. And these women were almost
certainly from Senegambia. Because the transatlantic slave
trade at that time in the 1530s,pretty much basically almost all
(20:18):
of the women or almost all of the people enslaved from Africa
were from Senegambia or Guinea, Guinea coast, which was just
next to Senegal. So these were, they were from
that region. And then there were women from
the Canary Islands and women from Canary Islands were also
seen as being oversexed. They were also of uncertain
(20:39):
ethnicity. They're probably mostly Spanish,
though, because the native people of the Canary Islands
were called the Guanches and they were largely exterminated
by the Spaniards and sort of wars of extermination.
But there were almost certainly some sexual, I don't know what
to procreation, I guess is the only word for it because that
(21:01):
marriage isn't really the right word.
So there were children that werethe result of some kind of
sexual interaction between Spanish men, Guanche women, but
I don't really seem to know thatmuch about the Guanches in terms
of their survival. The oversexed category of women,
(21:22):
is that a religious judgement? Does that have to do with the
Diabolical pact or is it just a cultural non religious behavior?
I think it's probably just mostly a cultural thing and
people do get accused of making pacts with the devil, but it's
not necessarily sexual actually usually isn't sexual.
Women, men get accused of havingpacts with the devil, but
(21:45):
usually it's having a pact with the devil to get something
concrete to find something or just have a better life or to be
a better. There's a lot of there's cases
these guys that have pacts with the devil because the devil
promises that they will, he willprotect them when he's riding a
horseback or make him a better rancher, stuff like that.
(22:07):
It's usually a lot more uninteresting and banal than
most of the cases that I've seen.
So the women also have pacts with the devil, but it's usually
like to get stuff just it's you also have cases where people
make pacts with the devil because they say, I tried these
other Saints and those losers didn't do me any good.
(22:28):
So I changed team. I changed teams to the devil.
Let's see what the devil had offers.
That was actually pretty common too.
So there's the kind of pact withthe devil business, but a lot of
women are just accused of being oversexed.
So it's classic old, just old fashioned slut shaming.
It's just like these women are accused of being oversexed.
They've got too many sexual partners.
(22:49):
Spanish has a bunch of differentwords for women that don't fit
into acceptable sexual categories, but the prostitute
prostitutas isn't one of those words.
In the 16th century, they don't,It's not a word that they use.
They've got what's other words that they use.
(23:10):
And in the, in the phrase that Isaw that was really interesting
that that that got applied to two different women is mujer en
amorada, which literally means awoman in love.
It meant, I translated it as cortisone because it's the
closest thing in English I thinkthat we can come up with.
(23:32):
Because it doesn't really mean prostitute in the sense of a sex
worker and it doesn't mean a street walking prostitute.
Because there was a name for that called Cantonera, which
meant a corner. It literally meant a corner
person. So they were, they had a word
for that. It was a cantonera, So it wasn't
that. It wasn't puta, which is whore,
(23:56):
and it wasn't romera, which alsomeans whore.
And it wasn't mere trics, which meant which is a Latin word, but
it was used in Spanish to emitted tricks from which we get
meretricious is just was basically just like AI don't
know. I mean meretricious person.
It just means like you engage insex for money.
So a mojer en amorada was something else.
(24:20):
It wasn't any of those categories.
So what it seemed to imply was sort of like a woman who had
sexual relationships with men for some kind of social,
political, economic, cultural gain, but not just like here's
(24:42):
$500.00 for an hour of sex. It wasn't like that.
This was a different kind of category.
So there were these women, womenaccused of being mujer in
amoradas just like the courtesanand and a lot of times and then
they got accused of being witches at the same time.
In the book you talk about how in Spain a lot of the witch
(25:06):
trials were handled by the RoyalCourts, but the Inquisition got
entrusted in this demonic pact thing, the Satanic pact in
Mexico, were these cases handledlargely by the civil authorities
or was the Inquisition always involved?
We don't really know because thea lot of the the documentation
(25:29):
from the civil courts for the very early period in the 16th
century is doesn't exist anymore.
There are hints of trials against women that were
undertaken by the civil authorities in Mexico.
So we know that they did. The first woman ever, at least
on record, the first woman accused of being a witch in the
(25:51):
Las Casas was accused of being awitch and was prosecuted, was
previously tried by the civil magistrate of Mexico City.
The case file doesn't exist anymore, but it's referred to in
her later inquisitional trials. So we know that the civil
authority had some kind of a, some kind of jurisdiction over
(26:15):
sorcery and witchcraft, but we don't really know the extent of
these trials. It doesn't seem like there were
that many because there would have been some kind of somebody
else contemporaneously would have mentioned these trials.
All we know is that that the civil authority had some
jurisdiction. They probably punish some
people, but we don't know how many because the records aren't
there. But the inquisitional material
(26:35):
is there. And so the inquisitional
authorities started prosecuting women for sorcery in the 1530s
in Mexico. And then in 1571, there was a
central office of the inquisition that was established
in the Americas, one in Lima andone in Mexico City.
(26:56):
And when that happened, this newbureaucratically centralized
inquisition quashed all the jurisdictions of all these other
individual inquisitions. So a central inquisition was set
up in 1571 and it also continuedto pursue witchcraft, but it
didn't really prosecute that many people.
(27:19):
If you look at the post 1571 data, which I didn't use for
this book, But if you look at that data and I have studied it
in the past, hundreds of these, you know, people go and they
snitch on their neighbor and it's usually because they don't
like the person is not a very original story.
They go and they snitch on the neighbor, They snitch on
(27:41):
somebody they don't like and they say, oh, so and so Maria
Suarez is a witch. And so they what did she do?
How do you know she's a witch? What, what's going on?
And then send off the denunciation off to Mexico City.
This is post 1571. And usually the Inquisitors are
like, whatever, they don't really care.
You're usually looking for Jews that that was what they really
(28:02):
cared about was Jews, Jews and Lutherans.
So like they got these denunciations against women for
being witches and they're just like, whatever, they don't
really care. So there are cases there's like
a little spike in the 1570s and there's another little spike in
the 1590s of women who get actually prosecuted.
The Inquisition actually has them arrested, they go to jail,
(28:23):
they get interrogated, they get there's a trial, witnesses are
called and then they get punished.
So there there is a little spike, but we're not talking
huge numbers. We're talking like in a decade,
less than 100, just like a couple dozen in a decade.
So the inquisitors in Mexico arepretty sceptical about that
mostly like most of the like kind of if you like most, most
(28:45):
of the Spanish writers, theologians and jurists.
And they mostly don't think witchcraft is real.
They mostly just think witchcraft's not they're like,
no, that's not real. There aren't any witches.
That's just like stupid superstition.
They're superstitious country people who believe in witches.
So the people in charge of getting rid of witchcraft didn't
really believe that it was really real.
(29:07):
Any they were just like, no, that's not real.
The Inquisition usually when it gets involved in these cases,
usually because there's something to do with like the
devil, that's usually when people get in big giant trouble.
It's like, oh, the devil's involved, or the these women are
mixing the sacred with the profane, then they're in
trouble. But if it's just like plain old
superstition, they're saying whatever, we don't care.
(29:29):
Yeah. So it was really about punishing
for mixing the sacred with the profane and not so much a
purification because I was thinking about the craze
histories and there's usually this really big rooting out and
purification goal happening. But it sounds like they were
(29:50):
doing that in the scene world with cultures and specific
ethnicities and religions versusthe onseed world of the
diabolical. Yeah, it's hard to know.
I mean, in Mexico they were skeptical of this.
You know, a lot of times, like, for example, in France and in
Germany, the big witch crazes there usually happen when
(30:14):
they're kind of the usual story was there'd be some Bishop and
the Bishop would come to power and he would blame all of
society's ills on Lutheranism and they would have to find a
scapegoat. And the scapegoats were women
and they would accuse them. And then you get like this whole
like kind of the psychology of the witch craze where like every
(30:35):
of all of a sudden everybody's finding witches everywhere where
they don't exist. Here's his name.
