Moon, Sun and Witches

Moon, Sun and Witches

• Used Book in Good Condition

<p>When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire<br>worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes,<br>while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca<br>queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such<br>notions of parallel descent were expressions of complementarity between<br>men and women. Examining the interplay between gender ideologies<br>and political hierarchy. Irene Silverblatt shows how Inca rulers<br>used their Sun and Moon traditions as methods of controlling<br>women and the Andean peoples the Incas conquered. She then explores<br>the process by which the Spaniards employed European male<br>and female imageries to establish their own rule in Peru and to make<br>new inroads on the power of native women, particularly poor peasant<br>women.</p><p>Harassed economically and abused sexually, Andean women<br>fought back, earning in the process the Spaniards' condemnation as<br>"witches." Fresh from the European witch hunts that damned<br>women for susceptibility to heresy and diabolic influence, Spanish<br>clerics were predisposed to charge politically disruptive poor women<br>with witchcraft. Professor Silverblatt shows that these very accusations<br>provided women with an ideology of rebellion and a method for<br>defending their culture.</p>