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• Other People’s Gods: Atheism, Demonisation, and Interpretatio from Strabo to Bernardino De Sahagún

  83–107.

  Francisco Marco Simón

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  1

  This paper aims to compare the different strategies used by the colonizers to conceptualize the gods of the vanquished peoples in the interreligious contacts that took place in Hellenistico-Roman Antiquity and in Mesoamerica, from the negation of the alien’s religious system (a feature of extreme barbarism sometimes described in terms of “atheism”) to the more common demonisation of the foreign divinities in terms of idolatry, to the different levels of assimilating them to one’s own religious cosmology through the diverse mechanisms of interpretatio.

• Conocer y representar al otro en América, siglo xvi. La actualización del pasado en el nuevo mundo

  197–214.

  Fernando López Meraz

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  1

  Tracing the history of how West has described the Other would take us very far in time and space. There are, however, some fundamental actions and intentions, as well as guidelines in that discourse. Here is a review of some that allowed the writing of the American by sixteenth-century friars, mainly Franciscans, as inheritors of that tradition. Particular attention is paid to how actions/mechanisms used prior to America, such as interpretatio, euhemerism and inquisitio, were essential when writing about Mesoamerican natives.

• Hoc nemus ... habitat deus (Verg. Aen. 8, 351-352). : Presence des dieux dans la campagne virgilienne: qui sont les di agrestes?

  73–82

  Charles Guittard

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  262

  In the pastoral landscapes of the Geogics (particularly in this poem’s opening invocation), in the Eclogues, and in some descriptions of the Aeneid, for example when Aeneas visits the site of Rome with Evander (Verg., A. VIII 306-368), gods are present in nature, in the wild space, in the fields ; and the Roman feels the presence of undefined divinities. The pastoral and agricultural themes include many gods of the countryside and of agricultural life; Virgil calls them agrestum praesentia numina (G. I 10). This paper will focus on such divinities as Faunus, Pan and Silvanus. Links have been established between these divinities by way of interpretatio, especially between Faunus and the Greek god Pan. Faunus is present in the religious calendar of Rome (Lupercalia); the worship of Silvanus is also well attested in the Roman world. The concept of di agrestes, well attested in Virgil’s works, helps us to define a special category of gods, living in a special area, between civilization and wild space. Some of these divinities combine human and animal features.