This guy wrote this book called The Looming Tower.
Now I forgot his last name. He wrote a previous book about
the witch craze in the 1980s in Los Angeles.
There were these people who ran a daycare center and everybody
accused them of being satanic pedophiles.
It's kind of the same story. But these kinds of things don't
(30:55):
seem to happen in Mexico. I don't.
I've never seen it happen where,I mean, there are little
instances of this happening where there's a little group and
a little location and all of a sudden everybody's denouncing
one or two different women as being witches.
So it does happen, but it's on amuch smaller scale than you see,
even of Salem. It's much smaller scale than
that. So it happens.
(31:18):
But when people get really in trouble, it's usually because
they get accused of doing something with the devil.
A lot of these women that I studied that I wrote about in
this book, they were investigated because they were
doing things that seemed kind ofvaguely diabolical.
They were using certain herbs orcertain potions.
One of the things that was supposed to be really bad was
(31:38):
you weren't supposed to ascribe any particular power to
nighttime or daytime per SE. A lot of the spells had to be
performed at nighttime and this was considered bad, or that it
had to be certain stage of the moon or things like this and
that. Now, it was considered bad, but
(31:59):
it wasn't really considered satanic per SE.
But then they would investigate.They want to find out like, is
this really about the devil? And a lot of times this women
would say, no, it's not about the devil, dude.
Like what? What's with the devil?
I'm just trying to do whatever. Midwives were frequently the
target of investigation because they're involved with babies and
(32:20):
they're intimate with other women.
I mean, not sexually intimate, but they're intimate because
they're delivering babies. That's pretty good.
Then they're using herbs and poultices, and so those women
also get scrutinized a lot. Now, one of the ingredients or
items that was being used in Magic was vaginal bathwater,
(32:45):
right? Can you explain where that came
from and what was the purpose? Vaginal bathwater as well as
menstrual ward, which I there was a case that I unfortunately
literally would let ended up on the cutting room floor, which
I'm going to turn into an article.
But yeah, so vaginal bathwater and Mensra blood seem to be
(33:08):
European. There doesn't seem to be any
evidence that this is a native phenomenon.
This seems to be a European phenomenon.
We don't really know where it's from.
There seems to be some suggestion that this was
something that was particular tothe Canary Islands.
Whether that means it was only in the Canary Islands or just
was more well known in the Canary Islands, it's hard to
(33:30):
know, but it's definitely European.
And the idea is that this would create some kind of metaphysical
link between the woman and the man.
So the idea is that you're mixing these intimate
substances, vaginal bathwater ormenstrual blood, with the food,
some kind of food or drink that the man is going to ingest.
(33:52):
And by ingesting this, he will become linked to the woman.
And once you get past the 1571, there's a lot more information
about this. There seems to be a few
different reasons that women do this.
One is the idea is to get the man to fall in love with them.
So that's the oldest one in the book is do this.
(34:12):
The man will fall in love with me and he will be tethered to.
The other reason that women seemto do this is that they are
being abused physically by theirhusband, boyfriend, partner or
whatever, and the idea is that this will get them to stop
beating them. In either case, it's about
(34:34):
controlling or taming the man with these substances.
But there's also, there's, at least in the Spanish case,
there's other cases that involvespells of that involve urine
mixed with like vinegar and stuff like this.
And but at its core, this is a kind of a form of love magic or
sexual magic that's supposed to tie the man to the woman.
(34:57):
And I don't think we're talking about like huge quantities.
I think the idea is that it's like a little bit just, although
I've read some cases that were pretty graphic and it sounds
like there was some kind of, I don't know how to even try to.
It's like in one case, this guy thought that it was like a kind
(35:18):
of a, a piece of dried, I don't know if you've ever seen what
happens to Chili Peppers, the dried Chili Peppers, then you
reconstitute them in water. He thought that it was that.
And I'm trying to think like what must have been really thick
menstrual blood or something. I don't know, like really
stringy, I don't know. And then apparently he puked.
(35:38):
So it didn't work. But the reason it didn't work on
him was that A was the wrong guyand B, he knew about it.
So that the whole point is that this is supposed to be secret,
that the man isn't even supposedto know.
Because I think probably in mostcases, if a woman brought the
guy like a Stew or a cup of chocolate and said, oh, by the
(35:59):
way, I mixed in some Menthol budthere just for fun, most men
would probably be like, I think I'm going to pass.
No thanks. It probably sounded to be like
dumb, but I think most people would be like, no, it's gross.
Pass. So the whole point was that this
had to be seen. They couldn't really get in
trouble for this. And I've never really saw
anyone, any woman actually get in trouble for doing that.
They just say that's gross, don't do that.
(36:22):
What kind of records would thesestories be in?
These are the ones that I've seen are these are Inquisition
investigations. The one that I used in the book
came from Guanajuato, which is amining town.
It's North Central Mexico or central Mexico.
It's north of Mexico City. It's like about a six hour
drive. And so it was a woman who was
(36:44):
from the Canary Islands and she had mixed her vaginal bathwater
in some mustard to the sky. But this was all part of a
inquisitional trial. She was put on trial for being a
witch. And that was one of the bad
things that she did, supposedly.She denied it, of course, but
everybody else said she did. Another type of magic that you
(37:05):
talked about is freedom magic. Can you give us some background
on what that is and how that wasused?
Yeah, it was really interesting.When I was finishing the
research and writing this book, I hadn't really come across
this. Or maybe I just, I'm ignorant,
which is true. But maybe I was particularly
ignorant of this, that there were cases of women who were
(37:28):
enslaved and they wanted to not be slaves anymore because it
seems to be obvious. Being a slave has got to be
terrible. And there were these cases of
these women, some who use spellsto convince their owners to set
them free. And in some cases, these women
(37:49):
said it worked. And what's interesting is that
in in at least a couple cases, these spells were sex magic
spells. So it's like a combination sex
magic, freedom magic. In some cases, the women who
were slaves were basically sexual slaves.
They were domestic slaves, but they were subjected to, by
definition, rape because you can't consent if you're a slave.
(38:11):
But in some cases, these women talk about their owners in
language that it's very difficult to talk about because
they don't want to be accused ofminimizing the how terrible it
is to be a slave. But some of these women talk
about their masters as if they were sort of their lovers, and
they sometimes talk about how they use love magic to convince
(38:36):
their master to set them free. In other cases, there's clearly
no relationship, coerced or consensual or not, between the
woman and her male owner. But did they that she still
heard about this way that you could convince your owner to to
set you free? It's a little bit unclear the
mechanics of how this is supposed to work, but this was
(39:00):
apparently a thing like you had.There were cases of women who
paid one of the things that you could do in the slave system in
the Hispanic world, you were, you could theoretically buy your
way out of freedom. It's not especially easy, but
you could in theory get a job and work and earn money and try
to pay your way out of slavery. And I guess in some cases is
(39:23):
women would pay other women thatthey had heard, Oh, I heard that
this woman was a very powerful sorceress and I paid her to cast
these spells on my owner to convince him to write a letter
of manumission. So it seems to be a thing, which
I didn't know was a thing, but it's a little, it was a little
(39:44):
unclear to me. The investigations don't really
indicate exactly how this is supposed to work.
Just like they they cast a spellon the guy and the guy in theory
is supposed to let them go. And then there's other cases
where women say, oh, I paid it and it didn't work.
And. And then the woman accused said,
oh, I'm not really a witch. I just conned these people out
of their money. And they were prosecuting cons
(40:08):
as well. Sometimes not for being cons,
but for being witches. And then of course, even if you
are a witch, you're probably notgoing to admit it.
You're like, no, I'm not a witch.
I just scammed these people out of their money.
Maybe they were a witch. But they, I guess you don't
really want to say like, Oh yeah, I'm a witch.
Not really a winning, winning strategy in jail, waiting trial.
(40:32):
So of course they're going to say I'm not a witch, but who
knows? For me, it was immaterial
whether these people are witchesor not.
I was more interested in what this tells us about the culture.
