The Kingdom of God in Paraguay

...The Spanish settlers, who had at first Few portions of the history of the Americas are more fascinating than that which deals with the efforts of early Jesuit missionaries to establish an ideal state, peopled only by Indians, in Paraguay...

...The father related: Sometimes they performed complicated dances, sometimes they played the games of chivalry, either mounted or on foot...

...they staged a very fine sham fight...

...The Indians leapt into the river and fought, partly below and partly above water, a pleasant sight to behold...

...It has, we think, never been told better than by Rene Fulop-Miller, the distinguished German historian...

...This work, warmly praised by Catholics and non-Catholics alike throughout Europe, will be issued in this country shortly by the Viking Press.-The Editors...

...The girls and boys went naked, their long, uncombed hair hanging like manes to their shoulders...

...In order further to intensify the impression made on the natives, the fathers also made use of statues of the saints with movable limbs and eyes, and strewed the ground with herbs and flowers, which were then sprinkled with perfumed water...

...but in addition they did all in their power to prevent the intrusion of European civilization into the territory entrusted to their guardianship...

...If a crucifix, a candlestick or some similar object were shown to an Indian with the request that he should produce replicas, he immediately made a copy which was hardly distinguishable from the original...

...one mounted his black horse, another his grey...

...When the first Jesuits explored the virgin forests of Paraguay along the river banks, any kind of missionary work seemed well-nigh impossible for the Indians persisted in timidly fleeing from them...

...The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits...

...By nature, the Indians were very much averse to manual labor, but here again music came to the aid of the fathers in overcoming their laziness...

...But, as the Jesuits found on their explorations, the River Uruguay formed at one point of its course a huge cataract with dangerous rocks and rapids which prevented its navigation by European craft...

...We landed at sunrise, and were greeted from the bank by the Indians with the joyous cry of "Yopean...

...They descended from their hills to the river banks in order the better to hear the enchanting notes, while many cast themselves into the water and swam after the boats...

...Work of this nature gave great pleasure to the Indians, who set to work willingly and with the greatest zeal when articles were required for their festivals and the adornment of their churches, or in connection with their musical instruction...

...They even went so far as to urge their proteges to use force against any stranger who might venture to enter their territory without express permission...

...Up to the present, they have not set foot in our dominions and have been unable to open relations or do business with our Indians...

...They therefore frequently arranged popular festivals with games, athletic contests and sham fights...

...On the bank stood the father superior with two troops of cavalry and two companies of infantry, all of them Indians, but all splendidly accoutered with Spanish equipment...

...The Tyrolese missionary Sepp gives a graphic description of a great festival which was held on his arrival in Paraguay...

...There now appeared in the middle of the stream two splendid craft, like armed galleys, filled with drummers, reed-pipe players, trumpeters and musketeers...

...Yo-pean...

...This patent was confirmed by Philip IV, who, when he ascended the throne, inherited the many financial embarrassments of his predecessor...

...These savages were of a childish, friendly nature, and the first missionaries who discovered them reported that they had seen "200,000 Indians" who were "in every way fitted for the kingdom of God...

...In addition, each settlement specialized in one particular trade...

...The missionaries thus sought to ensure that "the vocation was determined by natural aptitude...

...The women were ugly...

...They were armed with sabres, muskets, bows and arrows, slings and cudgels...

...Not only did they most strictly prohibit the natives to hold any intercourse with the whites, but they also took the precaution of insuring that the former learned neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese languages...

...As early as five o'clock in the morning, the people were summoned by a fanfare of trumpets to church, where Mass was celebrated with much singing, intoning of responses and instrumental music, for the missionaries held that nothing was so conducive to inculcating the Indians with reverence for God and love of His worship, or to make the Christian doctrines more easily understood by them, than their accompaniment by music...

...But, more remarkable still, the Indians themselves tried to imitate the musical performances of the missionaries, and, under the guidance of the fathers, set to work with enthusiasm to learn to sing difficult chorales in several parts...

...On another occasion, I made them act short comedies, in which, after I had taken much trouble to get their parts into their dense heads, they gave a most excellent performance...

...Particularly impressive was the way in which Corpus Christi Day was celebrated, many of the inventions of the missionaries recalling the festivities of the Chinese imperial court...

...The bands played, the trumpets sounded and the guns were fired, and a sham fight took place between the two vessels...

...For not only," wrote the fathers in their reports, "do the Spaniards make slaves of the Indians, but they also destroy them, inasmuch as they are addicted to many vices of which our simple children of nature know nothing...

