Martín Ocelotl

The tribunal that tried Ocelotl was not the Mexican Inquisition proper, which was not established until 1571 and which never held jurisdiction over indigenous people. It was the apostolic inquisition exercised by Juan de Zumárraga, first bishop of Mexico, who held a delegated commission from the Holy Office in Spain between 1536 and 1543 and used it against baptised Nahua found to be continuing older practice.

Ocelotl was among the first taken. He was arrested in 1536, his house searched, and objects seized as evidence: worked stones, ornaments, and painted books. More than twenty witnesses were examined over months, and the file that resulted is one of the fullest surviving records of what a Nahua ritual specialist was understood to do in the years immediately after the conquest. The series it belongs to did not last.

In 1539 Zumárraga tried Don Carlos Ometochtzin, a Nahua lord of Texcoco, for idolatry and had him burned, and the reaction in Spain was severe enough that Zumárraga was reprimanded and indigenous people were removed from inquisitorial jurisdiction altogether. The prosecutions stopped. What did not stop was the extraction of information about Nahua religion, which continued by other means for another two centuries.

The depositions describe a working practice rather than a doctrine. Ocelotl is a tlaciuhqui, a term the Spanish translated as sorcerer and which covers divination, weather work and the reading of signs. He forecasts rain and drought, and is paid for it. He heals, and is paid for that too. He advises on when to plant. He is prosperous, lends at interest, has land and dependants, and travels the highlands as a merchant, which is how his reputation moves. He is also political.

Witnesses report him telling people that the friars were not what they claimed, that the world was near a turn, and that those who had adopted Spanish ways would suffer for it. He is said to have advised storing food against a coming famine, which in a Nahua frame is prophecy and in a Spanish frame is sedition. He had been baptised in 1525 and did not deny it; the charge was that he had gone back. All of this comes from people answering questions put by a court that had already decided what it was looking for, and the vocabulary in which it reaches us is Spanish, so a category like sorcery is doing work in the file that it was never doing in Nahuatl. Read with that allowance, it is still the closest thing there is to a portrait of an early colonial Nahua religious specialist at work.