But some of them probably were witches in the sense that they
did tell people that they could cast spells and they because
there were monetary value associated with spell casting.
Like it wasn't free, couldn't just be like, hey, can you pass
(40:54):
a spell for me because you're myfriend?
It was like, no, it doesn't workthat way.
You have to pay me to cast the spells and this was something
that women made money doing. And did you see spells being
purchased to protect from the evil eye?
There's it's any spells for people to protect from the evil
(41:15):
eye, but there were people, there were a lot of women who
said that that so and so cured their child of the evil eye.
There was a couple different actually midwives, at least in
in the documents that I looked at, the people that were most
intimately associated with curing the evil eye were
midwives. But there were other sorceresses
(41:36):
in Spain who also could claim that they could cure the evil
eye. I'm not sure.
Didn't see anyone actually trying to proactively prevent
the evil eye. Usually it was just like don't
look at women, especially old women, don't look at old women
and don't let little kids look at old women.
Apparently that was like the worst possible scenario for evil
(41:57):
eye was post menopausal women looking at young babies.
That was you were totally doomed.
But there were these women who claimed to cure the evil eye.
There were all kinds of weird ways that they claimed to cure
the evil eye involved making these incantations and making
sometimes making poultices out of different kinds of plants or
(42:21):
materials. They were like the sort of
curing of the evil eye. But I didn't see anybody trying
to get like a anti evil eye potion or anything like that or
amulet. I haven't seen any amulets
against the evil eye even thoughthose are big now.
They're they were Cuban originally, but now they're
(42:43):
everywhere. Big giant eye, kind of blue iris
eye. They see them all the time now.
But those are those like an antianti evil eye.
Yeah, Neapolitans also have antievil eye.
It's the evil eye concept is waswidespread in Catholic Europe
even to this day. Yeah.
(43:04):
Yeah, Then I didn't see any protect me from the evil in the
future. It was more like my son has evil
eye, can you please make him better?
So there, there were midwives who apparently that was part of
their, that was one of the things they could do was cure
the evil eye, which was considered bad.
The official line was trying to cure people of the metaphysical
(43:25):
evil eye was bad because it was superstitious, because the
people even like people who wrote treatises said, well,
there's evil eye, what we would call probably conjunctivites.
So like infections of the eye, which are caused by natural
things. And then there's like the evil
eye, which is like caused by someone looking at you at a
certain point and that didn't necessarily result in your eyes
(43:49):
getting like the evil eye when it happens to you doesn't
necessarily make your eyes go bad.
It's like it makes you puke or make you just, it makes you sick
in general, but it comes from the eye.
So there's two different things.And but apparently curing the
evil eye involved things that didn't necessarily involve the
eyes. It's like the evil from the eye.
(44:10):
It comes from the eye and then it goes into the person's, I
don't know, goes into their soulor something and then it
manifests itself in the body. I'm not really sure how it
works. Yeah, they had a similar concept
in the Salem witch trials, according to one of the critics
was that what he called effluviacame out of and it went into the
(44:35):
person and then if the if they touched the witch, then it would
go back to the witch. Oh yeah, I haven't heard about
that one. The effluvia idea was around in
the Spanish people believed in the effluvia idea.
There was a guy, one of the guysthat I studied, this guy Martin
de Arleis, who was Spanish, but he was from the Basque region.
(44:56):
But I don't know, I don't think he was ethnically Basque, but he
was, he wrote a anti superstition trees back in the
very early 1500s. And he's got a whole section on
the evil eye. And he says the evil eye comes
out of the eyes and it's like effluvia.
And that's why he said that postmenopausal women were
especially dangerous because they were no longer purging
(45:20):
through menstruation. Therefore all these toxins is
kind of were building up in their body.
And the way that they were let loose was through the eyes.
And he said that sometimes menstruating women, if they
looked at a mirror a certain way, could make the mirror have
spots, which totally, I know, wejust think that sounds super
(45:41):
crazy, but this was apparently. And so he said that post
menopausal women were especiallydangerous because they had all
this built up toxin and they canproject it.
And so the people who were most at risk were young children,
like babies, babies and young children because they were soft
and tender as they were defenseless against the evil
effluvia coming out of the eyes of the evil post menopausal
(46:04):
women. And I guess it, I don't know.
And it's sort of weird way, there's a certain bizarre logic,
because at this time a lot of people didn't live to menopause.
Life expectancy was not really that probably 30 years old.
Most women didn't live to make it to menopause.
(46:25):
Most women were dead by then. So probably not a lot of post
menopausal women running around 16th century Mexico or Spain
because most of the people are dead before then.
Yeah. And I think the elderly have
behaviors sometimes from health,sometimes it's just from wisdom
(46:49):
and long life, but that are misunderstood by younger
generations. And I think today in some
communities where elderly are finding themselves accused it
getting the Gray hair and entering that phase of life
starts to put suspicion around them in communities today even.
If you look at the 17th century,where there's just like this
(47:12):
oceans of documentation for Mexico, if you look at the kinds
of women who get accused of being witches in the 17th
century, a lot of them are. You see a lot of things like
widows, younger women who are not married, women who are
somewhere, probably sex workers of some sort.
(47:33):
The widows are a popular target and one of the reasons is that
they're perceived as easy, easier targets, stuff like that.
There was all, they also there was this crazy idea that widows
had wandering womb, that this was like a popular concept, that
they were like walking around with these hungry womb, that it
(47:55):
was dangerous because they would, I don't know what they
would do, but this was like a thing, this was like an idea
that people had. So the widows were easy targets.
Would you like to tell our audience how they can get a hold
of your wonderful book? Well, the book is available on
Amazon. It goes on sale on September
4th, so two weeks from today, I think.
(48:16):
Goes on sale in the United States.
It's been available in the UK since July.
They made a really nice cover for it, which is nice.
Also, we never did get to talk about peyote, but peyote is
something that makes its appearance in this book.
So peyote is from Mexico. It's a talk to this to Mexico.
That's where it originally came from and people been eating
peyote for a long time. There's carbon dating of
(48:40):
excrement or whatever that proves that people have been
being it for thousands of years and it starts showing up in
witchcraft cases. That's the first place that
shows up in the documentation isin witchcraft documentation.
So I have in this book, there's a couple chapters that talk
about the first two women who get accused of being involved
(49:02):
with peyote. The first one is a midwife who
is a some uncertain ethnicity. She's described as a mulatto,
which means black and white or African and Spanish mix.
But her mother may have been North African, we don't really
know. But she was wealthy each other
wealthy father. She migrated to Mexico and she
(49:23):
worked as a midwife and she didn't herself eat peyote, but
she was living in Sacatecas, which is one of the main areas
where peyote naturally grows. But she paid some indigenous men
to eat peyote because she had, she herself had slaves.
She had these two slaves. There were native girls and they
(49:44):
ran away. And she wanted to know where
these girls had gone. So she paid these guys to eat
peyote because the idea was eat the peyote, the peyote spirit
will tell you. And then in 1569 in Guanajuato,
which is a mining town like SacaPekas, but further South and
also an area where peyote grows,this woman, Catalina Carasa, who
(50:07):
was from the Canary Islands, sheate pale.
And I guess maybe she didn't, but if she didn't, someone just
exactly like her eat it because there's all these testimonies of
people talking about her eating peyote.
So these are the very first cases of people who are not
natives eating peyote and tripping out.
And but they were doing it wrong.
(50:28):
So they were doing it to predictthings.
And in her case, you want to know if this guy, it was the
local magistrate who wanted to marry her or not.
And then I guess he, this peyote, told her that he didn't.
And then she cast bells on him to get revenge.
So this is the beginning of people using hallucinogens in
the Americas who are not native peoples.
(50:50):
People start eating shrooms too,but that's for a different book.
The third book in this sort of projected trilogy of books is
about hallucinogens. So it's mostly about peyote and
shrooms, which are psilocyba mushrooms.
People, they just call them shrooms.
Those are also from Mexico. They're a talk in this to
Mexico. That's where they originally
came. You can grow them anywhere now
(51:11):
you have to. All you need are the sports to
grow. Then people grow them at home.
