Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Rolena Adorno.

In this thesis I analyze the historiographical representation of the Devil in the two major sixteenth-century historians of the New World, who contemplated in the greatest depth the problem of the Devil: Bartolome de Las Casas and Jose de Acosta. I examine the manner in which each author's representation of the Devil serves a specific purpose within their respective historiographical programs and offers deep insights into the meaning of the Devil in the New World.

I propose that Las Casas uses his various depictions of the Devil and demons, as well as of their activity in the human sphere, as part of his voluminous evidence brought to prove that the Devil, rather than the Indians, is responsible for the latter's religious error. In this context, I examine Las Casas's ideas on demonic possession, divination, and the satanic pact, all of which establish a hierarchy of liability. By doing so, the Dominican friar does not exculpate the Indians from their idolatrous crimes, but alleviates the burden of the accusations, which helps him present the inhabitants of the New World as worthy of receiving the Gospel.

With respect to Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias , I argue that the Spanish historian presents a demonic causality for the origin of the different religious expressions of the New World, which he deems superstitious, and therefore culturally inferior. Thus, demonic causality takes the form of a "diabolical mimesis," a process by which Indians build their religion in the image of Christian beliefs, mocking the latter's institutions, hierarchies, and rituals. I suggest that by applying this demonic causality to his own account of the Indians' religious beliefs, his moral history denies the Indians an autochthonous origin for their spirituality. This in turn contradicts the explicit purpose of his work, which was to describe the Amerindians' culture from their own perspective.

Finally, this dissertation compares and contrasts these two portraits of the Devil, emphasizing this figure's plasticity. It also shows that different images of a common character serve different rhetorical roles within the historiographical program of each work. In the case of Las Casas' Apologetica Historia Sumaria, I argue that this integration is consistent and functional to the development of the historian's general apologetic argument. In Acosta's work, on the other hand, the deployment of his demonological theorization of New World religious and spiritual manifestations creates a methodological tension that sheds light on the complexities of the assimilation of New World cultural realities into the European imaginary.