Category Archives: Religion

Drinking the Ink of Prayer

By Genie Yoo  [1]

Sometimes historians dream of moments of recognition in the manuscripts they encounter. The act of reading or reciting, writing or copying, can trigger a distant memory, allowing one to draw a line connecting two seemingly unrelated points on the plane of history. I experienced something of this moment as I sat in the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia, reading an untitled and undated manuscript of Arabic prayers and their Malay prescriptions. That morning, Mas Bambang, a familiar face behind the counter, had handed me a manuscript labelled ML469. It was a prayer book, shorter and thinner than expected, and the first folio, glued tightly to the marbled cover, began with a list of recipes.

“For those who wish to memorize the Qur’an,” I copied into my notebook, “take ambergris, musk, and turmeric.” There was a hint of recognition in the order of these three ingredients, common since antiquity. “The three are to be moistened,” I copied, “to make the ink.” Suddenly, an inkling of recognition blended into memory. Two years prior, I had sat in Prof. Michael Laffan’s office in Princeton, reading out loud my transcription of the same lines from another manuscript, one which he had photographed in Simon’s Town, South Africa. “Write this prayer on a white bowl,” I wrote, “and drink for seven days.” I circled the Malay word for “bowl” (mangkung), a variation of its modern standardized form (mangkuk). Minute differences also beckon the memory. When I had given Michael a puzzled look about another variation of this term (mangku), he had pulled out the Wilkinson dictionary, an invitation to join the exercise of word hunting. Putting my pencil down, I gingerly flipped through the folios of ML469 until I arrived at the Arabic and saw that this copy of the prayer, too, like the one from Simon’s Town, was the prayer of ‘Akasa.

The earliest extant copy of Malay-language explications for the prayer of ‘Akasa in Europe is a late 16th c.-early 17th c. manuscript from the Scaliger Collection, initially mislabelled to be in the Turkish language. Or 247, Special Collections at the Leiden University Library.]

So began my fascination with two nearly identical copies of a Malay-language recipe for drinking the ink of prayer, now preserved in two manuscripts on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean: one in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the other in Simon’s Town, South Africa. While the former was a compilation of prayers in the same hand, its provenance an unmarked mystery, the latter was a shorter fragment copied into a communal notebook full of other recipe fragments. Variations between them left doubt as to their direct link in transmission; however, there were too many of the same lines in a string of recipes in the same order for the same prayer, to presume they were merely incidental. The question of a possible “original” seemed less relevant; they were likely copies of similar eighteenth-century copies circulating in the archipelago. What interested me more were the possibilities of bringing the two together into one frame: it allowed me to see that handwritten copies of similar prayer books circulated across vast distances and that prayers and their recipes for ritual use were copied, at times, in selective fragments.

The fragment in Simon’s Town was distinctive. The hand that wrote it, Michael assured me, had belonged to the famous eighteenth-century figure Imam Abdullah ibn Qadi Abd al-Salam, known as Tuan Guru (lit. “Master Teacher”). He was a nobleman from the eastern island of Tidore whom administrators of the Dutch East India Company had exiled to their Cape colony in 1780, just before the beginning of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. As Dr. Saarah Jappie has written, Tuan Guru’s fame is linked to his founding of the first Islamic school or madrasah in Cape Town in 1793.[2] There, he taught a diverse community of Muslim students and championed the rote-learning system in Malay and Arabic, which later madrasah teachers continued in Afrikaans.[3] Memory was essential to practicing the faith of Islam through recitation; and perhaps teaching how to commit something to heart, to preserve it within the body, inspired more than mnemonic instruction.

“For those who wish to memorize the Qur’an,” Tuan Guru had copied into the untitled notebook, “take ambergris, musk, and turmeric.” The handwriting is identical to a Qur’an Tuan Guru had copied from memory on Robben Island, now preserved at the Auwal Mosque (lit. “First Mosque,” est. 1794). “The three are to be mixed,” he wrote, “on a Friday night to make the ink.” The other manuscript had not mentioned the day and time for making the ink. If context can fill the gap, it may be noteworthy that Tuan Guru’s madrasah also functioned as the community’s first mosque, where followers of the faith congregated on Fridays, the sacred day of worship. “Write onto a white bowl this prayer,” he continued to copy, “and drink for seven days.” To write and to drink—the recipe called for a ritual assimilation of two common physical acts of learning in Islamic education.[4] Using the ink and the bowl to write and to drink, one was to absorb into the body the power of prayer, as a supplicatory means to achieve the memorization of the sacred Word.