People been eating shrooms for along time too.
And the cases against Spaniards or non-native peoples don't
start showing up until the 17th century.
But there are cases of people eating shrooms and they get in
trouble, but not necessarily foreating shrooms.
They get in trouble for casting spells and other bad things and
(51:34):
then it's like, oh by the way you ate shrooms, that's also
bad. Don't do that.
Thank you so much and thank you for producing work like this.
As you you pointed out, you're building context that's not
necessarily been built in the same way.
So it's so informative and it brings humanity out of the dusty
(52:01):
pages of the past and helps us ourselves.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Thank you all. Right.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
We want to thank you for joiningus and for keeping the
conversation going by sharing what you've learned with your
friends and family. We can't wait to see you in a
(52:21):
few days at our weekend podcast,The Thing About Salem.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
Today's guest is historian of Mexico Doctor Martin Austin
Nesbig. Doctor Nesbig has a new book
releasing in early September called The Women Who Threw Corn,
Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century Mexico.
(00:22):
And Mexico is a new region for the show, so I'm excited to
visit there in this episode. Me too, and we're looking at an
earlier era than we typically reach, the 16th century.
So join us to see what aspects of witchcraft and witchcraft
accusations are similar to otherstories we hear about around the
(00:43):
world throughout time. And which aspects are
surprisingly unique? You'll enjoy this discussion as
it takes some surprising turns. Welcome to the Thing about Witch
Hunts podcast. Doctor Martin Austin Nesbig.
We're so happy you're here todayto talk to us about 16th century
(01:04):
Mexico's conversation. Could you please tell us about
your work and expertise? Sure.
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
And my name is Martin Nesbig andI'm a historian of Mexico and
this is my third monograph. So I studied Mexico and most
(01:25):
people when you tell them they study Mexico, they usually say
things like oh, tacos or tequilaor conquerors or things like
that. So I don't really study any of
those things. I study the ways that people in
Mexico reacted to Spanish religion, and this is kind of
(01:46):
one of my main areas. But this particular book is
actually the first book in a planned trilogy of books about
acculturation. So most of the work that's out
there on acculturation in Mexicotalks about, OK, so like,
everybody knows, like, conquistador Fernando Cortez
(02:06):
comes to Mexico, He conquers theAztecs, and the Spaniards take
over. I mean, that's kind of standard
narrative. And that narrative has become
much more complicated in recent years.
In any case, there's a lot of people studied native people in
Mexico and they studied their native language, which is Nawat.
There's a lot of other native languages.
The one that that is that was the predominant language of the
(02:29):
Aztecs and in central Mexico is Nawat.
And the kind of predominant approach has been to study the
ways that native peoples responded to the Spanish
invasion or responded to Spanishcolonialism or Spanish imperial
rule or Spanish language. And So what I did is pretty much
(02:53):
the opposite. I had studied the way that
native culture influenced non-native people.
And that's the basic outline of the main subject of the book.
And I focused in particular on witchcraft.
So today we're talking about your new book, The Women Who
(03:14):
Threw Corn, Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century
Mexico. My first question is, what does
the name mean? The Women Who Threw Corn, What
is that? So it's a really good question.
And the women who threw corn refers to a traditional form of
(03:37):
we might call it magic, but magic isn't really the right
word. It was a form of divination.
So it's called slapuwalis in theNawa language.
Slapuwalisli refers to the process of growing corn or
hurdling corn as a way of divining events.
So in amongst the Nawas and other native groups in
(04:02):
Mesoamerica, they didn't really distinguish between magic and
medicine. It didn't really have a specific
difference to them. And so this throwing of corn or
hurling of corn was a very important part of their sort of
magic medical practice in pre Hispanic Mexico.
(04:23):
So the reason I titled the book that is that this is one of the,
it's, it serves as a metaphor because Spanish women and also
other women who came from Spain but may have been ethnically
North African or mixed or baskedliving in Mexico, they started
using this corn hurling themselves.
(04:45):
And at first what they start to do is they pay native women to
do the corn hurling. But then by the 1570's, the
Spanish women are hurling the corn themselves.
So the title comes from that andextends in as a metaphor for
this process whereby Spanish women and North African women
(05:07):
and other women adopted these native practices.
And you tell us a little bit about that process that you
mentioned, and now I'm forgetting the word.
That's OK, don't worry about it.Just call it corn hurdling.
That's what the Spanish did too,because they couldn't figure
that word out ether and so they they just stuck with HR
(05:29):
sweatface or HR meise which justmeans to throw corn.
And you were sharing with us about the adoption of practices
and cultures to different ethnicgroups.
Can you explain that a little bit more to us and just why it's
really important for us to understand how women learn from
(05:52):
each other and how they're absorbing the culture?
Well, they, yeah, they adopted alot of different practices from
native women. And part of what I tried to do
in this book is try to recreate the world that these women lived
in, which is not easy to do because the sources are
(06:13):
fragmentary. But obviously the domestic space
is a place where women learned from each other a lot, partly
because in traditional Spanish society, women were supposed to
be domestic creatures, and the domestic space is a space where
they learn things. So in the kitchen, in the living
(06:34):
spaces where they learn some of these things.
And so it's not surprising that some of the early forms of
cultural transfer come in the form of food or everyday life,
that sort of thing. And the corn hurling just
happens to be one of these particular practices.
Thank you. Are there specific regions
(06:55):
within Mexico that you're focused on in your work?
In this particular book, I it wasn't specifically regionally
focused. I wrote a book some time ago
that was specific to Michoacan, which is in western Mexico.
But this book was driven more bythe cultural practices as
(07:16):
opposed to specific regions, andit was also driven by the
availability of sources. Probably most of the material in
the book comes from Mexico City,which is unsurprising because
that's the major city. Even in the 16th century, it was
the major cities. So a lot of the material and a
lot of the stories that I tell in the book come from Mexico
City, which was a very large city.
(07:37):
I mean, prior to Spanish contact, it was one of the
largest cities in the world, probably bigger than most of the
cities in Europe. They don't really know how many
people exactly lived there, but the IT was an island and a lake.
And then there was the kind of cities around the edge of the
lake. So the island city itself
(07:57):
probably had about 50,000 people.
And then if you include the kindof the cities along the lake,
Sochimed Cocoyo, probably 200,000 people in the Basin of
Mexico. So a lot of the material comes
from Mexico City. And then I also have some
stories that involved Michoacan,which is to the West of Mexico
City. There's some stories from
(08:20):
Guanajuato, which was at the time of major mining producing
area, and also from Sakatekas, which was the major mining city
in the colonial period. There's a case of a mulatto
woman from Sakatekas and then I also have a couple cases from
Oaxaca in the South. It's kind of a combination of
(08:43):
different regions. And in this domestic space, the
divination practices are really important.
You mentioned that there's not defined separation between
medicine magic practices. Can you tell us how divination
was important to them? It was important to native
(09:06):
people for a variety of different reasons.
It was used to figure out the origins of diseases.
So in their sense of medicine, disease could be caused by a
sort of metaphysical things. And so the way that sometimes
you would figure out the origin of diseases was through various
(09:29):
forms of divination. The divination with the corn was
often used to predict events andit became basically a form of
love magic in the colonial period.
The Spanish women already had a practice of using fava beans in
sexual or love magic in prior togoing to the Americas.
(09:49):
So this was a kind of a well established form of love magic
was fava beans. Sometimes they would put fava
beans in their mouth and they would pronounce some kind of
incantation. The corn kernels were a
recognizable something that was akin to a fava beans.
They're similar in size. It's kind of similar concepts.
(10:11):
They readily adapted to the cornthrowing.
But the difference was that the Spanish women used it primarily
for love magic as opposed to sort of medicine Med.
It's a kind of they're doing it wrong.
