Moon, Sun and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

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.