Search

Search Results

• The Three Souls of the Otomi

  179–195.

  David Charles Wright-Carr

  Views:

  1

  The study of documental sources from New Spain (today Mexico) provides a window into the beliefs of the Otomi people regarding what is called ‘soul’ in Western culture. To begin, I shall explain who these people were and how they interacted with their Nahua neighbors in central Mexico. Then, I analyze the words, in the Nahuatl and Otomi languages, belonging to semantic fields that relate to the Christian concept of the soul. We find many calques, or semantic loans, revealing that these two language groups shared beliefs in multiple animic essences that could survive the death of the body. Finally, I present evidence from colonial period documental sources, showing how the beliefs of the Otomi were affected by the teachings of Christian priests. In these texts, one may observe the resistance of the Otomi people as a reaction to the efforts of the missionaries to impose Catholic doctrine and ritual on the native population.

• La eucarística en la evangelización agustina y la portada de Yuriria, México

  125–162.

  María Celia Fontana Calvo

  Views:

  1

  The New Spain Augustinians of the province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus developed in several of their churches eucharistic doors. Acolman was the first in the present State of Mexico, and a paradigmatic case. Later Yuriria was constructed in Guanajuato, at that time frontier with the fearsome Chichimeca’s Indians. This article deals with the theological and doctrinal factors that give rise to this type of portal, its variants and its enormous importance. The Augustinians were the only ones among the first evangelizers of ancient Mesoamerica who gave communion to the natives. By means of this salvation instrument, the friars gave themselves an extraordinary opportunity to compensate the souls lost by Luther in Europe and, on the other hand, to offer to the neophytes earthly benefits and the future life that only communion, according to Dogma, could provide. The Eucharist was used as an important strategy in evangelization, adaptable to very concrete situations, as shown by the portal of the church of Yuriria. 

• An execration formula from Lugo (Lucus Augusti)

  129–136

  Francisco Marco Simón

  Views:

  222

  Excavations in the Plaza do Ferrol in Lugo (Galicia, Spain) during 1986 brought to light a necropolis with cistae datable from the middle of the 1st. century to the end of the 3rd. On one of the funeral urns (with a typology pointing to the first half of the 3rd. century) a graffito was written with a formula execrationis invoking “two genii” or, more probably, Duagena to punish the possible looters. This theonym, a hápax, seems to belong to a Celtic chtonic goddess whose personality (“Born Dark”, or “Born from Darkness”) finds parallels in other magical texts (e.g. antumnos in Larzac).

• The transformation of the case system in African Latin as evidenced in inscriptions

  13–36

  Béla Adamik

  Views:

  1210

  Present paper intends to explore the process of the transformation of the case system as evidenced in the inscriptions of the Roman provinces Africa Proconsularis and Numidia. First the peculiarities of the transformation of the case system in African Latin in the preChristian and Christian periods will be analysed. Then the African distributional patterns of case system changes will be compared to those of other regions of the Empire selected for the survey including Spain, Gaul (including Germany), Italy, Illyricum, and the city of Rome. Finally, the results of the present analysis, especially those regarding the dialectological positioning of Roman Africa, will be compared with the results of the investigation of Gaeng 1992 regarding the later, Christian period.