So why do you think that the non-native women, the Spanish
and the other women who came from outside adopted the local
(10:33):
practices in Mexico instead of sticking with the practices that
they brought over? We would have to ask them, and
even if we could ask them, they might lie, so it's hard to know
exactly that. There's probably a combination
of factors. 1 is just availability of material that
can't use all the products from Spain because you're not in
(10:54):
Spain, you're in Mexico. So they didn't have fava beans
in Mexico. They had corn, they had what we
call beans. Fava beans, I guess are not, I
don't know the exact story here,but the fava beans and beans
that we think of like beans, like black beans, those are from
Mexico, that they're talking us to Mexico.
Fava beans were European, but I think they're like in a
(11:16):
different family or something, but they didn't have fava beans.
So like we don't have any fava beans here.
I guess we'll use this corn stuff.
And so they, it was what was available.
So a lot of it is just availability, but they still use
Spanish materials. They Fern seeds was like a
(11:37):
thing, if you could believe it, like ferns on the, I don't know
if you've ever seen ferns on theback of the Fern.
They've got these little things.They're like little seed pod
things. They're very small and they're
brown and those were used in magic in Spain and they got used
in Mexico, at least I saw them used at least in one case.
(11:58):
So they did, they imported Spanish stuff and then in sport.
And obviously their ideas are Spanish.
They're from Spain because in the very the early period, I'm
talking about people that were from Spain that were born in
Spain. I mean by the, once you get into
a later period, obviously have people who are ethnic Spaniards
born in Mexico, but I most of the people I was looking out for
(12:21):
women who were actually born in Spain.
So part of it is just availability of material.
The other thing is that Spaniards were very small ethnic
minority in Mexico in the 16th century up until the 1560s,
fifteen, 70s. They're very, very small ethnic
minority in Mexico City and outside of Mexico City even a
(12:43):
much smaller ethnic minority, certainly less than 20% of
Mexico City. And in a lot of places outside
of Mexico City they were certainly even a smaller
minority. So that's they're living in a
primarily native world and they're most of the people
around them are speaking native languages.
(13:05):
There are people speaking Spanish and Spanish is about the
official language of the colonial government.
But in their everyday lives, thepeople around them are not
necessarily Spanish. Most of them are not Spanish.
And then obviously the in the later period, which I don't
really talk about in this book, the later period, once you get
(13:25):
past about 15 fifties, 1560s, obviously it's a much more multi
ethnic world. A lot of people, mixed
ethnicities and a lot of those people cease to speak native
languages. But so they're just, they're
living in a native world, they're living in a
predominantly non Spanish world.They were able to continue their
(13:47):
traditional practices, it was just looking a little different
and being enriched by the new culture they were experiencing.
Yeah, most of these women were officially Catholic.
They probably a lot of them wentto Mass on a semi.
Well who knows? I mean a lot of people didn't go
(14:08):
to mass even then. They were nominally Catholic and
some of, but some of them were probably Muslim and women who
were of some kind of North African background, especially
in the earlier period in the 16th century, because the
southern part of Spain had been under Muslim rule until the 13th
(14:28):
century. And the very, very southern
part, Granada was under Muslim rule until 1492.
And there's women who came from Granada who that are in this
book and some of them are accused of being Muslims.
So, you know, who knows? But most of them are Catholic
and there's churches, they go tochurch, they go to mass, all
that. But even in Spain, ordinary
(14:52):
people who were all officially Catholic, even they didn't
really, they practice popular religion all the time too, so
they just adapted to their circumstances and started using
native forms of magic. Did Mexico see any large witch
hunts or witch crazes like happened in Europe?
(15:13):
There were no witch crazes in Mexico and there were no witch
hunts. There were in the whole history
of of Mexico and the Inquisitionand the witch hunts there.
They didn't burn any witches. The Inquisition, there were
people were executed for other kinds of crimes, but there were
no witch. There weren't really any actual
(15:34):
witch crazes. It depends on your definition of
a witch craze. The people that study witch
crazes or witch hunts in Europe usually say that in order for it
to be a craze, like there have to be large numbers of people
who were pulled into the courts and interrogated and large
numbers of people that were executed.
And that never happened in Mexico.
(15:54):
The ones in Spain that are famous like the Sugata Mundi
case from 16 O 9/16/10 is the one with the goat and Goya
painted a painting of it. That was witch craze.
But the the big numbers are in Germany.
That's where all the people, that was like the place where
the most people got killed for being accused of witchcraft was
(16:15):
in Germany. But in Mexico nobody gets
executed for being a witch. Women do get in trouble, they
get investigated, they get interrogated, but nobody gets
executed. So there's no witch crazes in
Mexico. It's just not.
It's just not a thing. When I was reading, I noticed
that you pointed out that some of the women who did find
(16:36):
themselves in the place of accusation were very exotic or
exceptional and perceived as exceptional.
Although there is the whole discussion on vulnerable and
people desperate in society finding themselves in
accusations. We also have seen lots of cases
(16:57):
in colonial US where the complaint was that the woman was
exceptional or beautiful, and I saw all that is a common thread
there. Sure, that definitely happens in
Mexico. That women who are considered
ethnically different or who are considered oversexed are often
accused of being witches. This is a pretty common, as you
(17:20):
mentioned, this is a this is pretty common throughout all the
different kinds of witch crazes and witch hunts or inquisitions.
There have been studies also that suggest that the widows
also are particularly vulnerableto accusations of witchcraft.
And at least in the context of the Hispanic world, part of the
reason is that they don't have any family to protect them.
(17:42):
So the women that tend to get accused are either single women,
widows, women who are perceived as being different, women who
are perceived as being oversexed.
But it's very common in this in the case in Mexico, and this is
similar to Spain, but in Mexico,a lot of the women who get
accused of being witches are women who were of mixed
(18:05):
ethnicity. So they're either from southern
Spain, which had a larger or longer term impact of Muslim and
North African culture because this the kind of the southern
part of Spain, especially Andalusia was under Muslim rule
until the middle of the 13th century.
So for 500 years it was under Muslim rule and then Granada was
(18:27):
under Muslim rule until 1492. A lot of these women are either
they're from Andalusia, southernSpain, which is where Seville
and Granada and Cordoba are located.
There are all kinds of stereotypes back in the day, in
the 16th century that women fromAndalusia were oversexed.
They also tend to be darker skinned.
(18:48):
And then you have this other group called Moriscas, which is
a kind of a term that sort of doesn't mean anything to the
extent that it can mean a lot ofdifferent things.
It can mean they can have a sortof a religious designation,
which means they could refer to somebody who had been a Muslim
and had converted to Catholicism.
(19:10):
It could just mean someone who was of some kind of vaguely dark
skinned vaguely North African look.
Could be that could be a Moriska.
It could also be just some a woman who was enslaved in a
Spanish expeditions and invasions of North Africa in the
16th century and from Tunis and other places women in Algiers
(19:35):
women were captured and sold into slavery and brought back to
Spain. And actually Moriska women were
highly valued as slaves for their perceived good looks.
So there's a lot of these women.And then of course there are.
There are enslaved sub-saharan Africans in Mexico, though in
the period that I'm looking at, there aren't.
(19:56):
The numbers are not gigantic, but the women that got accused
of witchcraft that we know aboutwho were sub-saharan African is
mid 1536. And these women were almost
certainly from Senegambia. Because the transatlantic slave
trade at that time in the 1530s,pretty much basically almost all
(20:18):
of the women or almost all of the people enslaved from Africa
were from Senegambia or Guinea, Guinea coast, which was just
next to Senegal. So these were, they were from
that region. And then there were women from
the Canary Islands and women from Canary Islands were also
seen as being oversexed. They were also of uncertain
(20:39):
ethnicity. They're probably mostly Spanish,
though, because the native people of the Canary Islands
were called the Guanches and they were largely exterminated
by the Spaniards and sort of wars of extermination.
But there were almost certainly some sexual, I don't know what
to procreation, I guess is the only word for it because that
(21:01):
marriage isn't really the right word.
