Into the Cave of Chile’s Witches
There is a place in South America that was once the end of the earth. It lies close to the 41st parallel, where the Maule River empties into the Pacific Ocean, and in the first years of the 16th century it marked the spot at which the Empire of the Incas ended and a strange and unknown world began.
South of the Maule, the Incas thought, lay a land of mystery and darkness. It was a place where the Pacific’s waters chilled and turned from blue to black, and where indigenous peoples struggled to claw the basest of livings from a hostile environment. It was also where the witches lived and evil came from. The Incas called this land “the Place of Seagulls.”
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Who were they, these sorcerers hauled before a court for casting spells in an industrial age? According to the traveler Bruce Chatwin, who stumbled over traces of their story in the 1970s, they belonged to a “sect of male witches” that existed “for the purpose of hurting people.” According to their own statements, made during the trial of 1880, they ran protection rackets on the island, disposing of their enemies by poisoning or, worse, by sajaduras: magically inflicted “profound slashes.” But since the same men also claimed to belong to a group called La Recta Provincia—a phrase that may be loosely translated as “The Righteous Province”—and styled themselves members of the Mayoria, the “Majority,” an alternative interpretation may also be advanced. Perhaps these witches were actually representatives of a strange sort of alternative government, an indigenous society that offered justice of a perverted kind to indians living under the rule of a white elite. Perhaps they were more shamans than sorcerers.
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/02/into-the-cave-of-chiles-witches/#ixzz2LmSDHeQ4
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