...The Jesuits were now in a position to set to work in the forests and steppes of eastern South America, mainly on both banks of the River Uruguay, to establish that ideal state in which pure gospel principles should alone hold sway...

...They engraved metal figures and made copies of missals in such a way that no one could tell which was the printed and which the written copy...

...As well as musical instructions, the missionaries took great pains to provide all kinds of amusements for the recreation of the inhabitants of their Indian state, for they held that a joyous life was not detrimental to virtue, but rather tended "to make the latter better liked, and to encourage it...

...they regularly conducted church choirs and even full orchestras, which included "violins, contrabasses, clarinets, flutes, harps, trumpets, horns and tym-pani...

...By the skilful and unobtrusive manner in which they encouraged such occupations under the guise of recreation, the fathers overcame the innate inertia of the Indian...

...constant practice, combined with a considerable amount of innate talent, had the result that "even in a chorus of thousands of voices a false note was never heard...

...These arrangements were intended to convey the impression that all nature's creatures were taking part in the homage rendered to the Blessed Sacrament...

...The Tyrolese Father Sepp, who later visited the country after the establishment of the Jesuit state, wrote: Our missionaries are all of the opinion that God made this waterfall and these rapids for the benefit of our poor Indians, for the Spaniards, impelled by their insatiable greed for wealth, have come thus far in their great ships, but no farther...

...Eventually, there were to be found in all parts of the country joiners, smiths, weavers, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, turners, pewterers, watchmakers, sculptors, painters, bell-founders and instrument-makers ; the workshops were generally situated close to the mission house...

...It was chiefly the German fathers who gave instruction in music...

...Almost every function of everyday life was performed to the strains of music...

...sometimes they gamboled on stilts six yards high...

...thus statues and carving were made in Loreto, the best instrument-makers were to be found in San Juan Bautista, while other settlements made a specialty of leather work...

...This discovery supplied the missionaries with a method of enticing the Indians from their forest haunts...

...All the missionaries expressed the greatest admiration for the extraordinary musical talents of these people...

...Among these natives, it was regarded as the first duty of a citizen to be able to sing properly...

...Bows and arrows fell unheeded from the hands of the savages, and their souls received the first impressions of a higher kind of existence and of the primitive delights of humanity...

...Father Charlevoix records how the Jesuits had introduced into the settlements "the laudable custom of the Spaniards" of celebrating with dances the festivals of the Church, so that the Indians might find greater joy in Christianity...

...As time went on, the fathers discovered that their proteges possessed a surprising aptitude for making exact copies of European models...

...The missionaries therefore began to cherish the idea of entirely segregating the Indians from the whites, thereby not only protecting them from tyranny, but also guarding them against the corruption of bad example...

...They all hastened from their huts, some half naked, some clad in garments of skin...

...Their noses were pierced, and from them hung by threads, bones or colored feathers, while their throats were similarly adorned...

...their jet-black hair fell in coils over the sunburnt, wrinkled faces and down their backs...

...M. Bach notes the plan of the workshops as follows: In the courtyard stood the sugar-mill, while in the rooms surrounding the courtyard were to be found those who were employed in sugar-boiling, the blacksmiths, the silversmiths, the carpenters, the joiners, the turners, the wax-beachers, the dyers and the weavers with between forty and fifty looms...

...The trumpets made by the Indians were fully equal to the products of the Nuremburg instrument-makers, and their watches were in no way inferior to those made in the most famous Augsburg workshops...

...During the most prosperous period of this strange state, there were in all thirty-one such settlements, each of which had a population of between three and six thousand souls...

...The fathers thus penetrated into regions hitherto unexplored by any European, in which the Guaranis and Chiquitos dwelt in a state of unspoiled nature...

...What follows is the first instalment of an excerpt, which The Commonweal is privileged to publish, from a forthcoming book...

...But the fathers noticed that, when they sang religious melodies in their canoes, the natives peeped out of the bushes here and there to listen to them, and gave signs of extraordinary pleasure...

...Chateaubriand writes in his Spirit of Christianity: The Indians fell into the pleasant trap...

...they tilled the soil to a musical accompaniment, and in the same manner they felled trees and erected buildings...

...The German Protestant, M. Bach, who was employed by the Bolivian government in the forties of the last century, during which period he made a thorough study of what vestiges survived of the Jesuit republic, relates that even the Indian children had to visit the music school for a certain number of hours daily...

...Eventually, the Jesuits submitted their project to the king of Spain...

...They took musical instruments on their voyages, and played and sang to the best of their ability...

...As the men marched forth to work in the morning, they were headed by a band of instruments...

...one seized his bow and arrows, another his sling and stones, and one and all ran, as only they could, to the river bank...