So there were children that werethe result of some kind of
sexual interaction between Spanish men, Guanche women, but
I don't really seem to know thatmuch about the Guanches in terms
of their survival. The oversexed category of women,
(21:22):
is that a religious judgement? Does that have to do with the
Diabolical pact or is it just a cultural non religious behavior?
I think it's probably just mostly a cultural thing and
people do get accused of making pacts with the devil, but it's
not necessarily sexual actually usually isn't sexual.
Women, men get accused of havingpacts with the devil, but
(21:45):
usually it's having a pact with the devil to get something
concrete to find something or just have a better life or to be
a better. There's a lot of there's cases
these guys that have pacts with the devil because the devil
promises that they will, he willprotect them when he's riding a
horseback or make him a better rancher, stuff like that.
(22:07):
It's usually a lot more uninteresting and banal than
most of the cases that I've seen.
So the women also have pacts with the devil, but it's usually
like to get stuff just it's you also have cases where people
make pacts with the devil because they say, I tried these
other Saints and those losers didn't do me any good.
(22:28):
So I changed team. I changed teams to the devil.
Let's see what the devil had offers.
That was actually pretty common too.
So there's the kind of pact withthe devil business, but a lot of
women are just accused of being oversexed.
So it's classic old, just old fashioned slut shaming.
It's just like these women are accused of being oversexed.
They've got too many sexual partners.
(22:49):
Spanish has a bunch of differentwords for women that don't fit
into acceptable sexual categories, but the prostitute
prostitutas isn't one of those words.
In the 16th century, they don't,It's not a word that they use.
They've got what's other words that they use.
(23:10):
And in the, in the phrase that Isaw that was really interesting
that that that got applied to two different women is mujer en
amorada, which literally means awoman in love.
It meant, I translated it as cortisone because it's the
closest thing in English I thinkthat we can come up with.
(23:32):
Because it doesn't really mean prostitute in the sense of a sex
worker and it doesn't mean a street walking prostitute.
Because there was a name for that called Cantonera, which
meant a corner. It literally meant a corner
person. So they were, they had a word
for that. It was a cantonera, So it wasn't
that. It wasn't puta, which is whore,
(23:56):
and it wasn't romera, which alsomeans whore.
And it wasn't mere trics, which meant which is a Latin word, but
it was used in Spanish to emitted tricks from which we get
meretricious is just was basically just like AI don't
know. I mean meretricious person.
It just means like you engage insex for money.
So a mojer en amorada was something else.
(24:20):
It wasn't any of those categories.
So what it seemed to imply was sort of like a woman who had
sexual relationships with men for some kind of social,
political, economic, cultural gain, but not just like here's
(24:42):
$500.00 for an hour of sex. It wasn't like that.
This was a different kind of category.
So there were these women, womenaccused of being mujer in
amoradas just like the courtesanand and a lot of times and then
they got accused of being witches at the same time.
In the book you talk about how in Spain a lot of the witch
(25:06):
trials were handled by the RoyalCourts, but the Inquisition got
entrusted in this demonic pact thing, the Satanic pact in
Mexico, were these cases handledlargely by the civil authorities
or was the Inquisition always involved?
We don't really know because thea lot of the the documentation
(25:29):
from the civil courts for the very early period in the 16th
century is doesn't exist anymore.
There are hints of trials against women that were
undertaken by the civil authorities in Mexico.
So we know that they did. The first woman ever, at least
on record, the first woman accused of being a witch in the
(25:51):
Las Casas was accused of being awitch and was prosecuted, was
previously tried by the civil magistrate of Mexico City.
The case file doesn't exist anymore, but it's referred to in
her later inquisitional trials. So we know that the civil
authority had some kind of a, some kind of jurisdiction over
(26:15):
sorcery and witchcraft, but we don't really know the extent of
these trials. It doesn't seem like there were
that many because there would have been some kind of somebody
else contemporaneously would have mentioned these trials.
All we know is that that the civil authority had some
jurisdiction. They probably punish some
people, but we don't know how many because the records aren't
there. But the inquisitional material
(26:35):
is there. And so the inquisitional
authorities started prosecuting women for sorcery in the 1530s
in Mexico. And then in 1571, there was a
central office of the inquisition that was established
in the Americas, one in Lima andone in Mexico City.
(26:56):
And when that happened, this newbureaucratically centralized
inquisition quashed all the jurisdictions of all these other
individual inquisitions. So a central inquisition was set
up in 1571 and it also continuedto pursue witchcraft, but it
didn't really prosecute that many people.
(27:19):
If you look at the post 1571 data, which I didn't use for
this book, But if you look at that data and I have studied it
in the past, hundreds of these, you know, people go and they
snitch on their neighbor and it's usually because they don't
like the person is not a very original story.
They go and they snitch on the neighbor, They snitch on
(27:41):
somebody they don't like and they say, oh, so and so Maria
Suarez is a witch. And so they what did she do?
How do you know she's a witch? What, what's going on?
And then send off the denunciation off to Mexico City.
This is post 1571. And usually the Inquisitors are
like, whatever, they don't really care.
You're usually looking for Jews that that was what they really
(28:02):
cared about was Jews, Jews and Lutherans.
So like they got these denunciations against women for
being witches and they're just like, whatever, they don't
really care. So there are cases there's like
a little spike in the 1570s and there's another little spike in
the 1590s of women who get actually prosecuted.
The Inquisition actually has them arrested, they go to jail,
(28:23):
they get interrogated, they get there's a trial, witnesses are
called and then they get punished.
So there there is a little spike, but we're not talking
huge numbers. We're talking like in a decade,
less than 100, just like a couple dozen in a decade.
So the inquisitors in Mexico arepretty sceptical about that
mostly like most of the like kind of if you like most, most
(28:45):
of the Spanish writers, theologians and jurists.
And they mostly don't think witchcraft is real.
They mostly just think witchcraft's not they're like,
no, that's not real. There aren't any witches.
That's just like stupid superstition.
They're superstitious country people who believe in witches.
So the people in charge of getting rid of witchcraft didn't
really believe that it was really real.
(29:07):
Any they were just like, no, that's not real.
The Inquisition usually when it gets involved in these cases,
usually because there's something to do with like the
devil, that's usually when people get in big giant trouble.
It's like, oh, the devil's involved, or the these women are
mixing the sacred with the profane, then they're in
trouble. But if it's just like plain old
superstition, they're saying whatever, we don't care.
(29:29):
Yeah. So it was really about punishing
for mixing the sacred with the profane and not so much a
purification because I was thinking about the craze
histories and there's usually this really big rooting out and
purification goal happening. But it sounds like they were
(29:50):
doing that in the scene world with cultures and specific
ethnicities and religions versusthe onseed world of the
diabolical. Yeah, it's hard to know.
I mean, in Mexico they were skeptical of this.
You know, a lot of times, like, for example, in France and in
Germany, the big witch crazes there usually happen when
(30:14):
they're kind of the usual story was there'd be some Bishop and
the Bishop would come to power and he would blame all of
society's ills on Lutheranism and they would have to find a
scapegoat. And the scapegoats were women
and they would accuse them. And then you get like this whole
like kind of the psychology of the witch craze where like every
(30:35):
of all of a sudden everybody's finding witches everywhere where
they don't exist. Here's his name.
This guy wrote this book called The Looming Tower.
Now I forgot his last name. He wrote a previous book about
the witch craze in the 1980s in Los Angeles.
There were these people who ran a daycare center and everybody
accused them of being satanic pedophiles.
It's kind of the same story. But these kinds of things don't
(30:55):
seem to happen in Mexico. I don't.
I've never seen it happen where,I mean, there are little
instances of this happening where there's a little group and
a little location and all of a sudden everybody's denouncing
one or two different women as being witches.
So it does happen, but it's on amuch smaller scale than you see,
even of Salem. It's much smaller scale than
that. So it happens.
(31:18):
But when people get really in trouble, it's usually because
they get accused of doing something with the devil.
A lot of these women that I studied that I wrote about in
this book, they were investigated because they were
doing things that seemed kind ofvaguely diabolical.
They were using certain herbs orcertain potions.
