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Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender, Ideologies, and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru
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1989
Year
Women's RightColonialismLatin American StudyColonial PeruIndigenous PeopleInca SocietyInca CultureCultural StudiesSocial SciencesIndigenous StudyGender IdentityGender TheoryGender StudiesFeminist IdentityCultural HistoryLanguage StudiesLatin American CultureFeminist PerspectiveSexual DissidenceIndigenous FeminismsFeminist TheoryFeminist PhilosophyInca UmpirePoor Peasant WomenMoon TraditionsAnthropologySpanishCultural Anthropology
The Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532 introduced a gendered cosmology in which Inca men revered the Sun and kings while women honored the Moon and queens, a complementarity rooted in pre‑Inca tradition that later intersected with European witch‑hunt ideologies that blamed politically disruptive poor women for heresy. The study examines how gender ideologies intersected with political hierarchy in Inca and colonial Peru. Silverblatt analyzes how Inca rulers employed Sun and Moon symbolism to control women and conquered peoples, and how Spanish colonizers adapted European gendered imagery to consolidate power over native women, especially poor peasants. Andean women, economically harassed and sexually abused, resisted and were branded witches, a label that simultaneously condemned them and provided a rebellious ideology and defense of their culture.
When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes, while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such notions of parallel descent were expressions of complementarity between men and women. Examining the interplay between gender ideologies and political hierarchy. Irene Silverblatt shows how Inca rulers used their Sun and Moon traditions as methods of controlling women and the Andean peoples the Incas conquered. She then explores the process by which the Spaniards employed European male and female imageries to establish their own rule in Peru and to make new inroads on the power of native women, particularly poor peasant women. Harassed economically and abused sexually, Andean women fought back, earning in the process the Spaniards' condemnation as witches. Fresh from the European witch hunts that damned women for susceptibility to heresy and diabolic influence, Spanish clerics were predisposed to charge politically disruptive poor women with witchcraft. Professor Silverblatt shows that these very accusations provided women with an ideology of rebellion and a method for defending their culture.