Sin in the Tarascan (Purhépecha) Language: Concepts of Confession in the Sixth Commandment of Friar Ángel Serra’s Confession Manual (1697)

Abstract

The friars of the early colonial era attempted to educate the indigenous population of the conquered territory of the Tarascan empire in the precepts of Christian religion. More than a century had gone by when the Franciscan friar Ángel Serra published his confession manual. The Spanish and Tarascan versions of the sixth commandment illustrate the difficulties such enterprise implied. The confessionary, published in 1697 and reprinted in 1731, allows us to undertake a comparison of the expressions which were used in the confession of the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. This paper presents a study of the Tarascan terminologies which are used to express pecado, the Spanish word for ‘sin’. The use of thauacurita for ‘sin’ and the preference for substituting the Spanish term pecado through the description of the sin itself are the focus of this semantic analysis.