EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Fall 2024 author Viviana Díaz Balsera to talk about her article, “Light of Egypt Shining from Within: Fr. Gregorio de Movilla and the Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua (1625).” For a limited time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE.
Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic?
Good luck and a number of coincidences led me to the hieroglyph in F. Gregorio de Movilla’s Tercero Cathecismo, which is bound in his volume Explicacion de la doctrina cristiana (1625), one of five Timucua-Spanish catechetical imprints housed in and now also digitized by the New York Historical Society library. Some years ago, while attending a conference in New York where I was presenting a paper related to my previous work on the missionization of the Nahuas in sixteenth-century Mexico, I snuck out to the New York Historical Society (NYHS). I very much wanted to see the Timucua-Spanish Confessionario imprint by Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja that archaeologist and ethnohistorian Jerald T. Milanich of the Florida Museum had used for the abridged English edition Francisco Pareja’s 1613 Confessionario. Serendipitously, at the very same time that I was examining the Pareja imprint, Milanich himself was sitting a few tables away, busily scanning boxes of Florida materials housed in the NYHS! He was looking for the Explicacion, which was supposed to be in the NYHS depository but was nowhere to be found. Milanich was trying to locate the volume for linguist-anthropologist George Aaron Broadwell of the University of Florida, who was reconstructing the Timucua language from the extant bilingual imprints co-authored by Pareja and unacknowledged Timucua linguists. As the second most important Franciscan author in Timucua, Movilla’s bilingual Explicacion de la doctrina was an indispensable source for Broadwell’s project. Then, lo and behold, with the help of a NYHS librarian, Milanich and I hit on the imprint. It had been quietly sitting, for who knows how long, next to the Pareja Confessionario volume that I had just borrowed.
As I leafed excitedly through the Explicacion, I arrived at the Tercero Cathecismo and was immediately smitten by the hieroglyph printed in its pages. I knew on the spot that I wanted to write about that image someday. At the time, however, I was working on Guardians of Idolatry, Gods, Demons and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions, a monograph on Indigenous invocations to salient deities from the Mesoamerican Postclassic pantheon that Alarcón had collected in south-central Mexico in the early seventeenth century. After I finished the book and connected projects, I was able to begin new research on the La Florida missions and could finally write the present article on the hieroglyph that had haunted me for so long.
I should mention a few. The first is George McCoy’s 1961 work, History of the Stomp Dance or the “Sacred Fire” of the Cherokee Indian Nation. In this publication McCoy explains how in the early 1900’s Cherokee Chieftain Redbird Smith had shared with him the origin of the Sacred Fire and its link to the (quadrilateral) cross, the arrangement of the four logs that feed the hallowed fire. In 1965, anthropologist James H. Howard reported that fourteen Indigenous consultants from the Southeast had also identified the shape of the cross with the Sacred Fire when shown images of the cross-in-circle from various pre-contact objects and engravings in the Southeast. According to Louisiana State University archaeologist Rebecca Saunders, the quadrilateral cross, with its four cardinal points of the earth disk, is a central Native American symbol of the world.
Another important source for my article is the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino’s last book in his Three Books on Life (c. 1489), where he writes that the quadrilateral cross was a primary figure for the “ancient sages.” Ficino explains that those sages believed that when the stars were positioned at the four cardinal angles in the sky and their rays shone against one another, the resulting image of the cross was the ultimate manifestation of cosmic power. Ficino singles out the Egyptians as the authoritative diffusers of this belief. For me, these sources evinced the quadrilateral cross as a powerful transcultural and transhistorical symbol.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading your article?
I hope readers will be able to appreciate the Tercero Cathecismo, as a unique visual catechism from seventeenth-century La Florida which, to my knowledge, has never been studied before. This visual catechism was explicitly created by Movilla to attract the attention of an Indigenous Timucua audience in northern-central Florida.
The catechism comprises a hieroglyph image that integrates–with orphic lucidity–Indigenous, pre-Christian, and Christian symbols of the sacred. Designed to be traced anywhere in the sand, the earth, or on an available piece of paper, the highly reproducible hieroglyph provides a lens through which to view some of the complexities, heterogeneities, and subtleties of the Indigenous-missionary experience in La Florida.
As I discuss in my EAS article, because of its inclusive malleability, the hieroglyph as an image could not–or would not—erase Indigenous significations of its visual forms. Movilla used the cross and circle of the hieroglyph to express new Christian meaning, but he could not control how Indigenous people understood it. Indigenous people interpreted the hieroglyph according to their own iconography. In the process, they reasserted the capaciousness of their long-standing Indigenous beliefs to anticipate, relate to and / or absorb, the friars’ exotic understandings of the sacred.
Viviana Díaz Balsera is Professor of Spanish in the Michelle Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. Her research interests include early modern transatlantic and Indigenous epistemologies in Central Mexico, La Florida missions, cultural translation, colonialism, and postcolonial theory.
Read Díaz Balsera’s article “Light of Egypt Shining from Within: Fr. Gregorio de Movilla and the Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua (1625)” in EAS’s Fall 2024 issue.