Did Tuan Guru copy this recipe for his students in the context of the madrasah? He wrote it into a communal book full of other recipe fragments in different hands, for instance, of writing a talisman for healing. Copying it ensured that the prayer would again be copied then imbibed. The book was instructional, and the recipe meant to be used, preserved, and transmitted through the act of copying, not only on paper but also in the body. Can the manuscript in South Africa reveal something about the manuscript in Indonesia and vice versa? While the two raise more questions than answers, they also open up ways to reflect on the link between memory and the physical acts that aid it, whether in the secular context of a library or in the sacred context of a madrasah. They allow us to see the point where the plane of memory intersects with that of history, in the past and in the present.

Biography

Genie Yoo is a PhD Candidate in History at Princeton University. She specializes in the early modern and modern history of Southeast Asia and works at the intersection of science, medicine, religion, and empire. This blogpost is based on chapter two of her dissertation-in-progress, titled “Mediating Islands: Ambon Across the Ages.”

Notes

[1] My gratitude to Dr. Saarah Jappie and Michael Laffan.

[2] Saarah Jappie, “From the Madrasah to the Museum: the Social Life of the “Kietaabs” of Cape Town,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 375-376.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Prof. Rudolph T. Ware III writes about the epistemology of embodiment in Islamic pedagogy, particularly in the context of West Africa. See Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

When Medicine is a Sin: Sex and Heresy in Colonial Mexico

Farren Yero

Laboring in the Mexican mining district of Real del Monte, José Antonio de la Peña met Manuel Arroyo in the summer of 1775. The two young men struck up a secret relationship, sharing a bed, a blanket, and a provocative cure for syphilis. It was the latter that landed Arroyo in an inquisitorial cell, charged with the crime of heresy.[1]  As the trial records indicate, de la Peña had received over thirty bocados (or mouthfuls), the term Arroyo used to describe acts of fellatio he performed upon his friend in order to treat his venereal disease. Their sex life, however, was not the problem. It was the men’s potentially heretical claim that “it is not a sin to suck human semen for reasons of health” that galvanized ecclesiastical authorities to intervene.

Fig. 1: Inquisition Case of Manuel Arroyo. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

 

The Holy Office of the Inquisition did police sexual proclivities.[2] However, maintaining religious orthodoxy remained their primary concern. For them, challenges to Catholic doctrine—including what might or might not constitute a sin—posed a far greater risk to the social order than clandestine sexual partners, even ones of the same sex. After all, if health demanded doctrinal exception—as Arroyo implicitly suggested—the Church would be hard pressed to preserve the strictures by which it managed its flock, a problem we continue to see play out over issues around access to contraception and abortion today. That Arroyo professed his oral ministrations to be acts of Christian duty only exacerbated the struggle to parse out the significance of his unusual claim.

 

According to Arroyo’s testimony, his acts were done to remove “bad thoughts” of women, prevent men from sinning with them in the first place, and—even more confounding for the judges—to heal. Arroyo insisted that, when aided by the medicinal effects of camphor and aguardiente (distilled spirits), these same benefactions were treatments for syphilis—an illness interpreted by Arroyo (and many others) as an outward symptom of impurities within. To prove this point, Arroyo recalled, for example, his quick recognition of the telltale pustules dotting his friend’s genitalia, a rash that purportedly required him to perform fellatio, employing a gargle of mixed herbs, in his words, “for his health, for his wellbeing, and for his remedy.” Though certainly damning, Arroyo did not shy away from these convictions. Instead, he worked tirelessly to convince his captors of their legitimacy, providing elaborate and intimate details of his time with de la Peña to defend his own knowledge and position as a healer.

 

When the local priest in Pachuca first learned of this strange ministry, he turned to a neighboring ecclesiastical judge, at a loss for what to do. Did something like this fall under the purview of the Inquisition? Or was this a matter for the civil authorities? Perhaps this was best left for the Protomedicato, the royal medical tribunal? Arroyo’s unorthodox assertions wove together the mind, the body, and the spirit, creating jurisdictional confusion and reflecting the myriad ways in which early modern patients and practitioners understood their relationship to health and disease. Because of this, his Inquisition case can tell us a great deal about how people made sense of their own bodies beyond the world of printed and professional medicine.

