Chapter 6 - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

prison chaplain. (44) Their parody of religion was very entertaining, and it also helped them feel less
terror about their own approaching executions.
[135] Humor as an expression of bravado can make a statement about power positions when no other
statement is possible. The powerful Church in Seville was allied with the secular government, able to
call on the powers of that government to restrain its enemies. It was a large landholder and had ties
with a fearsome agency, the Inquisition, which was empowered to arrest, imprision, torture, and punish
people. It could confiscate property, and it also seemed to hold the power of eternal damnation. A Street
thief who shouted from the Plaza de San Francisco that the Church was too powerful would probably
get no farther than the gallows, but he would find an appreciative audience in a nearby tavern if he told
them the hilarious tale of how he had escaped prison masquerading as a pious priest. To ridicule the
Church and its clergy was a popular and practical way to make them seem less awesome and powerful.
When underworld people called a rooster "bishop," they may have exerted a form of informal social
control on the Church. (45) Underworld burlesques of the clergy may have brought erring members into
line in a manner similar to nicknames, popular ballads, and the vito, a form of charivari or "rough
music." Church leaders undoubtedly saw the need to correct abuses within the Church without
underworld assistance, but underworld burlesques helped to keep the Church open to popular scrutiny.
As burlesque, underworld humor could be considered a form of social criticism, but this should be
distinguished from political protest. Underworld people were so busy exploiting the existing system
that they had no interest in proposing a new system. They liked the bread and soup they got from the
monks, and they wanted to use the prison chaplains as intermediaries to their own advantages. They
also liked to ridicule this powerful institution. Underworld people could be considered cynics and
protesters, but never revolutionaries.
Humor helped to defuse the social tensions that grew between the increasingly populous underworld
and the powerful Church. [136] As priests began to insist that they would give charity only to the
"honorable poor," ruffians might have reacted with an outraged thrust of the dagger into a well-fed
cassock. Instead, underworld people made fun of priests and charity. Ruffians hid in the shadows while
their women posed as honorable wives whose husbands were in the Indies. Hoodwinking the priests
into giving them charity not only avoided a violent confrontation; it also enabled the underworld to use
the existing system. Thugs didn't hesitate to use violence, but they became better parasites when they
could exploit and ridicule at the same time.
The obverse side of the Church's using the underworld to personify evil was that the underworld used
the Church as a caricature. All around them the people of the streets of Seville saw an order that was
not just or good or rational. Like the modern philosophers, they, too, looked into the abyss. The
response of underworld people, however, was not despair, but jokes. They burlesqued the Church
because it exemplified so much that was ridiculous: the wealthy ecclesiastical landholder in a city of
paupers, the hypocritical preacher asserting that only the honorable poor should have bread, the pious
monk urging the prisoner to confess and go meekly to his execution as a lamb to the slaughter. Such
absurdity was not to be changed, but to be laughed at and used.
Inadvertently, however, underworld burlesques of the Church helped to debunk the old religious myths
and prepare the way for the rational and secular myths of the modern period. Poking fun at a priest
showed that he was human like other people. Stealing the crown and star from a Virgin and Child in the
Cathedral demonstrated that these images had no supernatural powers and little value aside from their
jewels and precious metals. (46) Wearing a rosary made from witches' teeth combined the profane with
the holy in such a way that the holy would never appear quite the same. (47) In the modern period
secular governments substituted national myths for old religious myths, and they replaced traditional