Morfologías del Mal. El Demonio en el Viejo y el Nuevo Mundo. Una visión del "Demonio” Totonaco

Abstract

The Devil is a cultural idea, a western mystification of evil and sin concepts. A symbolic form that was fashioned through a vast period of time agreeing with a concrete anthropology, some ideas relative to human beings and its components, as well as the cosmologic patterns in use at the European Middle Ages. These images of evil crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the conquistadors to meet with very different morphologies of evil and its representations. In the moment of the contact, the ways to conceive the sacred, the human being and evil are inserted in the missionary labour crashing with the indigenous conceptions, which reinterpreted those ideas elevating the Devil figure to very different levels than in Christian imaginary. The present article revises the construction of devil images in Europe and his passage to American societies, paying special attention to the Totonac case.