 

Read alongside indigenous-language volumes, such as the Chilam Balam, discussed by Ryan Kashanipour, and published tracts by natural philosophers, examined here by Heather Peterson, Inquisition documents can enrich our understanding of “different ways of knowing” the body, as Pablo Gómez puts it in his study of the Spanish Caribbean.[3] This is true for scholars working on both sides of the Atlantic. Early modern physicians throughout the world sought out and studied indigenous pharmacopoeia, such as chupirini or chinanteca, but Arroyo’s case suggests how patients themselves understood the value of such herbs and their relationship to disease. Translated primary source readers, such as Women in Colonial Latin America, can allow students the opportunity to weigh in on such cases, like that of Isabel Hernández, a midwife and healer, who appeared before the Inquisition in 1652.[4]

 

Of course, modern readers—not unlike colonial inquisitors—might question whether a remedy like Arroyo’s “bocado” can really be considered medical in nature. When caught, did the denounced simply turn to health to mask an otherwise compromising affair? We can’t necessarily rule it out. Yet, if Arroyo did make it up, then he also contrived a number of authorial forms to back it up as well. As he explained to the inquisitors, he knew that the remedy worked because a woman had performed it for him. To be sure it took effect, she would extract his semen for her doctor, who was able to then determine if it was, in his words, “damaged.” If this was not proof enough, Arroyo confessed that she had first learned this remedy through none other than her local priest. This kaleidoscope of evidence, regardless to what extent we believe him, suggests the complexities that underlay beliefs about medical efficacy at this time. We see similar kinds of invocations in other Inquisition cases, provided by the thousands of colonial subjects imprisoned at one time or another in the dungeons of the Inquisitorial Palace, a building that ironically enough, became the medical school for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Today, it houses museums to both institutions: mannequins lay prone, emulating the bodies from which doctors and judges sought secrets hidden within.

Fig. 2. Palace of the Inquisition, now the Mexican Museum of Medicine. Photo by the author. 

 

 

[1] BANC MSS 96/95m, 13:1 (1775). The Mexican Inquisition Collection. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

[2] On the question of sexual deviancy in this case, see: Zeb Tortorici, “Heran Todos Putos”: Sodomitical Subcultures and Disordered Desire in Early Colonial Mexico,” Ethnohistory (2007) 54 (1): 35-67.

[3] Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[4] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2018).

Worst Housewarming Ever

By Lisa Smith

The Editorial Team debated whether or not to join the digital #ClimateStrike. The team was divided: should we make a political stand at all? In the end, we compromised. Rather than shut down the site temporarily, we decided to have a banner supporting #ClimateStrike week (September 20-27) and a blog post to explain our position.

To pick up on a theme of ‘hospitality’ that is so often a part of the history of food, I chose a banner for the week that suggests a big party–but one that has gone very badly wrong. What can we do to be better guests?  There is no Planet B for us to move onto for our next party once we trash this one.

Although we don’t often directly address it, many of us who work on recipes came to it through an interest in the natural world. What knowledge about plants’ medicinal properties have been lost over time as we became detached from our environments? How have modern agricultural practices reshaped what foods we can taste, and how we taste them? How can historical practices inform a need for agricultural sustainability?

Take, for example, work by Ryan Kashanipour that highlights the overlapping relationship between body, society, and nature. Or by Carla Nappi that describes the ways in which recipes encapsulate medical ingredients, embodiment, and time flows. For pre-modern Europeans, stewardship of the earth even had a religious imperative, as Marieke Hendriksen has argued. Religion was not the only reason, though; seasonality framed day-to-day experience. Our issue on seasonality from May 2017 has a range of posts that consider how seasons and availability affected foods, medicines, and artisanal crafts. I wonder how recipes of the future will be shaped by a hotter climate, fewer seasons, more deadly weather, and rapid change.

I will not hark back to the good old days (always bad historical practice), but we might consider how we can restore a sense of our human bodies and cultures as being part of nature rather than separate from it–or, masters of it. (Carolyn Merchant’s analysis in The Death of Nature seems more pressing than ever.) The work of some contributors offers, perhaps, more hope.  Anne Stobart’s work, for example, encourages us to look around more carefully at plants in our daily life.   Zara Anishanslin has a useful exercise for thinking about how things we use everyday have a global history: everything is connected. Sharing food helps to build cultural bridges and to build a sense of international community, as Megan Daigle describes. And one of our contributors, David Shields, is bringing back old crops, which expands our culinary AND agricultural possibilities.

If you want to know more about the climate crisis, I encourage you to read coverage in The Guardian. A good starting point is today’s article on “The Climate Crisis in Ten Charts”.

There is, of course, no easy answer. But one starting point might be to think more about our interconnected world, whether we are looking at the relationships among humans, animals, and nature, or across geographical regions. It is only by acting together that we can stop the housewarming guests from completely wrecking our home!

Religion Mixed with Food: Turrón de Doña Pepa

By Michelle M. M. Hancock

A palette of colors, scattered like confetti decorate a signature Peruvian dessert. The flavored pastry, called the Turrón de Doña Pepa or Ms. Pepa’s Nougat, contains basic ingredients such as flour, water, shortening, butter, sugar, salt and eggs. A range of ingredients including anise, cinnamon, cloves, oranges, apples, figs, limes quince (similar to pears), sesame seeds and candy sprinkles amalgamate to create a unique flavor in this sticky October treat. The dessert originated near the capital city of Lima. According to legend, an Afro-Peruvian slave named Josefa Marmanillo, who suffered from paralysis in her arms and hands, created it in the 1700s. On a personal journey, she left her home in Cañete Valley (south of present-day Lima) to visit a black Christ painting in Pachacamilla just outside of Lima. The image, known to heal believers and grant miracles, cured Josefa. She created the dessert as an expression of gratitude to God.

