The creation of colonial reality that occurred in the New World will remain a subject of immense curiosity and study … Whatever conclusions we draw about how that hegemony was so speedily effected, we would be unwise to overlook the role of terror … the space of death where the Indian, African, and white gave birth to a New World.

Abstract: This chapter juxtaposes the project of spiritual conquest as the dual project of religious conversion and resettlement, against the haphazard spread of Christianity as the ideology and propaganda of the Spanish conquest. Both themes appear regularly throughout the missionary chronicles, which documented the progress of each monastic Order (including the Jesuits) in establishing doctrina, a word that came to refer at once to a Christianized population, a mission-town, and the inculcation of the basic tenets of Catholic orthodoxy – in Spain's overseas possessions. The juxtaposed themes of missionary progress and social disintegration appear in a language and imaginary that represent the native experience of deracination as episodes of spiritual “battle”: shot through with magic, demonic possession, monsters, miracles, and divine apparitions.

Keywords: theo-politics, undeception [desengaño], shaman [catalonan / babaylan], anito [ancestral spirit], Devil / demonology, idolatry.