Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Missionary Had Taken A Fancy To Have The Ceremonies By
Which The Piaches (Who Are At Once Priests, Physicians, And Conjurors)
Evoke The Evil Spirit Iolokiamo, Represented In A Burlesque Manner.
He
thought that the dance of the devils would be an excellent means of
proving to the neophytes that Iolokiamo had no longer any power over
them.
Some young Indians, confiding in the promises of the missionary,
consented to act the devils, and were already decorated with black and
yellow plumes, and jaguar-skins with long sweeping tails. The place
where the church stands was surrounded by the soldiers who are
distributed in the missions, in order to add more effect to the
counsels of the monks; and those Indians who were not entirely
satisfied with respect to the consequences of the dance, and the
impotency of the evil spirit, were brought to the festivity. The
oldest and most timid of the Indians, however, imbued all the rest
with a superstitious dread; all resolved to flee al monte, and the
missionary adjourned his project of turning into derision the demon of
the natives. What extravagant ideas may sometimes enter the
imagination of an idle monk, who passes his life in the forests, far
from everything that can recall human civilization to his mind. The
violence with which the attempt was made to execute in public at Tomo
the mysterious dance of the devils is the more strange, as all the
books written by the missionaries relate the efforts they have used to
prevent the funereal dances, the dances of the sacred trumpet, and
that ancient dance of serpents, the Queti, in which these wily animals
are represented as issuing from the forests, and coming to drink with
the men in order to deceive them, and carry off the women.
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