Turrón de Doña Pepa dessert. Image credit: www.cooked.com July 2018.

History of Cristo Moreno (Black Christ)

Cristo Moreno’s own history emerges from Lima’s local spiritual landscape. In particular, Africans, both free and enslaved, revered his image. During the colonial era of the 1500s in the coastal city of Lima, Afro-Peruvian slaves worked the land and some converted to Christianity. As was common in the colonial era, churches and patrons often paid indigenous and African artists to paint portraits used to decorate colonial churches. In homage, artists rendered several images of Cristo Moreno. These paintings “were believed to please the spiritual forces that controlled the frequent earthquakes in the region”.[1] According to folklore, in 1651 an Afro-Peruvian slave, named Pedro Falcón from Angola, painted an image of a black Christ on the wall of slave quarters in Pachacamilla.[2]

Las Nazarenas Church in Lima, Peru. Image credit: Rafael Gómez, Flickr.

An earthquake hit the area in 1655 destroying churches and houses. In a sea of rubble the wall with the image of the black Christ remained. By 1687, locals built a chapel around the iconic image. That same year, another earthquake shook the city leaving the chapel in ruins. The image survived unscathed and endured a further earthquake in 1746.[3] These events signified a miracle and ignited a stream of devoted followers. Even King Charles II (1661-1700) of Spain issued a royal order calling the painting El Señor de los Milagros or Lord of Miracles.[4] The original painting stands as the centerpiece of the main altar at Las Nazarenas church in Lima.

El Señor de los Milagros procession in Lima, Peru. Image credit: USI.

Housed in the same church is a replica of the painting weighing two tons and is carried in a 24 hour procession once a year in October. Worshippers from all social classes dressed in purple singing hymns and praises “…accompany the image on its rounds through the oldest streets of Lima.”[5] Karsten Paerregaard states most Peruvians of African or indigenous heritage identify with the black Christ because white people have remained a minority in Peru since the Spanish conquest.[6] Processions of believers paying tribute to the image began in October 1687 and continue today as one of the largest Catholic ceremonies in the world.

Josefa Marmanillo

Josefa Marmanillo holding the Turrón de Doña Pepa dessert. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, October 2008.

Founded in 1556, Cañete Valley, named after Don Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza (Spanish noble Marqués de Cañete), became a key site of black culture.[7] As with Pachacamilla, Afro-Peruvian slave labor dominated the agricultural valley during the colonial period. Josefa, cursed with paralysis in Cañete Valley and healed in Pachacamilla, had a dream of visiting saints. They left her with a dessert recipe that she shared with others. Prepared, sold and ate during the purple month of October, the Turrón de Doña Pepa compliments the celebrations of El Señor de los Milagros. Today, a number of bakeries, such as the Panadería las Nazarenas in Lima, sell the treat year round. It is known for its strong taste as the anise flavoring is similar to black licorice. For many it tastes better homemade. Religion mixed with food brings Peruvians in all shades of skin color to come together in October and celebrate Peru’s month of purple, passion, procession and pastry!


[1] Karsten Paerregaard, “In the Footsteps of the Lord of Miracles: The Expatriation of Religious Icons in the Peruvian Diaspora,” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies 34, no. 7 (September 2008): 1075.

[2] Cesár Ferreira and Eduardo Dargent-Chamot, Culture and Customs Latin America and the Caribbean: Culture and Customs of Peru (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003), 42.

[3] Paerregaard, “Footsteps”, 1075.

[4] Ferreira and Dargent-Chamot, Culture and Customs, 42.

[5] Ibid., 42.

[6] Martin Mejia-Associated Press. “AP PHOTOS: Peru Venerates Lord of Miracle in Big Procession.” AP English Worldstream-English. Associated Press DBA Press Association, November 2, 2017.

[7] Roberto Sánchez, “The Black Virgin: Santa Efigenia, Popular Religion, and the African Diaspora in Peru,” Church History 81, no. 3 (September 2012): 637.

Michelle M. M. Hancock is a graduate student in the Historical Resource Management Master’s program at Idaho State University. She has a Bachelor of Arts-History from Idaho State University (2018) and an Associate of Arts-Biological Science from Arkansas State University-Beebe (1993). This blog post was written for a class with Dr. Kathleen Kole de Peralta.