José de Acosta, the Devil, and the Other: the Figural Reading of History in the Natural and Moral History of the Indies’ Demonological Discourse

During the reign of King Philip II, the Spanish Empire reached the peak of its territorial expansion. A second expansion, this time in the realm of ideas and legal practices, took place parallelly, embodied in the phenomenon widely known as the great European Witch Hunt. This article studies the demonological discourse in José de Acosta’s «Natural and Moral History of the Indies», taking into consideration these two peculiarities of the aforementioned historical context. Through a detailed analysis of the image of the Devil, in connection with various Amerindian religious practices, the article presents the hermeneutic principles with which the Jesuit historian explained the human world of the American continent. The article argues that José de Acosta’s vision in this regard springs from the encounter of two exegetical traditions born with early Christianity, to wit, the so-called diabolical mimesis and the typological-figural interpretation of world history. Resorting to early modern historiographical works, as well as to biblical and patristic sources, this article explains how the Jesuit historian carried out this complex epistemological assimilation of the American otherness, despite having aimed explicitly to account for the New World starting from its own principles. Finally, the article concludes that the Spanish historian used this hermeneutical mixture to build a cognitive bridge between the Old and New Worlds, thus keeping the internal coherence of Christian cosmology, threatened by the new cultural realities of the Americas.