1673 Engraving of Men Brandishing Torches at the Peruvian Feast of Situa
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of men brandishing torches at the Peruvian feast of Situa appears in this excerpted leaf from the Peru chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, two men in tall feathered headdresses brandish flaming torches. One wears a fringed skirt and carries a quiver of arrows on his back, while the other, in striped breeches, swings his torch overhead above a crouching figure. At left, two seated men drink deeply from huge tankards beside a figure sprawled on the ground. At right, figures wade waist-deep into a river, where one scrubs another's back and a man in a feathered headdress raises a smoking torch. Beyond them, the moon rises over the water and a distant shore, while llamas graze on the plain and a bonfire burns on a hill at far left beside a line of spearmen leading a train of animals.
The scene appears to show the feast of Situa, which the text below places in the tenth month of the Peruvian year. The people are said to have gathered before moonrise and to have howled terribly as soon as the moon appeared. They then struck one another with burning torches and washed the filth from their bodies (as the bathers seen here appear to do) before drinking for four days until they staggered and could barely stand. The same page runs through other feasts of the Peruvian calendar. At the feast of Huarki, a hundred gray sheep were burned, and in the eleventh month a pitch-black sheep was left tied under the open sky without food until a heavy dew fell. At the feast of Itu, people are said to have walked slowly for a whole day and night in long mantles drawn over their heads, without food or drink and without raising their eyes, before four days of eating, drinking, singing, and dancing. The reverse records José de Acosta's claim that the devil had given the Peruvians a shadow of the Trinity through the idol Tangatanga, whom they held to be "one in three and three in one." It then returns to the calendar with the harvest feast of Aimorai, when a small bundle of maize called perua was guarded for three nights under fine cloths and asked by sorcerers whether it would keep until the next year.
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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