One of the things that was supposed to be really bad was
(31:38):
you weren't supposed to ascribe any particular power to
nighttime or daytime per SE. A lot of the spells had to be
performed at nighttime and this was considered bad, or that it
had to be certain stage of the moon or things like this and
that. Now, it was considered bad, but
(31:59):
it wasn't really considered satanic per SE.
But then they would investigate.They want to find out like, is
this really about the devil? And a lot of times this women
would say, no, it's not about the devil, dude.
Like what? What's with the devil?
I'm just trying to do whatever. Midwives were frequently the
target of investigation because they're involved with babies and
(32:20):
they're intimate with other women.
I mean, not sexually intimate, but they're intimate because
they're delivering babies. That's pretty good.
Then they're using herbs and poultices, and so those women
also get scrutinized a lot. Now, one of the ingredients or
items that was being used in Magic was vaginal bathwater,
(32:45):
right? Can you explain where that came
from and what was the purpose? Vaginal bathwater as well as
menstrual ward, which I there was a case that I unfortunately
literally would let ended up on the cutting room floor, which
I'm going to turn into an article.
But yeah, so vaginal bathwater and Mensra blood seem to be
(33:08):
European. There doesn't seem to be any
evidence that this is a native phenomenon.
This seems to be a European phenomenon.
We don't really know where it's from.
There seems to be some suggestion that this was
something that was particular tothe Canary Islands.
Whether that means it was only in the Canary Islands or just
was more well known in the Canary Islands, it's hard to
(33:30):
know, but it's definitely European.
And the idea is that this would create some kind of metaphysical
link between the woman and the man.
So the idea is that you're mixing these intimate
substances, vaginal bathwater ormenstrual blood, with the food,
some kind of food or drink that the man is going to ingest.
(33:52):
And by ingesting this, he will become linked to the woman.
And once you get past the 1571, there's a lot more information
about this. There seems to be a few
different reasons that women do this.
One is the idea is to get the man to fall in love with them.
So that's the oldest one in the book is do this.
(34:12):
The man will fall in love with me and he will be tethered to.
The other reason that women seemto do this is that they are
being abused physically by theirhusband, boyfriend, partner or
whatever, and the idea is that this will get them to stop
beating them. In either case, it's about
(34:34):
controlling or taming the man with these substances.
But there's also, there's, at least in the Spanish case,
there's other cases that involvespells of that involve urine
mixed with like vinegar and stuff like this.
And but at its core, this is a kind of a form of love magic or
sexual magic that's supposed to tie the man to the woman.
(34:57):
And I don't think we're talking about like huge quantities.
I think the idea is that it's like a little bit just, although
I've read some cases that were pretty graphic and it sounds
like there was some kind of, I don't know how to even try to.
It's like in one case, this guy thought that it was like a kind
(35:18):
of a, a piece of dried, I don't know if you've ever seen what
happens to Chili Peppers, the dried Chili Peppers, then you
reconstitute them in water. He thought that it was that.
And I'm trying to think like what must have been really thick
menstrual blood or something. I don't know, like really
stringy, I don't know. And then apparently he puked.
(35:38):
So it didn't work. But the reason it didn't work on
him was that A was the wrong guyand B, he knew about it.
So that the whole point is that this is supposed to be secret,
that the man isn't even supposedto know.
Because I think probably in mostcases, if a woman brought the
guy like a Stew or a cup of chocolate and said, oh, by the
(35:59):
way, I mixed in some Menthol budthere just for fun, most men
would probably be like, I think I'm going to pass.
No thanks. It probably sounded to be like
dumb, but I think most people would be like, no, it's gross.
Pass. So the whole point was that this
had to be seen. They couldn't really get in
trouble for this. And I've never really saw
anyone, any woman actually get in trouble for doing that.
They just say that's gross, don't do that.
(36:22):
What kind of records would thesestories be in?
These are the ones that I've seen are these are Inquisition
investigations. The one that I used in the book
came from Guanajuato, which is amining town.
It's North Central Mexico or central Mexico.
It's north of Mexico City. It's like about a six hour
drive. And so it was a woman who was
(36:44):
from the Canary Islands and she had mixed her vaginal bathwater
in some mustard to the sky. But this was all part of a
inquisitional trial. She was put on trial for being a
witch. And that was one of the bad
things that she did, supposedly.She denied it, of course, but
everybody else said she did. Another type of magic that you
(37:05):
talked about is freedom magic. Can you give us some background
on what that is and how that wasused?
Yeah, it was really interesting.When I was finishing the
research and writing this book, I hadn't really come across
this. Or maybe I just, I'm ignorant,
which is true. But maybe I was particularly
ignorant of this, that there were cases of women who were
(37:28):
enslaved and they wanted to not be slaves anymore because it
seems to be obvious. Being a slave has got to be
terrible. And there were these cases of
these women, some who use spellsto convince their owners to set
them free. And in some cases, these women
(37:49):
said it worked. And what's interesting is that
in in at least a couple cases, these spells were sex magic
spells. So it's like a combination sex
magic, freedom magic. In some cases, the women who
were slaves were basically sexual slaves.
They were domestic slaves, but they were subjected to, by
definition, rape because you can't consent if you're a slave.
(38:11):
But in some cases, these women talk about their owners in
language that it's very difficult to talk about because
they don't want to be accused ofminimizing the how terrible it
is to be a slave. But some of these women talk
about their masters as if they were sort of their lovers, and
they sometimes talk about how they use love magic to convince
(38:36):
their master to set them free. In other cases, there's clearly
no relationship, coerced or consensual or not, between the
woman and her male owner. But did they that she still
heard about this way that you could convince your owner to to
set you free? It's a little bit unclear the
mechanics of how this is supposed to work, but this was
(39:00):
apparently a thing like you had.There were cases of women who
paid one of the things that you could do in the slave system in
the Hispanic world, you were, you could theoretically buy your
way out of freedom. It's not especially easy, but
you could in theory get a job and work and earn money and try
to pay your way out of slavery. And I guess in some cases is
(39:23):
women would pay other women thatthey had heard, Oh, I heard that
this woman was a very powerful sorceress and I paid her to cast
these spells on my owner to convince him to write a letter
of manumission. So it seems to be a thing, which
I didn't know was a thing, but it's a little, it was a little
(39:44):
unclear to me. The investigations don't really
indicate exactly how this is supposed to work.
Just like they they cast a spellon the guy and the guy in theory
is supposed to let them go. And then there's other cases
where women say, oh, I paid it and it didn't work.
And. And then the woman accused said,
oh, I'm not really a witch. I just conned these people out
of their money. And they were prosecuting cons
(40:08):
as well. Sometimes not for being cons,
but for being witches. And then of course, even if you
are a witch, you're probably notgoing to admit it.
You're like, no, I'm not a witch.
I just scammed these people out of their money.
Maybe they were a witch. But they, I guess you don't
really want to say like, Oh yeah, I'm a witch.
Not really a winning, winning strategy in jail, waiting trial.
(40:32):
So of course they're going to say I'm not a witch, but who
knows? For me, it was immaterial
whether these people are witchesor not.
I was more interested in what this tells us about the culture.
But some of them probably were witches in the sense that they
did tell people that they could cast spells and they because
there were monetary value associated with spell casting.
Like it wasn't free, couldn't just be like, hey, can you pass
(40:54):
a spell for me because you're myfriend?
It was like, no, it doesn't workthat way.
You have to pay me to cast the spells and this was something
that women made money doing. And did you see spells being
purchased to protect from the evil eye?
There's it's any spells for people to protect from the evil
(41:15):
eye, but there were people, there were a lot of women who
said that that so and so cured their child of the evil eye.
There was a couple different actually midwives, at least in
in the documents that I looked at, the people that were most
intimately associated with curing the evil eye were
midwives. But there were other sorceresses
(41:36):
in Spain who also could claim that they could cure the evil
eye. I'm not sure.
Didn't see anyone actually trying to proactively prevent
the evil eye. Usually it was just like don't
look at women, especially old women, don't look at old women
and don't let little kids look at old women.