...they aroused such interest that the savages invited them to accompany them to their forests and plains, there to sing to the old people and explain the meaning of what they sang...

...they ate their midday meal to music, and in the evenings they returned to their villages headed by a band...

...During the Easter procession were carried life-size figures, manufactured by the Indians, portraying various episodes of the Passion...

...Every village had, so the fathers recorded, at least "four trumpeters, three good lutanists, four organists, as well as reed-pipe players, bassoonists and singers...

...The total population of the whole country amounted at that time to about one hundred and forty thousand...

...above this impassable barrier there stretched the territories inhabited by the Chiquito and Guarani tribes...

...it frequently happened that the intercourse of the Indians with the Spaniards undid in a few short weeks what the missionaries had been successful in accomplishing after years of hard work...

...The first families to concentrate in one locality were certain of the Guarani tribe to whose settlement the Jesuits gave the name of Loreto...

...There they found human beings who, according to the accounts given by the missionaries, were clad in deerskins...

...He therefore granted a patent conferring the desired powers on the Jesuits, and, at their express request, ordering that in future no white man with the exception of the governor should enter the Indian settlements administered by the missionaries, without the permission of the latter...

...The geographical conditions favored the scheme of the fathers...

...The cautious fathers, however, relied neither upon nature nor upon the royal patent which had been granted to them...

...Finally, they all swam round our boat, greeting us joyfully...

...been attracted by the search for silver to the southeastern regions of South America, had settled at the mouths of the great rivers, the interior, except where accessible along the banks of the rivers, not having been opened up by them...

...THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN PARAGUAY By RENE FULOP-MILLER THE missionary Spanish Jesuits, who had become familiar with the customs and inclination of the colonists in the South American cities, came to the conclusion that the so-called "savages" of the primeval forests were much better fitted for the establishment of a religious state than were the white people...

...Their repertoire included, in addition to church music, marches and dances imported from Europe, and even selections from Italian operas...

...there thus arose among the virgin forests of Paraguay a regular industrial system...

...From this nucleus of Indian villages arose the settlements of Paraguay, which soon comprised considerable portions of the present states of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chili, Brazil and Bolivia...

...they could not adequately express their surprise at the quickness with which mere boys among the Indians learned not only to sing, but also to acquit themselves in a most skilful manner in the handling of difficult European wind and string instruments...

...The missionaries were not able to expound to the astonished Indians in their own tongue the meaning of what they had sung...

...While this was in progress, four standard-bearers waved their flags, four trumpeters rallied the people, the cornets, bassoons and reed-pipes sounded the alarm, while we gradually appeared from our verdant leaf-covered huts, embraced, and, to the sound of joyous pealing of bells, entered the church under green triumphal arches, accompanied by some thousands of Indians...

...The missionary Francis of Zephyris commented on one occasion that: Among the simple Indians in the virgin forests of America, the fathers were unable to claim any success in the teaching of mathematics, because no one there understood or wished to possess such knowledge, but they acquitted themselves well with the music...

...These primitive theatricals pleased the Indians so greatly that, many decades after the expulsion of the Jesuits, they still performed the plays which they had been taught by the fathers...

...The women could reproduce very closely the most costly Brabant lace, while a number of Indian work people even constructed a remarkable organ based upon a European model...

...For some time past, King Philip III had been in constant need of funds, so that the financial inducement offered by the wily fathers favorably influenced his decision...

...They thought that, if the king would grant them the right of setting up an Indian state completely independent of the Spanish colonial officials, they on their part would promise complete recognition of the Spanish sovereignty together with the payment of an annual poll tax to the court of Madrid...

...Here and there were placed "chained lions and tigers," as well as basins of water containing wonderful fishes...

...shortly afterward were founded the Christian Indian communities of San Ignacio, Itapua and Santa Ana, all situated on the middle reaches of the River Parana...

...The fathers, aware of the wonderful effect of music on the Indians, overcame any opposition they met with by striking up a solemn chant...

...Living birds of all hues were tied to triumphal arches of flowers and branches...

...At a certain age, the children were sent by the fathers into the workshops, where they were allowed to choose the trade for which they had a special preference...

...From the outset, they rightly appreciated the fact that a real "kingdom of Christ upon earth" could be founded only among savage Indians in the densest virgin forest, and subject to the complete exclusion of the European Christians...

...and sometimes they walked the tight rope, or tilted at the ring with lances...

...This interest in music was destined to have a considerable influence on the development of the state in process of growth, for the fact that the Indians, who had hitherto lived in scattered settlements in the forests, now came more closely together was, to a large extent, inspired by the desire to meet for community singing...