Apparently that was like the worst possible scenario for evil
(41:57):
eye was post menopausal women looking at young babies.
That was you were totally doomed.
But there were these women who claimed to cure the evil eye.
There were all kinds of weird ways that they claimed to cure
the evil eye involved making these incantations and making
sometimes making poultices out of different kinds of plants or
(42:21):
materials. They were like the sort of
curing of the evil eye. But I didn't see anybody trying
to get like a anti evil eye potion or anything like that or
amulet. I haven't seen any amulets
against the evil eye even thoughthose are big now.
They're they were Cuban originally, but now they're
(42:43):
everywhere. Big giant eye, kind of blue iris
eye. They see them all the time now.
But those are those like an antianti evil eye.
Yeah, Neapolitans also have antievil eye.
It's the evil eye concept is waswidespread in Catholic Europe
even to this day. Yeah.
(43:04):
Yeah, Then I didn't see any protect me from the evil in the
future. It was more like my son has evil
eye, can you please make him better?
So there, there were midwives who apparently that was part of
their, that was one of the things they could do was cure
the evil eye, which was considered bad.
The official line was trying to cure people of the metaphysical
(43:25):
evil eye was bad because it was superstitious, because the
people even like people who wrote treatises said, well,
there's evil eye, what we would call probably conjunctivites.
So like infections of the eye, which are caused by natural
things. And then there's like the evil
eye, which is like caused by someone looking at you at a
certain point and that didn't necessarily result in your eyes
(43:49):
getting like the evil eye when it happens to you doesn't
necessarily make your eyes go bad.
It's like it makes you puke or make you just, it makes you sick
in general, but it comes from the eye.
So there's two different things.And but apparently curing the
evil eye involved things that didn't necessarily involve the
eyes. It's like the evil from the eye.
(44:10):
It comes from the eye and then it goes into the person's, I
don't know, goes into their soulor something and then it
manifests itself in the body. I'm not really sure how it
works. Yeah, they had a similar concept
in the Salem witch trials, according to one of the critics
was that what he called effluviacame out of and it went into the
(44:35):
person and then if the if they touched the witch, then it would
go back to the witch. Oh yeah, I haven't heard about
that one. The effluvia idea was around in
the Spanish people believed in the effluvia idea.
There was a guy, one of the guysthat I studied, this guy Martin
de Arleis, who was Spanish, but he was from the Basque region.
(44:56):
But I don't know, I don't think he was ethnically Basque, but he
was, he wrote a anti superstition trees back in the
very early 1500s. And he's got a whole section on
the evil eye. And he says the evil eye comes
out of the eyes and it's like effluvia.
And that's why he said that postmenopausal women were
especially dangerous because they were no longer purging
(45:20):
through menstruation. Therefore all these toxins is
kind of were building up in their body.
And the way that they were let loose was through the eyes.
And he said that sometimes menstruating women, if they
looked at a mirror a certain way, could make the mirror have
spots, which totally, I know, wejust think that sounds super
(45:41):
crazy, but this was apparently. And so he said that post
menopausal women were especiallydangerous because they had all
this built up toxin and they canproject it.
And so the people who were most at risk were young children,
like babies, babies and young children because they were soft
and tender as they were defenseless against the evil
effluvia coming out of the eyes of the evil post menopausal
(46:04):
women. And I guess it, I don't know.
And it's sort of weird way, there's a certain bizarre logic,
because at this time a lot of people didn't live to menopause.
Life expectancy was not really that probably 30 years old.
Most women didn't live to make it to menopause.
(46:25):
Most women were dead by then. So probably not a lot of post
menopausal women running around 16th century Mexico or Spain
because most of the people are dead before then.
Yeah. And I think the elderly have
behaviors sometimes from health,sometimes it's just from wisdom
(46:49):
and long life, but that are misunderstood by younger
generations. And I think today in some
communities where elderly are finding themselves accused it
getting the Gray hair and entering that phase of life
starts to put suspicion around them in communities today even.
If you look at the 17th century,where there's just like this
(47:12):
oceans of documentation for Mexico, if you look at the kinds
of women who get accused of being witches in the 17th
century, a lot of them are. You see a lot of things like
widows, younger women who are not married, women who are
somewhere, probably sex workers of some sort.
(47:33):
The widows are a popular target and one of the reasons is that
they're perceived as easy, easier targets, stuff like that.
There was all, they also there was this crazy idea that widows
had wandering womb, that this was like a popular concept, that
they were like walking around with these hungry womb, that it
(47:55):
was dangerous because they would, I don't know what they
would do, but this was like a thing, this was like an idea
that people had. So the widows were easy targets.
Would you like to tell our audience how they can get a hold
of your wonderful book? Well, the book is available on
Amazon. It goes on sale on September
4th, so two weeks from today, I think.
(48:16):
Goes on sale in the United States.
It's been available in the UK since July.
They made a really nice cover for it, which is nice.
Also, we never did get to talk about peyote, but peyote is
something that makes its appearance in this book.
So peyote is from Mexico. It's a talk to this to Mexico.
That's where it originally came from and people been eating
peyote for a long time. There's carbon dating of
(48:40):
excrement or whatever that proves that people have been
being it for thousands of years and it starts showing up in
witchcraft cases. That's the first place that
shows up in the documentation isin witchcraft documentation.
So I have in this book, there's a couple chapters that talk
about the first two women who get accused of being involved
(49:02):
with peyote. The first one is a midwife who
is a some uncertain ethnicity. She's described as a mulatto,
which means black and white or African and Spanish mix.
But her mother may have been North African, we don't really
know. But she was wealthy each other
wealthy father. She migrated to Mexico and she
(49:23):
worked as a midwife and she didn't herself eat peyote, but
she was living in Sacatecas, which is one of the main areas
where peyote naturally grows. But she paid some indigenous men
to eat peyote because she had, she herself had slaves.
She had these two slaves. There were native girls and they
(49:44):
ran away. And she wanted to know where
these girls had gone. So she paid these guys to eat
peyote because the idea was eat the peyote, the peyote spirit
will tell you. And then in 1569 in Guanajuato,
which is a mining town like SacaPekas, but further South and
also an area where peyote grows,this woman, Catalina Carasa, who
(50:07):
was from the Canary Islands, sheate pale.
And I guess maybe she didn't, but if she didn't, someone just
exactly like her eat it because there's all these testimonies of
people talking about her eating peyote.
So these are the very first cases of people who are not
natives eating peyote and tripping out.
And but they were doing it wrong.
(50:28):
So they were doing it to predictthings.
And in her case, you want to know if this guy, it was the
local magistrate who wanted to marry her or not.
And then I guess he, this peyote, told her that he didn't.
And then she cast bells on him to get revenge.
So this is the beginning of people using hallucinogens in
the Americas who are not native peoples.
(50:50):
People start eating shrooms too,but that's for a different book.
The third book in this sort of projected trilogy of books is
about hallucinogens. So it's mostly about peyote and
shrooms, which are psilocyba mushrooms.
People, they just call them shrooms.
Those are also from Mexico. They're a talk in this to
Mexico. That's where they originally
came. You can grow them anywhere now
(51:11):
you have to. All you need are the sports to
grow. Then people grow them at home.
People been eating shrooms for along time too.
And the cases against Spaniards or non-native peoples don't
start showing up until the 17th century.
But there are cases of people eating shrooms and they get in
trouble, but not necessarily foreating shrooms.
They get in trouble for casting spells and other bad things and
(51:34):
then it's like, oh by the way you ate shrooms, that's also
bad. Don't do that.
Thank you so much and thank you for producing work like this.
As you you pointed out, you're building context that's not
necessarily been built in the same way.
So it's so informative and it brings humanity out of the dusty
(52:01):
pages of the past and helps us ourselves.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Thank you all. Right.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
We want to thank you for joiningus and for keeping the
conversation going by sharing what you've learned with your
friends and family. We can't wait to see you in a
(52:21):
few days at our weekend podcast,The Thing About Salem.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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